The post on my own blog with this title (Thoughts From The Heart on The Left) is for this coming Sunday but I think that it needs to be on this blog as well.  I have posted a link to the entire piece so that you can continue reading it there (besides, I added a video to the end of the blog and I don’t want to crowd this blog).

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This is going to be as much a political piece as it is a religious piece. But the signs of the times demand that it be so because the politics of the moment are bound up in how we see each other and how we treat each other and that, whether you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other religion, is the central point of religion.

Every time I read the passage from Genesis that is the Old Testament reading for today (Genesis 9: 8 – 17), I cannot help but think of the many conservative and fundamentalist preachers who claimed that the hurricane that ravaged and destroyed New Orleans and the floods that devastated the Mid-west in 1993 were signs of God’s wrath and displeasure. Perhaps I am not reading this passage properly but every translation that I know of says that God promised not to destroy the earth with a flood and that the rainbow would be a sign of this promise. And I know that after the rains came and poured down on New Orleans, there was a rainbow.

It isn’t that God couldn’t destroy this earth if he wanted to do so; he wouldn’t bother warning us again because He sent His son and we aren’t listening. By the same token, when we look around us today and we see wars ravaging this earth, the economy of the entire society that we call humankind faltering, with people starving and dying because there is no medical treatment available (and I am not speaking of just this country but the entire world), should we begin to think that these are the times that John the Seer did not prophesize in the Book of Revelation.

Those who proclaim that these are the end times and Jesus is soon to come again do not get those words from the Book of Revelation; they get them from a 19^th century preacher named John Darby. But the words have been refined and polished to the point that everyone thinks they come from John the Seer.

We live in a time when the words we speak to each other are more often hate and anger. In a time when we need to be working together for the good of all, we offer solutions that are best entitled “what’s in it for me?” We live in a society of winners and losers; we live our lives as if they were pick-up basketball games where the winners stay and losers walk. We hear and read the words of many who want to see their political opposition fail because they think it will make them look good, even though they don’t have anything to offer in return and the plans that they did offer have only exacerbated the present situation. At a time when we need new ideas, we get old ones; at a time when we seek leadership, we get others whose call is not to follow.

The piece continues here

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 6:41 am and is filed under Poverty, Economy, People, Environment, Republican Party, Democratic Party, Healthcare, Ethics, Justice, Freedom, Law, Education, Christian Denominations, Religions, Culture, Libertarian Party, Theocracy, Christian (Blue) Left, Christian (Red) Right, Bible, Political Philosophy, Faith-Based Initiatives, Peacemaking, Family Values, Passivism, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.