Christmas Stories

Christmas 1  Dec. 28, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Luke 2:8-14
8In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.10But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see--I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." 13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14"Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"

Helena, the sainted mother of Emperor Constantine, used the influence and wealth of her son to build churches in the Holy Land.  Three centuries after the events described in the gospels, she went to Jerusalem to build a church where Jesus was buried and to Bethlehem to build a church where Jesus was born.

I have been to both a few times but then, I have also been to Jericho where a guide showed me the actual Sycamore tree that Zacchaeus climb up into so that he could see over the taller people when Jesus came to town.

Now, Helena was no archaeologist determined to preserve history.  She was a devout worshipper so when she asked people in Bethlehem where Jesus had been born, the locals showed her a shepherd's cave.  She, of course, did not enshrine the cave, she had the entire hill excavated and a replacement cave made in the lower floor of the great cathedral of the Nativity out of precious marble.

Visitors to the Church of the Nativity are often treated to a plaintive tour guide who says that the manger in which Jesus was born is not on display there, not because such a crude wooden item would have turned to dust and ash thousands of years ago but, because it was stolen by the Catholic Church and is housed in the Vatican..... the absurdity of that claim never seems to trouble Israeli tour guides nor the curators of the Vatican's treasures who have no intentions to relinquishing the manger that has no more to do with Jesus than I have to do with managing the caviar trade in Russia.  Sometimes it is hard to embarrass religious people.

One of the most difficult issues in teaching Bible in my college classes is the fact that moderns tend to be so fact literal.  You read the parables where Jesus says that the Kingdom is like a man who had two sons and then another parable says that the Kingdom is like a woman who lost a coin and modern people get mad and say, "Well which is it?  Is it like a man with two sons or a woman who lost a coin because it can't be both!"

I sit in the back of the sanctuary and watch Dr. Trobisch patiently teaching us about the gospels, understanding them as stories written to help us understand great truths, metaphors used to open the mind to see reality in new ways, and, inevitably, at the end of the class, someone will raise their hand and ask, "But how do we know that this really happened?"

I complimented David once on his uncommon patience and in the midst of the conversation someone came up to him to demand an explanation for why God would be so cruel as to kill all of the animals on earth in the world wide flood of Noah when it was the people who had been sinful.  I responded, "Don't you understand that it is a sermon and not a bit of history, there has never been a world- wide flood."  And David interjected, "Well, in a way, it happens every time the story is read."

That is the power of story telling.... It becomes real in the moment it is shared in a community in order to bring about something that is real within us.

When St Helena went to Bethlehem, she was looking for the stable mentioned in Luke's gospel.  But that was just a choice she made.  In Matthew, Jesus was born in a house.
The two gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus have almost nothing in common other than the gender of the child.  In Matthew, the holy family lives in Bethlehem but flees to avoid the slaughter of the innocents and ends up settling in Nazareth.  In Luke, the family lives in Nazareth but are compelled in the most unlikely manner to visit Bethlehem for a Roman census and then return to their home after the birth.

Neither account is historically true.  Jesus was, in all likelihood,  born in and grew up in Nazareth.  Neither Mark nor John are interested in the geography or circumstances of Jesus' birth.  Matthew and Luke both have reasons of Jewish heritage to say that he was born in Bethlehem but Matthew and Luke don't compare notes.

The shepherds, angels, stable and the magnificat are only in Luke.  The magi, star, and flight to Egypt are only in Matthew.  The one thing that both have in common is that neither is the slightest bit interested in the historical facts because they are too busy trying to tell us an important story.... And we're still wondering why the Vatican refuses to give that old wooden manger back to the church in Bethlehem where it belongs.

The best way to kill a good story is to try to take it too literally.  One of the great rallying cries of the Progressive Christian movement is that we take the Bible seriously but not literally.  The question we should be asking is, if Luke and Matthew had no facts about the historical circumstances of the birth of Jesus, then why did they write these accounts?  Why?  What do they mean?  What is the message.... Those are the questions every story teller is actually trying to answer.

Matthew is at pains to tell the Jesus story in a way that proves to us that he is the true Jewish messiah.  He begins his account with a long genealogy tracing Jesus through the family of Joseph back to Abraham and then he tells us that Joseph wasn't really his father... like I said, Matthew doesn't want to be disturbed with any logical facts, he is telling us a story.

Like Matthew, his story is full of powerful irony.  Though Matthew will quote Old Testament texts repeatedly through the next 25 chapters of his book to prove that Jesus was the messiah, he completely leaves the Jews out of his birth narrative.  No one in the temple was aware of the birth of Jesus, but some foreign astrologers knew about it and they traveled across the wilderness to come bring presents.  Astrologers were anathema to Jews.  Practicing astrology is punishable by death, according to Deuteronomy 17 and yet, Matthew, the most Jewish of New Testament writers, is willing to slap traditional Judaism in the face and insist that gentiles knew about Jesus and his own people didn't.

There is a real message of humility in this.  As Michael Franti sings, "God is too big for just one religion."  Matthew tells us a story of a messiah who comes into the world, embraced by those who seek him but endangered by the both the institutions of religion and government.  The priests are indifferent and Herod tries to kill him, so that Jesus is aided by members of another religion and then is forced to flee as a political refugee.  If you let Matthew tell the story his own way, you see how we Christians are always uneasy around institutional religion, the halls of political power, and we can always look for Jesus among the refugees and the illegal immigrants.

Luke tells his Christmas story with entirely different details but hauntingly similar themes.  For Luke, Jesus is born into poverty and suffers both indignity and rejection by government and religion.

They are forced from their home by an oppressive occupying government and then in Bethlehem, they are not even shown the dignity to be allowed to give birth in doors.  We have all heard all of our lives that there was "no room" in the inn for them but I am inclined to think that Luke had something even more pointed in mind.

Ancient inns did not rent "rooms."  They were not like a Days Inn, after all.  Inns were just big houses largely comprised of a lower floor and an upper room.  Customers just paid to come in and they found a place on the floor among the other guests.  At what point does an inn keeper in the ancient world tell a paying customer, "I don't want any more money"?

It is possible that Luke is suggesting to us that for religious reasons, it was not simply that there was not room inside, it is that there was no room among all those people for Mary and Jesus.  Again, in Jewish tradition, everyone who is in a house when a woman gives birth is defiled and must make an offering.  Perhaps Luke is telling us that Jesus was rejected by formal religion even before he was born..... something that all of us who have been rejected by either family or faith because we were somehow "unclean" in their judgment should be able to appreciate.

Where do we find Jesus in Luke's story?  Out in the barn, among all of the stuff that you know is found in a barn.  And to whom is the divine birth announcement given?  Not to priests or kings but only to shepherds in the field.

We modern Americans tend to romanticize shepherds but don't kid yourselves....being a shepherd was the real night cashier job at Walmart in those days.  Sheep are smelly and stupid and they have to be watched all of the time.  Shepherds didn't get to observe Sabbath and they were always unclean literally or religiously.

That angels appeared to shepherds who were led to a barn where Jesus was born is a statement that you will find Jesus in homeless shelter for runaway teens where some unwed teen-ager just had a baby.  If you let Luke tells his story his way, you can appreciate why Jim Wallis says that no one goes to heaven without three references from homeless people.

The Jesus story is real, and every time we tell it, we bring good news to the poor, we bring hope to those in despair, we shine a light in dark places, promising justice to the oppressed, the refugee, the homeless and the unemployed.  The story of Christmas is not the first corner stone of a new organized religion.  It is a story that begins our story, our story of standing up to governments and churches, of siding with the poor and the oppressed.... Of kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.  Merry Christmas my friends.

Angels, Virgin Mothers, and the Power of Myth

Advent 4  Dec. 21, 2014
Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray

Luke 1:26-38
26In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."29But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 30The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." 34Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" 35The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. 36And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 37For nothing will be impossible with God."38Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her. 

2014 is drawing to a close now and not many of us are going to miss it.  We have been pummeled with horrible news. Much of which reminds me of when Mark Twain said, "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened."  We have spent months being warned about the tragic mistakes and cover up in a scandal around Benghazi, which, after several investigations, turned up no scandal, just a very sad and violent attack and equally sad and mentally deficient politicians trying to scare us.

Many of the same have tried to frighten us with images of bloody murders committed by members of Isil.  And, of course, the special in the run up to the fall elections was the outrageous misinformation campaign about the threat of Ebola in the United States.  Winner of the award for biggest "pants on fire" politician in America had to be a United State's senator from our neighboring state of Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts, who rolled all of the talking point fears together and warned that Ebola infected Isis terrorists could stream across our porous southern border to kill us all.

You could not make this stuff up.

But, for the more informed, beyond the fake Benghazi stories, the hysterical Ebola scare, and the push to get us involved in the tribal civil wars of the Middle East again, there have been some pretty sorry things going on.  You only need to consider how much air time was given to these exaggerated issues to realize the gravity of the news blackout on matters of real importance, like the fact that 90% of the growth in our current economic recovery has benefited only the top 1% of the wealthy in our country.  To the best of my knowledge, that hugely important fact has hardly been mentioned.
The political power of people like the Koch brothers continues to bend public policy toward making them richer as seen in the push to build the Keystone XL pipeline that will poison our air and may poison our water and will do very little for anyone other than Koch industries.

The news has covered a series of horrifying police killings of unarmed black men and there have been demonstrations in many major cities... enough to make elected officials pay attention. However, the demonstrations have also revealed the prevalence of racial prejudice among uniformed officers in cities across America as well as in otherwise seemingly sane people we all thought were our friends.
Recordings were made of some of the most egregious CIA torture practices but the CIA managed to destroy most of the evidence before they were investigated, though enough evidence remained to make every thinking American more than a little nauseous.

Here, at the end of this racist, violent, infected, impoverished, politically inept or corrupt year, finally comes Christmas.....and you thought that I had forgotten!

Having demythologized the New Testament's birth narratives, we don't go nuts around here with crèche scenes, we don't have a hanging of the greens service, there is no Advent wreath and no midnight candle light services.  But having swept the angelic hosts from the skies and mucked out the stall where the cattle have been lowing... along with other things... I would like to take a more sober look at the story of Jesus' birth.

The first versions of the gospels did not contain a birth narrative.  Mark never had one and it is fairly obvious that the nativity accounts in both Matthew and Luke were tacked on long after the original works were composed and made popular.

But modern progressives need not be too haughty about having figured out that the virgin birth account and the incarnational theology of the first century are not fit for modern consumption.  The people who wrote these birth narratives knew were babies came from.  Even if you had prudish, puritanical parents like I did, you don't have to spend too much time around the farm to get the birds and bees story.

The gospel writers were not gullible or ignorant.  They were storytellers.  Stories of heroes and super humans who were born of divine parentage have been around as long as there have been paintings and writing.

The ancient rulers of Egypt were depicted as standing under gigantic images of their gods to support their claims that there was divine blood in their veins.  The Greeks and Romans had hero stories of semi-divine historical characters who were only half human until current rulers began to wrap themselves in the mantle of divinity.

The gospel writers did not think that they were writing historical accounts of the birth of Jesus, they were writing a polemic, a sermon.  When early Christians announced that "Jesus is Lord," what they were specifically saying is that "Cesar is not lord," or, more completely, "I have chosen the message of Jesus over the authority of my government."

That was a dangerous thing to say back then.  Standing up to government authority.... Well, you could end up living like a prisoner in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for a couple of years as Julian Assange has, or be exiled in Russia as Edward Snowden is.

Just as Chelsea Manning is in prison for leaking information about war crimes committed by American soldiers though no American soldiers were ever put on trial for the murders of civilians that Manning exposed.

And, now that we know with certainty about the CIA torture of prisoners, you might expect criminal prosecutions.  So far only one person has been sentenced to prison related to American torture of prisoners.  Was it the guy responsible for chaining a naked man to a wall in a cold cell until he froze to death?  Was it the agent who beat his prisoner so hard that he put out one of his eyes?

No, so far, the only CIA agent in jail is John Kiriakou, and he has been in prison for two years now for leaking information to the media about our torture program.

So, you see, saying that someone other than Cesar is lord can be a very dangerous thing to do.  But the gospel writers knew very well the stories about how their rulers had miraculous virgin births.... That the Cesar's were incarnations of God.  They had read on the Roman coins that the Cesar was their savoir, their lord.

And so, they wrote about Jesus being born of a virgin, not because they were so stupid that they didn't know where babies came from but because they were so brave that they were going to adorn a Palestinian peasant with the accolades usually reserved for their rulers.

You have always heard the Christmas story told with an emphasis on the humble circumstances of Jesus' birth but I want you too see that it was not told this way as a "rags to riches" story.  It was told this way as an alternative to the glorious royal stories of Hebrew Kings and Roman dictators.
It was told this way to say that Jesus comes into the world where there is manure on the ground, in the stinking part of town where people live in barns and abandoned buildings, under bridges and in cars that don't start anymore.

The narrative, and I invite you to do with it what you will, but the narrative insists that God is not indifferent.... God isn't cloistered in some cathedral or temple... God isn't simply standing behind the king.... Saying the prayer at the opening of the day in Congress before any congress members have bothered to arrive and take their seats.

God, these narratives say, enters the world where the CIA tortures prisoners, where the media purposefully deceives, where the government is run by the corporations it is supposed to regulate, where police authority is exercised along racial lines, and where the poor are having their pensions taken from them to pay bigger bonuses to bankers and corporate bosses.

Because the gospel writers didn't want you to accept that the corruption we experience is the last word or that things are the way that they will always have to be.  I try to avoid anthropomorphizing my religious language but in the Christmas story it seems almost necessary to say it this way....
Yes, the world is violent, unfair, discriminatory, and the wrong people always seem to have the power but you should not let yourself believe that God does not know and does not care about your plight.  The Christmas story says that God was born right into the middle of all of it, at the bottom rung of the ladder, chained naked to a wall in Abu Ghraib, born in the back seat of Ford Tempo whose heater doesn't work.  God enters the world as a refugee, an unemployed grocery union worker, a retired employee who is made to feel like his meager Social Security check is some kind of a hand out after paying into the system for 50 years.

Your life story is known to God.  You are not alone.  We are not the silent, compliant, subjects of the throne, no matter who is holding the scepter this year.  For unto you is born this day a savior, who lives among you as a voice of justice, a voice of reason, a heart filled with compassion, and a generous advocate for you.  Let the people say, "hallelujah."

Mary: The First Christian Revolutionary

Advent 3   Dec. 14, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Luke 1:46b-55
46And Mary said,

"My soul magnifies the Lord, 47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 

                                              48for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 

49for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

50His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

51He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

54He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

55according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever." 

We started this church in the summer of 2008.  Our vision statement included the idealistic notion that we would try to give to this city a healthy spiritual community.  We specifically said that we were going to start a healthy spiritual community because we had all just come from one that was pretty unhealthy.... Toxic... dangerous.... Deadly.

So, we believed, we would wipe the slate clean and start all over without all of the petty political bickering of denominational politics, and the humiliating dimensions of ego battles in organized religion.  There were only fifty or sixty of us and about a fourth was one family group.

We began timidly, meeting in borrowed space and after a few weeks we had the courage to sign a lease for rented space and an office in a conference center.  The patriarch of the family that made up such a large portion of the church, paid the deposit and the first month's rent to get us started.

So you can imagine my surprise when he called me early one morning just a couple of months later to say, "I'm out, I'm never coming back."

I managed to get him to explain that the reason he was leaving.... And, of course, the rest of his clan left with him.... Was because I had written a column for the local paper in which I condemned our military's practice of torturing prisoners of war.

We had hints and rumors early on in the war on terrorism.  Then there were pictures of the abuse from the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison and our special prison in Guantanamo Bay.  The CIA's Inspector General's report that was released this week comes many years after we already knew enough to be outraged.

And so I asked my former friend, church member and benefactor, "So you are going to go to a pro-torture church?"  And he said something that I will never forget.... He said, "I will find one where I won't have to hear it mentioned."  Which, I suspect, is just about all of them.

I was crushed.  I was pretty sure that the church wouldn't survive.  We didn't have enough members; we didn't have enough donations to survive losing that many people.  And I was crushed because this was the sort of thing that I thought we had left behind.... The kind of church where you have to reel in the message to keep from stepping on anyone's toes... the kind of church where you are expected to talk about religious things but never real things.

I don't want anyone to think that I am brave.  I'm not.  I'm a coward.  I've spent most of my life being afraid.

I've led demonstrations and rallies, I married gay people to one another under threat of being fired, sued and even murdered but I was always afraid.  I just did it anyway. But that does not mean that I am a brave person.


What I knew then, what I believe now, is that the church where torture is never mentioned is, in every meaningful way, a pro-torture church.  As Elie Wiesel said, "Take sides.  Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed."  There is no way to be a healthy church and to say to the truth, even painful and inconvenient truth, "you have to just hush up if you are going to come in here."
This week, as news commentators have been discussing the Inspector General's report, I keep feeling like I am in an AA meeting.  When I was in grad school, I was doing my research on addiction recovery and I went to AA meetings four or five times a week for a couple of years.

I went to enough meetings that I became familiar with the certain stock, off the shelf stories.  A guy who was there because he was court ordered to go to AA would tell us about people he knows who drink more than he does and who have worse driving violations that the offenses that landed him in this church basement.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has demagogued through news shows, talking about prisoner abuse in Vietnam, in Russia and China, to say, "They drink more than we do... they drive worse than we do."  Donnie Deutsch chimes in that given our losses on 9-11, whatever we did to protect ourselves from future attacks cannot be judged by anyone.

They always try to use the "ticking time bomb" defense, as if we had a prison full of suspected terrorists on 9-11 and we were sending Jack Bauer into their cell to beat the location of the hidden nuclear weapon out of them.

Of course, it was none of that.  We didn't have people to interrogate for more than a year after 9-11.  When we did, we were picking up anyone we could find, and, if you can bear for me to say it, we even picked up a bunch of kids and used "enhanced interrogation techniques" on them.

My old college roommate is a military language specialist and though he is even older than I am, he was called up and deployed to Iraq to interrogate prisoners. Alan has made fun of me for 30 years for being so politically engaged and he has always tried to get me to relax and just accept the world the way it is.

But between back-to-back tours of duty, Alan came home for a couple of weeks in January of 2005.  He saw his wife in California and then drove his old car from California to Washington, D.C. so that he could be on Pennsylvania Ave. when George W. Bush's motorcade came by from his second inauguration.  And my very non-political, just roll with the punches old roommate, stepped to the front of the crowd as the president's limousine passed and he pulled down the pants of his uniform and turned his backside to the President of the United States.

Alan explained to me, "I'm being forced to interrogate children who had been caught stealing food because they were starving as if they had information about terrorist attacks against the United States."

He said, "I am angry and I am ashamed of my country." Ironically, he was not arrested for this display of protest.... I suspect that everyone who saw him, even though they didn't know any of the details, still, they could understand why.

The Inspector General's report hasn't told us much that we didn't already know or suspect.... We just didn't want to talk about it.  We still want to act as if it all happened in the heat of the moment after 9-11, when, in fact, it went on for nearly a decade.

Even some of my friends have posted a dramatic image on Face Book of a man falling to his death from the burning twin trade towers that carries the caption, "This is why I don't care about how we tortured terrorists."

Because we don't want to think about it, we tell ourselves that we only tortured terrorists during the heat of battle.  Yesterday's front page of the New York Times reports on interviews with 26 different people who were tortured, some over a period of years, whom the CIA later determined had no connections to terrorism and who had committed no crime.

We tortured some prisoners during WWII and documented the fact that it didn't work... you don't get go information that way.  There were some incidents again during Vietnam and those only confirmed what we already knew.... It doesn't work, it only turns us into what we hate.

What I find to be especially ironic is how much chest thumping is involved in the defense of our use of torture, as if it is the strong and the brave who favor torture when it is clearly the cowards who wet themselves every time they feel scared... as if being afraid is a reason to throw your humanity, your values, your beliefs out the window..... so much for the land of the free and the home of the brave!  As Jon Stewart has said, if you abandon your principles when times are hard, then they were never really principles, they were just hobbies.

For the most part, religion is a hobby.  Church, in almost every case, is a life enhancing activity.... Not a life changing, challenging, informing activity.

Look at our music, especially the music for this season of the year.  If you buy into the Christmas narrative.... That God became incarnate in a human man-cub... what does our music say about this absolutely amazing event?

O little town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie.... Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the new born king,..... Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing ore the plain....

To hear how the church has treated this ancient narrative you would think that it was just the sweetest thing.... Just precious... darling, even.

Sean is singing parts of the first Christmas carol, if I may call it that, for us today.  Mary's song as recorded in Luke.... Now, let's be clear.... I'm not taking that as a historical record.  I don't believe that an angel appeared to Mary and told her that she was going to bear God's son and then she burst into poetic singing.

This account is a creation of the early church but it is an important creation of the early church.  How did they interpret the birth of Jesus?  What was the significance of the Christ event in their minds?
You may not read Latin very well but let me tell you, it wasn't about, "away in a manger, no crying he made."  The early church says that Mary's immediate response to the angel was a revolutionary declaration.  Luke has this teenaged girl saying what Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez never had the nerve to say:

52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

A preacher could get fired for talking about revolution, about kicking the powerful off of their thrones and returning power to the people.  Why, people would leave the church if you started talking about a radical redistribution of wealth so that the hungry would be filled and the rich would be sent empty away.

This is not disguised.  This is not secret code.  This is in the Bible!  It is in chapter 1!  This is the introduction, if you don't get this you don't understand the rest of the story.

The Geometry of Time

Advent 2    Dec. 7, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Isaiah 40:1-11
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 2Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
3A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5Then the glory of theLord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." 6A voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. 7The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. 8The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.
9Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" 10See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

You can confidently say that there are two kinds of people in the world.  There are those who divide the world into two types of people and there are those who do not.  It is somewhat more complicated to divide all of the religions of the world into two groups but for conversation's sake, I'm going to go ahead and give it a try.

Every world religion attempts to make sense of our experience of the world through certain beliefs and rituals.  It is never a clean break, but religions tend to view time in one of two ways.... Generally speaking, religions of the eastern world tend to think of time as being circular, moving through repeated patterns. And religions of the west tend to think of time as being linear, going from creation to some kind of end.

Belief in reincarnation is more prevalent in eastern religions and, I suppose that the belief that you get multiple shots at life takes some of the urgency out of it.... You don't have to be afraid of going to hell for eternity, sure, you might come back as a cockroach but if you can be a really good cockroach then you have a shot at coming back the next time as something more interesting, like a dolphin or a hawk.

Religions that have a linear view of time view life like shooting an arrow... whatever direction the arrow is pointed at the moment of death, that's where you are going to go forever and so we Jews, Christians and Muslims are much more concerned about the afterlife, guilt and sin than are the eastern faiths.

This is, of course, a generalization.  There are aspects of linear eternity in eastern religions and there are aspects of a circular view of time in western religions.  Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have more or less annual calendars.  Jewish and Christian calendars are based on a lunar calendar that is modified by solar equinox and solar solstice and the Muslim calendar is only lunar which means that Muslim holidays move in their time of year because the lunar calendar only has 354 days in it.

The observances of Passover and Easter can move back and forth but they are always in the spring.  The Muslim observance of Ramadan is always moving 10 and a quarter days backwards each year so that Ramadan will, over a period of years, move from spring, to winter, to fall and then summer.  This year, Ramadan started on June 29, next year it will start on June 18th.  So, every 30 years or so Ramadan, Passover and Easter end up at about the same time and I am sure someone in retail marketing is already trying to figure out how to make that work as an interfaith spring buying season.  I think that will be in 2021 so, remember, you heard it here first.

So, which religious tradition is correct? Is time linear or is it circular?  It is not hard to find evidence in nature to support either one.  Trees lose their leaves in the fall and get more in the spring.  Our flowers and farm fields appear to die every winter and them come back to life in the spring.  The earth itself grows dark and cold and then comes back long days and hot weather.  And we go to sleep, and wake up.  We get sick and then we get better.

But we also see linear aspects to the world.  A tree will lose its leaves and come back in the spring for several years but eventually they do all die.  When we are young, our teeth fall out and we get a whole new set....but when those fall out, Mother Nature doesn't really have a solution for that.

We grow old and we die and though people may have strong personal beliefs about their conscience living on in another form, what we see is that they die and though they may live in a heavenly mansion on streets of gold, they won't be showing up at the house for Christmas dinner.

There are aspects of time that are circular and there are others that are linear.  Sometimes that line is fairly short, like the life of a single individual person, or it can be fairly long, like the life span of a species such as the dinosaurs or jellyfish.

I apologize for taking so much time in this introductory walk through comparative religions and you can be forgiven if you forget that there are 354 days in a 12 month lunar calendar by the time you get to the parking lot.

The larger point for me, at this point in history, is that both types of religious descriptions of time can be deceptive.  If you believe that life is always circling around in every repeating cycles, then you can be relatively indifferent about what you are doing in this life, assuming that you have a virtually infinite number of second chances....when reality may be better symbolized by how many complete sets of teeth you can reasonably expect to grow in a lifetime.

And a linear view of time that ends up in either heaven or hell for eternity can also have its very deceptive implications.  People will deny themselves the very joy of living at all, either out of fear of eternal punishment or out of lust for eternal reward.... Neither of which is known to exist outside of religious imagination.

Soldiers of all religious stripes have marched into the jaws of death under the promise of an afterlife reward.  Perhaps even more deceptively, our current marriage of evangelical Christianity to politics and the corporations that profit from coal and oil, are destroying the earth in a lust for current profits backed up with the absurd religious assurance that Jesus will come back and usher in the heavenly Kingdom before the earth becomes uninhabitable.

When the new Republican majority takes over the Senate next month, Oklahoma's senator, James Inhofe will be the chair of the Senate's environment committee.  Inhofe has repeatedly rejected climate change science and in 2012, defended coal and oil interests by quoting from the Bible.  He said:
"My point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

What is outrageous to me is that our neighbors to the west keep re-electing this guy but given our voting record and considering the senators who represent our neighboring states, maybe we shouldn't be too surprised, but the implications of this kind of denial of science is serious.... And serious in a lethal sort of way.

My favorite TV show is HBO's "The Newsroom."  In fact, if there is a fictional character that I wish that I could actually be, it would have to be the prophetically courageous, truth telling, Will McAvoy. But in a recent episode, the leading character got set back on his own rump while interviewing a fictitious EPA executive who, in a very deadpan manner, basically said that we have already put so much carbon into the air that there is nothing we can do to reverse the damage done to the earth.

He predicted that the child has already been born who will die from a cataclysmic collapse of the environment and that within the foreseeable future, that sea levels could rise by 80 feet.  Now, thankfully, this is a fictional TV show and not a documentary but, the truth is that we have done enough damage to the environment that even if we never started our gasoline burning cars again and never burned another lump of coal in our power plants, over the next few generations, sea levels are going to rise by several feet and many of our favorite vacation spots and costal cities will only be accessible to people who are wearing scuba gear.

This will cause mass migrations, and economic woes of potentially cataclysmic proportions and there is nothing we can do to stop it now.... But that doesn't mean that there is no reason to start living smarter now.

The world's major religions, the world's most powerful governments, and the world's largest corporations have all been guilty of treating environmental scientists as if they were Chicken Little going around screaming hysterically that the sky is falling.  Now, it is too late to keep the sky from falling because time really is linear and we've been going in the wrong direction for most of the last century.

Many of us were guilty of using our credit cards when we were young as if the future was always going to be so bright, that our income was always going to be much larger in the future and carelessness in the present was of no great consequence.  And we all took some unnecessarily draconian hits as we fought our way out of those imprudent mistakes.

Our relationship with the environment is no different.  We have foolishly believed that our careless stewardship of the earth would always be corrected by a new wave of technology and if not something salvific out of the scientists and inventors whose warnings we so casually ignore, then at least God would step in and wind the clock back for us.

The sobering message of progressive faith is that the messiah we have been waiting for is looking back at us in the mirror every morning.  We are the one we have been waiting for.

The people who can change the world for the better, who can lessen the impact of past mistakes and set the course of time in the right direction have already been born.... In fact, they all decided to go to church this morning.  Let's hope that their spirituality is substantive enough to make real change in the course of history.

While Ferguson Still Burns

November 30, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

(an excerpt from an Independence Day speech delivered by the former slave, Fredrick Douglass, in the presence of President Millard Fillmore in 1852)

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. 

There is a Buddhist parable about a group of monks who were traveling with their abbot when they came upon an uprising in which a group of peasants were fighting against government soldiers.  The abbot said to his disciples, "We must join the conflict."  Confused and surprised by this uncharacteristic demand, they asked, "Master, on which side should we fight?"

"Both," the abbot replied.  "The government must learn to care for the poor and not to mistreat them, and the poor must learn to respect the powers that bring order to our society."

I'm not typically indecisive.  In fact, I'm sure that most of you would readily assure me that I am more inclined to be decisive when I should hang back and think about things a little longer.

In May I drove a thousand miles to participate in a Moral Monday March in North Carolina where the state legislature has been taking very deliberate steps to keep black citizens from voting.

I have not, however, driven the 200 miles between Springfield and Ferguson, Missouri to participate in demonstrations there since the August shooting of Michael Brown.  The right wing politicians and much of the media in North Carolina bemoaned the fact that there were "out of state agitators" swelling the numbers of the Moral Monday Marches in their state.  If only I had known how vociferously they were going to object, I would have had a t-shirt made that said, "Out of State Agitator."  "Agitator," is, in fact, one of the more flattering things that I have been called.

But when the Prosecuting Attorney in St Louis County, Robert McCulloch, finally announced on Monday evening that there would be no indictment against officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, there was a predictable outburst of looting and burning on the part of a small minority of those involved in the demonstrations that have been ongoing in Ferguson since Brown was killed in Mid-August.

Tuesday morning, the Ferguson Police Chief, Tom Jackson, was angry that the clergy had not shown up to do more to prevent this from happening.  You know that I often complain about pastors not taking to the streets often enough but I have not participated in the Ferguson demonstrations.  In part, I have stayed away because I don't think that I need to help clean up the mess that Ferguson's city government and police department created through years of racial discrimination and over policing of the black community.

 I don't agree with those who set fire to buildings in Ferguson, or who looted stores, or who fired shots or threw stones at Ferguson policemen..... but, I understand why they are angry and why it is coming out this way.

And I want for you to know, if you have not heard it in the news already, that it was not just black protesters who were setting buildings on fire.  Michael Brown's family's church in Ferguson, the Flood Christian Church, was burned to the ground that night after having received more than 70 threats from white supremacist groups. Our corporate media keeps an audience by making white people feel superior to and somewhat afraid of black people.... They appear to have no incentive to even report on white criminal violence against the black community.

But, still, I didn't go because I couldn't get comfortable with the push to portray Michael Brown as a martyr that represents the plight of young black men in America.  And I don't think that Officer Wilson is the incarnation of evil that we want to fight.... Still, I understand those who think differently.

Michael Brown was a kid but he evidently used his size and his ability to intimidate others to push boundaries that he, if he actually did what he was accused of, would certainly end up badly.

Similarly, we were horrified this week by the news of a 12 year old boy, Tamir Rice, being shot and killed by Cleveland police.  Again, the boy was technically unarmed but he had a real looking BB gun and he was pointing it at people in a public park in order to make them think that he had a gun.

He should not have been killed.  The police should have managed the situation much better.  Tamir needed a good talking to but he didn't need to be shot, or arrested, or anything of the sort.  BB guns are still legal and they are still sold in the toy department of Walmart....they probably shouldn't be but they are and as long as they are, it shouldn't be a crime to buy one.

There were, however, many things in the Ferguson case, in Officer Wilson's testimony and subsequent interviews that are disturbing.  That he said that Brown looked "demonic" and that he was afraid for his life.... So much so that he fired his weapon 12 times, hitting Brown six times, possibly killing him when he was still a hundred feet away.

Wilson had never fired his gun on duty before.  He was not known as being either a racist or for being excessively aggressive, but when asked if there was anything that he could have done differently, he insisted that he did the only thing that he could.... I wasn't there, I don't know what I would have done in the same circumstances, but I can't help believing that there were a whole lot of things that could have been done short of using lethal force.

I don't think that Wilson was likely a monster but that he not only didn't get an indictment but that he can't even say that he wishes that he had wounded Brown rather than killing him.... Couldn't he at least say that he wished that he had not killed Brown?  Well, as I said, I understand why there are riots in Ferguson.

But in this same week, decades old charges of rape against the seemingly charming and lovable comedian, Bill Cosby, seemed to come in such large numbers that it is no longer possible to ignore them.  A new TV show featuring Cosby has been canceled and even his appearances in Las Vegas have been canceled and Vegas is not known for setting a high water mark in their expectations of virtue in their performers.

If he is only 10% guilty of the charges against him, then his career is over.  But six years ago people were saying that big named entertainers like Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey had made it possible for Barak Obama to win the 2008 election to become the President of the United States.  Here is the paradox that we have to be willing to deal with as mature adults.... His sex crimes are horrible.... And he was a transformative figure in race relations in America.

Thomas Jefferson, John Kennedy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, even Dorothy Day, all had some things, sometimes horrible things, to be ashamed of in their personal lives.  So, yes, Michael Brown wasn't a saint.... But you don't have to be a saint to deserve not being shot by the police.

In many ways in spite of how they died, it was fortunate that Gandhi, Kennedy and King, all got to leave the stage of public attention before their personal lives became fodder for media taunting.  No one can stand the scrutiny of a probing modern media that is more interested in what happens between your bedroom sheets than they are in the rampant injustice against an entire race of people in our streets.

Al Sharpton may show up for every public civil rights fight, but he is not the face of civil rights, nor is Cornell West, ... though I don't know of any substantive moral criticism of either Sharpton or West... but then neither are Bill Cosby or Michael Brown to be dismissed because we know of some things that they did that were wrong.... Or am I alone up in here as the only person in the room who has made some mistakes?

We have to stop allowing the mud slinging and public humiliation of any individual to take the power out of the larger issues.

No, rioters should not burn down businesses or police cars to avenge Michael Brown.  But, folks, racism is real.  Wilson should not have shot Brown.... That, however, was an individual event and the rightness or wrongness of the public's anger can not be judged based on whether or not Michael Brown reached in the Police patrol car window and fought Officer Wilson for his gun.

Every life matters.  Michael Brown's death is tragic and important but the issue of state sponsored racism did not begin or end with Michael Brown.

Black men are disproportionally stopped by the police, they are five times as likely to be charged and jailed for the same offense as a white person is.  Even the way the penal system is written discriminates against black people.... Jail sentences for possessing crack cocaine used to be many times the punishment for having powder cocaine.... Crack being preferred in black neighborhoods and powder cocaine being more popular among members of Congress and the Senate.

You may think that I'm exaggerating but I will point out as just one example the recent resignation of the Florida representative, Trey Radel, after being arrested with cocaine and he had been one of the legislators pushing for drug testing of all food stamp recipients.  I guarantee you that a higher percentage of members of Congress would be found to be using drugs than are food stamp recipients.
If we couple drug testing of elected officials to drug testing of welfare clients, there will never be a bill passed mandating drug testing of people on welfare.

Al Sharpton and Bill Cosby, though condescending in tone, were not wrong to counsel black young men not to try to make themselves look threatening and anti-social.  Crime in the black community is not an imaginary problem.

However, I can tell you how to cut crime in the black community by as much as 90% in a single year and I'm not even all that smart.  We could cut crime, I'm going to claim by 90%, by creating good paying manufacturing jobs in the inner-cities, by funding our urban schools the same way predominantly white private and suburban schools are funded, by decriminalizing drug addiction and by offering treatment for addiction rather than incarceration...AND, if I may add.... By instituting sane gun laws and by making health care universal.

We turned the "war on poverty" into a "war on drugs" and it has evolved into a "war on the poor."  I don't like to use words like "stupid" in the pulpit, but this shift in public policy is stupid....well, not entirely stupid.... It is mostly evil.  Racism in 21st century America is a choice, an institutionalized, wicked, inexcusable choice and it is time for it to end.

More than a decade before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a run-away slave, Fredrick Douglass, was asked to deliver a 4th of July address in Rochester, New York.

Perhaps next summer we may just read the address in its entirety as our sermon for Independence Day but I used an excerpt from it for our wisdom lesson today.

But if I may summarize, in the years before the Civil War, before the end of slavery in America was anything but certain, he reminded his white audience that the Independence they were celebrating on the 5th of July had been given to them by a generation of brilliant and largely peaceful people who had simply had enough of the oppression of the British crown.

He said, "Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression."

There were those who were scandalized by the suggestion that we forcefully reject the oppression of Great Britain.  There were those who protested the Civil War and refused to serve in it, insisting that the end of slavery would come gradually and peacefully if we just gave it time.

So, I understand why anger among the black communities of our nation's major cities can go from the boiling point to the point of open flames.  As President Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

I don't want to be guilty of exaggerating for effect because what I want to say, I want to be understood literally:

America is at a breaking point.  The income disparity that is driving the middle class into poverty and making the burden of poverty unbearable is not sustainable.  The absence of jobs that pay a living wage and the inaccessibility of health care, transportation, housing and education so that a smaller and smaller slice of society can be obscenely wealthy will push our once great nation to the point of violent revolution if we cannot intelligently correct our course.

The news media on both the left and the right use fear and misinformation to keep a profit generating audience.  The Republicans and the Democrats both serve corporate interests and both are guilty of wholesale deception of the voting public.

In the real world, however, racism is real.  Poverty is real.  Schools in poor neighborhoods are breeding grounds of ignorance, crime, and addiction, making them a pipeline into for-profit prisons.  It isn't slavery but it has so many of the elements of slavery in it that you have to strain to defend the differences.

A hundred and sixty years ago, Douglass said:

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Men and women, I suspect that there are young black men in Ferguson who have turned over police cars and thrown Molotov Cocktails at stores who could not even tell you why they feel such violent rage.  Just as, if they can catch the white extremists who burned down Flood Christian Church would not be able to sensibly describe why they are so afraid of black people and why they give vent to such hatred and violence.

We know that it wasn't the death of Michael Brown or the vilifying of Darren Wilson.  Those are the fuses on a social bomb that has been under construction for 200 years.... A fury that was born in slave ships and at the business end of whips on long forgotten plantations.

The rage comes from media that feeds a gullible public on subtle forms of racial fear and hated, disguised as entertainment.  As Noam Chomsky has said:  "As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome."

So, my friends, it is up to us not to be passive, apathetic, nor easily diverted by corporate media, nor led by our ignorant, racist friends into hatred of the vulnerable....because will must not let the powerful do as they please.  We must not stand idly by.

In A Country Well Governed

Dr. Roger Ray        
                       

Confucius "In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of." -

Deuteronomy 8:7-14, 17   7For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, 8a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. 10You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.
11 Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. 12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,..17Do not say to yourself, 'My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.' 

The Lord of the Flies, by British author, William Golding, was a 1950's novel that most of us had to read when we were in middle school.  It describes a plane crash on an island in which all of the adults were killed and only a few dozen pre-adolescent boys are left to fend for themselves.

Initially their only goals were to have fun, survive, and keep a signal fire going so that a ship might be enticed to come and rescue them.  The novel brilliantly chronicles the emergence of the darker side of human nature even in a fairly plush tropical island, as the boys engage in power struggles, dividing into rival clans and finally killing one of the boys.  In the end, the entire island is set ablaze in an attempt to corner and kill another of the island's leaders.  The smoke does attract a ship and the boys are confronted by a single adult officer and suddenly, their conscience catches up with them as they realize how feral, how violent, and evil they had become in just a few days of being left unsupervised.

I suppose that our teachers assigned the book to us just as we were coming into adult bodies and being pulled in every passionate direction as we struggled to become adults but it is not as if the story could only be told about pre-pubescent children.

This week we will celebrate our American Thanksgiving holiday that embodies a lot of myths about the awkward beginnings of the British colonies that became the United States of America.  The Jamestown colony was a group of several dozen adults who had the opportunity to build a new world settlement in the presence of abundant natural resources but they were nearly wiped out by the individual greed of the colonists who spent time looking for gold rather than planting crops.

Captain John Smith forcefully took control of the colony and gave work assignments to everyone so that their circumstances were improving until Smith had to return to England for medical treatment, and, like a bunch of unsupervised children on an island, the colony fell back into their old habits without Smith there to hold them accountable.  There is solid historical evidence that the Jamestown colony actually resorted to cannibalism, not just in digging up freshly buried Indians, but also in killing and eating a teenaged girl in their own colony.

A few years later, the Plymouth colony that was largely founded on religious principles, did not fare much better.  The sad commentary on both Jamestown and Plymouth was that when everyone was supposed to work for the common good, most people tried very hard not to work, even when public flogging was employed to discourage sloth.

It was not until they abandoned shared community property and began to work only for their own benefit that most people began to work hard enough to make a living in the new world.  This has, of course, encouraged some people to insist that free market capitalism saved America but that is far too simple an explanation for just how dark our human shadow can be, even when our own survival depends upon our willingness to help one another.

The Thanksgiving storyline that taught us that European immigrants came to the colonies for religious freedom and for liberty, democracy, and the free market was more than a little exaggeration.  Most immigrants came to escape poverty, the poverty created by an entrenched economic system that forced the many to serve the interests of the wealthy few.

Sadly, The Lord of the Flies, is not just a fictional novel.  It described the truth of our very human ability to exploit one another, even when we are trying to escape being exploited ourselves.

The Plymouth community was not unfamiliar with the failings of the Jamestown Colony.  The Pilgrims on board the Arbella crossing the Atlantic to found the Plymouth Colony, were not, however, all Pilgrims.  The cost of the voyage made it necessary to sell passage to a few people of means who were coming to America to get rich.  They did not plan to get rich by the sweat of their own brows but rather, they certainly planned to employ some poor Pilgrims.

Fearing their potential for failure, before they made landfall, their spiritual leader, John Winthrop, delivered a highly idealistic sermon to his captive audience in which he said:
"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our own wants (superfluities), for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ... community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."

Economics is a complicated science.  Religion gets involved only when the dark shadow of humanity takes charge of the economy so that it becomes abusive.  If you look carefully at the dating of the careers of the Old Testament prophets, it becomes clear that there wasn't any notable prophetic preaching when things were going well in ancient Israel.  It was only when the majority were being exploited or abused by the powerful and the wealthy that we began to see the bold preaching of the prophets arise.

It is nice when religious leaders and focus on baptizing babies, presiding over weddings, funerals, and holiday festivals with poetic liturgy and nostalgic carols and hymns. But when people are going hungry, homeless, and uneducated... when the poor are being left to suffer with their illnesses or being forced to bear the weight of the labor that benefits the rich, then people with a sincere spirituality cannot be idol, indifferent or devoted to Bible Study and Christmas caroling.

John Winthrop's fears came true.  Their attempt at communal living failed but their survival strategy, an "every man for himself" capitalist economy has not proven to be salvific either.  Somewhere between the extremes of communal property and economic survival of the fittest there is a just society and we can never be blindly patriotic until we have found that right balance.

We began today with this wonderful Confucian quote about poverty and wealth.  We think of Confucius as either a philosopher or a spiritual leader but he drew his paycheck for being a low level government official.  He thought about government a lot, about how a government can succeed or fail in supporting the creation of a just, harmonious, and he would even say, a courteous society.

He says that in a country that has a good government, that is being well managed, there mere existence of poverty should be embarrassing because, if you still have poor people when you have an efficient government then that can only mean that the people in power just don't care about that plight of the poor and that should be humiliating to them.

Confucius tended to teach in parallel couplets and the mirror image of this first statement is the observation that in a country that is poorly managed, that has an ineffective government, wealth should be a source of shame.


We can look to our southern neighbors to see examples of that.....the government of Nicaragua is one of the most ineffective that I have had the chance to see up close... in a nation of 4.5 million people, there are five fabulously wealthy families and nearly 2 million people living at the point of malnutrition.  Wealth, in a poorly run country is almost always gained at the enslavement of the powerless.  We have monkeys in our local zoo who are better housed and fed and who, frankly, have greater personal freedom, than do the Nicaraguans who work on most of the coffee plantations.

The people in our country who think that they would like to have a Libertarian led government have no idea what a nation governed by the survival of the fittest really looks like.  It looks like a nation without roads, bridges, schools or hospitals, with millions suffering in abject poverty while a few demonic super rich families try to imagine new ways of enjoying their wealth.

Still, the Thanksgiving myths that inspired the first Thanksgiving and the school plays we are endured as children should not be set lightly aside.  We have a strong and comparatively efficient government.... And if you don't believe that they are, try not filing an income tax return for a year or two, but it is a strong and efficient government that often fails to have a moral rudder.

Winthrop and many early leaders of utopian religious communities simply gave human beings more credit than we deserve.  The "dark side of the force is strong with us."  In our minds, we can see, we can do the calculations and we can see that we have come into, as Moses said, a land flowing with milk and honey.
We have the resources in the United States to wipe out poverty, to care for the sick, to educate the next generation and to employ the poor at a living wage.  All we have to do is marry our minds to our hearts, to let our idealism, our patriotism, our spirituality, become sufficiently influential to keep our shadow at bay.

There will be no more poverty in America when we will no longer tolerate it.  There will be no more discrimination against minorities, no denial of rights to gay people, and no splitting of families because of which side of the river they were born on, when we will no longer be willing to be a part of a nation that is well governed but still possessing a second class of peasant citizens.

Winthrop was idealistic but he was not wrong.... We must make the conditions of others our own, having always our community before our eyes, until everyone has reason to be thankful for the circumstances of their lives.

So, in conclusion, let me tell you a little bit about the word "amen."  We say it sometimes just to indicate that we are at the end of a prayer or hymn, or we shout it as a sign of agreement with a statement or a speech.  Technically, it means "truly," or "so be it."  Where our gospels translate Jesus as saying, "Truly, truly, I tell you..." the text literally says, "amen, amen, I tell you...."

There is, in saying it in a religious context, both a sense of affirmation and a bit of a prayer of intercession.... A hope, a wish, that what has been said will become true.  And so, as we prepare for our nation's observance of Thanksgiving, I hope that we will rekindle a dream of a nation so great that we don't have to be ashamed of our mistreatment of the poor, our neglect of the aging and the ill, our oppression of minorities, but that we may, in fact, become that nation that is a city built on a hill as a shining example of a place of opportunity, freedom, liberty, and of real social justice.  To that, I hope, we can all say, "amen."

Israel's Alternative Goddess

Proper 27       November 9, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16            
12 Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
13 She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
14 One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate.
15 To fix one's thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
16 because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought. 

They say that history is the version of events as recorded by the people who won the war.  The voices of the defeated are soon forgotten and lost to history with very few exceptions.

That can certainly be said of scripture.  The Bible was written by the people who won the religious wars.  The ancient near east was full of rival, regional religions, with various gods who specialized either in certain aspects of nature or life, or they were at least jealous about certain hill tops and high places.

But the Bible we inherited as children was written from the perspective of the Palestinian religion centered in Jerusalem, at the hilltop temple on Mt. Moriah.


There were other temples that practiced forms of Yahwistic religions, made sacrifices, and talked about Moses, the escape from Egypt, and the 10 commandments but the version that comes down to us states clearly that Israel was a monotheistic state with its religious center in Jerusalem.  That's not historically true but that is the sanitized version of religious history that we were handed.

Even if you are talking about those settled and stable periods when the royal family and the priestly class worked in harmony and there really was a fiercely dominant state religion, as Christianity was to a large degree in the first half of the 20th century in America.  Even still, there were always those who, on the more superstitious end, dabbled in other religions and forms of magical thinking, and there were always those on the intellectual end of the spectrum, who spoke the language of the dominant religion but who understood it in more symbolic and utilitarian terms.

I'm fond of the saying that equates religion to a swimming pool.... Most of the splashing and noise usually comes from the shallow end... but there is still usually a deep end for the stronger swimmers.  My value judgments are added to this sermon at no extra charge.

Seriously, though, if you read even the dialogues of Plato, you see that 400 years before Jesus, in Greek society, thinking people did not take their religious myths either literally nor even all that seriously.  Read the Republic and you see how Plato articulates through the character of Socrates that religion is used to tame and control the simple minded and the poor and to give encouragement to the noble and the wise, but it is not taken literally.

We get hints and echoes of the same, even from the sanitized view of religious history we get from the Bible.  As the Palestinian religion rubbed up against Greek culture more and more, we see the suggestion of a kind of alternative goddess standing somewhere near that monotheistic faith that attributed all holy things to Yahweh.

It is, of course, much more than an echo in the 4th chapter of Proverbs where we find a virtual hymn of praise to a goddess known as wisdom.  You always have to pay attention when a staunchly monotheistic faith speaks out of the corners of its mouth about some other god standing next to the big God.

There were people in ancient Palestine that spoke of angels and demons and buried religious trinkets in their fields in hopes of a better harvest.  And there were orthodox Jews who imagined that the one true God's presence actually sat on a throne in an inaccessible inner chamber of their temple on top of Mt Moriah within the walled city of Jerusalem.  But there were others who turned with religious devotion to wisdom itself, to intelligence and truth as if intelligence could be personified in a person.... Literally... a person to be desired.... A woman,... a strong, beautiful, woman.

Greek mythology had it that wisdom was a warrior goddess, Athena, and in unmistakable symbolism, she had been born, fully grown and clothed in battle armor, straight out of the forehead of Almighty Zeus.  As such, she was a mythic goddess.... A personification of a character quality that was respected, adored, and desired by ancient people who could see that wisdom was their way out of the darkness of primitive society.

Our wisdom lesson today comes from one of those "in-between" pieces of ancient literature.... Attached to Old Testament material but probably originally written in Greek rather than Hebrew.... A hybrid of Hellenist and Hebrew cultures.  It is from what Protestants call the "Apocrypha" and Catholics have called the "deuteron-canonical" part of the Bible but for our purposes, it is an example of how the ancient mind was striving to break free of the magic and superstition that had dominated the ancient civilizations and to aspire to something higher, something more honest if somewhat less comforting.

Our good friend, Dr. Charlie Hedrick, has mused about this point recently in his writing.  Several of the honored "wise men" of history eventually became described as being either divine or partially divine but that evolution of praise through the fog of history usually took a century or two, or three!  But in the case of Jesus, there were people who were saying that he was semi-divine within a generation of his death.

Why did it happen so fast?  What was it about Jesus that called forth such a rapid promotion from sage, to saint, to prophet, to demi-god and finally to God?

Sermons, unlike college classroom lectures, really ought to have only one point.  I know better than to stand up here and have lots of options in a short speech but this is a topic that simply can't tolerate a one note description.

The first person we know of who tried to push Jesus beyond mere mortal wisdom into a divine role was a guy who had never met him but who did at least have a geographical and biological reference point for Jesus and that was none other than Paul, the self-appointed apostle.
Sadly, however, even though he was closer in time and space, Paul apparently knew less about the historical Jesus than we do and, even more importantly, he cared even less.... He was not interested in the man, Jesus.... He was interested in a mystical Christ.

Fifty years later, one of the first of the famous Christian writers whose works did not make the cut to be included in the New Testament, a man we remember as Justin Martyr, wrote that, "Now the son of God, called Jesus, even if only an ordinary man, is on account of his wisdom (σοφία) worthy to be called son of God." (First Apology, 22)

In the early second century, Justin did not argue that Jesus was God's own offspring because he was miraculously born of a virgin by divine parentage, or that he was any kind of human, divine mix, but rather, quite simply, because he bore the stamp of the goddess who is wisdom.... It was his teachings that made Justin regard him as being a son of God.

In that sense, we too are chosen to set aside the manipulations and deceptions of a creedal religion that wants us to focus on pie in the sky in the by and by, in favor of a religious devotion to wisdom, to the truth, to faith rooted in rational evidence, reality and facts.

Folks, the best part of our faith has nothing to do with denial of reality.  Mysticism is not an embrace of fantasy over science.  Our faith is a principled decision not to be deceived by the trickery of modern magicians who are always asking for you to look "over here" while they are picking your pocket "over there."

Proper 27       November 9, 2014     Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor      "Israel's Alternative Goddess"
Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16            
12 Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
13 She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
14 One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate.
15 To fix one's thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
16 because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought.

They say that history is the version of events as recorded by the people who won the war.  The voices of the defeated are soon forgotten and lost to history with very few exceptions.

That can certainly be said of scripture.  The Bible was written by the people who won the religious wars.  The ancient near east was full of rival, regional religions, with various gods who specialized either in certain aspects of nature or life, or they were at least jealous about certain hill tops and high places.

But the Bible we inherited as children was written from the perspective of the Palestinian religion centered in Jerusalem, at the hilltop temple on Mt. Moriah.


There were other temples that practiced forms of Yahwistic religions, made sacrifices, and talked about Moses, the escape from Egypt, and the 10 commandments but the version that comes down to us states clearly that Israel was a monotheistic state with its religious center in Jerusalem.  That's not historically true but that is the sanitized version of religious history that we were handed.

Even if you are talking about those settled and stable periods when the royal family and the priestly class worked in harmony and there really was a fiercely dominant state religion, as Christianity was to a large degree in the first half of the 20th century in America.  Even still, there were always those who, on the more superstitious end, dabbled in other religions and forms of magical thinking, and there were always those on the intellectual end of the spectrum, who spoke the language of the dominant religion but who understood it in more symbolic and utilitarian terms.

I'm fond of the saying that equates religion to a swimming pool.... Most of the splashing and noise usually comes from the shallow end... but there is still usually a deep end for the stronger swimmers.  My value judgments are added to this sermon at no extra charge.

Seriously, though, if you read even the dialogues of Plato, you see that 400 years before Jesus, in Greek society, thinking people did not take their religious myths either literally nor even all that seriously.  Read the Republic and you see how Plato articulates through the character of Socrates that religion is used to tame and control the simple minded and the poor and to give encouragement to the noble and the wise, but it is not taken literally.

We get hints and echoes of the same, even from the sanitized view of religious history we get from the Bible.  As the Palestinian religion rubbed up against Greek culture more and more, we see the suggestion of a kind of alternative goddess standing somewhere near that monotheistic faith that attributed all holy things to Yahweh.

It is, of course, much more than an echo in the 4th chapter of Proverbs where we find a virtual hymn of praise to a goddess known as wisdom.  You always have to pay attention when a staunchly monotheistic faith speaks out of the corners of its mouth about some other god standing next to the big God.

There were people in ancient Palestine that spoke of angels and demons and buried religious trinkets in their fields in hopes of a better harvest.  And there were orthodox Jews who imagined that the one true God's presence actually sat on a throne in an inaccessible inner chamber of their temple on top of Mt Moriah within the walled city of Jerusalem.  But there were others who turned with religious devotion to wisdom itself, to intelligence and truth as if intelligence could be personified in a person.... Literally... a person to be desired.... A woman,... a strong, beautiful, woman.

Greek mythology had it that wisdom was a warrior goddess, Athena, and in unmistakable symbolism, she had been born, fully grown and clothed in battle armor, straight out of the forehead of Almighty Zeus.  As such, she was a mythic goddess.... A personification of a character quality that was respected, adored, and desired by ancient people who could see that wisdom was their way out of the darkness of primitive society.

Our wisdom lesson today comes from one of those "in-between" pieces of ancient literature.... Attached to Old Testament material but probably originally written in Greek rather than Hebrew.... A hybrid of Hellenist and Hebrew cultures.  It is from what Protestants call the "Apocrypha" and Catholics have called the "deuteron-canonical" part of the Bible but for our purposes, it is an example of how the ancient mind was striving to break free of the magic and superstition that had dominated the ancient civilizations and to aspire to something higher, something more honest if somewhat less comforting.

Our good friend, Dr. Charlie Hedrick, has mused about this point recently in his writing.  Several of the honored "wise men" of history eventually became described as being either divine or partially divine but that evolution of praise through the fog of history usually took a century or two, or three!  But in the case of Jesus, there were people who were saying that he was semi-divine within a generation of his death.

Why did it happen so fast?  What was it about Jesus that called forth such a rapid promotion from sage, to saint, to prophet, to demi-god and finally to God?

Sermons, unlike college classroom lectures, really ought to have only one point.  I know better than to stand up here and have lots of options in a short speech but this is a topic that simply can't tolerate a one note description.

The first person we know of who tried to push Jesus beyond mere mortal wisdom into a divine role was a guy who had never met him but who did at least have a geographical and biological reference point for Jesus and that was none other than Paul, the self-appointed apostle.
Sadly, however, even though he was closer in time and space, Paul apparently knew less about the historical Jesus than we do and, even more importantly, he cared even less.... He was not interested in the man, Jesus.... He was interested in a mystical Christ.

Fifty years later, one of the first of the famous Christian writers whose works did not make the cut to be included in the New Testament, a man we remember as Justin Martyr, wrote that, "Now the son of God, called Jesus, even if only an ordinary man, is on account of his wisdom (σοφία) worthy to be called son of God." (First Apology, 22)

In the early second century, Justin did not argue that Jesus was God's own offspring because he was miraculously born of a virgin by divine parentage, or that he was any kind of human, divine mix, but rather, quite simply, because he bore the stamp of the goddess who is wisdom.... It was his teachings that made Justin regard him as being a son of God.

In that sense, we too are chosen to set aside the manipulations and deceptions of a creedal religion that wants us to focus on pie in the sky in the by and by, in favor of a religious devotion to wisdom, to the truth, to faith rooted in rational evidence, reality and facts.

Folks, the best part of our faith has nothing to do with denial of reality.  Mysticism is not an embrace of fantasy over science.  Our faith is a principled decision not to be deceived by the trickery of modern magicians who are always asking for you to look "over here" while they are picking your pocket "over there."

Just as the ancients struggled to break free of a world defined by fear of demons and spirits by giving their faith and loyalty to a more reliable deity, a goddess they called "wisdom," so we choose to be freed from a culture that worships war, bows down to the power of wealth, worships at the altars of banks, corporations and a hysterical media that distorts reality as if they were feeding us a cocktail of meth, coke, and alcohol that they call "news," and we choose in stead an informed, sober, and sometimes somber awareness of reality that buffer only with hope that is born of faith.... Faith that together, we can make it better.

The Long Overdue Death of Denominations

Proper 26    November 2, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Matthew 23:1-12      Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2"The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; 3therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. 4They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 5They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.6They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 7and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. 8But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. 9And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father--the one in heaven. 10Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 11The greatest among you will be your servant. 12All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

There is an old proverb I'm very fond of about a time when a certain man and the devil were taking a walk together.  As they walked along, the man stumbled upon a great truth.  He showed it to the devil and Satan said, "Here, let me organize that for you."  There is just something about institutionalizing something wonderful that takes everything good out of it.

We get used to expecting politicians to be dishonest and self-serving.  We regrettably accept that corporations and the wealthy will manipulate the banking and tax systems to serve their own interests.  We may even become wary of friendships and love relationships that come and go far too easily.  But when it comes to the church, that vessel that has carried the gospel through the centuries, it never seems right to just accept corruption there and when we find it there, it seems always to be more malignant, more insidious, more heart breaking, because it is so very out of place.

It is one of the things you have to love about the gospels.  The Bible wasn't written by God, or Jesus nor was it even written by the Apostles...the gospels are a product of the early faith community, preserved by churches and edited by pastors and priests.  And yet, as we find in it, here and there, as in our reading from Matthew this morning, an occasional stone thrown right at organized religion and the pompous bishops, priests and pastors who run it.

There really isn't much preserved of the teachings of the historical Jesus, especially considering how important he has been to human history... but of all that got left out, edited out, covered up by later church tradition, it is kind of surprising that Matthew was able to preserve this stinging rebuke of the clergy in his gospel.

It is a helpful reminder for us in this age to make sure that we realize that the gospel and the church are not the same thing.  As important as the church was as a social institution, I always wondered if Jesus ever would have bothered to attend one.

The primary preaching message of Jesus was about the Kingdom of God.... The rule of God, the world where people didn't kill, steal, or lie.... The world in which there was neither warfare nor poverty... that's the kingdom Jesus talked about... that's the kingdom that Jesus said was coming.... But it didn't.  He didn't get the Kingdom of God.  He did get the church.... Is it any wonder then that he hasn't bothered to come back?

The church has been the vessel of the message of Jesus.  The church codified the gospel, ritualized, and in many ways sanitized it but at least it preserved a way of thinking and a vision for a better world.... Even while often lending its support to governments and economies that are the exact opposite of what Jesus envisioned.

But the church has been a vital institution for hundreds of years.  There was hardly a rural crossroads in America that didn't sprout one or two churches.  Our downtown city-scapes have been punctuated by cathedrals and steeples.  But the dominance of the church has gone the way of the wooden slide-rule and the manual typewriter.  Churches all over America and Europe are closing or being repurposed.

Twenty years ago, on a Sunday morning, I preached to between 300 and 400 people who crowded into two services in an ornate sanctuary.  In those days we had thirty or forty people a week who asked for a cassette tape of the sermon and a few hundred read a missive from me in the printed church newsletter.  Now we see 40 or 50 people gathered in our simple little church while somewhere between five and ten thousand people will download the message every month as either a video or a podcast.

I have tried in vain to make substantive connection with our far flung audience... struggled to somehow make them a part of our community...but the world has changed.  People don't connect they way they once did.  I fear that bricks and mortar churches will exist only in symbolic ways in the next generation but even still, you have to see, the church is not the gospel.

Our church never bothered to affiliate with any larger denomination.

I served Disciple of Christ churches for nearly 30 years and there was a time when I looked up to my denominational leaders with admiration and with confidence.  As the institution shrank, and jobs became scarce, it seemed to me that all of the really good guys were forced into retirement or unemployment and the rules of Machiavellian power manipulation took the place of virtue and noble leadership.

In place of self sacrificing servants of the church, the few remaining judicatories seemed willing to be as dishonest and corrupt as they had to be in order to keep drawing a salary and to hold on until they could retire.  My relationship with the Disciples did not end initially when I reported a former General Minister and President of the denomination, William Nichols, of pedophilia and of using church funds to pay for illicit sex.  I reported it but I trusted the church to deal with it appropriately but they didn't.  They paid of the living victims and swept it all under the rug unwell Nichols had died.

Closer to home, I demanded an audit of our local Ozarks Lakes Area office when it became apparent to me that the Area Minister was using designated funds to pay his own salary until all of the funds were depleted and all of the records had been destroyed.  To this day I cannot believe that Mike Weinman is not in prison rather than still serving as Area Minister.  More than that, I cannot believe that all of the Disciple ministers in the area, who saw this happening, chose to be silent and to allow the embezzling to just go on.

But the hypocrisy of others is no excuse for indifference on our own parts.

The institutional church was dying from financial starvation and now they are making themselves morally irrelevant.  I want to believe that this new pope, Pope Francis, is the real deal.  I hope that the reforms he is hinting at actually take root but whether they do or they don't, the Catholic Church is at least a half a century behind the inevitable changes of society and though they have the numbers and the money to survive for another century, they will shed numbers at a rate that will look like a free fall.

Smaller protestant denominations will either merge with one another or they will blink out of existence and, so far as I am concerned, they won't disappear fast enough to suit me.  They were useful at one time but have become too sick to redeem.  They need to get out of the way and make room for something new and different to emerge.

The institutional church is somewhere between the intensive care unit and the morgue but the gospel is still alive and well.  Where it will take root is still not entirely clear to me.  Though we have ten times as many listeners on line as we have in the room, I do not think that faith will find it's home on iTunes or YouTube.  Somehow, people of faith will still need each other, they will have to find one another and build community.

Bishop Spong has pointed directly at our little church and has declared that we are an example of what the church must become.  I find that validating and encouraging but like the two thousand people who will download one of our messages on the web this week, Bishop Spong lives a thousand miles away and even though he and Christine Spong have generously contributed to our future work, it remains to be seen if even our wild and rebellious version of church can survive.

But folks, you have to realize, the kingdom still hasn't come.  The military industrial complex still has more power than our elected Congress and President.  Our corporate media still tries to distract us as if we were all pre-school children, and poverty, which could have been stamped out by now, is actually on the rise.

The denominational church may and probably will, and probably should, die.  The whole business of religious institutions being against other religious institutions may have served a purpose in previous centuries but it threatens to kill us now.  There is no need to have a religious body that thinks that Christianity is right and Buddhism is wrong.... We need faith communities that believe that peace and justice is right and war and injustice are wrong.  It is not about communion, baptism, praying five times a day while facing Mecca, or putting food offerings and incense in front of a statue.... It is about paying a living wage to workers.... It is about treating people with respect and affording fundamental human rights to minorities, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation or nation of origin.

There are big issues in life waiting for our time, attention and resources.... Religious turf battles need to be relegated to the pages of history.