The Renunciation of Privilege

Community Christian Church                     
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor    
Sept. 25, 2011   Proper 22

Matthew 20:1-16                                            
'For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the market-place; 4and he said to them, "You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right." So they went. 5When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same. 6And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, "Why are you standing here idle all day?" 7They said to him, "Because no one has hired us." He said to them, "You also go into the vineyard."

8When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, "Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first." 9When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. 10Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. 11And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12saying, "These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat."

13But he replied to one of them, "Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?* 14Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?"* 16So the last will be first, and the first will be last.'

When modern biblical scholars look at any one of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels, they impose a certain sniff test to question whether the saying sounds like something the later church would have created because they needed for Jesus to have said it or was it something they might have wished he had not said.  Anytime the gospels gives us a saying of Jesus that seems to be inconvenient to the later church.... Something they might have wished that he had not said, then we are more inclined to believe that it is historical.

The saying before us today is awkward, so awkward, in fact, that it is something of a wonder that it was preserved... which while it makes it more likely to be a reliable teaching of Jesus, we are still left to wonder what it could have meant.

We read this story where a land owner goes out and hires day laborers at four different times on a workday:  9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.  So some people worked 9 hours, some six, some three and a few folks only worked for an hour.  The land owner pays them all the same amount but the amount he paid was the standard price of a day's work.

The people who had put in nine hours of hot back breaking labor were outraged that the people who had only put in an hour got the same pay that they did.  No one had been cheated but still, it is clearly unfair.  And we might expect Jesus to weigh in on the side of the laborers who felt cheated but instead he takes the other side.

Ironically, the people who got a day's pay for working a full day, would not have complained if the other workers had been paid less!  That is, you gold brickers don't deserve to be treated as well as we are being treated.

The land owners reply, well, the English translation goes to great lengths to make it understandable but the literal translation is a bit more abrupt and more of a punch in the face.... It actually says something like, "Is your eye evil because I am good?"  Perhaps a better way to word it is, "You see me doing something generous and it makes you mad?  What does that say about you?"

The saying is so obscure I would be dishonest to tell you that it means some certain thing but one thing I think we can be fairly certain of that it was a part of a core of Jesus saying that is dismissive of our economic assumptions.  Jesus is not big on ownership, property, wealth or money.  The historical Jesus is not a practical person and the church has always done violence to his memory when they try to make him sound practical.

If Jesus had been made the ruler of some small nation I'm not sure that any of us would want to live there.

His teachings would not amount to a very well run and stable state.... He is a bit permissive about crime, indifferent about economics and didn't seem to put a lot of stock in things like going to work and raising a family. But we turn to the teachings of Jesus to question ourselves, our values, our assumptions.

When it comes to what you are entitled to, what is yours, what you deserve..... Jesus is not likely to help you out very much.  I don't believe that the historical Jesus was in anyway indifferent to the violence of poverty or social injustice but I am inclined to think that he was nearly entirely dismissive of human competition to be better than, more wealthy than, more comfortable than anyone else.

In eastern thought there was an inclination among spiritual people to be more devoted to self denial than makes sense to us in a modern capitalist society.  I do not doubt that the last phrase of the last point we print on our bulletin covers each week is the least read and least understood part of the eight points.

We say that we:  Recognize that being followers of Jesus is costly, and entails selfless love, conscientious resistance to evil, and renunciation of privilege..... OK, but what privilege exactly are we renouncing?  Ironically, we in middle class America very often do not see that we have any privilege at all.... Life is hard, demanding, filled with uncertainty and vulnerability. Fear and self preservation drive us towards greater individualism and pours conflict into our politics and into our families as we fight for survival.

We tend more and more to think of ourselves as individuals and we see ourselves as being less and less connected to one another.

If you will allow me to make something of a leap by illuminating a teaching of Jesus with a teaching of Buddha:

Buddhism teaches that one of the fundamental mistakes we make is to convince ourselves that we are separated from everyone else. They actually call this a primordial ignorance and the first of the three poisons out of which arise the other two poisons, greed and hate. We experience envy and anger and even become violent with others because we cling to this false perception.

The realization of wisdom is that this separation is an illusion. Even the "I" we think is so permanent is an illusion.  Buddhism teaches that through the path of enlightenment we may be freed of the pernicious effects of the three poisons. When we understand that the causes of hate and greed are illusions, hate and greed -- and the misery they cause -- disappear.

This isn't an easy concept but the more you meditate on it, the more obviously true it becomes.  Our willingness to renounce privilege has a very practical implication for society.

I was very impressed this week with something Elizabeth Warren said in response to all of the recent talk about class warfare.  She said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there--good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea--God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

I hope that this very frank and very factual description of the fabric of our capitalist democracy will form a space where conservatives and progressives can have meaningful conversation.  We are connected to one another.  No one in America is a self made millionaire. There is no disputing the fact that some are more productive than others, some are more burdensome to society than others.... We are not the same, we don't have the same intellect, habits or genetics but we are connected to one another.

People who work harder or longer than others, in spite of what Jesus may have said in this parable, do deserve a bigger piece of the pie but they don't deserve the whole pie.  And shame on you for wanting to take the whole pie and leave everyone else hungry.

We don't have to feel guilty about being warm and well fed if we aren't trying to keep other people from being warm and well fed.... If we are actively working to give everyone a chance to make it, to have a place at the table.  This whole, "I got mine, everyone else keep their hands off," is just not a spiritual world view.  We are connected by history, dna, and culture to the poor, the unemployed, the uneducated, the elderly and sick.  The belief that separate is an illusion.

This week, when the military policy of "don't ask, don't tell" came to an end, all of us who are straight but not narrow minded could rejoice with our sisters and brothers who are gay.  Because we are connected we say, "Do ask!  Do tell!"

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "We may have come to America on different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now."

Getting in Line Behind the Prostitutes and Traitors

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
September 18, 2011     Proper 21  

Matthew 21:28-32  
28"What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' 29He answered, 'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. 30The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir'; but he did not go. 31Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. 32For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.

In the regular debates about social justice issues, progressives tend to hold the moral high ground on matters of fighting discrimination against minorities, immigrants and gays.  We tend to have ethics on our side in discussions about immigration, education, poverty, access to health care, housing and food but when our critics have run out of ammunition in every other way, many will play what they consider to be their trump card:  But do you favor abortion?

Some of my critics think that topic is their crucifix, wooden stake, holy water and garlic to protect them from the obvious conclusion of facts and information.  Frankly, when I adopted an abandoned baby from a third world orphanage, I felt like I cast my vote on the abortion issue.  I am not in favor of abortions, per se, but I am dramatically in favor of a woman's right to manage her own reproductive life.  I will never get an abortion but the last time I checked, other than a really bad Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, I need to assume that I'm not in the club of people who need to be consulted on that issue.

But controversial issues are used to dismiss people when you can't think of any other good reason to dismiss them. It is called "redirection" in argumentation.
I quoted Thomas Jefferson in a conversation with a rather unhappy gentleman and he interrupted me and said, "Jefferson owned slaves, you can't take him seriously."  And, you have to admit, slave ownership is repugnant, horrible, virtually unforgivable, but does that mean that Washington, Franklin and Jefferson had no redeeming qualities?

Dorothy Day had an abortion and several affairs.  Martin Luther King, Jr. had lots of affairs.  Martin Luther had some pretty serious mental issues and Joan of Arc was clearly schizophrenic.  Mohammed was a polygamist.  Abraham Lincoln suffered from major depression and may have been bi-polar.  Gandhi refused to allow his wife to be given antibiotics that would have saved her life.  Winston Churchill smoked cigars..... which is just one of the things I like about Winston Churchill...but I digress.

Seriously, if you look at history as if you were writing for a tabloid newspaper you would see the world as being a place devoid of heroes.  But if you look for people who have accomplished a great deal, alleviated suffering, liberated the oppressed and made the world a better place, you could find a lot of exciting and wonderful examples.

As you have heard me say before, the primary conflict in the pages of the gospel is a conflict between a religion of piety and the teaching of radical compassion.  The pious religious leaders lived their lives carefully to remain untarnished by the world.  And there are some good things to say about piety.  We certainly want our kids to live their lives in such a way that they don't end up with a criminal record.  We don't want them to get pregnant in high school, or contract AIDS.

We want our kids to be productive, responsible and to enjoy a good reputation but if they need to go to treatment for addiction, do you want the rest of the world to look at them for the rest of their lives as being a second or third class citizen?

It is the fallacy of ad homonym, to try to insult a person's character to remove the credibility of their lives from them unjustly.  And this is often the native tongue of religious people.  We act like we're being pious when we are really just gossiping.

We skewer a person, like pinning a bug to a piece of poster board and then we identify them.... Welfare recipient.... Alcoholic..... divorced.... Gay..... convict... drop out....adulterer.... lazy.... Or worse, we have stooped to racism and derision based on language, nation of origin or family.

Jesus, a friend to the most outcast among the outcast in that environment.... And, you know, Jesus wasn't a rabbi.... Some people called him that but really, he was neither priest nor cleric.... Just the son of a poor family born under dubious circumstances.  But he look at those important dignitaries....the pious, the religious, the respectable community leaders, and he said, "You know, God likes prostitutes a lot more than He likes you.  God will prefer the company of the corrupt tax collectors over your solemn assemblies."

They didn't kill Jesus because he said that he was the messiah, they killed Jesus because he told those pious pompous priests that they weren't all that special.

This is, I believe, one of the real crises in leadership in our world today.  We have allowed our minds to be captured by the pious when what we really need in church and in government are leaders who can do something.
There are people in public life who have lost their status...., do you remember in 1972 when Edmund Muskie dropped out of the presidential campaign because he wept in public?  The same year Thomas Eagleton dropped out when it was discovered that he had been treated for depression?

Do you ever wonder how many wonderful, capable people never ran for office because they didn't want to be identified by having ever had a personal problem?  I have had people trying to recruit me to run from everything from the school board to the state legislature but I already know what it is like to have been the victim of a puritan witch hunt and I would never subject myself to that kind of thing again.

Politics can be mean but the church can be more so and family can be even worse.  The nip in the air this week reminds us that summer is coming to an end and fall is on the way.  In a couple of months it will be Thanksgiving and a month later it is Christmas.  This is my first full year as an orphan and my daughter still lives with me but pretty soon my life time of traveling to be with my parents on holidays will give way to waiting to see if my daughter will be coming home for the holidays.

For more than 30 years, during those horribly challenging years of being a full-time graduate student and a full-time pastor, but loading up the car for a long drive every Thanksgiving and Christmas, exhausted and yet pressured to take what I euphemistically called our "holiday guilt trips" so that I could get caught up on what all I was doing wrong in life.

So, let me say a pastoral word to all of you who are hoping to have in-laws and out-laws coming to your patriarchal home this holiday season:  Jesus liked the prostitutes and tax collectors more than the pious people who did everything right.
Seriously, you cannot judge your kids into perfection.  You cannot manipulate your kids with guilt or judgment into becoming the happy family you imagine. You cannot gossip your way into having the church of your dreams and you cannot dissect politician's personal lives to create the country you want to live in.

Give me a politician with a track record of accomplishments even if she or he has had a few major screw ups along the way.  Give me a church that is willing to stand for something, even if they don't always get it right.  Give me a family full of interesting people who live their lives to the fullest, even if their skeletons are hanging in the living room rather than the closet.  I don't want my daughter to fail in marriage, career or life but I don't want her to be afraid to try.... Certainly not out of fear of her very Reverend father's judgment.

What I'm suggesting is, give your kids a Christmas present early, keep your opinions to yourself over Thanksgiving.

I realized many years ago that the Jesus of the gospels was tolerant of everything except intolerance.  He was a friend to tax collectors and sinners.  He hung out with prostitutes and the rejects of society but the only people he ever insulted, yelled at or condemned were religious leaders who passed judgment on others and that is a consistent element of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Mark Twain used to say that he would prefer to go to Heaven for the weather but to Hell for the companionship.  Ironically, it appears that Jesus felt the same way, which gives us some reason to hope for those of us who like to keep company with people who have bad reputations but who are a lot less pious.  On this one, I can clearly say that I'm with Jesus and I hope you are too.

Ten Years On

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
Sept. 11, 2011  Proper  19



Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35

Twenty years ago this fall, the Disciples of Christ held their General Assembly in Tulsa, OK where they were slated to vote for Michael Kinnamon as their new General Minister.  Michael had been asked in an interview a month or so before the vote if he was in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to be ordained to the ministry.  His answer was "yes."  And that was when the issue of homosexuality hit major denominations across the country.

And I will confess that when that happened, my life was changed and my education in sexual tolerance began.  I knew of a couple of lesbians in high school.  There were some openly gay people in my college theater group and several in seminary but none were my personal friends and though they seemed a bit odd to me, I never thought about the matter very much.

But when I heard people wanting to skewer Michael Kinnamon because he was open to gays and lesbians, I had to pay attention because I knew Michael and I thought he was about the most intelligent and spiritual person I had ever known.  This was complicated by my having just moved to Springfield and I inherited an associate pastor who was gay but who was afraid to speak up on his own behalf.

And so, without every planning it or having a moment to prepare, I was thrown into a religious battle which has defined a lot of the past 20 years of my life.  The issue of gay marriage and homosexuality in the Church has been a dividing topic in both religion and politics.

And as painful as the battle has been, ironically, I can say that if the people who wanted to condemn homosexuals had not been so loud, so cruel, so vicious, then the issue might never have received much public attention.

The plight of gays and lesbians in this nation has steadily improved, not in spite of the attacks they have suffered but, if I may say it just this way, their circumstances have improved because of the attacks.  The cruelty and judgmental condemnation from the religious right has forced the rest of us to wake up, pay attention and learn a lot about this community of people who have been hiding in plain sight since the earth had cooled enough for life to take tentative steps on the soil.

I had managed to skate through 12 years of ministry without ever discussing the issue a single time, until in 1991, a firestorm of condemnation was falling on the gay community and there was going to be a casualty in the office next to mine if I tried to remain neutral.

We are often reminded that the Chinese charter for "crisis" is made from two different characters, the character for "danger" and the character for "opportunity."  A crisis, by definition is dangerous.  Bad things can happen in a crisis but a crisis is also a time when the fruit basket is turned over... when the established order is disturbed, we have the opportunity to rearrange our reality.

Gay people had been forced to live nearly invisible lives in most of the world for most of history but when they were attacked, reasonable people of good conscience were awakened and motivated to change the dialogue.  The battle is not over and yet, the outcome is certain.  State by state, legal barriers to same sex marriage will fall and congregation by congregation, religious prejudice will fade away.
Ten years after that crisis in church and politics, we were even more suddenly ushered into a new crisis by the terrorist attacks on September 11 in 2001.  There had been previous incidents, the revolution in Iran and the hostage taking in 1979, but on September 10th of 2001, the largest terrorist act in American history had been a domestic militant Christian attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City.

How much did you know about Islam on 9-11?  I had read some chapters in a world religion text book but if you had, on that day, asked me to tell you anything at all about Muslim faith; I would have stammered and guessed for a few seconds before shrugging my shoulders.

I will not bore you with stories of where I was when I first heard the news.... We all remember the day as clearly as if it were yesterday, I will only say that a long scheduled meeting at church was canceled because no one had the heart to go on with business as usual.  I went home in a kind of fog, passing gas stations with long lines of cars waiting to fill up because so many people were having hysterical reactions, acting as if the Mongol hoard would be invading Springfield at any moment.

The only Muslim I knew in Springfield was a man who lived across the street.  He worked in Jefferson City and I went and knocked on his door to offer my friendship and support in what I knew would be a dangerous time for him.  He was not home.  He was, in fact, holed up in his Jefferson City office, afraid to venture out and come home.  And so I did the only thing that I could think of to do.  I mowed his yard.

Because, men and women, you have to think about where you want to end up to know how to start a journey.  I didn't know spit about Islam ten years ago but I knew that we were in a crisis and the danger was that Muslims would be portrayed as our enemies and a cataclysmic war was distinctly possible.

I knew that it would be wrong to blame all Muslims for those horrible attacks and I knew that going to war against terrorists was both illogical and virtually impossible.

More people died in that single terrorist attack than in any other in the history of the world.  But the issue is not simply a body count.  We don't know how many tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of our decade of war since 9-11.  We do know that more of our soldiers have died in the prosecution of those wars than were killed by the initial terrorist attack.  And, in terms of sheer volume of violence, more than 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug wars just south of our border since 9-11 and almost no mention is made in our media about the fact that we are both funding and arming that civil war.  It is as if it were not happening.

As horrible as it was, the issue is not the death toll.... It is our total shock at the nature of the attack.  It is that memory seared into our minds of seeing people jumping out of windows, falling to their deaths on the pavement below to avoid the more painful death of being burned alive.  It is our awareness of the sacrifices made by fire fights and police officers who bravely rushed into the burning, crumbling chaos to save as many people as they could, aware that many of them would die in the process.

50,000 people worked and did business in the World Trade Towers on a daily basis.  I assumed that the death toll would be in the tens of thousands if not, in fact, a hundred thousand.  The organization and bravery of those public servants can be credited with a lot of the reason why the body count was not much much higher.

But our reaction to the event has not made much sense.  A few months ago, my friend, Jeanmarie, and I took a trip to visit some of my friends in Kentucky.  While there we spent a day at Mamouth Cave National Park near my hometown.  We took a cave tour which starts out with all fifty or sixty tourists gathering in a cavern near the entrance to listen to a little safety speech delivered by the tour guide.

I shouldn't have, I know, it was childish and a little mean, but when the tour guide got to sentence where he said that more than ten thousand bats live in the cave, I made the sound of flapping wings...... the woman in front of me screamed... but then she turned and looked at me and could tell that I was the one who had frightened her and then she punched her husband.

She explained, "I know you did it but I don't know you and I had to hit someone."  That's not really logical but it is very American.  When we're scared, we feel like we have to punch someone.  When that is done on a national level with armies and war planes, we reveal the very worst side of our character.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.  Any testimony linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda was obtained by repeatedly water boarding prisoners who said what their interrogators wanted to hear.  On the strength of that obviously bad intelligence, we have wasted the lives of our soldiers and Iraqi citizens as well as trillions of much needed dollars hitting someone who didn't do it.
That has resulted in a decade of war which has not made us safer but has, in fact, made terrorism more likely and has left us on the threshold of what many are calling "a perpetual state of war."

The goal of a journey defines the path.  If you want to end up in St Louis, you don't drive towards Tulsa.  If you want to end up with peace and security then you must make steps that lead in that direction.  The attack on 9-11 required a meaningful response.  We obviously couldn't start out with a tea party to discuss our differences.  But if the goal is peace, what do you do to move in that direction?

In many ways, similar to the crisis in the church of the previous decade, I took this crisis as an opportunity to learn and grow.  I immediately put together a class in world religions, specifically to have a chance to study Islam with my parishioners so that we could all learn to tell the difference between those who were dangerous terrorists and the one and a half billion Muslims in the world.

We have been so shocked, so frightened, so sickened by what happened that anger and hatred are always close at hand, easy options for dealing with the pain of 9-11.  And anger and fear will take hold of us unless we choose to go in another direction.

The Apostle Paul reminds the Roman church that we are not all going to agree on matters of faith but we must not allow ourselves to despise those who disagree with us.  Paul is never very good at hiding his own prejudices, saying to them that they should "welcome those who are weak in faith," which you can bet is not how the people who disagree with Paul would describe themselves.

Muslims often think that we are morally lax and doctrinally messed up polytheists.  We often think they are extremists locked into the middle ages.  In fact, European Crusaders a thousand years ago often called the Muslims religious extremists which is pretty odd since they had walked all the way from England, France and Spain to fight them in the name of Christ!  Religious hypocrisy is present on both sides of this equation!

Our gospel lesson lies at the heart of the religious solution to a world crisis in which religion has so far played the role of a villain rather than the heroic role we would like to choose for ourselves.  Religion has taken a part in creating this rift and now religion needs to play a bigger role in healing it.

If what we really want as our goal is peace and security, the necessary path to that goal is the one Jesus talks about here.... The path of forgiveness.  Even when there is a lot to be forgiven.... Even in light of memories so painful that we can barely stand them even ten years later, the right path is the path of forgiveness.  And it is a long long journey.

I will share with you that there are five guys in this church who made a pact a couple of weeks ago to encourage one another in losing weight.  The five of us added together make up nearly 3/4 of a ton and so we have a bet about who can be the biggest loser between now and Thanksgiving.

We are all taking this very seriously.  I have started exercising every day.  I have cut back my calorie count to less than half of what I normally eat.  I have cut out breads, potatoes, rice, and all fried foods.  I eat very little meat and a whole lot of raw vegetables.
And it is working, we're all losing weight.  But the hard thing for me, after passing up donut holes and hot dogs, driving past burgers and saying no to fries, after walking three or four miles every single morning and yet, when I catch my profile in the mirror, I'm still fat.  It make me feel a little bit like God hates me or something.  Now, I mention this but don't misinterpret this self revelation as being permission to give me advice or to talk to me about dieting.  This is an illustration, not a public invitation.

My issue is that I'm being so good!  I'm denying myself so much but I'm still fat.  Because real change takes time.  You can't do the right thing for a week or two weeks and then everything is OK again.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."

We grieve the loss of life from terrorism and from warfare.  We grieve the prejudice born of misunderstood and distorted religion which has led to violence and death, poverty and want.  We resolve to forgive today, knowing that we will have to forgive tomorrow too, and the day after and next month and next year because we are on a journey to peace and we will not rest until we get there.