PRELUDE, May 2005

TABLE OF CONTENTS

From Our Executive Director:
THAT WE ALL MAY BE ONE. . .

Recently the “Christian Life Times” took the LICC to task for joining with the Long Island Board of Rabbis, the Diocese of Rockville Centre, and the Islamic Center of Long Island in inviting pastors, priests, rabbis, imams and other preachers to a joint sermon preparation seminar. They also criticized us for sending interfaith education teams to teach children, “we are all serving the same God.”

Jesus prayed that his followers “may all be one” (John 17:20-21). It hardly advances the unity of the Body of Christ for Christians to condemn one another without cause. It also behooves journalists—and Christians—to make some attempt to get the facts straight. The editors of CLT never picked up the phone and asked, “Is it true that ….?” Nor did they show up for the sermon preparation session they criticized.

Had they accepted the invitation, they might have been interested in what Rabbi Mark Greenspan had to say about how he approaches the Torah text each week with prayer. They might have been pleasantly surprised by the Rev. Jerome Taylor’s forceful, funny, high-tech, and entirely orthodox exegesis of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Bruce Rudolf, who recently retired as pastor of Emanuel Lutheran Church in Patchogue, told our Board last year that he prayed Jews might someday be able to hear the Good News without our message being distorted by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Pastor Taylor took us a step closer to that goal.

As for the Long Island Multi-Faith Forum, the LICC gladly pleads guilty to founding the LIMFF a dozen years ago, along with Auburn Theological Seminary. We remain deeply grateful to Auburn’s Dean Robert Reber and my predecessor Robert Pierce for their pioneering work in building relationships among Long Islanders from eleven different world religions. The LIMFF encourages people to treat one another with understanding and respect but does not teach, as the CLT claims, “we are all serving the same God.” There is a simple reason for this: they don’t all believe it is true.

Like other Christians, I use many names for God (Creator, Holy Wisdom, Savior, Shepherd, and Holy Spirit, to name a few) but firmly believe that there is only one God, the maker of heaven and earth. Hindus, on the other hand, have a panoply of deities - though as the Rev. Hope Koski reports she learned from a Multi-Faith Forum presentation, many Hindus insist that these “are merely different aspects of one God.” Some faith communities in the LIMFF claim that each faith is following a different path to the same God, but others in the Forum think that those who teach this are deluded. Do Baha’is and Buddhists worship the same God? The former say so, the latter do not.

Some of us certainly do worship the same God: Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Baha’is, for example, but we understand God in different ways: the Baha’is think their prophet is the last and best of the bunch, the Muslims think the Baha’is are apostates, Jews sometimes suspect that Christians worship three gods (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), and Christians on occasion claim that Jews do not worship the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth (a doctrine known as Marcionism, which orthodox Christians branded a heresy in second century) or that Muslims worship Mohammed, which they most certainly do not. Having different conceptions of God does not mean that we worship different gods. “We need to proclaim,” the Rev. Jack King insisted at a recent LICC Board meeting, “that we can talk about our beliefs even if we disagree.” To which the Rev. James Hulsey added “It is my belief that brings me here. The God I know in Jesus Christ wants me to get along with people who differ from me.”

Many people of good will would like to believe that “we all basically believe the same things,” but this is hardly true. The only fierce argument I recall at any meeting of the LIMFF Board occurred, long ago, when someone suggested this very thing. There are often similarities among different faiths, of course, but not uniformity. As you may have noticed in last month’s “Prelude,” nearly every tradition in the LIMFF teaches compassion for the poor, but the Brahma Kumaris believe material wealth itself is an illusion.

“Christian Life Times” argues that the LICC should focus on evangelism, but it was precisely the desire to preach the Good News more effectively that pulled many of us into ecumenical and interfaith work in the first place. The divisions among us, which are only worsened by theological trash talk that slanders fellow believers, does little to present our Savior in an appealing light. “We have been raised not to bear witness,” the Rev. Dick Ploth observes, “but to tell other people what they should believe.”

There is an extraordinary openness these days among educators, employers, and others on Long Island to hearing how we live out the Gospel in our daily lives, and the Forum has found a way to let people share diverse religious traditions without trampling on the First Amendment, annoying parents, or offending employees. The only persistent complaint from school parents is this: why aren’t more Christians volunteering to take part in these multi-faith festivals? If we Christians really want to share our faith and bear witness to the One who longs for us to be one, we need to show tolerance, humility, and hospitality toward others. We also have to tell the truth. As Werner Reich commented recently at a meeting of the LICC Board, arguing about God is far less important than doing what God tells us to do.

Shalom/Salaam/Shanti/Pax,
Tom

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Funeral Service for Doris McCoy

Doris McCoy, our longtime bookkeeper, died last weekend at her home in Malverne.

The funeral will be this Sunday at 3:00 at Flinch & Bruns Funeral Home (Peninsula Blvd. and Hempstead in Lynbrook, 516-599-3600), and will be led by the Rev. Fritz Nelson of Community Presbyterian Church in Malverne. Condolence hours with her son and daughter will be 2-4 and 7-9 on Sunday, with the burial on Monday about 10:15 at Greenfields Cemetery in Hempstead.

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DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT – Sara Weiss, Director
A WORD OF THANKS

A special thanks goes to First Presbyterian Church of Baldwin for its generous gift of $4,000, which we have used for our Jail Chaplaincy, Medical Prescriptions, MetroCards, and general operating expenses. We also thank the RCA-Classis of Nassau-Suffolk for its unrestricted pledge of $1,000 for 2005, for which we’ve already received the first quarterly installment. We thank the following for their gifts:

Congregational Church of Manhasset$500 unrestricted
Garden City Community Church$1,000 unrestricted, $1,000 food
Long Island Cares, Inc.$1,500 food
Mt. Sinai Congregational Church$500 unrestricted
Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church$700 unrestricted
United Way of Long Island$1,491 monthly allocation

We’re also grateful to the institutions that gave less, and to the individuals who also gave but who have asked us not to publish their names.


Most Urgent Need

Our most urgent need continues to be medical prescriptions. Many of our clients are the working poor who are either uninsured or underinsured. $250 in donations would enable us to help three to four families. If ten people could give $50 each, we could help six to eight families.


Memorial/Tribute Gifts

A great way to remember a loved one, whether deceased or living, is to give a memorial or tribute gift in his/her name. In your letter accompanying such a gift, please tell us who the gift is in memory of or in tribute to, and who is giving the gift. We will send a thank you letter to the contributor and to the family of the loved one in accordance with your instructions. Please send your contribution to the LICC: Attention: Sara Weiss. If you have questions, call Sara for further information at 516-565-0290.

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COME TO THE LICC ANNUAL MEETING MAY 5

The Long Island Council of Churches will host its 2005 Annual Meeting on Thursday, May 5th at Temple Beth David, located at 100 Hauppauge Road in Commack, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Registration will be from 11:00 AM until 11:30 AM, followed by the annual business meeting, a keynote speaker, lunch, and awards.

This year’s annual meeting will feature the Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, Our Lady of Kazan Orthodox Church in America and founder of “Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A.” Rev. Kishkovsky, an Orthodox priest, is a former President of the National Council of Churches (USA) and serves as the Ecumenical Officer of the Orthodox Church in America.

Contemporary American Orthodoxy derives from the work of Russian missionaries in Alaska beginning in 1794, when a small group of missionaries landed on Kodiak Island in Alaska. Orthodoxy was further enriched by the migration of peoples from Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and comprises considerable ethnic diversity.

Rev. Kishkovsky will describe how he is bringing together religious leaders from diverse Christian faith traditions who have traditionally been at odds with one another. He did so by uniting them around the unified goal of compassion for the poor and advocacy on their behalf – a theological imperative common to religious traditions throughout the world. To accomplish this, he formed a new organization four years ago called “Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A.” that includes leaders from the Roman Catholic, Korean Presbyterian, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Apostolic Churches, as well as the Salvation Army, mainline Protestant, Pentecostal and Evangelical churches.

The organization celebrates the unique traditions of these respective faith communities while simultaneously affirming what they have in common and how they can unite to advocate for the poor. By emphasizing the common goal of serving the world’s poor, representatives of the new organization were able to overcome barriers that historically divided them and have joined to work together on behalf of the poor.

For over three decades the Long Island Council of Churches has also united diverse Christians to serve the poor and build bridges of understanding and cooperation among diverse religious, ethnic, racial and cultural groups. We have successfully brought together Evangelicals, African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches, Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants, to name a few, who help us minister to and advocate for the poor in our region. For example, we are grateful for the faithful support of a Greek Orthodox Church in Hempstead that regularly gives us food for our emergency food center. We also have bridged faith community lines to serve the poor. Recently a synagogue in Riverhead responded to our e-mail call for food donations for the Riverhead food pantry by doing a food drive for us.

To advocate effectively for the poor, we have learned that we need to work not just with mainline Protestant churches, but also with people of far more diverse faith traditions both within Christianity and outside. We can all learn important lessons on how to advocate for the poor from Rev. Kishkovsky’s remarkable efforts. Please join us for an enlightening message on how representatives of diverse faith traditions can work together for the common social good.

Please register no later than Friday, April 29th by calling Brenda Morrison at 516-565-0290.

DIRECTIONS TO TEMPLE BETH DAVID

Take Commack Road north from either the LIE (exit 52 from the West or exit 53 from the East) or Northern State Parkway (exit 43). Going north on Commack Road, turn left onto Hauppauge Road at 2nd light north of Northern State. You will see a library on the northwest corner. Proceed west past the library, Presbytery Center and YMHA. Turn right at the sign for Temple Beth David.

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MAY 15 CROP WALK IN WANTAGH

Wantagh Memorial Congregational Church, the Presbyterian Churches of Bellmore and Levittown, St. Jude’s and St. Francis are doing a CROP Walk on Sunday, May 15, that will benefit Church World Service (the ecumenical relief and development agency) and the LICC’s Emergency Food Pantry. The walkers will begin leaving WMCC (1845 Wantagh Avenue) at 2 p.m. for a five-mile walk along local greenbelts. If you would like to walk or sponsor a walker or need further information, call Irene Donnelly at 516-731-4463.


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FAREWELL TO AL CHAMBERS

The Rev. Dr. Alphaeus Chambers, who has served the LICC as a chaplain since 1993, retired at the end of April and moved to Florida. Al surely will be missed! He offered some parting thoughts on chaplaincy:

“The opportunity to serve at the Juvenile Detention Center, and then at the Nassau County Correctional Center, was most rewarding. Working with young people at the Juvenile Detention Center, and the men and women at the Correctional Facility, who had their lives turned upside down, bedeviled by their own behavioral patterns and sinful nature, giving rise to hopelessness, despair, and defeat, was very challenging.

“. . . Many of these men and women have become ‘new creatures in Jesus Christ.’ Some have become better fathers, better mothers, better husbands, better wives, better citizens, able to re-enter society.

“My prayer on the eve of my departure from this correctional institution . . . is that the work of chaplains through the Long Island Council of Churches will be intensified for the total rehabilitation of the inmates. Through the work of the Long Island Council of Churches, the chaplains were privileged to demonstrate the love of God through caring, sharing, and giving to those who need it most, those who are considered society’s outcastes.

“…the ministry of Chaplains works. Not all prove to be success stories and some have been disappointing, in that they promise to break out of the cycle of crime but fail. But let us not fail to maintain this pastoral care ministry, caring for those who are still standing in need of spiritual and social support.”

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IDEAS YOU CAN USE

Invite the Multi-Faith Forum to Your Youth Group

Youth group leaders often are seeking ways to get teenagers talking about their beliefs in a way that is fun. The Long Island Multi-Faith Forum has sent teams of youth and young adults to speak at synagogues and Bahai fellowships, and the Forum has spoken at dozens of churches across our region, but they have received few requests thus far from church youth groups—and the Building Bridges presentations would make an excellent program for youth fellowship groups.

The Forum has trained a number of youngish volunteers and their new half-hour video “Faiths of Long Island” provides a quick survey of the major religions in our area, showing kids their age practicing their beliefs. Students are growing up today in a world which is more culturally and religiously diverse than their parents or teachers realize, and outside speakers can create a safe environment in which to ask questions that their elders cannot answer. At the very first BB presentation, to youth at Centerport United Methodist Church, a 6th grader, asked a Hindu, “So why do you wear that red dot on your forehead, anyway?”

Inviting a Building Bridges team to your church or synagogue could help the Forum, too. The LIMFF needs many more Christian and Jewish panelists and moderators for its presentations. Many “liberal” Christians are so turned off by the bad attempts at evangelism they have seen that they are uncomfortable giving their own testimony to their faith. Many evangelicals say they believe in evangelism but seldom practice it—and know deep down inside that they are ill-prepared to do it—or are not brave enough to describe their life as a Christian when seated between a Sikh and a Muslim. . Perhaps if you schedule a Building Bridges program in your congregation, God will raise up a young adult or parent who is brave enough to volunteer themselves.

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WORTH QUOTING

“Sermons should not be about being clever or profound but being clear and passionate. If you happen to be profound great—but people need to leave with an idea and an answer to the question: What should I be doing with my life?”

--Rabbi Mark Greenspan, Oceanside Jewish Center
LICC/LI Board of Rabbis interfaith sermon preparation seminar


“This is the hope that inspires Christians:
we know that every effort to better society, especially when injustice and sin are so ingrained, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.”

--Archbishop Oscar Romero’s last sermon, March 24, 1980


On the Terri Schiavo Tragedy:

“Write your wishes down, have the paper notarized. Don’t make me write another story like this one, which makes me feel sad and angry no matter whose side I see it from . . . Talk to your loved ones. Go see a lawyer. Don’t be the last to know when it’s time for the last call.”

--Paul Vitello, Newsday, March 20, 2005

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WORTH WATCHING: “Sugihara” on PBS May 5

When Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, 20,000 Polish Jews fled to tiny, independent Lithuania. They desperately sought visas to any country that would take them. Britain and the United States refused, but help came from an unexpected corner. Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul, asked his Foreign Ministry for permission to grant those crowded outside the consulate “transit visas,” allowing them to travel to Japan en route to some other nation. His superiors said no. Risking his career and the safety of his family, Sugihara defied his government and issued more than 2200 visas. Why did this quiet, reserved diplomat do this?

“Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness” a new documentary that will be broadcast on PBS on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, sheds light on his extraordinary compassion and courage. The Empire of the Rising Sun, we learn, had treated its Chinese neighbors with brutal racism - Sugihara himself resigned from his post in Manchuria in protest over the Japanese army’s mistreatment of Chinese workers - but the Japanese did not share the Nazis' virulent anti-Semitism. In 1904, the New York financier, Jacob Schiff, outraged by a Russian pogrom, made a huge loan to Japan while the nation was at war with Russia - after every bank in London had turned them down. Schiff, a Jew, became a hero in Japan — and Wall Street became a center of international finance. In the 1930s, some Japanese industrialists dreamed of excelling economically rather than militarily and hoped to bring 3,000,000 Jewish refugees to Manchuria.

In December 1939, in Lithuania, Sugihara saw an eleven-year-old shopping for his family’s Hanukkah party and gave him some money. The boy spontaneously invited the Consul and his family to the celebration. The diplomat had a grand time—and heard the sad story of one refugee’s escape from Warsaw. In June 1940, Russia occupied Lithuania, arrested Jewish leaders, and ordered consulates to begin closing down. Time was running out for the refugees, who needed a whole series of papers in order to flee. Sugihara decided that if he aided them, “I may be disobeying my government, but if I did not, I would be disobeying God.”

The Consul began writing transit visas and forging other documents at a ferocious rate, for sixteen hours a day, aided by a Dutch official who supplied a final, fictitious destination for the refugees: the tiny Caribbean colony of Curacao. Thousands began the long, arduous journey across war-torn Russia to Japan.

The Japanese people and the small Jewish community in Kobe welcomed them, but most were unable to find more homes elsewhere, and the flood of new arrivals soon created problems for their hosts. The Nazis urged their allies to slaughter all Jews in the nation, but Japan instead resettled them in Shanghai.

Sugihara paid a price for his act of conscience. Barred from the Foreign Service after the war, he found work only as a menial laborer and later as a businessman based in Moscow, separating him from his family for long periods. Only in 1968, when an Israeli diplomat found his benefactor, did Sugihara learn that most of those whom he had aided had reached safety. Today there are more than 40,000 survivors and descendants of the refugees Sugihara helped to save. The entire Mir Yeshiva relocated successfully in Israel. In an ironic twist of fate, one of those captured by the German army before Sugihara could issue a visa was the 11-year-old who invited the Japanese diplomat to Hanukkah. Sent on a death march by the Nazis, the boy was rescued by Japanese-American soldiers whose own families were interred during the war by their own government.

“Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness” airs on WNET/13 on Thursday, May 5, at 10 p.m. Check your local listings for other areas. It is a powerful reminder, as one survivor puts it, that one person can make a difference.

Also worth watching: “Red Hook Justice” Tuesday, May 24 at 10 p.m. on WNET/13 and most public television stations—a look at an innovative community court.

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WORTH READING: “The Beloved Community” & “Presumed Guilty”

“The Beloved Community:
How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today”
By Charles Marsh, Basic Books, 2005, 320 pages, $26

In all too many classrooms, students hear that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a stirring orator rather than a passionate preacher. Nor do many textbooks note the segregation of most congregations, either in the 1950s or now. A new book by Charles Marsh, who teaches at the University of Virginia, corrects this misrepresentation of our heritage.

When King urged people Montgomery to boycott segregated buses, Marsh reminds us, he insisted that “The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the blessed community.” The Koinonia Community that Bible scholar Clarence Jordan founded in South Georgia saw itself as a “God movement.” The civil rights movement included Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and others but was fundamentally rooted in Christian faith.

Whenever it strayed from this vision of the beloved community, Marsh argues, it lost its way. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee began as a profoundly religious organization. James Lawson, the future United Methodist pastor and broadcaster, wrote in SNCC's 1960 mission statement that it was committed to “a social order permeated by love and to the spirituality of nonviolence as it grows from the Christian tradition.”

Marsh's analysis of SNCC makes a real contribution to our understanding of this tumultuous era. SNCC was more militant than the Southern Leadership Conference or the NAACP, he notes, but no less rooted in the Gospel. White activists such as Bob Zellner and Union Seminary student Jane Stembridge were drawn to SNCC’s “theology for radicals” out of their own spiritual incompleteness. Zellner, the son of a Klansman and a Methodist minister, recognized that “White shackles needed to be broken, too.” Chuck McDew, an organizer for SNCC, saw lunch counter sit-ins as sacramental reenactments of Jesus sitting with the Samaritan woman. The most compelling demonstration of religion he experienced was when a rabbi invited him to temple after white Protestant ministers in Orangeburg closed their doors: McDrew soon converted to Judaism.

SNCC collapsed, Marsh argues, when it retreated from its theology: “By the end of 1964, many in SNCC had given up their former dreams and had abandoned nonviolence, community-based social reform, and the vision of the beloved community.” The same disillusionment hit the rest of the movement: “By 1968, the vision of beloved community lies in ruins.”

Marsh finds good news, though, in faith-based community development organizations that are building coalitions, institutions, and neighborhoods with the poor and the excluded. In these efforts, he believes, can be found “an activist faith for the twenty-first century.”

“The Beloved Community” provides food for thought, history lessons and sermon illustrations, and above all, good reasons to keep hope alive.

--TWG


“Presumed Guilty: How the Jews Were Blamed for the Death of Jesus”
By Peter J. Tomson. Fortress Press, 2005, 160 pages, $15

One of the best things that Christians can do to build better relationships with their Jewish neighbors is to visit a worship service for Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year is May 6. Reading this new book on early Jewish-Christian relations arrives just in time to help us see where we went wrong.

Christians tend to see our interfaith conflicts as arising from antipathy between Jesus and his critics, but Peter J. Tomson, Professor of New Testament and Patristics at the University of Brussels in Belgium, urges us to not exaggerate the degree to which Jewish leaders played any part in his execution. He likewise urges Jews not to turn the recognition of Christian anti-Semitism into a general condemnation of Christianity. We started off, he reminds us, on fairly good terms with one another.

There is now a consensus among theologians that Jesus did not in any way intend to abolish the Law of Moses but rather “to fulfill it,” following the Torah in his own fashion. The Pharisees did not condemn him, though the Sadducees and others who collaborated with their Roman occupiers may have wished him dead. The first followers of Rabbi Yeshua worshiped in synagogues. Even when distinct Christian congregations emerged in the 40s and 50s and soon spread from Italy to India, these “Jewish churches” were almost indistinguishable from other synagogues. The only thing remarkable about them was that they believed Jesus was the Messiah, a bit like the way many rabbis today view Lubbavitchers as Orthodox Jews - except for their belief that their founder is the Promised One.

None of his analysis is new among Biblical scholars, but many Christians have yet to hear it. Tomson gives a succinct summary, for example, of the differences within the Pharisee movement in the first century, and the way in which the Gospels record Jesus criticizing the closed and sometimes violent school of Shammai rather than the open-minded, tolerant, peaceable approach of Hillel. It was the latter faction that ultimately won over most rabbis, but all too many preachers act as if modern Judaism represents the legalistic losers of this internal argument, not the winners of this debate, the ones with whom Jesus sided. Rabbinic literature likewise assails the chief priests who condemned Jesus as corrupt collaborators with the Roman Empire, which oppressed their own people.

Churches and synagogues began to go their separate ways after 66 CE (or AD), when radical Jews revolted against the Romans and the Legions destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE. In the wake of the war, all contact between Jews and non-Jews was strained and both the followers of Jesus and the founders of rabbinic Judaism started to define themselves in opposition to one another. A second revolt in 132-135 CE turned into an even greater defeat for Jewish leaders. Rome banned Jews from Jerusalem, and from that point on, the church was led in its homeland by Gentile bishops.

During the second and third centuries, Tomson argues, mainstream Christianity became a non-Jewish movement, one whose leaders condemned Jewish Christians and the Jewish churches that remained faithful to the Law of Moses. In defining themselves apart from Judaism, many of the Church Fathers crossed the line into anti-Semitism, condemning all Jews for the death of Jesus.

Reflecting on our intertwined, painful histories can be painful, but Tomson writes with penetrating insight. This is an exceptionally easy to understand work of historical scholarship, one that should cause preachers and teachers, both Jewish and Christian, to rethink what they say about the origins of their traditions.

--TWG

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ENDING LONG ISLAND SEGREGATION
WITH “ALL DELIBERATE SPEED”
An Action Plan for People of Faith

Tuesday, May 3, 2005
7:30-9:30 PM
Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish Hall
1434 Straight Path, Wyandanch

Co-Sponsored by the Public Policy Education Network, Catholic Charities, the Ministry to Catholics of African Ancestry, Diocese of Rockville Centre, the Long Island Council of Churches and the Blessed Community Anti Segregation Committee


Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation “with all deliberate speed,” Long Island remains the third-most segregated suburb in the U.S.

The Time Has Come for People of Faith To Act Against Long Island Segregation

Program Facilitators:

  • Dr. Richard Koubek, Coordinator, Public Policy Education Network
  • Vanessa Baird Streeter, Director of the Ministry to Catholics of African Ancestry

Topics:

  • What Are the Patterns of Institutional Racism and Segregation on Long Island?

  • How Does Segregation Hurt Families and Children?

  • What Specific Actions Can People of Faith Take to Undo Segregation in Our Backyard?

Directions to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church:
From the Southern State Parkway, exit at Straight Path north. Proceed north about 2 miles. The church is on your left, across from the Wyandanch School District offices.
From the LIE and Northern State Parkway: Exit at Rte. 231 (Deer Park Avenue) south. About a mile south of the LIE, make a diagonal right on to Straight Path (across from the Upper Tabernacle Church). Proceed south about 5 miles. The church is on your right about 1 mile past the LIRR tracks.

Registration:
Please register by April 29, 2005 by calling Catholic Charities at 516-733-7078 or e-mail: Robinson.Mary@catholiccharities.cc or faxing 516-733-7098 or mail: PSM, Catholic Charities, 90 Cherry Lane, Hicksville, NY 11801
Give your name, your congregation, and your telephone number.

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TIPS FOR PENTECOST SUNDAY

FROM THE YEAR OF EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE
Preaching the Gospel Lesson, John 20:19-23

The Gospel reading has only five sentences (in some translations) but two clear movements:

  • from the disciples’ initial fear to Jesus’ offer of peace
  • from “I was sent” to “I send you.”

The miracle of the Resurrection continues in the coming of the Spirit, who makes possible the transference of Jesus’ mission to us. The work continues; redemption is ongoing.

The charge is to “forgive the sins of anyone,” which really means to restore love, to set things and ourselves right. It is not an individual act; it is not private. It is intensely personal but wholly social at the same time. To set things right, to restore relationships, is to correct conditions and systems. It is to change what is not right in God’s sight. To live this way is to find Christ’s peace.

Though it is a daunting task, the text implies that this change is achievable. Why? Because Christ has risen from the dead, all things are now possible. The Spirit empowers us, encourages us, leads us in the sacred work of the new creation: a new people, a new world, living the peace of Christ.

--by Jim Claffey, Society of St. Vincent de Paul



Embodying Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost is sometimes called “the birthday of the church, ” but it was unlike any birthday party I have ever attended. Acts 2:4-6 reports that, “All of them were filled with power of the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (NRSV)

I have prayed with Pentecostals, but I have never witnessed glossalia or speaking in tongues anything like this, where Christians both spoke in “unknown tongues” and also understood each other across language divisions. As with Christmas and Easter, we have heard the stories of the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the day of Pentecost so often that these shocking, unexpected miracles have become completely unsurprising.

One way to recapture the startling encounter with the Holy Spirit recorded in the Book of Acts is to pause after reading Acts 2:4 and have a number of people stand and read loud this verse loudly in their native language, one after another. After your flock has been properly shocked, you might ask them a few questions:

  • Did you know how diverse we are?
  • Did you know that your neighbors grew up speaking all these languages?
  • If you didn’t know this about one another, what does that say to us?
  • What languages do others in our neighborhoods speak?
  • Who is missing here? Why aren’t they here?
  • What languages or dialects did your ancestors speak? Do you speak them?

In moving toward a common language, English, have we actually lost some ability to communicate with others?

These multi-lingual readings can be quite dramatic and they remind us that we are truly a nation of immigrants. Celebrating linguistic diversity is an important part of ecumenism, telling our immigrant history in a concrete, personal way and revealing diversity that is often hidden or forgotten in our homogenizing culture. Hearing a multitude of languages demonstrates that Charley grew up in Russia, that Maria’s family came from Puerto Rico, or that several people in the parish have Native American ancestors. The American Bible Society can supply Scripture excerpts in many languages. An easy way to line up readers is to invite people from local Korean, Creole, or Malayalam services. The Long Island Council of Churches and the Long Island Catholic regularly publish lists of where to find worship in many languages.

Hearing Scripture in many tongues demonstrates that something miraculous is happening when we manage to understand one another despite language barriers, that God’s Holy Spirit reaches out to us in our uniqueness and seeks to unite us across all divisions of language, nationality, and race. As our country’s motto affirms, we are meant to become e pluribus unum: out of many, one.

--by Tom Goodhue, Long Island Council of Churches

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BULLETIN INSERTS FOR REFLECTION ON RACISM

The LICC is observing a year of repentance and reflection on racism.

On Tuesday, May 3, 7:30-9:30 p.m. we will have a program called “Ending Long Island Segregation” at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Wyandanch.

We urge you to print these inserts in your worship bulletin or newsletter:

(Publish May 8th)
Long Island's Invisible Black Middle Class

In May, 2002, Catholic Charities sponsored an inter-racial dialogue in North Amityville on housing prejudices attended by about 30 people, half white, half African American, all middle class. One thing became clear early in the program: these black and white middle-class people had never had this kind of conversation before. In fact, a number of the whites admitted that they were not very aware that black middle-class people lived on Long Island. Bernard Anderson, a professor of management at the Wharton School of Business, estimates that since the 1960s, the number of black people who could be described as middle class doubled, from about a third to about 60 percent of black families. Black college graduates rose from 8.3 percent in 1980 to 14.3 percent in 2000. According to the 2000 census, nationally there are more than 31,000 black physicians and surgeons, 33,000 black lawyers and 5,000 black dentists. For a time in the 1980s and 1990s, the black middle class was the fastest growing income group in the U.S. due in large part to affirmative action policies. And yet, the black middle class remains largely invisible to most Long Islanders because racial prejudices confine them to all-black neighborhoods. There are a few small, integrated middle-class communities, such as Wheatley Heights, which is in the prestigious Half Hollow Hills School District. But, many black middle-class families see themselves trapped in poor-performing school districts like Wyandanch and Roosevelt. Referring to Wyandanch in the 1960s, when it was a middle-class black enclave, Bernice Bostic said, "People were happy to be there. Many of the parents were involved." But, when poor blacks, including many on welfare, began moving in during the 1960s, Ms. Bostic said, "We found it very difficult to accept the growing amount of our taxes to take care of the needs of welfare" recipients. A class war had begun in what was becoming one of Long Island's poorest and most segregated communities.

Sources: The Philadelphia Enquirer, July 12, 2004; Breaking the Silence by Henry Louis Gates, The New York Times, August 1, 2004; Newsday, April 13, 2003

(Publish May 15th)
Long Island's Burdened Working Class

Hundreds of angry Huntington Station residents jammed into Huntington's Town Hall some months ago to protest a plan that would allow apartments above stores throughout the township. Housing advocates viewed the proposal as a logical way to expand the number of much needed affordable rental apartments. But speaker after speaker from The Station -mostly white - spoke cynically of how their community would probably get the largest number of these apartments. They had had enough. In many ways, Huntington Station has been the Township's "community of first resort" when it came to solving social problems. The Station was the site of a major low-income housing and urban renewal project that decimated its commercial center. It is in The Station that immigrant day laborers gather at a shapeup site to secure work every day. When the Town needed a site for 100 units of affordable housing in the 1990s, Huntington Station was again chosen. Residents of The Station are solidly working class: median household income is $61,700 compared with $82,534 in Huntington Village or $86,456 in Northport Village - two nearby, more affluent middle-class communities. The Station is part of the Huntington School District, which has a combined African American/Hispanic student population of 25 percent compared with about 4 percent in Northport. Similarly, almost 11 percent of Huntington's students have limited English proficiency compared with 1.5 percent in Northport. And, almost 20 percent of Huntington students qualify for free or reduced price lunches compared with 3 percent in Northport. Most of these Huntington School District students reside in The Station. When it comes to shouldering the responsibilities of social justice on Long Island, working-class communities like The Station are too often treated as separate and unequal from their more affluent neighbors.

Sources: New York State Department of Education Comprehensive Assessment Reports for the Huntington and Northport-East Northport School Districts, 2003; The Long Island Index by the Rauch Foundation, 2004

(Publish May 22nd)
The Special Burdens of Poverty and Race on Long Island

While the African American and Hispanic middle classes have grown over the past three decades, their unemployment and poverty rates remain two to five times higher than those of whites. And, too often their poverty is inter-generational. Locked in low-performing, segregated school districts, many poor children of color grow up in a violent culture marked by high school drop-out rates, births out-of-wedlock - often by teenagers, absent fathers, broken families, crime, drug and alcohol abuse. Such behaviors are found in poor white communities as well. Black comedian Bill Cosby sparked a national debate in 2004 when he challenged these behaviors of low-income blacks. "This is about little children and people not giving them better choices. How long you gonna whisper about a small pox epidemic in your apartment when bodies are coming out under the sheets?" According to African American columnist Sheryl McCarthy, "Cosby is onto something....Among his targets. Parents who teach the wrong values by buying their kids expensive clothes instead of educational aids. Young people who don't learn to speak proper English, thereby eliminating their chances of getting good jobs someday. Black criminals who prey on others, but are then portrayed as victims by their communities." Despite heavy criticism, McCarthy noted, Cosby has no plans to "shut up....He blasted blacks who hurl racial slurs [the 'N' word] at each other.... And he offered no soothing words for black men who passed up a chance to get a high school education." McCarthy and Cosby have been criticized for discounting our "systems and institutions [such as substandard housing, job discrimination, substandard schools]...which hamper the opportunity of our youth for whom success is a mirage." As this debate unfolds, Eric J. Cooper of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education cautioned Long Islanders "to work on both the individual and institutional sides of the success equation," supporting Cosby's challenge for an "audacity of hope" as well as institutional changes such as "the inequities in our educational systems."

Sources: Cosby's on the Right Track, Sticking to His Guns by Sheryl McCarthy, Newsday, November 15, 2004; Cosby Should Focus More on Institutional Racism by Eric J. Cooper, Newsday, November 26, 2004

(Publish May 29th)
White Privilege ... A Hidden Social Sin

"Many Americans would like to believe that racism is behind us....But racism ...remains embedded in government and other public and private institutions central to our society, in sometimes hard-to-see systems that disadvantage blacks and confer privilege on whites. Peggy McIntosh of ...Wellesley College [writes of her own and others'] white privilege, 'I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious.' Her list of 26 unearned assets includes the ability to rent or purchase housing in any area she can afford....and purchasing items with cash or credit, knowing that her skin color will not work against the appearance of financial reliability.... How does white privilege work? First, ... it supports the rationalization that blacks and whites really have a level playing field and that the differences between blacks and whites are not due to racism but are because of black inferiority or happenstance. Second, it hampers the 'undoing' of institutional racism because it fosters the illusion that the privileges that whites enjoy are entitlements based on merit and should be fiercely guarded. Sure, some whites may think, I want improved schools for blacks, but that isn't going to have any impact on my school district, is it? OK, help blacks have better housing options, but that doesn't mean that they have to live in my community, does it?"

Source: Racism Feeds on Embedded Privilege by V. Elaine Gross, project director of ERASE Racism, Newsday, July 19, 2002

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HOW TO REQUEST A MULTI-FAITH FORUM PRESENTATION

The Long Island Multi-Faith Forum, which the LICC created a decade ago in conjunction with Auburn Theological Seminary, has recently revised its description of how its multi-faith education program works:

Requests for Building Bridges programs should be made to Bernice Suplee (631-665-7033 or jbsuplee@aol.com). Please let her know:

  • Who will be the contact person? What are their daytime and evening phone numbers? Do they have a fax number or email address?

  • What location, day and time do you request? Don't ask when we are available—we do not know until we ask for volunteers, though Bernice can let you know if we already are booked up all-day with a Multi-Faith Festival involving fifty or more volunteers. Suggesting several dates slows down the process of recruiting volunteers: tell Bernice your preferred date and she will let you know if this date is impossible due to previously-scheduled presentations. Allow at least a month for us to recruit volunteers, longer for an all-day Multi-Faith Festival. It is best to allow at least an hour for a presentation to adults, but we often do shorter presentations in schools, skipping the video we've produced. Due to travel time, we seldom can find volunteers for presentations before 9 a.m.

  • Are there any particular topics you would like the panelists to cover? We avoid partisan politics and foreign policy, and our panelists are not professional theologians, but they can address a wide variety of questions about how they live their faith in the daily life on Long Island, such as the religious holidays they celebrate, what they want their neighbors to know about their customs and beliefs, and how to get along with one another in our increasingly diverse communities. Do you want them to tell what they have learned from their tradition about tolerance? Respect for diversity? Discrimination? Health and sickness? Dating? Marriage?

  • Would you like to see any particular faith communities represented? We have Baha'i, Brahma Kumari, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Native American Spirituality, Sikh, and Unitarian Universalist volunteers. We may not be able to find volunteers from every faith community you request on any particular date, but we can usually come pretty close. Keep in mind that the time you pick may affect which faith communities can come: Christians generally cannot come on Sunday morning and Jews and Muslims seldom can come on Friday night, because this is their worship time.

  • What can you tell us about the audience? How many people do you expect?

  • Who will set up the VCR/DVD player to show the LIMFF video “Faiths of Long Island”? Who will set up microphones if you expect a large audience?

  • Who will send maps and/or directions to Bernice for the panelists?

  • Would you like flyers describing the program to publicize your event? How many?

  • Can your group make a contribution to the program? The panelists are all volunteers, but we depend on donations to cover the costs of materials, mailings, and such to continue this program. Checks can be made out to the Long Island Multi-Faith Forum and mailed c/o
    Long Island Council of Churches
    1644 Denton Green
    Hempstead, NY 11550

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CRISIS IN DARFUR

Congregation B’nai Israel (91 N. Bayview Avenue in Freeport) is hosting a program on the current crisis in Darfur on Sunday, May 22, at 7 p.m. This western region of Sudan which has been the scene of militia attacks on civilians, and, many would say, genocide. Speakers will include Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy and Abulbagi Adussamb, a native of Darfur and an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders.

For further information or directions, call June Cadel at 516-763-0820, call the synagogue at 623-4200, or visit www.bnaiisrael-frpt.org.

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DID YOU KNOW?

  • Old Steeple Community Church (UCC) in Aquebogue has developed an excellent set of guides to corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investing. Contact Hank Boerner or the Rev. Led Baxter at 631-722-3070 for a copy.

  • The Anti-Defamation League has published the United Methodist commentary and guide “The Holocaust: A Christian Reckoning of the Soul,” the first in a new series of texts called “Between Us: Real Dialogue”. The booklet includes some excellent reflections by Jewish and United Methodist leaders and a liturgy developed by the General Commission on Christian Unity & Interreligious Concerns of the United Methodist Church for an interfaith Holocaust memorial service. You might use it on or near Yom Hashoah, which this year will be May 6. For further information, visit www.adl.org or www.umc.org.

  • Garden City recently declared that it was not a community where affordable housing should be built. According to Pete Hamill, in “Downtown: My Manhattan,” Garden City was founded by an Irish immigrant from Belfast, the department store pioneer A. J. Stewart, to provide affordable housing for his workers.

  • Half of all bankruptcies in the United States, affecting two million people each year, are due to medical bills. According to Physicians for a National Health Program, three-quarters of those bankrupted by illness were insured when they first got sick.

  • Nearly all prescription and over-the-counter medications, according to Psychopharmacology Today, remain effective long past their “expiration date.”

  • St. David’s Lutheran Church in Massapequa Park recently sent 85 letters to County Executive Tom Suozzi urging adequate reimbursement of the costs of feeding the clients the County sends to the LICC for emergency food.

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OFFERED/NEEDED

Offered:

New video in the LICC lending library at the Presbytery Center in Commack:
“Let the Church Say Amen” about a Washington, DC storefront church

College assistance for those with psychiatric disabilities:
The Mental Health Association of Nassau County offers a program called College Bound, an introduction to Nassau Community College for students with psychiatric disabilities. Call Adrienne Mantis at 516-489-2322, ext. 117 for information or an application.

Prison Ministry Workshop:
The Safe Harbor Mentoring Program and Circle of Love Ministry in Copiague are offering a workshop on prison ministry Saturday, May 7, 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Wingate Inn (801 Crooked Hill Rd. in Brentwood). Presenters include:
  • Dr. Divine Pryor on “The impact of the HIV population on the Church”
  • Dr. W. Wilson Goode on “Youth mentoring for children of the incarcerated”
  • Professor Freddy Baez, MSW “Counseling issues for the incarcerated”
  • Vivian Nixon on “Making the transition from incarceration,” and
  • Rev. Dr. Lonnie McLeod, Jr. from Exodus Transition Community, the keynote speaker.
For additional information or to register, call 631-789-2688 ext. 244, fax 631-789-4587, or email: roykirton@aol.com.

Needed:

  • The Education & Assistance Corporation’s Senior Respite Program is seeking volunteers to offer a weekly visit to a frail elder while at the same time relieving a family caregiver with much needed time off. EAC offers training, on going support and a stipend. For more information, call 516-539-0150 ext 217.
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NEED A Guest preacher?

  • Our Executive Director, the Rev. Tom Goodhue, is still available some Sundays this fall for guest preaching. You can reach him at tomgoodhue@optonline.net or 516-565-0290, ext. 206.
  • Alric Kennedy, our Director of Community Resources, also does some guest speaking and preaching. You can reach him at 516-565-0290, ext. 204.
  • The Rev. Lillian Frier Webb, an African Methodist Episcopal clergywoman, therapist, and LICC chaplain, is available occasionally for guest-preaching and would be glad to tell congregations about our Women at the Well project that seeks to avoid incarceration. You can reach her at 516-764-8728.
  • Our chaplain Nancy Schaffer is not available on Sundays but would be glad to speak to church groups at other times about Women at the Well. She can be reached at 631-586-9667.
  • The Rev. Dick Ploth, a member of the LICC Board and the Presbytery of Long Island, is available for guest-preaching, supply-preaching, and interim pastorates. You can reach him at 631-734-2587 or lyndik@optonline.net.
  • Dr. Eugene Purvis, a Conference Evangelist for the AME Zion Church and a member of our Public Issues Committee, is available for guest preaching. He can be reached at 516-623-0716.
  • The Rev. Alan Bentz-Letts, an ordained Lutheran (ELCA) clergyman and campus minister is available for guest preaching, supply preaching, and part-time interim pastorates in Queens, Nassau, and Western Suffolk. Call 718-380-7234 or email alanbentzletts@aol.com.
  • Sue Terry is a graduate of New Brunswick Seminary and is a licensed preacher in the United Church of Christ (and can celebrate communion in Suffolk County). She can be reached at gterrys@aol.com or 631-751-1170.
  • Jesse Glick and Kathy Burton from Church World Service, our partners in disaster response, would be glad to preach or speak about the work of CWS. Call 888—297-2767 or email jglick@churchworldservice.org.
  • Tom Lyons, a member of Mt. Sinai Congregational Church (UCC) who is active in the Heifer Project, would be happy to speak or preach in local churches. He can be contacted a 631-928-4317 or lyonheifer@aol.com.
  • The Rev. Randall Broger, a member of the Presbytery of Long Island who trained in interim ministry at Princeton Seminary, is available for guest preaching, supply preaching, and interim pastorates. You can reach him at randallb1@usa.net or 631-589-2923.

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JOB OPENINGS

ORGANIST/CHOIR DIRECTOR:
Congregational United Church of Christ in Farmingville is seeking an organist/choir director. They have an electronic Conn organ. Salary negotiable. Call 631-981-2343 for further information.

Youth Leader:
Wading River Congregational Church is seeking a part-time (25hr/month) youth leader to work with our high school program. Responsibilities include running a weekly evening program, organizing and taking part in outreach ministries, leading youth in worship and Bible study. He/she will work with existing youth leaders and committee. WRCC is located on the North Shore, 10 miles east of Port Jefferson. Interested people can review a full job description at www.wrcongchurch.org, and should contact 631-929-8849 or pastor@wrcongchurch.org.

Administrative Assistant:
The Board of Trustees and the Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork are seeking candidates who are available immediately for their Administrative Assistant. This person will be responsible for managing the daily and on-going clerical needs of this active Bridgehampton congregation of about 65 members and friends. The job is part-time: 8 hours a week on average. The nature of this work allows for very flexible hours as well as some work from home. The AA will, however, spend portions of two separate days present in the meetinghouse office in Bridgehampton. Call 631-537-0312 for a full job description.

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HEALTH CARE RESOURCES: FILE OF ADVANCE CARE DIRECTIVES

The tragedy of the Schiavo family, with the husband and parents fighting over what of a brain-damaged woman might or might not have wanted done for her, should remind us all of the need to let your family know how you want to end your days on earth and write down your wishes. You also need to make multiple copies of your health care proxy and advance care directives, so that there is a better chance that one will be found quickly if it is needed. One simple thing clergy and other religious workers can do is to offer to keep a copy of your advance care directive—along with your spouse, heirs, doctor, lawyer, and others. Here are parishes that have told us that they are already doing this. An Advance Directive, also known as a Living Will, is available free of charge, for each state from the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization by emailing consumers@nhpco.org or calling 800-658-8898.

Sister Kathleen McCarthy
St. Ignatius Loyola
20 East Cherry St., Hickville
516-935-8841

Rev. Louise Stowe-Johns
Community United Methodist Church
Jericho Road at Vernon Ave.
East Norwich
516-922-0133

Old First Presbyterian Church
125 Main Street, Huntington
631-424-2101

Jack K. King
The United Methodist Church
160 Main Street, Southampton
631-283-0951

John M Clark, CSW
St. Peter's Parish Social Ministry
1327 Port Washington Blvd.
Port Washington
516-883-6675

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COMMUNITY BLOOD DRIVES IN MAY

5/3/051st Presbyterian Church
Islip		3:00-8:30 PM
5/9/05St. Andrew Lutheran Church
West Hempstead		3:00-8:30 PM
5/9/05Abiding Presence Lutheran Church
4 Trescott Path, Fort Salonga		3:30-9:00 PM
5/9/05Old First Presbyterian Church
Huntington		3:15-8:45 PM
5/10/05Gloria Dei Lutheran Church
22 E. 18th St, Huntington Station		3:00-8:15 PM
631-271-2466
5/11/05Ascension Lutheran Church
33 Bay Shore Rd, Deer Park		2:30-8:00 PM
5/13/05United Methodist Church
792 Hawkins Ave, Lake Grove		3:30-9:00 PM
5/16/05Trinity Lutheran Church
40 West Nicholai St, Hicksville		3:30-9:00 PM
5/16/05Christ Lutheran Church
189 Burr Rd, East Northport		2:45-8:15 PM
5/16/05Holy Trinity Lutheran Church
Yaphank-Middle Island Rd, Middle Island		3:30-9:00 PM
5/17/05Massapequa Reformed Church
Merrick Rd & Ocean Ave		3:00-8:30 PM
5/19/05Commack Methodist Church
486 Townline Rd, Commack		2:45-8:15 PM
5/21/05Grace Cathedral, 886 Jerusalem Ave., Uniondale10:00 AM-3:30 PM
5/23/05St. Paraskevi Greek Orthodox Church, Shrine Place, Greenlawn3:30-9:00 PM
5/23/051st United Methodist Church, Amityville3:00-8:30 PM
5/26/05Grace Lutheran Church, Malverne3:00-8:30 PM


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The Long Island Council of Churches is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit. All gifts are deeply appreciated and are tax-deductible.

Tom Goodhue
Executive Director
Long Island Council of Churches
1644 Denton Green
Hempstead, NY 11550
voice: 516-565-0290, ext. 206
fax: 516-565-0291
email:licchemp@aol.com
Web: www.ncccusa.org/ecmin/licc

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