The Birth of the Emerging Church

Pentecost  May 27, 2012
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Acts 2:14-21
14But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 17'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 19And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 20The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. 21Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'

I had one of those rare Sunday mornings a few years ago, when I was on vacation but still here in town.  So I decided to indulge my curiosity as to what exactly goes on in our city's mega-church which many of us lovingly refer to as "Six Flags over Jesus."  A friend went with me who had no experience around Pentecostal churches and I warned her that it would not be much like the very reserved university Presbyterian Church of her childhood but she wanted to go see it too.

After nearly an hour of hypnotically repetitious choruses that repeated the same three or four words over and over in a manner that seemed to me to be as tedious as trying to empty the Pacific Ocean with a tea spoon, things got kicked up a notch when a very large woman in a loud print dress began to run up and down the isles dancing and then another woman rose and began speaking in tongues.  My friend had never seen either one of these things and was visibly frightened and so I whispered a reassurance that a man would very shortly stand up and give an interpretation of the incomprehensible utterances of the woman speaking in tongues and that, more than likely, he will tell us how angry that God is about women not being obedient to their husbands.

As luck would have it, I called it accurately just seconds before it happened.  In churches where women are deeply repressed, they are not allowed to serve on the board, to preach, to teach or have any sort of religious expression, Pentecostal spiritual expressions provide a loop hole in the gender bias.  Women can interrupt a male led service to dance and speak to their hearts content but in one of the rare Biblical references to the practice of speaking in tongues, Paul insists that there be an interpretation.

In my handful of experiences in such meetings, which does not rise to the point of being a scientific poll, the interpretations have inevitably been a Divine demand that women stop trying to act like they were equals to their husbands.  So you get a little liberation immediately balanced with another spiritual punch in the face.  Of course, I can't prove it, but it pleases me to think that the woman who stood up and so ecstatically spoke in tongues, upon hearing the interpretation of what she said as being another misogynistic message from God, is saying to herself, "That's not what I said at all you Jackass,"..... but, of course, I have no way of knowing but then you have no way of proving me wrong, so it is at least a draw.

I am certain that my account of my experience would sound like an insulting caricature in the ears of anyone who has felt a genuine spiritual presence in such meetings.  It is not my goal to be insulting but rather to put our scripture reading from the second chapter of Acts into a bit of perspective.

You were not there the morning I witnessed this Pentecostal gathering so it would be hard for you to say with certainty that I am exaggerating my account.  But as is clear from the third person narrative Luke records in the early chapters of Acts, he wasn't there for the events he is writing about either.
Luke writes his account of the birth of the church, placing it in the midst of the Jewish festival of Pentecost, a spring harvest festival at which it was expected that men, in particular would celebrate with over indulgence in new wine.... And so, it was not idle speculation when the people in the Jerusalem streets below the gathering in the upper room guessed that the disciples were drunk.  And, in fact, Peter's only defense against that allegation was that it was only 9 a.m. and they had hardly had time to get drunk yet.

Still, Luke is taking considerable liberty with the facts in order to construct a theological story of the birth of the church.  In every other Biblical account of speaking in tongues, the speech is entirely unintelligible.  They call the language of angels and the phenomenon is recorded not only in Pentecost Christian settings but in emotionally charged religious services of several world religions and, interestingly enough, if you pay close attention during the comedy performances of Kat Williams, he will occasionally dance across the stage while briefly speaking in tongues.  I'm sure most people in the TV audience miss it but those of Pentecostal background immediately catch the inside joke.

But Luke says that the disciples were not speaking in some angelic incomprehensible language but that they were suddenly speaking all of the languages known to the nations of the world.  Luke describes the birth of the church as being a dramatic restoration of all people being able to understand one another.

If you remember the Genesis narrative about the tower of Babel when God destroyed the tower and scattered the people, confusing their language so that they could no longer understand one another....
Luke sees the birth of the church as being the healing; the restoration of the unity that Genesis says existed in the very beginning of human history.

In the first pages of the Bible, we read the accounts of sin, of separation from God and from one another.  There is the fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden story, the murder of Abel by his brother Cain and Cain's subsequent banishment.  There is the flood and the Tower of Babel....each accounting for estrangement and distance between us and God and between the various tribes of people in the world.

Luke wants to believe that the story of Jesus and the beginning of the church was the other bookend to that story of human history.  That now our warfare with God and our divisions between different people can be over and we can all be reunited with one another and with God.

Of course, it didn't happen that way.  Even Luke's account goes on to chronicle the divisions between Jewish and Gentile Christians and one way of telling the history of Christianity is by looking at the conflicts and divisions that have left us in thousands of competing and critical pieces.

The writing of the creeds themselves were a way of drawing lines to say, "if you are a Christian you have to believe this and if anyone dares to worship or believe differently then we will have no more to do with you."  The church has unwittingly supported racial divisions, even supporting slavery.  It has kept women in subservient roles far longer in human history than has been seen in more secular societies.  The church has defended child labor, fought against labor unions and recently spent millions upon millions of dollars to deny equal rights to same sex couples.
That is not in any way to deny the wonderful things done in the name of faith by churches throughout the generations but for me, the balance between the good and the bad kept tipping through my 30 years of parish ministry towards an irreconcilable darkness until I left parish life entirely in 2007.  My then teen-aged daughter asked me at the dinner table a few months later, "Do you think you will ever go back to church again?"

In that moment, I could not imagine it, though I did try.  I visited liberal churches where I was bored out of my mind.  I visited traditional churches where both my intellect and my values were insulted.  I remember very clearly getting dressed in suit and tie to attend a Christmas Eve service and ended up just lying on my bed weeping because I couldn't think of any place where I could stand to go.

When a handful of us decided that since we could not find a place to go, that we would try to start a church we could actually support, it was done with a lot of decidedly personal motivation.  We wanted what we could not find elsewhere and even though we have always committed ourselves to being in service to the poor, we must admit that the first itch we wanted to scratch was our own.  We wanted a church where we could go, where we could bring both our intellect and our questions, our faith and our doubts.  We wanted to be a part of a community that didn't discriminate against anyone for their sexual orientation, gender, race, or what they believed or didn't believe.

The birth of this church has always been an intention to do what Luke thought the first church would do, to end the division, to quiet the Babel sounds of segregation and discrimination.  No more fear of hell.  No more judgment.  No more blood sacrifice, no neurotic guilt about our bodies or our humanity.
No more forcing ourselves to act like we believe what is clearly irrational.

And from this tiny upper room, our voices are heard in China, in Russia, in Iran and Indonesia, in Canada and Brazil.  I think we even have some listeners in Texas and Alabama.  And so we have begun to dare to wonder if we have started a church for ourselves where we can organize some service to the homeless poor around us, or are we now part of a movement that is inviting the church alumni association to dare to believe again, to believe that the divisions can be healed, the prejudice and racism can end, the craziness that has been our past experience of church can be over.

We dare now to speak of an emerging church, a church that will rise from the dust and ashes of a dysfunctional, judgmental, superstitious and divided graveyard of denominations.  Let love be our only creed.  Let radical compassion be our spiritual practice.  It is true that a smile means the same thing in every language and it may be that everything past that is really just commentary anyway.

Living as Resident Aliens

May 20, 2012   Easter 7
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

John 17:14-18                                              
14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.
15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 16 They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

In 2004 Dan Rather was forced into resigning from CBS news and several members of his staff were fired after they had aired a story that questioned President George W. Bush's military service.  They had based their story on a document that had turned out to have been fabricated.  Now, mind you, there was and is a great deal of very plausible speculation about some of the details of President Bush's National Guard duty regarding his early release and possibly spotty record of showing up for duty but the specific letter, called the "Killian" memo turned out to be a forgery.

And with all the things I have heard reported on news stations that were entirely fabricated in the back room propaganda machinery, I couldn't believe that someone as prominent as Dan Rather could be fired for having shown a lack of journalistic integrity in checking his sources on that report.  Especially considering that President Bush had sent our armies to war based on documents that showed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and he had not checked the validity of those documents either..... but he didn't lose his job.

Former Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell, has recently published a book challenging the CIA to explain why they put so much stock in testimony given by a source the CIA had code named "Curve Ball" because his information was so faulty.
What seemed apparent to me at the time was that Dan Rather was fired for questioning the President of the United States and they simply found a technicality to justify the action.  What he said in an interview shortly after leaving CBS is that the news media had failed generally to challenge the rush to war in Iraq and that the conspiracy of silence among the major networks amounted to a general failure of the news media to do its job in defending democracy against the excesses of autocratic government.

Questioning Bush's military record was just a way of nipping at the heels of a Commander in Chief whom Rather and everyone else in the media had given an undeserved pass in the lead up to an unnecessary, casualty riddled and disastrously expensive war.  I was a visiting fellow at Harvard at the time that Rather was dismissed and that same month we had a panel in a plenary session in the divinity school on war and the faith community.

The panel was comprised of a Catholic priest, a Muslim imam, a Unitarian pastor, a Rabbi and protestant pastor.  As each took their turn to make their introductory remarks, each one expressed their personal opposition to the war in Iraq and then each offered their excuses for why they had not said anything about it within their own faith community.  The Rabbi had members who were concerned for the security of Israel so they believed any war on an Arab neighbor was justified.  The Imam had members with relatives in both Sunni and Shiite sects of Iraq, the Unitarian had a retired general who was a consultant to military industrial concerns.... And so it went.

Religious leaders, faced on the one side with a clearly immoral war and on the other side, congregants who favored the war, chose silence..... just like ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, and every one at CBS until it was too late to do much about it.  I was, to put it mildly, furious.  These religious leaders all served congregations in Boston, MA within blocks of Harvard and the Kennedy School and they still didn't have the courage to speak the truth that was in their hearts.  I had, in my parish in Springfield, MO, loudly objected to the war....though, doing so eventually contributed to my suffering the same fate as Dan Rather did but I'm not bitter......

This short passage of scripture we have before us today from John was written when the church was already in its second or third generation.  The expectation of an immediate return of Christ and an end to history was starting to seem to be a fairly dubious hope.  So we have this language of being in the world while not being a part of it, like resident aliens, sojourning in an empire whose rules and values are foreign to us.

The emphasis is on clinging to the truth rather than fitting into the empire.  That's always the tension of faith communities in any nation... whether you are a rabbi or imam in the Middle East, a Buddhist in Asia or a Protestant in America, there is huge pressure to go along with the empire.

Thomas Jefferson was not necessarily opposed to religion but he sure didn't like the clergy.  He wrote in the 14th volume of his personal musings:   "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own."

That's why so many of us have traced the fall of the Christian Church to the 4th century when Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the state religion.
But it is not as if the faithful surrendered all at once, nor is it true that the faithful have never come back out of retirement.  What is interesting to me is that religious leaders will so often quote Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Archbishop Romero, Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh and Desmond Tutu but they would never do any of the things those people did.  What made each of those people famous was precisely because they stood up to the values, laws and power of the empire where they lived and the people who adore them will bow to the empire so fast I'm surprised that they don't all have whip lash!

We don't always need to be in protest mode.  There is, after all, a huge difference between being prophetic and just suffering from paranoid delusions.  But the proverb is true that says "only dead fish always swim with the current."  If we are not willing to stand up to the values of the dominant culture, to protest, even to break immoral laws, then we ought to stop talking about King and Gandhi and Day and Mandela because if they had been law abiding citizens you never would have heard of them..... or Jesus, or Moses for that matter.

As many of you know, I maintain a Face Book page entitled "The Emerging Church" where I can go and find a few hundred people to chat with about unjust war, income disparity, the insanity of our health care system and the prejudices of the religious right against gays, women, minorities and people with college educations.  The page has proven very useful when I can't find any of you to sit and listen to one of my rants but Face Book being what Face Book is, some of the participants are more than just a bubble off plumb.

One comment this week in response to the outrageous numbers of Americans we keep in prison was from a guy who said, "All of these problems will be solved when the government starts telling the truth about UFOs."

I'm not sure that I can draw a direct line between that posting on my page and the failure of the Face Book initial stock offering to rise to the anticipated value but I think it may have something to do with it.  Though, I have to say, that sentence has echoed around in my skull all week as a symbol of organized religion.  It makes a claim that seems, on the surface of it, to be completely insane and yet, you can't really prove him wrong.  And that description would fit most of what I was taught in Sunday School for the first two decades of my life.

When we say that we are in the world but not of this world, with all due respect to the Apostle Paul, that is not a claim that our true home is in a heavenly realm that may or may not even exist.  It means that we are willing to hold ourselves apart from the mythology of this world and its empires.  It isn't that we latch onto absurd other worldly religious claims, it is that we refuse to just play along with the absurd claims of emperors, prime ministers, kings and presidents, or their mass media lackeys.  We are willing to question, probe, challenge and search for the truth, no matter how costly that search or that truth may be.

At the homeless shelter where we serve lunch every Thursday and Friday there is a Native American who likes for us to call him "one feather."   A lot of people would say that "one feather" has a pretty bad drinking problem though I suspect he would prefer to say that he has no problem drinking but a lot of people around him seem to have some sort of personal problem with his intoxication.
He likes to tell us that he was a "code talker" during WWII, one of the native Navajo tribe who helped keep military secrets in radio transmissions during the war.  Of course, if that were true, he would have to be between 90 and 100 years old but we don't challenge his imagined account because I know what he is really saying..... he wants us to see him as something more than a drunk who hangs out at a homeless shelter waiting for someone to give him lunch..... he wants us to see him as being more than his surroundings.

And so we greet one another with a loud repetition of the traditional Navajo greeting, "Ya'at  eeh!" which is all I know how to say in Navajo and that may be ten percent of what he knows in Navajo but we hold to our separate reality because he is more than his surroundings.  And that's more than I can say for that panel of religious leaders at Harvard who just tried to blend into the wallpaper of society while tens if not hundreds of thousands of people were losing their lives.  It is more than I can say for most of the clergy I knew here in Springfield during that time.

And so, OK, Dan Rather should have checked his facts.... But no one died as a result of his careless error and that's more than can be said about our national leaders at the time.... At least Dan eventually decided to swim against the current and he got the usual reward we give to people who refuse to go along.

And so, I think we have to be prepared be viewed by the rest of the religious landscape and most of the rest of society as being a little crazy, a bit out of step, sometimes a thorn in the government's side and sometimes we have to be the one to pay the price of being a prophet.  And so, my friends, don't be afraid to be the one who is crazy enough to stand up for the truth.  Ya'at eeh!

After Prejudice and Division

May 13, 2012    Easter 6
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Acts 10:44-48                          
44While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. 45The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, 46for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, 47"Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" 48So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibVlVzGI9y0

A graduate student at MSU once asked me if I would be willing to talk with his parents.  He had tried "coming out" to them on his own and it had not gone especially well.  The evening of our appointment became more like a committee meeting.  The young man's mother and dad were there alright, but they also brought grand parents, siblings and cousins.

I had a very large office in those days but even still, it was crowded.  It got hot quickly.  I tried, in a pastoral and professorial way, to talk about some Bible passages that they felt made it impossible for them to accept their gay son.  Our conversation was apparently the first time they had ever encountered a Biblically literate pastor who disagreed with their vehement prejudice against homosexuals.

The conversation quickly fell into argument, grandma was on her feet shouting at her gay grandson, shaming him.  His mother was red faced, and screaming at heaven asking God to drive the demons from me.  Someone started speaking in tongues and the whole evening looked like the setting for some existential morality play but, and you should not resort to this too often, but one person armed with the truth becomes a majority.

We need to be careful that we do not become blinded by the false certainty of arrogance but when you know that you are right, it doesn't matter how many people in the room are calling you demonic, or are claiming a greater spirituality or moral superiority..... one person, armed with the truth, becomes the majority.

Thankfully, in my twenty years of meeting with families to discuss their newly discovered gay family member, the tide has turned significantly.  I remember leaving the movie, "Philidelphia" in 1993, that powerful film in which Tom Hanks portrays a young attorney who was fired for having AIDS, after watching those scenes in which the main character's family had been so supportive of him and his partner, so loving towards him in his last stages of death..... I said to my friends as we left the theater, "Where is that family?"

Parents used to wonder aloud what they did wrong to have a child turn out to be gay but it has finally dawned on our culture that having a gay child doesn't mean that you failed as a parent.  It is disowning a child because they are gay that makes you fail as a parent.

Thankfully, being HIV positive does not result in certain quick death anymore and that loving, accepting family is not so hard to find.  Now they are in the majority.  But there was a lot of angry accusation, guilt, screaming and even some speaking in tongues on the way to where we are this week, when the President of the United States could state openly on national television that he believes that gay people should have equal rights in marriage.

As with the end of the policy of "don't ask, don't tell" a couple of years ago, it seems to me to be coming several years late but I don't want to take anything away from the fact that this day has come.  Getting the president to speak his mind does not change the minds of many people immediately.  There is still a lot of work to be done but we are going in the right direction.

Even one Fox News reporter said that Obama was on the right side of history.  They had started out early this week decrying Obama's "war on marriage" but Shepard Smith stepped forward and changed the channel's tone and the other Fox commentators evidently stood down.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the church should be the society's headlights but we often end up being the tail lights.  Women got the vote early in the 20th century but still can't speak or hold office in many of our 21st century churches.  We integrated schools in America in the 1960's and yet the worship hour on Sunday mornings is still the most segregated hour of any week in America.  We gave women the right to control their own reproductive health in the 1970's and religious groups have been trying to reclaim their wombs and now their contraception ever since.

The United Methodist Church, the second largest protestant denomination in America, met this past week in their General Conference in Florida and again refused to change their policy of discrimination against gay pastors and their refusal to allow same sex marriages in their churches.  They will change in the next decade but not soon enough to rescue themselves from their downhill slide into moral irrelevance.

In the first century of the Common Era, the first great moral crisis faced by the church was the assumed prejudice between Jews and Gentiles.
I don't take much of the Acts accounts as literal history, but even if the story is entirely apocryphal the fact that Luke wants to tell the story records the undisputed truth that early Jewish Christians found it to be virtually inconceivable that God would want them to accept Gentiles into their Christian fellowship.  There were Jews who wanted to kill Paul for even suggesting it.  And Luke makes it seem that even the best and closest friends of Jesus where shocked almost beyond their ability to believe it, to see the Holy Spirit including Gentiles.

Prejudice is its own logic.  It doesn't make sense but we live with it until we can be liberated from the prison of judgment, moral condescension, anger and hatred.... Then, when you look back on it, you can't even remember why you were prejudiced in the first place.  I grew up in segregated schools and didn't think a thing about it.... It seemed to me that was just how the world worked.  Until it was all over, and little league and the community pool was integrated and in very short order, I would have never wanted to go back into that former way of living for a day without all of my new friends.

Even though I went to a very progressive seminary where, in 1978 they appointed the first woman dean of a Divinity School in America and shortly thereafter, Vanderbilt's new dean, Sally McFague, let it be known that she was also the first lesbian dean of a divinity school.  Even with lots of fellow gay students, I never really thought about the church's prejudice until an associate minister of mine came out of the closet and then I had to either watch him be crucified or I had to figure out what was right and what was wrong.

It was not my progressive seminary professors who taught my prejudice out of me.
It was the church's malice towards this gay man that forced me to look at the issue seriously and nearly 20 years before the president said it, I had to stand up to a church board and affirm my belief that gays were just like the rest of us, a blend of saint and sinner and watch the backs of members and donors as they left the church.

For the most part the church has been drug into the present kicking and screaming and regrettably years after public institutions had arrived at the same point.  The church often becomes the protector of the status quo rather than the proclaimers of social justice.  But that's the church we don't go to anymore!

We don't want to appoint ourselves as judges of other churches or other religions but I will draw this line in the sand..... genuine, legitimate spirituality brings people together.  Sick, misleading, evil religion divides people.  Any church that says that there are two tiers of people with one being superior to the other is not a church that deserves to have members.  If your church says that you have to be a male to preach then that church has a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of genitalia in sermon writing.  If your church says that straight people can get married in the sanctuary but gay people can't then self respecting straight people shouldn't get married there either....and I wouldn't give them a dime of support as long as they defend their prejudice...... but that's the church we don't go to anymore.

Today we celebrate with our gay members and friends now that our president's views have evolved.  We pledge ourselves to work with you in making full equality not just an idea but a reality in our time.  Have courage.  It gets better.

Racism without Racists?

Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
May 6, 2012    Easter 5

1 John 4:7-8, 18-21
7Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
18There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19We love because he first loved us. 20Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 21The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

I titled this sermon "Racism without Racists" but I think there should be a subtitle that says, "the Lamaze sermon" because I need to ask to be aware of the people sitting around you today.  If I say something that makes them so mad that they forget to keep breathing, you may need to get into their line of site and give them a firm command, "Breath!"

The scripture passage we just heard read from first John has the potential of being one of those really sweet and nice scripture passages you might see in needle point in your grandmother's living room.  "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God."  But John is not trying to be especially sweet.  In fact, he is being quite confrontational because he backs up this injunction by also citing the opposite, that is, "Whoever does not love does not know God."

That's not something many of you would be comfortable hearing me say to anyone and you are all accustomed to hearing me say confrontational and controversial things but you would not applaud me telling someone that they are a fraud.  But John is striving to be very clear and he uses a work in this text that even in our starkly partisan times, you won't hear a politician, other than Newt Gingrich, say about a competitor.
John says:   20Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

We try to get our children not to call people liars.  We try to let politicians off with things like, "I mis-spoke."  Like last month when Senator John Kyl said that Planned Parenthood spends 90% of their money providing abortions, when, in fact they spend only 3% of their money on abortions and most of their money providing other necessary women's health services.  When confronted with this huge "error" he explained, "I did not intend that as a factual statement.".... don't forget to breath ladies.

You see, I would like to be polite and not call people liars and I'm willing to do that, I just need something from the people on the other side of that equation.... I need for them to stop mis-speaking and stop saying things that are not factually true.

But I take the title of the sermon from an incident that took place in March when a federal judge in Montana, Judge Richard Cebull, emailed a racist cartoon from his courthouse email to some friends that depicted president Obama as a child asking his mother why he is black and she is white.  In the cartoon Obama's mother tells him that he is the product of a sexual encounter she once had with a dog.  The Judge added the line to his friends, "hope this touches your heart like it did mine."

Now, I am not the least bit surprised to find federal judges or anyone in any other high ranking office who is personally dumb enough to say something like this.

But I draw my sermon title from the apology that Judge Cebull issued when he was called on this horrible racist joke.  Once it hit the media the judge said that it was stupid and inappropriate but he added that even though the cartoon was clearly racist, that he is not personally bigoted in any way.  You see, the cartoon is racist but not the guy who thought it was funny, not the guy who said it touched his heart, not the guy who emailed it from the bench to his friends who, no doubt, are also not racists but who would enjoy a joke that said that our president is half dog.  If you are sitting near any of our black members please make certain that they are remembering to breath right now.

The only people who are called racists these days are the people who speak out against racism.  And black member of the media or the clergy who makes a public statement about racial discrimination is immediately accused of trying to divide the public along racial lines but this Federal Judge in Montana who is supposed to represent fairness, he should be the example of equal justice, he can call the president the son of a dog because his father was African and then look straight into the TV cameras and claim that he is not personally a bigot.  But once you can claim that there is racism but no one is actually a racist then racism becomes socially invisible while it is actually getting worse.

I have not said anything publicly about the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida in February because it seemed like the media was so full of mis-statements and non-factual reports that I wanted to steer clear of it until we had some reliable facts.  I do not know who threw the first punch in the confrontation between Trayvon and George Zimmerman.  It may be that Zimmerman did find himself in danger.


But what we know for a fact is that a large white man who was armed with a gun chased down an innocent black kid who was trying to get away from him and the black kid ended up dead.  And Zimmerman has, through friends and counsel, insisted that this was not about race but you can bet that it was about race from start to bloody finish.

It was about race on both sides of the equation.  Forget about both Martin and Zimmerman as individuals.... Think about race, especially in middle class neighborhoods in the south.  Young black men run from white men because they have a reason to be afraid.  White men are suspicious of black men because they have bought into a racial stereotype and all they every will let themselves see is confirmation of their racist bias.

So, yeah, an overly zealous neighborhood watch volunteer who is a white gun owner, will let his racist fear do the thinking for him when he sees a young black man in the neighborhood whom he does not personally know. I don't need to see Zimmerman on death row but I will not tolerate him telling me that he is not a racist.  And you cannot tell me that if the roles had been reversed, if Martin had chased an unarmed Zimmerman down in the neighborhood and shot him that Martin would not have been arrested on sight and not after a two month long national media outcry.

We have wanted to believe that the election of a black president was a sign of the end of racism in America but, while that was a huge step forward that should never be diminished, the fact that the nation took that step forward seems to have poured gasoline on the flames of racist sentiments.

We get one step forward and two steps backwards.  As most of you know I raised an Asian daughter here in this 96% Caucasian community and I always went the extra mile to have Asian dolls, coloring books and clothing in our home but when it came to the movies, all the princesses were white... even the ones that were only half human and the other half fish.... The human part was always white.

After she was too old to be interested in Disney movies, we got an American Indian heroine, an Asian, and finally, very recently, a black princess named Tiana in the Princess and the Frog.  But when Disney decided to produce Valentine candy for kids this year, they packaged a princess series with the very white princess from Sleeping Beauty on a package of Vanilla candy and Tiana on a package of.... I know you want me to say chocolate, but it wasn't, Tiana's flavor was watermelon.  That's not Valentine's Day 1962, that was this year.  What I'm telling you is that you don't get racism without racists.... You have to be carefully taught by someone.

Out west we've been overhearing a year-long drum beat out of Arizona about illegal immigration.  The media has been full of mis-statements and non-factual accusations about the crime rate caused by illegal immigrants.  Here is a fact you are not likely to hear in the news:  illegal immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than American citizens.  That's right.... If Arizona's governor is sincerely concerned about the crime rate she would do well to have Arizona citizens deported to Mexico and have more illegal immigrants take their place.  She would tell you that her concern is about crime and that it is not motivated by race but, folks, math is math, and math is not on her side.  I can't say that it is racism but I can say that it looks like racism, and it sounds like racism, and the net effect of the legislation she is pushing is racist..... ah, who am I kidding?  This is racism.
Friends, if you will indulge me a moment longer, I would like to tell you about an old Hassidic tradition.  There was a rabbi working with some students on definitions of words in their traditional question and answer method.  The rabbi asks his students when we can say that the dawn has come.  One student ventures that it is when there is enough light to tell the difference between a man and a tree in the distance. Another says that it is when you tell the difference between a grape vine and a thorn bush.

Not satisfied with any of their answers the old rabbi says, "The dawn has come when you can look into the face of any stranger and see that person as your brother or sister.  Until you can do that, it is still night."

So, men and women, what I am telling you is that it is still night time in America.  There is racism and as long as there is racism, you can know that there are racists and it is not enough for you just to make sure that you are not one of them.  It is for us to help the sun to rise.... It is for us to bring the light that makes it clear that no matter whether the strangers face is black or brown, yellow, red or white that it is the face of our beloved sisters and brothers.  Keep breathing my friends.