Schedule for April 1st

9:00 am - meeting with ADP (area development project) staff, Design Committee and sub county local government leaders.

11:00 am - Visit Amaji primary school

Visit Barlong village - water source

HIV/AIDS clinic at Aber hospital

1:00pm - lunch

Afternoon - meet and spend time with sponsored children

return to hotel
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schedule for March 31st

10:30 am - travel to airport
noon - arrive in the Gulu Region; lunch
afternoon - briefing with the Gulu Mangement team


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Uganda Trip Update

Today's agenda includes a 10 am church service at the Kampala Pentecostal Church. This service, in contrast to the UCC Medfield service, could last for several hours - depending on how the spirit moves the pastor and the congregation! The afternoon schedule today includes sightseeing and preparation for the flight tomorrow to the Gulu region. Please continue your prayers for Phil and the World Vision team.

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Phil arrives safely in Uganda! The landing at the Entebbe airport was on schedule, 8:15 pm today. Housed at the Grand Imperial Hotel, just 2 miles north of the equator, Phil and the World Vision team enjoyed the temperate 73 degree weather. Please continue your prayers for Phil and the rest of the team.

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Off to Uganda

My flight to Uganda leaves from Logan at 8:10 p.m. this evening. The eight hour flight lands in Amsterdam where we have a three hour layover and then we head to Kampala, Uganda and arrive eight hours later.

I have been spending the last several days collecting and purchasing things that World Vision recommends that I bring with me. I am taking some small gifts for some of the children that we will visit while there, as well as for the World Vision staff in Uganda. Care must be taken to back well because if you don't pack it, you can't just run out to the store and pick it up.

I would love for you to keep the eight of us on the trip in your prayers. I have asked Bill Sobo to post each day's schedule on the blog so you will know better what to pray for. I am not expecting to have access to email while I am gone, but if I do I will try to give an update.

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Thought for the Day

The word stands for the body, but the symphony stands for the spirit.
--Hildegard of Bingen

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Thought for the Day

A man must not choose his neighbour; he must take the neighbour that God sends him. The neighbour is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.
--George MacDonald

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Thought for the Day

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
--G. K. Chesterton

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Prayer for Easter Monday

Almighty God, who for our redemption gave your only begotten Son to death on the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant me so to die daily in sin that I may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

One's own self is the most difficult to subdue.
--Dhammapada (c. 5th century B.C.)

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Easter Prayer

O Lord God, our Father. You are the light that can never be put out; and now you give us a light that shall drive away all darkness. You are love without coldness, and you have given us such warmth in our hearts that we can love all when we meet. You are the life that defies death, and you have opened for us the way that leads to eternal life.

None of us is a great Christian; we are all humble and ordinary. But your grace is enough for us. Arouse in us that small degree of joy and thankfulness of which we are capable, to the timid faith which we can muster, to the cautious obedience which we cannot refuse, and thus to the wholeness of life which you have prepared for all of us through the death and resurrection of your Son. Do not allow any of us to remain apathetic or indifferent to the wondrous glory of Easter, but let the light of our risen Lord reach every corner of our dull hearts.
--Karl Barth

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Prayer for Holy Saturday

O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so I may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

All of creation is a song of praise to God.
--Hildegard of Bingen

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Prayer for Good Friday

Lord Jesus Christ, who for the redemption of the world ascended the wood of the cross, and the whole world was turned into darkness, grant us always that light, both in body and soul, whereby we may attain to everlasting life; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, world without end.
--Ambrosian Manual

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Thought for the Day

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Trip to Northern Uganda

As many of you know I will be leaving a week from today for a "Vision Trip" sponsored by World Vision to Northern Uganda. I will be one of eight people on the trip the purpose of which is to see if we as a church can connect in a meaningful way with a newly started project in this area of the world. If we find a way of connecting, we will have the opportunity as a church to forge a three to five year relationship with the people in the project area.

Northern Uganda showed up on our radarscope as a result of our encounter with Grace Akallo last fall. Grace, a child soldier who escaped after seven months of captivity, eventually made her way to Gordon College on the north shore, married to Jonathan and recently had a baby boy. Her story (we have copies of her book, Girl Soldier, in the church office) so moved many of the church we wondered how we might become more involved in helping to heal the terrible wounds of this area of the world.

I will share information on Northern Uganda and my trip over the next week and ask that you would keep me in your prayers.

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Prayer for Maundy Thursday

Lord Jesus Christ, who when thou wast able to institute thy holy sacrament at the Last Supper, didst wash the feet of the apostles, and teach us by thy example the grace of humility: cleanse us, we beseech thee, from all stain of sin, that we may be worthy partakers of thy holy mysteries; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
--Office of the Royal Maundy in Westminster Abbey

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Thought for the Day

Wisdom is that olive that springeth from the heart, bloometh on the tongue, and beareth fruit in the actions.
--Elizabeth Grymestom

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Thought for the Day

Sacrificial love does more than create a defensive middle; it also presents a transformative witness to a world where the pursuit of self-actualization is the highest value, a world where self-asserting violence is the norm.
--Richard B. Hays

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God and the New Atheism, Chapter 3

The third chapter has the title, "Does Theology Matter?" and begins with a quotation from Sam Harris' book: "Science has become the preeminent sphere for the demonstration of intellectual honesty. Pretending to know things you do not now is a great liability in science; and yet, it is the sine qua non of faith-based religion."

Haught begins his critique in this chapter by likening them to the creationists and fundamentalists against these new atheists rail. One of the common traits of books by the new atheists is their withering critique of theology and theologians. For example, Harris writes, "Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings" (173).

One would expect, however, that along with such a devastating critique that the new atheists would have done their homework and informed themselves about how theology addresses the issues that they raise. Amazingly, they have not done so. Haught writes,

In preparing treatises on a-theism, one would expect that scholars and journalists would have done some research on theism, just to be sure they know exactly what they are rejecting. It is hard to be an informed and consistent atheist without knowing something about theology, but aside from several barbed references there is no sign of any contact between the new atheists and theology, let alone studious investigation of the topic. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology (29).

This reminds me of something Terry Eagleton said in a review of Dawkins' book in the London Review of Books in March 2007: Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

Haught calls the new atheists, "scientific literalists" and argues that like religious literalists, "there is nothing beneath the surface of the texts they are reading--nature in the case of science, sacred Scriptures in the case of religion. Scientism, the scientific community's version of literalism, assumes that the universe becomes fully transparent only if it is packaged in the impersonal language of mathematics or other kinds of scientific modeling" (30).

Again, Haught addresses the shallowness of scientism and its resultant reductionism when he says,

Scientism is to science what literalism is to faith. It is a way of shrinking the world so as to make it manageable and manipulable. It is a way of suppressing the anxiety that might arise from a more open, courageous, and wholesome encounter with mystery. Scientism's main motive is fear of losing control (38).

This scientific literalism has the effect, then, of shrinking religion in the following ways:

--Reducing, or trying hard to reduce, the entire monotheistic religious population to scriptural literalists, dogmatic extremists, escapists, perverts, perpetrators of human suffering, and fanatics.
--Reducing the cultural role of theology to the systematic underwriting of religious abuse.
--Reducing the meaning of faith to mindless belief in whatever has no evidence.
--Reducing the whole of reality to what can be known by science.
--Reducing the idea of God to a "hypothesis... (38f).

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Thought for the Day

Many are the devices and marvelous the elaborations by which men everywhere seek to avoid condemnation before that inner tribunal known as conscience.
--Anton T. Boisen

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Thought for the Day

Treat the other man's faith gently; it is all he has to believe with.
--Henry S. Haskins

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Sunday's Prayer: Palm Sunday

As on this day we keep the special memory of our redeemer's entry into the city, so grant, O Lord, that now and ever he may triumph in our hearts. Let the king of grace and glory enter in, and let us lay ourselves and all we are in full joyful homage before him; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
--Handley C. Moule

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Thought for the Day

Concentrate on today. Be a today man, not a yesterday man, nor a tomorrow man. Live today. For if you try to live three ways at once--living in worry over the mistakes of yesterday, living tensely about tomorrow, you will be living ineffectively today.
--E. Stanley Jones

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Thought for the Day

In biblical days prophets were astir while the world was asleep; today the word is astir while church and synagogue are busy with trivialities.
--Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Thought for the Day

To be proud of virtue is to poison yourself with the antidote.
--Benjamin Franklin

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Thought for the Day

No Christian escapes a taste of the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land.
--Evelyn Underhill

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Is Time Money?

I read an interesting article about time, "Time Out of Mind," in the March 7, 2008 New York Times. He notes that Benjamin Franklin was the one who coined the phrase, "time is money," but explains that "he meant this only as a gentle reminder not to 'sit idle' for half the day." The author, Stefan Klein, continues, "He might be dismayed if he could see how literally, and self-destructively, we take his metaphor today. Our society is obsessed as never before with making every single minute count. People even apply the language of banking: We speak of 'having' and 'saving' and 'investing' and 'wasting' it."
He shares some of the latest findings of research concerning how our bodies track time and says how our brains measurement of time is connected to physical movement. Studies have also shown that when we experience sensory arousal our sense of time seems to expand. He writes,

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

In the end, this obsessive relationship that we have with time actually costs us time. The remedy he advocates is to let go off this misunderstood phrase from Benjamin Franklin. He notes that time, using the words of Joyce Carol Oates, is "the element in which we exist. We are either borne along by it or drowned in it."

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Thought for the Day

In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.
--Dag Hammarskjold

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Thought for the Day

Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.
--Nicholas Berdyaev

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Sunday's Prayer

God our Father, you sent your Son to us: grant that filled with your Spirit we may be renewed in faith, and inspired in hope and love, to spread the gospel of your kingdom to all humankind; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

There are enough targets to aim at without firing at each other.
--Theodore Roosevelt

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Thought for the Day

Faith furnishes prayer with wings, without which it cannot soar to Heaven.
--St. John Climacus

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Thought for the Day

The order of human existence is too imperiled by chaos, the goodness of man too corrupted by sin, and the possibilities of man too obscured by natural handicaps, to make human order and human possibilities solid bases of the moral imperative.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

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Thought for the Day

When money speaks the truth is silent.
--Russian proverb

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Thought for the Day

Shame kills faster than disease.
--Buchi Emecheta

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Culture and Perceptions

There is an interesting article this morning in the Boston Globe's Health/Science section with the title, "Cultural insights." The author, Carey Goldberg writes, "New brain research is adding high-tech evidence to what lower-tech psychology experiments have found for years: Culture can affect not just language and custom, but how people experience the world at stunningly basic levels--what they see when they look at a city street, for example, or even how they perceive a simple line in a square."

Westerners tend to focus more on a distinctive object whereas Easterners tend to focus more on the background which contains the distinctive object. Dr. Denise Park says, "Literally, our data suggest that people see different elements of pictures. If you're looking at an elephant in the jungle, the Westerner will focus on the elephant and the Easterner is going to be more thinking about the jungle scene that has the elephant in it."

I wonder how these subtle but important differences affect the gospel, how it is presented, how it is shared and what things stand out in the different cultures. It is a fascinating article with implications for the missional church.

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Thought for the Day

Only one thing can give unity in the Church on the human level: the love which allows another to be different even when it does not understand him.
--Karl Rahner

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Sunday's Prayer

O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant that I, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear my cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ my Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

Sleep is the best meditation.
--Dalai Lama

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