I’ve been asked to contribute to an anthology about “Finding Christ in the Quaker Church”. If you, dear reader, know me well, then I’d be curious to hear what you think I might particularly be able to highlight or contribute to that conversation. If you, dear reader, do not know me well, then I’d be curious to hear what you are curious about on this point.
Living Leadings
Religious, Spiritual, and Scholarly Considerations from Robert C. Fischer
One rarely knows what is good for us and what is bad. Therefore if we knowingly put ourselves in the hands of Almighty, whatever happens must be deemed good. And I try literally to follow that precept.
Gandhi, "Letter to Francesca Standenath", April 1947
Sermon: Possessing the Church
This is my last sermon for Preaching class (and possibly my last sermon ever!). The manuscript is mangled, because I wrote enough for 15 minutes without reading the scripture, so I had to do some on-the-fly editing and improvisation. It begins with my translation of Matthew 9:35-10:23 and then launches into a critique of the church’s social engagement based on Jesus’s call to His disciples.
You probably want to download the file and play the downloaded version: the file is big and your player probably won’t stream the file, so if you just press “play”, it might take a minute or two for the sermon to actually start playing.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (32.5MB)
How #OccupyWallSt Revealed Truth
(And Those Who Want to Hide It)
Police evicted #OccupyWallSt at 2 AM last night. They barred press coverage — even closed the airspace above the park so that press helicopters couldn’t fly over (an unprecedented move). These are not the actions of a reasonable and democratic system maintaining law and order. These are the actions of people who are afraid. But what do they fear? Are they afraid of the nonviolent protestors? Are they afraid of the press, because they might capture pictures like this one?
The press is everywhere. We are all press. You can’t ban us all. Kicking out the “official” press just forces them to speak more directly to the witnesses and to capture their stories and air them as the truth.
#OccupyWallSt has now done exactly what it intended: it revealed that the system was ignoring the people. The people refused to be ignored any longer, so now the system has to oppress the people violently and openly. The only other choice the system has is to change.
So, for fear of change, the system has to tighten its grip. It has to destroy libraries. It has to disguise itself and lie to “infiltrate” something that is totally open and visible. It has to deploy riot police to beat unarmed little girls. It has to do 2 AM evictions and lock totally uninvolved people in their homes like they are criminals. It has to attack our own soldiers, because the soldiers know the truth better than anyone else.
But the sick part is that these actions are not killing #OccupyWallSt. These actions feed it, because it shows that the #OccupyWallSt protests were right and just from the first moment — there really is something broken in this system. There is violence in this system, and all it took was rejecting that violence to coax it out of its hole. In the light of day, though, that violence cannot survive.
The system cannot win. We are eternal.
