Living witness

by Stephanie Rhodes

This week a West Bank-headquartered media organization is conducting a training course for Palestinian journalists.

Previous trainings have focused on providing an authentic Palestinian perspective without inciting violence, on supplying comprehensive election coverage, on facilitating talk shows and encouraging live debate.

This training focuses on not dying in the field.

It focuses on not being deliberately targeted by Israeli soldiers or Palestinian political factions.

It focuses on witnessing the truth on the ground and living to broadcast the tale.

Let’s be clear: field journalism is dangerous, and Palestinian journalists are not the only ones targeted. On the other hand, most of the world’s forces targeting journalists do not claim to be modern, Western democracies. Palestinian journalists are, quite literally, caught between an unaccountable, occupying army that appears to view documentation as armed resistance and an internal conflict so ruthless its factions seem to view objective reporting as a form of high treason.

All of this is to say that you don’t want to be a Palestinian reporter. It’s simply not safe. But it’s also vitally important.

Palestinian media organizations are beginning to come into their own, to develop an authentically Palestinian voice while also trying to hold themselves accountable to international media standards. They don’t always succeed, but then again, who does?

So why does it all matter so much? I believe that having a meaningful peace process, one that promotes peace instead of simply mitigating violence, demands transnational dialogue. That cannot happen if only one side has the capacity for indigenous mass media.

To be sure, Palestinian media has a broad scope of problems, ranging from insufficient legal protections to basic lack of funding. In the end, though, there can be no media if Palestinian journalists cannot do their jobs. There can be no sustained Palestinian media dialogue if journalists cannot routinely witness the truth on the ground and live to broadcast the tale.

So what can you do? If you’re feeling very wealthy and very generous, you could donate flak jackets, helmets, emergency medical kits and more training courses. Even if you’re not very wealthy, it could be an interesting collaborative project.

Mostly though, you can read/listen to/watch as much as possible of the material they produce (in English). Make their work, their professional and personal sacrifices, matter. Too often Palestinians feel like the tree that fell in the woods with no one to hear it.

Help them make some noise.

Ma’an News Agency
International Middle East Media Center
Ramattan News Agency

Stephanie Rhodes is a young adult currently living in Jerusalem and coordinating Palestinian media development projects. She is also a former member of Episcopal Church Committee on the Status of Women.

Tomorrow: Lallie Lloyd

"I thirst"

by Craig Cole

“I thirst.”

These two simple words are displayed next to the cross that hangs in many of the Missionaries of Charities homes around the world. At least, in the several I have visited.

The simplicity of the words are astonishing upon reflection. Yet, considering the King of Kings came wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger. Little packages, or a few words, can have tremendous significance.

“I thirst.” The words make me tremble.

Before I became executive director of Five Talents, I worked for a relief and development organization that had projects in the Caribbean, West Indies and Latin America and many of those projects were with the Missionaries of Charity, the organization founded by Mother Teresa.

And, I was trembling the first time I walked into a Missionaries of Charity home. It was a home for the elderly in Georgetown, Guyana. I had never liked “old folks.” As a teenager growing up in suburban Chicago, Christmas time meant caroling at the elderly home down the street. I went, but I made sure I was in back of the group. I made no eye contact and when the singing was done, I shuffled my feet instead of greeting the men and women and handing out cookies. I was always scared.

Now, it was my job. I had to go in. I had to talk to them and find the stories to tell our donors.

I came into the room in the women’s ward in this old wooden 2-story building. I put on my best fake smile, which was really just gritting my teeth. They were so desperate for attention. They thought the smile was real. They were enthusiastic and so warm in their greeting.

I ended up sitting next to a woman, who was so frail she could hardly sit up. Her face etched with the lines of age, her mouth almost toothless and her hands wrinkled and thin. She reached out her hand and I had no choice but to take it. I was afraid her fingers might break they were so frail. I held it like a feather in my hand, caressing ever so gently. The next few minutes were so, gentle and peaceful, I knew if God had so much as whispered I would have heard him. We were generations and worlds apart sitting together enjoying silence.

Then she nodded and slunk down in her chair, mumbling quietly to herself. I was startled and instantly afraid she might die right there. The sisters quickly came and picked her up and softly put her into her bed and covered her with a sheet. Exhausted, I was told.

“I thirst”

I thirst for that moment of peace and serenity of God’s whisper of God’s connection with others.

Jesus thirsts from the cross, the poor thirst for a simple drink of clean water, and we in suburbia thirst for life-giving water that will quench our souls.

John 19:28-30- Jesus knew that everything was now finished, and to fulfill the Scriptures said. “I’m thirsty.” A jar of sour wine was sitting there, so a sponge was soaked in it and put on a hyssop branch and help up to his lips. when Jesus had tasted it, he said, “It is finished,” and bowed his head and dismissed his spirit.

Craig Cole is the executive director of Five Talents International, an Anglican microfinance nonprofit. He is also a member of the Diocese of Virginia's Mission Commission and an EGR board member.

Tomorrow - Stephanie Rhodes

Inviting Courage: A new initiative for congregations and the MDGs

by The Rev. Devon Anderson

There’s a quote that I’ve written out on a 3x5 card and taped to my wall. I look at it everyday. It’s from St. Augustine and it says:

Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger
at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they
are.

I’m the kind of person that is easily excercized by both injustice and inconvenience. Hope’s daughter Anger is a constant presence in my life. She and I are big buddies. It is daughter Courage who is more elusive, one I’d like to see more often -- both in my own life and in the life of our church.

Part of the reason I am personally energized by the MDG movement is that whenever we engage MDGs – as individuals, congregations, dioceses, or as networks of friends and colleagues – daughter Courage makes an appearance. The MDGs are based on the premise that we are not content with the way most people must live in the global village. They rest on the reality that there is no earthly reason why, save the lack of will, things need remain the way they are. Whenever I see the MDGs in action, I see Courage. This simple fact alone gives me great hope and anticipation that we are on a good road, one that leads to justice and transformation through the eradication of extreme poverty.

The Diocese of Minnesota, and in particular our MDG Task Force, has been focusing our efforts on being even more inviting of daughter Courage. We are trying something new. We recognize that our beloved church does not have such an impressive track record when it comes to big initiatives. There’s a rather long depressing list of innovative, exciting, hopeful initiatives that have earned TEC endorsement in the past, that have enjoyed a limited explosion of attention and euphoria, only to eventually fade to black, falling off the horizon almost completely. Maybe it’s because not enough attention was paid to laying down deep roots at the congregational level, to mobilizing individuals in the pews. We recognize that the MDG movement is vulnerable, too, to the fate of initiatives-past unless we muster up our courage and try something different.

Next week we will launch a pilot program that will focus all of our energies on mobilizing individuals in congregations around MDGs. We are starting small with three-to-five congregations as our “guinea pigs.” These congregations, equipped with trained five-person leadership teams, will conduct a 0.7% individual giving campaign during the season of Lent. The idea is that individual giving is a vehicle through which we might deepen and widen the investment and commitment in MDGs within a congregation. The idea is that a campaign that mobilizes individuals (their interest and their resources) lays a firmer foundation for on-going, sustainable, effective mission work. Our pilot program will start small in its first phase, and include more and more congregations in the subsequent phases. It will build networks of people that cross congregational, theological, cultural, and geographical divides who support each other and maybe even partner with each other in common areas of interest in mission.

Please pray for us. Our hope is that our pilot program is successful. Our hope is that we are able to offer it up to the wider church as a model, for others to use, mold, and improve upon. Our hope is that we have enough courage to risk something big for something good.

The Rev. Devon Anderson is a priest, chair of Diocese of Minnesota MDG task force, and the recipient of an Episcopal Church Foundation grant to develop models for equipping congregations for engaging global mission and the MDGs.

Tomorrow - Craig Cole

Meanwhile...

by The Rev. Becca Stevens

Following the path of Jesus can drive you crazy. I pray impatience with the Gospel is not a deadly sin! While we may not necessarily want to skip the journey, and get to the destination, we at least would like to move ahead on our spiritual path. Lord, each week, inch by inch, the church doles out only a tiny snippet of the story of Jesus on the way to Jerusalem. Each week we preach and hear the Gospel a paragraph at a time. Sometimes it is excruciatingly slow.

One section of the Gospel of Luke is called, “The Journey”. It begins in the 9th chapter after the transfiguration when Jesus has “his eyes set on Jerusalem”. It continues until the 19th chapter of Luke with the triumphant entry into the Jerusalem. These 10 chapters take months to read a paragraph at a time. It took Jesus months as well, even though he could have traversed that amount of territory in a couple of weeks, easy. Months after the transfiguration we find we are still wandering with Jesus right outside Jerusalem in Jericho. He may have had his eyes set on Jerusalem but his heart is sidetracked feeding, healing, teaching, and praying. His disciples tried to keep him moving. They rebuke parents for bringing their infants to Jesus, but Jesus lets all the children come anyway. He spends time visiting Pharisees, tax collectors, healing lepers, telling parables and debating in the synagogues and streets. And those are just the events they recorded. The image of a map with a hundred dotted lines going every which way indicating all the detours gives us a picture of what on the way may mean.

On the way, he is slowly and patiently teaching his disciples. At the beginning of the 12th Chapter the very first words to his little flock are, “meanwhile”. That is the part that undoes me.

Meanwhile, while we preach a paragraph at a time, meanwhile, while we take up one more collection, meanwhile we eat a bite of bread and take a sip of wine.

Meanwhile, the world is burning for his message of radical love, the war is four and half years old, the number of people below the poverty level in America is on the rise, and the Nobel Peace Prize has been given in recognition of the crisis of global warming. Meanwhile, he is within fifty miles of Jerusalem in an occupied nation in which people are being persecuted. Meanwhile he takes his own sweet time saying, don’t worry about tomorrow, give everything away, give thanks and watch and wait.

Meanwhile, two Sudanese women walked into my office.

I had scheduled forty-five minutes for their meeting. They began the meeting by thanking me for my time, my precious time. Then they told me the journey part of their story.

They had been on a long and arduous journey from a long and bloody war that created an entire generation of refuges. They told the story of the death of most of their family, their village being ruined, being separated from their siblings and friends since their childhood in the late 1980’s, fleeing to Egypt and the brutality they faced, the process of becoming refuges and arriving in Nashville in 2000. Finally they are here and safe with their own children. They are now feeling called to return to their hometown and build a school for the orphans of war. They had their eyes set on freedom on a journey that took them 10 years; a journey that should only take a day by plane. They get here and begin to get established. But in their great humility, they were sitting in my office with beautiful thick accents saying they wanted to turn around and go back and help. They said that God had been merciful to them and this was an expression of their gratitude.

The Gospel message came flooding past my pharisaical mind and I could hear the words, “God have mercy on me, a sinner. God forgive my arrogance and impatience. God make hear the cry of others so that I don’t worry if I ever make it to Jerusalem.” These two young women wanted to go back, register themselves as a new organization and get some land for their fellow pilgrims in need. Having been given mercy from the war, they needed to make meaning out of all the suffering. The scars on their legs are reminders we can’t walk fast enough to get away from the pain. We worked on their journey and how to begin to plan for a school when they return.

We can keep moving forward on the journey only to find out we have walked round and round and found ourselves right back where we started saying, “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” I am not ready to go into Jerusalem yet. I need to stand by the side of the road with the blind man, I need to climb a sycamore tree with Zaccheus, I need to stand in the temple with the tax collector and beg for mercy.

Dr. Buttrick, a Professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School, taught us to proclaim the whole story of salvation and not be limited by the lectionary. But sometimes studying a whole paragraph might be too much. We may need to take it slower and stay at a verse long enough to feel it sink in, forgetting the journey and destination for awhile. St. Paul says the Gospel is so rich we need to sip it. Like communion, savored. Digesting slowly what it means to be humble, until we feel it sink into our thick hearts.

It is enough to read, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner”, be changed by the words, and the deeds these words provoke, so if we ever get to Jerusalem, we are ready.

+ + +

My Night-Time Prayer for Tennessee

In a Cumberland cove by the old Oaks you can hear in the hollow the whispering of our mothers. Near a black willow shaking by the Tennessee River you can hear in the current the laughter of our children. In a field with Pecans and Basswood old enough to trace their ancestors like DARs you can hear the delight of our fathers. Under a hawk perched in a sugar maple limb afire in fall you can hear old farmers’ whistles.

We have found magic in the trees, shelter under a canopy of green, and reverence for their silent witness. We have walked on parched trails with unmoving roots and thin seedlings and prayed for rain and survival. We have buried our beloved in their shade, praying they find some solace.

We live in a land that beholds trees that have clapped their hands like the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision:

Hemlocks shed cones like tears for the seasons gone by. Sycamores tell the story of the tornado of ‘98 in their bark. Chinquapin Oaks exhale poetry, Catalpas drip with ornamental pods, and Ginkgos put us in our humble place. Poplars call us to passion that comes only from loving the woods.

We live on a limestone foundation, in moon light and bow our heads in thanksgiving. In this prayer we feel the dusty voices of our ancestors rising from the chert to join our thanksgiving for these sacred woods:

God give us vision to preserve these woods. Let the moonlight carry our meager prayers to your heart. Fill our heart with love like this heavenly host that holds us all as your children. Knit us close to these trees so that we teach another to love these woods, and they will be saved.

Amen.

The Rev. Becca Stevens is a priest, author, rector of St. Augustine's Church in Nashville, TN and founder of Magdalene House. She has also worked with St. Augustine's to found a school in Ecuador. Read her bio here.

Tomorrow: The Rev. Devon Anderson

Step by Step: Finding the blessings in the slums of Nairobi

by Reynolds Whalen

As I walked through the streets of Nairobi’s poorest area, the police were pulling electricity out of people’s homes. Local gangs had tapped it illegally from nearby power lines and charged residents to use it. My friend, Fred, advised me to hide my camera as we passed a dump truck full of wires surrounded by a dozen officers donning sleek sunglasses and brandishing fully automatic weapons. The air pulsed with a dangerous tension.

Several minutes after we passed this scene, gunfire erupted behind us, popping like the firecrackers I had watched serenely on a grassy hill in St. Louis weeks earlier for the Fourth of July. Startled, I turned to my friend Fupi for a plan of action and was surprised to find him and Fred laughing.

“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” I asked frantically. They just smiled reassuringly and replied:

“Don’t worry, they’re not aiming at people, they’re shooting into the air.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I can tell by the way it sounds,” replied Fupi.

My immediate thought, and one that still haunts me, was that no one should have to know the difference between the sound of bullets being fired into the air and the sound of bullets being fired into a human body.

Mathare is one of the most neglected areas in Kenya. It is the second largest slum in the country with 700,000 people living on about four or five square miles of land. Like many condensed informal urban settlements in this part of the world, problems of HIV/AIDS, drug abuse, violence, prostitution, early pregnancies, and poor sanitation plague its inhabitants. Visitors to this harsh and violent area often balk with disgust and lament the hopeless conditions of its inhabitants. Over the past year, I have learned to think differently.

During a study abroad program last fall and while conducting research this summer, I worked with a group called Haba na Haba, which means “step by step” in Kiswahili. This is a development agency run entirely by people in the community that empowers youth to change their own difficult situations, using a broad spectrum of performing and visual arts. As an Acting major at Washington University, I found particular interest in the drama group and their stunning community outreaches.

Every weekend, groups of young performing artists pile into vans and drive to nearby informal settlements. Upon arrival, they identify an open area such as a field or courtyard and set up drums. Soon, the air is filled with powerful rhythms and a crowd of hundreds has gathered within 10 or 15 minutes. Then, a group of acrobats performs, creating impressive human structures, doing rope-skipping tricks, and swallowing fire. A team of dancers follows, merging aspects of many Kenyan cultures into one poignant routine that uses specific movements to address important issues in the community. Finally, the drama group enters the space and performs an original short play about a concern affecting that particular area. These topics are carefully selected in weekly rehearsals where members of the drama group brainstorm and use improvisation exercises to form their plays. The actors live in these areas, and thus understand which issues are most important at the time. Due to a high level of illiteracy, education through drama is the most effective way to teach about HIV/AIDS prevention, violence, and drug abuse. Haba na Haba reaches nearly 100,000 people a year with its community outreach program.

In addition to the theatre activities, Haba na Haba has a program called Shootback. This initiative started nearly ten years ago when an American photography student equipped about a dozen Mathare youth with cameras and asked them to take pictures of their daily lives. The result was stunning and produced a beautiful book and photography exhibit that traveled the world for years. Last year, Shootback underwent a similar project where they educated ten local young people about the Millenium Development Goals, then asked them to take pictures of them in the community. The resulting book has raised a considerable amount of money for Haba na Haba and increased international exposure.

The Shootback that exists today is run entirely by the original youth and seeks to capture a life that is horribly misrepresented in the national and international media. Journalists and reporters only venture to Mathare when something terrible happens. Therefore, we get the image with which we are all so familiar: starving babies, crumbling homes, uncontrollable violence, towering trash heaps, etc. We never hear about the talented football team that won an international tournament in Norway, the local furniture business that successfully put a bright student through college, the thousands of Mathare residents commuting six hours a day to central Nairobi, or the Mathare kid who became an important United Nations consultant. These stories are not told, so Shootback makes it their mission to tell them.

Recently, Shootback developed a program called Slum T.V. where they spend all week in the community, interviewing people about their businesses and shooting footage of important events. On selected weekends, they have a showing on a large screen in a popular Mathare field, highlighting slum life and the significant contributions of its residents. These bright young adults have reacted to a life of extreme poverty and marginalization by re-claiming agency and changing the community from the inside.

Supporting the MDGs should be central to our lives as Americans and Christians. But when you plan on giving, carefully consider why you are doing it and where your money is going. Resist the temptation to feel you are somehow solving “third world” problems or saving helpless African children. Our role as the church and as a global community is not to “save” anyone. Our role is to share the love of Christ by offering all that we can, while thanking God for the innumerable blessings granted to us.

When you donate 0.7% of your income, know that your money does not have to go to huge organizations like the United Nations or USAID. There are countless movements and groups like Haba na Haba doing incredible work every day. Be creative. Think locally. Find someone who has traveled in developing countries and ask how you can be involved. Participating in the MDGs should not be a passive activity. Take ownership of your ministry and seek to be like Christ, constantly seeking the best way to serve others and share a message of undying love.

Reynolds Whalen is a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, has traveled extensively in Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan. He spent fall semester 2006 in Kenya working with Haba na Haba in Mathare -- read his blog on it here and is working on a documentary film on that experience.

Tomorrow: The Rev. Becca Stevens

An Age of Hope And Promise. A Time to Say "Yes" to God's Mission.

by the Rev. Jay Lawlor

We live in an age of tremendous hope and promise. You may not feel it when you look at our world – but we live in a time of grace and we only need to realize grace’s full potential.

Bono, lead singer of the rock group U2, once commented that if the sleeping giant – which is the Church – would wake up to the reality of the new leprosy which is AIDS; it could bring tremendous healing to the world. If it did not, it would be irrelevant. A stinging comment, to be sure, but one that is spoken in truth, with love. Bono’s comment is a reminder of not only the influence that people of faith can still have in our world, but of our responsibility as people who should be committed to God’s vision of how the world should be. Bono is holding the church’s feet to the fire and challenging us to BE THE CHURCH.

Well, the good news is that the sleeping giant has awoken…and is even beginning to stir.

This is important because it matters what people of faith say. It matters even more what people of faith DO…reconciliation requires a change of attitude in relationship with others. The concept of reconciliation is primarily relational and its being relational is rooted in conversion, forgiveness and making whole that which is broken.

Reconciliation calls us to bear one another’s burdens across the divides of culture, religion, gender, socio-economic status, geography and every other barrier that humanity constructs in keeping us from being in right relationship with God, each other and our environment.

Engaging reconciliation is engagement with none other than God’s Mission in the world. The mission of restoring everyone to right relationship with God, each other and all of creation.

And at the heart of reconciliation – as proclaimed by all the world’s religions – is justice for the world’s poor…caring for the sick, the hungry, the homeless, and all those left vulnerable by the pride and greed of our world.

The poor and vulnerable are suffering greatly in the absence of true reconciliation:

The scourge of extreme poverty in our world today is more than a tragedy…it is a sin. In a world abundant in wealth, resources and technical know-how – enough so that all may have abundant life – millions die needlessly each year.

What does God say to us? How are we to respond?

There are over 2,000 references to poverty in the Bible – God, obviously, has a lot to say on the matter.

The Gospel According to Matthew gives a clear message in the scene of the final judgment as Jesus call to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, take care of the sick, and visit those in prison. Jesus tells his disciples that in caring for those in need we are caring for Christ himself. These passages from Matthew are also the only place where Jesus is explicitly judgmental with respect to how we respond -- or don’t respond -- to the needs of the poor.

Jesus is following in the great Jewish tradition of the prophets and the Jewish scriptures where the central message of the Hebrew texts is on distributive justice. This is justice rooted in communal obligation and generosity toward those in need.

Our Muslim brothers and sisters have similar teachings in the Koran where one is to give away wealth out of love for the near of kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and the beggars, and for the emancipation of the captives.

In fact, all the world’s religions share in common the care for the poor and vulnerable – no matter whom they are or where they live.

It is in our scriptures and in our lives of worship and prayer. The term for the Christian liturgy comes from leitourgeia in Greek which first meant for the sake of the public good. Liturgy serves as both adoration of God and service to the world that is distorted by pride and greed – especially in the midst of extreme poverty -- where we sustain the comfort of the prosperous few at the cost of God’s common resources and life for the poorest people on the planet.

For Anglicans – and many other Christians – the liturgy of the Mass / The Holy Eucharist / Holy Communion is central to our lives of faith. It is not only participation in Christ’s presence that spiritually nourishes the participant, but is for the sake of making God known in the world. One of the Eucharistic prayers from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer reminds worshipers that they come to receive Holy Communion not for solace only, but for strength; not for pardon only, but for renewal.

Each of us are called by God to be renewed so that can then send us into the world to carry out God’s Mission of reconciliation…It is mine, it is yours, it is ours together.

It matters what people of faith say because we are God’s ambassadors; God’s voice on behalf of the poor and oppressed. It matters what we do because we are God’s workers. And we are called to the work of reconciliation in the world to bring an end the scourges of extreme poverty.

I do believe that we live in an age of hope, and of promise, and of grace. We have not lived up to grace’s full potential, but we can. For the first time in human history we have the resources, the knowledge, and the technology to actually end extreme poverty.

We live in an age of hope, promise and grace because of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Projects successfully implementing the MDGs are bringing life to villages in Africa and some of the other poorest regions on our planet. They are bringing the age of hope, promise and grace to the poorest people on our planet as they bring more clearly into focus God’s vision of abundant life for all.

Yet our wealth, resources and technology are not being shared generously enough. The Millennium Development Goals offer a concrete plan. The MDGs have established a covenant for action to end the scourges of extreme poverty. But to fully honor the covenant; to fully implement the plan, we need to provide the resources. There is more than enough – if we care to share just a little of the abundant wealth and resources with our brothers and sisters in need…our brothers and sisters who are pushed over the edge of life into death because of their poverty…and our wealth.

This is an age of hope and promise. This is an age of grace. We are called to realize grace’s full potential. It is up to us. We can do nothing, or we can embrace God’s Mission and literally and measurably make this a more just world where extreme poverty no longer brings death from hunger and preventable & treatable disease.

A world where clean water flows for all;
A world where education is available for all;
A world where we become better stewards of our environment;
A world where every person’s dignity is respected;
A world where new global partnerships replace division and strife.

A world where hope and promise and grace abound and there is life abundant for all people, for all of God’s creation. We can do this, if we are willing to say ‘Yes’ to joining God’s Mission of reconciliation.

The Rev. Jay Lawlor is a priest and economist who has worked with Jeffery Sachs and the Earth Institute on the MDGs. He is currently living in North Carolina and founding an interfaith nonprofit aimed at getting faith communities involved in the Millennium Villages Project.

Tomorrow: Reynolds Whalen

How are we as Christians engaged in the world?

by Abbie Coburn

I struggle with being an Episcopalian.

I struggle with the priorities of what seems to me to too often be an antiquated, hierarchal structure where who’s rubbing elbows with whom is the most discussed topic. I struggle with faith being separated from daily life in such a way that ‘following in Christ’s footsteps’ becomes a diluted phrase, rather than a way of transforming one’s life.

How’s that for an introduction?

This past weekend there was international mobilization against the current U.S. occupation in Iraq. All across the country (and various parts of the world) there were marches, demonstrations and teach-ins. I hope that some of you reading this were able to participate in your local community.

As I marched in San Francisco I chose to join the contingency from the War Tax Resisters. These are people who choose to resist paying varying percentages of their taxes as a protest against the absurd amount of federal funds being used for the purposes of war. As there wasn’t a large contingency of folks of faith marching together, I chose instead to align myself with war tax resisters, a lifestyle I choose to lead as well.

It seems to me appropriate to be a person of faith and a tax resister. Would Jesus not be a tax resister as well. Or that he would at least not be paying taxes to our current US government. If our government is doing so little to address issues such as the Millennium Development Goals, but rather is continuing to be responsible for the killing of thousands daily, is it not my duty to stand up and say ‘NO’? For all our banner-bearing, petition-signing, email-sending that goes on, is it not our faith that really pulls at us when injustice is occurring? When we can see with our own eyes that we are directly responsible for such atrocities throughout the world, why in God’s name do we continue to be herded?

Marching with thousands on Saturday, however, was a touching experience. A highlight of how disjointed the peace movement(s) is, as well as a testimony to diversity in the exhaustion with our current state of affairs. In front of me marched Palestinian women pushing their strollers and holding the hands of their small children, chanting for an end to the US-funded occupation of Palestine. As 10,000 of us fell to the ground in a symbolic die-in along Market Street a mother of a young Marine lay next to me loudly reciting her Hail Marys. I found it comforting that someone was calling upon God to be present as we lay there in protest to the injustices done in our names.

Yes, it is important to divert 0.7% of funds to the MDGs. But isn’t it also important to make sure that the 99.3% of funds is not used to support killing and suffering throughout the world. And when we find out facts such as 51% of the federal budget going towards military expenses (which obviously is not getting to the military families), how can we continue, in good conscious, to pay that money? I find that there is immense amounts of fear involved with standing up – fear of the government, fear of jail, fear of alienation. Aren’t these all fears that Jesus and his disciples faced as well? And fears that they in turn cast aside in order to live a life more meaningful.

The time for action has come. The repercussions are but blips on the screen. The injustices have reached a cataclysmic roar and we must not turn a deaf ear. We must not sit idly by debating, as Christians with immense privilege, the best ways to move forward. But, rather we must charge. With the convictions that Christ has showed us. Casting aside fear and living fully with faith in a life more meaningful.

Abbie Coburn is a 23-year old from San Francisco who has lived in Zimbabwe, attended the international school, Friends World Program, and has worked in Palestine with Birthright Unplugged. Currently traveling around the U.S. with Wheels of Justice -- which organizes education and nonviolent action for justice and human rights, especially in Iraq and Palestine.

Tomorrow: The Rev. Jay Lawlor