Denise and I had the wonderful opportunity to come back to my home state of Minnesota to hear “The Boss” offer up an evening of positive energy and outstanding music on the opening night of the E Street Band’s “Land of Hope & Dreams tour.” I needed this concert last night more than I realised.
As an American, a Veteran, and a Pastor, I have struggled a lot with complex feelings and concerns about the trajectory of this nation that I love and served for 26 years in uniform. Feelings of anger, despair, depression, and anxiety have been, at times, difficult for me to handle. Thankfully, Denise my sweet partner in life, love, and ministry has walked with me through these challenges and continues to be one of my guiding lights.
I needed a revival of the soul and Bruce Springsteen did just that for me and for Denise. The feeling of community and commitment amongst the approximately 18,000 concert goers was palpable. The energy was carried out into the streets of Minneapolis as we left the venue and walked back to our hotel. Even this morning the energy and excitement was present in the breakfast area and elevator as we chatted with others who had attended the concert.
In his opening comments last night, Springsteen said “We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals…” He then asked us to join in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over and peace over war! At that point, the band blasted right into the epic song “War!”
At the end of the concert, Springsteen reminded us that this country was founded by people who disagreed with each other but that didn’t stop the founders from working together in building this nation forged in the crucible of a Revolution which gave birth to our country and the Constitution which is the foundation of who we are as Americans.
Before beginning “Chimes of Freedom,” he told the audience This is a tour that was not planned. We’re here tonight because we need to steal your hope and your strength. And we wanted to bring some hope and some strength to you. I hope we did.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band delivered on that promise and he encouraged us to go home and, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.
Thanks for the encouragement Boss, we will return home with our spirits revived and with a renewed fire in our hearts. And with you We’ll take our stand for this land/And the stranger in our midst/We’ll take our stand for this land/And the stranger in our midst/We’ll remember the names of those who died/On the streets of Minneapolis.
“The invitation is to be Church. Not just passive pew dwellers, but an active embodiment of God’s love.”
–John Valters Paintner, PhD, Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life — A Self-Study Online Retreat. Use code SACREDTIME20 to take 20% off through March 31st, today.
How are you an active embodiment of God’s love?
To read the book this retreat accompanies, click here.
Verse of the day
For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
– Mark 8:36
Voice of the day
History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.
– Marsha P. Johnson
Prayer of the day
Faithful and True Witness, help us make choices that will reverberate justly in the present and in retrospect.
Verse of the day
There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
– Galatians 3:28
Voice of the day
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
– Margaret Atwood
Prayer of the day
God, help us keep each other’s resounding dignity at the forefront of our minds as we fight the yoke of oppression.
Persons are known not by the intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as an other self, we resort to the impersonal “law” and “nature.” That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, its demands. In effect, however, we are considering our nature in the concrete and his nature in the abstract. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused, an evil being. — Seeds of Destruction, pp. 254-255
In his commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, Fr. Berrigan wrote the following about Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.
…he [Ezekiel] allows room for a touch of madness, surrounded as we are by evidence of insanity in high places—addictions to death-dealing, domination, greed, ego, the forms of death that govern authority high and low today. Ezekiel, truth-teller, points to another way. He resists every attempt to be “normalised, by wicked authority,” “assimilated” by the world. He will not grow spiritually sodden; no business as usual, no war as usual, no waste and want as usual, no religious rote and rot as usual. God, he declares, has another, far different, hope for creation, for ourselves. For the “widow and orphan,” the abused and condemned and forgotten, those who count for little or nothing, “lives of no value.” And we, the beneficiaries of such sanity, so talismanic an ancestor, can only give thanks. — Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings, pp. 252-253
Fr. Berrigan wrote that the prophet and truth-teller points to another way. What if that way was love? Transformative love that changes lives. Love that changes vision in order for us to see our enemies as our sibling instead. Love that helps us to agree to disagree while still working together to help the most vulnerable in the world.
Perhaps then we can do something positive for the community and the world. I believe that these words from Martin Luther King, Jr. may well hold the key to such a transformation. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
This is my hope… this is my prayer. Darkness transformed into light and hatred transformed into love. Dear reader, will you join me in that prayer and work? From our lips to God’s ear may we pray.
Verse of the day
Then Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it on a rock for herself, from the beginning of harvest until rain fell on them from the heavens; she did not allow the birds of the air to come on the bodies by day or the wild animals by night.
– 2 Samuel 21:10
Voice of the day
I am sick of war. Every woman of my generation is sick of war. Fifty years of war. Wars rumored, wars beginning, wars fought, wars ending, wars paid for, wars endured.
– Josephine Winslow Johnson
Prayer of the day
God, hear the outcry of your people inundated with violence and complicity to it. Galvanize us into articulating outrage into action.
I can easily hear Fr. Louis saying this today….
If only our foreign politics made sense! But we have nobody in it who knows what he is doing: or if one or two know, they are still impotent. — Turning Toward the World: The Pivotal Years (The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 4: 1960-1963), June 20, 1960
Verse of the day
If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true.
– 1 John 1:6
Voice of the day
Strange things are happening in this land, and only when the truth is widely known, can we put a stop to them.
– Luisa Moreno
Prayer of the day
Spirit of Truth, cast aside any willful ignorance toward what is happening in this land. Counsel us to act as we face what we know now.
When we struggle for human rights, for freedom, for dignity, when we feel that it is a ministry of the church to concern itself for those who are hungry, for those who have no schools, for those who are deprived, we are not departing from God’s promise. He comes to free us from sin, and the church knows that sin’s consequences are all such injustices and abuses. The church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things. — The Violence of Love
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 