Choosing to Suspend Judgment

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
February 27, 2011    Epiphany 8

1 Corinthians 4:1-5
1 Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God's mysteries.
2 Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.
3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. 4 I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.
4:5 Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God.

Back before Lindsey Lohan and Robert Downey Jr. made going into drug treatment programs so popular, the place where famous people disappeared to was the Menninger Clinic, which, until the last decade, was located in our neighboring state in Topeka, Kansas.

Though you generally only heard the Menninger Clinic mentioned when someone famous was going there for treatment, it was and still is a very serious psychiatric hospital which was founded in the early part of the 20th century by the Menninger family and their most famous teacher and family member, Karl Menninger.

After many years of teaching graduate school classes in psychology and training young medical doctors to be psychiatrists, Menninger noted the disappearance from the language of mental health any concept of "oughtness" or guilt.  In 1973 he published a book which had a very large influence on me during my seminary years entitled, Whatever Became of Sin?

Menninger noted that his graduate students either had no concept of sin at all or they held the view that it was associated only with neurotic religious guilt.
His book very helpfully made the distinction between what is, in fact, harmful, unnecessary, neurotic guilt and what is very mentally healthy and appropriate guilt which is based in honesty, reality and personal responsibility.

I love the proverb that says that previous generations went to their priest to confess their sins and the current generation goes to see their therapist to confess their parents' sins.  In some ways, one of the false aspects of modern psychology was the implication that human behavior is determined by genetics and environment and that no one is really responsible for their own actions.

And yes, it is true that both genetics and environment are hugely influential.  Almost all child molesters were molested when they were children.  Almost all abusive spouses grew up in a home watching domestic violence.  Having a parent who is an addict dramatically increases the chances of their children becoming addicts.  The child with two addicted parents seems almost certain to struggle with the same issue.

What Menninger wanted his readers to remember is that it doesn't always turn out that way.  While you can say of someone who is convicted of violent crimes and sent away to prison that it was because they grew up in a bad neighborhood, went to a bad school, had bad parents or unfortunate genetics but then you may investigate and find out that this prisoner has a brother who is a professor at MIT.

Charlie Sheen can say what he will about AA and the treatment programs which have saved his life, but one of the most important things I have learned from my work with addicts is that the road to recovery begins with a sense of personal sin, of acknowledging our failings and that honesty can lead to being healed.
Menninger wrote that the only sins that can hurt you are the ones you refuse to confess.  It is by having the courage and the honesty to admit your failings and to find the desire to correct those defects of character, to make amends where possible, that a person can become sufficiently healthy to be sober.

I did not grow up in a liturgical religious tradition.  I grew up in a relatively progressive Protestant church with an educated clergyman for a pastor so I escaped a lot of the crazy neurotic aspects of religion that so many people have to try to overcome.  But I did not grow up with worship services like ours.

It was my study of pastoral counseling and addiction treatment which made me more interested in looking at the theological content of worship, especially in the inclusion of a prayer of confession and an assurance of pardon.

I know of no other protestant free church tradition which now regularly features a prayer of confession and assurance of pardon. It is more common for Catholics, Episcopalians and Lutherans but even there I have noted that the "mia culpas" have becoming increasingly less specific and more attributions of praise to a saving God.

Over the years, I have gotten a lot of objections from church members who said that they were too negative. One man even came to my office to demand that I stop putting confessions in the service because, he said, "You make it sound like we have done something wrong and we need to change."  He could not even see the irony in saying that even in worship, we are suppose to pretend that we are all innocent and we have nothing for which to be forgiven..... not to mention the fact that he was on my short list of people who really needed to change a lot!
Many years after Menninger's book was published, the popular self-help guru, M. Scott Peck, wrote a book about human evil entitled, The People of the Lie.  The "lie" he references in his book is the claim that we are innocent.  The truth is that we are not innocent, and the greater truth is that if we can take responsibility for our failings then we have the opportunity to be healed through forgiveness.

Peck argued that the pretense of innocence, our insistence upon being seen as having no guilt, is the foundation for becoming genuinely evil.  I do not mean for this to sound partisan in any way because, trust me, there is not much innocence anywhere in politics but I want to mention one instance from recent history:

In the debate about prisoner interrogation techniques in Iraq and at the Guantanamo Detention center, the point was made that the Geneva Conventions defined some of the things American interrogators were doing were, in fact, torture.  While Secretary of State, General Collin Powell, warned President Bush that he was reversing over a century of American policy against the use of torture, the then White House Counsel, Roberto Gonzales, sent a memo to the president in which he referred to the Geneva Conventions as being "quaint."

This resulted in the rather circular logic in which President Bush attempted to explain to the public that what American interrogators did was not technically torture because Americans don't use torture so, if we were doing it, it couldn't have been torture.

If you start with the premise that you are innocent then there is no longer any sense of sin, of personal responsibility, of morality or of an ability to ever become better or more moral people.
Søren Kierkegaard said that Christians should be objective about themselves and subjective about others but that we tend to be subjective about ourselves and objective about others.  We always seem to have the ability to describe almost everything we have ever done as being either morally neutral or entirely understandable but we can dissect other people with the precision of a surgeon.

You may even be entirely correct in your assessments of other people's failings but, folks, come on, you cannot judge your way into a healthy world.  You cannot heal a broken family, a dying marriage or a dysfunctional office by passing judgment on people.  You can only do that through forgiveness.

When we were meeting to discuss starting this church, one of the things we struggled with the most was deciding what we would do when we got together.  Are progressive Christians interested only in philosophical inquiry and discourse?  Were we going to just talk or would we sing hymns and say prayers?

As I look back over these past three years, I realize that a lot of what we did initially was really just an echo of my own denominational past.  Old habits die hard.  But from week to week, we took some parts and changed or removed them.

I think some parts of what we do are still echoes of our past but I'm not at all convinced that is entirely a bad thing.  For example, we sing a gender inclusive doxology every week that is still fundamentally a Trinitarian statement in a church where I doubt that we have more than a dozen people who find a Trinitarian doctrine tenable.  However, I am prepared to see certain aspects of symbol and ritual as being an affirmation of our heritage and the birthplace of our faith.

Even though I suspect that anyone coming here from a Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu heritage would not be quite as charitable towards our politically correct doxology and our more ecumenical communion service.

I have held onto some fairly high church and uncommon things in our services.  We're the only progressive church I know of that begins its service with a Gregorian chant of a psalm text.

You don't even hear that in Catholic churches anymore but we have retained that tradition because, I believe, it sets the hour of worship apart from any other hour of the week.  Chant is not something you will hear on the radio and you probably don't have any cd's of it at your home, unless, of course, you happen to live at my house were there are dozens.....

Chant puts the Psalms into the room in a way which mere singing or reading does not.... It is so uncommon, so out of the ordinary, that it alerts us to the fact that something entirely different is now happening.... We have left the secular and the profane for a moment so that we can focus on God and our own spiritual lives.  Maybe we do that at other times of the week, or maybe we should, but this hour is certainly and intentionally different from every other hour of the week.

We sing together.... Again, not something that most of us do in the normal run of a day but the blending of our voices in theologically rich song is an act of community.  If you were to isolate individual voices in the room during a hymn, with a few exceptions, it would not be a necessarily pleasant experience but taken together, it is a meaningful exercise of community.

But the thing I have held onto the most doggedly against what I know to be the popular trend in Protestantism and especially among progressives, is our prayer of confession.  I have, for all the reasons I have articulated today, incorporated prayers of confession in worship for 25 years but for the past couple of years, as we have evolved, I have found fewer and fewer of the traditional prayers of the church to be acceptable for us to use.

Almost every week, I find that I have to write the prayer of confession myself in order to connect it to the scripture reading and the theme of the day.  The fact that I write it instead of some liturgical poet is why they are so often difficult to actually read in unison but I am more about content than I am art.

I write them on our behalf, as your pastor, though I know that not everyone is going to find meaning in all of them.  I'm not a mind reader but I am a theologically trained opinion writer so you can read those prayers as my attempt at helping you to put into words what I think you should be confessing if you are inclined to do so..... no thanks necessary, it's just one of the services I provide!

I rarely find anything in traditional sources which does not sound to my ears to be too fake, too religions, to unreal.  But I do believe that we have important things to confess, not in order to avoid God's wrath but to become more healthy ourselves.

The language of AA is that we seek a spiritual life, not to go to heaven when we die but so that we can be restored to sanity.  I think that is a very helpful way of thinking about the spiritual journey.


Prejudice is, isn't it, a form of insanity?  Turning our drinking water and our air into a dangerous poison is insane, isn't it?  Hating the couple next door because they love each other and they are of the same gender, that's really messed up, isn't it?  Isn't it crazy to give half of the society the best health care in the world while denying basic health care to the other half?  Doesn't it just seem crazy to you that we have houses the size of hotels for just one or two people while we still have hundreds of people huddled under bridges and in abandoned grain elevators?  Going to war without meaningful provocation or an attainable goal.... That's crazy isn't it?

Dennis Miller was talking about the use of the insanity plea to defend a mass murderer and the prosecution was asking for a psych evaluation to see if, in fact, the murder was insane.  And he asked, if the fact that the guy shot and killed a bunch of people in cold blood is not diagnostic criteria enough to prove that he is insane, what you are looking for, serving red wine with fish?

There are many ways in which the world we live in is obviously insane and our sincere, real and honest spirituality should be and must be a path towards the restoration of our sanity.

Anything that we do repeatedly, week after week, should be done with great intention and for a very good reason.  We say a prayer of confession because we are not yet the entirely whole people we could become.  We hear an assurance of pardon because on a lot of the other days of the week we hear assurances of condemnation.


We deliberately respond to confession and pardon by passing the peace because, in the world, people are judged harshly, refused forgiveness and they live in isolation.  What we do as a ritual in worship here is intended to teach the values of confession, pardon and peace in our daily lives outside of these walls.

Lindsey Lohan and George W. Bush, have this in common, they need to be able to accept their mistakes as mistakes and allow a Higher Power to restore them to sanity.  But we can add the names of Barack Obama, Billy Long, and Roger Ray to that list as well.  None of us are innocent, all of us can be forgiven.

I think that it is one of the sickest parts of TV news that the addictions and legal woes of stars are paraded before the public but I encourage you to see, not just the Lindsey Lohans and Charley Sheens who look foolish in the eye of the camera.... All of us would if our worst moments were broadcast for the world to see.  We should see ourselves in their places, whenever they are being dragged through the mud, every one of us could have been in that place if our lowest and worst moments were recorded and broadcast.

It is not because of our inherent superiority that we stand erect in this sanctuary but because we have been forgiven and through that forgiveness we have been restored, by God, to sanity.  Let us then give the gift of sincere forgiveness and sanity to a world which is apparent in dire need of a little healing.

Creating Community

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
Feb. 20, 2011  Epiphany 7

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18         The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
9 When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
11 You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. 12And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.
13 You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. 14You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling-block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
15 You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16You shall not go around as a slanderer* among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood* of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
                                          
Matthew 5:38-48

You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." 39But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; 41and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
Love for Enemies
43 'You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I have had occasion, from time to time, to attend a soccer match in which the teams were comprised of three and four year old children.  If you have never witnessed a soccer game played by three and four year olds, let me tell you, any resemblance this may bear to the soccer matches you have watched on TV is purely coincidental.

The ball never leaves the ground so there are no great head shots or body blocks and players are as likely to score a goal for the opponent as for their own team. It is, in fact, so confused that no one actually keeps score and there are no fouls called and the total number of players on the field at any one time is never quite equal between the two teams.  Most of the time a few players are gathered around the ball in a huddle with no idea what to do while a few other players are walking around, holding hands with a friend, looking for bugs and four leafed clovers.

I'm no great sports fan but this spectacle is difficult for me to watch.  Soccer without rules is not soccer....it's rugby.  Life, without some rules, is similarly impossible to live.... Especially when there are now nearly 7 billion players on the field.

The book of Leviticus is not one of the favorite books of the Bible in the modern church.  In fact, some of the most embarrassing, sexists and otherwise discriminatory passages of the Bible are found in Leviticus so that we are much more likely to ignore it entirely than to try to understand its sometimes laborious social codes.

But to be fair to its historical context, the laws of Leviticus were not written so much to teach the people how they were to try and satisfy their God as they are rules for how the game of life is to be conducted.  In any society, you either accept the Darwinian rule of "survival of the fittest" or you have to agree upon some rather more sophisticated rules for living in close proximity to people who otherwise might like to have your food, your house, your spouse or your children.

Twice, in just these 11 verses, the text tells people not to steal from one another and then it says basically that in several other ways.... Not to defraud one another, not to lie to one another, not to murder anyone so that you can take their stuff.

We have police, locked doors and alarm systems to help remind people not to steal or murder but a lot of the rest of this text, which the author took just as seriously as murder and theft, we can only observe if we are all willing to agree to the rules of the game and try to follow them as best we can.

Some of the laws of Leviticus are articulated in order to lay out the necessary ground rules of surviving in close proximity to other people who are also seeking food, shelter and family.  But a lot of what remains is really about creating quality of life.... It is about moving beyond merely not killing one another and taking one another's food but it is about living in a way which fosters love, meaning and genuine community.

Look at verse 9 of this reading from Leviticus chapter 19.  The text is speaking to land owners and it tells them when they are harvesting to leave the wheat on the edges and in the corners of the field for the people who don't own any land.... For the alien who is walking by, or the poor who are without an inherited farm of their own.

It would be like saying to a merchant now, when you are making up your nightly deposit, don't take of the money you made during the day, leave some of it out on the counter in case someone else needs a little money.  You wonder how many people in Israel took Leviticus any more seriously than the church of today does but you have to admit that it is a challenging concept.
You have heard me frequently mention the fact that the word "personal" is not in the Bible.  The emphasis on the individual and individual freedoms and rights really is a rather modern concept.  More primitive societies were much more aware that no one gets to be a teacher unless some farmers agree to feed the teacher.  No one gets to wear shoes and clothes unless you are also good to the cobbler and the miller.

Of course, the text does not say how much of your crop to leave standing in the field, how many of the grapes you are to just leave hanging in the vines or how much of the day's business to leave lying on the counter.  But what the text asks land owners to do is to remember that they are not alone.... That though the crop may be the fruit of the farmer's labors, the land isn't..... the text is generously peppered with the reminder:  for I am the Lord your God!

Rugged individualism is the hallmark of the modern age but that is nothing more than a polished up version of Darwin's "survival of the fittest."  The people of ancient Israel knew how to be self centered.  They knew about tending to their own concerns and leaving everyone else to be responsible for themselves, but their holy scriptures asked them to remember the vulnerable that lived among them.

The text asks them simply to be considerate of people who have issues.....verse 14 says not to "revile the deaf or put a stumbling-block before the blind."  Don't verbally ridicule people who are too deaf to hear you and don't make faces at blind people who can't see you.

And the text demands that those who are in the position to hire the poor show respect to the people who are in their employ.

Just telling them not to withhold a worker's pay until the next day is really just saying not to taunt the poor about being poor.

When I was just a puppy preacher, I went up to St Louis to attend a church conference and at that time I had a very wealthy aunt who lived in a St Louis suburb and so I was staying as a guest in her home to save myself a hotel bill.  She lived on a large estate with several acres that required the care of a pretty much full time gardener.

One morning, as we were sitting down to breakfast, there was a knock at the back door and I could see the old black man whom she employed to keep her living in the trappings of urban luxury.  She spoke to him briefly and returned to the table where we ate and talked fairly leisurely.  When we finished eating and the dishes were in the sink, she went back to the back door, where her gardener was still standing, and she gave him the pay he had come to ask for.

I couldn't believe that I had accidently been a party to that humiliation of her employee.  It was her feeling that her employees had nothing better to do with their lives than to be made to stand at the door with their hand out to be paid what they had clearly earned.

My aunt considered herself to be, not only a good Christian woman but even a philanthropist who donated to various charities but, at the root of it, she indulged herself in the belief that having inherited money made her more important that the man who cut her grass and trimmed her hedges.   I couldn't afford it, but I gathered my things and moved into a hotel for the remainder of the meeting because I just couldn't spend another day in the pre-Civil War era my aunt occupied.

Paying a wage is not justice if you have to do it in a way that humiliates the wage earner.  The text from Leviticus demands, in verse 15, that their society neither show undue advantage to the poor nor discriminate in favor of the rich but that both should respect each other.

But regardless of class, regardless of the division of employer and employee, the one thing that can destroy a sense of community as fast as stealing your neighbors food, is stealing their reputation.  Verse 16 says that you are not to go around as a slanderer and that seems to spill out into several similar injunctions about not hating your kin or taking revenge or bearing a grudge.  But slander is the theft of another person's reputation which, for many of us, is more closely cherished than our food or our furniture.

Those of you who really want to be God's special friends who have troubled yourselves to read my book, Christian Wisdom for Today, know that I have a special love for the wisdom sayings of that ancient monastic community from Alexandria in northern Africa.

These monks lived in huts and deprived themselves of all worldly pleasures.  They never took their fill of bread so that they would never be hungry for meat.  They never drank enough water to stop being thirsty so that they would never crave wine.  But the Desert Fathers said that it is far better to eat meat and drink wine than to consume the flesh of your brothers and sisters in gossip.

Frankly, I see gossip as being one of the most corrosive dangers to either a family or a church and yet it is almost impossible to be entirely free of it.

People can be quite strange.  Our conduct is sometimes abrasive or irrational.  And so we seek confirmation from others that we are not the only ones who find a particular person to be difficult to get along with or that their demeanor is such that they are a constant irritant.

Thomas a' Kempis, the writer of the spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, said that if we will only take the time to fully understand any person we will find ourselves able to be completely forgiving of them.

I had a campus minister when I was in college who encouraged us to work out our petty differences.  He suggested that if someone was really getting on your nerves that you should just go tell them, "I don't like you very much, I need to get to know you better."  Which I thought was absolutely hilarious advice until someone actually said it to me and meant it!  I'm not sure you should announce your intentions in just that way, but it is very likely that if you will invest the time and energy to draw a little closer to the people you like the least, you may, in fact, discover that their most distasteful attributes are not only understandable but that they no longer matter.

All and all, the Levitical code lays out the soccer rules for a fairly decent game on the field of life.  Don't steal from each other, don't lie to each other, don't gossip about one another, be generous with the poor and sensitive to the needs of the handicapped, and show justice to everyone.  And it is summed up with what Jesus later calls the greatest of the commandments, even though it is not one of Moses' top ten:  "you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Now this is the tradition that Jesus' inherited.  Clearly, this is a text he knew and freely quoted.  But if you take Matthew's gospel to heart, one of the things that Jesus does in Matthew's gospel most notably, is he takes this traditional Hebrew standard for creating community and he raises the standard so high that no one could possibly do it.

We're not doing everything it says in Leviticus that we should do but Jesus takes that chalk mark on the wall, climbs a ladder and makes a mark up by the ceiling and tells us that we should all be that tall.  Leviticus tells the children of Israel to love their kin.  Jesus tells his followers to go much farther and to love their enemies.  If someone strikes you on the face, stand there and let them do it again.  If someone takes you coat from you, give them your shirt as well.

For Jesus, loving the people who love you is too easy.  He wants us to love the people who hate us.

I love that scene in the Ben Kingsley movie about Gandhi where Gandhi has moved his family into an ashram and is trying to extinguish the traditional Indian cast system.  Everyone, he insists, must take their turn at every task in the community which meant that his upper cast wife would also have to take her turn cleaning the latrines which had always been the task of the lowest cast.

She told her revered husband, "Not everyone wants to be as good as you."

And I feel like saying that to Jesus sometimes.  The Jesus of Matthew's gospel often asks me to be a better person than I really aspire to be and yet, I can never quite say "no" to Jesus without feeling like I am cutting off some part of myself.

We're trying to do something here which is a lot more important than forming a successful soccer league.  We have a mission to be a prophetic witness to social justice out there, in the bad neighborhoods and at city hall.  But in here we have the potentially delightful task of creating community out of some otherwise fairly incompatible parts.

To do that, we can't steal from one another, attempt to diminish one another, lie to or gossip about one another.  But more importantly, Jesus tells us that we need to find a way to love the one who bugs us the most and it is just up to you to decide if you even want to be that good, but I know someone who seems to have hoped that you would try.

Declaring the Earth to be Good

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor  
February 13, 2011
                

Genesis 1:1-5  
1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

I was giving some New Testament lectures in a little seminary in Otavalo, Ecuador several years ago.  This largely Quichua Indian area, high in the Andes Mountains, is surrounded by the taller peaks of volcanoes, Gaugau Pichincha and Pichincha Ruca, whose occasional eruptions sometimes make into our news.  I noticed as my taxi driver took me from my hotel to the school each day that there were small fires lit, above the tree line, on the sides of the volcanoes.

At first, when I inquired as to why anyone would be so high up there and why they were lighting fires, my driver would mumble something like, "crazy peasants."  It took some persistence to finally get the explanation that the local farmers maintained a belief that the black smoke from their little fires would help to encourage the rain clouds to form and bring rain on their crops.

And, I suppose, as you can say of a lot of prayers, if you keep it up long enough, it does eventually work..... the rain does finally come.  Four hundred years after the Jesuits brought the Christian faith to that part of the world, some of their agriculture based earth religion still survives.

Obviously, the most primitive forms of all religions were nature based religions, trying to survive in a sometimes hostile and always capricious universe.  And they did not originally see it as a religion.... It was their science.  Religion evolved to explain why things are the way that they are.  The weather sometimes seems angry.  The fields sometimes refuse to bear fruit as if they were insulted like a jilted lover.

Clearly, they were wrong about a lot of stuff.  Science and religion often seemed to go different ways with one attributing to demons what another would attribute to a virus.  In the modern era, the two have often seemed at war with one another in a faith verses reason battle.

When environmental scientists began to warn us that we were nearing a tipping point in global climate change, the Rev. Jerry Falwell went on TV and said, "The fact is that there is no global warming.... I urge everyone to go out and buy an SUV... today."

I think that a part of the problem in this disconnect the Christian religion seems to have from a sincere reverence for the earth, was the movement from a more actively evolving religion into a religion based on religious texts.  Sacred scriptures were written in interaction with the culture in which they were written.  The values reflected in the pages of the Bible are attempts by the spiritual communities which produced them to interpret the meaning of their lives and as such, the Bible and other sacred writings have served us very well.

The obvious limitation is, however, the silence of scripture on matters which are of great urgency in our age but where not even thought of two thousand years ago.

Ancient cultures were at the mercy of the weather and the seasons.  They had no concept of being able to pollute the air and the sea.  They had no concept of running out of land or resources.

The ancient Hebrew scriptures essentially taught the faith community to dominate nature, to subdue it and make it serve their purposes without any thought of how that might end up destroying the planet in our age.

In the modern era our faith must become more nimble, not a battle of faith or reason but a new cooperation of faith and reason.  In many ways, the Buddhist faith is more adept at this than we are.  When the Dali Llama was asked by a reporter how the Buddhist faith coped with the explosion of scientific knowledge in the modern era, he replied saying that when science discovers a truth which is contrary to Buddhist traditions, Buddhism changes.

An excellent example of that came up when he was asked about homosexuality.  When the question became clear to him that he was being asked if Buddhism approved of sexually active same sex couples he had a very negative reaction, declaring that such a life is incompatible with faith.  When he was asked why, he sat and thought and then asked a few questions about fidelity and commitment in same sex relationships, and, as if the idea was just dawning on him, he said that if two people love one another and live in a committed, respectful and mutually supportive relationship that it should not matter whether they are of the same sex or the opposite sex.

I was relieved to hear that interview but I found myself marveling at it because it all seemed to happen so quickly.
I personally wrestled with that theological question for nearly 15 years before I was able to let go of my ingrained religious prejudices and arrive at the same conclusion the Dali Llama reached in about three minutes.

We Christians have had an inclination to try to use religion to trump facts, keeping factual scientific education out of public schools by declaring the superiority of our ancient texts.  And Americans are similarly guilty of using patriotism to trump facts, demanding an interpretation of everything in the world based on our world domination.  Sometimes patriotism and religion seem to merge, as in the attitude we have seen during our Middle Eastern wars in which we seem to be making the theologically profound and patriotically noble inquiry, "Why did God put our oil under their desert?"

A few years ago, when I had taken a rather angry and intentional sabbatical from parish life, my one concession to staying in touch with a church community was in leading a book study which met once a week.... Several of you were there and will remember that read together Bob Edgar's book, Middle Church.

Edgar is the former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches and prior to that he served six terms in the United State Congress.  From his long career in both politics and the church, Edgar composed a message to a dying church, a kind of prescription to save a patient which was circling the drain.

He argues that for the church to regain relevance in the modern era that we must focus on three profound ethical issues which are:
Addressing poverty  -  Advocating for peace
And restoring and protecting the environment
Two of those priorities the church can put its arms around if only we would just begin to take the teachings of the Christian and Jewish scriptures seriously.  Compassion for the poor is the most consistent theme in the whole of the Bible.  Advocating for peace and the things that make for peace.... Reconciliation, mutual understanding, forgiveness, generosity kindness, love..... that should be the most obvious expression of Biblical values.  We are not doing very well in those two arenas but they are not hard to find in the pages of our scriptures.

But the environment is left to go begging in the Bible.  Our sacred texts were written in a time and by people who had every reason to fear nature, they had no concept of nature having reason to fear us.  In many ways, this means that we must show the kind of flexibility that the Dali Llama showed in being willing to change course on what he had to say about homosexuality.

We have to be able to look at the facts and apply our spiritually trained ethical minds to this new situation.  Edgar quotes environmental scientist, David Orr's book, Earth in Mind, describing how, on any typical day:
...we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second.  We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation.  We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100.  Today the human population will increase by 250,000.  And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon.  Tonight the earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

Everyone has a right to their own opinions but no one has a right to their own facts.  Faith, faced with scientific facts, must stretch to accommodate new information.  The math of this situation is as direct as it is disturbing.

This is not about simply loving the wilderness.  This is bigger than enjoying canoe trips, fishing, hunting and wilderness hikes.  The facts point towards two issues that should bring the church to moral arrest.  The first is that we are poisoning the only environment in which we have to live so that we are cutting off the next generations from having the resources to survive.  We have no right to do that and we have a moral imperative to pass along to our children and grandchildren, a healthy planet.

The second is the fact that this is a huge issue of poverty.  Industrialized nations of the world create most of the greenhouse gasses that then create the climate change that destroys the livelihood of the poor.  The 2004 Asian tsunami was not caused by global warming, it was caused by and earthquake at sea but it gave us a chance to see how rising sea levels are going to primarily strike the poorest places in the world.

My friend, Dr. Jeanmarie Verchot, has a brother, Dr. Louie Verchot, who is currently living in Indonesia doing research on forest management.  You can see one of his videos on CNN.com's website by searching Indonesia and deforestation.  His work passionately underscores the way that demand for products in the developed world, results in the destruction of natural resources in the third world.  We clear off rainforests in South America for space to graze cattle to increase beef production.  The jungles of Indonesia are being cleared to produce palm oil, releasing centuries of stored carbons in the process.
We would not tolerate clearing our forests to plant cheap crops like sugar cane but we do it in Africa, in Asia and in Central America.  In most cases, environmental policies fall apart at the point of conflict between the right of the rich to exploit the poor.

I think that we are sometimes seduce into thinking that we can recycle our newspapers and drive a more fuel-efficient car and save the earth.  That isn't going to do it.  In fact, sadly, a lot of our recycling efforts use up more resources than they save.  Symbolic measures will not save us nor will individual efforts.

This is a point where the church must clear its throat and use its prophetic voice.  The necessary changes must take place on a national level as we invest in alternative fuels and energy production.  We must shift from private cars to public transportation.  We must build smaller and more efficient homes.  We are going to have to make some financial and life style sacrifices, literally living more simply so that the poor and the next generations can simply live.

If we live for ourselves alone then we shall collectively bring about the end of life on our planet.  If we will live for the welfare of others then, in truth, we become partners in creation with God.

Keeping Religion Real

Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
Feb. 6, 2011     Epiphany 5  

Isaiah 58:1-10                                  
Shout out, do not hold back!    Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.  2 Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. 
3 'Why do we fast, but you do not see?  Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?'
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day,  and oppress all your workers. 
4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.
 Such fasting as you do today  will not make your voice heard on high. 
5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:  to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house;
 when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? 
8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard. 
9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, 
10 if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

Matthew 5:13-16                                                                                        
'You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
14 'You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

On Thursday mornings when the guys are lining up to be served for lunch at Bill's Place, we pause for a moment of prayer.  I'm not sure that we are supposed to do that in a Burrell operated program.... In fact, I'm pretty sure that we're not, just like I know that it is not legal for us to be serving food there at all.... We are not, after all, health department approved and the city has passed an ordinance against expanding homeless services on Commercial Street but I feel like, being the kind of church that we are, that we should do a couple of things that are illegal every week.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, moral people are obligated to break immoral laws.

Besides, for all of the things that Jim Payne might have been arrested for in his life, seeing him handcuffed and carted away for feeding the homeless would seem like a real triumph!

But when I am there, I am the designated prayer.  We have a lot of folks who are better cooks than I am so I am rarely called upon to actually do anything any more complicated than bringing the paper plates but I say the prayer and I'm not usually too imaginative about that.  I thank God for the food and for the generous people who donated it and cooked it.

And I always add something to the prayer, asking God to help us to leave that meal inspired to show compassion to the people we meet who have not eaten, who are too paranoid to come into a crowded building.... Who are too frightened to leave their stash of collected old clothes and canned food that they have hidden in a storm sewer.  I don't want our guys at Bill's Place to see themselves always as victims in need of a handout..... they too will encounter people who need a hand.

They too can be a part of solving someone else's problems.  Most weeks, after we have served lunch we set out some take away foods.... Sandwiches or something wrapped that they can stick in their pocket for later.  I always like to imagine that some of those sandwiches and brownies are handed off to someone they encounter who is also hungry.

If you wait until you are all fixed up to show compassion.... If you wait until the house is paid off, the kids are out of college and your pension fund is fully funded.... If you wait until the world presents no real threat to your future comfort to show kindness to those who are in crisis then, my friends, we are going to find ourselves living in a very mean world.

When I looked at the scripture readings in the lectionary for today, I said to our musicians that I would like to have this text engraved in the stone of the walls of our church.  This says it for me.  Isaiah chides the hypocritical religion of his audience.... People who act like they are great friends of God while they go about trying to line their own pockets without caring about anyone else.  He quotes his fellow Jews who ask God,

3 'Why do we fast, but you do not see?  Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?'


Religious people can feel so sorry for themselves.  We pray, we go to church.  We have a fish emblem on the back of our luxury automobile and we have a big Bible on a hand carved olive wood stand from the Holy Land on the coffee table in our mansion's living room..... why doesn't God do more for us?

Isaiah loves to answer questions like that.  He explains to them:

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day, and oppress all your workers. 
4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today  will not make your voice heard on high. 
5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?

I don't want to necessarily make light of the popular religion which says that you have to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.... Even though that concept can be found no where in the Bible... the word "personal" isn't even anywhere in the two thousand pages of the Bible.  Just because Jesus never said anything like that and wouldn't have even understood the point of it is no reason for us to make fun of it.

But if you take the sum total of the expressed values of the cultural religion which bears the name of Christianity while having virtually nothing to do with Jesus and what he taught..... having a personal relationship with Jesus, inviting Jesus into your heart... being saved, being born again, being baptized in the spirit.... All of the rituals, sacraments, texts and liturgies..... you can do all of that stuff but if you rise from your prayers to go out and abuse your workers, to fight with your peers, to promote your own interests over the interests of everyone else then your religion is subject to derision, not necessarily from me or from us but by God.

Or at least that's what Isaiah says and who am I to argue with him?

Many mornings I start my day with coffee and an hour watching Morning Joe on MSNBC.  Joe and Mika are intelligent hosts who represent both conservative and liberal perspectives and they have a lot of important and intelligent guests but one morning when the subject of labor unions came up I was shocked that everyone on the set was united in their insistence that labor unions must make concessions on wages and benefits, on job security and health care in order to get the economy going again.

You can be a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative but when millionaires get together to talk about how the middle class ought to make sacrifices for the good of the aristocrats then they all start to look a lot the same.

I know that there are examples of abuse and greed among labor unions, and as soon as we get rid of the multi-million dollar bonuses on Wall Street and the seven figure salaries in the banking system then I think we really ought to take a look at some of those labor union issues.

So Isaiah is willing to patiently school his listeners in how to make their religion more relevant... remember now, Isaiah is not a politician.... This is not politics.... This is scripture.... Don't ever let anyone tell you that making religion relevant and real takes it out of the realm of spirituality and turns it into politics.  I'm not reading from some socialist handbook or communist manifesto.... This is the Bible and this is what Isaiah said that God expects from people who pray, and worship, and get born again:
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:  to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

If you don't do those things then your other religious gyrations are really just a disappointment to yourself and an insult to God.  I would have this carved on walls of our church because this defines our defiant view of the prevailing religious environment which is so hypocritical and so laden with magical thinking and superstition and self serving idolatry.

But we know all of that.  If you have attended here for two or three weeks, you probably could have rehearsed most of this stuff yourself.  The one thing I want to add to this conversation today is the awareness that Isaiah did not deliver this sermon on Wall Street or to a gathering of investment bankers or millionaire television hosts.

This is not the prophet who preached in Jerusalem before the fall of Judah.  This isn't even the poetry of Second Isaiah. This comes out of chapter 58, the third phase of writing.  This is a sermon preached in a ghetto in Babylon.  A sermon preached to slaves, albeit slaves who had been allowed a certain amount of personal property and business.  Even among the poor, there is a pecking order.  Even poor white farmers in my native Kentucky often had one or two slaves back in the 19th century.

Isaiah is not speaking to the well healed, not the rulers or politicians, not the plantation owners or the people with big shops in the market place.  He is speaking to people, many of whom are barely getting by..... people in the middle of what you might call a 40 year long economic down turn.  It was to these people that he was preaching that if they are not willing to share their bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into their own shack, to cover the naked with their own worn out clothing that their worship, their prayers, their songs and sacrifices were insulting to God.

I wonder sometimes how the very wealthy can stand themselves.  I wonder how a person with millions of dollars can fail to do everything in their power to address homelessness, hunger, the uninsured sick, the talented kid who can't afford to go to college, how do they turn their backs on the world in which they live.  And it is a great sport among we well intended middle class folks to console ourselves with thoughts of what we would do if we were among the elite club of the super rich.

It is a great pass-time but it has nothing at all to do with this text.  This text was not addressed to the super rich.  It was, in very truth, addressed to the barely getting by poor.  We can play "what I would do if I won the lottery" later.  Right now we're being asked to consider whether our religion is just a self serving, self deceptive joke, or if we really plan to take our faith to heart and do something godly with it.

Ah, people so often tell me that they are looking for a church where they can feel comfortable..... and I have to say, "well this isn't it."
If you can feel comfortable with what is being said in church then you really aren't much of a church.... Not one Isaiah would be caught dead in, that's for sure.

In the Sojourners community in Washington, D.C. they have a soup kitchen where they serve a hot meal to a couple of hundred homeless people every day.  Some of the people who once had to come there to eat, after they had gotten on their feet, gone back to work and had shelter, would come back and volunteer in the soup kitchen.

One of those former guests, a woman Jim Wallis called "Lucy," was, according to Wallis, their designated prayer.  Every day, before they unlock the front door to let the guests come in and be served, they would pause to pray.  And Lucy would pray, "Dear Jesus, we know that you will be among the people in line to eat today.  We pray that when it is our turn to serve you that we will show you kindness, that we will treat you with respect, that we may show some gratitude for those who served us when we were on the other side of the serving line."

Men and women, you are the salt of the earth.... Without you there is not much compassion, not much kindness, not much hope.  You are the light of the world.... Without you there is no hope for justice, no end to violence, prejudice, oppression.

And so, let us work together to untie the poor from the yoke of oppression,  to unlock the handcuffs of injustice, to liberate those held in bondage to poverty and discrimination.

Give us the courage, even in our economic insecurity, to share our bread with the hungry and to open our lives to those who are homeless, to open our closets and share our coats and boots with those who are cold and ill clad. Let our light break out of the bondage to fake and symbolic religion that we may, in fact, be God's own family.