Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
May 22, 2011 Easter 5
1 Peter 2:2-10 2Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation-- 3if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and 5like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6For it stands in scripture:
'See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious;
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.'
7To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe,
'The stone that the builders rejected
has become the very head of the corner',
8and
'A stone that makes them stumble,
and a rock that makes them fall.'
They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people;
once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
In my very small hometown there was a country club. My family didn't belong to it but I never thought much about that until one of my friends from church asked me to go to the pool with him. In those days before air conditioning, going to the swimming pool was the best thing going on in town during the hot days of summer.
My brothers and I went to the large public pool. We had friends from school and from church there every day and it was not uncommon for us to spend the entire day there, every day, during the worst part of the summer. But one day I had agreed to meet a friend at the park to play tennis and then we were going to go swim, and at his invitation, I rode my bike with him to the country club.
It was a small town and so, once there, I recognized people that I knew from school, from church and some of the families from the Electric Coop where my father worked. After about 30 minutes, a life guard came over to me, a young woman who was actually a Sunday School teacher at my church, and she told me that I would have to leave because my family did not belong to the Country Club.
Small towns being the way that they are, word got to my father that I had been at the Country Club and when he came home from work he scolded me and told me never to go there again because it had embarrassed him for me to be told to leave.
I thought that my embarrassment was enough but he was embarrassed because, even though we had cousins at the Country Club. We had fellow church members and he had work associates there, still, we were a blue collar family and the Country Club was structured and priced in such a way as to make sure that it was a reserved only to the white collar or blue blood families in our little town.
These were still the days of segregation in the south so I can only imagine how it must have felt to have been black in Glasgow, KY. Even after segregation, there were neighborhoods where black folks lived and other neighborhoods where white folk lived and if a black person was in a white neighborhood, it had better be to come and mop someone else's floors.
Over the past decades we have done a lot to break down some of the clear divisions of the various "in" and "out" clubs of life. Jobs which were once male only can now be made open to women. Schools are integrated in the classroom even if they are still self segregated in the lunch room.
Neighborhood covenants which once restricted ownership to white Christians are now a historical embarrassment. And yet, after all of this progress, our nation is more divided than it ever was before, at least in my lifetime.
The political divide is a part of our daily bread now, being fed to us in the newspapers, on the radio as we drive to and from work and on TV news all night. It strikes me that we are in a terrible rush to re-establish a dark ages European economy in which the population is starkly divided between lords and peasants.
And it is not simply the people at the country club making certain that the Jews, blacks and blue collar folks can't get it..... it is often the poor who are fighting to make certain that they become more poor.... Insisting that we make it nearly impossible for labor unions to survive, working to un-do even modest progress in health care reform and championing legislators who consistently give billions in subsidies to big oil companies, military manufacturers and Wall Street bankers, all of whom are making record profits, while unemployment continues to rise, salaries fall and things such as home ownership and health care become unattainable to more and more people.
We need to be rebuilding the power grid so that we can build wind farms in Wyoming and solar collection farms in Arizona and move the power around the country. We need to be creating good paying jobs for Americans but what we are doing is creating a few billionaires and a few hundred million peasants.
I am mystified by why the poor and the middle class so consistently vote and act for their own demise but I think that at least a part of the problem is having had any self worth, self respect, or dignity beaten out of them by religion.
I sometimes make jokes about the use of guilt and fear to get things done around here. But as is often the case with humor, if there were not a substantially real side to it, it wouldn't be funny. Almost everyone in the modern west has been reared with a certain amount of religiously produced anxiety.
Parents take their kids to church, at least in part, to socialize them and get them to become a part of a moral, productive and decent society. However, the messages used to keep kids from being immoral, indecent or slovenly are often on the level of telling children that there are monsters under their beds who will kill and eat them the moment they fall asleep.
We tell them that their mortal lives are short and that at the end of this brief time of testing, they will either go to heaven for all eternity or they will be sent to a place of eternal painful punishment. We don't want them to be sexually immoral but religion often makes them fear their own bodies, assuring them that to even think about sex comes with it an eternity in the flames of hell. Unable to become something other than a human being, most become uncomfortably resigned to the fact that they are probably not going to ever see the pearly gates.
We want them to be honest and so we tell them crazy lies about how worthless they are, how evil, how corrupt and that their basic urges to eat, drink, sleep and have friendships all somehow lead them into paths of condemnation. It is amazing how the message of love and justice gets so perverted into a religion of guilt and fear.
I have often thought that one of the most important gifts the Jewish faith gave to the world three thousand years ago was the concept of the worth and dignity of every person. Whereas most ancient religions affirmed the royalty and insisted that the royal family was at least partially divine, while the peasants were made for meaner fair, the Jews insist in their scripture that we are all made in the image of God and the mere fact that we have breath is a sign of the spirit of God living in us.
The ruling class, whether it is in ancient Egypt, medieval Germany or modern day America, the ruling class uses religion to beat down the peasants into a subservient attitude in which they do not believe that they deserve to live well.... They don't really deserve good health care, a safe working environment, time off or prospects for a dignified retirement. The few use religion to control the many but if that were the only kind of spirituality on the menu, you sure wouldn't find me wearing a big black dress in public.
At the heart of the Jewish faith, the Muslim faith, for that matter, at the heart of the Christian scriptures is a sense of the dignity of every person. Peter says in our scripture lesson today, "once you were not a people,"..... you didn't have value. You were taught that you were born to wash someone else's dishes, mop someone else's floors and do the world the favor of dying as soon as you couldn't do hard labor anymore...... "once you were not a people, but now you are God's own people."
Healthy spirituality should elevate the human spirit. If our religion does not liberate us, inspire us, encourage us, then it might be time to go church shopping.
At least a part of why we Americans are willing to tolerate the growing disparity between the haves and the have nots is that a sick spirituality has taught us to accept being treated like dogs.
I think an honest reading of our Judeo-Christian faith tradition elevates our status. I remember reading a quote from an English Pet Cemetery gravestone set over the final resting place of a bulldog. It read, "Major: born a dog, died a gentleman." Do you hear that? Once you were not a people, now you are God's own family.
I love the old Spanish novel about Don Quixote de la Mancha. We most often mention Don Quixote in reference to foolishness, insanity or meaningless crusades. We say that someone is "tilting at windmills" to mean that they are all excited about something which is nothing.... Or we say that something is "Quixotic" to mean that it sounds noble but is, in fact, unattainable.
The character, Don Quixote, is, obviously, more that a little out of touch with reality but there are ways in which his unreality is better than the reality which has entrapped the minds of nearly everyone else in the novel. Quixote imagines himself to be a noble knight, and, like all true knights, his courage must spring from a passionate adoration of a worthy princess.
Quixote fixes his attention on a singularly unattractive scullery made who is a part-time prostitute, Aldonza. Don't let the fact that the part of Aldonza was played by Sophia Loren in the movie fool you. In the novel, Aldonza is described as being very unattractive, even stupid. But in the eyes of Quixote, she is not Aldonza, the unsuccessful prostitute.... She is Dulcinea del Toboso, the beautiful and elegant princess.
She rejects Quixote's adoration, telling him to see what everyone else sees in her, a fat, ugly sweaty prostitute whom men use and promptly forget. But on his deathbed, Quixote is visited by a beautiful lady and he asks her for her name and she says, "I am Dulcenia." Her transformation was complete, not because the world gave her the permission to rise above her former low estate but because Quixote had seen in her something which only required faith to reveal.
We have said in our vision statement that we want to give this church to Springfield as an example of a healthy spiritual community. What we didn't say specifically but which is an underlying assumption is that our community is abundantly supplied with unhealthy spiritual communities in which people are taught to despise themselves for their sexuality and mistakes in life. We are over supplied with churches that tie up burdens of guilt and fear on our shoulders.
A healthy spiritual community is a place of liberation, of forgiveness and healing. A healthy spiritual community is a place where you can be safe to dream of yourself becoming more than you have ever been, more than what others call you, more than how you have been treated.
This should be the place where all of us who have been told that we should be the Aldonza's of life are given the awareness that we are called to be Dulcinea.
Once you were not a people, but now you are God's own people.... The most powerful, creative, intelligent and important people who have ever lived. Don't let anyone ever tell you differently.
