Dear Friends,
Come sing love songs, hear love stories, write love letters, study love scriptures and pray prayers about your heart being filled with love this summer -- love for all God's creatures and especially for our enemies. Come dance in celebration with us as we study the teachings of Jesus that transformed my life and millions of us in history: "Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors."
Why share love stories about our enemies this summer? Because if we do not learn to love our enemies, we are doomed to become them. God loves those who are good and bad. God calls us to do the same.
During worship we will explore the love stories that Walter Wink shares in The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millenium. Madeleine L'Engle wrote, "Walter Wink's The Powers That Be is a brilliant book, and an important book. We need to take seriously his understanding that violence is never redemptive. Walter Wink is indeed giving us a new theology for a new millennium and if we are to make it for another thousand years, we need to understand this. This is not a book of doom, but of wonderous hope."
Please check out this book about hope at your library, or if you prefer digital Kindle books, you can begin reading it in on your phone in the next few minutes with this link:
Amazon.com : the powers that be walter wink.
Or call me at (858) 248-5123 and I will buy you a copy!
Wink's love stories gift us with hope, just in the nick of time, as we experience increasing planetary catastrophes. If you are awake, you are witnessing the US providing support and bombs for genocide in Gaza, and escalating ecocide of the natural world and our habitat. As a result, we have multiple fires and temperatures are rising, rising, rising. As if that was not enough, we learn world news of elections ushering in fascist leaders at an alarming rate. We need to submerse ourselves in this most profound teaching of Jesus, to practice love of enemies and nonviolence. We have a spiritual problem in our human family, and it demands our focus on our practice of a loving spiritual response.
Thank you to Edie Jessup for the beautiful photo above and everyone who played music, walked and prayed for the natural world in our Interfaith Secret Prayer Garden, planted two Oak Trees of Friendship for the US and China, and enjoyed a dinner in the rose garden and shared deeply in an Earth Crisis Support Group. Thank you to our beloved Chinese friends, Dr. Zhihe Wang and Dr. Mei Fan, for bringing over twenty Chinese ecological scholars to visit the John Cobb Eco Farm a few weeks ago, after your yearly conference in southern California, Institute for the Postmodern Development of China. We look forward to working with our Chinese friends and are committed to creating programs of citizen diplomacy with our shared vision of an ecological civilization. Thank you, Dr. John Cobb, for giving us this vision and for your teaching us about love of enemies. Our country is on a suicidal course as it escalates its rhetoric wanting to make China our enemy. This past week our government allocated more money for suicidal weapons--not only for the genocide in Gaza--but now for sending weapons to Taiwan.
This Sunday we will begin to stay in the light of love by submersing ourselves in heart filled and heroic tales of love, love that is stronger than any suffering and death. We begin sharing a love story about a man who did not give up on his religious faith as a Muslim during impossibly horrific circumstances. At a Juneteenth celebration this past week, I heard the inspired love story about Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was kidnapped in Africa and taken into American slavery during our country's history of the torturous sins of slavery. Omar wrote an autobiography in Arabic so we now can learn about his remarkable life. While in prison he wrote passages from the Koran on his prison walls. Rhiannon Giddens, the Pulitzer Prize winning artist extraordinaire, created an opera about Omar Ibn Said. Please click to learn more: News story about Omar the Opera
Omar's story is not a story of a man who became his enemy. His enemies inflicted unspeakable injustice and suffering on him and millions of others, but he is now a part of a cloud of witnesses of a God of love. What would you write on a prison wall if you were kidnapped and became a slave? Join us this summer as we submerge ourselves in new and old love stories. Stories about love of God, stories about love for all God's creatures in the natural world, and even love for our enemies who are destroying the natural world, our shared habitat, our beloved Mother Earth. This is not a superficial kind of love. This is love that is never codependent, never lies or condones injustice and suffering. A love that never, ever lies down to become a doormat to our enemies.
I want my life to be a love story and that means I must always find a third way of noncompliance with my enemies. A life where I make a decision to love them. Not like them - love them. This is not rational. We will do the spiritual work to become resolved to remain faithful, for God loves us and makes it possible for us to love others. Thank you, Walter Wink, for sharing your fascinating life story with people around the world coming together to learn nonviolence and love of enemies.
I keep imagining being in prison myself and writing this on a prison wall. "I am loving you my prison guards and enemies. What you did to me is wrong, but I will not become like you. I will love you instead. I am praying for you." This mental movie of watching myself actually writing these words and mediating on them on a prison wall, helps me somehow. Let's write love letters to our enemies on prison walls figuratively together this summer. Let's sing them love songs and dance in celebration together for the miracle that is love.
This summer, every Sunday from 4-5pm PST, Church for Our Common Home is now like a kind of rehearsal studio for love practices in painful times: Love of God, chickens, rabbits, flowers, the breeze, our friends, church community and family, and even love for our enemies. Come be inspired by Walter Wink's remarkable love stories.
Zoom Link Church for Our Common Home worship 4 pm pst
Please join us the last two weeks in July to learn an ecologic way of building that is sculptural. We will make a work of art that will also be the compost toilet for our Dream Incubation Guest House. Make your reservations now.