July 8, 2012 Proper 9
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Ezekiel 2:1-5
He said to me: O mortal, stand up on your feet, and I will speak with you. 2And when he spoke to me, a spirit entered into me and set me on my feet; and I heard him speaking to me. 3He said to me, Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day. 4The descendants are impudent and stubborn. I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them, "Thus says the Lord God." 5Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.
Mark 6:1-5
He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, "Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him. 4Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house." 5And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6And he was amazed at their unbelief.
I had a little "Come to Jesus" meeting with the Executive Editor of the Springfield NewsLeader this week. Contact between the Executive Editor and opinion columnists is fairly rare. When it happens it is almost always a "come to Jesus" meeting of some sort.
This one took place because the editor had gone over the head of our opinion page editor and changed the wording in one of my recent columns. He would have said that he was "toning down" my rhetoric a bit.... Something editors do sometimes when they would like for me to be a nicer chap than I actually want to be.
And so I had sent him a bit of a cryptic message explaining my views on journalism. I said, in my two sentence message: Journalism is the publishing of something someone doesn't want you to publish. Everything else is just self promotion.
He thought that perhaps we should talk. I am completely sympathetic with the fact that it is his role to produce a paper that people will buy and in which businesses will advertise. But I implored him to understand that from my perspective, I write for the paper because there are topics of great ethical importance that I want to keep before the public.
It is not difficult to see, then, that we are often at cross purposes. I believe that a free press and an unfettered pulpit are both crucial to keeping the government honest but publishers must acknowledge that the free press is not free.... Every newspaper is dependent upon subscribers and advertisers. But, as we have seen illustrated so clearly in the past year.... Money is speech but the people with the most money, even though they may get most of the TV, radio and print time, doesn't have anything at all to do with whether they are telling the truth.
Aaron Sorkin has created a new series for HBO that was just launched this week. It stars Jeff Daniels as a TV news anchor who is very intelligent, apparently rather bitter and jaded, and, also more than a little delusional.... Possibly even schizophrenic. He imagines seeing people in the audience holding up challenging signs... trying to get him come out from behind his non-partisan, neutral news reporter disguise and to tell the absolute truth.
It is interesting to me that, as we saw in the old movie Bullworth, for any public figure to tell the truth, to make it believable, the prophet has to be a little bit crazy. Let me share this four minute clip from the inaugural show..... it may be the best 4 minutes of television I have ever seen: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ6YXYf0Dvs)
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Of course, the news anchor suffers terrible consequences for this lapse into honesty. That's what keeps most politicians using important sounding words without ever actually saying anything. That's why, if you did a free association word test on almost anyone in America, if you say the word "sermon" the first word they will say is "boring." Almost every pastor I know has been willing to exchange relevance for job security.
We normally have only one scripture reading in our services, today we have two because they both illustrate a similar point from two periods of our ancient faith history, separated by nearly 600 years. The job of the prophet is to say what most people don't want to hear. The job of a newspaper is to print what someone doesn't want printed.
The truth, St. John says, will set you free. But we know that before it sets you free, it is likely to make you angry. And yet, it is the willingness to expose ourselves to things we don't want to hear that inspires us to be better people, that keeps us honest, and, if in fact we want to be able to say that ours is the greatest nation in the world, we have to be willing to work to put some meat on those bones because it should be becoming obvious to all of us that we cannot rest on the memory of the greatest generation.
The spiritual death I see in our culture, and I love the way Jeff Daniels' character phrases it.... We've gone from a war on poverty to a war on the poor. President Johnson's initiative in the war on poverty was more successful than we have generally given it credit.... There was homelessness in America back then but not at all in the numbers we see now. The war on poverty gave way to the War on Drugs, which has been, as lest in my estimation, a total failure.
Did you know that if we transferred the money we are spending in the war on drugs to higher education spending that we could pay off every student loan in America? You don't have to be more than an armchair sociologist to realize that most of drug addiction is motivated by the depression people feel when they don't feel that they have a future. If we had free college education in America, I'm going to stand here and claim that drug use in America would go down much more than by any affect of the war on drugs.
If you want to do more than just stick your chest out and say that we are the greatest nation in the world because we happen to live here, then you know that you have to invest in the future. Rather than making education easier to obtain, we're making it nearly impossible for the poor to go to college to become taxpaying, successful citizens.
Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower led our nation in investing in our own infrastructure, creating the nation's interstate highways which made our economic success possible. But, in the past 25 years, the number of vehicles on our roads have doubled and yet the total number of miles of pavement have remained about the same. We've gone from being the world leader in transportation to 24th out of the 124 soverign nations of the world. Our bridges and roads are crumbling.
In terms of GDP, Norway, South Korea and Austrailia are spending twice as much as we are in developing their roads and bridges.... Even struggling European economies in Spain and the United Kingdom are way ahead of us. Americans keep talking about improving our infrastructure but according to polls reported in Time Magazine recently, 71% oppose any new gas taxes, 64% oppose toll booths..... I guess a 100% would like for the tooth fairy to fix our roads and bridges!
The column my editor had altered was about access to health care. Nation wide about 10% of Americans don't have health insurance. In Missouri, it is 18%, nearly double the national average. And yet many of the people I know are adamantly opposed to health care reform that will give access to those millions of people because they might have to sacrifice something themselves. I referred to those people in my column as being "moral midgets." My editor said that was name calling. I said it was demonstrably objectively true. I believe that he thinks that I might be a little bit crazy. I think that he is probably right, but then, I'm counting on your to be a little bit crazy too....
When I was a college student I had a very annoying medical problem. It was a virus in the sole of my foot called a "plantar's wart." It was very painful and I had to do a lot of walking on campus and so I kept going to a local doctor who tried every cure known in those days. He cut them out but they grew back. He burned them with electricity.... But they came back. He even put a kind of acid pack on them that burned for days but once the flesh grew back, the painful warts returned.
The doctor finally told me that these kinds of things would never go away until I believed that they would go away. When I told my father what the doctor had said after nearly two years of unsuccessful treatments, my father said, "You tell him to just keep sending me a bill until he believes that he has been paid."
Dad was a little cynical about such things. But I want to point out to you a very peculiar passage in our gospel lesson today. It is printed there in your bulletin, from Mark. It is about when Jesus went to preach in his hometown and people were unwilling to accept him as a religious teacher.
It is right there at the end, verses 5 and 6 of Mark, chapter 6:
It says that he could do no deed of power there and that he was amazed at their unbelief. Matthew and Luke copy almost all of Mark but they don't copy that sentence.... Mark inserts a qualifier himself..... it is hard to think about Jesus not being able to do something but even in the formula of the healing miracles they report, they all say that Jesus said to the cured individual, "Your faith has made you well."
Without the faith of the people, Jesus couldn't do anything. You would never have heard of Gandhi if he had made the salt march alone. No matter how brilliant Martin Luther King, Jr. was, if no one had marched with him.... If he alone had been arrested, beaten, imprisoned..... he would have hardly rated a couple of column inches in the metro section of the Memphis newspaper that April 5th morning after he was murdered.
If you want to be able to say that America is the greatest nation in the world and say it with a straight face, then we have to end homelessness..... we need to end the extremity of poverty. Every sick person should be able to access medical help and it shouldn't bankrupt them. Every child of the poor should be able to get an education that would end the cycle of poverty in their family.
And that can happen if you will believe it can happen. If you will work for it to happen. If you are willing to sacrifice for it to happen. If you refuse to give up until it has happened. To do that you either have to have a lot of faith or you have to be kinda crazy.... Either way works for me.
