Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 8 June 30 , 2013
Galatians 5:1, 13-23
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
13For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 15If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. 16Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. 18But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. 19Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.
There's been a lot going on this week. Of particular interest to me was the AMA decision to diagnose people who are as over weight as I am as having a disease.... which seems a tad strong to me. I've always looked as my extra weight as being insurance against abduction. I have a lot of very devoted critics in town but it is hard to take someone my size hostage and nearly impossible to hide the body so the AMA may have to back off a bit.
The more interesting news has come at last from the Supreme Court. I don't want to go all Nostradamus on you guys but I did finally make an accurate prediction on the Supreme Court's decisions. It seemed inevitable to me that they would have to rule against California's Prop 8 challenge and on DOMA because there was just no way around this obvious march of history. In fact there were not even many protestors outside of the Supreme Court on Wednesday because all but the most hard core conservatives have accepted the inevitability of marriage equality.
Of course, there were a few politicians and one prominent Baptist ethics professor who immediately objected that this means that now we will have to make it legal for people to marry their dog.
I don't know about you but I'm increasingly nervous about how often right wing politicians and preachers bring up bestiality. Every time we make progress in the arena of gay rights, they talk about people wanting to marry their pets. I don't have any inside information here but I would encourage you not to sell any dogs or cats to right wing politicians or preachers.
I had predicted that the Supreme Court would strike down DOMA and I believed that they would use that decision to leverage a more insidious decision about the Voting Rights Act that has protected southern poor and minority voters for two generations. The Supreme Court defended removing its important protections by saying that things have dramatically changed in the south and that such anti-racist provisions are no longer needed....An ironic observation to make during a week when we cannot avoid daily installments of Paula Dean revelations about fresh southern racism served with butter and sugar.
But of much greater relevance than and specific person's racial views is the fact that the Voting Rights Act has been used many times in recent history to keep states from creating barriers to poor and minority voters. Texas legislators announced their intention to enact voter ID requirements that they had previously been blocked from doing the very day that the Supreme Court removed this legal barrier to discrimination.
As demographics in the USA is shifting away from the descendants of white Europeans we will see a lot of these sorts of political dirty tricks to repress voting by the poor and by minorities but all these efforts are destined to only be effective for a very short time.
What has to happen is not a change in the machinery and methods of voting but a much more substantive change to the political landscape that allows minorities and the poor a greater share in our government and in our economy.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg referenced Martin Luther King's famous statement that the "arc of time is long but it bends towards justice" and said that with this decision they had contradicted that course of history, setting the clock back towards injustice. We would like to think that justice, liberty, freedom are such desirable aspects of life that we would always march towards those goals in an ever more perfect world.
Sadly, however, we are often like a dog that works tirelessly to dig his way under the fence in the back yard, only to run to the front door and beg to be let back in. An indescribably cute characteristic of many Spaniels though you shouldn't let that make you want to marry one..... I'm just sayin....
It appears to be likely that the Apostle Paul started his career of letter writing when he caught wind that a church in which he had made a considerable personal investment was evidently abandoning the liberating message he had taught them and that they were mixing Paul's version of Christianity with all sorts of other religious practices and observances that were likely rather more traditional to them and comfortable for them.
Our scripture lesson today begins with verse 1 of chapter 5 of Paul's letter to the church in Galatia. There are not many seminary lectures that I can clearly remember now more than 30 years after my classroom time at Vanderbilt but I can never read this passage without hearing the voice of my New Testament professor, Dr. Daniel Patte, literally yelling the line, "It is for freedom that Christ has set you free, do not then return to bondage."
It should be obvious but it is not. All of us who have worked in mental health have had women in counseling with whom we worked to get them out of a violently abusive relationship only to watch them go right back.... I believe the average now is 7 times that a woman will reconcile with an abuser before succeeding in getting away alive.
Who doesn't have a gay or lesbian friend who just keeps going back to Baptist or Assemblies of God churches and are shocked, time after time, that they are abused or at least not accepted.
Senator John McCain, after a decade of unsuccessful military involvement in two Middle Eastern nations is now just apoplectic about getting us to get involved in Syria's civil war and to attack Iran.
I've even known people who have gone to see a Seth Rogen movie and still went back later to see another one! I mean really, after Pineapple Express and the Green Hornet someone put up money for him to make "This is the End"? This may be the apocalypse! But I digress..
Paul is quite literally shouting off of the page in his letter to Galatia..... once you have been set free, do not get lazy and just slouch back into bondage. Don't get scared and allow yourself to be drawn back into sick theology or a bad relationship or a bad war just because that is what you have always known.
You have heard me say it before and you will likely hear it again.... There are two essential sins to slavery. The first is in wanting to own a slave and the second is the willingness to be enslaved. Spiritual communities must emphatically refuse to be oppressors but we must equally refuse to allow ourselves to be oppressed.
Hanging back, suffering in silence, avoiding confrontation doesn't help the world to change.... That doesn't liberate anyone. If the victims of apartheid in South Africa or segregation in America had not spoken up, organized, protested, demonstrated, sacrificed do you think white people in South Africa or in the United States ever would have just volunteered to give up their privileged station in life?
People fight against labor unions and collective bargaining now in some kind of idealistic notion that the free market will take care of workers when we all know that slavery and child labor were the creations of the free market.... Safe working conditions, living wages, health care benefits, retirement and the two day weekend were the creations of labor unions and those things will not last in the absence of united workers any more than we can expect southern states to protect the voting rights of minorities without legal mandates that they do so.
We will not just coast into a more just society. Our children will not learn compassion and justice from video games. We will not have successful relationships by watching sit coms.... Those couples are paid to get along and they have a staff of writers!
A Texas legislator stepped out of the shadows this week to swim against the stream of Texas politics by conducting a one-person filibuster in the state senate. Senator Wendy Davis stood up for more than 12 hours to defend Texas women's access to reproductive choice. The rules in Texas are especially difficult. Davis had to stand on her feet the whole time without so much as leaning on the podium or taking a potty break.
Much as been made of the tennis shoes she wore and there is little doubt that she was wearing depends underneath her loose fitting clothing but still, her feat was absolutely athletic..... I couldn't have done it for a third of that length of time.
But, of course, the physical challenge of the filibuster was not the real issue.... The issue quickly became the ridicule that would come from her critics, even the governor of Texas. Her personal life was put up immediately, telling the world that this attractive blond representative was the product of a single mother and that she had been a teen mother herself....of course, failing to mention that in spite of these limitations, she had graduated from Harvard Law School.
That's the real threat to progress. No one wants to stick their neck out.... No one wants to be subjected to ridicule. No one want to be publicly put back in their place.... Who are you, with all of your mistakes, flaws, personal life issues, to stand up to the powers who want to take away women's rights, keep gay people in the closet, bar the doors of universities to minorities and the poor and keep people of color home on election day?
Wendy Davis pulled on her red tennis shoes and absorbent unmentionables and stood up to the cameras, a room full of angry men and a dangerously mean governor. Did she win? Well, maybe not much.... They can call a special session... they can still take away women's rights in Texas if Wendy Davis is the only one who tries to stand up to them. What we can hope for is that thousands of others will remember that it was for freedom that they were set free.
The arc of time does bend toward justice but only if you will come out of your comfort zone, grab it with both hands and use all of your strength to bend it. And if you are willing to hide, if you are willing to be enslaved....then I guarantee you, you will be.
I will add my voice to the voice of the apostle and implore you, "stand firm then and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery."
