Waking up to , and drinking my morning coffee over the Silent Night/”Christmas in the Trenches” article from Jim Wallis, seems like a sign of direction for me to pursue in 2005. No more complaining and “resolved to LIMIT my concerns to blogging” (although I certainly will not relent or scale back on my efforts there). Blogging is, like the Church should also be, a center of dialogue, community obervance and celebration, and source of energy and koinonia to enable us to DO the work to which God is calling (and one of these is to help each other hear and clarify and implement the thing to which God is calling us.)

As Church related agencies gather hundreds of thousands of aid money online, there is another emergency in process over the past 2 years, and has reached such a point of desperation , and yet is still being muffled and held back by the forces afraid of what DISSENT might mean for the measures of Church success (like attendance and giving).

But it seems that , like the Tsunami disaster, the need for aid and action is obvious. The Tsunami disaster has a distinct advanatge: there is no political dividing line. No one can oppose on any grounds the rightness of sending as much aid as possible as quickly as possible.

The emergency in the Middle East , sadly, has no such universal “clearance”. It is mired in shallow theological squabbles, which baffle my mind, but do not surprise me, due to experience in the evangelical Church, and familiarity withe Church history since Constantine, when the forces of Empire and Religion first made peace in Christendom.

I am saying that the Iraq War is a parallel duty, no less serious, and no less desperate. The tens of thousands (some say 100,000) deaths of Iraqi citizens , at the hands of American forces, is a moral crisis as well as a humanitarian disaster, made all the more critical on a moral scale because here, we do not have a natural disaster, but a human choice with disasterous consequences.

And politics combined with heretical Christianity keeps us from responding. The Church of the Empire has a disasterous hold on the minds and hearts of evangelical Christianity, so much so that I am at pains to insist that we are talking less about Christianity and more about a “Church of the Empire”.

I am writing this not to detract from the tragedy of the Tsunami disaster, but rather to call upon people of faith to the task that has become culturally masked and muddled in many Churches: that there remains an absolute human disaster ongoing and comparatively unchecked in temrs of moral outrage by the people of the Church of Jesus Christ, and that on a relief level, if we were to respond WHOLLY to the Tsunami effort, we would be responding to but half of the deadly forces being unleashed — and in Iraq, we have the power , as humans culpable in the progression of decisions leading to this (and in its deceptions), to DO something there as well.

Let not one disaster be a detraction from the ABSOLUTE REQIREMENT to respond to BOTH. Let one inform the other. Let one open our eyes to the other, and our role as a compassionate people.