Tag: Injustice

Stand with Humility

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In this fourth part of our series in Esther, Stand Up: How to Fight Injustice, we finally get to the action Esther takes to battle the gross injustice facing the Jewish people in Persia.  But, the exact nature of her action really isn’t all that important.  Rather, it’s how she goes about it that matters most.  Keep reading to see just what it is she does that makes her plan so effective.

 

Stand with Humility

I was born in what some would call the Golden Age of cartoons.  While they weren’t making new episodes, I had all the classic Looney Toons shows available to me.  But I came of cartoon age with the truly classic versions of Batman, Superman, Justice League, the X-Men, and Spider-Man.  I grew up loving superheroes—a love that is now being richly rewarded on the big screen.  The rewards are coming mostly from Marvel Studios which by next May when the fourth Avengers movie releases will have given us 25 movies over the span of 11 years, all telling one, big, overarching story.  It’s a little like the comic book world’s film version of the Bible.  And indeed, the latest Avengers movie has crossed the billion dollars in ticket sales mark faster than any other movie.  I’ve seen it: It was amazing.  It is not a standalone film, however, so I am eager as can be to catch part two next May. Read the rest…

Stand Down

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In this third part of our teaching series, Stand Up: How to Fight Injustice, we finally start talking about action.  We’ve spent the previous two weeks establishing a baseline from which to begin our fight.  This week the fight begins…but not where we might expect it.  Our battles against injustice begin best not on our feet, but on our knees.  Keep reading to see how this plays out through the story of Esther.

 

Stand Down

One of our good friends in Virginia is a handyman who enjoys woodworking.  Prior to living there and getting to know Rod, the only time I had ever done any woodworking was my junior high shop classes—classes which I thoroughly enjoyed and was pretty good at.  I still have most of the things I made.  Rod and his wife, Pat, had the gift of loving us and they did it well and in a number of ways.  One of the ways Rod did this with me in particular was to let me come down and play in his shop and create.  I only got a few projects finished before our growing family reduced the time available for woodworking to nil, but I enjoyed every minute of it.  Some of my favorite projects are a spice rack/cookbook shelf that’s hanging in the dining room and a toy bulldozer that was intended to be for the boys to play with until I realized how quickly they were going to break it relative to the number of hours that went into making it at which point it became a display piece.  Well, Rod liked to collect t-shirts with inspirational or funny messages on them.  One of my favorites was one that was perfect for the novice woodworker.  It read: Measure twice, cut once, curse, go by more wood, repeat. Read the rest…

Be Ready to Stand

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This week we begin a brand new series called Stand Up: How to Fight Injustice.  For the next six weeks and with the story of Esther as our guide, we are going to look at how as followers of Jesus we can stand effectively against injustice in the world around us.  Sometimes we’ll be called to do that in big, bold ways, but more often than not, our best chances will be small and seemingly insignificant.  But, if we don’t make them, injustice is given that much more space to flourish, so make them we must.  Stay tuned in the weeks ahead for how to do it.

 

Be Ready to Stand

Have you ever heard the word “serendipity” before?  I’m sure you have.  Better question: Do you know what it means?  You might know it was the title of a romantic comedy starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale.  That doesn’t really answer the question, though.  Serendipity is a word used to describe a random, but fortunate turn of circumstances.  In other words, serendipity is when something good happens to you totally unexpectedly.  The idea is that the universe has contrived to bless you in some kind of a way without your realizing it.  Now, this is not a concept that connects with the Christian worldview at all.  As followers of Jesus, we believe that God is the giver of all good gifts, not some impersonal entity such as “the universe.”  But, many people don’t have a category for something like this happening because they don’t have the proper worldview framework and so they simply call it serendipity. Read the rest…

A Fount of Injustice?

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One of the challenges many critics of the church have used to write it off is the fact that we have some skeletons in our closet.  There have been several times in the last 2,000 years when the church got its mission not just wrong, but devastatingly so.  Still, are things really as bad as our critics allege?  A sharper look at history suggests perhaps not.  In this fourth part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we take a look at the church’s supposed dark past and discover that there may be a good deal more light there than most folks might think.  Read on for more.

A Fount of Injustice?

There is a story about the interactions between a powerful institution and a particular scientist from the 17th century that has come to define much about how many people view the church today.  The institution was the Roman Catholic Church.  The scientist was a man named Galileo Galilei.  Galileo, as the story usually goes, by carefully following the scientific method, discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth as was widely believed in his day.  Instead, the truth is the exact reverse: the earth revolves around the sun.  For espousing this scientific fact which violated not only their false explanations of how the universe worked, but also the theological explanations undergirding them, the Church set out on a campaign to persecute this courageous scientist into silence.  When this didn’t work, Galileo was excommunicated—a social death sentence in that day—and placed under arrest.  He spent the remaining years of his life in prison where he died a martyr for the cause of science. Read the rest…