Roger Ray, pastor
August 14, 2011 Proper 15
Matthew 15:10-20
10Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, "Listen and understand: 11it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles." 12Then the disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?" 13He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit." 15But Peter said to him, "Explain this parable to us." 16Then he said, "Are you also still without understanding? 17Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? 18But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. 19For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. 20These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile."
As we prepared for our 3rd anniversary, I happened to hear Billy Joel's famous song, "We Didn't Start the Fire," in which the former history teacher flashes through hundreds of images of historical events between 1949 and 1989. It struck me that if we simply added a couple of verses we could bring the song forward from 1989, blending national events with Springfield events and ending up with the creation of our church.
It turns out that writing verses of songs is not all that easy, particularly with the rapid-fire rhythm and rather irregular rhyme scheme of that song. In the last days before our rehearsal, it fell to Paul Thomlinson and me to push the lyrics back and forth. If you were here, I hope you liked it, but you won't see it posted on line because I'm not entirely sure of the legality of what we did.
If you were here and able to keep up with the rather dizzy pace of the song, it ended with the names and pictures of the staff with Jesus Christ Superstar thrown into the mix for gravitas. I ended the list rhyming with my own last name, "Roger Ray, what else do I have to say?" Paul felt that the line needed two more beats, so he edited the conclusion to say, "Roger Ray, marries gays, what else do I have to say?"
I wasn't sure that I wanted my 20 year long career in ministry in Springfield summed up in just those two words but it fit the needs of the song and made for an interesting image to end our presentation so, there you have it, two plastic grooms standing side by side on top of a wedding cake.
It is historically accurate to say that I was the first mainstream pastor in town to perform same sex unions and, sadly, it is still true, 20 years later, that I am among the few who insist upon treating straight couples and gay couples with equal respect and dignity. But it is also true that I have spent a hundred times as much time and energy on methamphetamine and other drug and alcohol addiction and treatment research and funding. And much more time still on poverty issues, welfare to work training, housing and nutrition.
None of which either rhymes with "Roger Ray, what else do I have to say," nor does it draw as much public attention. As important as the civil rights and social justice aspects of liberation in the arena of sexual orientation is, you have to marvel at how much time and energy is given to the symbolic nature of it all.
I perform same sex weddings but there is no marriage license in the state of Missouri.
Now, let me hasten to add that other than the child custody issues of marriage, virtually ever other legal privilege of marriage can be conferred on a gay couple through other legal documents.... And everyone probably should be careful to do that.
But most of the rest of the debate is symbolic. The research I spearheaded into Meth use in Springfield resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of treatment funding and influenced research and treatment here and in Asia..... that's very real. The work we've done in poverty issues has resulted in feeding thousands of people and building new houses for thousands of others..... that is literally concrete and steel.
But whether Mitt Romney is for gay marriage or against gay marriage..... or both...... Can you imagine two women sitting together at their breakfast table in Massachusetts, and Martha reaches out and takes Mary's hand and says, "Honey, I love you and I cherish the 20 years that we have spent together and you know how much I love our children. But when we first got together, Gov. Romney favored our sort of family but now that he has changed his mind.... I just think it would be wrong for us to stay together."
Because, of course, any vote on matters of sexual orientation is going to be symbolic.... A matter of opinion... but the fact of a couple living together, loving one another, supporting one another through good times and bad times, that's has very little to do with either licenses, ceremonies, politicians or preachers. One is real, the other is symbolic, and we need to not confuse the two.
Still, the issue has been debated and fought over in political campaigns for years and years, even though sexual orientation is a matter of personal reality and has nothing to do with the symbolic opinions and votes of either churches or states.
Religion is especially subject to getting substance and symbolism confused. Marcus Borg has very convincingly portrayed the entire conflict within the New Testament as being a conflict between a religion of piety and a religion of compassion. We have to be very careful to fall into simplistic anti-Semitism when we talk about this because the Jewish faith, like the Christian faith, is complex and there are people who practice Judaism in one way and others who practice the same faith quite differently and the same can be said for Christians, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists.
Jesus was in conflict with Jews whose religious practice was primarily focused on personal piety. They worried about kosher regulations of what you ate, what you wore, how you pray and on what days you work and the days you don't. In this gospel passage today, Jesus plainly says that all of that stuff is just ridiculous.
The spiritual life has nothing to do with whether eat bacon or wear blended fabrics but it has everything to do with whether you actually show compassion, kindness, tolerance, love and respect for others. But religious people are famous for making huge deals of symbolic things..... are you baptized by sprinkling or immersion? At birth or when you are "of age?" Do you take communion every week or every quarter?
How do you take communion and what do you believe about the communion when you are taking it?
My earliest memory of a great religious debate in my own home came when I was just 10 years old and I found my mother crying in the kitchen.... Which was a very rare sight! When I asked her what was wrong she explained that my older brother was marrying "someone from another religion." This can be very upsetting to families..... the proximity of Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan and Jews and Muslims in Palestine have made for any number of painful family mergers. In Glasgow, KY, my mother's tears were for the fact that her Christian Church son was marrying a woman from the neighboring Methodist Church.
Such a colossal waste of energy and emotion over what is purely symbolic is something we really have get past if communities of faith are to regain any sense of relevance in the modern world. There are members of the Jesus seminar who have speculated that the historical Jesus may not have been especially religious. I find such statements to be interesting but historically unlikely.
Clearly, he was a person of faith but if what these scholars are suggesting is that he was dismissive of the symbolic, magical, superstitious and merely pious aspects of faith, well, then I think they have a lot of sympathetic friends in this room.
In times of great adversity, throughout recorded history, people in desperate circumstances tend to gravitate towards a religion that is primarily other worldly. It reflects a kind of incurable cynicism about prospects for a better world in this life and so everything becomes focused on getting a ticket for the train ride to a better life in heaven.
My frustration with the religion I have encountered in the mountains of Ecuador and the jungles of Nicaragua is that it is almost always focused on personal piety in order to appease a rather neurotic deity who could give you eternal life in heaven but probably won't unless you learn the secret passwords and secret handshakes. In that event, isn't it obvious that the American backed evangelical churches supporting these missionary efforts are keeping people from using their spiritual resources, time and energy in actually changing the only world and the only life that we know that we'll ever have. We need a faith which addresses the reality of the world in which we live and not the imaginary or hoped for world that no one knows anything about.
Bill Maher recently observed that if you see someone talking to their hairdryer as if it were God, we would lock them up in a mental hospital. Take away the hairdryer, and they're just praying. But in politics and the church of today, there are any number of people who swear that the hairdryer is talking back to them..... and that, I submit, is a serious problem.
I want nothing to do with the religion that asks people to focus only on some promises of worlds unknown and unseen that ignores the very real and substantive circumstances of life.
I want a piece of the faith that kept Nelson Mandela alive on that prison rock in South Africa for 28 years, doing manual labor in the unbearable heat of Robben Island, and emerging to become the first black president of South Africa. Twenty-eight years! Do you think he was talking to his hairdryer in that prison cell when he knew what lay ahead of him when the sun rose the next day and the day after that, and the year after that? I don't want the religion that promises me that God will help me to find a parking place at the mall and keep it from raining on my Labor Day picnic.
I want a share in the faith of Martin Luther King, Jr. who kept leading marches for civil rights and organized labor even after his house and been bombed and he had been repeatedly beaten and imprisoned. I want the kind of faith that makes you step out on the balcony to speak to the crowds when you know good and well that someday there would be an assassin out there with a gun waiting for you.
You would think that the choice between symbolism and substance wouldn't be that hard.... It should be obvious.... But wars and broken families still seem to be on the casualty list of superstitious religious values.
I often cringe when I hear people say that they are spiritual but not religious but at least at this level, I am prepared to say the same thing about myself and about our congregation. The mainstream church is all but gone in Europe. It holds onto existence by its fingernails in on the east and west coasts of America.
The denomination in which I grew up was quite strong in Springfield when I came here 20 years ago, sharing about 1600 among six congregations on Sunday mornings. Those same six churches are now less than half their former size and I expect their decline to pick up speed in the years ahead if they don't put down their hairdryers and get back to being engaged in reality.
The world needs more ethically engaged spiritual communities than it ever has before and the mainstream church keeps not showing up on the job. We must learn from their mistakes and make certain that we don't follow their lead, falling into symbolic gestures while ignoring the fact that the world is on fire.
We didn't start the fires of injustice, war, prejudice, poverty, sickness and hunger but we will fight it.
