Here's a link to Doug's Paper:
posted by Rev. Dr. Karen Wacome at 12:55 PM
"Here we have a saying: a good friend is someone who visits you when you are in prison. But a really good friend is someone who comes to hear your lectures." Malcolm Bradbury
2 Comments:
Doug, thanks for being first up in our works in progress. Here's some thoughts. I would suggest giving up the Daniel analogy entirely. But keep your wrestling with Christian responsibility in the face of evil in culture. What are our responsibilities? Do we have to mourn that we are not all called to be prophets? I admire Angelina Grimke because she develops various levels of activism appropriate for Christians. Not all of them involve putting oneself in danger. As Milton writes,
Doth God exact Day Labor, light denied?
The answer he hears back is interesting and famous--
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Let this man you are studying be an example of the way more of us act and think. We want peace and life. If needed we will speak out, even lose our jobs, but out of the center of the "action," we desire to be at peace.
Maybe our example ought to be the Lord who didn't campaign to end slavery in Roman society, who didn't set out to end poverty, nor did he cleanse all the corruption from Israel. But he did overturn the tables in the temple when he saw them, and he helped the poor he encountered, and he saved us all from spiritual slavery though no one from physical slavery.
We are human and we have human limits--we are always going to act and feel in ways that fall short of the divine. But as with this man, we can rejoice in those moments when good happens around us, when someone takes a risk and tries to help another. Then we clearly see, for a moment, the face of God.
What do you think?
Yes, Doug, I find I agree. But I also hope and find comfort in the fact that God promises that he loves us. All the time. And his love is perfect.
I quote from _If Grace is True_ by Gulley and Mulholland.
"Evil no longer astonishes me. Grace astonishes me again and again.... What I find encouraging is that evil has been unable to overcome goodness and grace.... Paul wrote, 'Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good' (Rom. 12:21). This is the ethic of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of Mother Teresa, of Jesus, of Gandhi, and of countless others. It is an ethic that makes sense only if the grace of God will ultimately triumph. If evil and sin ultimately determine nothing, they can be mocked."
If every good humankind does is seen in this light--a mocking of the power of evil--then we can uphold such deeds even though every human will fall short of an ideal life of fighting injustice.
I love you Doug and I appreciate the seriousness of your faith. I guess having left a religious tradition where failure to live up to any aspect of law or doctrine was sin and punishable by hell fire, I'm all too ready to embrace a more optimistic view of human relations with the divine. I want to stop seeing a Christ re-crucified by every mistake I make and want to see a loving father and heavenly host that rejoices at the good I do and even the good I try to do and fail. I believe that grace--even skin-of-the-teeth-grace--can allow me that vision. Maybe this is cheap; certainly I have not earned it, nor do I deserve it. But gifts are usally not deserved; the gifts are still ours to have and to hold and to give away.
"Buffaloed" Joonna, your friend.
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