Beans and Fake Sausage

The best news in food is this: what we eat has a lot to do with our health.  Enter the lowly bean.  Beans are a much derided carbohydrate. Well, let’s get finished with the jokes about beans and gas and deal with a positive thing about beans.

I discovered Dr. Joel Fuhrman on the Dr. Oz Show some time ago. He was there to tell us about resistant starch in healthy carbohydrates. We have heard about simple and complex carbs, and now here is something else. Dr. Fuhrman wrote a book called Simple Immunity, which is about strengthening the immune system, with, among other things, beans. The resistant starch in beans and other vegetables  including greens, fruits, nuts and seeds, gives us some benefits.  (1) these foods’ glycemic index and caloric density are low; (2) they are resistant to digestion, which means they do not break down into simple sugars in our systems, so we are less likely to become diabetic, unless we have a lot of dessert and other delicious bad foods in our meals; (3) these foods are full of fiber, which is good for what we do in the bathroom. Just remember to drink lots of water with the fiber. To sum it up, beans are good for us. Just read Dr. Fuhrman’s book. He also inhabits YouTube, where we can hear him talk. He backs his statements with some science.

I have discovered that I can have meatless sausage using beans. It is easy to make and tastes like sausage. It’s a good way to eat those resistant starches. I think this sausage is good for an imitation product. It won’t satisfy a determined meat eater, but has a place in the vegetable kingdom. It’s simple and plain, not elaborate and filled with layers of sophistication.  As some of you know, I am about simple foods.

Fake Sausage

This makes enough for one person.

1 cup cooked white beans

½ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

½ teaspoon crumbled dry sage

1 egg, beaten slightly

1 tablespoon or more flour (I use brown rice flour)

Drain beans if they are in water from can or cooking. Mash them with a potato masher, or process in food processor until they are mashed. I don’t make them perfectly smooth textured. Add seasonings and stir all together. Then add egg and stir. Correct seasoning until it tastes like sausage. Stir in enough flour to firm the texture but still have it somewhat wet. With spoon, shape the mixture into about three patties, or more or fewer, depending on how big you want them. Saute the patties in a small amount of oil, at medium heat or lower, about five minutes, turning them once, until they are somewhat brown on both sides.

Thoughts About Lent

Lent is here again. It creeps up on us every year between Christmas and Easter and stays with us for a little more than a month. It is a season in the calendar year for traditional Christians.  In our pluralistic society, we can choose to observe it, ignore it, or know nothing about it. We give up something or we don’t. Or we say we will, and we don’t make it through the season with our good intentions. Or we decide to take on a good work, something to make a better world. Or we do nothing.

I have known about Lent for a long time. As a child, I saw it as a time to give up something I cared about. I didn’t know why. In my early adult years I didn’t care about it. Later in my life the light bulb went on and I came to some understanding of it. The Church taught me that Lent was a time to prepare for Easter. Ok. This is a concept that involves not thinking about rabbits and colored eggs, but rather a time to go without something in order to be ready for the Resurrection. It’s like fasting before the feast.

None of this makes sense without some inkling about fasting. I don’t hear much about fasting in today’s affluent society, either from the Church or American culture. Fasting has a purpose and a history. It’s there in the Old Testament.  Jesus did it. He went out into the wilderness, and Matthew tells us that he deliberately fasted before his temptation and the start of his public ministry. The Oxford Companion to the Bible says, “Fasting in connection with prayer, penance, and preparation for new ventures has been practiced from early times in many cultures and religions….normally it involved abstinence from all food to show dependence of God and submission to his will.” Huh? Even in church I’m not hearing much about that.

Historically, the approximately forty days of Lent are days of fasting, either partial or entire, so that we can take part in the new annual adventure of the Resurrection. Lent has come down through the ages with a set of rules.  Somewhere along the line, Lent became regulated. It’s there on the Internet, at Catholicism.about.com. Just point your search engine to “Lent season.” Everything is online, even rules for Lent. The website hits us with a list of questions that tell people how to “do” Lent if they are Roman Catholics. First it tells us, “Lent is the season of penance and prayer before Easter.” Then it proceeds with a FAQ about Lent, with questions about liturgy, diet and whether to fast on Sundays.  Since I am an Episcopalian, and we also observe Lent, all these rules are optional and, to me, stultifying.  The Why question is still there.

Here is my answer to the Why question. In today’s affluent culture, giving up something for Lent is a good exercise for us, for the planet and for God. We spend our lives in dietary and other kinds of gluttony, eating a lot and taking advantage of the many things around us.  We fill our stomachs with junk food. We fill our landfills with waste. We fill our lives with possessions. We can live another way, even a little bit for a month.  My son gave up Facebook for Lent. I gave up complaining, which is almost impossible for me to accomplish. I also gave up some kinds of food. The point is to impose some discipline into our busy, thing filled lives, so that we can go through our month and come out at the end a little bit more appreciative of the plenteousness around us, and unclutter ourselves to make us ready to share in the love of the resurrected Christ.

Cottage Obituary

Our cottage is gone. Well, it is still there, but it has a new owner. We have the memories. He has the future.

My parents bought the little A-frame in the woods on the Lake Michigan shore at Washington Island in the early 1970s. They loved it. They helped us to love it. My brothers and I and our children crossed the Death’s Door passage and entered a different world every summer. Our children grew up and brought their children. My parents died and we continued to spend time there after we inherited it. It has been part of us for about forty years.

My father added a living room to face the Lake Michigan shore, plus a deck.  Some years later my mother added a second bedroom on one side. We still had to close the cottage every fall, and drain the water system and turn off the power. It was not built for winters. Our little home in the woods rested during the winters until we came in spring and turned on the water and power. And everyone came back to stay for weekends or weeks. It was wonderful.

It’s not that we did a lot. It isn’t Wisconsin Dells. My brothers, their wives and children found things to do, as did Rick and I and our children. We had fish boils. We ate junk food at the Albatross. When we weren’t swimming in the lake at our property, we were swimming at the Sand Dunes Park and School House Beach. In later years, as the lake receded, weeds and other vegetation grew along the shore and became smelly from decay, but our weeds didn’t smell. Our immediate family didn’t fish in the island waters, but others did. At least once every summer we took the ferry to Rock Island where we walked on the trails and swam in the lake with its big waves . Back at the cottage, Rick cut up downed trees, and we had plenty of firewood for the little cottage fireplace and the one on the beach. The kids had woods adventures. We spotted and exclaimed about the deer and other animals that called the island home. I exhibited my paintings at the Art and Nature Center.  After Sarah grew up, she participated annually in the Washington Island Music Festival. In recent years I attended the Island Forum, sponsored by the Wisconsin Council of Churches. These activities will continue. We will be back on the island and stay where we can find space.

Finally, we sold our little island home. Brother David, sister-in-law Marcy, and nephew Eric and I went back last week for a winter trip on the ice breaking ferry. We spent a day working with no heat, no water and no electricity. Our little cottage wasn’t built for winter use. It was very cold. We were working during daylight hours.  No, we didn’t sleep there; we stayed at a little hotel. We enjoyed the camaraderie that went with the end of an era.

That day on the island we threw out four pickup truckloads of possessions we no longer needed. The island dump has long been called the Island Exchange. Maybe someone else will use the items that didn’t go into the crusher, such as the world’s oldest microwave oven, or used up chairs that can only be called grade B quality. Most of the furniture is still there for the new owner, who is willing to have it. We donated bags of books and games to the island library. The next day we returned to the cottage to load our vehicles with items we wanted to save for ourselves.

We said goodbye to years of enjoyment, gave the keys to Butch, our realtor, and went back to our other lives.

You Can't Afford to Get Sick -- Book Review

“I believe strongly and passionately that every American has a right to good health care that is effective, accessible, and affordable, that serves you from infancy through old age, that allows you to go to practitioners and facilities of your choosing, and that offers a broad range of therapeutic options. Your health-care system should also help you stay in optimum health, not just take care of you when you are sick or injured.”—(Andrew Weil, You Can’t Afford to Get Sick, p. 4).

That says it all. Dr. Andrew Weil, one of our best known physicians, takes on the American medical system in You Can’t Afford to Get Sick: Your Guide to Optimum Health and Health Care, a book published in 2012, as an updated re-issue of Why Our Health Matters: a Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future, a 2009 publication. The book is readable and persuasive.

Weil points out that at one time American medicine was the best in the world but it isn’t any more. He tells what is wrong with it and what to do to make it good again. Remember, this man is a doctor who has been there. His specialty is integrative medicine, a field that he heads at the University of Arizona.

The book is organized in three parts: Where We Are, Where We Need to Be, and How to Get There. He discusses the dysfunctions of the American medical system and puts blame on medicine delivered via the profit motive, especially the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies. As a physician, Weil says he has heard many misdiagnosis and mistreatment disaster stories from patients, colleagues and others. He suggests that the system be repaired like this: “Our long-term goal must be to shift our health-care efforts from disease intervention to health promotion and disease prevention….the time has come for a new paradigm of preventive medicine and a society-wide effort to educate our citizens about health and self care” (p. 9).  His two main objectives are: “(1) Change the focus of health care in this country from disease management to prevention and health promotion. (2) Minimize interventional medicine’s dependence on expensive technology” (p. 10).

That is what Weil’s book is about. He goes into how to prevent disease and promote health, which he says will greatly improve medical services delivery, prolong lives and save millions of dollars. In the last chapter of the book, which is not in the 2009 book, he offers “a Two-Week Plan for Taking Greater Responsibility for Your Health and Well-Being” (p.224). He calls the 2010 Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare) a step in the right direction that does not go far enough. He lists good features including providing insurance coverage to more Americans, and denial of fewer preexisting conditions, but is distressed that the new law does not reduce the high cost of medical care. He offers a path for American people to use the available services selectively and wisely.

This is good reading for those of us who are distressed about the dysfunctions of current medical services delivery and hope for improvement. 

Year End 2012

Has it been a good year for the greatest nation on earth? Well, maybe for Wall Street. Maybe not for many of the rest of us. We are ending our year with some big problems in the USA. I am more interested in ongoing big problems than in listing the top news stories of the year, although problems and news about them are related.

The economy. It’s about the unequal distribution of wealth, real estate still in trouble, meaningful jobs in short supply, and the role of government in taxation priorities. The US has the greatest income inequality in the world; one to two percent of Americans receive at least a quarter of the income generated. Money buys political power.  Corporate CEOs have huge salaries while the have-nots are struggling and the middle class is disappearing. Wall Street seems to being doing well even though we are in what is called the Great Recession. Greed wins.

The government could establish some policies that would help the majority of our people if it had the will to do it. It isn’t socialism; it’s good practice to love one’s neighbor at the policy level.

The medical scene. It’s not health care; it’s medical procedures. I think it is atrocious that people’s medical service is delivered for profit. We have a system that is dominated by drug companies and insurance companies, and both are enriched by operating for profit. It’s profit first, addressing disease  second, at whatever prices they set. Government policy has cooperated with them. The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is part of that system rather than being a reform of it. Chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes and heart disease are costing huge amounts of money. High-tech procedures are very expensive and reportedly over-used, although they can be life savers. Many doctors prescribe drugs when natural solutions can be used. Drug companies encourage and advertise this. Why? They exist for profit. Natural remedies don’t make profits. Insurance companies decide what to cover and what to refuse. Their rates for coverage are becoming unaffordable, whether they are paid for by government, employers or individual payers.

Government had the opportunity to turn this around with the Affordable Care Act but didn’t do it. Medicare is forbidden by law to negotiate drug costs. Medicare pays huge medical expenses even when they are unjustified. We can have better health with lower costs. Our medical system costs more than that of any other nation on earth and we are nowhere near the top in outcomes.

Violence. Ours is a violent society. We have been hearing about mass shootings recently in addition to individual murders. A black teenager was shot in Florida, and his killer’s defense was a legal Stand Your Ground law. Many children were shot in an elementary school in Connecticut very recently. The National Rifle Association suggested that teachers in schools be armed. The conversation goes on and on about whether to ban assault weapons. The second amendment to the constitution is interpreted to justify individual people having guns. As I remember it, the second amendment existed originally for protection of Americans against the British army, as a guarantee for a militia. I don’t know of anyone who needs an assault weapon to shoot a deer. I don’t know of anyone who needs an assault weapon for anything except a gun collection or mass murder.  I believe that our government should regulate weapons in this country. Deer hunting, yes. Mass murder, no.

Education. I believe that universal education is a public good. I’m not sure everyone does.  I am seeing a movement that produces two tiers, private schools for people who can afford them and public schools for everyone else. Many school systems in our large cities are reportedly falling behind in achievement. Business has gotten behind school improvements, apparently using business models. Teachers’ unions are being criticized. Charter schools are proposed, although their track record is not universally wonderful.  As long as this dialog continues and the proponents of changes do not have constructive dialog together, and if education continues to be underfunded in many places, good education is not likely to happen. For example, why do we have to have charter schools with only non-union, lower paid teachers? Here in Madison we have some non-traditional schools (not charter schools) within the district. My granddaughter attended one and was able to graduate.

The cost for a college degree has become prohibitive; if our government is in favor of higher education, it should fund it at the level it did fifty years ago when my tuition at the University of Wisconsin was ninety-five dollars per semester. The high cost of a university education is crippling people with debt.

I do not think it was in the best interest of students of any age for our governor to cut education in Wisconsin by 2.5 million dollars. Any model of education should be adequate for the whole population. New ideas, yes. Egalitarian funding, too, yes.

War. What is the good of war unless we are genuinely attacked? Our nation has been on the empire track for quite a number of years. The Bush administration pushed pre-emptive war after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. Bush wasn’t the first to promote pre-emptive war; we did it to the Native Americans as part of expansion of our nation in its early years. We love being an empire. It has been reported that the US spends more on our military establishment than all other nations combined. We have no reason that I know of to have military bases in many countries in the world, and we are fighting an ongoing war in Afghanistan for no reason that I know of other than the so-called terrorist threat. It has been reported that the US is not well liked for its arrogant military action. Our military budget is huge. We don’t need this. I would like to have our military actions and killing end.

Maybe we would be the greatest nation on earth if we would stop imposing ourselves on everyone else. I think we need to have the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu as our generals. Save the military money; give it to the struggling economy at home.

The environment.  Corporate interests are killing our planet.  Now we are fracking. It takes large amounts of water and imported sand to produce natural gas to fire our insatiable appetite for power, heat, transportation, and the economy in general. That is one example. We blow up mountains to harvest coal. We have a transportation system that encourages the automobile with its pollution, while some countries continue to use mass transit and fewer cars. In the USA, it’s profit first, good environmental practices second.

Related to our misuse of our resources is climate change. Are we surprised at our weather extremes? Do we notice that the ice cap in Greenland is shrinking? Is it too late? Conservation is needed. Regulation is needed.

And the news…  I think the three biggest news stories of the year were the presidential election, hurricane Sandy, and the recall elections in Wisconsin.  The two deaths that I cared about were in the arts: Maurice Sendak, writer/illustrator of children’s books, and Dave Brubeck, great jazz musician.

Christmas and Cookies

The Christmas season reminds me of family, and that reminds me of cookies. My grandmothers were the champions of cookies. My mother was perpetually fighting the battle against weight gain, so I have few memories of her making cookies at any time. She specialized in other dishes.

My maternal grandmother, whom we called Sweetie Pie, made the best chocolate chip cookies in the world, and she had a batch ready almost every time we went to see her when she lived in Chicago. Late in her life she tried to give us cookies made from grocery store cookie dough, but we immediately noticed the difference and let her know about it. After she realized that we weren’t fooled, she went back to the originals.

My paternal grandmother, known as Grandma, produced many cookies for us, but the ones I remember best were pinwheel cookies. Pinwheel cookies are small cookies with chocolate and vanilla spirals. They melt in your mouth. It was impossible to eat just one. I learned to make them after Grandma became old and stopped making them. Now my daughter Libby makes them every Christmas and brings them to the family gathering.

Pinwheel cookies are easy to make. Just find a refrigerator cookie recipe in your big fat cookbook. You say your big fat cookbook doesn’t tell you how to make refrigerator cookies?  It seems to me that some of the best concoctions get forgotten by cookbook writers. That’s why we have public libraries and the Internet. But don’t despair. Here is my recipe, revised from my old Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, 1953 edition:

Pinwheel Cookies

½ cup shortening or butter

½ cup sugar

1 egg yolk

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons milk

1- 1 ounce square unsweetened chocolate, melted

Cream shortening and sugar. Add egg yolk, milk and vanilla. Mix flour, baking powder and salt; add to shortening/sugar mixture and mix. Divide the dough in half. To one half add chocolate; mix thoroughly. Chill both halves. Roll each half into a long rectangle 1/8 inch thick on waxed paper. Turn the white half onto the chocolate half. Let chocolate extend a half inch beyond the white part on the edge toward which you roll. Remove paper and roll as for jelly roll, into a long tube. The size of the cookies will depend on the shape of the rectangles you roll together. Wrap in waxed paper. Chill for several hours or overnight. Cut the tubes into thin slices, about ¼ inch thick. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 375 degrees about ten minutes. Makes about 4 dozen small cookies.

Sermon - Christ the King Sunday

The Rev. Michael Ramsey-Musolf delivered this sermon at St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church, Sunday, November 25, 2012. It is passed on with his permission.

Today is Christ the King Sunday. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me the notion of Jesus as a monarch needs some “up-dating”.

For one, the whole institution of a monarch as the focal point of a society seems just a bit passé. When I think of a king or queen, the first person that comes to mind is Elizabeth II. Granted, she is probably the most popular political figure just about anywhere in the world, but somehow I don’t think her role as a benevolent, parent-like figurehead fits with how we think about Jesus. Nor do I think that her 16^th century predecessor, Elizabeth I – perhaps one of the most powerful women in human history who very shrewdly used her sexuality to maintain authority in an otherwise male-dominated political society – encapsulates the notion of Christ as King either.

Does Jesus resemble any other kings from the past? How about Louis XIV of France, the so-called “Sun-King”. Many years ago I visited Versailles, his not-so-modest “home” outside of Paris, and I was astounded by the signs of wealth and power dripping from its walls. The same could be said about the imposing and impressive Hapsburg palace in Vienna, built from the wealth born of this royal family’s conquests of much of Europe.

Is this how we should think of Christ the King? Apparently, some of our brethren (and I do mean only one gender here) in the Roman Catholic tradition have this interpretation. You only need to walk through the halls of the Vatican with its gold, tapestries, and neoclassical art and notice the resemblance with the interior of Versailles to reach this conclusion.

OK, so if not Louis and the Hapsburgs, how about Charlemagne – the first anointed “Emperor” of the Holy Roman Empire in the Medieval era who very effectively “evangelized” his ever growing realm through military means. Or for that matter, we could try the various popes and minor rulers who lead the Crusades against the Muslims in the 11^th-13^th centuries. Is that how the refrain from the hymn “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war” is encouraging us to think of Christ the King?

It seems to me that none of this works very well when it comes to Jesus, so I’ve been wracking my brain these last days to come up with an alternative – one that is more fitting for 21^st century Christians in the middle of America. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

Christ the CEO: Since it’s all about the economy these days, why not a metaphor that epitomizes the height of economic success. Unfortunately, when I tried this one I just could not get around the notion of Jeffrey Skilling, head of Enron during its “death star” days or the more recent discussion of Bain Capital. Really, I don’t want to even go there.

Christ the Five Star General: Granted a bit militaristic, but we are accustomed to holding our military leaders in particularly high regard (think of Colin Powell). However, we have the little problem of a recently resigned director of the CIA to contend with…

Christ the Champion: Great. Works very well in Wisconsin, I think. Before he abandoned the Packers, Brett “Gunslinger” Favre was the closest this state has come to having a patron saint. So why not kick it up a notch and celebrate Christ the Champion one Sunday a year? We’d have to try and forget about Lance Armstrong…but perhaps a challenge like this can be overcome.

OK so I’m not doing so well. In one last try, I reached for a figure who is quintessentially American, who doesn’t come with some form of baggage, who calls us to be our better selves or at least makes is feel better about how we are, yet can also challenge us to look beyond our current preset notions. And I think I found the answer:

Christ the Talk Show Host: Think Oprah. Think Letterman and Leno. Think Conan, Ellen, or Jon Stewart. Though I would have gone with Oprah as my personal favorite, we should probably stick with Ellen, who rates number one in impact according to the blog “Klout.com”. Is anyone here with me on this one?

Well, it appears that I have not come up with a universally acceptable, viable alternative. So we are more or less stuck with “Christ the King”. What to do?  

Perhaps, we should start by thinking about what it meant to call Jesus King of the Jews as we read in today’s Gospel and what it meant for Jesus to admit that yes, he was a king, but that his “kingdom is not of this world”?

To set the stage, imagine the ancient Palestinian world as being somewhat akin to the modern-day Middle East. You know the saying: “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Like today’s Middle East, the ancient near east was characterized by political domination maintained by iron-clad military rule, periodic revolts by minority factions, sectarian violence, and the near-complete absence of anything resembling self-determination. If we wanted a modern-day setting for the Incarnation, Bethlehem might do just as well as it did when Jesus was born. But so might Ramallah on the West Bank, Gaza City, or even Aleppo in Syria. Change the names of the players – trading Herod, Pilate, and Augustus for Meshal, Netanyahu, or Assad – and update the tools of violence, and you’d have to conclude there are more than a few similarities.

Imagine, then, the entry into the present-day Middle East of a religious figure hailed by some of the populace as a new king, and try to visualize what the response might be by various parties. How would folks in the West Bank respond to this “King of the Jews”? How would this figure fare with Likud or Hamas? What message, what new political-religious-economic reality would he be trying to establish? Yes, his kingdom would most certainly NOT be of this world of violence, domination, mutual fear, oppression, assassination, AK 47’s, and the like. But what is it – this kingdom, and who is this “King”?

In reflecting on Jesus Christ the King, I have been re-reading small parts of a book I read in seminary called “Jesus and the Spiral of Violence”. In a sense, the title itself already says it all when we try to conceive of what Christ the King truly means. But let me try to break it all down for you a bit more explicitly.

First of all, the meaning of violence is not simply that of military or police actions, armed rebellion, or murder and assassination. It’s much broader, having political, economic, social, religious, and cultural dimensions.

The way I think of it is like a vice. Imagine that the ordinary folks in ancient Palestine – mostly peasant farmers – were like a piece of material squeezed between two plates of a vice. One plate was the Roman government (Herod, Pilate, Augustus) who required that the locals pay a tax called “tribute” to help fund imperial projects that were designed largely for the benefit of the upper classes.

The other plate was the Jewish religious aristocracy (Pharisees, Sadducees) who maintained their security by doing the bidding of the Roman government and keeping the local populace under control. They also exacted a tax, called the “temple tax”, to help fund the operations of the Jerusalem temple and the bureaucracy associated with it.

Over time, the squeeze of the two taxes – the two plates of the vice – became increasingly intense, putting more and more economic pressure on the famers. It became more difficult for them to afford the basics to maintain their way of life (things like seed or animals for farming). Some went into debts that they could not repay. Others lost the lease on their land. Still others became indentured servants, or slaves.

Imagine the stress and the impact this tighter and tighter squeeze of the vice exerted. Imagine the impact on family life and marriages. Imagine the toll it took on self-esteem, the feelings of increasing helplessness because there was no political process through which to change the situation. Imagine the growing sense of anger, the breakdown of normal life in the village, the effect on community and friendships. Not even Jewish religious life was untouched, as the Roman government required daily sacrifice to the emperor in the temple.

This squeezing economic, political, social, cultural, and religions vice is the spiral of violence, and its outward manifestation -- armed rebellions and the repressive responses of the authorities – was like the periodic eruptions of a volcano that results from growing pressure of a cauldron that can no longer be contained by a mountain’s walls.

And so into the middle of this spiral comes Jesus, King of the Jews who announces the arrival of a new realm, who preaches that the people in the middle of the two plates of the vice are blessed, and who tells them to pray to their Father in Heaven, Abba, daddy for relief:

Give us today our daily bread, since we don’t know if we will have the means to afford it.

Forgive us our debts before our debtors separate us from our spouses and children and force us into slavery.

Save us from the time of trial, from this spiral of violence, from this pressure we cannot escape.

Because we need you as our king. Because we want your will to be done. And because only your power can save us.

Hail Jesus, King of the Jews. Christ the King.

My friends, as you and I consider the world about us; as we think about the situation in our country, in our state, here in Dane county, in our communities and workplaces: where do we see or experience the spiral of violence, the squeezing plates of various vices that – to quote our baptismal covenant – corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?

Where can we, as followers of Christ the King, confront those dehumanizing economic, political, social, cultural and – yes – religious structures and announce a new realm of justice and wholeness for all?

Where can we, following in the footsteps of Jesus before Pilate and the angry mobs, witness to a kingdom that is truly not of this world and put ourselves, perhaps, a bit more on the line to make it a reality?

Christ the King calls us to this ministry. Let us pray for the grace, the courage, and the determination to answer faithfully the King’s call.