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National Week of Prayer For The Healing of AIDS
The National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS is the coming together of all people of faith to unite with purpose, compassion and hope. Through the power of God’s love we will educate every American about HIV prevention facts; encourage and support HIV testing; advocate for the availability of compassionate care and treatment for all those living with the disease in every community in America; and love unconditionally all persons living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. The mission of The Balm In Gilead is to prevent diseases and to improve the health status of people of the African Diaspora by providing support to faith institutions in areas of program design, implementation and evaluation which strengthens their capacity to deliver programs and services that contribute to the elimination of health disparities. (BALM IN GILEAD©)
This Nonsense With Titles
When you stand before God, and, you will, He’s not going
to ask you what your title is. He’s not going to care about your
advanced degrees. Your honorary degrees. How many letters are
before or after your name. He’s not going to care if you call
yourself “apostle” or “prophet.” It will make absolutely no
difference to Him if you have an MDiv or a MACM or a ThM. He
won’t care what board you’re the chairman of or that you’re the
vice-moderator of thus-and-so-convention. God won’t be impressed
by your head count. You don’t get a special entrance to Heaven
because you’re a bishop. There will be no Bishops Only express
line. No Pastors Only luxury suite. When you stand before God
you will stand before Him absolutely naked. No fine clothes. No
Lexus. No rings and Rolexes. No gold crucifixes. No intricate
robes. No socks. And He won’t care about that degree you worked
so hard for. He won’t care how much you have in the bank or what
your pension plan is. None of the things we, in our tradition,
strive for. Things we value above all else: these ridiculous
positions within the church hierarchy and the titles that go
with them. God won’t care anything about that. All He will care
about is our work. What work have we done? How has it fed
people? Clothed people? How have we invested ourselves in their
lives? Long after you’re dead and gone, only your work will be
able to speak for you.
READ ESSAY
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PraiseNet Video The Tea Party & African Americans 2010 State Of The Union Address
Clips
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This film never opened here.
Colorado Springs residents who wanted to see Lee Daniels' brilliant, Oscar®-winning Precious had to make the hour-plus drive to Denver. While I'm slow to attribute this to outright racism, as Precious opened in precious few cities, all the buzz from Sundance and wins at the Golden Globes and now the Oscars (including screenwriter Jeffrey Fletcher's historic win—the first African American screenwriter to win an Academy Award) would make you think the film should qualify for a wide release. Nope. Just never opened here. even worse, there's a deafening silence, an alarming lack of outrage from the black community here, who, frankly, never seem to get outraged about much (except one person, one, who complained about Mo'Nique's character's use of the word "ass" in the Precious trailer, this one complaint causing a church to take the clip off of their website). Church Folk complain, routinely, about the wrong things, missing the point, entirely, that the negatives of Precious are also the grim reality the Gospel was intended to engage.
From
MSNBC: "Precious" star Mo'Nique startled fans with dramatic
depths previously unsuspected in the actress known for lowbrow
comedy. "I would like to thank the academy for showing that it
can be about the performance and not the politics," said
Mo'Nique, who plays the heartless, abusive welfare mother of an
illiterate teen (Gabourey Sidibe, a best-actress nominee in her
screen debut) in the Harlem drama "Precious: Based on the Novel
'Push' by Sapphire." Mo'Nique added her gratitude to the first
black actress to win an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel, the 1939
supporting-actress winner for "Gone With the Wind." "I want to
thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to so
that I would not have to," she said, adding thanks to Oprah
Winfrey and Tyler Perry, who signed on as executive producers to
spread the word on "Precious" after it premiered at last year's
Sundance Film Festival. "Precious" also won the
adapted-screenplay Oscar for Geoffrey Fletcher. "This is for
everybody who works on a dream every day. Precious boys and
girls everywhere," Fletcher said. (MSNBC©)
The Trouble With Barack
“Barack Obama has grandly failed to lead the nation emotionally
as well as rationally,” Newsweek's Jon Meacham wrote. “What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country. Like all of us, Obama has the vices of his virtues. He is cool and steady, but can seem cold and remote. He is thoughtful and thorough, but can appear eggheady and out of it. He appeals to the intellect, but often fails to make the visceral case for something.” Meacham’s engaging essay, The Trouble With Barack, is well worth the read. It is, despite my choice of quote, here, quite positive of the president, making the case that the conservative right’s scare tactics present a distorted view of Obama, presenting him as an extreme liberal when a sober review of the president’s record fins him just slightly right of center (including the president's health care reform ambitions, which Meacham describes as "just to the right of those of Richard Nixon").
But I agree with Meacham’s assessment of the president’s biggest
failure thus far: to lead, to inspire. He’s been, for the most
part, the Negotiator-In-Chief, wasting enormous amounts of time
working within a Pollyannaish view of Congress—specifically the
Senate—and, from what I can tell, wrongly assuming these men and
women are, in fact grownups. The sheer vitriol going on in
Congress, on both sides of the aisle, paints a picture of a
deeply insecure gang of children. The sheer level of
childishness—from petty agendas to dirty tricks—going on in the
face of the worst economic crisis this country has ever faced
defies description. These folks seem concerned exclusively with
their own reelection chances. Their focus on the coming midterm
elections inhibits every choice, every decision, as
conservatives bank hard right and liberals move to the center,
nervous about being blamed if things go wrong.
Well, guess what, Sherlock: things HAVE gone wrong. And we DO
blame you—all of you petulant, snotty-nosed children running the
country. Democrats: you absolutely will get voted out of you
fail to act, to do what we voted you nitwits in to do. Democrats
spent eight years tip toeing around conservatives. Now we’ve
thrown the bums out, but the Dems, idiots that they are, are
still tip-toeing.
Meanwhile the president seems to be living in some alternate
universe. He seems oblivious to the preposterous level of
sophomoric behavior up on the hill. Lyndon Johnson, Richard
Nixon, Ronald Reagan—these guys would have strong-armed,
threatened, insulted people’s mothers. Would have gone on TV and
embarrassed them. These men set the tone. Instead, President
Obama seems to be insisting on an admirable path of hands-off
legislating. But all it’s done is drag his numbers down, push
moderates and independents to the right, and bog down the
president’s hopeful agenda in a mud wrestle of name-calling.
I was heartened to see the president finally talk tough last
week. Rumors abound that the president’s chief of staff, Rohm
Emanuel, is the likely author of Obama’s thus-far professorial
tip-toeing, and that the president is fed up with the
foolishness in Congress and had finally gotten the message: Step
Up, Mr. President. All of which could be clever White House
maneuvering, or it could be table setting for Emanuel’s
long-planned departure, with, hopefully, a more determined
president emerging in Emanuel’s wake.
Much like Mr. Clinton, President Obama has done a great deal of
simply amazing work under impossible stress and in difficult
times. And, like Mr. Clinton, he has thus far done a terrible
job of telling his own story. Modesty has absolutely no place in
Washington, where whomever shouts the loudest tends to be the
one telling the story. Only, the loudest voice, in any room, at
any time, is that of the president of the United States.
Thirteen months later, Mr. Obama has finally made a good start.
I hope and pray he continues, now, to do what he should have
done from the very start: lead. Bully if he has to. But, we’re
begging you, Mr. President, get something done.
POST REPLY
Casting Crowns
There was once this barbaric tradition,
here, of Church Folk gathering at a crowded little buffet place
after church. This restaurant, Furs, was crowded not because the
food was so great (at times it reminded me a high school
cafeteria) but because its process were so low. Low enough that
the chain vanished from Ourtown a few years back. But, during
its heyday, most Church Folk could be found congregating there
after Sunday service, services they often groused about going
too long, only to then spend hour upon hour gossiping at Fur’s.
In this mix, you could always tell who the pastors were. They
were the guys, most often the pot-bellied guys, wearing their
hats. These men would get out of their fancy cars, just a s
often ungracious, stereotypical Cadillacs and so forth, who
would then don top coats and hats for the twenty-foot walk to
the restaurant door. Being a guy who’d die naked if they’d let
me, I could never understand why these pastors insisted on
bringing these heavy coats and gregarious clown-pimp hats into a
restaurant only a few feet from their car. It’s not as if these
men had to march across the frozen tundra to get there. The
wives would, just as often, put on mink and ridiculous gold lame
“crown” hats, a quizzical display of prosperous bling
considering going to Fur’s on a Sunday usually told the world
what a cheapskate you were.
Inside,
many of the pastors would
remove the heavy coat—which they wore just to show it off—and go through convolutions of finding an empty chair or such they could park their folded armor into before seating themselves—with their gregarious hats on—to eat dinner. Many, to my direct observation, did not even remove their hats when they prayed over the table. It was like a convention of Insecurity Anonymous, these people behaving like ten-year olds in desperate need of external validation. And, I’m not talking ball caps. I’m talking large, gregarious fedoras, some with bands and feathers and such. Pimp hats. Some of these men having removed their top coat and even their suit jacket, rolled up their sleeves, and dug into fried chicken and mashed potatoes while still wearing a large eyesore of a felt Fedora. Those were the pastors. CONTINUED
Next: Privacy: A Preacher's Confession
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