Sunday Drive: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

It does my Episcopal heart good to see them rockin' the bells and smells at Trinity Church, Wall Street, recorded on February 26th of this year.  I'm not an Anglo-Catholic, or even particularly High Church - but a little festivity now and then is a joyful thing.

 

BONUS:  The late Archbishop Tutu gave a wonderful sermon there in 2006, on the theme of God's love, which I hope will give you a spiritual blessing today. It did for me. You might want to turn up the sound a little; and if need be, you can turn on captioning by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the YouTube screen.

 

Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee . . .

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Show and Tell

Your Head Trucker has been given to understand that these particular images are very popular on that Facebook thing now, which I suppose must be something like television, only with still pictures, maybe? Never have used it myself, and see no need for it, but these are worth a look:

 

 

Tutu Speaks Truth to Power

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times:

I am deeply, deeply disturbed at the suggestion in “A Court to Vet Kill Lists” (news analysis, front page, Feb. 9) that possible judicial review of President Obama’s decisions to approve the targeted killing of suspected terrorists might be limited to the killings of American citizens.

Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it.

I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.

DESMOND M. TUTU
Aboard MV Explorer, near Hong Kong
Feb. 11, 2013

The writer, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town.

See also this article in the New Yorker, "Torture and Obama's Drone Program":

Nick Gillespie suggested that liberals’ lesser outrage at Obama’s drones than Bush’s “enhanced interrogations” amounted to a kind of intellectual corruption. “This isn’t ultimately about ideological hypocrisy—of liberals changing their tune once their guy is in office—but something much more basic and much more disturbing. It reveals that for all their crowing about being watchdogs of all that is good and decent in society, when push comes to shove, too many journalists are ready and willing handmaidens to power—including the power to kill.”

And this article in the Miami Herald, "On Use of Drones, Obama Overreaches":

But in its memo, which surfaces as the Senate ponders confirming John Brennan as director of the CIA, the Justice Department says its definition of “imminent threat” doesn’t require “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

In other words, “imminent” doesn’t mean “imminent.” And if U.S. intelligence — which we all know is infallible, right? — determines you to be a member of al Qaida, that determination, absent any evidence of a planned attack, gives the government the legal pretext to vaporize you. Worse, the government contends this may be done without oversight, judicial or otherwise. The president becomes, quite literally, your judge, jury and executioner.

Cf. Targeted killing - and for a further thrill, National security letter.

And this chart. And this quote.

There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.

--Ecclesiastes 7:20

Honk to Mimi, who first posted Tutu's letter on her blog.

Sunday Drive: Made in God's Image

Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written an editorial for the Washington Post, condemning the wave of anti-gay legislation and violence in Africa.  An excerpt:

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity -- or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong. . . .

That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

"But they are sinners," I can hear the preachers and politicians say. "They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished." My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

Sunday thought: "God is weeping . . . "

Link to BBC News video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7602535.stm

Bishop Tutu, former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize winner and a leader in the struggle to end apartheid, says he's "ashamed" to be associated with religious leaders who are "persecuting the persecuted" . . . i.e., the gays. "I can't imagine anyone in his right mind choosing a way of life that would expose him to so much hatred."

Basically, Tutu is telling the Church to get over it and stop "obsessing" over homosexuality. And get on with feeding the hungry, healing the sick, helping the poor. You know--the original plan; wasn't that it?