Archive for the ‘Christian Faith’ Category
At the most recent gathering of the General Council of the United Church of Canada the topic of racism within the church surfaced as a result of a “powerful” speech given by Rev. Paul Walfall of Edmonton.
Is “the church” listening?
Rev. Paul Douglas Walfall speaks at General Council in Oshawa, Ont. on Friday, July 27, 2018. (Credit: United Church/Flickr/Creative Commons)
The text of his adder to the General Council can be found at:
A subsequent interview with The Observer can be found at:
On May 24, 2018 The Walrus published an article, with the title above,written by Michael Coren. In it Coren argues that the secular “left”, and “progressive” Christians ought to find common cause ( a “joint enterprise ) and work together.
We can add more beauty and life to this world through cooperation, no?
Some of what Coren writes is:
“There are those on the left who see religion as a distraction from the genuine challenges of poverty, echoing the Marxian notion of faith as the “opiate of the people.” Having watched Christian groups try to restrict the rights and freedoms of lgbtq people, they are angry at religious leaders who support and defend arch-conservative administrations. In return, I offer the vision of a joint enterprise based on the moral agenda we share: a dedication to the social values that liberate the very people to whom Jesus devoted his work and teachings. He came for everybody but certainly seemed to prefer the poor and needy. He came to provoke the complacent and empower the vulnerable. He was never a figure of the status quo.”
Over 250 clergy and United Church of Canada staff personnel have endorsed a letter to the new Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford. In the letter, the premier is requested to reconsider his stances on refugees, supervised drug injection sites, and the province’s sex-ed curriculum.
Ontario United Church ministers behind a letter to Premier Doug Ford are inviting people to share these graphics. (Credit: OntarioUCCMinisters.org)
In Ontario there’s plenty of controversy over the unilateral decision of the Doug Ford government to revert to the 1998 educational curriculum.
A well-respected minister in the United Church of Canada, Rev. Dr. Cheri DeNovo has written a column in The Observer on this action. The column speaks of the rights of those who are marginalized, and of Christian love and respect for our neighbours. Part of what Rev. DiNovo writes is as follows:
“Soon, I will be hand-delivering a letter to Premier Doug Ford or Deputy Premier Christine Elliott, a woman I admire and consider a friend, signed by dozens of United Church clergy, asking the premier to exercise compassion and justice on a number of issues, one of them being to protect our children by informing and educating them so that they can protect themselves.“
The following reflection by Jim Taylor is an excellent reflection on how the Bible, and scripture, has been used in the past, and not so recent past, to justify the actions taken by those who have political power. In fact, I too have been guilty of this offence. In the particular case that Taylor is reflecting on, Romans 13:1 was used to justify how a government has incarcerated children.
Beware of politicians quoting Bible verses
By Jim Taylor – Sunday, June 24, 2018
For a hundred years, the Canadian government took children from their parents and incarcerated them in Indian Residential Schools. For their own good. The feds have since issued apologies. They’ve paid around $5 billion in compensation. And all governments have paid many billions more in welfare, prisons, and social assistance.
In the 1950s, the B.C. government took Doukhobor children away from their families, and locked them up in a prison camp in New Denver. For the children’s own good, of course.
In the 1960s, various governments did the Sixties Scoop. Once again Indigenous children were separated from their parents and placed with white foster families. For their own good, of course.
We’re now reaping a bitter harvest of alcoholism and drug dependency, of depression and suicide, of adults who don’t know how to be parents.
I know about the trauma of foster parenting and adoption personally. My grandson was adopted from Ethiopia. At 11, he’s still working through the after-effects of being torn from his natural family, shipped from orphanage to orphanage, and finally brought to Canada.
Adoption data suggests that if you can adopt during a child’s first year, separation anxiety will fade in two or three years. Separation at two will probably take five years. Separation at seven or eight may never be overcome.
And then the Trump administration set a policy of removing children from parents who enter the United States illegally, and locking the children up in detention centres.
Can’t we ever learn from past mistakes?
A policy in search of justification
Last Sunday, Father’s Day, William Rivers Pitt wrote that there were already 1,469 children locked into in “an old Walmart outside of Brownsville, Texas… which was given the grimly Orwellian name Casa Padre, or ‘Father’s House’.”
To his credit, the president overruled his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Children can now stay with their parents. In jail. Sessions had claimed earlier, to a gathering of law officers in Fort Wayne, Texas, that St. Paul himself endorsed strict enforcement of immigration laws — which, by Sessions interpretation, included ripping children from their mothers’ arms. He quoted Paul, in his letter to the Christians in Rome, saying, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities…”
Sessions didn’t get the quotation quite accurate, but that never matters when using the Bible as a back-up authority. Claiming that the Bible says so is usually sufficient.
Collection of mixed messages
In reality, you can use the Bible to prove almost anything. I have yet to encounter a topic that can’t be defended by quoting some biblical verse.
If you know the right verses, the Bible commends incest, polygamy, betrayal, treason, adultery, civil disobedience, drunkenness, cold-blooded murder, slavery, genocide, and ecocide.
The Bible contradicts itself. The prophet Isaiah had a famous instruction: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks… Another prophet, Joel, reverses it: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”
Which one y’ gonna choose?
Two days before Sessions quoted Paul in support of strict immigration enforcement, the Southern Baptist Convention cited Scripture six times for immigration reform.
Once again, which one y’ gonna choose?
Not anyone’s final word
The standard Protestant Bible contains 66 books, written by at least 50 different people –not counting the Psalms, known to have at least 57 more authors — over about 1500 years.
I’m an editor. I have worked with books where multiple authors contributed chapters. It was almost impossible to achieve consistency. Even though they were all writing about the same subject, to the same standards, in the same time period.
Expecting consistency in a text created over 15 centuries is like expecting pigs to do long division.
And don’t quote me the verse that says, “All scripture is inspired by God.” That verse was not written to be part of the Bible; it was a personal letter to a young man named Timothy. When it was written, the only scriptures it could refer to were the Jewish scriptures, which we now condescendingly call the “Old Testament.” The New Testament didn’t get finalized until 367 AD.
But that doesn’t matter to Jeff Sessions.
All that matters is finding a verse he can quote to support his policies, to people who think the Bible is the final word on everything. Even if that policy goes against everything we have learned from family studies, psychology, and post-trauma treatment, and against the message of the Bible as a whole.
Anytime politicians quote the Bible to prove their point, beware!
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Copyright © 2018 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved. To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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This is a personal reflection written By Jim Taylor:
I was driving north, up the main highway. As I came down the hill into town, traffic slowed to a standstill. The truck ahead of me turned on its four-way flashers.
Something was happening, but I couldn’t see what. I peered through the gap between the vehicles ahead of me. And I saw a woman, walking backwards across the four lanes of traffic, beckoning to something or someone with her hands, encouraging them to come on.
Then I saw what she was encouraging. A pair of geese. Canada geese. Big birds. When they spread their wings and hiss, they can be terrifying. But these two waddled along following the woman. And right behind them came a pair of goslings, balls of fluff on toothpick legs. And finally, behind them all, came a man pushing a bicycle, making sure no one got left behind.
Or run over.
The whole cortege reached the far sidewalk. The geese vanished into the park. The man and woman gave each other high-fives, and went their separate ways. Traffic rolled again.
As I too drove on, it occurred to me that I had just seen a parable enacted, a parable of the way the world could be, and should be.
Jesus didn’t have Canada Geese or four-lane highways to talk about in his parables. But I think he would have described that scene as a sample of the kingdom of God.
The goslings trusted their parents enough to follow them into a totally foreign environment. The geese trusted the woman enough to follow her across the highway. The woman trusted the drivers enough to believe that no impatient driver would run her down.
And it worked.
For that couple of minutes, no one roared over the sidewalk to save a few seconds. No one honked angrily. No one brandished middle-finger salutes. Everyone got where they were going, at most a couple of minutes late.
It’s a parable of the “kingdom” because all our relationships depend on trust. Every day, we commit hundreds of little acts of trust. So many, in fact, that we don’t even think of them as acts of trust — we take them for granted.
I trust that my breakfast cereal is safe to eat. That an oncoming driver will not suddenly swerve into my lane. That the radio news is not fabricated fiction. That the cash register at the grocery store will add my bill accurately. That the tree will stay upright, the bridge will hold, the sky will not fall.
At least, not today.
If I couldn’t trust these incidents, I’d be paralyzed. Afraid of everything. A nervous wreck, a human Chicken Little.
Trust keeps our society, our civilization, even our world, running smoothly.
We exist in a vast, universal, web of relationships. We are, in a sense, the sum of our relationships. When we can no longer trust those relationships, we lose a huge part of what we are. We are reduced to being an individual playing solitaire.
That’s why breaches of trust are so serious. And that’s why little incidents that remind us how much trust matters, matter. Even if they bring traffic to a standstill.
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Copyright © 2017 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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