Forgive us, for we know not what we do

30 minutes ago, my government, the state of Georgia, crucified (by lethal injection) a convict named Troy Davis. 2,011 years ago, my ancestors' government, the Roman Empire, crucified a convict named Jesus. It never ceases to amaze me that Christians can put so much faith into executing capital punishment, when our own God was wrongly accused, convicted and murdered by a criminal justice system.

And what if our system is right this time, and the convicted is also guilty of the heinous crime? Well, my hope is in salvation - and that's where Jesus is too:

"One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’" - Luke 23

There is grace for you, Troy Davis. I'm just sorry we were too broken to offer it to you on earth as it is in heaven.

Rest in peace.

White Crucifixion. Marc Chagall 1938

Let's all stop giving Love a bad name

Friends, when you are running an advocacy campaign claiming first (1) that love takes sides, and second (2) that you always know definitively what "side" love is on - I can assure you that you are creating God in your own image. This huge theological error is most visibly on display among Unitarian Universalists - but is also running rampant in mainline protestant churches as well.

Now, I have always been a supporter and fan of the Standing on the Side of Love campaign because I stood for all the justice issues it supports and it seemed to be the first time the UUA had finally found a marketing budget. But I was woefully blind to the really troubling message it is sending about the nature of love - and thus the nature, as most Americans will interpret it, of God. Christianity teaches that God = Love. (Sometimes we go so far as to capitalize the 'L' all on its own, which makes it really Important.) To say that you are standing on the side of love sounds no different than what Pat Robertson professes about his own ministry.

Let's all stop giving Love such a bad name! Read your bible, your Thich Nhat Hanh, your Dalai Lama, or your Universalists! - do some serious soul searching and reasoning here. Pray about it. I think that you'll find that what we're really fighting for so righteously is justice. And that is no small thing. It's just not the same as love.

True Confessions of a Weepy Worshiper

You don't have to be a Pentecostal to be that-girl-who-cries in worship. Actually, thinking about that more - you can't be a Pentecostal to be that-crier, because I would imagine everyone's crying, and shouting, and singing etc. But in the mainline world of which I am more or less a part, there's always someone or a handful of people who get misty at the drop of a hat. While the rest of the congregation may look like they're being read to out of a plumbing manual - we appear to have mistaken the pew in front of us for the wailing wall.

I hope I don't look like this,
but I'm not ruling it out.

As a kid, I had emotional armor as thick as a Humvee, which makes it no surprise to anyone - except myself of course - that I am now, as an adult, a weepy worshiper. That's right I'm a town church cryer (sorry, I could not resist!). I have been known to get verklempt:

• At baptisms for kids who I don't know from Adam
• At funerals for people I barely met
• Over fortune cookies with my pastor
• At strategic planning committee meetings (this takes advanced weepiness)
• With my career/leadership coach
• Almost every time I take communion
• Whenever anyone else cries
• During awesome sermons/ praise songs/ prayers/ candles of sorrow - or any other element of worship except perhaps for the doxology, but I would not rule it out for the future!

Spiritual but not religious? The rant, the response and what it means for the church today

This week ministers across denominations were getting stirred into a frenzy by a very pointed blog rant by UCC Paster Lillian Daniel in which she vented her exhaustion with the pseudo-original standpoint shared by so many today that they are "spiritual but not religious."

Many pastors were amen-ing her digging into the consumer-driven selfishness that seems to be at the root of those who prefer sunsets and walks on the beach to living within the tension of real-life community - "Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building," she writes. "There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself."

Others saw this rant as evidence of how out-of-touch churches are with society today. The infamous Pew Forum study was trotted out as evidence of the reality that while we may not like it - the sunset and beach folks are not coming to our churches and we better change now or die the slow death of cultural irrelevance.

Personally, I've been wondering a lot about these issues, and Rev. Daniel's post certainly struck a cord with me - enough so to drive me into the Facebook commenting fray that my less-than-holy side can sometimes succumb to. Anyway, so what does an emergent-Christian with a UU background think of all this? Here's where I'm landing: