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.
