Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 15 August 11, 2013
Isaiah 1:11- 17A gay couple I knew very well here in town were forced to spit up by the Federal government. Now, they wouldn't see it that way but that was the net effect of their actions. One of the men was from Springfield and had a job in Kansas City. The other had been an international student from Ecuador and when his student visa ran out, in spite of many attempts, he could not get a green card to stay here and work.
11What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. 12When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; 13bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation-- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. 14Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. 15When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
16Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
If he had been a she, and the two could have been legally married, this would not have been an issue. At that time the federal government did not recognize same sex marriages because of the Defense of Marriage Act. Now that DOMA has been over turned, most instances in which gay couples living in the United States look for our government to smile on them have been resolved..... but not in matters of immigration.
Yes, the American probably could have gone to Ecuador where he did not know the language and would have little prospect of employment but that is not a relationship stress placed on straight couples is it?
A huge part of the push for immigration reform is to make it possible for families to live together who have been forced by economic circumstances to live in different nations. And when you are already poor, when your housing, food and medical care are already pretty dubious, you don't get to spend a lot of time traveling internationally to visit.
Now, honestly, I'm anything but confident that any real immigration reform is going to happen this year since our Congress is still paralyzed in partisan bickering, but there was some impetus from both sides of the isle to do something about this and even if the motivation may have been little more than desperation to curry Latino votes, still, letting families live together is a good thing.
But the delicate coalition began to break down around the familiar battle line of the definition of who is a family. Conservatives both want to recruit more Latino voters and hold onto their traditional right wing religious base which means they are threatening to pull out of the immigration reform coalition if gay families get to be reunited at the same time as straight families.
This is obviously irritating to those of us who are tired of this antiquated prejudice rearing its ugly head once more on its way to the graveyard of indefensible discrimination. But one of the things that has disappointed me is seeing how some religious leaders who had been warming up to being advocates for gay rights now quickly turning to throw the gay population under the bus.
I don't want to use the pulpit as a club to beat specific people over the head..... it is much better form for me to club bad ideas than it is for me to identify any people as being bad people.
And I hope I can make a little space for myself here when I say that I fully accept that a lot of people with whom I have sharp disagreements also do a lot of good and very praiseworthy things and some of the people with whom I identify theologically are useful for little more than shade or as a paper weight.
I have followed the work of Jim Wallis for 30 years. I have read his books. I subscribed to Sojourners magazine. I took a course with him at Harvard. And during that fall in 2004 I ended up taking him out to eat and driving him around to various media meetings where he was being interviewed about the presidential election
But Jim was out of place at Harvard. He insisted and still insists on a very evangelical theology. He holds to the traditional view that God is a person like we are persons who is "out there" somewhere and God sired a man child who died for our sins and was literally raised from the dead.
I heard a couple of professors try to reason with him, as I certainly did, but he kept insisting that without that dogged devotion to supernatural theology that no one can maintain commitment to a life of fighting injustice.
A claim that is, on the very face of it, simultaneously insulting and preposterous. No one around him at the time he was insisting on these ancient creedal beliefs agreed with him and I suspect that most of us felt pretty committed to our convictions regarding liberation and social justice......
And I know that a lot of you would counsel me that everyone has a right to believe whatever they want to believe and what harm can it do if Jim Wallis still believes in a literal heaven and hell, a divine murder to atone for our undefined sins and a literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative? But my contention is just this: if you can get someone to believe something for which there is absolutely no evidence, no reason for believing it other than that I just want to believe it or because of some grand personal claim of having heard voices or seen visions..... once reality becomes a matter of personal preference, then your moral compass can never be reliable.
This week, Jim Wallis, who about 20 years after the rest of us concluded that gay rights are civil rights, quickly threw gay families under the bus saying "this is not the time,"..... this is not the time to worry about the rights of one of the most discriminated against minorities in the world..... it is not the time because Jim Wallis is willing to sacrifice their rights if that can advance the cause of straight immigrant families.
And when someone has already told you that rational thought, critical thinking, evidence, reality orientation are not important to them.... That they believe what they want to believe even though there is no way to check those beliefs out or even to rationally criticize them then when they decide to throw a few million people under the bus in order to achieve a personal objective there is also no way to rationally argue the point.
Jim has often absolutely been on the side of the poor, of immigrants and of women, as long as those women were willing to sacrifice self-determination over their reproductive lives and lately he has been a very tardy and reluctantly evolving supporter of the gay community but that house of cards fell apart this week.
I believe there is a connection. None of us who are straight here today were reared to be open and affirming..... we thought our way into a progressive set of conclusions because we valued evidence, rational thought and a clear orientation to reality even in, nay, especially in matters of faith.
Sloppy thinking can lead to entirely irrational and undependable results. Rational progressives don't always get it right but we are not arbitrarily picking our truths out of thin air and when presented with evidence to the contrary, when we are being honest, we are willing to quickly change.
Irrational religious convictions have, through the centuries, caused many parents to disown their own children for being gay, or for not being virgins, or even for getting a divorce. Irrational religious fervor has justified oppressing races, women and gays and it is not an unfamiliar part of our hostility towards immigrants.
But I am not saying that everyone needs to be a trained theologian, philosopher or Biblical scholar because the most obvious of spiritual truths don't come from deep within your gray matter. The prophet Isaiah says in our reading today that what God wants from you is not a lot of religious rituals and doctrines but, as we see in verses 16 and 17, right at the end of today's reading: cease to do evil, 17learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
Check your own hearts.... You didn't take your kids to Sunday school just so they could rattle off the names of the 27 books of the New Testament.... You hoped that somehow they would learn to do unto others what they would like for others to do unto them.
No one can be very wrong about their theology if they are doing good to other people and no one can be right enough about their theology if they are not doing good things for other people.
There is a form of the golden rule in every religion of the world..... sometimes you have to look past a lot of silly rituals and a good deal of prejudice, misogyny and homophobia to find it, but it is there.
Being frightened of people who are different from us is a purely natural reaction. Straight people are naturally uneasy about homosexuality. Europeans are uneasy about Arab immigrants, North Americans are frightened by Latino immigrants, apparently Republicans are frightened by intelligent women..... I kid Republicans.... Even if it is true.
Many critics of progressive Christianity say that by rejecting what cannot be known that we are rejecting faith. I think that is a gross misunderstanding of what faith means. I don't believe that faith has anything to do with irrationally making yourself believe in something that either cannot be known or is obviously false.
Faith is more like being faithful, committed. When you ask your spouse if they have faith in you, you are not asking them if they believe that you exist. You are asking them if they are with you, if they support you, if they are committed to you.... If they have the courage to stand with you against your critics.
The New Testament Greek word, "pistis" that we translate as "faith" is almost always used to denote courageous, committed faithfulness. My faith has nothing to do with ancient claims about spirits, demons, angels or the heaven and hell where there are said to live.
For me, faith is about looking at the examples of the prophets, of Jesus, the apostles and saints and trying to find in them the inspiration to have the courage to do the same things.... The courage to overcome our prejudices about people who are different from us or even our willingness to abandon our ethics, throw a minority under the bus, in order to gain the support of the majority.
Before Christians were called "Christians" they were called "followers of the way." I believe that before Christianity ever became a set of creedal beliefs, it was first and foremost a way of living. That's what we're trying to recover. I have a degree in philosophy and two degrees in religion. I am fascinated by Biblical studies and enamored with theological debate but love is my religion and radical compassion is my true worship.
And if you agree with me you shouldn't leave Rev Mel hanging out there on his own when he says: Amen.
