Toxic Religion

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
January 29, 2012   Epiphany 4   
 

I Corinthians 8:1-9                                
Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that "all of us possess knowledge." Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; 3but anyone who loves God is known by him.
4Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that "no idol in the world really exists," and that "there is no God but one." 5Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth--as in fact there are many gods and many lords-- 6yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
7It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. 8"Food will not bring us close to God." We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. 9But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

A woman limped into my church office one day when I was a graduate student serving a little county seat congregation in southern Kentucky.  She had been to see me a few times but this time she looked much worse than ever before.  She had survived a brutal beating.  She had a broken nose and broken ribs, she limped from having been repeatedly kicked.  She was a nurse in the local hospital and had told them too many times in the past that she had fallen down the stairs and so this time she feared going in for treatment because if the emergency room doctor called the police she might lose her job and if she lost her job, she was sure her husband would kill her.

I begged her to let me call an attorney, to take out a restraining order, to file for divorce.  She shook her head and wept.... She couldn't.  You see, she was a Catholic.... She had been a nun and she left her convent twenty years ago to marry the man who was now her abuser.  She had been to see her priest before she came to see me.
He had told her that this was happening because she had broken her vow and that now these beatings were her cross to bear.  I knew Father Tom.  I knew him to be a kind and sincere man.  But I could also hear him saying those words..... a vow to God is a vow that is not broken without severe consequences.

I can name Catholic priests, monks, professors and authors all day long who are wonderful, insightful, spiritual people.... I'm not trying to tar the Catholic Church with a single brush but neither am I willing to white wash the offenses because of the good on the other side of the scales.  If you can't tell the truth in church, then where can you?

Earlier this month, Aaron Anson wrote an article for the Huffington Post about his struggles with coming out to his family.  He says, "My cousin was a teenager when my family first learned he was gay, and you would have thought an airplane had crashed in our backyard. The malicious, bigoted religious rhetoric that ensued stunk to the heavens. I'm certain it contributed to my remaining closeted for the next 20 years. When I finally did come out, you would have believed Jesus himself had shown up in the backyard that time. Their rhetoric was condescending, venomous, and loaded with ill intent."

He writes about the "It gets better" initiative which is now more than two years old, in which celebrities and other adults post articles and videos to reassure young people who are being bullied and harassed to help prevent the epidemic of teen gay suicide.  Of course, there are also examples of people who have posted reassuring videos who later decided that it didn't get better and they have also taken their own lives.

Anson is making the point that a lot of the anti-bullying effort is aimed at public schools and colleges where peer abuse makes young gays feel that they will never ever be accepted but the fact is that the most vicious, the most damaging bullying doesn't come from school or peers..... it comes from church and family.

It's hard to accurately talk about numbers because I believe that many teen suicides are not reported as suicides and the ones that are, are often reported in a way to allow the family to pretend that they have no idea why their son or daughter took their own life because they would not be willing to admit to the abuse they had dished out themselves and to the derision to which they had subjected them in Sunday School and church.  Because, it shouldn't matter to us if it was 1 suicide or 1,000 suicides and, frankly, of the 4 to 5 thousand people who take their own life in America every year, no one knows how many of them are the direct result of sick religion but I suspect that most of us would guess that more than half bear the marks of religious persecution.

In the biblical text we read this morning, Paul is imploring the members of the church in Corinth to get along with one another even though they will not all agree on everything.  Now, you have to understand that getting a letter from Paul telling you to be more understanding of one another's differences of opinion would be a little like getting a phone call from Charlie Sheen asking you to reign your behavior in a little bit.

There is a tension here that I simply must beg you to take very seriously.  On the one hand it is incumbent upon those of us who insist upon being open minded, unjudging, compassionate and accepting.

It is not too strong a statement to say that the survival of the world is dependent upon people being willing to let other nations, other peoples, and sometimes our immediate neighbors to have different religious, political, economic and family values and beliefs.

However, you cannot say that religious beliefs that tell battered women to remain in a marriage where they know they will be abused.... You cannot defend someone's right to believe differently if they are using their beliefs to drive teenagers, and sometimes the teenagers under their own roof, to commit suicide.  You cannot say that the religions that have defended slavery, child labor, sexual and gender oppression are mere matters of opinion.

If you need to believe that the Noah's ark story is literal history.... If you insist that Moses really did divide the Red Sea.... If you insist that a snake talked to Eve and a donkey talked to Balaam, and a fish swallowed Jonah.... As much as that kind of talk offends the religion professor in me, we have to say, "Go ahead."

But when you quote the gospels to say, "the poor will always be with you" to justify not trying to fight poverty, or if you quote Paul saying that women should be subject to men and should keep quiet in public, or if you insist that the Levitical injunction to stone gay men is something you must do..... then I have to call "foul."

It is far too simplistic, far too dangerous, there have been way too many deaths, and too many destroyed lives to say that we have to respect and honor whatever someone decides to call their religious values.
There is sick religion and there is healthy religion and we must not be afraid to make that distinction and depending upon the severity of the illness, we may need to make that distinction very forcefully.  I do not know if the woman that I told about a few minutes ago managed to get out of that family alive but I know that I didn't do her any favors by respect her priest's pious Catholic views..... I shouldn't have just tried to talk her into believing differently.... I should have walked the two blocks down the hill in Russellville, KY and gone into the manse at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and said to my colleague and friend, "Father Tom, we have to talk."

If we are too timid to confront religion that has a body count of victims then, my friends, we are too timid.  Progressive Christians, of all people, cannot justify any compulsion to stand idly by and pretend that abuse is not happening in the name of being polite.

As Karen Armstrong says in her autobiography, "If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

I asked Paul to come sing Ziggy Marley's song, "Love is my religion," today.... My apologies to our YouTube viewers.... We can't legally include the song in our recording but you can look it up yourselves.

His simple lyrics declare that after searching for meaning in the religions and Bibles of the world, he had reached this one conclusion:  Love is my religion.
He says, "I don't condemn and I don't convert cause no one is gonna lose their soul."

Madeleine Albright wrote a book a few years ago entitled "The Mighty and the Almighty," in which she carefully talks about the ways in which Jews, Christians and Muslims have allowed their religious differences to repeatedly draw the world into violence and war but she emphasizes that these same religions also contain within them the cure for war and violence.  Faith can heal the world, faith can be the basis for compassion and peace.  Albright says that we must encourage the angelic tendencies in each nation, in each religion, to reinforce that which is healthy even when we cannot always do surgery to simply remove that which is malignant.

When the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about letting one another disagree on matters of personal preference, he spoke from the background of someone who came from a toxic faith.... Paul had been a man who had been willing to use the law to imprison and use his religion to justify murder of people who had, in his opinion, perverted his religion.

Most of us here would not be happy to hear that someone had followed us around with a video camera 25 and 30 years ago and were ready to play clips such as what we see in political attack ads these days.  We are not unfamiliar with toxic faith, poisoned family values, and nationalism driven by misinformation, racism and fear.  We have simply decided that we want to be better than that....
We don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past... we want to emerge into something better.

I think that Millard Fuller had the right idea when he tried to get Catholic and Protestant, Fundamentalist and Main Stream churches to come together to build Habitat for Humanity houses. Fuller called it, "the theology of the hammer."  You don't have to agree on doctrine, sacraments or what happens to you when you die; you just pick up a hammer and help build a house for a homeless poor family.

We should try whenever it is possible, to find common ground with all other religions and every flavor of Christian.  We should work with them to fight poverty, support civil rights, promote justice and defend the weak, but we should never be afraid to speak clearly about our belief that liberation theology is the obvious conclusion for anyone whose religion is love.

I believe that we should be more gracious towards our critics and those on the opposite end of the theological spectrum than they are towards us, but as I have said before, peace in the absence of justice is just surrender and people of faith should never consider surrender an option.

I have been told that the French Foreign Legion had a motto that went something like, "If I falter, push me.  If I stumble, help me up.  If I retreat, shoot me."  That may be a little strong for church folk but really, what possible excuse do we ever have to turn our backs on the victims of abuse no matter what religious excuses may be used.  May God do this and more also if we ever fail to be heroic in the face of injustice.

Do You Do Well to Be Angry? (or, I'm Already Against the Next War)

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO  
Roger Ray, pastor
January 22, 2012   Epiphany 3

Jonah 3
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2"Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." 3So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across. 4Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
5And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. 10When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

The story of Jonah is an Old Testament parable and it is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful and most misunderstood books in the Bible.  It is not intended to describe a historical event.  This short work doesn't tell us about a real person or a real city and, much to many folks disappointment, not even a real whale.  It struggles to tell us something about God and our anger.  And like any well crafted parable, it is full of irony, humor and dramatic action.

The story is set up this way: a Jewish man is called by God to go and preach in the capital city of Assyria.  It is set in a time when Assyria has destroyed Israel and pretty well messed up Judah and all of their neighbors.  Assyria was practicing that ancient form of warfare which built their national wealth by stealing everything of value from all of their neighbors and enslaving their population.  Assyria had never done anything good for any Jew and had done every outlandish, criminal, reprehensibly violent thing they could do to destroy the Jewish people.

So, this is a very tense set up.  God tells Jonah to go and preach to the people he hated the most.  Now, Biblical scholars agree that this story is not nearly old enough to have been written in those days of Assyrian rule.  It was written much later, two or three hundred years later.
It was written in a time when the tiny little remnant of Jews were trying to rebuilt a scrap of a nation on the ruins left behind after nearly a century of slavery in Babylon.  In those days of reconstruction there was just an awful lot of anger.... they had been bullied, robbed, burned out, sold into slavery and then finally dumped totally vulnerable in a nearly barren land in a city with no walls and very little to eat.

The person who sat down to write Jonah lived among a rag tag bunch of survivors who kept themselves alive by feeding on how much they hated Babylonians, Egyptians, Syrians and just about anyone who didn't look and sound Jewish.  And when people are so certain that their hatred is justified, when they know for a fact that their blood thirsty prayers are heard by God it is very very difficult to offer an alternative position.

Sometimes, when people are that mad, using a little slap stick humor is the only way to break the ice.  So the story starts with Jonah going the opposite direction from where God wants him to go.  And God causes a great storm to strike the ship at sea.  And even pagan gentiles are getting religion trying to beg God to help them.

They finally throw Jonah overboard into the raging sea and the sea calms down and a giant fish swallows Jonah and swims for three days to deliver him to the shores of Nineveh.  See, everyone in this story is totally obedient to God.... the weather, the sea, the fish, and even pagan sailors but one person is defiant of God's will..... the preacher!

Cause, see, he has got a serious mad on.  It is not just that he thought Judaism was that much better than the religion of Assyria or that Judah was just all that much better than any other nation.... it was that he had seen the wreckage, the slaughter.... he knew people who had been killed, enslaved, raped and robbed.  His anger was a righteous anger that doesn't really believe that anyone who disagrees with him can be anything but stupid or evil and probably some of both.

Jonah walks into the middle of this huge monstrous city and delivers a short and pretty sad attempt at a sermon.  He preached a sermon predicting the immanent destruction of the city.  And against all credible odds, the entire city repents.  The story teller wants us to believe that everyone from the King to the cattle in the field repented!  Best revival in the history of the world!

But, of course, that is part of the irony.  Jonah didn't want them to turn from their evil.  He wanted God to destroy them.  Isn't that God's business?  Destroying evil people?  Doesn't God see the injustice?  Doesn't God become outraged by the mass destruction?  Doesn't God want us to wipe out Nineveh and every city like it?

Jonah goes up on a ridge over looking the city to watch and see if they'll mess up.... maybe God will go ahead and bomb the city anyway.  You know, it gets hot when you don't have anything but your anger to keep you company.  Jonah is just sitting up there, waiting, watching, hoping they'll mess up.

In Alcoholics Anonymous they say that anger is the dubious luxury of ordinary people.  It is a luxury because it is an emotion that some people can revel in but recovering alcoholics know that it is a luxury they can't afford.

If they get angry then it won't be long before they also get drunk.  But it is a dubious luxury because even people who don't get drunk don't seem to get much good out of it.  Anger doesn't seem to make people very smart.  It doesn't make them spiritual.

It doesn't make them compassionate or loving and a whole lot of the time it makes them do something really destructive, usually self destructive. The wisdom of A.A. is that when I am angry it usually means that there is something wrong with me.  The Big Book of A.A. calls anger poison and it may well be.

But let me return to the Biblical story.  Jonah is sitting on the ridge watching the city and a vine grows up over the little shack where he is sitting and the vine is the only decent thing that has happened to Jonah.... at least the vine offers some shade from the hot sun.  However, just as the weather, the sea, the fish and the pagans are all obedient to God, now even a worm is sent to do God's will..... a worm eats through the vine and it dies and that, for Jonah, is the last straw.

He rants at God:

He said, "It is better for me to die than to live."
But God said to Jonah, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?"
And he said, "Yes, angry enough to die."
Then the LORD said, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left...?
When God asks Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry?"  Jonah doesn't even understand the question..... because, you see, anger can be its own logic. Why wouldn't he be angry?  Angry at the Assyrians for their violent sins.  Angry at God for not destroying them.  Angry at the vine for dying and making him so uncomfortable..... angry enough to die.

You know the routine...... angry at illegal immigrants so that when you see signs in Spanish at the hardware store you are afraid that you are losing your country.  Angry at Muslims who raise terrorists and who have no remorse for their heinous deeds.  Angry at auto workers for demanding salaries that bankrupt American businesses.  Angry at bankers who helped to wreck the economy.  Angry at gay people for wanting the same rights as straight people.

It is not that Jonah and his people did not have a reason to be angry, it was that he had a better reason to get over being angry.  The message of Jonah to the people who first read it was that their captivity in Babylon was over and it was time for them to stop hating and to accept the interracial marriages among them, the mixed blood Jews, the Jews who spoke other languages or who had family members who were of another religion.

But the stakes are much higher today than they were for the first people who read the book of Jonah.  War in the 21st century is a lot more serious than it was 2500 years ago.  Our nation has been at war for the past decade and we appear to teetering towards starting a new and probably much more bloody conflict than the last two wars we've been in.  I want to ask you to look at a couple of maps.

This is a map of Iran.  The ten American flags around Iran show where we have American military installations.  This second map is a map of the United States which shows all of the Iranian military installations surrounding us..... you may notice that there aren't any.

Let's look at that again; here are the American military installations around Iran.  And here are the Iranian military installations around the USA.  One of these nations is accusing the other nation of having aggressive military objectives and is seriously talking about a pre-emptive invasion to stop them from their insane rouge military objectives.  Now, I'm no expert on these things but if you looked at this map from Iran's perspective, would you feel inspired to beef up your arsenal?

We are being asked to be very frightened by the prospect of Iran developing a nuclear weapon because they might use it against Israel.  Again, I'm no expert but Israel has an estimated 100 nuclear weapons and I suspect that what would keep Iran from bombing Israel is the same thing that kept us from bombing Russia and Russia from bombing us during the Cold War.  I wish that we could rid the world of all nuclear weapons but if Iran's desire to have a nuclear weapon makes them crazy and unreliable then what does having 6000 nuclear weapons say about us?

God asks Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry?".....  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left...?

God asks Jonah to look at the inhabitants of the city he wants to have destroyed.  I think that is an excellent idea and I would like for us to take just a couple of minutes to look at some of the people who live in Iran:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98j0I7e5OHE

In years past we have invaded Mexico and Canada.  We have gone to war with England, France, Germany and Japan, all of which are now close allies and trading partners..... OK, not France really but still..... think of the wine and cheese.  It is possible for old enemies to become allies.
It is possible to find a way around the anger to something much more healthy..... not out of fear but out of courage....Not in ignorant naiveté but in powerful faith.

The question the Bible poses to us is to wonder if we do well to be angry.  Jonah asks us to remember how compassionate that God is and it asks us to see how silly we look when we cannot see that our blood lust is not echoed by God.

If I could wish one thing for my nation today it is this, I wish my people would stop being afraid.

Sleeping in Church

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
January 15, 2012     Epiphany 2

1 Samuel 3:1-11    
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. 2At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; 3the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. 4Then the Lord called, "Samuel! Samuel!" and he said, "Here I am!" 5and ran to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call; lie down again." So he went and lay down. 6The Lord called again, "Samuel!" Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call, my son; lie down again." 7Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. 8The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. 9Therefore Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place. 10Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
11Then the Lord said to Samuel, "See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.

As the career of the probably insane comic, Andy Kaufman, began to take off in the 1970's, Kaufman he made the decision to return on a part time basis to the first job he ever had, as a busboy in a diner.  Appearing on Saturday Night Live, in Playboy Clubs and finally in a lead role on Taxi, he became aware that wealth and fame could separate him from everyday people and it was his understanding every day people that had made him a successful comedian.

When I first learned that about Kaufman, I was initially impressed but almost immediately thereafter, I was convicted.  It was such an obvious thing.... To stay in touch with your roots, don't let your goals of success rob you of being who you are, literally to lose your soul.

There has been a poster floating around the liberal websites this week that says, "Each week, millions and millions of upper middle class American citizens put on expensive dress clothes, and load themselves into SUV's and drive past homeless shelters, orphanages, prisons, missions, and halfway houses on their way to very expensive and nice church, where somebody tells them how to be more like Jesus."

Let the congregation say, "OUCH."  I'm sure that some of you get tired of hearing about our involvement at Bill's Place and at Crosslines.  In 2004 I chaired an effort to build 200 little cinder block houses in rural Nicaragua in a blitz build.  I had to raise nearly a half a million dollars and make a lot of trips to Nicaragua but we got it done.  The next year, when I was trying to organize a new team to go down and help build more houses, a church member complained, "That's what we did last year, let's do something different this year."

The challenge made me angry but in a way I understand it.  For most of the world, religion is a form of entertainment.... It should be kind of exciting, thrilling, and doing the same thing over and over.... Well, that lacks Hollywood imagination.

And so, some of us go to Bill's Place every week.  For the past few months, we've been going twice a week.  That's my Andy Kaufman, busboy, staying rooted exercise.  Some of the guys we share food, sleeping bags, hats and coats with are just unemployed and down on their economic luck.  But many others are haunted with addictions, mental illnesses, TB,HIV, hepatitis.... Some have cancer, most are either on parole or there are warrants out for them somewhere.

For me, to be a real pastor, I feel that I need to stay in close contact with the people who are in the greatest need, who are the most broken, the most vulnerable and, quite frankly, the most abandoned by mainstream religion.

Back when Bruce Willis still had hair he made a movie with the child actor, Haley Osment, that made my hair start falling out.  In the frightening mystery movie, The Sixth Sense, little Cole shares with the psychiatrist his horrifying secret, "I see dead people, walking around everywhere, they only see what they want to see, they don't even know that they are dead."

Someone took that iconic picture of the frightened child hiding under his covers and added the caption, "I see churches, they are big buildings everywhere, they only see what they want to see, they don't even know that they are dead."

That seems rather harsh but I know where the sentiment comes from.  But rather than saying that they are dead, I think that it might be more fair to say that they are sleeping.  That's how the faith community is portrayed in this reading we had this morning from I Samuel.  The literal story is that the boy Samuel was sleeping in the temple and the Lord kept calling to him and he keeps thinking that the old priest, Eli, is calling for him.  It took God several times to get Samuel to sit still and actually listen.

That part of the story would be meaningless except for what it symbolizes.  The writer of the narrative sets it up the account by saying:  The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. How's that for an introduction?  How would that do as a way of describing the modern church?.... the word of the Lord is rare these days, no one seems to have any vision.

Sleeping is used frequently in scripture, both in the Old Testament and in the gospels, as a metaphor for just not being aware.... Of not getting it.
The disciples slept in the Garden of Gethsemani while Jesus was in such stress that he was sweating blood. Both Pauline and deuteron-Pauline epistles enjoin the church to "wake up" and realize what is going on.

My continued hammering of issues of biblical criticism and of the historical Jesus goes to this issue of how the church took the powerful, life changing, socially challenging message of Jesus and put it into a prison of doctrines and dogmas, rituals and creeds that go so far that the very voice of Jesus is drowned out entirely.

Look at the creeds themselves..... I believe in God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate...... the creed is telling you what Christians are supposed to believe but all they want to tell you about Jesus is that he was born of a virgin, killed by a Roman governor and then raised from the dead..... not a word about what he said.... Not a word of his teachings, what he stood for, what he wanted us to be and to do.......  Indeed, the word of the Lord is rare in these days, visions are not wide spread.

The church has used belief in order to cover their ears and fail to hear how Jesus has told us to love the least of these, to serve them, even to forgive and to love our enemies.  Those of you who have suffered through reading that book I wrote several years ago, may remember my section on fideism.... Fideism is the belief that  we are saved by believing the right things.... Rejecting reason and just believing.  The Catholic Church officially condemned fideism as a heresy but you have to admit that both Protestants and Catholics practice it with abandon..... believe the right things and your soul (which no one has ever seen or knows exists) will go to heaven (which no one has ever seen or knows exists) rather than going to hell (which also no one has ever seen or knows exists).

Which is so much easier than actually doing what Jesus distinctly said which was to give to the poor, forgive the people who have hurt you and love your enemies.  So the church focuses on getting everyone to believe the right things and that process is to terminally boring that everyone goes to sleep.

Harriet Tubman, and amazing black woman who was such a successful abolitionist, famously said, "I freed a thousand slaves.  I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew that they were slaves."

In the conclusion of this little periscope from I Samuel, when God finally has Samuel's attention, he warns him, "I'm about to do something that is going to many anyone's ears who hears it, tingle.... Burn..... you are going to want to cover your ears."

For centuries the church has depended on being able to tell people, "Come to here and we'll make sure you go to heaven, but stay away from here and you will spend eternity in hell."  And people, in droves, are staying away because that old saw just isn't going to work any longer.  The main stream denominations are dying.  Most churches in America have fewer than 40 people in attendance each week.  Gigantic structures stand on street corners throughout the east coast, in Europe, and they are virtually empty.

Mega churches here in the Midwest are using as many as 8 drum sets on their stages to keep people awake... they can put a Starbucks in the lobby and add multiple gymnasiums, but the message won't continue to seduce a population that is able to look at it and recognize a snake oil sham when they see it.

Jesus is the teacher of radical compassion.  He is the one who told us that love, forgiveness, mercy, self sacrifice, service of others, working for peace and fighting poverty..... that is our religious heritage and the only church that will survive, the only one that deserves to survive, is the church that wakes up to that message.

Time to Talk about Trinity, Monotheism and Panentheism

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
January 8, 2012    Epiphany 1   



Genesis 1:1-5

When the German Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, was getting into very hot water with the Vatican, his friend and my Old Testament professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. Doug Knight, invited him to come to Nashville for a series of lectures where he was greeted by both Vanderbilt's student body and the American press as a hero.

It was a fabulous opportunity for me, as a young student, to sit in a room and listen to talks that were, frankly, not only obscured by a thick German accent but were a bit past my academic reach as a new seminary student.

But what I remember, even across the span of more than 30 years now, is the passionate way in which Kung was imploring us to break out of our old ways of thinking about God and to emerge into a new and more vital kind of faith.  He talked about the genesis of religion being a belief in what he called "a God of the gaps."  That is, whatever we didn't understand, we said it was God... or gods.

In the primitive world, everything was thought to be spiritual... the weather, the growing season, a successful hunt or a drought.  Before modern medicines, demonic or divine attribution was given to every illness and every turn of fate.  Even the realizations of such things as the fact that the world is not flat and that the earth is not the center of the universe, flew in the face of early religious assumptions.

But in the scientific age, in the era of growing understandings of botany, medicine, astronomy, there was always still the edge of knowledge and it has been our habit to walk up to that edge of what we could not explain and call that edge of darkness, the mystery of God.  There was a time when we did not know how the moon stayed up their circling the earth or why the earth never just fell into the sun and we said that God held the stars and planets in their orbits.

When your faith is in a "god of the gaps" then every time there is a scientific explanation for why things are the way they are, then we need God a little bit less and the whole business of faith looks a little more primitive, a little more embarrassing.  When famous atheists make a summary dismissal of religion, inevitably, what they are dismissing is the religion that is based on this idea of "the god of the gaps" in our knowledge and, since we see ourselves as being terribly clever and enlightened, then we have no need for that god any longer.... We just need to do more research so that we can answer any unresolved questions for ourselves.

Rarely a day goes by that I don't get a message from one of our YouTube or iTunes listeners who tell me that they have considered themselves to be an atheist but they have found some appreciation for the spirituality of our emerging church community.  And I generally tell them, "The god you don't believe in is the god we don't believe in either."

The god-of-the-gaps, that creation of superstition and magic, that combination of pre-science simplicity, is not what draws us here.
We're not trying to get in touch with the god who helps us to find a parking place at the mall or make it rain on our vegetable garden.  And yet, people are terribly afraid to give up on the institutional religious packaging that first introduced us to the god-of-the-gaps.

And I want to be quick to say that I am in no way dismissing our traditional faith heritage as being either worthless or bad.  It is impossible to speak accurately about that which is beyond human comprehension and certainly far beyond human language and so we try to "eff" the ineffable.

When you were in middle school, your science teacher began to teach you about the building blocks of the universe.  You were shown a model of an atom.  There are 118 known elements, the most simple being the hydrogen atom with one proton and one electron.  The periodic table takes you through various levels of complexity of combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons with electrons orbiting the atom's core in varying levels of electron shells.

You work with those models, those drawings, for so long that you can come to assume that an atom actually looks like little different colored balls with rapidly spinning bright electrons circling around them.... Which is, of course, totally absurd.  No one can see an atom and if you could see it you would not recognize what you were seeing from the model.  The model just helps you to think about atoms, elements, and the construction of the universe.  As such, the models are immensely helpful.  The models are not the absolute truth but they help us to start understanding certain truths.

The problem would be if scientists started to behave like fundamentalists who insist that everyone believe in the literal interpretation of the model of the atom and anyone who deviated from that belief was not a scientist but a dangerous heretic.  You see where I'm going with this.

Your middle school science teacher was not a liar or an idiot.  You were being introduced to concepts that were impossible to grasp and so you were being brought into the conversation through models and images to help you to understand.... It's just that your introduction should not be considered to be the sum total of what can be known.

All of the world's religions have tried, through the centuries, to find a way to put into words what we have experienced of God.  Sometimes their efforts are brilliant and helpful and, honestly, sometimes they get it wrong.  Sometimes they create a model that is helpful to them to solve a problem in their understanding at that time, within that culture but the model doesn't translate well through the centuries and across the continents.

For cultures in which animal sacrifice to appease angry gods and demons was a fresh memory, the notion that Jesus had to die in substitution for our sins made a certain amount of sense.  But shortly after that notion of atonement was articulated, animal sacrifice began to make less and less sense and then the only way they could force someone to believe in the atonement was to tell them that they were going to burn in hell forever if they didn't believe it.

First God demands the blood of his own son for something he didn't do and he'll do even worse to you if you don't act like you appreciate that bloody gesture.... I think God needed a better publicist.

What people had experienced was that the words, the teachings, the example of Jesus had brought them closer to God.  Then they tried to answer the difficult question, "Why did he have to die?" and from that point on they started to make less and less sense.  The atonement led to the development of the model of the Trinity which, in philosophical terms, solved a problem among third and fourth century thinkers but doesn't really stand up to analysis..... so, we go back to the first technique..... you will burn in hell if you don't act like you believe this.

The atom is too complex to be entirely explained in a middle school drawing.  God is too big for any creed, dogma or religion to fully or accurately explain.  That is why there are so many isms.... Monotheism, polytheism, humanism, pantheism, panentheism.... But it comes down to asking, "Which song is right?"  You can love music.  Your life can be changed by music.  You can even have a favorite song.... But you would have to be crazy to say that your favorite song is the only song that anyone should ever sing.... And yet, in the world of religion, we are often just that crazy.

In an interview about one of her biographies, Karen Armstrong tells the story of when she was a young nun being educated in theology.  She was asked to write a paper on the incarnation.
The mother superior of the convent congratulated her on a well written paper and assured her that she would do well in the order.  But Armstrong couldn't leave it alone, she replied:  But, honestly, none of it is true is it, Mother Superior?  And the older nun leaned down and whispered, "No, of course it isn't, but don't tell the others."

The problem, of course, is in trying to nail down a definition of God in the first place.  I am deeply indebted to the work of Marcus Borg who has given a lot of us permission to be enthusiastic people of faith without having to feel tied to dogma.

In one of his most beautiful lectures, delivered at the Chautauqua Institute a few years ago, he was talking about the Apostolic Creed.  The first line of the creed in Latin says: Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem which we translate as saying "I believe in God, the Father, almighty."  But obviously, we get the word "creed" from the first word in the Latin version of the creed "credo."  Borg says that we moderns, who tend to see "I believe" in a very fact literal way, should try to hear it in the more fluid and poetic sense of the ancients.  He asks us to translate it, not as "I believe" but as "I belove."  That is, "I love the tradition that is expressed in Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

I love the Christian tradition of incarnation, atonement, resurrection, sacraments and scripture because that is the heritage through which I was introduce to God. I don't have to pour concrete about those early models and doctrines and say that I have to understand my relationship with God in just that way throughout all time.... Frankly, that would be silly.... But it would be just as silly to let ourselves despise our own roots.
You do not have to despise your middle school science teacher to begin to study sub atomic particles because you would never grasp quarks, bosons and mesons without first drawing models of protons, neutrons and electrons.

What is inescapable is that we have an experience of the divine "other" that even though we cannot fully or accurately describe the divine, we know that we would be nuts to not try.  The universe is not God.... Though we experience God in every part of the universe.  By faith, we reason that God is something more than the sum total of all of the universe's parts because if we experience God as having a kind of moral force.... That is that we experience the good in peace over war, in love over hate, in kindness over violence, in generosity over greed.

And we know, if only because we experience it, that we can live in a way that draws us into closer communion with God or we can live in a way that alienates us from God.  And, after many centuries and a number of very embarrassing religious wars, inquisitions and excommunications, that we need to stop trying to regulate how anyone tries to express what and who God is or isn't.

We can love the tradition that brought us here but we can also let go of all claims of being in possession of the absolute truth.  If love is our religion, then no one has to ever go to hell again. No one ever has to be afraid of God or demons.  No one can tell you what you have to believe.

But we know that together, we can change the world if we let our faith grow in love, kindness, mercy, forgiveness and compassion.  So love is my religion and I'll try to get you some more details when we have more time.

End of Times or Endless Times?

New Year's Day at Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Jan. 1, 2012

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13          
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 7a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. 9What gain have the workers from their toil? 10I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.
11He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.

The 170,000 lbs. NASA satellite, dubbed "Skylab" was put into orbit in 1973.  The very heavy object had no way of keeping itself in orbit but the plan was that the soon to be launched Space Shuttle fleet would occasionally boost it back up into a solid orbit.  However, as government plans often seem to go, the Space Shuttles were seriously behind schedule and, in 1979, a couple of years before the first shuttle launch, Skylab came tumbling down through the sky, giving Chicken Little's long derided warning some new found merit.

Of course, even a 2000 pound satellite, falling through the atmosphere of a very large planet, has almost no chance of actually hitting anyone or anyone's house.  It is possible but then it is also possible that Jennifer Anniston will finally get over Brad Pitt and decide that she has a real fondness for a certain Midwestern cleric but I'm not keeping my Friday nights open waiting for her phone call.

I was living in Memphis, TN when Skylab's orbit began to deteriorate and suddenly there were signs all over town from a local insurance agency that was selling Skylab insurance.

You may be aware that Memphis is not generally thought of as being the MENSA Club capitol of the world but I was astonished that anyone could possibly be dumb enough to actually purchase insurance against the infinitesimally small chance that they or their property would be injured by the falling debris.  It occurred to me at the time that perhaps the insurance salesmen might be persuaded to turn over their list of clients to a mandatory sterilization program to make sure that those insured individuals would never reproduce.

It took 40 years but the idiocy of Skylab insurance was finally trumped right here in our fair city in the lead up to New Years day in the year 2000.  The over trumpeted computer glitch dubbed "Y2K" had some of our locals preparing for the apocalypse.  One local pastor actually ran paid ads in the paper encouraging people to come to his church where the Lord would save them from the coming dangers of Y2K.  There was even a small commune developed in Seymor where several people built self sustaining homesteads where they could draw water from a well, heat with wood and generate electricity with a windmill while protecting themselves from the coming hoards of zombies set loose by computers that were not capable of moving from the 1900's into the year 2000.

Kinda makes ya proud, don't it? Yeah, I know.

But now we greet 2012, the year when the Mayan's ran out of room on their stone calendar. In any event, it was excessively optimistic so far as the Mayans are concerned since the sand ran out of their hour glass long before the Spanish came and started killing off their chief rivals and successors in Mesoamerica.

Of course, the Mayan calendar issue is of even less consequence than Skylab, which did fall to earth on Australia, in the outback where no one and nothing was hurt but at least that was something.  Still, you can bet that there will be any number of religious folks in this coming year who will thrill themselves with a certain amount of apocalyptic hysteria for more or less the same reasons that Jr High aged girls love to read about Vampires..... none of it is real but it's kinda fun to talk about..... that is, until your intellect grows past early adolescence and then it is just kind of embarrassing.

Look, we religious people have got to stop letting ourselves get drawn into that kind of silly stuff.  We absolutely must separate ourselves from thrill seeking speculation so that we can focus on what is actually true right now.  The turning of a new year is more importantly a time for us to think about where we are and what we can do to make things better.... This can be true individually.... It is a good time to decide to stop smoking, start exercising, lose weight, deal with addictive behaviors, stop cheating on your spouse.... Oh, wait, maybe I should just stop there....

Seriously, as we come to a new year, this is a time when we can spend a moment in honest reflection about our lives.  One of my favorite all-time quotes is Henry David Thoreau's statement that:  "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."  
We don't have to be victims.  We may have any number of reasons for being the way that we are but the only cause is our own choice.  A certain amount of suffering is unavoidable in life but misery is not a necessity, it is a choice.  One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, William James, said that "The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can change his life by changing his attitude of mind."

And I do not say that to diminish anyone's history of pain or victimization.  Horrible things happen, many of which are totally beyond our control, but as Viktor Frankel said, "suffering is like a gas, it expands to fill the space allowed to it."  We can choose to be different people.  We can improve both our joy and our character by consciously working to change the way we think and act.

But we can do that nationally and globally as well.  Especially in an election year when we are being asked to get all exercised about issues over which we have no control while ignoring the things that actually are in our hands.

In philosophy we have a concept called "Occam's Razor."    Many people summarize the theory saying that it means that the simplest explanation is usually the best.  That doesn't quite capture the concept completely.  What Ockham really said is that among competing hypotheses, the one that requires the fewest new assumptions is the one most likely to be true.  And Ockham was a 14th century monk, but he was saying even then, we really need to talk about what we know and not go making silly superstitious claims about things we do not know and cannot prove.

When it comes to religion, there is an Occam's Razor that I would like to propose to you and to articulate it, I want to borrow the words of Karen Armstrong in her autobiographical book, "The Spiral Staircase:  My Climb Out of Darkness."  I think that it is safe to say that Armstrong is one of the world's very top religious academics.  She was, at one time, a nun but details in her book her climb out of the darkness of her previous religious life into the liberation of her current spiritual perspective.  And here is the Occum's Razor that tells us how to tell sick religion from healthy religion, she says:
"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

If we, as a faith community, want to face 2012 with complete honesty, embracing an understanding of our faith that leads us to be more kind, more empathetic, more impelled to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, then we need to not be afraid of looking at the facts of the world in which we are going to live out this healthy faith.

We Americans often cannot resist telling ourselves and the rest of the world that we are number one.  There can be no denying that we are the greatest military power in the world..... we ought to be, we spend more on our military than the rest of the world added together.  And, collectively, we are the richest nation in the world.

But when you say that we are number one, that claim deserves to put to a certain objective test, especially if you are an honest person of faith.
What really makes a nation number one?  Is it wealth?  Is it military might?  A German foundation looked at the 31 nations that work together for economic growth and expansion and ranked them on what we might call national character.  They listed a number of social justice concerns including income disparity, access to health care and education, jobs, individual freedoms and justice.

Look at in this way, the USA is not number one.... Nor are we number five, or number 10 or even number twenty.  In fact, we were fifth from the bottom, scoring only slightly better than Mexico, Chile, Greece and Turkey.  "We're number 27" just doesn't have the same ring to it does it?

Only Canada made the top ten from the Americas.  We were way behind such places as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.... Which is a strange list of countries for us to have to look up to in terms of social justice in matters of poverty, health care, personal liberty and fair treatment in the judicial system.

One of the conversations that comes up fairly often in rooms where I happen to be is this matter of keeping partisan politics out of religion. And here is what provokes someone to bring that topic up..... it comes up when I say something that makes them uncomfortable.  No one ever thinks that I'm being political when I say something they agree with, they just complain when they want me to be quiet.

I want to lodge the opposite complaint.  I wish that all religious people would stop talking about stuff that no one can know anything about, what Ockham called the "unknown assumptions" that dominate most religious messages.
We need to talk about what is real.... We need to apply the religion that inspires compassion, loving-kindness, and empathy to the known world. Not in a partisan political way.... Everyone has a right to their own opinions it's just that no one has a right to their own facts.

The fact is that nearly half of America is living in poverty and the over whelming majority of our children live in poverty.  Lack of access to education, health care, housing, jobs and equal treatment under the law.... Those are religious issues and if you don't believe me I can only invite you to try reading the gospels and the prophets.

We have claimed that the church serves as the conscience of our nation but many nations with empty churches have put us to shame in matters of great religious importance.  But I don't want to stand up here and scream like Chicken Little about how the sky is falling.  The good news is that we can change as individuals by making the conscious decision to change and we can change as a nation if ever the church will choose to stop acting like we are unconscious.