Sermons

"If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday."

And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"

"We Are One Body"

Over the past year I have become increasingly distressed, and actually frightened by the general lack of civility in our public debates over issues affecting our public life together in this country, whether that debate involves health care reform, immigration, the leadership roles of women and minorities, the national debt, or who our government taxes and by how much. We Americans seem unable to even listen to opposing views, much less to consider any validity of either the opinion endorsed, or the person endorsing it. Instead, in our national debates, in both the political arena and in the media's presentation of the public debates, people are personally vilified and their speech distorted by those on the other side of the debate.

The reports and images coming out of the earthquake ravaged nation of Haiti overwhelm us with its level of destruction and devastation.

And, of course, even in the best of times, Haiti is one of the worst of places - the most poverty stricken region in the Western Hemisphere, with governments which vary from time to time only by their level of corruption and oppression, with the bar being set by the infamous Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his vicious Ton Ton Macoute, his personal death and terror squad which enforced his wickedly blood-thirsty regime with torture and murder in the 50's and 60's. If you are a fan of classic movies, catch the film adaptation of Graham Greene's sardonically titled The Comedians sometime, a Richard Burton/Liz Taylor flick which is set against the back-drop of Papa Doc's Haiti.