In this season of Lent, many Christians in liturgical traditions have been meditating on the Stations of the Cross, a series of events ”” biblical and traditional ”” depicting the story of Jesus’ death.
This year, however, the Episcopal Church is promoting new devotional material for Lent: the Stations of the Millennium Development Goals. The church’s Episcopal Relief and Development office created a liturgy based on the United Nations plan to eliminate extreme poverty and other global ills, and sent e-mail to church leaders encouraging its use “in lieu of the traditional Stations of the Cross service.”
Mike Angell of the denomination’s Office of Young Adult and Higher Education Ministries designed the stations for a September 2007 young adult conference. While the traditional Stations of the Cross meditation has 14 stations (though this has varied through church history), the Episcopalian Stations of the Millennium Development Goals liturgy has only eight stations, one for each goal.
Station four, on reducing child mortality, reads:
Every three seconds a child under the age of five dies. A disproportionate number of these children live in developing countries, without access to clean water or basic medical care.For personal reflection and prayer: Lord, help us to love and care for little children””the least of these who are of your family. Protect and heal them with your divine power.
I have no real problem with the MDGs. They are worthy goals and as Christians we should be mindful and supportive of them.
That said, they become a problem – an idol, in fact – when they replace the Cross of Christ. Which seems to be *literally* what ERD is asking people to do.
Didn’t we beat this to death at the start of Lent?
It’s dead!
I always note that the MDG’s VERY CAREFULLY avoid any mention of abortion when they “cry out” for “reducing child mortality.”
If we were really concerned for the health of children in the world, we would address the need for affirming the prenatal life of each child as well as being concerned for their life after birth. What this really says is that the weakest of the weak, the unborn child, has no value in the sight of the Episcopal Church who is committed to helping women make their own decisions about their own bodies.
Sorry gang a “Catholic” Church has bested that with its Ecological Stations of The Cross. From the blogsite of Father John Zuhlsdorf
http://wdtprs.com/blog/2008/02/the-ecological-stations-in-durham-nc-christ-as-earth-mother-praise-of-the-serpent/
“Excerpts from the Ecological Stations of the Cross
Second Station: Jesus Embraces the Cross
(Earth as Suffering Servant—Isaiah)
Meditation:
Mother Earth, you are alive with Christ’s Spirit. You, like Christ, are the suffering servant. You serve all Earth’s creatures so splendidly and graciously, but we often treat you as nothing more than a storehouse of goods. May we awaken to see both your suffering and your generosity. May we only harvest wood from your forests in ways that are sustainable and may we leave your ancient, mystical, old-growth forests to grow in peace.
Third Station : Jesus Falls the First Time
(The Poor and Unjust Systems)
Meditation:
Christ, we see you alive in all creation, and know your love extends in a special way to the poor and suffering. Like you, the poor fall so often under unjust social systems that strangle their right to good housing, health care and meaningful work. May we awaken to see how our economic systems and multinational corporations could be made more just. May we create just systems in solidarity with all peoples and nature.”
Sorry but looks like paganpazoola is alive and well at this Parish
#1: In agreement with your irenic spirit of recognizing that the MDGs should not be blithely dismissed, but shouldn’t Christ Himself be the object of our worship, and not the cross?
“The real point of this liturgy was to allow people to prayerfully enter into the MDGs,”
I don’t want to “enter into” the MDGs. I’m delighted to help accomplish them anyway I can, but this is … wrong. The creator of the liturgy is quoted as saying that they shouldn’t take the place of the Stations of the Cross – then why write the liturgy in that format? Why call it “Stations of the MDG” – what do “stations” have to do with the MDG in the first place? The goals aren’t God. And the goals are not more important than God, either. Give money, give energy, give any help you can to alieve the suffering in the world. But don’t meditate on them as if they were God. Liturgy is just a format into which TEC can pour any thing at all, it seems.
How can one read this an not laugh, bitterly to be sure, but laugh nonetheless. This sort of thing will give pretentiousness – and perhaps even vapidity – a bad name. LM
This makes Barbie a serious contender for iconography.
The Episcopal Church has just gone beyond parody. I would have thought this was a piece in The Onion if I weren’t told.
Br. Michael, you owe me a keyboard and a monitor!!!
Jesus was put to death because his ideals were not consistent with the Empire Development Goals.
Oh, well – Lots of people think that the liturgy of Stations of the Cross is just an idolatrous Catholic practice.
how sad…and how tragic that people no longer have faith in the message of Chrsit crucified.
The reaction to this is truly bizarre. The article quotes Edith Humphrey, a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary:
I wonder whether Humphrey was accurately paraphrased in the quote above. The article makes her out as holding that, when we feed the hungry, etc., we do so not for its own sake, but to demonstrate our fealty to King Jesus. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc., just happens to be the particular token of fealty Jesus wants. The logical implication of this view is that Jesus could have said he wanted us to torture and kill our neighbor, and we’d still do it, just because he’s Jesus and that’s what he wants. Am I the only one who thinks that would be, um, an idiosyncratic view of Matthew 25?
Neither the sheep nor the goats were aware of what they were doing. They had no MGD’s.
Pb,
Actually, you are closer to theological truth than sarcasm. The truly were NOT aware of what they had done.
In Jesus’ account of the sheep and goats (not really a parable, since He indicated this is what would really happen), both sides are perplexed and ask “now, when did we not do these things” or “when did we do these things?” They had no idea they were fulfilling the conditions of salvation in their actions (for we are created in Christ Jesus for good works).
They both thought their confession of faith was enough to guarantee salvation.
The difference was that the sheep acted on the impulse given by the Spirit to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, etc., and the goats obviously did not.
But they did not need a list of MDG’s to show them what they needed to do, just the Scriptures and the words of the Lord.
Peace
May we all be as the sheep in the story.
Jim Elliott
Who has a long way to go.
Jim, I agree and I did not attend sarcasm. I find this to be one of the most troubling passages in scripture.
libraryjim [#17] writes: “But they did not need a list of MDG’s to show them what they needed to do, just the Scriptures and the words of the Lord.”
In WWII, the order Eisenhower received from the Combined Chiefs of Staff was a simple one: Invade Europe and destroy the German armed forces. The operational planning, however, was necessarily more detailed, and included interim goals and milestones such as, capture Cherbourg. It’s useful to think of the MDGs as being in the same category vis a vis Jesus’ order to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc.
The problem with the MDG’s is not in the thing itself, but rather in its use as a substitute for Christ as the center of a Christian church, because this is what TEC has done. The MDG is a worthy goal, after all, regardless of whether you are religious or not, but TEC is using them, not as a supplement, but as a replacement because it fashionable to do so, just as TEC will become greener and greener simply because it is fashionable to do so. LM
Larry #20, How right you are. If the Christian liturgy is truly said and believed in, the goals of the MDG will be automatically taken care of. It would appear that the PB is doing her very best to violate the US Constitutional separation of church and state which our US forefathers fought and died for.