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.
