Sept. 9, 2012 Proper 18
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
James 2:1-10, 14-17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? 2For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, 3and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, "Have a seat here, please," while to the one who is poor you say, "Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet," 4have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 5Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? 6But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? 7Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
8You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 9But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.
14What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? 17
There is a small Trappist monastery in the vast pine forest around Monk's Corner about seventy miles outside of Charleston, SC. I visited my friend, the former guest master at Gethsemane Monastery, Brother Luke, when he was assigned to lead music there for a couple of years. Luke walked me out to the edge of the monastery to show me their egg producing business that the brothers operated to support themselves.
More than ten thousand hens occupied the rows and rows of cages where, what the brothers called their "lay sisters" worked tirelessly to support the monastery. Every few months, the hens had to be replaced. A large truck from Campbell's Soup would roll up, the cages were opened and then monks chased scrambling chickens all over their acreage in what they called a "chicken party." But, as Luke observed, it really wasn't much of a party for the chickens who would soon become part of a can of chicken noodle soup.
The image reminded me of an old 80's song that made fun of elections. It says:
"I was born down south on a chicken farm near Nashville, Tennessee
There wasn't nobody there except a sky full of air and 17 million chickens and me
And then one day I said to myself, I think I'll take a little of that LSD
Well, it blew my mind and I got real kind and I set my chickens free.
And there was chickens in the pasture, chickens in the barn
There was chickens driving Cadillac's to Washington, DC
when I set my chickens free.
In this presidential election year, we have two "parties," each going by different names, vying to gain control of the American government. Each party tries to make their convention look as festive as possible but I assure you, just like the chicken parties at Mepkin Abby, there are victims.
Because of my stridently liberal newspaper opinion column, most Republicans in Springfield assume that I am a Democrat. What they might be surprised to know is that the only correspondence I have received from the Greene Co. Democrats' office for the past several years has been quite hostile. Even though I am the only published member of clergy in local media, you will notice that I am never asked to speak at any of the big Democratic gatherings in our area because they think that I have been way too critical of elected Democrats. They either want me to be a devout, unquestioning Democrat or they don't want me at all.
Religious professionals are not supposed to promote one party or another nor champion one candidate over another and though I am not often known for bowing to such rules, that one comes easily for me. I see victims in both parties and it is easier for me to say, "A pox on both your camps" than it is for me to applaud one over the other.
My spirituality informs my politics and I hope that yours does too but my spirituality doesn't fit neatly into either camp. As a spiritual person, the guiding principle that I bring to governance is a preference for policies that provide the greatest good to the largest number of people. It is not simple utilitarianism but rather radical compassion that dictates the spiritual desire to see the greatest good provided to the largest number of people, I favor a more equitable distribution of wealth rather than stacking the deck so that a minority holds the majority of the resources.
Because my spirituality directs me to pursue the greatest good for the largest number of people, I oppose the exploitation of the poor, the oppression of minorities, unjust war, unequal justice in the court system, and the despoiling of the environment.
Granted, then, at least based on rhetoric, I'm much more often likely to favor a Democrat over a Republican but we should all resist the temptation to baptize either party.
Charles Toy, the founder of the website called The Christian Left, summed up his opposition to the Mitt Romney candidacy this way:
Mitt Romney's Platform: Deny gay people the right to marry; Deny women the right to make decisions about their own body; Deny health care to millions of Americans; Restart The Cold War; Return to Bush era torture policies; Instate austerity; Privatize Medicare and Social Security; Make it harder for kids to get a college education; Destroy unions; Roll back regulations on Wall Street; Start more wars in The Middle East; Raise taxes on the poor and middle class and cut taxes for the rich; Double down on the failed "War on Drugs." Any questions?
And I recognize that Charles can back each of those claims up, if not with direct recent quotes from Mitt Romney, at least from the lips of other nationally prominent Republicans. And I don't want to play a "yes/but" game or engage in false equivalencies because all of the issues Charles named are very real and very serious.
But it does have to be said that President Obama doubled down on the war in Afghanistan and I have yet to hear him or anyone in his administration reasonably defend the claim that we have any militarily achievable goal in that nation that in any way justifies the loss of life and expenditure of resources in that war. I know some of you disagree but this practice of political assassination by predator drones is, to me, an outrage. We use these sci-fi flying robots to kill people that a generation ago would have been called political assassinations rather than military targets. And though they are deadly and astonishingly accurate, they do not kill with a single bullet.
The collateral casualty numbers of victims who just happened to be in the kill zone at the time of the strike got to be so large that the Obama administration redefined collateral civilian deaths as being military targets if the deceased were of fighting age..... which, in the countries where we are using predators, is just about anyone between childhood and infirm old age...... which means most of you here could easily be defined as a potential terrorist threat if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many people have accepted, even the targeting of American citizens who have not been tried or even indicted for a crime, because you trust the judgment of President Obama but a precedent has been set and surely even those of you who trust President Obama with this authority to kill alleged enemies of the state at will, can think of a recent president whom you would not like to have given that authority and can't you realize that now some future president with whom you have no confidence will be carrying out these exact same sort of strikes?
We still have Gitmo. We still use secret foreign prisons where prisoners are certainly tortured. We still have an obscene judicial system in which the wealthy almost always get their way....
And let me digress here for just a moment to tell you, especially all of you who worked so hard gathering signatures to put both an initiative to raise the minimum wage in Missouri and another to cap the interest rates charged to the poor by payday loan businesses on the ballot this fall that you will not get a chance to vote on those issues. Even though we had far more than enough signatures to get these measures on the ballot this fall, the attorneys representing the Chamber of Commerce joined forces with the attorneys representing the PayDay Loan sharks and they continued making legal challenges to signatures on petitions until our side just ran out of money.
As Howard Zinn said, our judicial system is not set up to determine who is right and who is wrong, it only determines who can pay their attorney the longest. The just cause of the poor in this state has once again been defeated by the profit motive of the wealthy, echoing our reading from James this morning that would not receive a friendly hearing in many churches but is a first century statement of fact that is just as true in the 21st century, verse 6 of chapter 2 says, "Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?"
Politicians are under constraint to be politically correct..... prophets are under constraint to be correct.... To tell the truth and to let the chips fall where they will.
James writes about an applied spirituality that is nakedly honest and it is nearly entirely dismissive of almost everything we know of that passes for Christianity. He says plainly that faith without good works is dead.... It is a farce, it is a pretend faith. If you are not actively working to provide the greatest good to the largest number of people then you really have no business calling yourself a Christian. Faith is a way of life, not a way of believing.
Few people in America were more moved by the election of Barak Obama in 2008 than I was. He was not my first choice or my second choice because I did not believe he had the experience to be an effective president.
But the mere fact that a black man who once ate from a table financed by food stamps could rise to become a Harvard educated lawyer and then win election to the office of the president was nothing short of miraculous. I do not want to diminish the significance of that historic event but I also will not ignore the fact that he has reappointed many of the same monetary leaders who brought our nation to bankruptcy in 2007, and put the owners of the Frankenfood industry in charge of our food supply.
Earlier this summer I attended the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina and I was pleased to hear Frank Schaeffer, the son of the famous evangelical preacher and author, Francis Schaeffer, speak. Frank Schaeffer was, at one time, following in his father's footsteps, preaching, writing, producing films that were consumed by the right wing religious conservatives until he had a kind of epiphany and he was able to walk away from that world of wealth and hypocrisy.
I was glad to hear someone who could, first hand, speak to the falsehood, the manipulation of and the exploitation of the gullible for money and political power and I was glad to hear that he found the character to walk away from it all. But Frank chided the liberals in his audience who were being critical of President Obama. He didn't say it the way Chris Rock recently boiled it down but it was something the same as when Chris said that voting for someone other than Obama because Obama didn't do everything he said he would do would be like saying, "because Obama couldn't cure cancer, next time, I'm going to vote for cancer."
But as I heard Frank Schaeffer speak during that week of the festival, he told us about how he had gotten disgusted with religion and had quit believing anything or going to church at all but when he had grandchildren, he began to reconsider and to seek out some way to have a spiritual life that did not involved the evangelical faith he despised. He told us that he now attends an Orthodox church because he loves the liturgy and the sacraments and the whole non-rational, other worldly feel of the services. But when he was asked about the Orthodox Church's refusal to allow women in leadership and their official condemnation of homosexuality he literally shrugged his shoulders and said, "You have to make some compromises."
I suppose that it is easy enough to make that compromise if you are not female, or not gay but what gives Frank Schaeffer or anyone else permission to give away anyone else's integrity as a whole human being? How do you make that compromise, especially in the name of going to church?
At the ballot box, I will fight to have the right to vote my conscience and I may have to accept that there are times that the best I can do is to vote for the lesser of two evils but I will not pretend to have shifted my spiritual loyalty to a political party and I will not give loyalty to a church that intentionally discriminates against their own people for reasons of race, gender or sexual orientation..... and while I hate to be prescriptive but, common on people..... if you are a woman, don't go to any church that tells you that you are not allowed by their beliefs to have any role a man can have. And if you are gay and you are attending a church that will cash your checks you drop in the offering plate but won't let you speak from the pulpit or be photographed in your church directory with your partner then just stop it!
Don't buy bullets for your own assassin. Don't support the people who oppress you. Demand the greatest good for the most people and you can't get there by oppressing half the population for being female and a tenth of the population for being gay.
I am not trying to speak for you, but assuming that at least my own understanding of a spiritual person's participation in politics is to seek the greatest good for the largest number of people, there is still room for a lot of debate. There is an argument to be made that ill-conceived public assistance can rob a person of motivation to work and be self supporting. Spiritual people do not eschew the value of personal responsibility with some well intended but ultimately destructive demand that we just give everyone food, shelter and medical care without any prompting to work for those things.
Affordable electrical power is a priority for the poor, but burning coal is still the cheapest way to generate electricity.... Is it the greatest good for the largest number of people if we gain a temporary benefit at the cost of long term destruction of the environment?
Some people argue that we need to pass right to work laws so that there will be more jobs in our state but is the creation of jobs that pay less than what it costs to live a good idea in the long run? A present benefit in exchange for creating an abusive permanent economy doesn't sound like the greatest good for the most people to me.
As Elizabeth Warren noted in her recent speech in North Carolina, "If you feel like the system is stacked against you, that's because the system is stacked against you." What we need to do is to change the system.
Setting the chickens free seems like liberation in the moment, but if they are going to be in a can of soup by Wednesday, then we're not really talking about liberation, are we? I will not vote for a system that opens your cage with one hand and puts you in a soup can with the other.
The portrait of Dorothy Day that hangs in our conference room has a caption that quotes the founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system." My modest suggestion to you is, that you not act or vote like you accept this filthy rotten system anymore.
