Killing Jesus

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
February 24, 2013     Lent 2

Luke 13:31-35                        
31At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." 32He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 33Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' 34Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 35See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

One of my jobs during our recent trip to Nicaragua was to interview scholarship students in the rural villages where we work.  When I ask high school students what they want to do when they finish school, in any group of fifteen or twenty students there are always three or four who want to be computer technicians, though most of them rarely if ever see a computer or know what is done with one.  There is a pervasive myth in Nicaragua that computer technicians make a big salary and while that may be true for a couple of dozen people in the nation of Nicaragua, it seems to me that the myth only leads to disappointment for a lot of young people who will get a nearly meaningless certificate in computer engineering and then they will return to picking coffee beans with the rest of their family.

But I usually also hear that someone wants to be a doctor and though ambitious it is possible and I even know of a couple of the kids we have worked with who have accomplished this goal.

But now and then, usually one out of ever two or three hundred kids I meet will say that they want to grow up to be a journalist.
When I hear that, my heart stops and I pause to look into the eyes of a prophet. Because even teenagers in Nicaragua know how many journalists have been found murdered in Central America.  In Central America, newspapers have some of the same afflictions we see here, telling more about sex and fashion than about news, but there are still investigative reporters there.  There are still brave men and women who write stories that expose important truths about government corruption, or about why so many people in La Paz Centro have kidney diseases next to the chemical dumps of  the Kodak corporation.... Where my friend Jairo Cortez nearly died before turning 30.

We say that we value honesty.  We think we want our media to tell us the truth but the fact is that there is always someone on the other side of truth who profits from falsehood and ignorance.  There are things that governments do that they would like for you to not think about too much.

President Obama can talk about transparency in a state of the union address but when it comes down to actually talking about how an American president can order the execution of an unindicted American citizen through a predator drone strike that might kill thirty or forty innocents who just happened to be on the same city block with the target..... then there is not much transparency.

Walmart may have to put content disclosures on their food items but you know that they would not be willing to put a red sticker on their low low priced items that had been produced by slaves in third world countries.

American oil companies would not want you to know what they have done to the environment of Ecuador but there is a reason why so many American corporations prefer to operate in nations with very weak national governments where they can dump toxic chemicals and poison farmland without consequences.

Behind every prostitute is a pimp who makes a living off of the abuse of women and there is a lot of pimping that goes on in corporations and governments that has nothing to do with sex.

So when Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his famous "I have been to the mountaintop" speech the day before he was assassinated that "I have seen the promised land but I may not get there with you," he was not being ironically accurate.  He had been telling the truth in speeches for years.  His house had been bombed.  The FBI had done everything possible to ruin his reputation, literally drawing a target on his chest for some self appointed murderer to take a shot.  King knew that he had relatively little chance of not being murdered.

You could say pretty much the same for Gandhi, Archbishop Romero and a number of other outspoken prophets of the civil rights movement and of liberation theology.  So, when we read in the gospels that Jesus told his followers that he was going to be killed, while such formulaic passages of scripture serve a sort of literary purpose for the gospel writers, I am willing to read them within the historical narrative because Jesus didn't need to be divine or a magical visionary to know that he was not going to live to retire from preaching.
Jesus was an advocate for the poor.  He challenged the values of the empire and he did it with such courage, such honesty and he did it so publicly, that, like King, there was virtually no way that he was going to go to Jerusalem and walk out alive.

Now, let me say this as succinctly as possible..... I believe that the historical Jesus was an advocate for social justice and he was executed by the empire for challenging their principles, their authority and their power.  Very soon after Jesus was dead, his name and the importance given to his preaching and his death was picked up by people like the Paul who knew almost nothing of the content of his teaching but who used him as a symbol of their hope for resurrection in a new life.

Paul belonged to a sect of Judaism that believed in heaven.... All Jews did not agree on that issue and we have no idea if the historical Jesus gave so much as a moment of thought to the topic of an after life.  Paul write the first third of the New Testament and he influenced the writing of much of the rest of it.  While Paul may have had subtle anti-empire sentiments, the empire in this world was not his motivating concern.

And so Paul helped to fashion a religion that actually served the interests of the empire.  I want to be clear about this:  Jesus was killed by the empire for opposing the empire.  The religion that Paul shaped, using the name of Jesus, became a useful tool of the empire by convincing the population to serve the empire unquestioningly...... the exact opposite of the message of Jesus.

Now, there are moral points of contact between Paul and the historical Jesus and I read Paul, study Paul, teach the Paul course at Drury University and sometimes preach on Paul, but I am convinced that Paul's emphasis on life after death obscures the real heart of what Jesus taught.

Sadly, because the Christian religion became the tool that Constantine used to control the masses as he united the Roman empire, the only gospels that survived, the only Jesus materials we have, are the ones that the empire approved of and in these we find, sometimes hidden between the lines, bits and pieces of the historical Jesus tradition.  Mining those bits and pieces is not a certain science...... it is scholarly, to be sure, but it is not certain and so we are always in dialogue with the Jesus tradition, in search of truth but we progressives have had to make a decision to give up on false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty in many things.

As you have often seen, I am very impatient with evangelical theology that seems to me to be very misleading..... it turns the power message of Jesus into a kind of magical incantation to ward off the fires of an imaginary hell and removes the voice of one of the greatest prophets who has ever lived.

Many of us took our children to church to teach them to be good people, to inculcate in them the values of honesty, charity, self sacrifice and love but too often what they got with that character education was an indoctrination into the religion of the empire that taught them to obey without thinking in this life in return for a better life in heaven.

That, in my opinion, should not even be called Christianity.

In fact, I usually just call it Constantinian religion because it reflects the values of emperor Constantine much more than it reflects the teachings of Jesus.  I know that many of you would wish that I was more tolerant of evangelical thought but please understand this:  once you can persuade a person to believe something for which there is absolutely not one bit of evidence then you can get them to believe anything and then you can get them to do anything.

If we cannot ground our spirituality in reality, in rational thought, then there is little difference between the people who, for example, either advocate for peace or who advocate for war..... because it is a matter of interpretation or personal preference.  There is little difference in that world of relative religion between those who advocate for gay rights and those who still advocate violence against the gay community.  Sloppy thinking leads to irrational and irresponsible results.

Religion has too often been the tool by which the empire has made people compliant against all reason and against their own best interests.  Howard Zinn wrote:
 "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders...and millions have been killed because of this obedience...Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves... (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

When I am meeting with those high school students in Nicaragua, and I've been doing this for more than 10 years now.... I have never had a one of them tell me that they want to be a priest or a pastor.  The Vatican has all but extinguished any vestiges of liberation theology from the Catholic Church.

The Protestant Evangelical churches in Central America almost universally focus on life after death and teach a religion based on fear, guilt and pie in the sky.  They don't always know why, but even barely literate kids living in the jungle can see through that junk that has captured the minds of so many otherwise well intended Americans.

But when they say "journalista" I hear taking up the work of Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero and I have hope that Jesus is not dead because the empire cannot keep the truth in a tomb as long as there is still one of us who is willing to speak when the empire tells us to be silent.  Si, se puede.

A Wandering Slave Owning Mercenary Was My Father

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
February 17, 2013      Lent 1

Deuteronomy 26:5-9
5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us,
7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders;
9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

It has been quite a week for me, traveling in rural Nicaragua since we were last together.  I met a lot of interesting people and was a part of some fabulous experiences but I must tell you that while there, I met Jesus, and he's gay.... and only about 4'10"..... and in Nicaragua they pronounce it "Jesus." Jesus was one of our translators who traveled with our team and, I'm happy to say, is one of our newest web based church members along with another of our translators, Jiros.  Hola mi amigos!  Proxima ano!

In Nicaragua churches basically come in two flavors: Catholic and Pentecostal Evangelical.  Jesus and Jarios were both pleased to find out that there is a church where gay people are welcomed and where you can believe in the moral teachings of Jesus without all of the guilt, fear of hell and manipulation of lust for heaven.

What amazed me the most was when Jarios asked me if I had ever read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."   Jarios to speak English from a friend he hung out with at the park at night just because he wanted to learn to improve himself and from those conversations in the park, he moved onto reading pretty challenging books, not just Zinn but even John Perkins', "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man."
Our conversations grew  to include other translators and some of our Rainbow Network doctors, all of whom had a much deeper awareness of their own history and the ways in which Nicaragua has been little more than an enslaved
agricultural plantation for American interests for most of the past century and a half.

They are not either angry or vengeful.... it is what happened and they knew that we were there trying to do good things.  I am also factual about it but I am not there out of a sense of guilt or obligation, but I am factual about it..... I was on the power side of the North America verses Central America competition.  I'm not trying to do penance or even the playing field, I'm just trying to do what is compassionate and reasonable in light of our history and their need.

Similarly, though I have invested relatively little time in personal genealogical studies, I am aware that my patriarchal family operated a large slave plantation in southern Kentucky for four generations.  Their wealth was invested in land and the evil practice of slavery, or as Stephen Colbert calls it, "our unpaid African internship program."

And even though my family was locked into agricultural poverty for another three or four generations, we were destined to emerge, as a clan of white people born in North America.  Again, it is foolish to feel either advantaged or guilty based on gender, race, nationality or any other condition of birth, but it is a fact that the greatest indicator of economic success in the world is still to be born white and male in North America.  Those are the facts.... some people celebrate those facts and they feel tremendous fear as the descendants of white Europeans are becoming a minority in the United States and some of us acknowledge these facts and choose to work to create a more just world.

Reciting our history helps us to understand who we are.  Our scripture text this morning is very familiar to you if you have ever been close enough to a Jewish family to be around for Passover in which reciting the history of the Jews is a formal annual exercise.

In the late Bronze Age, as the cultures of ancient Syria and Assyria in collapse, nomadic Semitic tribes, Arameans, settled close enough to Egypt to be drawn into their expanding empire and enslaved.  There, we are told by the Biblical accounts of Deuteronomy, God found the Hebrew slaves and turned them into a people who would inhabit Palestine.

Every spring, when Jews come to celebrate Passover, their central holiday, they began by defining themselves by reciting their history..... in Jewish homes, the world over, in a few weeks, the youngest person present will ask the formulaic question about what all of these rituals mean and the head of the household will respond in the way that Passover celebrations have begun for centuries:  A wandering Aramean was my father.....

I could say, "an immigrant Brit who became a slave owning farmer was my father."  Most of you who woke up this morning as citizens of the United States could say something similar because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "We may have arrived on different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now."

Though many of us have had to face ridiculous and unjust discrimination and have been challenged with barriers to education, health care or employment in our lifetimes, still, we must acknowledge that we live in a nation envied by our southern neighbors for both our national wealth and the opportunities afforded to us.  And we, who are the inheritors of a nation made wealthy by hard work, sacrifice, courage, ingenuity, and by killing off 90 million Indians as we took their land, through forced labor of both African slaves and children in the 19th century, and exploited women and illegal aliens in the 20th century, now have the opportunity to help to create a more just, sane and spiritually honest world.

The Canadian artist, Bruce Cockburn, was inspired by the theology of one of my Harvard professors, Harvey Cox, as I certainly have been.  In search of a more engaged spirituality, Cockburn traveled in Guatemala and in Nicaragua the time of the Disappeared and during the Contra War. His anger at the injustices he witnessed and his determination to see the world changed became the poetry of his Stealing Fire album, now almost 30 years old and still one of the most influential collections of music in my life and, evidently a huge inspiration for the music of U2.

We asked David to sing a song from that album today, "Lovers in a dangerous time," that contains the line that I have so often used to define our ministry, asserting that we will keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. We will not deny our history.  We will not hide behind religious mumbo jumbo.  Genuine spirituality is in need of the whole truth but we are not destined to repeat our past or to be tied down to the abuses of our ancestors.  We have chosen to do a new thing, a good thing, a loving and compassionate thing..... we have chosen to keep kicking at the darkness of slavery, exploitation, oppression and abuse until it bleeds the light of liberation, justice, mercy and freedom. We are, as the Nicaraguan hero, Augusto Sandio, who fought against the US occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930's said, "viven en la luche por la paz."  We live in the struggle for peace and you will have to forgive me for believing that this time, we are winning.

Ending the Conspiracy of Silence

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Transfiguration Sunday

 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
12Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, 13not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. 14But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. 15Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; 16but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. 17Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
4Therefore, since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God's word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.

Magicians do not actually practice magic because, of course, there is no such thing.  What they actually practice is more accurately called the "art of illusion."  Magicians have long used scantily clad young women, puffs of smoke and flame in order to draw the audience's attention away from where the real sleight of hand, the real action they need for you to not see is taking place.

I've recently read the suggestion that we watch or read the news in the same way.  It may be helpful if you ask yourself, when the news is full or reports about a famous General's sexual escapades or a movie star's drug problems, what is the story they are wanting us to not know about while they are distracting us with this fluff?

Though I am often critical of our Springfield paper, as a contributing writer, I'm enough of an insider to know that the decline in newspaper advertisers and subscribers has resulted in the layoff of so many writers that any real investigative reporting is nearly a thing of the past.  There are just not enough journalists to do much more that grab news service stories and reprint them.
On the TV side of the equation, we've seen a rather more intentional dumbing down, as resources have shifted, year after year, away from investigative reporting in favor of huge contracts given to celebrity news readers......most of whom have about the substance as "Bambi, my lovely assistant" or a sudden puff of smoke.

Monsanto doesn't want us to know what they put in our food or that the government officials who regulate food safety used to work for them and will work for them again one day.  Boeing, GE, Morton Thiokol, General Dynamics and Haliburton do not want you to know what their profit margin is in military manufacturing.  In the conversation about sequestration, you hear lots about how the economy couldn't stand to cut the military budget because it would cost too many American jobs..... total bologna, of course.  For every million dollars we spend on the military we only create 11 jobs but for ever million cut from education, we lose 26 teachers.

I know the pulpit is not a great place to get into statistics and accounting but folks, what I'm trying to say here is that important things are going on while we are being asked to stare at smoke and mirrors.  A prophetic church is in need of the whole truth, but the media mostly feeds us gossip.  They call it the "liberal media" but something as important as global climate change is almost never mentioned and, those who analyze media content have reported that in almost every case that it was brought up last year, it was brought up by conservative politicians who were making fun of it.

Part of the false equivalency of the media is the sense that if one person says something about the dangers of climate change, they have to balance that with someone who undermines or denies climate change, as if it were a 50-50 proposition.  The truth is that 98% of qualified scientists agree on human caused climate change as a fact but 90% of what you hear in the media is the opposite.

In our scripture lesson today, Paul metaphorically refers to the Exodus account of Moses covering his face with a veil after he had been with the Lord......, In Exodus it said that Moses' face shown in a disturbing way so he covered it for the sake of the people.

My high school science teacher in Kentucky speculated that God must be radioactive since being with God made Moses' face shine.  Which leads me to two conclusions..... public school teachers not only shouldn't lead prayer in school but they should talk about religion at all..... and, my science teacher needed to not talk much about science since she clearly didn't understand.... while radiation does make some chemicals glow, no matter how many science fiction shows say it does, radition doesn't work on people that way.... radiation makes people dead.

The glowing face of Moses in Exodus is a metaphor and Paul uses the reference in a different kind of metaphor.  Paul talks about the veil as something that is cast over your minds to keep you from seeing the truth.  And though I do not always find it very easy to agree with Paul theologically, I certainly agree with him in his insistence that honest spirituality demands that we take off the veil and see reality.

An old classmate of mine from Vanderbilt, Dr. Paul Jones, has recently published a book entitled, "The Church's Seven Deadly Secrets."  I loved the title but I have to admit that I am not crazy about the content of the book.  I had hoped that Paul was going to do something really bold with this title but it is mostly very safe Sunday School chatter.

For example, chapter three is entitle:  The Bible is not the word of God, Jesus is.  He is correct, of course, to call out the modern fundamentalist assertion that the written text of the Bible is actually the word of God but he dismisses one unprovable truth claim for another, insisting that Jesus is the incarnate word of God.  If he had said that out loud while he was sitting next to me Jack Forstman's theology class everyone would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of it.... in fact there is some relief in the fact that Dr. Forstman passed away about six months before this book went to press.

You don't replace one magical claim with another magical claim.  We take the teachings of Jesus very seriously but the naked truth of those teachings doesn't need to be hidden behind a theological veil of smoke and mirriors.

When I think of the deadly lies of the church, I think of the ways in which the church has tried to get people to think about heaven and hell, rather than the economic realities of the present.  Jesus told people to sell all they owned and give it to the poor.  Jesus said that the rich have no more chance of entering God's kingdom than a camel has of walking through the eye of a needle.

The church says that Jesus is God's incarnate son but that God can't have any more sons or daughters..... it is just the two of them..... except for when it is not just the two of them, when it is God but not God or Jesus, then it is Spirit and when you consider that you have a trinity of gods that you must still believe is only one god so to be acceptable you have to believe that one plus one plus one equals one or you are really a very bad person and not Christian at all. Don't try this in math class boys and girls, it only works in Sunday School but if you don't make work in Sunday School then God will hate you.

See, Dr. Jones, that's the deadly lie of the church..... that's the illusionist's distraction.  Jesus said to love your enemies.  Jesus said to forgive the person who has hurt you seventy times seven times.  Jesus said to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, welcome the alien among you and sacrifice for justice, liberation and healing.

The church has told us to be baptized, take communion, recite the creeds, repent of our sins and avoid all physical pleasure, primarily by singing really boring hymns and being quiet during tedious sermons...... of which, if I must point it out, this is not one.  And honestly, I don't despise religious ritual or doctrine and I wouldn't mention it at all if we were generally pretty good about the loving your enemy and forgiving your brother and caring for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and the alien but we all know that the church of our experience was a lot better at rituals than they were at reality.

Our spirituality should give us insight and courage to deal with was is, not become an elaborate hoax that makes us focus on the illusion while reality passes us by.

Many of you are old enough to remember the Berrigan brothers, Fathers Daniel and Phillip.  During the 1960's they were both on the FBI's 10 most wanted list and eventually spent more than 3 years in prison.  For serving communion?  For baptizing?  For telling people how to go to heaven?  No, but the crime for which they went to prison wasn't bank robbery or murder either.

After visiting Vietnam and seeing the carnage there, they made a kind of homemade Napalm and used it to burn up draft records in a Maryland draft office.... burning paper rather than children.
Father Daniel wrote:  "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise....We say killing is a disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. For the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate (us) from public risk, when the poor can die without defense."

Father Philip was more poetic.  He said:

"The poor tell us who we are,

the prophets tell us who we could be, 

So we hide the poor and kill the prophets."

So when you hear me saying things like "I want to get magic out of the church."  What I mean is that though the church has a history of hiding the poor and killing the prophets, my modest proposal is that we focus on finding and serving the poor until we have served so much that we find that we have become prophets.

The Unacceptable Word of the Lord

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 3, 2013    Epiphany 5

Luke 4:21-30
21Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.' 22All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?' 23He said to them, 'Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, "Doctor, cure yourself!" And you will say, "Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum." ' 24And he said, 'Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's home town. 25But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27There were also many lepers* in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.' 28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Howard Zinn died three years ago this week.  When he died at the age of 87, the press reported his death, describing him as a "leftist historian."  I find it strange that he was labeled that way.  There may be left and right perspectives but there are not left and right truths.  Howard Zinn told us the truth about historical events which we very often did not previously know.

Things which it seems more politic not to mention..... like the fact that churches all over the nation found the miraculous story of Helen Keller to be nearly addictive until the blind and deaf young woman learned how to read Braille and when she had discovered how much violence, oppression and poverty there is in the world, Helen Keller became an outspoken advocate for a socialist reform movement in America..... that's when American churches began to say, "Well, you really can't pay much attention to a bind and deaf woman now can you?"

That's not a leftist fact.  That's a fact.  You can like Helen Keller or you cannot like Helen Keller but the fact is that once Helen Keller learned to read and write, she became an outspoken socialist..... it is a truth you have to deal with.

Zinn's recounting of history states certain uncomfortable facts, such as his almost throw away mention of Dr Charles Drew who developed the Red Cross' blood bank system,... Drew suggested that it was not medically necessary to separate the blood donations of white people and black people.  Drew was then fired by the Red Cross, not because he actually mixed Negro and Caucasian blood but just because he suggested that it could be done.

Drew, for whom Drew Medical School is named, happened to be black himself, which made his suggestion that the blood of blacks and the blood of whites were the same all the harder for the white majority to take but it was true.  But there are not black people truths and white people truths..... there's just the truth.

Zinn made a profession out of telling the unvarnished truth, and as a result, he was denied tenure and fired and marginalized and labeled and largely ignored in academic circles.  John quotes Jesus as saying that you will know the truth and the truth will set you free but popular wisdom says that before the truth will set you free that it will make you very very angry.

We have a rather "on again, off again" relationship with the truth.... both as Christians and as Americans.  There are things church people don't want to own up to.... and there are lots of things Americans don't want to own.  There are things we would rather not know, or at least, we would rather not have said in public.

Many of us have objected to the fact that there were never casualty records kept of either Iraqi or Afghani deaths in wars in the Middle East.  We count the deaths of American soldiers but reliable information about contract labor or enemy or civilian casualties has been difficult to find.

We have an unconscious belief that if we do not know the facts that the facts are not real..... it isn't really true until we acknowledge that it is true.

I was reading an article in the Christian Century years ago during the first Gulf War and I came upon a quote which was so bazaar that I copied it into a notebook and have held onto it through the years.  The columnist wrote: Defending U.S. military censor's refusal to release video footage showing Iraqi soldiers being cut in half by cannon fire from helicopters, a Pentagon senior official said, "If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war."

......If we let people see that kind of thing....... There would never again be any war...... you see, there are truths, which if you utter them, you can lose your job, lose your credibility, lose you tenure..... you can make people very angry.

In the current gun control debate, you can be cast as a liberal for just stating numerical facts..... a 100,000 Americans get shot every year.  30,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds every year.  That's not liberal.... that's not conservative.... that's math but you can get labeled as a liberal for just reciting those numbers because the people who don't want to deal with that fact don't want you to say those facts.

Luke tells us a very brief, encapsulated version of a time that Jesus went back to his home town to preach after he had become something of a superstar in the Galilee.  The scene moves very quickly from everyone being so impressed with him that they were breathlessly praising him to this scene we see today where they entire congregation of the synagogue is pushing him towards a cliff with the intent of murdering their cousin, their former neighbor and friend.
What set them off?  Well, he had been talking to them about liberation, about healing, about preaching good news to the poor.

Still, in a way, it was sort of a "chicken in every pot" kind of a political speech until he began to clarify himself and say, actually, the chicken won't be in your pot, it will be in the pot of your neighbor..... your neighbor who is not a member of this congregation, who is of another religion, a different race and who speaks a different language.

Preachers have, for centuries, secured their salaries and their pensions by telling straight people that gays are bad, by telling married people that divorced people are bad, and telling Christians that Moslems and Jews are bad, and telling Americans that the Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Russians and the Iraqis are bad.

Religion often takes on a corporate view of the truth, like Wal-Mart did when Sheryl Crow released her self title CD several years ago which featured her song, "Love is a Good Thing."  One of the lyrics in the song says, "Watch out sister, watch out brother, watch our children as they kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores."

Wal-Mart executives met down in Bentonville to discuss the fact that Sheryl Crow was calling them out on the fact that they do, in fact, sell guns right next to the toy department in over 2000 stores nationwide.  And faced with that fact they had to make a decision to do something about it, and this is what they decided:  They voted to ban all sales of Sheryl Crow's cd in their stores.  Keep selling the guns, but don't sell Sheryl Crow's cd because it is dangerous..... to sales of guns.
The Danish philosophy, Soren Kierkegaard, was very critical of the irrelevance of the church of his day.  He once quipped:  .. for our generation does not stop with faith, does not stop; with the miracle of faith, turning water into wine - it goes further and turns wine into water.  Isn't that what church has felt like to so many of us so often?  By treating us like we were children..... by filling our heads with stories of magic and superstition and by masking the real truth of our existence.... they had taken the potent wine of the message of Jesus and turned it into filtered water.

As we are gathered here in our church this morning, for the first time in our history, our elementary aged children are in a class of their own in our newly opened Annex.  There was a time in our history that we thought we might be just something of a boutique church..... a church for people who had become disenfranchised with mainstream theology.... a church for people who hungered for intellectual honesty and an academic approach to religion.

We are not a part of a denomination.  There are not many other churches like ours anywhere that we know of but we have sought one another out because we know that we just don't fit in with the rest of the religious world that prefers not knowing the facts, that would rather wallow in superstition, lies and half truths than to actually do the hard work of changing the world.

Some time back we realized that it was not enough for us to just find some friends who also don't fit in.  We realized that it was important to make sure that our children don't fit in either.
In part, we want to protect our children from being exposed to the dishonest mythology of either magical Christianity or American exceptionalism but the bigger issue, at least for me, is that the next generation will need its own prophets.

Howard Zinn is dead.  Marcus Borg, John Spong, John Dominic Crossan and Karen Armstrong are reaching retirement age.  Roger Ray and David Trobisch are not far behind.   It is our task to teach our children to love the truth as much as we do not to perpetuate our church because we have no reason to believe that our children will stay in Springfield.

We want to prepare them, not to be members of this church but to be the church of the next generation.... to be the Howard Zinn's and John Spong's of the 21st century.  Honestly, I wish that I was 36 years old and not 56 years old..... I wish that I could believe that I had another forty years to preach to nurture the progressive Christian movement, but a hundred yards to east of us, there is a room full of young prophets if only we will do our part to make sure that they can tell the truth from a lie and magic from reality.  Let's make sure that we don't fail them.

Between now and the time that I have to retire, I'm going to try to live my life in a way that gives them something to live up to and to surpass if they can.