September 16, 2012 Proper 19
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Isaiah 50:4-9a
4The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens-- wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. 5The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward. 6I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. 7The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; 8he who vindicates me is near. Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who are my adversaries? Let them confront me. 9It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty? All of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.
In 2004 Missouri earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first state in the union to pass an amendment to our state constitution, banning same sex marriage. I grew up in Kentucky where, even when I was growing up, our state constitution banned automobiles. Needless to say, that conservative move by the voters in Kentucky didn't keep cars off the streets any more than Missouri's absurd amendment will stop gay people from falling in love with one another.
When the amendment was put on the ballot, I organized a press conference and invited pastors in the area to join me in making a united statement in opposition to this prejudiced and backward amendment. And I did have several who joined me for the press conference but I was disappointed that they were all retired pastors. I was the only pastor at the press conference who was still drawing a salary from a church though I did receive phone calls from a few other parish pastors who said that they would really love to join me but that... as one said, "I have young children at home and I have to keep my job to keep a roof over their heads."
And I don't want to be too diminishing to that response. I was fired not long after that and I had a kid going into college and a mortgage and a lot of years to work before retirement. I have felt the fear of economic desperation.
I know what it is like to be over 50 and unemployed and let me tell you, when one big church fires you, there are not a dozen others that come rushing to offer you a job. Being fired by people whom you have loved and literally grown up with for two decades is traumatic but, and it took me a long time to get to the point of being able to say this, but it may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.
They say that the best way to defend a lion is to open the cage door. I had no way of appreciating how small my prison had become until I had been set free.
Our beautiful and poetic reading from Isaiah this morning moves quickly from one image to another. At first, the prophet is just reveling in the belief that he had been called to be a preacher who is, first and foremost, a teacher:
The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens-- wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.
But then, without explanation, he turns immediately to a violent image, saying:
I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.
On the one hand, the prophet is ebullient about being in a role of teaching prophetic truth but he is aware that people will also pull out his beard and spit in his face for doing it. And here is what I really want to draw to your attention about his text. This is not first Isaiah, the writer of the first 39 chapters of Isaiah was predicting the destruction of their nation by a foreign army.
You can easily understand why people would want to fire, abuse or kill a prophet who is predicting doom for his own nation. We're used to seeing Old Testament prophets being imprisoned or abused for saying things no one wants to hear.
But Second Isaiah, the beautiful poetry from the middle of the book of Isaiah comes from a different preacher in an entirely different generation. He isn't warning an established nation that they are about to be conquered and carried away into slavery. He is talking to a ghetto full of slaves who have been in slavery for as long as almost anyone alive could remember.
He is telling them that their cage is open! They can leave the familiar surroundings of slavery in Persia and return to their own land, rebuild their own nation, observe their own religion and culture and, apparently, a lot of the slaves in ghetto responded by spitting in his face and abusing him.
The famous abolitionist, Harriet Tubman, escaped from slavery but then returned to the south many times to help free others. She said, late in her life, "I freed thousands of slaves but I could have freed thousands more if only they had realized that they were slaves."
From the days of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and the Greek gods of Olympus, governments have used religion to help keep society stable..... as such most houses of worship have been the defenders of the status quo. Ironically, the prophetic tradition has always stood up to challenge the status quo but the institutional priest and preacher tells people that we have always supported war against whoever we need to kill this year.... We've always hated gays.... We've always bowed to the power of the employer or slave owner..... and you must always believe in the same magic!
Keeping people believing in the same anti-intellectual, anti-logical, anti-critical thinking religion is a part of keeping them from questioning authority and the social order. Once you can make someone believe something that is totally absurd then you can get them to do almost anything, from strapping on a suicide bomber vest to telling your own son or daughter to get out of the house because they are gay...... nothing a sane person would do who didn't have their head filled with non-sense.
Once you question ancient religious assertions that tell you that you are so sinful that God had to kill himself..... that even though life is unfair, unjust and cruel in this world that God made, there is another world that God also made that is either infinitely more cruel or incomprehensibly cushy..... of course, God could have started you out in the cushy world but a little suffering for a few decades here will make you appreciate it all the more...... there are some other things about preachers inside of fish and walking on the water but basically, just don't think and don't question the guy in the big dress.
I was in graduate school more than 30 years ago and even then some of my biblical professors would occasionally introduce a lecture by saying, "Now you can't say this in your church......" assuming that if we took good scholarship into the parish that the stupid people there would revolt and fire us.
And that is why, most churches today hold onto a seventeenth century way of talking inside their churches while people have to leave and try to live in the 21st century.... And so, is it any surprise that there are people who insist that global warming is not real because they don't believe in it. They can say that the United States has the best health care in the world because they refuse to accept the actual research that places us somewhere around 35th in the world. Even C. S. Lewis, one of the darlings of the evangelical church, said that a mad man cannot put out the light of the sun by writing the word "darkness" on his cell wall.... And yet traditional religion expects to do basically that..... assuming that you can recite a creed and make it true because you and a lot of other people say it in unison. Give me someone who believes that the doctrine of the Trinity accurately describes the nature of the one true God and, trust me, you are looking at a person who can be made to believe that you can cut taxes and balance the federal budget at the same time.... No really, some people will believe anything!
Those of you who are on my email list have seen many of the letters from viewers we have from around the world who often write saying that they have never heard anything like what I tell them about the Bible or about a way of being Christian that is free of superstition and magic..... that you can still be devoted to the ethical teachings of Jesus without believing in blood sacrifice or the threat of a burning hell..... or the alternative with the streets of gold and dozens of virgins..... and what is so special about that if they all insist upon remaining virgins for all of eternity anyway?
But here is the newsflash for you..... there is nothing that I have said that is original to me.... I'm not an original scholar in any way.... The only thing different about me is that I am no longer afraid..... if there is anything about me that is different from a garden variety preacher it is that I have failed to pay attention to my professors when they said to us, "You can't say this in church."
John Shelby Spong says that the fastest grown church in America is the Church Alumni Association because people are just not going to go on being willing to assassinate their brains and believe stuff that is clearly not true that leads to all kinds of oppression, violence and discrimination.
And so, I believe, the only church that will survive, the only one that should survive, is the one that joins Isaiah in courageously telling the truth, even if it makes people mad.... Even if they would prefer to remain in mental slavery, even if they prefer the cage to freedom.
We have already freed thousands from the grip of irrational fear, guilt and superstition and there are thousands more to free whenever they are willing to stop being enslaved to ignorance and fear.
To those who are willing to unplug from the matrix of illusion and lies, welcome to reality. It isn't all that pretty but I can tell you this, if you still want to go to heaven you are going to have to roll up your sleeves and join us in the trenches because the only heaven we are sure of is the one we work together to build in this world by fighting against poverty, discrimination, war and injustice.
