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!
