Orthopraxy Trumps Orthodoxy

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
March 25, 2012     Lent 5

Jeremiah 31:31-34  
31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt--a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, 'Know the Lord', for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

The word for "king" in Spanish is "Rey."  The connection between "king" and my family name "Ray" had never been mentioned until the middle of this week when I visited the new community of El Parisia near Dairo in Nicaragua.  Our friend, Mel West, had raised the money to build 25 little cinder block houses on a small tract of land next to the coffee plantation where the new homeowners work.

It was one of those deals of one hand washing the other.  The Rainbow Network agreed to finance the houses and supervise the construction, the plantation owner agreed to donate the three acres of land, run a water line to the new neighborhood and build the raised sanitary latrines behind each house.  Of course, latrines become absolutely necessary when you move 200 people onto three acres of land.

We had gotten title to the land, Mel and his connections in Columbia had raised the $100,000 necessary to build the 25 houses and they were ready for the families to move into but the plantation owner had reneged on his promise to run the water line into the neighborhood and build the latrines.

Keith Jaspers, the Rainbow Network founder, was visibly angered by this news and he wanted to go visit the rancher immediately to renegotiate the contract.  Our Nicaraguan staff was desperate to avoid a confrontation between the employer of everyone in the community and an angry Keith Jaspers so they went out to strike the best deal that they could.  We met with them the next morning and this was the compromise, the landowner would pay for the water line if we would pay for the latrines.  The latrines would cost $3000.

Standing around people who wanted to move out of their mud and stick huts and into their new cinder block and tin homes, I said that we would pay for the latrines.  Unlike the old outhouses we used to build, these set up on a concert base, you walk up three steps and open the door to, some would say, the majestic looking throne.  Which is why, from that point on, Keith introduced me to the villagers as "El Rey de Latrinos", the "King of the Latrines."  Which, ironically, is about as witty as Keith's humor ever gets.

But the important issue is the difference between saying that you will do something and actually doing it.  I do not doubt that when the plantation owner was presented with the opportunity to have permanent homes built for his employees that would keep them more reliably in the area, that it was well worth the donation of land and a few thousand dollars of infrastructure.  Once the time came to lay out the cash.... And, of course, the houses were built...... he was less motivated.



You folks do a lot both for Rainbow and for the homeless poor of Springfield but I sent out an email that night and before breakfast the next day, I had pledges of more than enough to pay for these latrines and more..... and what is more, as of this morning, I have pledges of over $6000 allowing us to provide the latrines for another housing project that is currently being started..... we're up to about 60 latrines now... I'll try to make certain that donors get photos of their own thrones in Nicaragua.

But it reminds me of that parable in Matthew 21 in which Jesus tells a story about a man who had two sons.  He said to the eldest, "Go into the vineyard and work today," and the son said, "No, I will not," but later he thought better of it and went.  The same father went to his other son and told him to go work in the vineyard and that son said the right thing, he said, "I will do it," but he never did.  In any contest between what you say you will do and what you actually do, all that really matters is what you do.

That's a problem for religious folks.  We have, for centuries, had a very profound and strong notion of orthodoxy, of believing the right things.  And we believe those things with such vigor that there are times when Catholics have said that Protestants are not Christians and Catholics often say that Protestants aren't Christians and there are small, self-congratulatory groups of Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Church of Christ and some Baptists who are convinced that they are, in fact, the only ones who are Christians....




And then there is our little liberal outpost here on the edge of town and we may be the one unifying lightening rod of Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, the Church of Christ and all of the others who, very likely, agree that we are not Christians...... and as soon as I have a few free minutes I'm going to sit down and really worry about what they think.... But don't start holding your breath anytime soon.

We will probably never say the right things to satisfy our religious peers but as long as we keep doing the right things, then I think we're OK with God even if we don't have a lot of friends meeting under steeples in the Ozarks.  I don't want to sound too strident about that but who needs the approval of churches in Springfield when you are a king with 60 thrones in Nicaragua?

Gandhi once said that "A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion."  The Christian religion, as it is based on the teachings of Jesus, is a religion of radical compassion, of great personal sacrifice in order to change the world, fighting against injustice and working for peace and mercy.  The religion that evolved in the name of Jesus, is a religion of beliefs intended to magically get your soul into heaven and in as much as that is a religion that is personal, and in your head only, it is no religion at all.

The Marcus Borg book that many of us have lately been reading together, "Speaking Christian," discusses this crucial difference between Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy....The difference between having right Christian beliefs and have a right Christian practice, or life.  Borg tends to say that our religion started out as a religion of orthopraxy, a way of life based on radical compassion, a religion primarily practiced among the poor.

Borg, as do many other religious historians, traces the change from orthopraxy to orthodoxy to the time of Emperor Constantine in the 4th century.... Saying that basically, the royal family took over the religion and imposed the creedal form of religion on the entire empire.  In fact, I tend, in my own writing, to make the distinction between the teachings of the historical Jesus and the religion of Constantine though since the great majority of church folk in our day confess what looks pretty much like Constantinian religion, they don't usually like it when I say that.

And, to be fair, it isn't like there was one kind of Christianity for 300 years and suddenly there was another kind.  There are things in the letters of Paul and in the gospel of John that push the scale towards orthodoxy and there are lots of things in the synoptic gospels and James that push the scale towards orthopraxy.  We just know which side of the fence we are on.

But without ever arguing biblical interpretation or the theological debate between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, you don't need a posse and a 30 minute head start to know that the son who went into the vineyard and worked is the one who got it right and the one who said he would but didn't is not the hero of that parable.

And in El Parisia, there is no contest between the plantation owner who said he would build sanitary latrines and our faith community that is actually going to do it.  I don't want to encourage hubris about this, I'm just trying to be real about what it means to practice our faith.
You have to be careful about what you take from the New Testament book of Acts as historical but there are seven times in the middle part of that book in which the author refers to the early church as "the Way."  Christians were initially known as "followers of the Way."  It wasn't a new set of beliefs, it was a way of living.  The later church turned Christianity into a set of beliefs with some life style implications but I am convinced that the community of faith that was initially gathered around Jesus were people who chose a way of life that had some core beliefs.

The emerging church, the church that will likely survive the next century, is the church that is able to re-strike that balance and become again a church that is relevant because of the way that we live and not because of our set of doctrines, creeds and theology.

Our Old Testament lesson today is that familiar passage from the prophet Jeremiah who said that one day we'll stop teaching beliefs because people will actually live their faith.  It isn't a matter of believing the right things, reciting the right creed, repeating the right magical incarnation..... it isn't about saying what you believe it is about being what you believe.

I'm not saying that people who focus on orthodoxy are just full of it, but I am applauding you for building the latrines to dispose of the... the refuse.  Any double entendre you heard in that is entirely your responsibility.

A Serpent and a Savior on a Stick

Community Christian Church of Springfield         
Roger Ray, pastor
March 18, 2012     Lent 4

John 3:14-21
14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17"Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God."

About a third of this congregation was packed into Galloway Station last night to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and the fact that there is no video from that gathering will be the focus of our prayers of thanksgiving later in the service.  This social gathering was organized by our own June Hertenstein who is the only member of the church with an accent that could pass for Irish.... However, she is no more Irish than St. Patrick was.... June is Scottish, a distinction often lost on this side of the pond but never forgotten in Britain.

Perhaps the more alarming thing I just said though is not that June is not Irish but that St. Patrick wasn't Irish.  The truth is that Patrick was born in Wales in the fourth century and was captured and made a slave for several years before he was able to escape and return to his family.  Much later, he returned to Ireland as a Christian missionary.

It is always also alarming to many traditionalists to learn that Patrick, although declared to be a saint, was not Catholic.... He lived before the Roman Catholic Church came into existence.  And March 17th is not his birthday.
We don't know when he was born but historical records indicate that he died on March 17th.... Not a terribly happy holiday.  But the mythical record is that Patrick drove all of the snakes from the Emerald Island which would be a noteworthy thing had there ever been snakes in Ireland.  You could say that I drove all of the wild tigers out of Springfield but I'm not going to put it on our stationary because, even though there are no wild tigers in our Ozark woods, it would be somewhat disingenuous of me to take any credit for that fact.

As much as some of this factual information might rile an Irishman in the United States, it would not rise to being worthy of a good fist fight in a pub in Dublin because, in Ireland, they call St Patrick's Day, simply, March 17th.  It is a lot more important to second and third generation immigrant families who need a good excuse to drink green beer.  Self respecting patrons in pubs in Ireland don't drink green beer.

Mark Twain said, "A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth."  In many ways, so far as religious traditions go, a lie told and stuck to for a few generations becomes the truth.  Certain Biblical myths or certain interpretations of Biblical myths become so well situated in our minds that they become so true that no one is allowed to speak or even to think differently.... Which is generally why that none of you free thinkers ever felt like you belonged in a traditional church.

We have before us today one of the most familiar passages of scripture in the whole of the Bible.  So familiar that when you see someone unfurl a banner at a football game that reads simply, "John 3:16" you know that you want to try to find a seat as far away from those people as possible.

I've been grading midterm papers all week for my students at Drury so forgive me for putting it just this way, but any "C" grade student could hear these seven verses Russ read for us today and they would be able to tell you that it was the "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, ..." text.  A "B" grade student would have also caught that reference to Jesus being like the serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness.

A solid "B" grade New Testament student would be aware of the reference to the account in Numbers 21, when the people of Israel had escaped from Egypt but they immediately started grumbling about how bad the food was.  And, verse 6 says, that God, not caring much for food critics, sent poisonous snakes into their encampment and many of them had died from snake bites.  I suppose for our more literalist and fundamentalist friends we should say, "God loved them so much that he sent poisonous snakes into their camp to bite them and kill them so that they would learn to appreciate God's cooking."  So, the story goes, rather than command the snakes to go away..... like St Patrick would have.... God tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze and put it on a pole in the midst of the camp and then anyone who looked up at the bronze snake, after being bitten, would not die.  There are several things about this narrative that should seem a little fishy to you not the least of which is that the second of the ten commandments we discussed last week very specifically said not to make any graven images of any human or animal..... and now God is telling Moses to make a bronze snake.

But now, an "A" student would dig a little deeper and would be aware that the other point in the Old Testament where this bronze snake shows up is in a text in 2 Kings when King Hezekiah was leading a reform to restore the faith and make Yahweh, once again, the only God in Israel.
In Hezekiah's time, there was a bronze snake on a pole in the courtyard of the temple to which people came and made offerings!

The embarrassing truth of the matter was this, the Israelites, who were not supposed to have any idols, not only had idols but they had them in the temple courtyard until Hezekiah decided that he was the new sheriff in town and he was going to get rid of all of those rivals to Yahweh.  Years later, in the priestly accounts of Israel's history, not wanting to admit that they had an idol of a snake in the Temple grounds, they basically made up this insane story about the snakes and Moses making the bronze snake.

And, again, as Mark Twain said, "A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth."  It would have remained as one of those rather untidy little bits of narrative in the Old Testament if John had not picked it up as a metaphor to use to explain why Jesus had been killed.

You see, in spite of what we were told in Sunday School when we were growing up, there was no one in pre-Christian Judaism who was expecting a son of God to come and die for our sins.  Some were certainly hoping for a Jewish king who would be a successful military leader who could same them from Roman occupation.... But any talk of a messiah among the Jews certainly did not include a cross!

For most of the followers of Jesus, his cruel execution was the end of the movement.  Just like when John the Baptist was beheaded, his movement quickly lost steam and within a generation you didn't find the church of John the Baptist spreading around Palestine and Alexandria.
For the early New Testament writers, the execution of Jesus was a problem to be explained to their readers and they tried lots of different ways to explain it, some of which make more sense than others.  In some ways, I believe, the more poetic explanations make more sense than the concrete doctrinal explanations.

Here, in the midst of this beautiful and memorable text, John compares Jesus on the cross to that bronze snake that Moses had allegedly put up on a pole.  Now, the story about Moses putting a bronze snake on a pole that you could look at and be cured of a poisonous snake bite is not literally or historically true.... I trust that you are with me on that.... It is a myth used to hide an embarrassing fact that the Jews had kept an idol in the temple courtyard for a couple of hundred years.

But in John's hands, the myth becomes a beautiful metaphor for the sacrifice of Jesus.  The Psalms often speak of their kind, literally, their "messiah" being "high and lifted up."  And by that, they mean that the king is elevated on a throne high above the heads of the people.  The paradox for Christians is that when Jesus was lifted up, he was just lifted up about three feet off the ground and then they nailed him to a cross.

Now, I don't want to go all "Mel Gibson" on you, but what do you think John means when he says that looking up to that tortured, broken, executed body of Jesus, nailed to a cross, will heal you?  They were looking for a king, a messiah, who would be a great and successful military leader, who would both protect them and punish all of their enemies and yet, what they got, which is not want anyone wanted, was a messiah on a stick.... Christ on a cross, that looks like failure and the end of the story if all you really want is a throne.

Now, I know that I shouldn't try to tell you exactly what John meant by using this metaphor but if you'll indulge me just a moment to return to my previous story about St. Patrick.  Now, the part of Patrick's story that is actually historical, what really did happen is that some really bad assed Irishmen had come to the coast of Wales, raiding defenseless villages and they had taken young Patrick to be a slave.

And he served several years under cruel circumstances in the household of his Irish master until he managed to escape and go back to his family in Britain.  There Patrick became a person of great faith, and after several years he decided to go back to Ireland, to go back to the people who had stolen his childhood from him, back to the people who had abused him, enslaved him... the people who had ruined his life.... He went back to those people to share his faith with them, to protect them from the abuses of the vestiges of the Roman army that was persecuting Christians and, the legend has it, he even took money to his former master to pay him the price of redeeming a man from slavery.

What could make a man do that?  What could make a man forgive that much?  What could lead a man to set aside his own pain, any desire for revenge, and find himself able to sacrifice his life in compassion even for people who don't deserve it at all?

You can look up to a man like that.... You can look up and if you can emulate that character, that willingness to be sacrificed in service of the undeserving, even your own enemies, then I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if you can do that, you can be healed.

Learning to Live in Community

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO      
Roger Ray, pastor
March 11, 2012     Lent 3  

Exodus 20:1-17
Then God spoke all these words: 2I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3you shall have no other gods before me. 4You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, 6but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. 7You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. 8Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
12Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. 13You shall not murder. 14You shall not commit adultery. 15You shall not steal. 16You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 17You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

I want to offer a warning to our YouTube and iTunes viewers that today's sermon contains the potentially offensive ideas that women are fully human beings with the same rights as men and that a heterosexual majority has no more right to vote on the legitimacy of same sex relationships than a gay minority has a right to vote on the legitimacy of heterosexual relationships.... Or to put it in more familiar Biblical language, "thou shalt not be a jerk and thou shalt mind thine own business."

And that being said, I would like to invite you to spend a few minutes considering that very familiar passage of scripture that all of us over the age required to buy discounted coffee at McDonalds saw posted on the walls of our schools and public buildings.  For most of us that public debate about the 10 commandments is buried in a couple of generations of history but it still pops up now and then when some lower court judge or municipal official decides to try to drag us all back to Mayberry by posting the Decalogue in public again.

Most of those guys, even the ones who are not in Alabama, seem to think that it represents the values of their bygone days with all of those very peaceful and Christian segregated schools when women had to wear dresses, even in winter, on their way to their jobs as secretaries or school teachers where they earned wages that kept them dependant on a man for their food and housing.  I hope none of you are feeling a wave of nostalgia right now.

But, let's humor them, let's look at the Decalogue in context.  The ten commandments became the core of Jewish teachings as they evolved from being nomadic desert shepherds into being settled farmers with villages and walled cities.  Survival in the desert with just your family takes a different set of values than it takes to suddenly have neighbors and sometimes lots of neighbors who are competing for the same resources and, in very fact, competing to survive.

Regardless of some of the exaggerated priestly accounts of Jewish history, they never actually had Palestine to themselves.  There were always competing groups from the Philistines and Canaanites to that whole list of Hittites, Amorites, Havites, Jebusites, Perezzites and the annoying people who try to force you to buy something from them when you are stopped in traffic at the border.

To survive, to keep from just being assimilated into the genetic buliabez of the Ancient Near East, the Jews had these first four commandments that defined who they were.  They were to worship only Yahweh, protecting even Yahwey's name from being profaned.  And they were not to flirt with other gods by having idols, and they were to distinguish themselves by observing a day of total rest every seven days.

These four rules kept the Jews distinct and separate from Philistines, Cannanites or any of the other Middle Eastern "ites" and you can tell that it worked because you can't find any Hittites or Perazzites anywhere anymore.

This is a concept that really vexes a lot of modern Christians but both ancient Judaism and early Christianity are emphatically devoted to the value of the community over the value of the individual.  Americans are big on rugged individualism but our Biblical faith is all about the nation, the tribe, the community of faith taking care of one another.

In fact, as much as modern evangelicals like to talk about having a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" it continues to shock them when you point out that the word "personal" is nowhere in the Bible.  No one in the New Testament was invited to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and no one in the Old Testament talked about having a personal relationship with Yahweh.  There is an indisputable personal dimension to the journey of faith but American rugged individualism is the opposite of Biblical faith and not its normative condition...... am I going to fast for you?

We can honestly say that when it comes to Biblical theology, it really isn't all about you.  It is about us.  Their devotion to Yahweh, their rejection of foreign gods, idols and their distinictive observance of the Sabbath defined them as a people and it was an immediate and distinct protection of poor workers from being abused in that everyone, even farm animals, got a day of rest every week.

The other six commandments had to do with how you live in community with these people of whom each of us is just a part.
As nomadic tribes, "survival of the fittest" was often the operative rule.  Stealing, taking wives and slaves, murder and violence was a natural part of the pre-civilized world but as they were becoming a settled people, for anyone to have a decent life without having to be so hyper vigilant that you could never leave your tent or allow yourself to sleep through the night, you had to gain an emphatic respect for your neighbor, for the integrity of their family and you own.

You care for your mother and father because the elderly become as vulnerable as children and just as you instinctively protect your children you must decide that you are going to protect your parents..... which, as a society, means that they are going to be fed, housed and cared for.....right?  You don't take away their food, housing or health care by calling them "entitlements" because, in a civilized and just society, our elders get to be housed, fed and provided medical care because, "Thou shalt not be a jerk."

Adultery was important in that society for reasons of real estate as well as for the sanctity of family.  Property ownership followed male blood lines and so they had to know who the father of each child was but more than that, you see in this a religious demand that you respect the integrity of your neighbors' property, family and safety.

You can't murder them, that should be obvious, but more than that, you can't constantly be looking covetously through their bedroom window or into their garage and back yard.  Your neighbor's spouse is not for you.  Your neighbor's kids are not your kids.  Your neighbor's car, farm implements and business tools are not yours.

The principle of believing that your neighbor's person and family is not yours to govern might come as a surprise to some of the people who have historically been so eager to put a monument with the 10 commandments chiseled onto it in front of the court house.

Legislation is often named to deny the reality of what is in the legislation.  If you want to take away individual rights guaranteed in the bill of rights then you call it the "Patriot Act."  As if it is patriotic to take away the rights that are at the bedrock of what it means to be an American.

I think we see the same in that bill that was passed in 1996 called the "Defense of Marriage Act" because what it actually does is it keeps about ten percent of the couples in America from getting married and it takes away from them the pension and health care benefits that they have earned.

That is, if George and Sally live next door to Ted and Sam, and George and Ted both work at the post office, at the end of their work day, Sally gets to be covered by George's insurance but Sam doesn't get to be covered by Ted's, even though George and Ted and done the same job.  And at the end of their natural lives, Sally gets to receive survivor pension benefits from George's retirement plan but Sam doesn't get Ted's even though Ted paid in just as much as George did.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is coveting what belongs to your neighbors.  It is not a "defense of marriage" it is a "I can be married and economically solvent and you can't be because I have stuck my nose into your personal life and business."
Which violates that whole, "Thou shalt not be a jerk" commandment... right?

I do understand that there are some things that happen when you live in close proximity to one another that we feel a need to govern for the integrity of the whole of society.  And honestly, I can understand those who are morally outraged by the issue of abortion.  If you believe that an unborn fetus is a human being then I understand why you believe that social norms have gone off the rails by legalizing abortion.

But the fact is that our society does not agree with that view.  A woman's reproductive life is a matter to be governed by that woman and her physician, not her state legislator and that legislator's super pac contributors.  And yet, in the name of morality, there have been those suggesting that when a woman is making the most painful and difficult personal choice of her life, that she and her doctor should be subjected to a state legislator who says that a medical device should be inserted into that woman's body, for no medical reason at all, but rather, as a form of humiliation because that woman is exercising a choice that the legislator does not agree with.

She may have been raped by a stranger but then her legislator gets to mechanically rape her again just to make her feel that much worse but I gotta tell you, in my humble opinion, the second rape is just as vile and disturbing as the first one.

When you talk about stealing from your neighbor, there is nothing you can steal that is of greater value than your neighbor's dignity so, from a Bible preaching pastor's point of view.... You need to leave Ted and Sam alone and however Sally decides to manage her womb, you should consider that to be none of your business.  Because God didn't call us to be jerks.... God called us to be liberators and defenders of the dignity of our neighbors.  Let the people say, "Amen

Speaking Truth to Power