The Frontiers of Religion

by Rev. Catherine Fransson
April 25, 2004

The Reverend Catherine Fransson's Sunday sermon is one of the most beautiful and powerful messages I've heard. Her eloquent words express a worldview that touches me deeply. May what she says come to be. I pray this in the name of love ...
= SkySpiritElohim (David Enroth)

The Frontiers of Religion
Isaiah 2:2-5

My first profession was in public education where, it seemed, religious differences could be honored. We carefully scheduled the annual fall open house away from Yom Kippur; we were sensitive to our young fasting Muslims during the winter Ramadan. Muslim prayers were made in a tiny room off the nurse's office where prayer rugs could be rolled out. Students offered oblations to Allah every day. Not very many Roman Catholics took Good Friday as a holiday but we honored it, nevertheless. Not so in churches. When I followed my call to the ministry it began to dawn on me I was stepping into a crucible, a place not safe and hot with controversy.

As a twenty-six-year-old teacher I walked into Garfield High School (Seattle, WA) in the late sixties and took a deep breath as I approached, for the first time in my life, a group of African American male students blocking the long narrow hallway on the way to Room 308. I passed through them, noncommittally if not convivially, and spent the next three years in close proximity and conviviality not only with them, but the pimps posturing on Alder waiting for their girlfriends, newly-arrived Chinese who wrote their papers in characters first, and then translated to English, Sephardic Jews whose parents refused to let them ride in a German-made car (I drove a Volkswagen), and white liberals, children of local attorneys and journalists who were reverse-busing to improve the racial climate of that beloved and challenged school.

This was the introduction of this cloistered Everett Baptist to the family of humankind and the quest for a common humanity among a colorful population of teenagers. Like them I was also learning to know who I was as separate from, and yet a part of such a conglomerate of peoples. That quest continued until I retired, when most Seattle high schools were filled with Somalis, Eritreans, Philippinos, Mexicans (some legal, some not), Chinese, Vietnamese, Chom, Laotian, and Hmong.

When my proximity with peoples of the world ended, the quest did not. Here in a mostly white church I sometimes reminisce about a world I know that is worlds away from these four walls, yet just blocks away.

I miss it. I miss its challenges and its riches. I miss the daily encounters that called me to a great depth of prayer to respond humanly, humanely, to principles that transcend race, culture, and religion. In a word, to Christian ways of living and loving. Christ did not say love humanity, of course. He said love your neighbor. And that neighbor can be anyone just ahead of you in line, in your way at the grocery shelf, living in the next apartment or worse, the floor above, or driving slower than you when you're late for a meeting. Loving your neighbor is much harder than loving a concept.

One morning At Roosevelt I sat with a small Eritrean woman robed in a chador exposed only from her eyebrows to her chin. A woman who had seen her son, Asmelash, through trials I could only imagine on their way to the United States. She spoke intently in soft, worried words to the interpreter who translated for me. Her son sat there too, stony faced: Asmelash, Ash, for short, was a handsome, smart young man on the verge of being thrown out of school. School was what he needed to survive. On occasion I offered through the interpreter what seemed puny and irrelevant words to the anguished parent, hoping Ash heard me and would find some wisdom that transcended the differences between his mother's culture and his new world.

After his close friend was shot dead at the Public Market early one morning in 1996, I wrote him an impassioned letter about the choices he faced, imploring him to use his considerable talents for good and not for revenge. I don't know where he is or how he is doing now.

But I know God surmounts the barriers of language, culture, and, yes, religion. Steve said last week that God must always elude our labels and our boundaries, else God would not be God. As early as the fifth century Saint Augustine said, "If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God." The single greatest dimension of my growth in seminary was an explosion of my images of God, and those images badly needed to be exploded. Maybe yours do, too.

What better place to do it? We Baptists traditionally enjoy the freedom to interpret scripture for ourselves, and though the majority of Baptists across the country have settled for narrow and colorless dogma, that needn't limit us, though it challenges our powers of tolerance and forgiveness. One of the graces of conversation in our new association of Greater Seattle churches is people coming to terms, one at a time, with views unlike their own. And like my own inner earthquake when I first walked into a group of black male students at Garfield in '68, when Christians first encounter those of us who don't habitually call God "Father," or who profess a deep faith in spite of -- or because of our sexual orientation, there are inner earthquakes. Fear. We encounter strangers if not where we live and work, at the grocery store, the gas station, the doctor's office. If strangers appear to believe different things from us, whether it's nothing or it's fundamentalism, aren't we somehow threatened? Maybe they'll think our beliefs are wrong. Or, were we to say anything, maybe we'd realize ourselves we're wrong about something.

So we feel threatened. And to counter our vulnerability we lash out in defense of our way of life. We distance ourselves, and reject what we don't understand; we condemn, we criticize, we fight back as if we have been confronted. In our own ranks here we do not all agree. Some of us think we're so liberal we never share our views lest others be shocked. Others of us are trying to hang onto everything we know and love from the last 25 years. People are on both sides of the question of whether to follow the Christian lectionary or choose scripture from week to week. We are the "free church," after all. We can do almost anything we want, given our own consensus and how we agree to worship together. That's no small thing.

If we experience dissonance even here where our progressivism is such a banner, how on earth do we handle the dissonance we encounter in the world outside? Given the one faith we try to practice daily, there is simply not time to study any other faith as well, or know it as well as our own. Thursday night here there was a standing-room only crowd that raised the roof for a number of performances likely never heard here on Sunday mornings. Shocking. Wonderful. That's a crowd that falls under the label multifaith. How do you know who is who? How do you know whom to trust? There were Druids, Wiccans, Presbyterians, Jews, Catholics -- few Baptists, I think.

Have you read The DaVinci Code? [Dan Brown, 2003] This popular novel describes a conspiracy to hide the contributions of women, particularly Mary Magdalene, in the shaping of Christianity after Jesus' death. The author's questions are a good thing. So is all the recent scholarship about the Gospels of Mary and Thomas, and the other writings found in Egypt [the Nag Hammadi Library] that reveal views of the early church we have never read or heard before.

In her book on the Gospel of Mary Karen L. King writes, "Here is where the recent discovery of early Christian writings from Egypt is so utterly crucial... The Mediterranean world in which Christianity appeared was in a period of rapid social change and religious experimentation... What if there were not unity and certainty at the beginning but Christians differed in their views and experiences and sometimes came into conflict and division? What if the earliest Christians don't model for us a fixed and certain path, but instead call us to emulate their struggles to make Christianity in our day?" [The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle. Karen L. King, 2003. Pp. 157-158] King concludes, "The clearest contribution of the recent discoveries is in providing a wealth of primary works that illustrate the plural character of early Christianity and offer alternative voices." [ p. 160] "'the plural character of early Christianity'" The plural character.

We are living in a plurality in 2004 none of us has ever experienced before. And is it like the pluralism of the first century? Isn't it ironic that the discovery of these ancient texts comes to us when we are beginning to feel overwhelmed and threatened by the global village of religion? Especially fundamentalists of the other religions? And can't this early diversity inform us now as we seek to live alongside Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and a slew of other religious? If humanity has done this before, we have an opportunity to do it better.

Marcus Borg's newest book clarifies for us that as late as the seventeenth century when Christians began to feel threatened by the secular world, they began to insist on the absolute truth of Christianity. It was only in the nineteenth century that Protestants began to affirm the Bible's infallibility and Roman Catholics affirmed papal infallibility. So these are not doctrines that each back to our written beginnings. They're only one or two hundred years old.Borg and what he calls "new paradigm" churches are not threatened by the world religions we rub elbows with today. We see all religions as "sacraments of the sacred," human creations responding to experiences of the sacred over many years in many countries and cultures. Borg suggests all enduring religions share the goal of seeking "to inform, engender, and nourish a transforming relationship to" Mystery. [The Heart of Christianity. P. 213]

A transforming relationship. Transformation is what religion is about. None of us human beings, when we assume total authority over our lives and refuse to consider a higher being, do very well at the business of life especially when it concerns the millions of marginalized people in the world. But even we religious, if we are not open to risk, to growth and to change, don't do very well at the business of life with many of the very threatening dangers with which we live. Religion must be about empowering us to step beyond our narrow selves to see as God sees, to reach the foreigner set upon by thieves, the neighbor beaten by her partner, the unemployed without work and health insurance.

All those of us committed to transformation have that opportunity when we encounter women wearing hijab, or men wearing a turban wrapping around hair that is never cut, or a yarmulke, the respectful cap on the back of the head. We wake up to our ignorance. We then engage: enter into conversation seeking to know more, recognizing that the person in question has higher loyalties just as we do. To be citizens of a global religious village, if we are not simply going to contribute to the powder kegs that threaten to blow us all up, we need to grow more comfortable with differences and with our understandings of what they mean. And rather than waiting for encounters, perhaps we ought to be going out to find them and inviting them in.

Karen Armstrong, in her recent autobiography, and Diana Eck, director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, both explain that the word, credo, translated as "I believe," does not signify just a head trip, nor a merely intellectual assent to a list of propositions such as I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and earth. A credo is an expression of a heart's commitment. It means I give my heart to this. Armstrong comments that the original word beleven [believe] meant to love, and claims that we "must first live in a certain way, and then [we will] encounter within a sacred presence [...] which monotheists call God, but which others have called the Tao, Brahman, or Nirvana. [ The Spiral Staircase pp. 292-3]

Diana Eck describes how pluralism requires a respect for differences and for religious dialogue. [Encountering God 1993] Religious pluralism requires we engage with others to learn to understand them; and it assumes we each also have real commitment to our own heart beliefs. Sharing deeply held beliefs needn't draw us off center but could affirm us and the other. A relativist would say, Oh, whatever... but a pluralist says, yes. I understand how you and I differ, and I respect our different, and deep commitments. It is not unlike learning to live with the ones we covenant with, whether a single relationship or a congregation. We grow as we learn about ourselves in relation to the other -- if we keep the conversation going, if we hold both realities and neither submit to the other nor live at arm's length. In psychology this is called differentiation. And it is required for each of us to grow as human beings and followers of God.

Armstrong was struck by the profound similarities of the three Abrahamic faiths. "...none of them had a monopoly of truth. Working in isolation from one another, and often in a state of deadly hostility, they had come up with remarkably similar conclusions. This unanimity seemed to suggest that they were onto something real about the human condition." And so Armstrong concludes that the one real test of valid religious ideas, doctrine or devotion, is practical compassion. "If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology." [293]

Compassion is the litmus test: seeing the faces of God within and in all others. All others. Gandhi said, "Truth, or God, cannot be the exclusive possession of any one people, but is the very transcendence of ourselves that calls us into relationship with others." The very survival of our world depends upon our recognition of the transcendence we share in common with all the peoples in the world faithful to a higher power to whom we attribute creation itself. We need to be about doing what Jews call Tikkun Olam, "the mending of the world." And in what other spirit could I have prayed my Christian prayers in the face of Muslims who did not share even my language? All the forces of Light must join hands and work together. If light does not begin to link up with light, how can our light overcome the darkness in the world? Isaiah describes a vision we have tended to see as ours alone: the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of God come together with Abraham and all the saints, Jesus and St. Paul, in a final resolution of our lives. What if that vision is not merely Christian? What if the God Isaiah names is not only the God of Jacob but also of Ishmael? What if the kingdom is not only of the Christian church, but the realm of all the peoples and prophets of compassion known to God on the planet? All those who walk with Mystery under their own rubrics, loving kindness, doing justice, and walking humbly with their God? We are only as powerful as we are united in bringing the light, whatever its name, into the world together.

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

"And then all that has divided us will merge,
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another's will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life's creatures
And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again."
[Untitled poem from "The Dinner Party," Judy Chicago]

May it be so.

[Rev Catherine Fransson is a pastor of the Seattle First Baptist Church, Seattle, WA.]

[+] U.S. churches must reject 'Americanist' Christianity

by Rosemary Radford Ruether

National Catholic Reporter
April 23, 2004

American messianic nationalism calls for united religious response

By ROSEMARY RADFORD

In 1934 a group of German theologians gathered in Barmen, Germany, where they adopted a declaration drafted by Reformed theologian Karl Barth and Lutheran theologian Hans Asmussen. This declaration denounced as heresy the emerging “German Christianity,” which accepted the Nazi Führer principle in church government. This Führer principle acclaimed Hitler as “lord” over the church and acquiesced to a racist ideology that made Christ and Christianity uniquely German (Aryan). By rejecting this German Christianity, the dissenting Christians were issuing the church a call to resistance against Nazism.

In the context of increasing use of an “Americanist” messianic nationalism by the Bush administration to justify its “war against terrorism,” the question needs to be posed, particularly for U.S. Christians, “Do we need a new Barmen Declaration?”

What is “Americanist” messianic nationalism? This is an ideology rooted in the belief that the United States of America is uniquely an elect nation chosen by God to impose its way of life on the rest of the world by coercive economic means, and even by military force, if it deems necessary. Nations who pursue other ways of economic development than “free market capitalism” can be regarded as enemies, not only of the United States but of God. This is particularly the case if they seek to mobilize a counter-block of nations against the global hegemony of the United States.

The ideology that the United States is an elect nation divinely chosen to be a model and mentor to other countries has long been entertained by dominant American culture. During the Cold War the struggle against communism was typically couched as a “war against evil.” The conflict between two strategies of economic development, capitalism and communism, was defined as if it were a war against demonic powers in which capitalist countries were the agents of divine goodness.

This language has returned with new force under the administration of George W. Bush in its “war against terrorism.” The language of holy war, “crusade” and the apocalyptic conflict between good and evil, God and Satan, are freely used in its war rhetoric, directed first against the Taliban in Afghanistan and then against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. These wars were depicted as if they were episodes in an apocalyptic drama of good against evil, angels of light against the forces of darkness, God’s chosen people against God’s enemies. This language of apocalyptic warfare assumes a U.S. mission to the rest of the nations of the world. America in general, and President Bush in particular, are depicted as messianic agents chosen by God to combat evil and to establish good -- namely American hegemonic power and its economic, cultural and political “way of life” over the rest of the world.

This messianic nationalism was expressed in its most blatant form by Gen. William Boykin, an American military leader charged with the hunt against Osama bin Laden. In a speech to his fellow believers, Boykin declared that the United States is an object of hatred by other nations because we are uniquely a “Christian nation.” He went on to claim that “our spiritual enemies can only be conquered when we confront them in the name of God” (that is, their spiritual identity is that of Satan). He said that Muslims worship an idol and not the true God. Moreover, God has put George W. Bush in office at this time to carry out a world redemptive mission: “We are an army of God raised up for such a time as this.”

This language of apocalyptic warfare and messianic nationalism is enormously dangerous at a time when the peoples of the earth are becoming increasingly divided by aggressive American power. Many see this as impoverishing the earth, disabling authentic democracy, undermining cultural diversity, destabilizing social integrity and aggravating the gap between rich and poor. The Christian churches should be involved in many kinds of alternative development to this dominant system, together with other groups, religious and secular. But the first responsibility of the church is to rebuke the blatant misuse of its own religious language.

I suggest that this “Americanist” messianic nationalist Christianity needs to be critically analyzed and rejected theologically. This denunciation needs to be communicated to American churches of all denominations as a call to conscience. There are four basic heresies involved in this “Americanist” Christianity. Since the term “heresy” is currently not well accepted, and can be seen as simply a sectarian claim, I refer to these as “false theological ideas.” By “false” I mean that these theological ideas are both idolatrous, pretending that the American nation is uniquely a representative of God, and also conducive to destructive violence, and hence blasphemous when attributed to the will of God.

1) God chooses one nation above all other nations. In Christian tradition God is a God of all nations. “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:21). Christianity confirmed a development within universalist Judaism that God is the creator of the whole world, loves all peoples and nations equally and chooses no one nation above or to the exclusion of others.

2) The United States is God’s uniquely chosen nation. Since God is a God of all peoples and loves all peoples equally, God cannot be seen as choosing the United States for some unique mission over other peoples of the world. Although the concept of “election” can be seen as a way in which every person and every cultural and national community grapples with their responsibilities before God, this idea cannot be translated into an objective positioning of one nation over others.

3) Evil is socially located in the enemies of the United States. In Christian teachings all humans are created in the image of God and all have a potential for good and yet all have sinned and fall short of the will of God. Evil exists particularly in the way in which humans violate their relation to one another. To usurp power and monopolize wealth in one person’s or group’s hands, depriving other people of the bare means of existence, is the basis of evil on earth. To defend injustice as divinely given is blasphemy, attributing evil to the will of God.

Every person and nation must struggle with how they have helped to construct systems of evil that are impoverishing the earth and the majority of humans and how they have blasphemously sought to defend such evil systems as good and divinely ordained. Although there is undoubtedly responsibility for evils in other peoples and nations, the United States and its citizens must grapple with evil by first asking how they are contributing to it and helping to perpetuate it.

4) Evil can be conquered by external coercion, ultimately by military force. Local, national and international societies have limited rights to use coercive force in order to constrain abuse of people and the environment within their jurisdictions. The coercive role of government must include those who use power to abuse others, such as paying less than a living wage and allowing toxic environments that injure health. The proper role of governments is not limited to police functions of restraining outlaws, but includes the use of the sanctions of the law to encourage justice and fair treatment for all.

But it must be clear that such coercive means, whether within or between nations, cannot be construed theologically as “overcoming evil.” Evil can only be overcome by conversion, which takes place in the hearts of persons in community. This change is a mystery of divine grace that calls us, empowers us to change and opens us to this call and transformation. Conversion means giving up unjust power and privilege, reconstructing one’s relation to others, so that the means of life are justly shared. In Jesus’ words to the rich ruler, “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.”

Conversion always happens in a social context, not as isolated individuals in no relation to society. Personal conversion is ex-tended in a struggle to change communities. Persuaded by converted mentors, communities recognize that they are using their wealth and power to abuse others and to spiritually impoverish themselves. They decide to change their ways in order to create more just and life-giving social relations for all.

Thus, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can never be ended by the endless cycle of Israeli assassination of Palestinian leaders and Palestinian suicide bombers taking revenge by randomly killing Israelis. Although the international community can play a role in defining and encouraging a more just sharing of the land between Israelis and Palestinians, a real breakthrough to a just sharing of the land can only happen as Israelis and Palestinians become converted from enmity toward each other to seeing each other as fellow human beings with whom they wish to live together as neighbors.

Apartheid in South Africa was overcome not by external coercion, al-though sanctions may have played a positive role, but ultimately when whites and blacks were converted to one another and determined that they must live together as equal fellow citizens of one national community. Although all “evil” has hardly been overcome in South Africa, the end of apartheid has lessened one aspect of the evil of racist monopolizing of political power by whites. This has laid the basis for new efforts to create a more just sharing of resources between whites and blacks.

Conversion is the only way evil is “overcome.” Military violence generally worsens evil, imposing one unjust system in place of another. Nonviolent coercion and social reforms may constrain social evils. But coercion never actually “overcomes” evil. This only happens when people are converted from enmity and abuse of others to love of one’s neighbor as oneself.

Rosemary Ruether is the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.

National Catholic Reporter, April 23, 2004

Evangelican Lutheran Church of America Challenged by Churches with Gay Pastors

ECUMENICAL NEWS ALERT

[Thanks to Neil Kalouner for forwarding
the following article. -- Editor]


Friday, April 16, 2004 / 12:27 PM

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) is bracing for a potential showdown after three congregations defied the denomination's rules and appointed noncelibate gay pastors.

While celibate gays and lesbians can serve as pastors in the Lutheran church, the three pastors who have been appointed are considered sexually active.

Within weeks the Southern California Evangelical Lutheran Church will have its first gay and lesbian pastors. On Sunday Rev. Jennifer Mason, 41, will be installed at Central City Lutheran Mission in San Bernardino, followed by the installation of Rev. Daniel M. Hooper, 56, on May 2 at the Hollywood Lutheran Church.

Later in Minneapolis, Rev. Jay Wiesner, 30, will be installed at Bethany Lutheran Church on July 25.

The nation's fifth-largest Protestant denomination has faced this situation before. A decade ago, it expelled two churches in San Francisco for appointing clergy who were living in same-sex relationships.

Since that incident, more than a dozen Lutheran churches have appointed sexually active gay men and lesbians as pastors without being expelled.

The upcoming installations of three open and active homosexual clergy members come after two other Protestant denominations struggled with similar issues.

At the beginning of March, Rev. V. Gene Robinson officially became the first openly gay bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church.

Weeks after Robinson's installation, a United Methodist Church court near Seattle ruled in favor of Rev. Karen Dammann, a lesbian pastor. Dammann had been accused of breaking church law because she was in a committed same-sex relationship.

Conservatives in both denominations cried foul, and Lutherans are worried how the next wave of openly gay and lesbian pastors will affect the relationship of 10,700 affiliated churches that support about 5 million members.

"This does not have to be a dividing issue," said Emily Eastwood, the leader of Reconciling In Christ, a Lutheran GLBT organization. "This could be a church-building issue."

"We are hopeful that the success of these congregations which have called pastors who are in committed loving relations will convince the Lutheran Church to change its policy," Eastwood said.

[+] Feeding Not Fighting

by Robert Warren Cromey

Much Christian liturgy focuses on the Eucharist, the feeding, the heavenly banquet, the sacrament of holy community. Eating and drinking in the miraculous, mysterious presence of Christ is at the center of our corporate life. Feeding, eating and drinking are the remarkable actions of Christians in church and in the world.

Suppose all that money now spent bombing the poor was allocated to feeding them? Iraqis, American and Allied explosives bombard Iraqis, Afghanistans, and Palestinians. These are among the poorest people on the planet. They have little food, poor housing, minimal health care and inadequate education. Suppose we sent food instead of bombs, building supplies rather than bullets, doctors and nurses instead of soldiers.

Perhaps if we bombarded our so-called enemies with the stuff to make them healthy and whole instead of munitions to kill and maim them, they would not respond with vengeful and violent reprisals.

It is true that terrorist groups are found in these poor countries. Terrorism is the last resort tactic of the poor says the former head of Israeli Airport Safety. Saul Alinsky pointed out people fight with the only weapons they have on hand. Poor people can’t compete with the weaponry of advanced countries. Thus they fight with what they have.

Yes, we know from experience that corrupt governments officials in Africa and South and Central America have siphoned off money, food and supplies destined for the poor to enrich themselves. But experience has also certainly taught us how make sure our gifts get to their proper recipients. If our CIA can corrupt governments, they could help inspire the corrupt to care for the poor and needy.

It is possible that citizens of those poor countries would regard our efforts as patronizing or even corrupting their way of life. Could it be any worse than a military force patrolling their streets in the name of freedom? Could it be any more damaging than the military closing an Iraqi newspaper? Could it be any more harm than imposing democracy on a people who don't want it? It is possible that such gifts would indeed pour coals of fire on their already bloodied heads and they might retaliate.

However, it is a system that has never been tried. Yes, we have supported some help programs to poor countries, Care, Food for Peace, USAID, UNICEF -- but with minimal amounts of money, nowhere near what we spend on weapons. The American government has traditionally responded with the force of arms to assert its way in the world. Most Americans support the use of arms to assert what we think is right for the country, our way of life and for business.

No matter how popular it has been among the people, military force has failed to bring peace. [Since] the end of world War I, the war to end all wars, we have had a steady stream of war to seek protection, peace and harmony. Nazi Germany and Japan used war to assert what they thought was right for them and for Europe and the Orient. That brought on World War II, the war to defend freedom. Then we had the fear and anxiety brought about by the cold war and the threat of nuclear weapons. Korea, Vietnam and then terrorism carried out by the poor of Ireland, Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now the United States, Britain and Israel are leading the war against terrorism with little hope of winning it and no end in sight.

Money seems to be no object. The congress does not know or apparently care how much the war in Iraq is going to cost. If our country determined to wage peace by providing food, shelter, education and medical care for the poor of the world, the money could appear just the way it does to wage war.

It could be done incrementally. A billion reduction in military spending and a billion for help for humanity, each year or so until some vestige of real peace appears. The Department of Defense could have within it a division providing needed goods to the poor as well as its already strong effort in arms production, both as ways of defending our country.

Perhaps the American government could find the United Nations a useful agency to provide food for the hungry, a way of pursuing peace.

Yes, I know, this is an unrealistic expectation that the United States should act in a way to enhance its self interest in finding peace in the world. Yes, it is Utopian visionary thinking and isn't practical by today's standards.

But it is time to use our imagination to find ways that work rather than depend on ideas that do not work. Americans are enormously creative in business, finance, politics, the arts, sports and religion. Tat creativity can be put to work in feeding the poor and bringing more peace to the world.

But there is no doubt of the generosity of the American people when it comes to helping people in need. Our response to earthquake, fire and flood anywhere in the world is overwhelming and well publicized. That same generosity of heart can be tapped for world peace by providing not bombs for the enemy but food for the hungry poor.

Christians are feeders and nurturers not killers. We will return the world to a semblance of peace when we become feeders of the poor and hungry.

Robert Warren Cromey

[The Rev. Robert Warren Cromey is the now retired former rector of Trinity Episcopal Church of San Francisco. He frequently writes on issues of domestic and international peace and justice. Robert may be reached by email at twocromeys@earthlink.net. ]

An Easter message

We receive from our parents our greatest gift: our life.

Frederick Buechner says life is trying to tell us something: "The alphabet of grace is full of sibilants--sounds that can't be shouted but only whispered: the sounds of bumble-bees and wind and lovers in the dark, of whitecaps hissing up flat over the glittering sand and cars on wet roads, of crowds hushed in vast and vaulted places, the sound of your own breathing. I believe that in sibilants life is trying to tell us something. The trees, ghosts, dreams, faces, the waking up and eating and working of life, are trying to tell us something, take us somewhere.

If this is above all a Christ-making universe, then the place where we are being taken is the place where the silk purse is finally made out of the sow's ear, and the word that life is trying to speak to us is that little by little, squealing and snuffling all the way, a pig either starts turning into at least the first primal, porcine version of a hero, or else is put out of his piggish misery. At the heart of reality--who would have guessed it?--there is room for dying and being born again.

How do I happen to believe in God? I will give one more answer which can be stated briefly. Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot."

At least, some of us wind up in a plot.

The promise of an empty tomb is that life begins anew. Let your love be heard someplace in the new beginnings of this Holy Week ...

[The 28th of this month will be the ninth anniversary of my mother's death (she was 90) followed on Aug. 11 by my dad's death (at 83). I would not have expected to still be "processing" this nine years later -- but I seem to be, and still coming to appreciate all the gifts they gave. At Easter time, a difficult time for me theologically, it is really good to know of Buechner's view on the beauty of small things and the way in which good can come out of despair and hopelessness. Thanks to "Sky Elohim" (David Enroth) for sending this and so many other insightful pieces.]