Roger Ray, pastor
Palm Sunday 3-24-2013
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?
From time to time, someone suggests that I publish a collection of my newspaper columns. I have never been interested in doing that because a newspaper column is intentionally aimed at something currently topical and not something that would be very interesting a month or two later. I have, however, considered publishing a collection of my columns that the NewsLeader refused to publish.
I had a column rejected just before I left town. I understand that he paper wants to build up subscriptions and not run off advertisers but I have found that it is almost always by best work that gets rejected. Though it can reasonably be said that my rejected columns are provocative, I would argue that none of them were inaccurate.
My most frequently rejected columns have been on health care related topics and most of what I have been trying to get into print was very similar to what appeared in a recent issue of Time Magazine. The Time article even mentioned our own Springfield Mercy hospital along with the CEO's salary, outrageous profit margins and price fixing that our local paper always refused to publish, I assume out of fear of alienating major advertisers though other less plausible reasons were given.
Again, I don't fault them. It is my job to speak prophetically, it is their job to sell newspapers and those two things don't always go together.
What troubles me more is when churches start to make decisions to edit their message in order not to alienate their paying customers. I can forgive a for-profit industry for doing what it has to do to make a profit but you cannot realistically extent the same to a "for prophetic" institution like the church for failing to be prophetic.
I love the modern proverb that says, "You can't fault a child for being afraid of the dark but we cannot similarly excuse adults who are afraid of the light."
Our scripture lesson from Isaiah this morning directly connects the prophet's willingness to speak on behalf of the Lord with his willingness to have people spit in his face, pull out his beard and hit him with sticks. I know that we have several pastors who view our YouTube Channel and I would like to say to you, as painful as it was being absurdly fired by a denominational church and rejected by my mother denomination, I have to admit that being fired has proven to be the single most liberating thing that has ever happened to me.
How many of us have spent most of our careers trying to walk the fine line between doing what we know is right and managing to keep our jobs? How much of our souls have we sold to remain securely employed? It is certainly unpleasant to have people spit in your face, pull out your beard and hit you with sticks but it is no longer legal to crucify annoying prophets and you can survive everything else they can do to you. Integrity is better than a pension fund and being free to speak the truth is better than being popular.
There will always be someone who wants to edit the content of your sermons.
Even in the most liberal and progressive of settings there will be some who insist that you not say this or say that or who through friendship or guilt try to make themselves the filter of your message and while no one is above criticism there really is not excuse for not saying what you know is right just because someone you know isn't going to like it. In fact, I'm not sure that I have much confidence in any member of clergy who has not been fired at least once.
My most recently rejected article had to do with gun control. You look at the conversation that has gone on in public about gun control in these months since the Sandy Hook shooting. It has been amazing to me to watch because the nation seemed so unified against the lunatic fringe at first but we have been continually giving ground ever since.
We didn't start on a very realistic footing because the most inciting gun deaths are mass murders committed by deranged individuals with crazy big weapons. But of the 30,000 gun deaths in America every year, those high publicity mass murders never account for more than two or three dozen deaths. Handguns are the real culprits in America's insanely high casualty count but it seems that we are not allowed to talk about that.
Hardly any religious voices are talking about gun control at all and if they are, they are talking about the fringe, the most symbolic, the least controversial of measures. Fearful of backlash, even in the face of 30,000 deaths a year, a hundred times more than what is experienced in most industrial nations, the church is silent.
My most recent attempt at publishing on the topic was inspired by Illinois legislator, Jim Sacia (R), who, during a recent gun control debate, said, "Here's an analogy folks, I ask you to think of this: You folks in Chicago, want me to get castrated because you're families are having too many kids. It spells out exactly what is happening here! You want us to get rid of guns..." (http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/02/il-state-representative-compares-chicago-gun-laws-to-castration-video-2578552.html) To quote Mike Myers' character, Austin Powers, "Paging Dr. Freud!"
It wasn't technically what we call a Freudian slip though it rather goes to the heart of the intent. Many mental health care professionals have assumed that there is a phallic connection to be made between men and their addiction to guns but Representative Sacia just came out and made the connection very personally. For him, gun control is equivalent to castration.
So when you wonder why we can't make any progress on the gun control issue in America, if you are willing to have the courage to be really honest about it, it seems that the 2nd amendment is not really what is at stake. We waste a tremendous amount of time while tens of thousands of people die every year because we won't talk about what is really at sake here.....male insecurity.
Sure there are a lot of men who inherited hunting rifles. There are people who have been in the military or in police service who just have an affinity for weapons but they are not generally the ones who oppose all forms of sane gun control that would significantly reduce the number of deaths in this country. The lunatic fringe is driven by psychological motivations that we are simply too polite to mention and while we are being polite and politically correct and debating the symbolic aspects of gun control, another 80 or 90 Americans will die today, tomorrow and Tuesday.
The lunatic fringe tells us that we can't talk about gun violence or meaningful gun control because that would offend them, insult them, if the church got involved it would mixing religion and politics.... And so the church remains uninvolved and another 90 people will die on Wednesday, another 90 or so on Thursday...... but we're afraid of offending people.
Or did you really think that what made people pull out Isaiah's beard and spit in his face was because he was telling them that God loved them and they should pray more and attend church regularly? The ancient prophets suffered abuse, not because they were too religious but because they were too honest, too relevant, too willing to tell the most unvarnished truth about what mattered the most in their day.
You can be well thought of or you can be relevant but in spite of years and years of looking for way to be both, I am convinced that there is no way to do it. I know that several of you have had people really give you a hard time just for attending this church. After 22 years in Springfield, there are people, especially in the conservative evangelical community, who have tried to libel me in every way possible. But that is the nature of ad homonym.... If you can't refute the message, try to negate the messenger.
I don't like waking up in the morning and reading some letter to the editor calling me everything but a prophet. I didn't like finding out that a group of conservatives had even hired a private investigator several years ago in a very expensive and entirely failed attempt to find something that you actually use against me. I can laugh about it now but I assure you it was not funny then.
But I accepted what I am betting you to accept that a certain amount of beard pulling and face spitting is the price you pay for not selling out. The best we can hope for is name calling and beard pulling during our life time and maybe a place in the Bible when we are gone or they may name a street in a dangerous neighborhood after us but, really, what more did you ever think that we deserved?
As Charlie Shedd pointed out, "A ship in harbor may be safe but that is not what ships are built for."
Let the other ships stay tied up to the dock if they have to but if we see ourselves as being a part of the Jesus movement, a part of the prophetic tradition.... If we see ourselves more in the vein of Martin Luther King, Jr. than of Billy Graham, more of Dorothy Day than of Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" then we can never hang back and wait for the winds of public opinion to make it safe to tell the truth.... We have to be willing to take the lead.
A decade ago every pastor in town who had spoken up about the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were in favor of it until public opinion began to shift the other way and the same pastors came out against it. Against that backdrop of irrelevance and hypocrisy, I would like to go on record now as already being against the next war.
The church has no business sitting on the fence when it comes to matters peace, justice, compassion and the environment. After all, it's not like they killed Jesus for being a moderate.
