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Table of Contents - December 2002
A Bag Full of Starlight
Joe E Trull
Harold Lewing describes Sam, a poor farmer
of the 1930s with six children. A week before Christmas, Sam brought home six
brown sacks, one for each child. “These bags are just for you. Rich kids would
say they are empty. But I want you to fill your own bags with the real meaning
of Christmas.”
On Christmas night Sam took his six kids to
the barn loft. Snuggled in the hay, they watched the stars. Sam asked them to
open their bags, then to look at one of the brightest stars.
Continue
We’ve Got Mail
Loving People Into The Kingdom
By Tony
Campolo
In Matthew 22, some Pharisees
confront Jesus and one of them, a lawyer, tries to embarrass him. I know what
that is like to have questions, not for an explanation of ideas, but to
embarrass the teacher. I know what that is like because I’m a professor. For
ten years at the University of Pennsylvania, students and faculty were always
after me because I was the “Resident Christian” in the Sociology Department. I
remember, they would always question me at faculty meetings.
I taught in an Ivy League school but I never graduated from
one personally. I went to Temple University where the poor guys go and the
other school was where the “intellegincia” go. If you graduated from
Temple and you teach at Penn they will not
let you forget from whence you come!
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Far Be It From Me To Politicize
Shootings
By Tom Teepen, Columnist
Cox Newspapers, Atlanta
The
body count around Washington was still rising when the good people who can be
counted on to rally for the safety of firearms rushed forward to warn that
gun-control advocates would surely try to “exploit” the situation.
Any such attempt to take unseemly advantage
of the victims and their families, we were sternly counseled, would show “poor
judgment and taste.” This is becoming a standard part of the gun-lobby script.
Presumably it also would be untoward to
cite the high number of fatalities at a troublesome intersection as an argument
for redesigning the traffic control there. And indiscreet to clamor for levees
along the part of a river that often floods by hunting the victims swept
downstream.
In short, if public safety breaks down more or less regularly at any particular
point, civic etiquette expects that everyone will look the other way and not
give the matter a thought.
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Resisting
the Growing Gun Culture
By Dwight A
Moody
The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty five was the
best Christmas ever. To prove it, I have a picture, one of those old, black and
white shots, with shinny finishes and serrated edges, now displayed in the
family photo album.
There I sit, all five years of me: black cowboy hat atop my
round, sandy head; sure enough wild-west vest buckled around my proud chest; a
genuine leather belt with two holsters strapped to my waist; and slung beneath
on each side, a sleek, silver six-shooter.
Legend has it I was the fastest gun on the street.
What isn't legend is this: those two imitations of the real
thing were the last guns ever to occupy a place in my home.
I am among those who think homes (and people) are more secure
without guns.
Continue
A Courageous
Mission
By
Charles Johnson, Pastor
This
famous Woman at the Well was powerless and disenfranchised in every conceivable
way by the males of the time.
First, she had the misfortune of being a
woman. They defined her personhood only in relation to males. Because they saw
circumcision as the sign of a covenant with God, the woman could relate to God
and the community of faith only through the man. Because the blood of the
sacrifice on the temple altar became the means of atonement from sin, they
considered all blood outside the temple life as ritually unclean; thus, they
excluded women from worship life during menstruation and childbirth.
Increasingly they excluded and segregated
women. They had access to the Holy only through their males. A woman’s court
was added to the temple to distance females from the sanctuary. It came to be
that a woman’s vow before God was not as valid as a man’s, and that a husband
could essentially annul a wife’s vow.
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Is Genesis a Blueprint
for U.S. Policy in the Middle East?
By Robert
Parham
The Bible is no blueprint for U.S. foreign policy, despite what
fundamentalist Christians say.
They
believe the Bible is a literal blueprint for the nation's Middle East policy.
They have announced plans to mobilize 100,000 churches and one million American
Christians to support Israel. Their leaders include Jerry Falwell, Oliver
North, Ralph Reed and many less notable Southern Baptists.
"God
gave the land to the Jew," Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, told
www.Beliefnet.com. "I didn't give it to them. It wasn't my land, it was God's
land. He gave it to the Jews."
Another
proponent is Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who told his Senate colleagues,
"I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel; that it has a
right to the land." Israel is entitled to the West Bank because God said
so."
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Updated
Thursday, December 26, 2002 |
Remembering Browning Ware
By Hal Haralson
Our mothers were sisters. Our grandparents went by covered wagon to Monument,
New Mexico in 1910 to homestead 160 acres on the prairie. Oscar was a Baptist
preacher and rode horseback into the ranches of New Mexico to preach to the
cowboys. Bertha lived in a dugout with six small children. She took three
Mulberry seedlings to plant near the dugout and the well they dug.
In 1913 on one of his trips, Oscar was caught in a snowstorm. He died from the
illness resulting from the exposure. His death left Bertha with six children
under the age of twelve and pregnant with the seventh one. Our uncle Dell told
me he heard his mother praying under the Mulberry trees asking God to help her
keep her family together and to educate them. She did just that. There were five
sons (four of whom became lawyers) and two daughters who became teachers with
Masters degrees.
Continue
Cross and Community: Philippians as Pauline
Political Discourse
By Jeph Holloway
The story is told of a village in
which many citizens were struck by a mysterious illness so severe that it
rendered its victims in a condition indistinguishable from death. In fact, the
worry arose that some might have been inadvertently buried alive. The people of
the village assembled to discuss the issue. One group advocated drilling a hole
in the lid of the coffin through which a pipe might be inserted leading to the
surface over the grave. In case of mistaken burial, fresh air might circulate
in the coffin and a revived loved one might call for help. Another group
offered a different approach to the situation—affix a spike inside the lid of
the coffin about chest high so that when the coffin lid is closed, any question
of the person’s death would be settled. Obviously the two groups were answering
two different questions concerning the same situation. The first group sought
to answer the question, “How can we make sure that we do not mistakenly kill
someone?” The second group sought to answer the question, “How can we make sure
that the people we bury are dead?”[i]
What
decisions we reach and what actions we take depend very much on what questions
we ask. Of course, what questions we ask reflects our way of viewing the world
and discloses what really matters to us and how we see our place in the world.
What questions we pose of the Bible, for example, and what questions we think
various passages in the Bible might address, too often predetermine what we
might draw from our engagement with Scripture. As well, what questions we take
to Scripture also says much about us.
Continue
The True Word
By Oda Lisa
Hernandez,
Where can we find truth from
Above,
regarding the one to preach it?
For forty years, I've heard it all.
There is one voice altruistic.
Yet, one man used oral testing,
claimed a million reasons to die.
Pronounced that God would take him,
but was allowed to live that lie.
A man deemed songs with Satan's sting,
who, himself, was quite a braggart,
hid the blackguard in his own heart,
except his Mexican swagger.
Jerry fell well with Y2K,
advising Christians to buy guns.
Then, he blamed a purple puppet,
for holding the bag of its "mum."
A similar Jerry-atric,
Continue
Simple—No
Strings, No Hassle!
By Terry Cosby
I’d
seen it before. They know how to work the system. She had called the church that
Sunday morning as I was headed toward the worship center from my office. I
normally wouldn’t have been in a position to answer, but the phone rang as I
walked by. I grabbed it thinking it was someone wanting to know what time the
worship service started. I usually tell them since we are a small church we will
just wait ‘till they get here and then we will start. Not this time. The lady on
the phone told me she needed help with a motel room or some place to stay. I
told her to come by about 12 or 12:15 and ask for one of the deacons. I really
didn’t expect her to show up. I was wrong.
After greeting the guests
I was returning to my office to put my Bible on my desk, and I heard Gloria, my
secretary, talking to someone. Nearly everyone had already left and I heard
Gloria tell Javier to take the kids and she would be with them shortly. When I
went into the office I knew why. There was the lady who needed help.
Continue
Strange
Conceptions
By Martin E. Marty
The
Holy Ghost is a pedophile. No, that opener does not mean that I have gone off
half-cocked or whole-cocked. Blasphemy is not my game, now or ever. Keeping the
sacred sacred is part of our mission on these pages, and I would not risk
losing readers’ trust on this score. So why begin that way?
I wanted to try that sentence on for size,
to see how it felt to word-process it, to let it trip on the tongue and resound
in the ear. It’s all part of an exercise in empathy. Calling the Third Person
of the Trinity a pedophile is stranger stuff than calling a human, even a
prophet, such. But there are parallels.
Continue
The Next
Reich
By Al Staggs
Like
civilizations past,
We suffered from our delusion
That we were the chosen,
That we were the last word as regards Truth.
Our wealth and our strength
Only confirmed the rightness of our cause.
And body bags are flown to a far-away place
To bring our children and our grandchildren home
After our cause
And our enemies are executed.
Continue
What’s the Good Word?
By Foy Valentine, Founding
Editor
A
word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in baskets of silver.
The wise man who wrote this proverb
understood that words can be priceless treasures. They can be sublimely
beautiful, marvelously powerful, immeasurably effective.
When John introduced his Gospel by saying
that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God,” he laid out one of the profoundest concepts ever to engage the human
mind. Its profundity is fathomless and its simplicity is sublime.
Mark Twain is said to have observed that
the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the
difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Continue
Index
to Authors-Titles Volume 8,
Issues 38-42 (2002) |
