My first protest! Well, sort of.

Today, after church, three people from church and the three of us drove up into our neck of the woods to attend the fourth in a series of five gatherings intended to bring attention to the ongoing genocide/mass rape/persecution etc. of people in Darfur. We missed the first three, one to see our Beloved Mariners lose to the Nationals, and the next two because we were out west visiting family. So we went today to sing songs, and listen to a sermon all about death and what we can do to stop it. Also, we were right across the street from the Sudanese Embassy protesting their government's apathy towards and/or active encouragement of the aforementioned atrocities. Police were on hand in case anything got out of control.

But here's the deal. I constantly get caught up in the minutiae in sermons. The guy today (I don't remember his name) went on for awhile about the activism we need in order to change the situation in Darfur. He namedropped the National Association of Evangelicals and praised their work. And then he mentioned their three major social/political issues. Darfur, abortion, and preserving traditional marriage.

Screeeeeeech! Let's call the whole thing to a halt. Is he saying that by being there we are condoning the NAE stance on all three issues? Can't we take them one at a time? And how can you compare the mass murder of millions of innocents (be they in Africa or in American wombs) with the "weakening" of an, at best, two-century old matrimoial tradition that isn't even biblically mandated? And from that point on, all I could do was nitpick the rest of the sermon. I noticed how he divided Christians up into us-and-them, and we're the good guys. I noticed that, while paying lip-service to the idea of loving others as ourselves, he didn't seem to believe that it applied to gays. I noticed that he wasn't even a very good speaker. And I couldn't help thinking that when he told a story about a woman who died in NYC, in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood when no one would answer her calls for help, he was also thinking that it was black people who wouldn't answer the calls and that it is black people in Sudan that are not answering the calls now, and that that's just how black people are, so we have to carry the white man's burden to change it.

I'm sure that I read waaaaaaaaay too much into what he was saying. And maybe that says a lot more about me than it does about him. But I'm not ready to delve into that idea quite yet.

By the way, one of the songs that we sung was what I've always known as "The Prayer of St. Francis." The first line is "Make me a channel of your peace." I just love that idea. I love the whole song. It's all about becoming selfless, loving others as yourself and just being a messenger for God. If I ever get the guts, I'll try to play and sing it at church (the version I know, not the one we sang today)