Episcopal Life Daily March 19, 2008
Episcopal Life Online is available at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/elife.
Today's Episcopal Life Daily includes:
* TOP STORY - Five years into Iraq war, Episcopal Church ministers on many fronts * TOP STORY - Sunday School students find Christ's Seven Last Words illustrated in Central Park * SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS - Good Friday - Year A [RCL] * SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS - Easter Day - Year A [RCL] * DAYBOOK - March 20, 2008: Today in Scripture, Prayer, History * CATALYST - The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
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TOP STORIES
Five years into Iraq war, Episcopal Church ministers on many fronts
Caring for soldiers and families, working for peace
By Mary Frances Schjonberg
[Episcopal News Service] Five years after the start of the war in Iraq, the Episcopal Church remains active on at least three fronts, including ministering to those involved in the fighting and their families, ministering to those who have come home, and continuing its call for peace in Iraq and the entire Middle East.
"I join many in this church who continue to work and pray for an end to the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan," Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told ENS. "We pray for our soldiers and their families, for the people of both countries, and for the refugees searching for shelter from the violence surrounding them."
"I have spent this week in the land we call holy and been reminded in countless ways that achieving a two-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis is essential for the future stability of the Middle East and Afghanistan. We seek a society of peace with justice, for all peoples of this world. None of us will enjoy security until all do."
Full story: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_95857_ENG_HTM.htm
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Sunday School students find Christ's Seven Last Words illustrated in Central Park
By Mary Frances Schjonberg
[Episcopal News Service] Christians have for centuries meditated on the last words Christ uttered from the cross. Now a group of Sunday School students in New York City have created contemporary illustrations of them.
Looking for a way meditate on God's word during Lent, to make their Bible study come alive and perhaps inspire others, middle and high school students from the Church of St. Matthew's and St. Timothy's Sunday school took their cameras into nearby Central Park to find Jesus' last seven words in their world.
The project began early in Lent with the students contemplating Christ's seven last words, reviewing their context and considering what the words said to them, according to Oliver Brewer, director of the Sunday school.
Full story: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_95872_ENG_HTM.htm
More Top Stories: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/elife
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SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS
Good Friday - Year A [RCL]
Isaiah 52:13-54:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:79; John 18, 19
By Katerina K. Whitley
[Sermons That Work] "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15).
Good Friday comes to us each year with a nearly unbearable weight of remembered pain. We know what will happen. The desperate human heart that always longs for salvation, despite its knowledge of the end of tragedy, longs to change the ending, to move it from death to rescue. How many times have we wished for the same when watching Romeo and Juliet, Antigone, or Hamlet? We want to shout to the protagonist, "No, no, don't believe the lie. Don't kill yourself. There is hope yet to come if you only don't give in, if you only stay alive."
When Judas comes into the garden for the arrest, we want to cry out, "How can you, Judas? Go back, don't betray the one who loves you." When Pilate acknowledges that Jesus is without the guilt of political insurrection, we cry out, "Why then did you have him flogged? Why are you allowing them to choose Barabbas instead of this innocent man? Why do you give in to the cries of 'Crucify him'?"
Full reflection: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/82478_95755_ENG_HTM.htm
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Easter Day - Year A [RCL]
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts: 10 34-43; Matthew 28: 1-10
By David Moxon
[Sermons That Work] The arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion of Jesus occupy the largest single incident in any one of the four gospels. This incident has been the most widely depicted of everything in Jesus' life. Every detail of this grisly process seems to have been carefully recorded by the evangelists. The heart-rending details of the final suffering of the Son of God reveal how deep God's empathy is for the pain and sin of the world and how far the divine love will go to redeem them. Evil in so many forms - political, religious, psychological, and spiritual - poured itself out completely in this event. Yet all these forces exhausted themselves without finally exhausting the faith, hope, and love of God in what happened. In a way, the forces of evil, as powerful as they are, were finally put in their place, exposed as ultimately unreal, and finally overcome in resurrection. The resurrection is the place in human history where evil, injustice, and prejudice are transfigured into justice, goodness, and enlightenment.
However, the details of the resurrection itself are not recorded in Matthew's account, neither is there an attempt to record them in the other three gospels. What we have are various accounts of the results and fruits of the resurrection, but not any attempt to describe how it happened. This is because no one was present. No one could have anticipated it; the event itself didn't fit into any of the known categories of knowledge or understanding.
What we have is an event without comparison. You can understand something scientifically today only if you can compare it with something else or with some sort of pattern that already exists. With the resurrection this is not possible: we have an utterly unique, mind-blowing, heart-changing, spirit-restoring mystery of God. The resurrection cannot finally be assessed by human method. However, various attempts have been made to explain what happened. Here are four of the most common explanations.
Full reflection: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/82478_95756_ENG_HTM.htm
More Spiritual Reflections: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/82457_ENG_HTM.htm
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DAYBOOK
On March 20, 2008, the Church calendar remembers Maundy Thursday and Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne (634-687).
* Today in Scripture: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/82457_ENG_HTM.htm * Today in Prayer: Anglican Cycle of Prayer: http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acp/index.cfm * Today in History: On March 20, 1885, Christopher Wordsworth, Anglican priest and nephew of the English poet William Wordsworth, died in Lincoln, England.
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CATALYST
"The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It" from Oxford University Press, by Paul Collier, 205 pages, hardcover, c. 2008, $28 [Source: Oxford University Press] Global poverty, Paul Collier points out, is actually falling quite rapidly for about eighty percent of the world. The real crisis lies in a group of about 50 failing states, the bottom billion, whose problems defy traditional approaches to alleviating poverty. In The Bottom Billion, Collier contends that these fifty failed states pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines a much needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nation between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning.
Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that snare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work against these traps, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, and new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. As former director of research for the World Bank and current Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, Paul Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.
More Catalyst: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/83842_ENG_HTM.htm