Why the Pittsburgh Post Gazette is an embarrassment at best

“Death of a President” is a film that opens today at a couple of theaters in Pittsburgh. It won’t play at our local Cinemark or many other theaters whose corporate owners refuse to run it. What makes “DOAP” controversial and why some theater chains have decided not to show it is that it is “a sober fakeumentary from Britain’s Channel 4 that imagines the assassination of the current President Bush in Chicago on October 19, 2007.” (Time Magazine).

The film imagines what might happen in the aftermath of such a tragedy and shows an over-reactive government and populace “rushing to judgment” as the first person suspected of being the lone assassin is a Syrian man with rumored al-Qaeda sympathies. Suspicions prove wrong, but the damage is done. (more…)

Sunday is Reformation Sunday among the Protestant churches (wear plaid). The day is set in commemoration of All Saint’s Eve (October 31) 1517, when the young German monk, Martin Luther, tacked a list of 95 grievances against the medieval church on the door of the chapel at Wittenberg. The date is often sited as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, though the winds of change had been blowing across the church for more than a century.

The great watchwords of the Reformation were “scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone.” Luther and the Reformers insisted that the sole authority for the life of faith, right belief and the ordering of the church was the Bible. And from the pages of scripture they heard a clear and unequivocal message that our justification – our ability to come into a right relationship with God and to “enjoy him forever” – was “by faith through grace.” Salvation is a gift of God received by faith, and that faith itself is a free gift of God to all who believe.

Reformation Sunday is more than a commemorative event, however. We celebrate not just the past, but the reality of our justification before God; God’s gift of faith through grace to us.

So, put on some plaid, but more than that, put on thanks for the great gift of God!