In My Lifetime

Honestly....

Well I was back at my beloved MCC of Northern Virginia today preaching for the second time during their pastor's sabbatical. I am so blessed to have been a part of that community and I am equally blessed to continue to call them friend and to spend time among them.  They are a wonderful community of the people of God.
My sermon today was called "Honest to Jesus"  and I have provided links below to audio and text versions of it.  If you listen to the audio please do avail yourselves of reading the texts of the readings.  They do figure prominently in the sermon and you will benefit from reading both readings.
I hope your day is going the way you wanted and if not, I hope it's going to work out even better than you'd planned.  It's important to live the the axiom "When in Rome...."  So I say "Go Redskins!"

Download honest_to_jesus__audio.mp3

Matthew 21: 23-32

Download with_all_honesty_by_sara_coslett.pdf

Palin Hangover

Ok there's no need to reprint it here.  Just follow this link and READ it.Gloria Steinem Op Ed
I rest my case.

Is it just me?

Ok.... so is it just me or do you feel like you're in the twilight zone?  Are these the SAME Republicans who had a COW about Clinton and Edwards' dalliances?  Suddenly there's just no big deal about a pregnant 17 year old?  The spin from the Republican camp sounds like this kid is the blessed virgin pregnant with the 21st century messiah!

I gotta tell you I'm proud of Obama for saying that folk's families are "off limits."  But what happened to the religious right's axioms that include Proverbs 22:6 "Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it."  In my Baptist upbringing this meant that if the children misbehaved and particularly if they created some scandal (like a 17 year old girl's pregnancy) then the assumption was that there is something wrong in the upbringing.

Now certainly I do not subscribe to this idea.  I know plenty of folks who have kids with issues and problems.  Kids do kid things.  But this "overlooking" such an obvious transgression of "good Christian values" as turning up pregnant while one is still in high school is a little disingenuous on the part of the fundies isn't it?  Or are they just so damned happy she's not a lesbian it's become a hetero-celebration to showcase the obvious lack of need for legal abortion in the US? 

I'm just confused.

On Hurricanes and Conventions

CNN makes me crazy most of the time.  But nobody does a hurricane like CNN.  They have people outside, inside, in the studio, on the beach... they're whack jobs actually.  A split screen shot of the water overtopping the industrial canal includes a shot of an idiot camera person walking around just under the levee as the waves splash over.
I'm sitting here praying for everyone, even the idiot camera operator, who are in or around this storm.  Our friends at Big Easy MCC are evacuated or hunkered down. Rachelle's grandmother finally agreed to go to Lafayette. When your name ends in an x and you're over 90 years old.... it's hard to take a single hurricane very seriously.  She's seen so many come and go.
The lower 9th ward is flooding again.  The wreckage still left from Katrina is beginning to float around and smash against the new homes that individuals and actors and singers and benefactors have helped to get moving because the government, THREE years later, still can't get its act together.  They rebuilt Bande Ache in less than two years but the richest nation in the world has been unable to get money to its citizens after 3 years.
For those who said that Katrina was God's judgment on the feminists and the abortionists and the gays and lesbians.... what does the timing of Gustav say about the Republican Convention?  So they're calling it off to look like they're doing something.  Telethons instead of a convention?  That sits really well with me, how about you?  I have my own charitites thanks.  I don't need the Republican National Committee to help me figure out how to contribute to people who need and deserve to be helped by the very government that is subsidizing the companies who are "outsourcing" their jobs out of the country, financing the national debt by China, and allowing the sale of land, resources, even ports to foreign interests while American citizens go bankrupt trying to pay for healthcare and buy gas to go to work.
Could it be that God is unhappy with John McCain's choice of a woman as his running mate?  Afterall, it seemed that the darned hurricane just exploded at the moment he announced Palin as his running mate.  Or could it be that God is protecting her because there's no room for the media to cover the ethics investigation of her in her home state of Alaska?
Perhaps God is just having mercy on us all so that we all don't have to endure Bush and Cheney on TV at the convention since Bush has bailed and Cheney just got on a plane and left the country.  Interesting timing for that trip.  Maybe he figured it was one of his last opportunities for a little "round the world" tour.
This whole post is tongue in cheek.  I don't think God gives a rat's .... well, bum about the Republicans or Palin or the convention.  And I certainly don't think God is engineering the storm surge that threatens to flood the 9th ward again.  God is sitting with the people who are in hotels in far away places, hovering with those who decided to stay, comforting the loved ones of people too ill to move out of hospitals in New Orleans, carrying the souls of those who are dying at this very moment.
Well let me get back to CNN.  There's a reporter standing outside with the wind nearly blowing him down showing us a tree limb that flew in there in the last gale.  He's telling us that this could become a projectile that the wind could push straight through a human being.  Yes I said he's telling us this as he's standing outside in wind speeds so high he can barely stand....  It boggles the mind.