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A WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANT REFLECTS ON THANKSGIVING: On Offering Fruit Meet for Repentance

A sermon preached on November 21, 2018, in La Jolla, California, at the 38th Annual Thanksgiving Eve Service celebrated by Congregation Beth Israel and the First United Methodist Church of San Diego.   I WANT TO BEGIN BY SAYING “THANK YOU.”   Thank you to the good people of Congregation Beth Israel for your hospitality.   Thank you to Rabbi Berk, for the many years of friendship and partnership, and congratulations on your upcoming retirement.   Thank you to Phil Amerson, our interim Lead Pastor at First United Methodist, for the generous invitation to speak this evening.   I think Phil knew how much this would mean to me, to preach on this occasion.   My brother and I used to ride our stingray bicycles across this land when there was nothing but dirt mesas as far as the eye could see.   I count it a great privilege and honor to share this time with you tonight.   Will you pray with me? "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation  of my  heart , be acceptable in thy si

"On Being Refined" - An All Saints Sermon in a Season of Political Distress

Did you catch it? Did you catch who it is that Jesus commends for his understanding and spiritual maturity? "One of the scribes came  near and heard them disputing ... " (YOUTUBE - sermon starts at 39:00) But wait a minute, I thought the scribes and the pharisees were Jesus' mortal enemies, his foils in our gospels as he put down the ways of old and inaugurates a new era. I thought the scribes and the pharisees were legalistic and narrow-minded, prone to heap burdens on people, and to miss the deeper meaning of God’s holy laws? Two comments are required: 1.      Anti-semitism, much of it justified by a partial reading of our New Testament scriptures, is one of the great scourges of human history, and the fact that we are seeing a resurgence of it in our times is as sad a commentary as I can think of on the state of our life together.  The Anti-Defamation League logged a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017, compared to t

CRIMINALIZING FRONTERIZOS - Yet Another Lament

In Spanish, there is a word for people whose lives and family trees span the US-Mexico border: "fronterizos." The closest we can come in English is "borderlanders," but this word does not conjure the rich and painful history that the Spanish word suggests. In the 1930s somewhere between 400,000 and 1 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans returned to Mexico "by their own decision or through officially voluntary – though often coercive – repatriatio n programs directed by state and local governments and charitable aid agencies," this according to the USCIS . I know many people whose parents or grandparents were forcibly evicted in this way - in effect, they were deported without due process. Now, eighty years later, according to the Washington Post , US federal authorities are sifting through the birth certificates of fronterizos born twenty, thirty, forty years ago and demanding that they provide corroborating documentation (hospital bills, rental a