wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Peace Fellowship speaker rues 'signs of empire'

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Peace Fellowship speaker rues 'signs of empire'
GA03079

Peace Fellowship speaker rues 'signs of empire'

by Midge Mack

DENVER, May 28 - "We live in the time of empire," Rick Ufford-Chase said at
the outset of his breakfast address to the Peace Fellowship on Wednesday.

	"These are the signs of empire," he said, enumerating:

	The price of coffee drops on the world market and families can no
longer afford even to harvest their beans. Four malnourished children in
Guatemala, one carrying a baby, are abandoned in farm country when their
parents move to the city to seek work. Government officials in Panama divert
millions of public dollars to private accounts.

	"The face of empire in our time is that McDonalds must be backed up
by McDonnell Douglas (a defense contractor)," Ufford-Chase said. "There is no
more powerful symbol of that military might and how it protects our economic
interests than the U.S.-Mexico border, where 10,000 Border Patrol agents and
16-foot-high steel barriers 'protect our way of life,' as the sign proclaims.

	"Such is the relationship between our standard of living in the U.S.
and the force necessary to protect us not only from desperate hordes who
might threaten us but also to keep two-thirds of the world where they are
willing to work for poverty wages in the fields, the greenhouses, and the
factories of empire."

	"The question for all of us," he said, "is how to be church in the
heart of empire."

	He turned to the fifth chapter of Mark, the story of Jesus and the
man possessed by demons. Some try to subdue the demoniac by beating him with
chains, Ufford-Chase said, and that is not unlike our efforts to subdue those
we think may threaten us with bombs, tanks, economic sanctions and "homeland
security."

	"Yet we don't feel any safer!," he pointed out.

	He offered his vision of a world in which workers everywhere can earn
a fair day's pay; resources will be used fairly; the environment will be
respected and preserved; justice will be more a matter of negotiation and
consensus-building than of power; and money now used to buy weapons will be
used instead to build safe communities with adequate housing, education and
health care for all.

	Those who heard Ufford-Chase responded with a standing ovation. Many
were in tears.

	The Peace Fellowship presented its annual PeaceSeeker award to Gloria
and Ross Kinsler for dedication to peace and justice and their concern for
indigenous peoples around the world. Their recent book, Biblical Jubilee and
the Struggle for Life, is available in the Exhibit Hall.

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