Friendship, Marriage, Union, Love and Loyalty

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
April 28, 2013    Easter 5

John 13:34-34                              
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Normally, I am long suffering and an absolute paragon of patience.... Don't test me, but I have reached a point where I don't even try to be patient in some of the most basic matters of social ethics. I spent two decades speaking in college classrooms, in church basements and from pulpits trying to explain why, biblically, psychologically, philosophically, medically and socially that we should not be prejudiced against gay people and to be willing to celebrate same sex relationships with the same joy and respect that we afford to heterosexual relationships.

But I am no longer willing to pretend that there is anyone who needs more information or a chance to process all of this.  Any remaining prejudice is, in my eyes, just that, prejudice.... It is not respectable, it is not understandable, it is not a matter of opinion any more than we would, in the 21st century, afford such issues as slavery and child labor the luxury of being just a matter of personal opinion.  There may have been a time when we needed to be patient with those who needed some time to catch up with reality but that time is surely past.  You can choose to remain in ignorant prejudice, that is your individual right, but we don't have to pretend that ignorant prejudice is not ignorant prejudice.

I am not far from the same point about the scourge of gun violence in America.
The recent failure of a watered down gun bill that at least offered some background checks to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists and criminals has shown me that rational thought is no longer a part of the legislative process in our nation.

John Spong has said that it is no longer our responsibility to explain to conservatives why we are not prejudiced against gay people, it is up to them to explain to us why they think they have a right to hold onto their prejudice..... an exercise we recently watched in Supreme Court hearings demonstrating just how vacuous that line of thinking is.

I now feel that rather than engaging in debate about 2nd amendment rights or America's tradition of gun ownership, the burden of proof now should be placed at the feet of gun owners to tell us what they are going to do to dramatically and quickly reduce the gun violence death toll which remains at more than 30,000 deaths per year in the USA.

One guy tried unsuccessfully to blow up an airplane with fewer than 200 people on board by putting a bomb in his shoes and for the past 12 years, millions of people all over the globe have had to take off their shoes every day to be scanned by tax payer supported security guards at airports...... no one died.... There was a threat of death but in the name of security, an army of TSA agents are employed to, in part, xray our shoes.

Since that failed Christmas shoe bomber in 2001, nearly a half a million  Americans have died from gunfire, and more than one and a quarter of million more have been wounded and yet our legislators say that there is nothing that can be done and that, to put it in Baskin Robbins terms, is "32 flavors" of stupid.  Billions spent to protect us from a shoe bomb that never killed anyone..... nothing to address gun violence that has killed millions...... I'm all out of patience.

I believe in a very rational form of Christianity.  I rarely move out of typically secular language to say that something is a spiritual issue but when I mention that there are 30,000 gun deaths every year and a gun advocate gives me that blank "so what" look, I start to wonder if that person has a soul.  How can you be a human being and be indifferent about that level of carnage?

I am waiting for the media to tell us where the Boston Marathon bombers got the semi-automatic hand gun they used to murder one policeman and conduct a lengthy shootout with others. No matter what the answer is, however, we would all agree that these two murderers shouldn't have been able to acquire the hand gun they had but before any meaningful regulatory changes can be made, someone has to care, someone has to have a soul, someone has to have a heart......and that does, in fact, make it a spiritual problem.

John tells us that Jesus made love the single defining aspect of what it meant to be a Christian, to be a religious, a spiritual person.  Love, not the feeling of being thrilled or smitten.... Not the urges of sexual appetite.... Not even the more mysterious love we have for our infant children that makes it possible for us to perpetuate our species.

The love we see in this context is the spiritual dimension that makes us care about children in Nicaragua who have no shoes, that makes it possible for us to be concerned about 15,000 of those gun deaths that are suicides and all the thousands that are the result of domestic disputes or stupid accidents.  Others may be able to write off people who stay in bad relationships, or who abuse drugs, alcohol or who are addicted to violence.  We care about them, not because they are members of our family but because they are humans.

It is not an easy message for people to take in.  Think about who in modern history has tried to get people to live together in peace, to end violence and prejudice and discrimination... President Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Medger Evers, MalcolmX, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Oscar Romero....all tried to heal the division of the north and the south, Hindus and Muslims, Blacks and Whites, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. It might also be worth noting how the world reacted to each of these great leaders..... they were all shot and killed with a gun...... how might history have been different if guns had not been available to those murderers?

For the past 35 years I have heard religious people asking, "Who is the Martin Luther King of this generation?"  No one has ever had a good answer for that question but I have to wonder if this generation's Martin Luther King just got shot before he or she got to start preaching.  King was only 39 years old when he was murdered by James Earl Ray.  39!  What were you doing when you were 39?  I was still trying to figure life out..... I hadn't even hit my stride as a preacher until I was a decade older than King lived to be.
What if one of those children shot at Sandy Hook Elementary was our next great leader?  What if that little girl who went to hear Gabby Gifford speaking in a grocery store parking lot in Arizona, 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green..... what if she was going to be our next great leader before she was shot and killed?  Or what if it might have been Veronica Mosier, killed at age 6 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado last summer?

Against this backdrop, in this special place, set aside for our community gatherings to hear the ancient words of our sacred texts, the voice of Jesus says, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.  This is how the world will know that you are my followers, when they see how you love one another."

I'm just saying that there is not enough love going on..... not enough of the real thing..... the kind of love that cares about the stranger, that values human life, that sacrifices to make the world less violent, more safe, more sane.

The drum beat of selfishness and violence in our world can cause us to become so cynical that we quit caring, so defeated that we stop trying, so disgusted that we just give up, circle the wagons, protect ourselves, seek diversion in entertainment, food and alcohol...... we can become more inclined to quietly take our anti-depressants than to keep fighting for change.

I don't know if John can ever be taken literally but I can understand why he says this in language that is not intended to persuade or invite or simply encourage...... A new commandment I give to you..... that's strong..... liberals don't like to be told what to do..... we don't use imperial language in our church..... we don't call Jesus "Lord," we don't celebrate "Christ the King".... We don't much go in for the language of dominance or obedience so I think we should pay attention when the language of the text steps across the line a bit....

A new commandment I give to you, that you love.... And you don't stop loving.... You don't let cynicism paralyze your noble loving hearts.... You don't let the repeated victories of dark oppression and violence make you retreat..... I command that you love.... Love the stranger.... Love the person you have never met..... those people on Face Book.... They are not really your "friends" unless you are willing to put your flesh into the bargain.

I know how many people have "liked" our church's face book page but no one is going to take that seriously if they don't see how we love one another.

Lord deliver us from shallow religion.... From using the language of friendship and love too easily.... Save us from a self-protecting and facile society that acquiesces to silence in the face of prejudice and violence.

We are lovers in a dangerous time and that is why I add my voice to the voice of the poet who calls us to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.  Violence and prejudice is strong and it can be lethal and frightening but in the end, the best lover always wins.

Birth and Death, Marriage and Divorce, Life and Disease, Vitality and Old Age, Ebullience and Depression

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
April 14, 2013   Easter 3

Psalm 30
Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness
1 I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up, and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
2 O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.
3 O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.*
4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name.
5 For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
6 As for me, I said in my prosperity, 'I shall never be moved.'
7 By your favor, O Lord, you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face; I was dismayed.
8 To you, O Lord, I cried, and to the Lord I made supplication:
9 'What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?   Will it tell of your faithfulness?
10 Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me! O Lord, be my helper!'
11 You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul* may praise you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

Human beings invented religion when they became sufficiently self aware to realize that they were going to die one day.  Bishop John Spong argues persuasively in his book, A New Christianity for a New Age, that humans needed to invent supernatural deities in the heavens governing over an unseen after life in order to cope with the existential awareness that like birds and trees, fish and flowers, we have only a few short years to live under the sun.

And it is true enough that an awful of the sillier parts of religious life amount to little more than a kind of existential whistling in the grave yard, assuring ourselves that we should not fear being snuffed out of existence because our imaginary friends in the clouds are going to take us to eternal reward when we die.

But that is not the better part of even very ancient religions.  Even among the poems and philosophical musings that echo down from the dawn of human civilization are insights that are helpful far beyond any opium for the anxiety caused by mortality.

I was privileged a few years ago to hear the famous Old Testament professor, Walter Brueggemann talking about the importance of the Biblical lament.  If you took every passage of the Bible about heaven or hell or your soul or any afterlife reference and printed it together, you would have about a dozen pages.  A great deal of the Hebrew Bible is devoted to human self expression of fear, depression, anxiety, confusion along with supplications for hope, health, and even meaning.

Much of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament is not written as if it is God speaking to us, it is written in the voice of us asking God why?  Why do we suffer?  Who do bad people seem to prosper and good people  seem to fail?

Most of us grew up in churches where the word "salvation" always had to do with going to heaven when you die but that's not how it is generally used in the Bible.  When, in that walking on the water story in Matthew (14:30), Peter decides that it would be a good idea to walk out on the water to meet Jesus and Peter quickly sinks under the waves and is drowning.  Matthew says that Peter cried out, "Lord, save me."

Now, who among us, if you were to take this account on its face, believes that Peter, as he was drowning, was saying to Jesus, "Please die for my sins on the cross so that I can go to heaven after out drown in this lake?"  Clearly, the only salvation Peter was looking for was a hand back into the boat.
When we read in the Psalms where David is saying, "my enemies are encamped all around me, my strength is run out," when he says "save me," he has a very specific agenda in mind..... something to the tune of, "Dear God, please let me live to wake up in my own bed tomorrow."

The real meaning of the word, "salvation" is "to be made whole."  If your life is broken by health issues, then being healed is salvation to you.  If your life is broken by mental illness, disturbed relationships or even grievous sin then salvation  comes in the form of being empowered to get your life back on track.

I was sorry to learn this week of the suicide death of the adult son of  the famous evangelical pastor, Rick Warren.  I was certainly one of the people who published sharp criticisms of President Obama for inviting Rick Warren, an outspoken anti-gay evangelical, to take part in the first Obama inauguration.  I don't like the body of Warren's work and it would be hypocritical of me not to confirm that now but I am proud of the fact that when his son, Matthew, took his own life, Warren did not fall prey to the culture of shame and denial so often associated with religion.

Being a religious person does not alter the course of events in this capricious universe in which we live.  Mental illness, cancer, diseases as well as car accidents, addiction and freaks of nature, plague people of faith just as much as they do anyone else in the world.  I have no idea what the nature of Matthew Warren's mental illness was.  I will not speculate about what caused his depression and why he chose to end his own life but because I have lost close friends in the same way, I simply acknowledge the loss of a young man's life and the hole left in a family and a congregation as a result.

A few months ago I received a call from a doctor's office asking me to come pick up an elderly woman whom the doctor believed should not be trusted to drive herself home.  The woman was in distress.  Because of deep grief, she had not been able to sleep or eat and she was run down and at the breaking point.  Before I took her home, the physician's assistant called me back into a consulting room and said, "Dr. Ray, I know that you'll agree with me that the real problem with this patient is that she is not close enough to Jesus Christ."

I will not repeat what I said to that outrageously inappropriate and condescending unprofessional statement because I would like for at least our internet audience to enjoy the illusion that I can be a nice person in stressful situations and yet, no matter how ignorant and uninformed this medical professional's dismissal of a beautiful grieving widow's spiritual condition was, it is not far from the kind of magical self delusion common among religious people.

Had I been inclined to be instructive in that moment, much of what I would like to say to pious Christians is wrapped up in the quote you have heard me repeat from Soren Kierkegaard in the past, that is that "prayer does not change the one to whom we pray but it changes the one who prays."

That is, our silent, internal prayers do not then change the mind of God and cause divine intervention.  Lots of people tell themselves that "God answers prayers," in a magical manner but Matthew Warren didn't die because Rick Warren didn't pray hard enough.

The mortality rate in our liberal, post supernatural theist church is exactly the same as the mortality rate down at Six Flags Over Jesus or at Warren's Saddleback church.  It is 100%.  Pray all you want, everybody dies.

So what is the benefit of being in a spiritual community?  Why pray?  It is this.... two years ago when the most powerful tornado in recorded history wiped out a huge swath of Joplin, MO, in insurance jargon, those hundreds of people who lost their lives and thousands of homes that were destroyed were lost in what is sometimes call an "act of God."  I say that's bologna.  A tornado is not an act of God, it is simply a part of a capricious universe.

When we loaded up pick up trucks and went over to Joplin with food, tarps to cover houses, chain saws to clear roads and trash bags to help survivors to clean up their yards and homes.... that was an act of God. That was a sign of the compassion that is born of sitting in this room, singing hymns, studying religious texts, taking communion and passing the peace.

Our spirituality does not change how God acts in human history but it changes how we act in human history.  My faith won't keep me from being depressed or getting cancer but I hope that it changes how I react to those painful aspects of the human condition.  We pray, as they say in the AA program, to increase our conscious connection to God and to one another.  When I pray for you when you are in the hospital, I don't think that I am sending your magical energy beams that knits your bones back together and seals your surgical wounds..... I am pausing for a moment to love you, to feel my concern for you and to compose my own heart into action.....
which in Ron Hertenstein's case this week, amounted to getting up and taking him some Andy's frozen custard after doctors used a circular saw to install a new knee in his right leg.

Now, you tell me, when you have been through some trauma, would you rather have some evangelical church put you on their prayer list or would you rather have someone bring you an Andy's Frozen Custard?  See, you are all becoming theologically discerning here.

Our funeral services do not give some soul a boost on their way to heaven.... they give us a chance to express our grief and to console one another in our losses.  Our worship services are not intended to satisfy the ego needs of a twisted deity that needs to be praised by his subjects.... our services are intended to strengthen our community in which we show love to one another when we are hurting and we challenge one another to rise up and work harder to live lives of love adorned by good deeds.

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable is not a platitude, it is literally what we do here.  Your personal spirituality may certainly have ineffably mystical dimensions.... mine certainly does, but our corporate religious life is rooted in reality.  There may be some kind of afterlife where souls reside in eternity but what I know for certain is that neither I nor anyone else knows anything at all about that existence and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or crazy.

What I do know is that we live in a world in which love relationships that were supposed to be permanent sometimes come to an end.  We inhabit bodies that sometimes turn on us such that good people die far too young.

I know that sometimes because of human evil or human indifference or human ignorance that people die in accidents, get sick, get left out of meaningful work, education or housing but that because of the human desire to be spiritual people that we can kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

There was a Russian poet who wrote that every morning he takes a razor in his right hand, looks into the mirror and makes the decision of whether he is going to shave or cut his throat.  I've been at that point and I bet Rick Warren has too and I suspect that most of you have as well.

So what makes you decide to shave again rather than cut your throat?  Most of the time, for me, it was because of my connections to people who cared about which decision I made.  My spirituality doesn't make life perfect but it makes it clear that the world expects something of me.... that my daughter expects something of me, my friends expect something of me, you expect something of me.

On Thursday there will be a hundred homeless people lining up at Bill's Place expecting us to show up to pray with them..... I mean, bring them a hot meal..... I'll pray with them too but mostly we'll pray by ladling some hot stew into a bowl against the violence of the cold wind on the sidewalk.

There is an African proverb that teaches, "When you pray, move your feet."  Because that is the only kind of prayer that really makes a difference.

Not Going to Play Dead for You

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
April 7, 2013   Easter 2

Acts 5:27-32  27 When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them,
28 saying, "We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man's blood on us."
29 But Peter and the apostles answered, "We must obey God rather than any human authority.
30 The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.
31 God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.
32 And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him."

American history was never a subject that captured my attention.  As a Biblical student, my attention was always focused on the Ancient Near East and American history seemed like a matter of modern interests.  But during my time in the Boston area when I was a fellow at Harvard, I took some free afternoons to ride my bike over parts of the route where Paul Revere rode a horse.  I visited Bunker Hill and Beacon Hill and walked the Freedom Trail.

In that small area around the bay where the Boston Tea Party started the Revolutionary War, I listened in on tour guides speeches who were not always fawning nationalists.  It turns out that while there was a lot of general unhappiness with the British rule of the colonies, what it took to actually get settlers, merchants and farmers to show up and fight and die to liberate the colonies from British rule was not all that noble.

That is to say, as frustrated as most of us are at the lies that were told to the American public to get us into a war with Iraq, those lies were nothing compared to the whole cloth fabrications told to American settlers to get them to come out and muster to fight the British.
Samuel Adams turned out to be such an outrageous propagandist and character assassin that I have never again been able to enjoy the modern product that bears his name. Crazy, stupid lies were told to the people in order to get them sufficiently angry or afraid or both in order to do what, eventually, turned out to be in their best interests.

I'm not historian enough to argue whether we should have revolted against British rule or not.... Let's just assume for the sake of argument that it was manifestly the best thing to do.  For good or for ill, evidently, the colonists were not motivated to fight in sufficient numbers until they were tricked, lied to and manipulated into responding with some force.

I suspect that we could go through the historical record and find no small amount of that sort of deceptive propaganda in every great military battle.  We sometimes like to remember WWII as being the "great war" or the "good war" because in it we were fighting against evil nationalistic forces in order to liberate the Jews from concentration camps.  Sadly, stopping the holocaust was more of a by-product than a motivation for entering the European war.

The truth is that the American government turned away boatloads of Jews seeking refuge in America and even sent out the Coast Guard to make sure that no one jumped off those boats and tried to swim to shore.  I wish that it had been different but it wasn't.

A hundred years passed from the end of the Civil War in America before the Civil Rights movement began in our nation.  Blacks were oppressed in ways that may have been more cruel even than slavery for generations.
In many ways, it was the employment opportunities created by manufacturing during WWII that created a black middle class that then pushed up leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. who made Civil Rights a successful cause.  The subsequent impoverishing of the black population in the past two generations is the best reason why there has not been another Martin Luther King to arise in this generation.

When people are beaten, impoverished, oppressed, it is very difficult to persuade them to find the courage, the energy, the nobility to organize, to fight back, to stand up to their oppressors.  People will stand by and watch horrible tragedy until they are prompted by self-preservation or personal profit to roll up their sleeves and get involved.  The single most disappointing aspect of church life to me, during my years of serving denominational churches was that no matter how hard you worked, how much you did to serve a congregation, that when someone tried to wring me out in a public meeting, in almost every case, the board would sit and watch like sheep watching one another eat grass.

The author of the book of Acts tells stories of heroism among the earliest disciples in order to inspire similar devotion to the cause among later generations.  We have good reason to read Acts with a great deal of skepticism about its historical veracity but, assuming that it is a product of the early second century, it is written after the persecutions of Christians had become very violent in certain parts of the empire.

One of the few evidences of the spread of the church from antiquity is found in a letter written by a Roman governor, Pliny, to Emperor Trajen asking for clarification of his orders to persecute Christians.
He asks the Cesar, "but do your instructions apply also to those who are no longer Christians, for many of them say that they have not been Christian for years."  Being a Christian when it meant being a part of a loving community that liberally shared its food and thumbed its nose at the empire was one thing, but when the empire began to grind the young church under its heel, many were all too willing to resume their former more pluralistic lives.

A great deal of the New Testament is written in a way to encourage readers to have the courage to face martyrdom, torture, threats and oppression.  Because, men and women, then and now, the reflex reaction of almost everyone in the world is to grumble quietly but do nothing to fight an oppressive government, employer, spouse, parent or church.  We just watch and even if we are mad about it, we do nothing.

The Nobel prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, explained in his acceptance speech that the holocaust only happened because the world was willing to sit back and watch.  He told his audience that they must choose to take sides in matters of ethical importance because neutrality always serves the oppressor and never serves the interests of the oppressed.  By turning away refugees, Americans and Europeans were not morally different from the Nazis who imprisoned and killed the Jews.

He said that you could distill the ethical teachings of all of the Bible down to a single sentence, "Thou shalt not stand idly by."  We took that simple statement of truth and put it on this worship banner when we started our church.

The winged lion is typically the symbol of the gospel of Mark but we adapted it to stand over this central truth for our church.... A solemn pledge that we would not stand idly by.

The church in our age is facing extinction.  The cathedrals of Europe have been turned into warehouses, office complexes and shopping malls.  Those that remain open as church have tiny gatherings comprised largely of tourists.  On the east and west coasts of the United States, other than a few mega churches that offer a cultural religion entirely unrecognizable to those who are actually interested in the teachings of Jesus still exist.

Among main stream churches in the United States, the average Sunday attendance is fewer than 40 as aging congregations try to keep the lights on long enough for the church doors to remain open for their own funeral.  And, honestly, for the most part, I can say, "good riddance."
The church that stood silently by while women had to fight for the right to govern their own bodies and to fight for equal pay for equal work.....
the church that stood idly by and watched as black Americans were set upon by racist police, dogs, water cannon and tear gas.....
The church that remained silent in Argentina during the "Dirty War" and in Guatemala during the time of the disappeared and in Nicaragua during the Contra war.....
the church that encouraged discrimination against gays and lesbians while hiding sick pedophilia in their own ranks....
The church that abandoned their inner city, turned their backs on the poor and used their resources to build obscene monuments to the pretense of their own importance....
The church that sat in silence while the income gap between the poor and the rich grew wider....
The church that virtually applauded the recruitment of our nation's poor sons and daughters to be put in uniforms and sent to kill the poor sons and daughters of Iraq and Afghanistan......
the church that has patiently and silently sat on the sidelines and watched our environment being spoiled, our schools crumbling and our black young men being imprisoned while our gay sons were literally pushed into suicide....
That church can go to hell.

The church with the government, the two great guardians of the status quo.... The apologists for corruption in the economy, the military, religion and education, flogged the apostles and told them to keep quiet and, I must beg you to forgive me for saying it twice, the apostles told the authorities to go to hell.... They said it lovingly, I'm sure

We will not always be right.... But we will not be silent out of fear of being wrong.  We will not often have our way in matters of public debate and ethics but we will not be a silent co-conspirator with oppressors.  We are not many in number but we will not be intimidated into silence.  We are not rich, we are not powerful, we are not located on a major highway nor do our pageants require TV news coverage but I don't have to wear a clergy collar when I go to a city council meeting because of who we are, I stand out like Ralph Nader in an automobile plant.

The church that deserves to survive the rapid changes in religion is the church that has a meaningful voice.... It is the church that opposes war and works for peace....
It is the church that doesn't just use the poor as a backdrop for a foot washing ceremony but that actually works for justice, fair wages and access to health care, education and housing.
It is the church that defends the environment and is unafraid to demand alternative energy sources and protection of our air, water and soil.
It is the church that is willing to tell the truth about government protection of Monsanto and their Frankenfoods, the abuses of the oil and coal industries and the sociopathic insanity of the NRA.

Because we know from experience that if we don't do it that the whole world will be silent and we know that it is our calling to never stand idly by.

I am proud to be counted among your number.