The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have chosen Buffalo and Fort Erie, Ont., to celebrate a decade of “full communion” between the two denominations. The presiding bishops of the denominations will be in the area May 1 to celebrate “Called to Common Mission.”
Human beings are capable of the most wretched behavior – as the old confession put it, there is no health in us. Yet through human prophets God continues to call us to turn in a new direction, toward healing, wholeness, and holiness of life. In the wider world, we call that justice. Some have said that justice is simply love in public action.
The recently concluded, but soon to be renewed, budget negotiations in Washington have left me feeling that our nation’s leaders are spiritually bankrupt. We are balancing the budget of our wealthy nation by deciding just how much suffering the poor must endure on behalf of the rich. This is the Gospel in reverse.
Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul.
National and local studies make clear that congregations occupy an important but limited place in community social welfare systems. These studies also make clear that, far from constituting an alternative to that system, congregations’ social service activity depends on it.
When the events at the Wairau, and the Land Question in general, had made a breach between the two races; then doors began to be shut in the faces of the natives, and language peculiarly offensive to them was in common use among the lower classes: and it became a frequent remark among them, which I have heard again and again, that, with the exception of the Government officers,