Commentary

Holy Saturday 2017

by Ken Sehested

Betwixt and between. Jesus’ disciples and followers are bereft and adrift. The world seems to be coming apart.

As are we.

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Funeral songs

by Ken Sehested

When I was in seminary I remember thinking that all of us, as part of our final year of study, should be required to build our own casket, hauling it around as a storage chest wherever we lived, until the day for its final use. Odd as it sounds, the “remember you are dust” charge provokes an intensity and a freedom to the living of our days, chipping away at the anxiety that too often drives our frenetic habits.

Along that same line, one element of our congregation’s seven-week Lenten reflection group was beginning and ending each meeting by listening to songs participants’ want at their funeral service, in keeping with the season’s invitation to reflect on our own mortality.

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The United States at War

There have been only 17 years that the US has not been involved in a war since 1776

“We’re at War!”
And We Have Been Since 1776: 214 Years of American War-Making

Danios, loonwatch.com blog, 20 December 2011

Year-by-year Timeline of America’s Major Wars (1776-2011)

1776 – American Revolutionary War, Chickamagua Wars, Second Cherokee War, Pennamite-Yankee War

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Follow-up on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

by Ken Sehested

¶ Connecting the dots—or, as we now say, intersectionality. “But when, exactly, did the post-civil rights era begin? Arguably it was fifty years ago today when in a speech [‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,’ aka ‘Declaration of Independence From the War in Vietnam’] at Harlem’s Riverside Church Martin Luther King Jr. definitively broke ranks with the liberals he once considered allies. . . .
         “The very liberals who supported and signed civil rights legislation while waging war in Vietnam would wind up in the years ahead being the chief promulgators of new laws that criminalized the daily lives of the urban poor and authorized the militarization of municipal police forces. The 1968 Safe Streets Act, signed by Johnson, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building up law enforcement and the criminal justice apparatus—astronomically more than was ever spent on the same president’s anti-poverty programs. This legislation would lead to a slew of other law-and-order policies that together helped lead us into the age of mass incarceration.” —Eric Tang, “‘A Society Gone Mad on War’: The Enduring Importance of Martin Luther King’s Riverside Speech,” The Nation

¶ Can’t turn back now. “At first blush it may seem counterintuitive to elevate [the ‘Beyond Vietnam’] speech above the watershed ‘I Have a Dream’ speech delivered four years earlier, or the "[I Have Been to the] Mountaintop’ speech he would give on the eve of his death. But if King's address at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom made him into an American icon, his Riverside Church speech announced him as a genuine prophet for social justice, one who willingly sacrificed his hard-won status to defy an empire.” —Peniel Joseph, “This speech made Martin Luther King Jr. revolutionary,” CNN

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Palms, Passion, Politics and Prayer

A Palm Sunday sermon

by Ken Sehested
Text: Matthew 21:1-13
Sunday 17 April 2011
Circle of Mercy Congregation

      Before I begin, a word of explanation about our special communion table cloth. No doubt you’ve seen the photo on this banner many times before. It’s probably the most widely published photo in human history, and it is the first clear image of an illuminated face of the earth. Officially, it’s known as “The Blue Marble.” It got that name because the astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft, at a distance from about 28,000 miles high.

      One other bit of trivia: originally the photo had the South Pole at the top of the image. (How confusing is that?) It was rotated, with the north at the top, before being distributed.

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Health care as a fundamental human right

by Ken Sehested

       Last fall one of our local journalists, who has an “answer man” column devoted to readers’ questions, was asked about hospitalization insurance coverage, particularly why some of the services received were covered by insurance but others (the ones in small print about “out-of-network” exceptions) were not.

       The hospital president wrote an explanation. This was my response.

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The sinister side of Judeo-Christian Scripture and tradition regarding women

A brief summary of texts

by Ken Sehested

            Thanks to our recent presidential election, more people know the meaning of “misogyny.” As with so many lingering patterns of structural discrimination (which is different from, and far worse than, simple prejudice), gender inequity remains even in societies considered culturally “advanced.”

            Within the Judeo-Christian world, resistance to gender equity has deep roots in Scripture and church history. While it is true that alternative texts and traditions can be identified in these sources, it is still imperative that we openly confront and address the elemental texts and pretexts authorizing overt and covert patterns of domination.

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The things that make for peace

The purpose, promise and peril of interfaith engagement

by Ken Sehested

The only way I know to pluck from the hearts of enemies their desire
to destroy us is to remove from their lives the sense that, for their own physical
and spiritual survival, they must. —David James Duncan

In the early weeks of 2011, during the Arab Spring uprising, Egyptian blogger Nevine Zaki posted a photograph from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. It showed a group of Muslims bowing in prayer, surrounded by other people standing hand-in-hand, facing outward, a human security wall. Zaki affixed this caption: “A picture I took yesterday of Christians protecting Muslims during their prayers.” [1]

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