Roger Ray, pastor
Oct. 16, 2011 Proper 24
Exodus 33:12-23This week's political theater opened a controversy I've been waiting for now for several months. Rick Perry was being introduced at the Values Voters' conference by a prominent Baptist preacher from Dallas, Robert Jefferies. Jefferies sought to undermine Mitt Romney, saying that, although Romney is a good man, he is not a Christian man because he belongs to a cult.
12Moses said to the Lord, "See, you have said to me, 'Bring up this people'; but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, 'I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.' 13Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people." 14He said, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." 15And he said to him, "If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. 16For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth." 17The Lord said to Moses, "I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name." 18Moses said, "Show me your glory, I pray." 19And he said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, 'The Lord'; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20But," he said, "you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live." 21And the Lord continued, "See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; 22and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; 23then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen."
This was bound to happen, especially as Perry is slipping in the polls and Romney has remained at a more or less constant level of depraved indifference on the part of Republican voters.
And, it is true enough, when I took a course in American cult religions at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the early 80's, Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses were included in a course that covered Moonies and the indisputably crazy Jim Jones of that era.
Currently, The Book of Mormon is playing to sold out crowds on Broadway and I've already bought the sound track because I can't wait for the show to come here. The Mormon Church does, in fact, pass the sniff test for a lot of what might make us call a religious group a cult. They suffer from the inconvenient fact that their founder, Joseph Smith, lived only a couple of centuries ago and his manipulative, con man antics are well documented.... So much so, that the South Park episode that made fun of Mormons did so without making up anything.... They just told the Joseph Smith story and the facts are hilarious enough.
But there has been a big public backlash against what Jefferies said because, quite frankly, as weird as Mormons are, they have a lot of company. The Southern Baptist Church and the Churches of Christ were formed as pro-slavery spin off's from their mother denominations..... not something they put in their literature either. And main stream church of Christ ministers still regularly teach that God is so very petty that if you have not been baptized by them by total immersion or if you attend a church that used instruments in worship that our kind and loving God will burn you up in a lake of fire for all eternity. I want to be respectful and inclusive of other faith traditions but folks, you just have to say that is 32 flavors of crazy.
And Mormons stand out as a recent and uniquely American church and you can make fun of them for their magic underwear but really, how different is that from the scapular you can get at a Catholic Church that if you wear it under your shirt it can keep a demon from jumping into your soul? And you have to be blind not to notice that the world's largest Christian denomination, the Catholics, and a whole lot of their cousins in various protestant flavors, still insist that you have to have boy parts in order to be a religious leader. Really? Really? You think God cares what is in your underwear rather than what is in your heart? Please!
And that whole celibacy thing? After all of the sexual perversion revealed in the past few years, the Catholic Church still can't give up on their hypocritical veneration of female virginity, male priest celibacy and condemnation of homosexuality? If I could get an afternoon alone with the pope, I could introduce him to several gay Catholic priests and to an even larger number of Catholic women who are saintly people who don't fit the virgin mother Mary image they seem to insist upon clinging to. When are religious people going to wake up to the fact that demonizing human sexuality is nothing less than demonizing humanity in its entirety?
After a firestorm of angry rejection of Perry's apparent endorsement of the idea that Mormons are a cult and Southern Baptists aren't, his wife came to his tearful defense claiming that her poor husband was being persecuted for being a Christian. Anita...... I think you have missed the point.... And, frankly, I think you have missed it on purpose. This kind of religious hypocrisy needs to be drummed out of politics.
I must beg your forgiveness if I am being rude in my attempt at being entirely honest. But one of the things I learned in my work in addiction recovery is that you can love the addict and support the addict in their recovery but you don't do them any favors by acting like you believe their lies. I want us to be charitable, I want for us to be tolerant, I want for us to encourage inter-faith dialogue, but I refuse for one second to act like I believe their lies just because they are religious lies. That's not good for us but more importantly; it's not good for them.
Progressive Christianity seeks to restore the voice of Jesus who was one of the world's greatest moral teachers and to accomplish that goal, we have resolved to rid ourselves of superstition, magic and any claim that any religion makes to having ownership of absolute truth or control over who receives eternal reward or punishment. That is an addiction I refuse to play along with and I hope you do to.
The awareness that no one gets to own the absolute truth is buried even in the most ancient strata of the Hebrew Bible. So far as the Jewish faith was concerned, no one who ever lived was closer to God than Moses. And in this drama described in Exodus 33, Moses implores God to allow him to have the beatific vision, to see God face to face.
And God says, according to this text, something that needs to be said Rev. Jefferies, and Anita Perry and Mitt Romney and to all the rest of us, and that is that no mortal can ever know that much about God. No one.... Not the pope, not Mohammed, not Jesus or Buddha..... and certainly not your or me.
God tells Moses to hide in a cleft of a rock and God will pass by.... This is a very anthropomorphic story, of course, assuming that God walks and has hands and feet. But it has to be told in an anthropomorphic way to make the point. And that is, Moses arrogantly wants to be shown what no mortal can see and as a consolation prize, God let's Moses see his back side.... Or, as my Old Testament professor said in the language of the 1980's, God mooned Moses......metaphorically speaking, of course.
As crass as this story is in some ways it makes the unmistakable point that if the greatest prophet of history is only allowed to see God's back side then the rest of us need to assume a bit of humility whenever we presume to make statements about stuff that no one can know.
The heart of the teachings of every faith is found in their teachings of ethical conduct in the here and now. Anything that is said about what happens in heaven or hell or in any unseen realm or afterlife should be taken with a grain of salt and a health dose of skepticism. We don't believe in magic, we believe in justice. We don't want to teach superstition, we want to develop character.
NPR was interviewing some southern voters this week, asking them if a candidate's religious affiliation mattered to them. One man replied, "It sure does, I'm not going to vote for anyone who doesn't believe in the niacin Creed." And, I know that he meant Nicene Creed but I think that he was on to something more substantive..... most of the Nicene Creed is unknowable truth claims which have little or no bearing on the teachings of Jesus but the niacin Creed, surely Jesus would want us to get our vitamin B.
But please, just no more BS.
In this case, as is so often true, the poet has a better grip on God's truth than the popes and prophets: (Michael Franti)
I don't need a passport to walk on this earth
Anywhere I go 'cause I was made of this earth
I'm born of this earth, I breathe of this earth
And even with the pain I believe in this earth
so I wake up every mornin' and I'm steppin' on the floor
I wake up every mornin' and I'm steppin' out the door
I got faith in the sky, faith in the one
faith in the people rockin' underneath the sun
'cause every bit of land is a holy land
and every drop of water is a holy water
and every single child is a son or a daughter
of the one earth mama and the one earth papa, so
don't tell a man that he can't come here 'cause he got brown eyes and a wavy kind of hair,
And don't tell a woman that she can't go there
because she prays a little different to a god up there,
You say you're a Christian 'cause God made you,
You say you're a Muslim 'cause God made you,
You say you're a Hindu and the next man a Jew
Then we all kill each other 'cause god told us to? NAW!
