by Stephen Phelps | Nov 25, 2012 | hope, sermon 2012, social justice
Don’t you feel the thrill of Ezekiel’s righteous anger, and feel it is as your own! “You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock; you do not bring back the strays.” The translation sounds out as plain politics. “You eat the curds” means you pay poverty wages to the poor and make a million off their backs. “You clothe yourselves with their wool” refers to the fine estates, the sumptuous feasts, the elegant clothes and the secure billions . . .
by Stephen Phelps | Nov 11, 2012 | generosity, sermon 2012, stewardship
If you have studied the Older Testament with me, you’ll remember its undulating highs and lows, with three exuberant Everest peaks, each with its hero—Abraham, Moses, and David; and three terrible troughs between, each with its sorrow—slavery, disintegration, and exile. But here’s the thing. In the trough is where the future comes. . .
by Stephen Phelps | Oct 28, 2012 | racism, sermon 2012, social justice
We close the series today thinking about racism. As a people, we can barely talk about it, yet it touches virtually everything that has gone wrong in America. The love of war; the love of power by and for the few; the hatred of what is different or foreign; the hatred of real education, real food, real wages, real medicine, real women, and so much more we have considered during these last four months . . .
by Stephen Phelps | Oct 21, 2012 | criminal justice, mass incarceratiom, racism, sermon 2012
We are incarceration nation, apparently so full of hatred for certain people that, like crazed animals, we severely damage our whole tribe with this giant prison industry that fosters the very corrupt and violent behaviors it purports to control. Like a dragon waiting inside a cave to devour the next generation of young black and brown men, we do not see that our mouth-parts are fastened on our own body. Yet hardly any political leader of any stature or color, and hardly any religious leaders, are ever heard to say of our (very) criminal justice system that we have a problem—all of us . . .
by Stephen Phelps | Oct 14, 2012 | health care, sermon 2012, social justice
Today, we are going to feel our way with America’s towering health care crisis. In this, we are certainly politically stuck, but we are jammed up in many other dimensions as well. Costs are out of control, our weight and our diets are out of control, fear of death and disability has control of us, for we have lost the courage of being humbly human; we want to live forever. To cap it off, unlike the rest of the industrialized world, many Americans refuse to consider health care a right, rather than a privilege . . .
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