So, you’ve been asking for it! Here it is, the Sex Sermon from Broadway Christian Church, August 26, 2012:
Archive for August, 2012
This morning the congregation I serve had lots of sex in church. Ok, not what you’re thinking. The topic of the day was making sense of sexuality through a faith lens, in particular same-sex relationships. At one point I suggested that in order to get over our anxiety about saying the “S” word in church we just say it in unison, which we did. That was interesting. What a liturgical exclamation!
What led to the suggestion was the observation that we can talk about sex everywhere in the culture except church. What does that say to our children, our youth, when we send sex packing away from our faith communities?
The test of the day was from that ancient blusher, The Song of Solomon. There is no escape from its deep eroticism, however it has been used metaphorically to express rapture with God. We began a journey of exploration in the Bible, recognizing that there is no one “Biblical perspective” on sexuality and marriage, but only perspectives. The only option is to become interpreters of complex texts.
Sex belongs in church. We need to model healthy, faithful and reasonable conversations for our children and youth. Because if we don’t, others will. Do we really want an disembodied religious experience that excludes a life force as powerful as this? If so we will continue the downward spiral into irrelevancy, the church as soul without a body, a phantom.
The Gift that Keeps on … Taking
Posted: August 22, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: Payday Loans, Predatory Lenders
Just yesterday I was working with a person who was struggling with finances. A whole series of events led to a desperate decision: go down to the corner payday loan shop on the corner. They were cordial and helped her obtain her loan in quick order. The problem was what came next. She was shocked by the interest and payments. It would be impossible to get out of this obligation. In fact, it worsened her original situation.
Payday lenders target the working class and poor folk, the most vulnerable communities, and trap them with impossible debt. In Missouri, these predators charge an average annual percentage rate (APR) of 445%. It’s one of the highest averages in the nation, 26 times the rate cap in Arkansas, where lenders can’t charge more than 17%.
Trapped families pay fees upon fees for what was presented as quick fix money. It sends them toward certain financial oblivion. There are now more payday lenders in Missouri than McDonalds and Starbucks combined.
And where do these profits go? Usually to large out-of-state corporations. Our Missouri families are charged triple digit interest rates and millions of dollars are drained from our communities.
What should we do? Like other states, we should act to cap the rate. The FDIC recommends a reasonable 36%. It’s long overdue.
We can’t avoid economic crisis for every family in Missouri. But we can prevent the vultures from circling over the wounded body laying by the side of the road. That we can and should do.
From Above the Hills, the Ocean and Time
Posted: August 16, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence
It was just at the dawn of the 20th century that a young New Englander by the name of Edna St. Vincent Millay submitted her first poem of note. Those in the poetry world recognized greatness immediately and her visible career as one of America’s great poets was launched. The poem was titled Renascence and its over 200 lines were based on her experience of sitting on a mountain above her beloved Camden, Maine, and looking to the hills at her back and Penobscot Bay and its islands before her.
Kathy and I visited that very site in our own recent travels. It is not difficult to imagine her inspiration at the sight. But with all the imagination in the world one is not given Millay’s crisp elegance of verse. That is a gift, something to be savored and tasted like the mountains and sea that accompanied her pen to paper those many years ago:
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
That’s what happened in Joplin yesterday. People burned down the Mosque. It was arson. And the job was done right, or wrong, morally speaking.
My Joplin brother notified me – with his understandable outrage and disappointment. Really? After the tornado? After everything they endured? People of all faiths pulled together to become a community of survivors, of more then survivors. And then this – another tornado, one propelled not by wind, but by hate.
It is so easy to hate. And hate endures.
We talked, my brother and I, about the natural response to such an act. Our first response is retribution: firebomb the perpetrators’ houses and see how they like it. Uh huh. It’s easy to hate, hard to love. I know that very well. The evil intentions live in us all – differently and by different degree. But they do.
We also talked about the ways that evil intentions are often transformed by God into a a greater good. How will God and God’s people transform this tragedy into a new world of hope in Joplin, Missouri?
Already several churches have reached out to the Muslim community, offering them space for their temporary Mosque.
And could this become a definitive moment in that community, in many communities, when neighbors gather together and simply say, “Hate no more.” It’s not who we want to be. We will not conquer hate by pouring more gasoline on the fire, so to speak. Rather, hate will be overcome with love.
Hate is a powerful force in all of us. Our automatic response to violation is to achieve vengeance. But the solution is to create a new world so crowded with love that hate has to take up residence elsewhere. It happens. Even in the ashes.
vitalwholeness 