COFFEE BREAK 150

+ updated at 5:16pm EST Monday, March 1, 2010

+ Chuck Currie offers "Time For Up Or Down Vote On Meaningful Health Care Reform In Congress". Excerpt: "The insurances companies and the special interests on K Street have spent millions to kill off health care reform and to protect their record profits but we sent the politicians to Washington to do the difficult work of governing."

+ Shuck and Jive offers "I Want To Be An Ancestor--A Sermon" by John Shuck.  John deals with the report of the PCUSA Middle East Study Team which is the subject of my previous entry (below).  Here's an excerpt from another great sermon by my favorite Presbyterian agitator:

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will be meeting in Minneapolis in a few months. Once every two years Presbyterians gather to celebrate, lament, and make decisions in a revelry of Roberts Rules of Order.

Among the many issues that divide us, the General Assembly will consider a report from the Special Committee to Prepare a Comprehensive Study Focused on Israel/Palestine. This committee was formed in 2008. It has not yet finished its report but has made some recommendations. According to the Presbyterian News Service:

The report affirms historic PC(USA) positions — an immediate cessation of violence by both sides, an immediate freeze on the construction and expansion of Israeli settlements on occupied territory, the relocation of Israel’s “separation barrier” to the internationally recognized 1967 border, a shared status for Jerusalem, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and immediate resumption of negotiations toward a two-state solution.

The report also calls on the U.S. government to end its acquiescence in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and to “employ the strategic use of influence and the withholding of financial and military aid in order to enforce Israel’s compliance with international law and peacemaking efforts.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement this past Monday saying that the "adoption of this poisonous document by the Presbyterian Church will be nothing short of a declaration of war on Israel and her supporters.”

The statement from the Wiesenthal Center got results. This past week during meetings in Louisville, Presbyterian leaders were flooded with over 2,700 emails protesting this committee and its report, even as the report has yet to be completed.

We are warming up for another thrilling General Assembly.

Meanwhile Jesus sits on the hill weeping over Jerusalem, like a mother hen who “longs to gather her brood under her wings.”

Sadly, as usual, no one is willing to be gathered.

+ Presbyterian News Service offers "Middle East study team nears release of its final report: 'Time for action is now,’ nine-member panel urges" by Jerry L. Van Marter. Excerpt:

With several sections of its massive final report still to be completed and edited, the committee approved with just one dissenting vote a package of 30+ recommendations calling for an immediate end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank; endorsement  of the emphases on hope, love, non-violence, and reconciliation found in an ecumenical statement by Palestinian Christians called the Kairos Palestine Document; and urging the U.S. government to take swift action toward a just peace that guarantees secure states for both Israel and Palestine — the commonly called “two state solution.” Their first and key recommendation, committee members emphasized, is that the years 2010-2012 be declared by the upcoming 219th General Assembly  “as a time of Presbyterian prayer and action for the Middle East,” including travel/study to the region, study of the Reformed theological  and historical understandings of the area, itineration throughout the church by Middle Eastern Christian partners and local conversations between Christians, Jews and Muslims.