A lite moment at a serious time

In the midst of our present kerfuffle, I thought you might enjoy something to make you smile - at least it make me smile. The young man is really a good actor to pull this one off.

McDonald's brand director in France says the ad simply looks at how French society is today.

We're very comfortable with the topic of homosexuality, there is obviously no problem with homosexuality in France today. The point was not to show someone who is troubled, especially a teenager. We know it can be difficult for some people, but we wouldn't have dared show someone who is struggling.

Do you know why there is no real problem with homosexuality in France? Very few fundamentalists mucking about. That's because during the "Revolution," the state became secular and no particular religious view is allowed to govern the country. Chalk one up for the French.

Lisa Howards, McDonalds's director of corporate media relations, told Media Matters that the Come as You Are campaign was made exclusively for France.

The ad you're referencing is one of a series of ads called Come as You Are, which recognized he diversity of McDonald's customers in France. This particular commercial was produced by McDonald's France and is running only in France. Each of our 117 markets around the world determines their own advertising and marketing.

That means we won't be seeing an ad like this in the US for years to come. Too bad.

Is it Pope Rowan I?

Well, Mr. Williams has decided that he really is the first supreme pontiff of the Anglican Communion and has attempted, without any authority to do so, to seize all power from the Communion.

Of course, we know his first act - send down TEC. Here is the pertinent bit of the epistle from Canon Kearon:

Last Thursday I sent letters to members of the Inter Anglican ecumenical dialogues who are from the Episcopal Church informing them that their membership of these dialogues has been discontinued. In doing so I want to emphasise again as I did in those letters the exceptional service of each and every person to that important work and to acknowledge without exception the enormous contribution each person has made.

I have also written to the person from the Episcopal Church who is a member of the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO), withdrawing that person’s membership and inviting her to serve as a Consultant to that body.

I have written to the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada to ask whether its General Synod or House of Bishops has formally adopted policies that breach the second moratorium in the Windsor Report, authorising public rites of same-sex blessing.

At the same time I have written to the Primate of the Southern Cone, whose interventions in other provinces are referred to in the Windsor Continuation Group Report asking him for clarification as to the current state of his interventions into other provinces.

These are the actions which flow immediately from the Archbishop’s Pentecost Letter.

Notice not a word about the African princes.This, in my opinion, makes him quite untrustworthy. Rowan fails to "discipline" the African churches because he knows it will get no press. By appearing to send own the American church, he is going to get publicity and appear to "mean business." And, also, at the same time, delude himself into believing the African churches will suddenly come flocking back to the Mother Country and Mother Church wailing wearing sackcloth and ashes as symbols of their repentance. He still doesn't get it that they wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire, as my grandfather was wont to say.

But the interesting thing is that TEC has only been removed from minor committees that really don't do anything and TEC is still in communion with the Church of England.

So, what is Rowan doing? Well, my guess is that he's testing the water. All dictators start with very small moves to see if they can get away with their actions. History is full of examples. He has acted but his action is about the least possible action he can make. It's a fishing expedition, really. Also, he had to do something to pay back KJS for being such an upstart rude American woman and daring to make him look like un homme sot incompétent.

So there you have it. Where is Henry VIII or Elizabeth when we really then one of them to poke this git in the eye and send him packing? I have a feeling that Rowan may be surprised that his contempt for TEC unifies our members.

Thank God TEC has ++KJS a person with both a spine and the conviction to stand up to abuse.

Please read an article by the Rev'd James Stockton at the Daily Episcopalian on the recent developments.

UPDATE: There is a bit of the letter that I didn't "catch" on first reading:

Secondly, to ask the question of whether maintaining within the fellowship of one’s Provincial House of Bishops, a bishop who is exercising episcopal ministry in another province without the expressed permission of that province or the local bishop, constitutes an intervention and is therefore a breach of the third moratorium.

Williams is using Mr. Kearon for an exploratory mission for Duncan's schismatics. - don't forget that ACNA meets this week.

A Nation Remembers 6 June

On this day in 1944 American Forces landed on the coast of France in what history calls D-Day. It is not possible for us to comprehend what the forced experienced on that day on those beaches. My cousin, Hearl, was there. He had nightmares the rest of his life about that day and he could never talk about what happened there on 6 June. Truly, the men who served during the Second World War were some of American's greatest generation.

Today in 1968 one of American's brightest lights was extinguished. He, too, was part of that great generation of Americans. For those of my generation, this was a moment when the "dream" flickered and nearly went out. It didn't go out, but it has never burned as bright since that evening in Los Angeles.

Let us give thanks today for those who landed in France on this day, the living and the dead, and let us give thanks that occasionally, God raises up a man like Robert Kennedy.

Pentecost II - Trinity I

The Second Sunday After Pentecost
The First Sunday after Trinity
Proper 5

1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24), Psalm 146 ; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17

Collect: O God, from whom all good proceeds: Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Homily

One of the most remarkable features of the First Book of Kings is the collection of stories featuring the prophet Elijah. The first of these comes after the rather generalized anecdotes about the royal house of kings following the death of Solomon. Without exception these monarchs “did what was displeasing to the Lord,” and then suddenly the narration changes subject. In Chapter 16, which precedes our reading for today, King Ahab is introduced and then suddenly Chapter 17 begins with Elijah the Tishbite, “inhabitant of Gilead” confronting Ahab with the observation that the God of Israel has said there is about to be a drought that no amount of royal power can prevent or stop. Rain will come only when the God of Israel says so.

The picture of Elijah being both confrontational and cryptic with King Ahab is actually emblematic of the whole collection of prophetic literature. Prophets are the ones God calls to speak God’s truth to power – to speak and to live as example and warning of God’s alternate reality while the powers that be in monarchical or temple leadership pursue other goals, and achieve their ends by ungodly means.

Prophets function in Biblical texts as the vehicles of God’s word: when they speak God’s judgment on those who perpetrate injustice, they are announcing God’s own critique of social, political, and economic injustices that bring about death, despair, and hopelessness. When they offer alternate pictures of life as God intends it, prophets bring hope to the hopeless, life to those shadowed by death and disaster. In short, prophets bring God’s good news into bad times.

Elijah in today’s reading offers us just such a picture of hope in contrast to the world Ahab and his predecessors have made. In the midst of the drought affecting King Ahab’s world and people, God interrupts Elijah’s life and sends him outside Ahab’s jurisdiction.

First Elijah is sent to the Transjordan, where he is protected and sustained by ravens, but as the drought spreads, he is sent northward up the coast to Zarephath in Sidon. Here, as God said, he finds a certain widow who will feed him. The word of God calls the prophet to go way beyond all the normal support systems of his life. As death, in the form of the drought, spreads, Elijah stays on the move until he comes to the widow. She is, by definition, lacking all the life-giving resources of ordinary patriarchal societies in the ancient world. It is noteworthy also that God sends Elijah without any resources himself: he brings neither bread nor oil to the widow, nor does he bring well water. He has nothing to give away, it seems.

Yet the whole point of the Elijah stories is, precisely, that having nothing at all in the worldview of King Ahab, Queen Jezebel, and all the priests of the pagan gods who are turning the lives of God’s people into a desert, the prophet brings unimagined and unimaginable hope into the parched lands because he brings the life-giving word of God.

Through Elijah’s faithful obedience, God’s life-giving word assures the daily bread for the widow. And more than that; when the widow’s son dies, and her hope for any sort of normal, ordinary future dies with him, the life-giving word of God renews the boy’s life, and therefore hers too. There is holy power at work in Elijah, as in all the prophets, the power of God’s life-giving word to break through the death-dealing ways of nature and culture alike.

Before moving to Jesus, we must pause to meditate. You and I have been assured of holy power at work in our own lives: the power of the Holy Spirit allows us to live transformed and transformative lives. Hold that thought.

Now we can move into the gospel and watch Jesus, the living word of God, who is bringing life into another socioeconomic situation like that in the First Book of Kings. Here is Jesus with a widow whose only son is dead.

Our reading from the Gospel of Luke says: “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’”

While Luke has undoubtedly structured the scene based on the story of Elijah, there is a significant difference: Jesus’ compassion. To have compassion, and to be moved by compassion, is to take the suffering of other persons into oneself. Elijah the prophet was so identified with the God of the life-bearing word that his own actions brought life in the midst of death. Luke’s Jesus embraces the suffering of people at the edge of the social fabric, on the margins of the power structures, and thus he identifies with the hopelessness of the widow. With Elijah and Jesus alike, however, the hope that blazes forth from the Biblical texts is God’s life-bringing and life-bearing presence, which transforms death-dealing situations into visions and experiences of life as God intends.

Life on the margins is brutal, nasty, and often much shorter than “three score years and ten.” The best-contrived social safety nets develop holes, and it does not take the eruptions of nature or the recessions of the human economy before people fall through them. These pictures of Elijah and Jesus can illuminate our own death-dealing times, and prod us to live as Pentecost people called to embrace and bear life as God intends it. We have been empowered by the Spirit to live transformative lives, bearing compassion in deed as well as word, carrying the life of Christ, moved by the power of the Spirit amid the ways of our world – at work, at play, as daughters or widows, soldiers or secretaries, as citizens who care enough to vote.

Christmas and Easter are behind us now, but as the angels said at the nativity and at the empty tomb: “Do not be afraid.”

Let us go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

-- The Reverend Angela V. Askew is priest-in-charge of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York.