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.
