Gratitude, Economy, Creation Event @ Park St. Church w/speaker Shane Claiborne

Sat night on February 21st some friends and I attended this event at Park St. Church.

Gratitude & Creation with Shane Claiborne - Saturday, Feb 21
Category: news, Events, Fair Trade, Creation
Climate change. Toxic trash. The earth’s budget overstretched. What would our relationship to the environment look like if rooted in gratitude to God?

On the eve of Lent, learn about and undertake a creation commitment together with Christians from all traditions at Gratitude & Creation on Saturday, February 21, 4:30-9:00pm at Park Street Church, Boston.

4:30-6:00
Prayer with Shane Claiborne, Jubilee Sessions sharing practical ways to respect God’s creation.
* Feast without Injustice: fill a Fair Trade cupboard
* Water without Waste: resisting commercialization of water resources
* Beauty without Contamination: clearing out toxics from your household
* Energy without excess: reducing your carbon footprint beyond the light bulb

6:00-7:00
Community Dinner

7:00-9:00
Worship and Message with Shane Claiborne. Music led by bluegrass band featuring local musicians.

Shane Claiborne is the author of the Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical and founding partner in the neo-monastic community, the Simple Way.

A $10 donation to defray costs is suggested but not required. All are welcome to attend.

Sponsors include the Massachusetts Council of Churches, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light.


This event was pretty intriguing and inspiring. I missed the seminars due to arriving late with friends, but still enjoyed the night immensely.The author & speaker Shane Claiborne was down to earth, real, pssionate, and captivatingly humorous as he delivered his message to us. I love and live to be inspired to live for Christ and that is exaclty what Shane's message did for all that attended.

They asked us to commit to giving something up for lent in a way that would help our environment such as stop using a clothes dryer, or stop purchasing bottled water, and or remove toxic household cleaning and beauty products from your home.

It made us think of making wise decisions on what we buy and to the extent of the purpose behind our purchase. Do we need it, is it good for our envirnment, ect..

This was an event that was quite different from the normal church event I am used to but was refreshing that now is the time for the church to make a stand on our social resposibility to care for God's creation.

We are the generation that must be the change!

Excerpts from The www.bosonfaithjustice.org website for more check out their website!

A Pre-Consumption Prayer
November 29th, 2008 | Category: Fair Trade, Consumption
Posted on God’s Politics

“Consumption” isn’t a bad word. Even as we watch the excesses of the consumer economy crumble and collapse around us, we should remember that the word “consume” also means “to eat.”
This season, many of us consume to excess as eaters; on “Black Friday,” many also consume to excess as shoppers. But as pastor Eugene Cho has pointed out, buying stuff at low prices isn’t by itself a mark of shame or weakness. It is, in our post-agrarian, post-industrial society, a necessity. The issue isn’t whether we buy or not buy things. It is whether we do so with appreciation for all of God’s creation.

Before we eat, we say a prayer to acknowledge our gratitude for God’s bounty. Through prayer, we express both humility and appreciation. If we pray mindfully (rather than out of rote habit), we simultaneously acknowledge our joy at what we have while also feeling compassion for those who have not.

What if we said a prayer each time we bought something – each time we “consumed”?
For most of our history, getting enough to eat has been our primary preoccupation. Praying before we ate ensured a direct connection between our livelihoods and God. But for those of us lucky enough to live in a modern, developed nation, the idea of “putting food on the table” has become more figurative than literal. Praying before a meal no longer carries the weight it once did.

A gratitude economy involves, I think, a more spiritually conscious consumerism. It is no better to wallow in guilt about our need to buy things than to flaunt our ability to buy while considering ourselves specially blessed. It will not advance global justice to focus simply on what not to buy; rather we also have the responsibility to buy the right things – for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters worldwide.

As we go about our shopping or no-shopping in the next days, why not say a prayer dedicating the buying and giving and receiving and yes – our stuff - to God.

May the food we eat, feed those who farmed it. May the things we buy, support those who fashioned and shipped and sold them. For everything we enjoy from your good earth, God, thank you.

And if the purchase doesn’t sit right with the prayer – well, maybe that’s a sign to put it back on the shelf.
Bill Moyers’ Commencement Speech at SMU
June 07th, 2007 | Category: news, Inspirations
Below is the last portion of Moyers’ poignant speech at Southern Methodist University in Dallas on May 19. It speaks to the overall mission and need for the Boston Faith & Justice Network.

My young friends, you are not leaving here in ordinary times. The ancient Greeks had a word for a moment like this. They called it “kairos.” Euripedes describes kairos as the moment when “the one who seizes the helm of fate, forces fortune.” As I was coming here to Dallas today to ask what you are going to do to make the most of your life, I thought: Please God, let me be looking in the face of some young man or woman who is going to transcend the normal arc of life, who is going one day to break through, inspire us, challenge us, and call forth from us the greatness of spirit that in our best moments have fired the world’s imagination. You know the spirit of which I speak. Memorable ideas sprang from it: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”…“created equal”… “Government of, by, and for the people”…“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”…“I have a dream.” Those were transformational epochs in American politics, brought forth by the founding patriots who won our independence, by Lincoln and his Lieutenants who saved the Union, by Franklin Roosevelt who saved capitalism and democracy, and by Martin Luther King, martyred in the struggle for equal rights. These moments would have been lost if left to transactional politics – the traditional politics of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” But moral leadership transcended the realities at hand and changed the course of our history.

Never have we been more in need of transformational leadership.

America’s a great promise but it’s a broken promise.

It’s not right that we are entering the fifth year of a war started on a suspicion. Whatever your party or politics, my young friends, America can’t sustain a war begun under false pretenses because it is simply immoral to ask people to go on dying for the wrong reasons. We cannot win a war when our leaders don’t have the will or courage to ask everyone to sacrifice, and place the burden on a few hundred thousand Americans from the working class led by a relative handful of professional officers. As is often said – America’s not fighting the war; the American military is fighting the war, everyone else is at the mall. Our leaders are not even asking us to pay for it. They’re borrowing the money and passing the IOU’s to you and your kids.

America needs fixing. Our system of government is badly broken.

You are leaving here as our basic constitutional principles are under assault – the rule of law, an independent press, independent courts, the separation of church and state, and the social contract itself. I am sure you learned about the social contract here at SMU. It’s right there in the Constitution – in the Preamble: “We, the People” – that radical, magnificent, democratic, inspired and exhilarating idea that we are in this together, one for all and all for one.

I believe this to be the heart of democracy. I know it to be a profoundly religious truth. Over in East Texas where I grew up, my father’s greatest honor, as he saw it, was to serve as a deacon in the Central Baptist Church. In those days we Baptists were, in matters of faith, sovereign individualists: the priesthood of the believer, soul freedom, “Just you and me, Lord.” But time and again, as my dad prayed the Lord’s Prayer, I realized that it was never in the first person singular. It was always: “Give us this day our daily bread.” We’re all in this together; one person’s hunger is another’s duty.

Let me see if I can say it a different way. A moment ago, when the reunion class of l957 stood up to be recognized, I was taken back half a century to my first year at the University of Texas. In my mind’s eye I saw Gilbert McAlister – “Dr. Mac” – pacing back and forth in his introductory class to anthropology. He had spent his years as a graduate student among the Apache Indians on the plains of Texas. He said he learned from them the meaning of reciprocity. In the Apache tongue, he told us, the word for grandfather was the same as the word for grandson. Generations were linked together by mutual obligation. Through the years, he went on; we human beings have advanced more from collaboration than competition. For all the chest-thumping about rugged individuals and self-made men, it was the imperative and ethic of cooperation that forged America. Laissez faire – “Leave me alone” – didn’t work. We had to move from the philosophy of “Live and let live” to “Live and help live.” You see, civilization is not a natural act. Civilization is a veneer of civility stretched across primal human appetites. Like democracy, civilization has to be willed, practiced, and constantly repaired, or society becomes a war of all against all.

Think it over: On one side of this city of Dallas people pay $69 for a margarita and on the other side of town the homeless scrounge for scraps in garbage cans. What would be the civilized response to such a disparity?

Think it over: In l960 the gap in wealth between the top 20% of our country and the bottom 20% was thirty fold. Now it is 75 fold. Stock prices and productivity are up, and CEO salaries are soaring, but ordinary workers aren’t sharing in the profits they helped generate. Their incomes aren’t keeping up with costs. More Americans live in poverty – 37 million, including l2 million children. Twelve million children! Despite extraordinary wealth at the top, America’s last among the highly developed countries in each of seven measures of inequality. Our GDP outperforms every country in the world except Luxembourg. But among industrialized nations we are at the bottom in functional literacy and dead last in combating poverty. Meanwhile, regular Americans are working longer and harder than workers in any other industrial nation, but it’s harder and harder for them to figure out how to make ends meet…how to send the kids to college…and how to hold on securely in their old age. If we’re all in this together, what’s a civilized response to these disparities?

America’s a broken promise. America needs fixing.

So I look out on your graduating class and pray some one or more of you will take it on. I know something about the DNA in this institution – the history that created this unique university. Although most of you are not Methodists, you can be proud of the Methodist in SMU. At the time of the American Revolution only a few hundred people identified with Methodism. By the Civil War it was the largest church in the country with one in three church members calling Methodism their faith community. No institution has done more to shape America’s moral imagination. If America is going to be fixed, I believe someone with this DNA will be needed to do it. It’s possible. So as you leave today, take with you Rilke’s counsel “to assume our existence as broadly as we can, in any way we can. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in this life. The only courage demanded of us is courage for the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

Some of the elders among you will remember that Martin Luther King made a powerful speech here at SMU in l966. It’s been said – this part of the story may be apocryphal – that when he was asked why he chose SMU instead of one of the all-black colleges, Dr. King replied: “Because if John Wesley were around he’d be standing right here with me.” Martin Luther King said at SMU: “…The challenge in the days ahead is to work passionately and unrelentingly…to make justice a reality for all people.” One of your own graduates – the Reverend Michael Waters – got it right a few years ago when he was a student here: “Martin Luther King became the symbol not only of the civil rights movement but of America itself: A symbol of a land of freedom where people of all races, creeds, and nationalities could live together as a Beloved Community.”

Not as an empire. Or a superpower. Not a place where the strong take what they can and the weak what they must. But a Beloved Community. It’s the core of civilization, the crux of democracy, and a profound religious truth.

But don’t go searching for the Beloved Community on a map. It’s not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds – our hearts and minds – or not at all.

I pray I am looking into the face of someone who will lead us toward it.

Good luck to each and every one of you.

The Boston Faith & Justice Network...www.bostonfaithjustice.org

Christians seeking social justice as an expression of our faith...

Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.-Isaiah 1:17

www.bostonfaithjustice.org
Our Story: In the winter of 2005,a small group of Christians in Greater Boston began to meet to share the connection of faith and justice in our lives.

Looking at the Boston community, we saw churches with rich and varied gifts-some with a strong emphasis on social engagement on behalf of the poor and others with a focus on individual disciplship. We felt that the power to live out God's mission in the world must come from bringing these gifts together: Christians embraceing social engagment and personal discipleship as part of the same calling.

About Us:
The Boston Faith & Justice Network is a community of Christians committed to alleviating poverty and promoting just stewardship.

We believe that over-consumption and unjust consumption may just be emptying our bank accounts, exhausting the world’s dearest resources, and fueling the exploitation of the most vulnerable. Something must change inside our souls and in our communities to set things right. So, together,we are taking these steps.



1. Live Gratefully. Many of us have lost track of how much is actually enough. We make promises to buy less, but these promises are hard to keep. The BFJN organizes small groups that support each other in spending less, buying justly, and giving collectively. It all begins with giving thanks.

2. Change our Community. All around us, advertising urges “buy more!” What if our community reflected a different set of values: respect and dignity for people and creation. The BFJN is seeking to make ours a more just community, starting by increasing Fair Trade in neighborhoods throughout Boston and beyond.

3. Advocate. Good policies enable people to steward and enjoy God’s blessings together. Good policies include the interests of those who are the poor at the highest levels of decision-making - not just those who are rich and powerful. The BFJN partners with organizations like the Micah Challenge to advocate for policies we believe will make a difference in the lives of those who are poor.




In the summer of 2006, we launched the Boston Faith & Justice Network with a worship event at Tremont Temple. We are now a community of evangelical, mainline and Penecostal Chrisitans with the goal of inspiring, uniting, and mobilizing Christians to alleviate poverty and promote social justice.


What We Do:
We work to see Boston embody God's Shalom-the peace that comes from right relationships between one another an between us and God.

Our programs change,community change and advocacy for social change.

Personal Change-Community Change-Advocacy


Iniatives:

Lifestlye Discipleship
When half of the world's people live on less than $2 a day, what is a just Christian lifestlye? Lazarus at the Gate, is a Scripture based discipleship group fostering simple living, just consumerism, and collecting giving in response to global poverty.

Fair Trade
The Fair Trade Iniative connects global responsibility with local action. We seek to transform Greater Boston into a fair trade community- a place where more of what we buy supports poor producers and growers.

Advocay
The Boston Faith & Justice Network advocates on policies related to global poverty including HIV/AIDS prevention and care, hunger, an enironmental sustainability. By partnering with the Micah Challenge, we join our voices with Christians around the world.

Getting Involved:
Connect-
We meet as a community every other month and quarterly for worship. Come get inspired and get involved.
Contact: rachel@bostonfaithjusice.org

Join Lazarus at the Gate-
Respond to global poverty by changing your life. Join or host a Lazarus at the Gate discipleship group.
Contact: discipleship@bostonfaithjustice.org

Become a Member-
The Boston Faith & Justice Network relies on members for financial and volunteer support. If you share our passion for living justly, community change, and advocacy, become a member!
Contact:members@bostonfaithjustice.org

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
-Isaiah 58:6

Book Review on "The Year of Living Biblically" One Man's Humble Request to follow the bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs

The first book I read this year in 2009 was very intriguing and interesting if you are interested in any aspect of Judeo-Christian religious value & lifestlye. It is called "The Year of Living Biblically" One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. It is a New York Times Bestseller by A.J. Jacobs. This book was just shy of 400 pages but so captivating you wil be able to fly through it. A.J. is a man who is searching for some faith as he is an editor for Esquire magazine in NYC. His goal to write this book is to experience life as attempting to live out all or as many as possible of the laws and rules of the Bible literally. As he started out in his journey he took on an incredible journey of faith as an assignment but as we all know the Bible changes people from the inside out. He has a board of spiritual advisors to help him on his journey for guidance. Much of the book is focused on several laws, rules, and practices of the Old Testament of Jewish culture. It is intriguing and interesting to read and to imagine more of what it was like to live in biblical times. Jacob grew a beard & wore a white robe. He consulted with Rabbi's,Pastors, and different religious groups such as the Red Letter Christians among others. He even went to visit a Creatinonist museum in Kentucky.He even ate some locust and honey~! He researched things on line as well as visited the Holy Land of Jerusalem. Some things that he was able to incorporate in his life was prayer, gratitude,tithing and resting on the Sabbath. This book has a lot of inside thoughts of humor as well. He examines positive & negative views on wine on pg 231-232 which is pretty interesting as well.

A small excerpt from the book itself:Some conservative Christians were baffled by A.J's undertaking of writing this book. They said that he could not truly understand the bible without accepting the divinty of Christ. They said that many of these laws-like the ones about animal sacrifice-were nullified by Jesus's death.
A.J started to have doubts. He started to get anxious about his approach and his ignorance and lack of preparation and all the mistakes he might make. He absorbed more and more on the fact that the Bible isn't just another book. Its the book of books, as one of my commentaries calls it. He says he loves his encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia hasn't spawned thousands of communities based on its words. It hasn't shaped the actions, values, deaths, love lives, warfare, and fashion sense of millions of people over three millennnia. No one has been executed from translating the encyclopedia into another language, as was William Tyndale when he published the first widely distributed English-language edition of the Bible. No president has been sworn in with the encyclopedia. It't intimidating to say the least.
Fortunately, I got a couple of pep talks from two of my favorite advisers. The first was Reverend Elton Richards, my friend David's Father, who just retired as minister of his Lutheran congregation in Des Moines, Iowa. He calls himself a "pastor out to pasture." I told him about my doubters.
"You just have to tell them that you have a hunger and thirst. And you may not sit at the same banquet table as them, but you have a hunger and a thirst. So they shouldn't judge you.
A midrash-a story or legend that is not in the Bible proper, but which deals with biblical events. This midrash is about the parting of the Red Sea.
"We all think of the scene in The Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston, where Moses lifted up his rod, and the waters rolled back. But this midrash says that's not how it happened. Moses lifted up his rod, and the sea did not part. The Egyptians were closing in, and the sea wasn't moving. So a Hebrew named Nachson just walked into the water. He waded up to his ankles, then his knees, then his waist, then his shoulders. And right when the water was about to get up to his nostrils, the sea parted. The point is, sometimes miracles occur only when you jump in."
So I did. And here is what happened, writes A.J...
This author & his book has inspired me because I see God drawing someone closer to Himself.. as far as I know at the end of his book A.J. decided to attend a Jewish Temple & send his son to Hebrew school as a start to teach his children some aspects of religion and the bible. A.J. sitll may not have had the aha moment call from the Lord to fully accept Christ and a relationship with Him, but I trust God that He will continue to work in A.J's life & family to continually draw Him closer and continue to grow a hunger & thirst in his life and all of our lives so that we may draw closer to Him and His ways.
So after reading this book, A.J Jacobs & family is now one more addition to my prayer list. I thank God for Him & to be able to read about someone's journey exploring the faith community and to know some of their inner thoughts & perspective of how foreign some aspects of things of faith can seem to an outsider looking in the bible or church life for the first time.

Some websites he recommended were as follows:www.creationmuseum.org www.ReligiousTolerance.orgwww.Eprayer.comwww.moveon.orgwww.flukerfarms.comwww.breadbeckers.com/recipes/ezekiel_bread.htmwww.prochoiceactionnetowrk-canada.org/articles/bible.htmlwww.priestsforlife.org/brochures/thebible.htmlwww.elroy.net/ehr/abortion.htmlwww.jimfeeney.org/pro-life.htmlwww.lulu.com/content/186110www.meson.org/religion/torahcompare.phpwww.zootorah.comwww.polygamy.com/articles/templates/?a=www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_4.htmlwww.straightdope.com/columns/06110.htmlwww.psychclassics.yorku.ca/Festinger/index.htm

Some of the Spiritual Advisory Boards A.J. Jacobs visited or observed...
The 700 Club,Pat Robertson, The Red Letter Christians, Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis,Thomas Road Baptist Church,Lynchburg, VA,Jerry Falwell & the Samaritans, the Amish,& many others.. from Jewish background.

A Long List of books in his notes he examines for perspective on his journey...

The Battle for God, The Great Transformation, A History of God, Thy Kingdom Come, The Oxford Bible Commentary,Roadside Religion, The Complete Idiots Guide to the Bible, Radical Honesty, The Kregel Pictorial Guide to the Temple The Missing Gospels:Unearthing the truth behind alternative Christianities, Reading the Bible again for the first time, Daily Life in Biblical Times, The Myth of a Christian Nation, How to read the bible, Religon Explained, Holman's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Letters to a Young Doubter, What Would Jesus Eat,Our Endangered Values,Sources of Strength, The Language of God,Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench, Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith, Don't Know Much About the Bible, The God Delusion, Living Judaism, Everyday Life in Bible Times, The JPS Guide to Jewish Traditions, Misquoting Jesus, The Bible unearthed, The Five Books of Moses, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Commentary on the Torah, Who wrote the Bible?, The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book, The Bible for Dummies, My Struggle with Faith, Kingdom Coming, Wrestling with God & Men, Letter and Spirit: From written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy, The World of the Bible, The End of Faith,Letter to a Chrisitan Nation, Living by the Book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Permission to Receive, The Book of Lost Books, Why the Ten Commandments Matter, Fear and Trembling, The Jewish book of why, Jewish Matters, The Book of Jewish Holidays, The Bible as it was, Left Behind, Mere Christianity-C.S. Lewis, We Got the Bible, What the Bible says about Parenting, Manners and Customs in the BibleCatholicism: New Study Edition, Lives of the Saints: From Mary and Francis of Assisi to John XXIII and Mother TheresaAn Incredible Journey, Evidence for Christianity, Christian Living, Confessions of Faith, The Oxford Companion to the BibleGod: A Biography, The Questions of God, Handling Serpents, God's Secretaries, A Book of Prayer, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, When good Men are Tempted, American Theocracy, Teach Them Diligently, The Institutes of Biblical Law, The Maker's Diet, Why I am not a Christian, Fundamentalism: the search for meaning, American Judaism, Bring back the Sabbath, Encyclopedia Judaica, The World's Religions, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, The Sins of Scripture, As a Driven Leaf, The Essential Talmud, The Courtier and the Heretic, The Case for Faith, The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, The Book of Jewish Values: A day-by-day guide to Ethical Living, History of Christian Thought, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God, Letters from Earth, The New Unger's Bible Handbook, United States Catholic Cathecism for Adults, God's Politics, The Purpose Driven Life, A Handbook of Bible Law, What Jesus Meant, Noah's Ark: A Feasiblity Study, Can Man Live Without God

His Bible Bibliograpy:
The Five books of Moses, Good News Bible, The New Jerusalem BibleTanakh: The Holy Scriptures, Amplified Bible, The Stone Tanach, The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version, The New Oxford Bible Annotated Bible, The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, The Holy Bible: New King James Version, The Living Bible, The New American Bible, God's Word Bible, Holy Bible: New International Version