Between Memorial Day and Pentecost 2009
May 26, 2009
After reading the Valley of the Dry Bones in Ezekiel 371-14 and walking around Gettysburg on Memorial Day, I could almost hear the voice of the blood of 51,000 souls crying out of the soil on the futility of killing and empathizing my grandfather who committed suicide, attributed to his being in WWI… And all those killed in collateral damage, or all those damaged physically and emotionally in our recent middle east wars…amputees, PDSD, It is still the spirit of the age…violence, killing, fear. Miroslav Volf, author of Exclusion and Embrace
A few evenings ago I was playing roulette with my universal remote and flipped from Channel 1 to channel 300 and found nothing to watch. The overwhelming majority of it was stories of cheating, stealing, lying, and killing. How many ways can we do this to each other? I guess the ways are infinite. It reminds me of what Tolstoi said about families…. “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” , recently said on a Speaking of Faith interview on NPR that more people are killed in domestic violence than war.
Yet 50 miles down the road from the most violent killing field in North America, if you stay on Route 30 eastbound, the Lincoln Highway, you come to the most productive non-irrigated soil in the world, Lancaster County. It generates $1 Billion a year in agricultural revenue, in part due to a backward peace loving people who, for over more than 480 years, are still running against the wind, against the spirit of the age. No, the Amish/Mennonites are not perfect and some have been found to have puppy mills…but the whole area produces a whopping amount of food and they are quick to forgive…even when their children are massacred. Another product beyond food and forgiveness which Lancaster County is known for is live stage productions. According to a NYT article a few years ago, Lancaster County is only second to Broadway in live theater production audience. And on top of that…these are all bible stories….stories of people acting badly as well…but people who end up, with all their flaws..making a decision to follow the Lord. I would like to venture a guess that they may be second in live stage production, but they just may have the largest buffet in North America.
For now perhaps the food, forgiveness and bible stories, is a counter balance to the most violent example of mankind killing each other in North America. A thing about which William Penn would definitely rejoice in the Peaceable Kingdom he had in mind when he founded PA, and Edward Hicks kept redrawing. Yet the vision of Ezekiel goes further..kind of a reverse of Raiders of the Lost Ark..when after the Ark is opened…flesh is being stripped off of that ugly face until it becomes a skull. Ezekiel 379-10 “He said to me, ‘prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man’. Say to the breath ‘the Lord Yahweh says this: come from the four winds, breath, breath on these dead let them live!’ I prophesied as he had ordered me and the breath entered them; they became to life again and stood up on their feet, a great and immense army.”
Oh that we could live lives of faith in our communities that would shun fear, lying, cheating, and self-interest and seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and strive for the fruits of the spirit. Isaiah takes us out of the valley on to the Mountain:
On this mountain
Yahweh Sabaoth will prepare for all peoples
a banquet of rich food, a banquet of fine wines,
of food rich and juicy, of fine strained wines.
On this mountain he will remove
the mourning veil covering all peoples,
And the shroud enwrapping all nations,
He will destroy Death for ever.
The Lord Yahweh will wipe away
The tears from every cheek…
-Isaiah 256-8b

Our Mighty Companion

Our Mighty Companion

A recent lectionary reading for September 10 http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp18_RCL.html was Psalm 146 which relates directly to Peaceful Living’s principle of companionship. It reads:

Alleluia

Praise Yahweh, my soul

I mean to praise Yahweh all my life,

I mean to sing to Yahweh as long as I live

Do not put your trust in men in power,

Or in any mortal man-he cannot save,

He yields his breath and goes back to the earth he came from,

And on that day all his schemes perish.

Happy the man who has the God of Jacob to help him,

whose hope is fixed on Yahweh his God,

maker of heaven and earth,

and the sea, and all these hold!

Yahweh, forever faithful,

gives justice to those denied it,

gives food to the hungry,

gives liberty to prisoners.

Yahweh restores sight to the blind

Yahweh straightens the bent.

Yahweh protects the stranger

he keeps the orphan and the widow.

Yahweh loves the virtuous

and frustrates the wicked.

Yahweh reigns forever,

your God, Zion, from age to age.

For us at Peaceful Living we are committed to being companions to the individuals we are here to serve. The root of companionship is “to break bread with”. We are here to break bread with the people for which Yahweh holds dear. But we cannot do this alone…and so as we are “tiny companions” so is Yahweh our “mighty companion”.

The Dominos fell the wrong way

September 7, 2006

Dominos fell the wrong way

Seeing, reading, and hearing about all the war hysteria an old saying popped into my head…”that’s all I can stanz and I can’t stanz no more”. While I agree with Popeye’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye) food preferences, as a Mennonite committed to non-violence, I take a different approach than he would to Bluto or Brutus

I remember walking out on the playground at Lower Salford Elementary School one day, I don’t know if Ida Keyser, Miss Heckler, or Mrs. Smith was my teacher that year, but I remember seeing the whole play ground filled with bomb shelters. I also remember in our Weekly Reader in the world news section we read about Vietnam. During most of junior high school and Souderton and later while at Christopher Dock Mennonite High School….we were constantly told in the news about the threat of communism and why we needed to stop this threat to American democracy and Southeast Asia is where we were going to do this. One of the US solders who fought in Vietnam and was involved in the My Lai Massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_Lai_Massacre) went back 25 years after the incident in 1993 to revisit the site. When he arrived the children now living in the village approached him announcing their names….”me Flower…me Blossom.” His response was…”My God we should have bombed these people with Love”

Instead of going to Vietnam, I volunteered to go into alterative service, working as an orderly caring for persons with disabilities in West Berlin, Germany…living behind the Iron Curtain for two years…in an island of western democracy.

Suddenly in 1989 the Iron Curtain fell under its own weight. The people in Berlin said the Wall fell for the same reason it went up…to keep people from leaving. When it fell, hardly a shot was fired, but it fell backwards and knocked a lot of other communist dominos with it. And so, at the end of one of the most violent centuries in history, we saw a non-violent revolution, using Gandhi and Martin Luther Kings non-violent approach, that democratized over a billion people’s lives...in East Germany, Russian, Romania, Czechoslovakia, China, South Africa, Chile and other countries as well.

This is why I’m a member at Salford Mennonite Church, Harleysville and involved in our “Be not Afraid Weekend” to find ways to live in peace in a fear-filled age. I invite anyone who is interested in this kind of dialogue to our sessions on Saturday and Sunday September 9 and 10 (http://www.salfordmc.org/ ).

Joe G. Landis

Lederach

Time and Eternity

I’m a Christian, I’m a Mennonite, and I’m concerned about doing things that will last for eternity. My primary concern is how we as a Christian church include or don’t include persons with disabilities into our fellowship. I believe as a Christian, and the broader faith community as well…Judiasm, Islam, Buddhism, should be a light for the rest of the world to see how we as the faith community do this. My quest to understand this emerges out of my life and thought after working 30 years in the field of disabilities. I have come to believe that the individuals who we call the most severely disabled, are the ones who are the most spiritually profound. They could care less about our different faith traditions, but simply ask the questions…”are you kind?” and “will you spend time with me?”...and dear people, is this not what the heart of our faith traditions are?

Joe Landis