Wednesday, January 17, 2016
Poetry From Prison: From Jail to Yale
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/stuck-behind-bars-a-writer-found-a-way-to-connect-to-the-world/
Please Watch This Video If You Are Concerned About Race In America. September 5, 2015
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
I came across this interview with Bryan Stevenson by Charlie Rose by accident last evening, and this man is my new hero… what a beautiful, humble human being. It is riveting television, and I think he has it exactly right about race in America. I hope you’ll take the time to watch it.
If you have trouble with the link, go to http://www.hulu.com, search “Bryan Stevenson + Charlie Rose” and click on the first video.
Bryan Stevenson’s book is called Just Mercy.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/just-mercy-bryan-stevenson/1120199052?ean=9780812984965
An Oasis in a Food Desert August 7, 2015
Friday, August 7, 2015
Building an Oasis in a Philadelphia Food Desert
This story is so inspiring! We’ve become familiar with the extreme difficulty that people living in poverty face in accessing fresh produce and healthy food, and also with the barriers faced by those who have formerly been incarcerated in securing employment after release. Here is a wonderful man — a grocer — who is solving both these problems in an exceptional way.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/building-oasis-philadelphia-food-desert/
Servant? Leader? Both. May 23, 2015
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Servant? Leader? Both.
“Ministry is… a mutual experience… [Jesus] wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as ‘professionals’ who know their clients’ problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved.
Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead… Someone serves, someone else is being served, and be sure not to mix up the roles! But how can we lay down our life for those with whom we are not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship!
We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for. The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.
Therefore, true ministry must be mutual. When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits. The world in which we live — a world of efficiency and control — has no models to offer to those who want to be shepherds in the way Jesus was a shepherd. Even the so-called ‘helping professions’ have been so thoroughly secularized that mutuality can only be seen as a weakness and a dangerous form of role confusion. The leadership about which Jesus speaks is of a radically different kind from the leadership offered by the world. It is a servant leadership — to use Robert Greenleaf’s* term — in which the leader is a vulnerable servant who needs the people as much as they need their leader.”
~~ Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, Reflections on Christian Leadership
*Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness
Lent: I’m Not Much, But I’m All I Think About February 18, 2015
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Lent: I’m Not Much, But I’m All I Think About
This evening I sat in the beautiful Church of the Incarnation and listened to a wise, direct, and very profound sermon by our rector, Bishop Anthony Burton, on preparing for Lent.
In speaking of the temptations that Christ experienced during his forty days in the wilderness — which we symbolically replicate through our observance and celebration of the Lenten season — Bishop Burton clarified them in a way I hadn’t previously understood: Christ, he said, was tempted to become the star of his own show — the centerpiece of his own movie. He refused.
As I sat through the service, surrounded by the majesty of a church I’ve loved for decades, I observed how often my thoughts are centered upon myself. Briefly, I can be fully present within the momentous mystery and magic of what is going on around me, but quickly and automatically, I am back to… assessing myself, critiquing myself, speculating about myself… which then turns in an equally automatic way to quick and sometimes even scornful and petty judgments of people around me.
To quote a friend who has spent decades successfully working twelve-step programs, “I’m not much, but I’m all I think about.”
Referring to the unremitting humility of Jesus and of His unwillingness to become a person of consequence and importance — or, perhaps in today’s parlance, one could say His unwillingness to become “relevant”, the bishop said, “I want that.”
So do I.
ks
Church of the Incarnation incarnation.org
Bear Witness September 3, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Bear Witness
“Bear witness to injustices that result in poor health, and work to remove those injustices and build health equity. This is what healers owe society. And this is what our society desperately needs at this moment in time.”
~~ Jessie M Gaeta, M.D., Medical Director of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program
Commencement Address, Boston University School of Medicine Convocation, 2013
You Can’t… August 26, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Wise Words From Someone Who Knows…
“You can’t preach [the Gospel] to someone who is starving.
You can’t entertain people who are dying.”
~~ Pastor Karen Dudley, Founder and Senior Pastor, Dallas International Street Church
