From Reality to Ritual and Back Again

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
February 26, 2012    Lent 1

Mark1:9-15
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." 12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
14Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

When you adopt a child, there are certain moments of bonding that stand out in your mind.  It isn't the filling out of forms and all the legal mess of adoption.... It is the moments of mutual understanding and connection.

I remember that 2 a.m. feeding when I held her in my lap in the moonlight and she took her sweet time finishing the bottle she had so urgently demanded as if she had to eat at that moment or face a sudden death.  But she lingered over her formula as we looked at one another.  And when she had finally finished, she reached up and touched my cheek, and in a moment of deep recognition, she said her first word, "Mum-mum."  It was OK, I knew what she meant.

At the time of her birth I was very committed to eating a healthy diet.  There was no red meat, no fried foods and no sweets in our house.  But one day, when we were on our way to my family home in Kentucky, we stopped for breakfast in a little truck stop dinner, and in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to order the kind of breakfast I had grown up with.... Salt cured country ham, grits, biscuits and eggs.

I didn't expect her to like the hard, chewy salt cured ham which most people tell me has the taste of meat that has already spoiled, but from the first bite, she was an immediate convert.
She loved it and I was forced to exchange my breakfast for her bowl of oat meal as she discovered that my ethnic food was now also her ethnic food, doing more to seal the official adoption than anything that had happened at the court house.

We now keep a supply of country ham in our home.  We don't eat it often but now and then, when you need to remember who you are, where you are from, what your roots are, we get some out of the freezer and fry it up, sometimes making those side dishes like "red eye gravy" which is nothing but ham fat with a little hot water added but ladled over grits, a biscuit and scrambled eggs can take you back to the old Ray farm in southern Kentucky where we are from.

Some literalists have challenged Valerie's penchant for an ethnic food that is not Asian but she patiently points out to them that she is from "South" Korea.... So she is a southerner at heart.

But truth be told, men and women, while our country ham meals are good for our souls, they are not all that good for our hearts.  Realistically, no one should ever eat salt cured pork, but it is a part of our definition of who we are.

When salt cured ham found its way into the lives of my ancestors, there was no refrigeration, there was no freezer.  We slaughtered hogs in the winter and cured the meat through the winter and though it grew a layer of mold on the outside, the salt preserved the meat on the inside for two or three years and so it was a part of what it took to survive during the pre-electricity years on the farm.

We don't need to salt cure meat to preserve it anymore but we do it sometimes as a kind of ritual of remembering.  It has symbolic value that is greater than its nutritional hazard.

You know, most religious rituals have very practical beginnings.  The kosher dietary restrictions of the Hebrew Bible made sense to the culture and time in which they were originated.  The rules about agriculture and apparel served to preserve the Jewish people as an identifiable group in the mix of cultures in the ancient world and the ritual and dietary habits forged in a Palestinian wilderness helped to preserve their sense of belonging to that specific tribe of people.

For us, as progressive Christians, it is sometimes hard to tell when we need to preserve a tradition that has outlived its original purpose and when we need to uproot it because it has become unhealthy.

On this Sunday which, according to the liturgical calendar, is the first Sunday of Lent, the gospel lesson always repeats one of the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus.  The season of Lent has functioned for many centuries as a time when people who were preparing to be baptized would spend time in personal reflection, penance and prayer to get them ready for the momentous moment when they are baptized.

We've never put any emphasis on baptism in our church.  We have baptized an infant by sprinkling when asked to do so by the family and we've done an adult baptism by immersion when asked to do so, but we've never implied that anyone was either required to participate in this ritual or even encouraged to do so.

In the days before the Christian era, baptism had evolved as a kind of symbolic bath... it was a part of the rituals involved in converting to Judaism and certainly preferable to circumcision..... trust me on this one.  John the Baptist appears to have been a part of the Essene movement which took baptism to the extreme of being a bath that Essenes may have observed as often as five times a day, believing that their personal cleanliness and spiritual purity, would hasten the coming of God's apocalypse.

Baptism was reinterpreted in the early church to be a ritual participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus.... a kind of sacramental re-birth.  Unfortunately, it moved from being an affirming ritual into being invested with magical importance and if you didn't have that magical ritual your imaginary soul might be sent to an imaginary place of eternal torment.... Proving once again that organized religion can turn anything good into something absolutely neurotic and destructive.  Let the people say, "Amen."

Many things that make perfectly good sense can become ritualized and institutionalized in a way that turns them into a meaningless religious burden and that is the sort of thing that we've been trying hard to get rid of in the emerging church.  Some things we hold onto just because they are reflections of a tradition we love, the tradition through which we came to inherit a spiritual life.  Most of those things are reinterpreted, to be sure, but we do not despise our own roots.

Baptism, Lent, the whole notion of penitence is suspect among progressives.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we were not the only progressive church in America that still has a prayer of confession in our liturgy every week.

I'm pretty sure that we're the only Progressive church in America that has a Gregorian psalm chant at the beginning of each worship service and we're one of the few that makes communion a weekly observance.  But we are trying to affirm our roots when we can do so meaningfully, and simultaneously refusing to pass on that which is simply superstitious, neurotic or magical.

So, when it comes to something like baptism, you are not going to catch me mounting an argument either way.  If the symbol is meaningful to you then I am all for it but if it is not, then I'm not going to expend any breath or energy defending it.

However, what it represents is, in my opinion, the real meat of the issue.  The presumption that there is something in us that needs to be cleaned up... the suggestion that we need to die to an old way of living in order to be resurrected to a new way of living.... I'm not willing to give that up.

It seems evident to me that we all come into the world screaming and we're not screaming about unemployment, racism, environmental pollution or an unfair distribution of wealth.  We come into the world screaming when we are unhappy.  We naturally scream when we are hungry, tired, bored or wet.  The problem is that a lot of what passes for human debate about politics is just not that different from the screams coming from the nursery at 2 a.m.  The sound of a baby wanting a bottle and a rich person wanting a tax cut are made of the same primordial stuff.

To embrace a spiritual life is, in many ways, to do what the Buddha called "giving up the illusion of our separation from one another."
The spiritual life is unnatural in that it asks you to stop thinking about your own comfort, when you are hungry, bored, tired or wet and it asks you to grow in compassion, being able to feel the kind of wet a homeless person feels when it rains and their tent can't keep the water out of their bedding.

On Thursdays and Fridays when we take food to the homeless at Bill's Place, most of the time we have sandwiches wrapped up for them to take away with them for later.  In our minds, the "take away" sandwiches are for their supper, or, even better, for them to give to someone they encounter who is hungry.  But I'm going to estimate that 9 out of 10 of those sandwiches are eaten while they can still see our tail lights going down Commercial Street because, for the genuinely poor, there is no tonight.... There is not later.... They live in the moment.... A moment when they have no idea whether or not they will have a "later" and so we feed them a big hot meal and we give them a sandwich for later and they eat it as soon as they can get it down because their world is that uncertain.  That's the kind of hunger that we who are well fed should scream about!

Because I am baptized, I no longer want to waste my breath screaming about how I want to be in a bigger house or drive a newer car or wear nicer clothes..... I want to scream about children living in cars.... I want to scream about the unemployed and the uninsured being denied the basic necessities of life.

I want to scream about Payday Loan shops making a profit off of the desperation of the poor.  I want to scream about men in state legislatures wanting to stick electronic devices into the bodies of women who have come asking for an abortion just to humiliate them and hurt them some more.
I want to scream about using our military might to keep gasoline cheap while we sit back and watch tens of thousands die in a tortured Syrian genocide.  I don't know that I need to baptize everyone in the world, but I know that I live in a world that is full of sin and darkness and the concept of repentance is not an antique ready for the trash heap.

During the dark days of apartheid in South Africa, Alan Boesak said to white church goers, "On judgment day you will stand before the Lord and he will ask you, 'Where are your scars?' And we will answer, 'We have none.'  And he will ask us, 'Did you find nothing worth fighting for?'"

Men and women, if you are not shouting about the evil in our age, then you must not be paying attention because we have a lot that is worth fighting for.

A Priesthood Frat Party

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor  
February 19, 2012
               

Isaiah 28:1-3, 7-13

I did not know the story line of Les Miserable when I first went to see it in a theater in Louisville.  When the main character, Jean Valjean, was taken into the home of a Catholic Bishop, Myriel, I felt myself tense up.  When, in the play, Jean Valjean steals the bishop's silverware and is almost immediately caught by police and brought back to the Bishop's home, I felt a knot in my stomach.  I was prepared for the worst.  I expected Bishop Myriel to demand that Jean Valjean be returned to prison or perhaps executed because every time a minister, priest or religious official shows up in a TV show, a movie or a play, they are portrayed in one of two ways:  Either they are complete idiots or, worse, they are morally bankrupt frauds.

I was the most surprised patron in the theater when the Bishop quickly insists to the police that the silverware had been a gift and he scolds Jean Valjean for forgetting the two silver candelabras, which were the most valuable part of the gift.  There was no punch line, no joke, no manipulation.  In fact, the Bishop insisted that Valjean keep the candelabras and use the proceeds to turn himself into an honest man.

People often seem to be thrilled to have the opportunity to think ill of the clergy.  And, I can tell you that with 32 years of experience as a pastor, you can never be right enough to satisfy everyone.... Something about you will appear to by hypocritical to someone who is determined to either point out the speck in your eye or put one there if they can.

So, let me be quick to acknowledge, with everything that I am about to say, that I recognize that it is not accident that I'm standing up here behind the pulpit.  I am a pastor.  I think that I am pretty different from most pastors but, for whatever I am going to say, that band of priests and preachers, of pastors and religion professors..... I am one them and I share in their faults.

Which puts me in a rather uncomfortable spot when we turn to this passage from Isaiah that is printed in your bulletin today.  This passage does not show up in the common lectionary.  Unless you have a minister who is willing to go off the rails a bit, this text is never read in a Sunday morning worship service in a Catholic Church, or a Presbyterian, Methodist, Disciple, UCC, Lutheran, Episcopal or Orthodox church.... And, since it doesn't show up in the preaching cycle, my suspicion is that most pastors will have never read it, and it is just as well, I suppose, became it would make them madder than.... Well, we're talking about ministers so I guess we can say, "Madder than hell."

But, the prophet Isaiah is clearly in no mood to try to play nice and just try to get along with all of the religious leaders.... You know, how you often want me to be when I go to clergy meetings.... We want everyone to be sweet and even when we disagree we respect one another's right to be.... A jerk.... Isaiah starts off by telling them that they are just a bunch of drunks, verse 7:

7These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment. 8All tables are covered with filthy vomit; no place is clean.

Of course, he's not being literal.  It isn't that they are just drinking all of the time, it is that they are acting stupid, stupid as if their brains were pickled.... Their sermons, their teaching, their guidance, Isaiah says, is like vomit.

And then Isaiah leaves the drunken fraternity party and turns to another image, he says, in verse 9 and following:

9"Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from milk, those taken from the breast? 10For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little."

Isaiah is, on the surface of it, chiding them for having reduced religious life to a bunch of rules, beliefs, rituals that are useless and childish. But Hebrew scholars say that there is a bit more to his use of language.  Where he says that their religion is just "precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little" in Hebrew, that sounds like a baby's prattle.... "cov la cov, cov la cov, sav la sav, sav la sav, sier shom, sier shom."

Do you baptize by immersion or by sprinkling?  Do you take communion every week or just once a quarter?  Does your pastor wear a clerical collar or a t-shirt?  Do you believe that you have to invite Jesus into your heart to be saved or do you believe that you have to speak in tongues too?  Do you confess the Apostle's Creed or is it just believing that Jesus died for your sins?

Is it necessary to believe in the trinity, incarnation, sacraments and clergy?
Isaiah would look at the church of our day, at the gathering of priests and pastors, .....oh, can't you see the scene?  Can't you hear him saying, "Your religion is childish, insulting, it reeks like vomit.... You have taken the world changing message of peace and justice.... Of radical compassion, of fighting against the violence of poverty, prejudice and racism and you have turned it into baby prattle.... Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line.....And so the prophet says to us just as he said to the priests in the Jerusalem temple 2500 years ago:

11Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12to whom he has said, "This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose"; yet they would not hear.

This is what you were told.... Give relief to the weary... and we have turned it into a religion of beliefs.  And so the prophet concludes, about them and about us:

13Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them, "Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little;" in order that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.                      

In an article published in the Huffington Post this week, Diana Butler Bass summarized her new book that is entitled, "The End of Church."  She notes that a mere generation ago, half of all Americans were in church on a Sunday morning. Now that number is down by half.  One out of ten Americans now describe themselves as being a "former Catholic" and even as mega churches arise within the conservative wing of religion, their total numbers are plummeting.  The majority of churches in America have fewer than 40 people in their Sunday morning service each week.

And, if we could ask Isaiah about that, he would probably say, "Good!"  It may be that the institutional church, particularly the main stream denominational churches will have to die in order for real faith to be reborn.

I say that with some fear and trepidation as we are having all of these meetings to talk about expanding, about trying to grow and add classrooms because, even though we have had a very successful start, we should be aware that all churches in America today are being built over an open grave and it would take very little to fall into the tomb..... if we abandon the message of liberation and compassion and just go all religious.... Teaching precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, then we too will deserve to be buried and I would gladly sing at the funeral.

We either have the courage and faith to keep kicking at the darkness or we should turn off the lights.  You have heard me say it before and you will likely hear me quote Leon Bloy again, "Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."

We need to quit trying to get people to be believers and we all need to start being followers.... Disciples of that famous liberator whom we sometimes call Buddha, or Confucius or Moses but whom we mostly call Jesus.

The Never Ending Battle with Addiction, Appetite and Id

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 12, 2012     Epiphany 6      

1 Corinthians 9:24-27            
Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. 

Every holiday season you hear someone sweating the challenge of "what do you get for someone who already has everything?"  It always sends a bit of a shudder down my spine for what that question says about our society..... why on earth would anyone feel the slightest motivation to give a gift to someone who is already bury in material things?

I can tell you from experience; it is much harder to know what to give to someone who has almost nothing at all.  For many years of my life I was a friend to the Trappist community at the Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky.  Brother Luke was a particularly close friend who was so important to me that I felt that I always had to give him something on special occasions.  Luke keeps two changes of clothing, a few photographs, a few books and almost nothing else.  He is allowed, by the order, to have a few personal possessions and sometimes he would indulge himself in some sort of personal stereo.... That he liked to call a "walk monk" or a camera but after enjoying that personal item for a while he would always give it to someone else because he didn't want to be distracted from his primary job which is to pray and to serve his faith community.

Perennially skinny, Luke stays pretty cold from September to May so one Christmas I bought him a couple of pairs of really heavy thermal sox because Trappist monks are the only people in America who should be allowed to wear sox with sandals.  I remember the day he opened the package and the look on his face was suddenly a look of crisis.  I had hit a homerun, of sorts.  The thick wool sox were exactly what he would love to wear but, as he explained later, he already had two pairs of socks and so he felt that it would be best to give them to someone else.

In movies and in a lot of literature, monastic communities are often portrayed as being filled with sick masochists who like to beat themselves with whips and impose painful penance on themselves and others.  This is a gross misrepresentation of monastic discipline on the scale of pointing to Timothy McVeigh as an example of MidWestern Christianity.

In our epistle lesson today, Paul uses the terribly unfortunate choice of words to express this sense of personal discipline by saying:  I beat my body to become its master.  Sadly, history is full of examples of people who took that sentence way too literally.  But what he was saying was that he disciplined himself to keep from being run over by his appetites.

One of the desert fathers from the ancient Alexandrian tradition explained his practice this way:  He said, "If you never take your fill of bread, you do not long for meat and if you never take your fill of water, you do not lust for wine."

The life of a monk, either in ancient Alexandria or in modern day Kentucky, will seem to be absurdly severe to most of us.... Not only beyond our reach but beyond anything we would even desire.  But the merit of their example can only be understood when you look at the opposite extreme.

The news is full of disgusting examples of outrageous bonuses paid to investment bankers and greedy insider trading on the part of corporate bosses and elected officials.  It is easy to point to the excesses of the fabulously rich and you all know that I have written and said a great deal about economic injustice in the division of our nation into a privileged class and a permanently poor class.

But, seriously, we don't need to devote all of our attention to the 1% whose personal habits are not under our control.  Every person in this room and within the sound of my voice has a dark, greedy, pleasure seeking and pain avoiding part of your character that Freud called the "id." It is a part of us, whether we are a greedy Wall Street banker, a third world dictator or a pope or a prophet.  What seems to me to be the greater spiritual issue is how each and every one of us addresses our own id, our appetites.

Seeing Brother Luke stand and sweat about a decision about whether it would be morally wrong for him to own 4 pairs of socks or not, makes me have to wonder about personal choices of my own..... should I cook at home or eat out again?  Should I buy a used car or get a new one?  Should I join a gym or just discipline myself to walk more and exercise at home?

As our economy has languished in a nearly imperceptible recovery, a lot of Americans have had to tighten the belt and have learned that living on their credit cards in the assumption that they will have more money next year than they have this year is not at all necessarily true.  Many young people get themselves into huge difficulty by not being able to say "no" to their appetites at all.... Buying impulsively, scratching every itch, trying to satisfy every desire, until they become imprisoned by debt.
Debt, as one commentator put it recently, is the new slavery.  As we were shocked by the news of Whitney Huston's death yesterday, though I do not want to jump to conclusions, we are all aware of how her drug addictions had ruined her beautiful and talented life and probably cut her life on this earth in half.  Addiction is the saddest and most wasteful example of how our appetites can turn on us and consume us.

As most of you know I've been working for the past several months to lose some weight and it is a fascinating topic about which everyone on earth has advice to give.....most of unsolicited and a great deal of it entirely wrong.

But we want to believe that there is an easy way to be slender and healthy.... Just take these pills, sprinkle this on your food.... Television is full of ads for some exercise equipment that will get you into a super model's physic in just twenty minutes three times a week.

It is all lies.  There is nothing you can do for 20 minutes three times a week and end up with the kind of cut body they show on those ads unless you are getting lipo suction for 20 minutes, three times a week.  And there is nothing you can take that will kill your appetite and leave you feeling energized except for certain controlled substances which come with lengthy prison sentences and lots of the obvious down sides of addiction.

Here is the one and only honest secret to losing weight and it is very simple.... It is the ability to be hungry and to choose to not eat.  Sure, it helps to avoid fried food, sugars and fats.... Exercise is very helpful.... Some foods are better than others but it comes right down to being able to say "no" to your appetite....
To be hungry and to choose not to eat.  Look, just eating salads will not do it..... I don't want to be the first one to point this out to you but fat people eat salads.... I personally think that salads are delicious but let me just remind you that all that cows, hippopotami and elephants eat are green leafy vegetables.  The fattest animals on earth eat nothing but salad with no dressing.

But we live in the capital of all-you-can eat buffets.....men and women, no one should ever eat all they can eat!  But the buffet becomes a symbol for our bloated society that can never tell when they have had enough.  We stand over buffets of steaming fried foods like Gollum caressing the magic ring in the Lord of the Rings, "precious, my precious, it's ours it is and we wants it."

We have made fun of prudish, puritanical religion that tries to make you feel guilty about ever indulging in anything and I do despise that absurd, human hating, neurotic guilt that makes you feel bad about every aspect of being human but I'm here to tell you that anything you cannot say "no" to is, in fact, your slave master.

There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with moderate alcohol consumption.... In fact, there can be a great deal said in favor of moderate alcohol consumption, especially when someone else is buying.  The problem is that so many people cannot drink just moderately and addiction then becomes their prison warden.

Beer and liquor commercials always associate drinking with happy, sexy people but let me let you in on some mathematical facts, and this is from a recent policy paper published by the AMA:  it is estimated that 3 out of every 5 drinks purchased in bars and restaurants are purchased by alcoholics.
If the beer and distilled spirits industries were making their money off of moderate drinkers almost all of them would go out of business.  Addicts drive the market.... Advertising just masks the addiction.  One of every ten cars on the road is being driven by someone who is intoxicated.

Even cigarette smoking wouldn't be a bad thing if people could limit themselves to one a week but the sorry fact is that no one does.... It is a product which, when used as directed, kills the consumer.  The inability to say no to our appetites for drugs, alcohol, sex, tobacco, wealth, power.... This is what drove religious people to the extremism of using fear and guilt to drive the monster of appetite back into the cave though guilt and fear become their own toxins in short order.

What we need to control appetites whose aim is to enslave us is not a sick religion to counter a sick addiction.  What we need is a healthy spirituality that empowers us, teaches us the discipline of being able to say "no" to our appetites.  Not to beat ourselves into submission but to be willing to endure the pain of wanting something that we do not buy in order to be able to give to someone else..... to be able to resist eating everything we can hold, so that we can share our bread with the less fortunate.

While I am certainly not afraid to be critical of Paul, in this case, I believe that he has gotten a bad rap.  I think what he is telling us is, in fact, very similar to the four noble truths of Buddhism.  The four foundational truths that the Buddha taught to his followers are:
1) Life is full of suffering.
2)  Our suffering comes from our attachment to and our desire for things
3)  The solution to suffering is to empty ourselves of desire or appetite
4) The path to a life free of suffering is the gradual growth of a life of spiritual character.

In that, I believe that American Christians have a lot to learn from Buddhism.  The pathway to a good life is the path of letting go of being controlled by, enslaved to, our appetites.

Our religion is not based on superstition, mythology or lies, nor is it based on guilt, fear or neurotic self loathing.  The best short hand explanation I know of is to say simply, "Love is our religion."

Love of others calls us to lead lives of self sacrifice so that others may have enough to eat, a safe place in which to take shelter and a hope for the future.  Love of self calls us to a life of devotion to the truth and an absolute refusal to be enslaved to debt, be it to Pay Day Loan shops or credit cards.... We will not surrender our freedom to addiction, gluttony or greed nor will we stand idly by while our sisters and brothers are tricked or forced into bondage.

Healing Miracles and What they Mean to Us

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
February 4, 2012     Epiphany 5      

Mark 1:29-39                                              
29As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. 30Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. 31He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
32That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 35In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." 38He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." 39And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I visited a young couple in the waiting area right outside of the neo-natal intensive care unit at Cox Hospital several years ago.  They were both ordained ministers, both were Harvard educated people who professed a very progressive and academic faith but they were in a crisis.  The woman had given birth to their first child and there had been complications.  They had spent nearly a month in that waiting room, seeing their infant son only for a few minutes a day.

As the days had past, any hope of the child's survival slowly evaporated and they young parents were left to wait for that inevitable event that is, in anyone's eyes, the saddest thing anyone on earth ever has to endure.  I offered to pray with them, as I always do in such circumstances, and Micki began to weep softly.

You know, we are the kind of people who have set aside magical views of prayer.  We do not believe that the Creator of the Universe sits enthroned in the heavens waiting for our supplications like a great Santa Clause in the clouds.  We pray but we believe that prayer changes the one who prays and not the one to whom we address our prayers.

But Micki said, "You know, I thought I was so far past praying for miracles but I find in these days, that I cannot help myself."  And so, that's what we did.... We prayed for a miracle because that was what was really in our hearts, even though we know that the universe really doesn't work that way.

That's not to say that miracles don't happen, nor would I limit the Almighty's ability to get into history and mix it up a bit with us but I do not believe that God needs either information or guidance from us.  Their baby did die.  The couple grieved for a couple of years before they decided to try again and they now have two very healthy children, though, of course, a dozen children would not replace the one that they lost..... surely we can all understand that nothing ever does.

So religious people often talk about miracles, hope for miracles, we pray for miracles and we defend the miracles recorded in our holy scriptures.  And most of us have experienced what we call miracles..... a cancer that seemed lethal goes away for no medically explainable reason.  Someone survives an accident that seemed too impossible to believe.  I've seen my life flashing before my eyes in a couple of out of control automobile skids on ice that ended with the car right side up and even pointed in the right direction without a collision.

And so, sometimes, in spite of our relatively good grades in math, our experience in analysis and logic, we'll buy a lottery ticket and then spend a few moments putting our rational faith on the shelf while we dust off our superstitious faith and begin to pray like Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof,

"Oh, dear Lord! You made many, many poor people. I realize, of course it's no shame to be poor. But it's no great honor either.. So what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune.......Lord, who made the lion and the lamb,  You decreed I should be what I am Would it spoil some vast eternal plan If I were a wealthy man?

But for the most part, those of us within progressive faith traditions just get a little nervous when the scripture reading recounts a healing miracle.... Maybe even a little embarrassed.  The biblical critics of the early 20th century recounted healing miracles from other religions of the time.  Most famously, we know of a contemporary of Jesus who was a traveling Neo-Pythagorian philosopher and teacher in Cappadocia known as Apollonius of Tyana, about whom there are healing accounts that are eerily nearly identical to gospel accounts about Jesus.

It was argued that gospel writers had to recount such healing events to give Jesus credibility in the ancient world.  And, to an extent, that is probably true, as are a number of other honorific accolades in scripture intended to encourage faith in Jesus.  But I think we would be mistaken to consign every miracle account to the category of literary embellishment.

There were healers in the ancient world and, believe it or not, I think there is reason to accept that they did successfully heal some people.  The lines between our mind, our bodies and our spirits which we so often assume to be rather firm boundaries are, in my experience, rather porous.

When I was a young college student I had a particularly bad time with very painful plantar warts on the bottoms of my feet. I was attending Western Kentucky University which is built on a steep hill that required a great deal of walking and so I was regularly going to the doctor to have these painful viral warts cut off, or burned off with electricity or acid.

No matter what the doctor tried, the bad warts always returned and he eventually said to me, "Roger, if you are ever going to be free of these things you are going to have to believe that they won't come back."  To which my father replied, "You tell the doctor to keep sending me a bill until he believes that it has been paid."

But, like it or not, there does seem to be a connection between mental health and physical health and there is a world of research to indicate that a healthy spirituality can contribute to both mental and physical health.  In that sense, I, along with Marcus Borg and many other modern scholars, are unafraid to say that the historical Jesus was a preacher, a teacher and that he was also an exorcist and a healer.

But I want to go a bit farther with the topic because it seems clear to me that the gospels do not simply give us miracle accounts to bolster Jesus' credentials or to preserve a record of a few wonderful events.  The New Testament tends to use the Greek words for "miracle," and "sign," and "wonder," fairly interchangeably.  The miracles recorded in the gospels were not simply good news to frightened or grieving people nor were they just religious credentials for an important prophet.

The primary preaching theme of Jesus had to do with the Kingdom, the reign of God.... Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  In that sense, I believe, and if I believe it, wouldn't it be polite of you to at least try to entertain the idea, that the miracles were signs of the Kingdom.

The gospels don't try to tell us that Jesus healed every sick person in Palestine.... He didn't cast out all of the demons, he certainly didn't raise everyone who died.... But the accounts recorded in the gospels are like sermons, they are like parables, they serve to give evidence, to teach what the Kingdom is to be like.

The real meaning of the word "salvation" in the New Testament, has nothing to do with going to heaven when you die.... I don't want to disappoint anyone but that is a meaning we brought to the word much later.  The word means, "to be made whole."  So when Jesus heals a blind man, he says, "Go, your faith has saved you," just like he says to the woman of ill repute who has been crying on his feet, "Go, your faith has saved you."

The woman's bad reputation cut her off from community and meaningful living.  A blind man cannot work and support a family, cutting him off from community and meaningful living.  In the Kingdom, people don't get tossed to the curb.... People aren't left out.  The sick are not told to go get a job and insurance and try to come back before the cancer kills you..... as if a sick person can get a job or insurance.

I wish I could reach into every Sunday School class and Bible study and put a stop to the perpetuation of this notion that the miracles are tests of faith... you either have to make yourself believe in the impossible or your faith isn't strong enough.... Not believing in miracle accounts doesn't mean that you have weak faith, it means you have a strong orientation to reality, which is a good think in almost every case unless you are running for public office.... For that you need to be able to believe in myths and lies but for church, we're good with a commitment to reality around here.
Folks, hear me out on this, the miracles are not magical accounts to tell you what Jesus could do.... They are signs pointing the way towards what you can do.

You help the Kingdom to come.  You are God's hands and feet.... You make it happen.  As Alexander Campbell said, to get down on your knees and pray for something that you are not willing to then stand up and work and sacrifice to make happen is just a disappointment to yourself and an insult to God.

We will not save every sick baby, but if we try, if we work for it, if we demand it from our nation, if we are willing to sacrifice for it, we can heal most of them.  We can't spit in the dirt and rub mud on someone's eyes to heal blindness but I will tell you this:  I will be going to Nicaragua next month where lots of children are blinded due to malnutrition.... I will see children who are being carried or lead around by the hand because no one in their village has $600 to pay for the cataract surgery necessary to restore that child to community.... To save them... to make it possible for them to learn to read and write, to play with their friends, to marry and to have children of their own.  I've not only seen it happen, I've paid for it to happen.  And you can too.... It just depends on whether or not you are willing to meaningfully believe in miracles or if you just want to talk about magic.  It's your choice..... but I tell you this, the Kingdom is not coming down from heaven, it is among you.