In my previous post I spoke of how I felt a little frustrated with the “60’s hippy” feel that was much more prevalent than the faith-based feel of the gathering yesterday.

I found this gathering listed on the Sojourners site by searching on my zip code, but this gathering was not what I would call “Sojourners-like”, since there was no public attempt to link it to faith. Not that anyone moving from a faith-based world view would not find such a gathering affirming. But I want to see a clear message from the Churches in America. There are some, but I am somewhat disturbed that there isn’t a more concerted effort among those who do express their deep concerns and sense of outrage.

The point of this, I would think, would be to make such an impact and such an outcry that there would be change in approach, policy, and even personell, that lives would be saved by beginning to reverse the destructive and misguided efforts by this administration to fulfill their neocon dream of a Pax Americana.

I have had a couple of people tell me, why complain so much? DO something positive! But these same people would not consider involvement in peace solutions to be “postive”. Part of that requirement woudl be to stop resisting; stop complaining; “see the light”, and work for “their kind of change” (which is hardly change at all). I suppose they would say that “evangelism” would be a worthy cause. But where and how are we to “procalim the good news?” What did Jesus say when he spoke of “proclaiming the good news?” Did he not say, immediately following his opening public announcement, that “the Spirit of the Lord is on me. becuase he has annointed me to preach good news to the poor….to release the oppressed….” Is it not “oppression” to seek to impose an ill-planned, ill-conceived, greed-motivated, “capitalist” enterprise as the “solution”; to seek to “colonize” the land of Iraq (and eventually the entire middle -east” with structures friendly to our American corporate profits?

The Religious Right scoffs at such notions. They call it “communist” and “secular humanism” since it fails to “protect” the “American way of life” that our system drills in to the heads of its subjects; Biblical notions of justice get pushed into the background and eliminated from theologies, until the theology from which it came is transformed into servants of the system. The prophets railed against this. They warned of the follies of empire; of “trusting in horses and chariots” (or in today’s military realities, “bombs and tanks”).