Not All Religious Legalism is Bad

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Epiphany 7   Feb. 23, 2014

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18                
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 2Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. 9When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
11You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. 12And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord. 13You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. 14You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. 15You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. 17You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

My late father was a stutterer.  I was really glad when the movie, The King's Speech, drew some popular attention to the fact that this speech impediment, though often portrayed comically on TV, is no laughing matter.  I've been told that my dad stuttered a bit when he was young but after an apparent nightmarish experience in WWII, the problem became quite profound.

My father's PTSD was so bad when he finally came home that he was put into a mental hospital.  He got better but he was always a nervous and fairly unhappy man, given to episodic over reaction to minor events and occasional completely out of control incidents in punishing his children  that might have had us all placed in foster care if such a thing had existed in those days.

When he was upset about something and wanted to give my siblings and me a patriarchal lecture, he would begin to stutter and there were two things that could make him give up on the lecture and just commence with the corporal punishment.  The worst would be if you dared to crack a smile in the face of his malady.  The second was if you tried to say the word that he was stuck on for him.  So there were occasions when the four of us were seated in the family room with our red faced father standing before us on the verge of explosion, yet frozen in time.

These very uncomfortable family moments didn't happen often but they didn't have to.... None of us ever forgot them.  And none of us ever wanted to be the cause of another one.  There are better ways to inspire your children to make good grades, clean their rooms, show respect to their mother, do their chores and to sit quietly in church but this was the way it was done in my family.

Now, if your father or mother becomes your first image of a supernatural theistic parent who watches you from above the clouds and is a constant threat of punishment while always being the giver of life, food, health and every other good thing, then you can see how easily I was prepared to accept the Christian view of God.

Traditional Christianity gives us a God who will, in the name of both love and justice, kill his own son in the most torturous and horrible way.

We were taught to believe in a God who was generally distant, but constantly very demanding.  And though we were given an alleged book of directions about how to stay out of trouble, some of the stories in that book just seemed to be kind of crazy.  On the one hand, having lots of wives is a sign of blessing, read on a few pages and you discover that having more than one will send you to hell for eternity.

The whole business is supposed to be about love and compassion and yet there are stories of incest, human sacrifice, warfare, land theft and even directions on selling your own children into slavery.  We were given, in a way, a rather angry, stuttering God who was hard to understand, difficult to make happy and not, if I may say it this way, entirely rational.

As Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer said in his book, Jesus Against Christianity, most of the Hebrew Bible describes God as being a kind of pathological land-thief.  There are aspects of the image of God that was given to us through traditional Sunday School that were really quite neurotic.  As Scott Peck said in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled, the Catholic Church is what kept him in business as a private practice psychiatrist.  And he acknowledged that he simply lived in a heavily Catholic part of the country.... Around here it would not be hard to see how the Assemblies of God or the Baptist Church might limber set you up for an adult life in therapy.

My older brother, who also eventually became a pastor, usually tried to make excuses for dad though I suspect that being the first born, he probably suffered the most from dad's unrealistic expectations and sometimes-cruel enforcement techniques.  He did however, once make the poignant observation that our childhoods were among the uncounted casualties of WWII.  Not that you can lay all of the blame for some really bad parenting decisions at the feet of a bad war experience but it isn't hard to see the causal link.

There were some obvious deficiencies in my family or origin, so obvious that it was fairly easy to know exactly what I did not want to do when it was my turn to be a father.  But, as a father, I quickly discovered that the flaws were not the major part of my own family experience.  There were things to pass along that were family treasures that I could see were absent for many young people.

The most elementary form of religion places a harsh, stuttering, father in the clouds that we were taught to fear.  It wasn't healthy but even still, there may have been a laudable goal in mind.  There are things about our religious heritage that we do well to leave behind but we would not be very wise if we did not recognize that there were some valuable lessons we do not want to abandon.

I tried hard, as a father, to make my daughter know and feel every day that she important, valuable, loved and deserving of being treated with honor and respect by everyone she meets.  But I also taught her to clean her room, work to get good grades, to be honest, fair and to be kind to people, even when they didn't necessarily deserve it.

There were times when our conversations were serious.  She might have even wished that I might have had a speech impediment at times because when I am trying to be clear in moral instruction, I tend to be very very clear.  He didn't go about it in a brilliant way, but my father wanted his children to be honest, hard working, responsible, self reliant people of character.

The churches many of us grew up in also tried to teach us how to be decent people.... Admittedly, they often used threats and promises of rewards that were less than healthy and not at all honest but, when you pull back the curtain.... When you are no longer afraid of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, you find a little flawed chap who was not entirely a fraud.... He really did want to be helpful.

The lectionary reading from the Hebrew Bible today is a kind of holiness code from one of the books of the Old Testament that contains some of the craziest, most neurotic and wacked out examples of why no one should believe that God wrote the Bible.  And yet, this holiness code we look at today starts off by telling those ancient farmers not to harvest all of the wheat from their fields.  It tells them to leave some of the grapes on the vines because there are poor people living among them who need some of your grain, who also need fruit from the vines.

We are far removed from that kind of an agricultural life and yet, it isn't hard to know what this text is teaching us.... There is no stuttering here, no need to finish the thought.  It asks for us to not be so hard hearted, so self centered, that we are not ready to share with those who are in need.

The passage continues to say, "You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.......  and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. 14You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind....  You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor..... 17You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; ....18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

I'm afraid that too often we enjoy repeating to one another how much we despise the neurotic aspects of the religion we inherited while forgetting that the core of it is what made us who we are..... something we do not want to revile or toss out the window.  Sure, we want to remove both the carrot and the stick of outrageous religious promises and irrational religious threats but we still want to be the kind of people who will share our food with the poor.... Who don't slander our neighbors.... Who are able to give up on the all too human desire for revenge and to choose to lay aside our grudges.

We don't want to be guilty of finding ways of withholding workers' wages or passively allowing the rich to control our judicial system or even allowing the poor to scam the welfare system.

I rejected fear based parenting but I didn't reject the values of being a person of good character.
We have let go of a lot of neurotic religious history but come on, do you watch the news????.... don't you realize that we cannot afford to abandon our faith as a source of moral instruction.

I don't need to change my last name to be a different kind of father, I just need to wear it differently.  We don't have to abandon Christianity to get past the crazy stuff..... we just have to do it better.

Forgiveness: the Real Secret to a Spiritual Life

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Epiphany 6a    February 16, 2014

Matthew 5:21-26
21"You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' 22But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. 23So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you,24leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 25Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

A recent letter to the editor of our Springfield newspaper publicly informed me that a group of Christians had gotten together and, they reported, voted me out of Christianity.  Though they applauded my advocacy and service to the poor, they unanimously affirmed that my beliefs were woefully inadequate to qualify me for the title of "Christian."

I was rather more disturbed to see, a few days later, that the director of the local Southern Baptist association of churches, also published an essay saying that though he appreciates what I do, that I really should stop claiming to be a Christian because I have rejected the kind of beliefs that I believe were imposed on the Christian Church in the third century by Emperor Constantine in order to make Christians compliant with his military agenda and to make the church morally irrelevant.

Though I believe that it was both unprofessional and rather embarrassingly simple of him to publish these dismissive insults to me, and by inference, to you, I am not, honestly, too surprised.  Frankly, if their religion of beliefs in incarnation and intercession, of souls bound either for heaven or hell or of magic books and invisible angels and demons is Christianity, then I am not one of them....though I think Christianity is something altogether different.
Most of us were reared to control our appetites and moderate our behavior under the simultaneous threat of punishment in hell and promise of reward in heaven.  In fact, we were so well trained to at least hedge our bets in case these invisible claims were true that we could hardly imagine religion existing without these things.  When we first began to be exposed to the idea that religion is more about a way of living than it is a set of supernatural beliefs we could nod in basic agreement but for years we still kept returning to the comfortable familiarity of rituals and antiquated beliefs.

The dawning awareness in the progressive movement is that religious practices are much more important than beliefs.  For some reason, we've almost always been able to see that as being true for other people's religions.  American Christians could adore Gandhi for what he did and they very nearly idolize the Dalai Lama for his teachings on spiritual practices though most could not reasonable tell you anything about either Gandhi's Hindu or the Dalai Lama's Buddhist beliefs.

If I may be allowed to make a somewhat racial observation, white Christians have always accepted civil rights speeches and marches for social reform led by Black Christians when they would not accept such things out of their white Episcopal or Presbyterian pastors for a moment.  Somehow, we inherently recognize the value of the spiritual life led by outstanding Buddhists, Hindus and Black Christians while insisting that white Christianity remain morally irrelevant and focused on magical rituals and privately held beliefs.


Mainline Christians who insist that religion should not be involved in politics would not have applied that to Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech, or to Gandhi's Salt March nor would they tell the Dalai Lama to quit protesting China's occupation of Thailand.  We understand their religion to be about ethics but we've insisted that Christianity is about an afterlife and a kind of magical approach to this life.

A few years ago I was in the uncomfortable position of pushing for an investigation of some very shady business practices at a local hospital.
It seemed inevitable that a couple of my church members going to prison for a very long time.  One of these pillars of the church who had been using his board position at the hospital to scam his way into several million dollars, cornered me in my office one evening to threaten me with being fired if I didn't stop pushing for this investigation.  The conversation became heated and he started shouting at me.  He said, "Do you know what your problem is?  You think that you are Jesus Christ!"

Without thinking, and in fact, I was rather surprised to hear the words coming out of my mouth, I jumped up and shouted, "No I don't!  I think that I am Martin Luther King!"  And I relate that story only by way of saying, I don't think that any of our newspaper critics would be quite so exercised if we were Buddhist, Hindu or, if I was a Black Christian pastor leading a largely black congregation in agitating for civil rights.  So, in some ways, I think that it would be more accurate if, rather than voting me out of Christianity, if they would just vote me out of the race of white people. Let's be honest, I've never really fit in!

Not to leave you hanging on this story, my former church member did not go to prison.  After the Federal investigation was ended the hospital was fined several million dollars but no one was criminally charged.  So, board members got away with stealing millions of dollars which came out of the pockets of sick people who paid exorbitant medical bills and the fines for these crimes was paid by the hospital whose money comes from the exorbitant medical bills paid by sick citizens.

Admittedly, the public might have been hurt less by just looking the other way because, in the end, they were both the victims of the crime and then they had to pay the fine for the crimes..... and that, men and women, is what we call white privilege in the American judicial and economic system.

Progressive people of faith have given up the confidence that evangelicals and fundamentalists have in their beliefs.  Many of them would look at us and ask, "Why do you bother if you are not afraid of hell or trying to get into heaven?"  In fact, most people among the church alumni association feel pretty much the same way.  Why bother?

Ironically, they would not say that to King, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama.... It makes sense that they bother, whether they believe in heaven and hell or not.  I'm suggesting that our spirituality does make a difference, it is worth the bother..... even if we are a mostly white congregation with traditional Christian roots.

With or without a heaven and hell, we know for a fact that we live in a world full of light and darkness, good and evil, abundance and want, obesity and hunger, comfort and pain.  Once you strip away the magic and superstition of religion and take a clear, sober and rational look at reality, you face some serious choices.

The world is full of things that can make you really mad.  I'm starting to doubt the level of exposure to liberal media that I allow myself to watch because there seems to be an endless supply of genuinely evil, violent, greedy, stupid and unjust things going on in the world.  Like this investigation I mentioned.  The facts were clear.  The evidence was there and none of the criminals were ever even made to give back what they had stolen.

I know that I need to be informed but sometimes I find myself becoming so angry, so full of rage, that I start to see the world in very negative terms.   And I know that some of you get there too.... The problems seem so big that you can become paralyzed with cynicism.... Nothing makes sense.... There is nothing we can do about it.  Nihilism starts to look attractive.

And this is just as true on the personal level. I have to tell you that for most of us in the relatively comfortable middle class.... The personal stuff is much more existentially powerful...... on the personal level we have all had family members or friends who have really hurt us.... And not by accident either.  It wasn't an oversight or a slip of the tongue or a matter of circumstances.....


Most of us have had a lot more than one person whom we have loved, trusted, sacrificed for and really believed would be close to us for our entire lives, do something to hurt us that doesn't even make any sense.... They didn't get money, a promotion, or anything out of the bargain..... they just intentionally, maliciously, viciously hurt you.  People can be like that.

There may be very complex psychological explanations for it.... Sociopathology, borderline personality disorders, adult children of alcoholics... or it might be some very simple human emotions.... Jealousy, envy, gossip... a desire to feel powerful or important, if only for a moment.

Remove spirituality from that equation, remove the sense that we are connected to every other person, every other part of the universe.... Indulge yourself in the cold hard belief that all that matters is your personal comfort, your feelings, your appetites and you can talk yourself into becoming a moral monster in search of revenge.

Or more likely, you can just pull all of that resentment, anger and hurt inside and lie awake a big part of every night, just dwelling on the hurt, reliving it, feeding the fire of your anger.... Investing energy, time and emotion in remembering the hurt.  I'm not projecting.... I'm not speculating.... I'm speaking very existentially here.

I have spent my adult life fighting social injustice but on the personal level, I have had to survive some deep personal disappointments that have given me a storehouse of resentment that has kept me awake more nights than I care to admit.

I have felt personal loss, depression and anger that I have obviously tried to dull with food. I have felt adrenalin pumping through my body demanding some kind of vengeful justice, to set the scales right.  I can identify with Clarence Darrow who once said, "I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."  I'm sure that he meant that with a certain degree of jest but I have opened the obituary page in the paper more than a few times and seen the faces of people who had done me harm and I can tell you that while there is some relief in outliving your enemies that it is not the satisfaction that you hope for.

The most satisfying resolution to hurt is reconciliation.  The best answer to anger is to forgive.  The only real resolution of resentment is lay that burden down.  It would be so much easier if the people involved would apologize but the truth is that in most cases, they will carry the conviction that they did nothing wrong to their graves.... They don't want your forgiveness.  But from a spiritual perspective.... You should forgive them anyway.

You know that is what Gandhi would have done.  You know that is what the Dalai Lama would tell you.  You have read this in Thich Nhat Hanh's work.  What we seem to have overlooked is that Jesus said it too.

Jesus tells us to go and be reconciled to the person with whom you are in conflict before you ever even kneel down to pray.  And as much as I believe in reconciliation, long for it, hope for it.... What I know.... What you know.... Is when it matters the most, it is the most unlikely to happen.

The only meaningful answer to that is to choose on your side of the equation to forgive first.... No matter what they do.... On your side of the offense, you forgive them, let go of the resentment and you decide that you are going to be the better person.

You have my permission to quote this sermon back to me whenever you think that I'm screwing up because, I guarantee you, no one in this room needs to hear this message more than I do.

We have chosen to be a prophetic church.  We practice both direct aid to those in need and we try to challenge in the institutions that create poverty, injustice, war and pollution.  What I'm saying is that a prophetic church cannot be successful if it is motivated by anger.  If we are not motivated by love then we really are just a political organization with a social agenda.

What separates us from being just a bunch of opinionated atheists is that we have chosen a spiritual path and that path seeks to heal the world through both justice and love and I am certain that the first step of that path is to be very very generous in forgiveness.

What is in the Crystal Ball?

Chapter 16 - WHAT IS IN THE CRYSTAL BALL?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

Will churches see the vision and respond to it?  Some will; most will not.  Many churches would, if given the choice, choose to die rather than change.....
These faith-communities will emerge, I am confident, inside our existing structures.  They will ultimately separate themselves from the pack.  They will float freely, taking a wide variety of forms. They will attract the restless, the hungry, the alienated, the marginalized, the open, the honest, the doubters, the seekers.  In time they will recognize kinship with one another, allowing them to coalesce and to build a new consensus.
- Bishop John Shelby Spong ( A New Christianity for a New World, 2001  pp. 244-245)

"Sire, it is in truth the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I am speaking, to endure blows, and not to strike them. But also may it please you to remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers."
- Theodore Beza, a 16th century French Protestant reformer, appealing to the king of Navarre (http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1601-1700/beza-last-of-the-great-reformers-11630054.html)

The famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in 1948 when he was only 33 years old and had been in the monastery for six or seven years.  Though the book was very popular and drew attention to monastic communities all over the nation, it wasn't very many years before Merton was saying that he wished that he could gather up all of the copies and burn them.

Merton was born in France to nominally Protestant parents.  His journey towards faith led him to the Catholic Church, then to monastic life and finally to the most strict of monastic orders, the Trappists.

His journey, which was profoundly intellectual while still being distinctive in its mysticism, made for a very engaging story.  However, when he wrote his autobiography, Merton was still a very young man in the midst of huge life changes.  His book was decidedly Roman Catholic, so much so that it was very nearly offensive to anyone who wasn't.  Within a very few years, however, he became a leading world scholar in comparative religions and was in conversation with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh as well as scholars of Hindu and Muslim heritage.  He wrote his most famous book long before it was time to write his definitive biography.

Awareness of how not ready Merton was to write The Seven Storey Mountain has plagued me during the writing of this book.  Though I am now older than Merton lived to be and I have delayed writing this book for some years, the movement I am trying to describe is moving and evolving so fast that it is difficult to capture in print.  What I know with certainty is that if I had written this book five years ago, I would now be screaming more loudly about gathering all of the copies and burning them than Merton did about his autobiography.

More than a decade ago, Bishop John Shelby Spong offered his vision for the future of the progressive church in A New Christianity for a New World.  He predicted the emergence of new progressive faith communities that would not be a part of the old existing denominational structures and, in fact, we are one of those churches.

Shortly after we first established our presence on YouTube and iTunes, I received a call from a gentleman in Japan who was asking me if I knew of any churches like ours in Japan.  Sadly, I informed him that I didn't know anything about any churches of any kind in Japan.  The caller was very disappointed because he assumed not only that there would be a lot of churches like ours but also he assumed that we would know each other and that there would be a network of like-minded churches.

The Center for Progressive Christianity has tried to create a directory on their web site but it is anything but comprehensive and many of the churches that list themselves on it are still quite traditional in their theology though they are somewhat more open minded about social issues such as gay marriage and divorce and their meetings are often blessed with a wonderful beer garden.  But being progressive involves a great deal more than accepting our gay friends, serial monogamists and drinking craft beer.

The original mission of the Jesus Seminar, to bring a more enlightened, progressive and academic approach to faith into mainstream churches has had, at best, only very limited success even after 30 years of impressive lectures and publications.  A century of teaching higher biblical criticism in our better seminaries and a generation of really insightful publications by John Spong, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong and John Crossan and still almost all mainline denominations continue to parrot a watered down version of the more conservative evangelical line that Jesus is God's one and only divine son who was killed for the forgiveness of the sins of everyone who is willing to buy into incarnational and substitutionary death theologies so that your as yet unseen eternal soul will spend eternity in an as yet unseen place of reward and bliss.

Many people continue to try to persuade me to accept that everyone has a right to their own religious opinions and no one opinion is superior to another. This kind of religious tolerance is true enough if religion is the equivalent of choosing which color of paint you want to put on your bedroom walls. If it is simply a matter of personal taste that has nothing to do with life, health, politics or wars then paint your room any color you like.

If, however, your religion teaches women that they are second-class citizens because they were born women......or if your religion teaches homosexuals to hate themselves, then that is a different matter.  And if your religion teaches that other religions are so wrong that they are evil, evil in a way that may deserve dehumanizing treatment or even warfare....or if your religion teaches you to feel that you are broken, sinful, a worm and to despise yourself for unavoidable human appetites then, you need to recognize, that is not a matter of taste.  That religion is sick.

If you are neutral about neurotic religion that provokes wars, ethnic cleansing, racial and sexual prejudice, misogyny, and religious guilt and fear then you are not open minded, you are just heartless and that is nothing to be proud of. Many people try to mask moral laziness and indifference behind a facade of tolerance but we are not doing the future any favors by pretending that this is acceptable.

There are very many good things that can come from religious education and the practice of a spiritual life but we can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend that there are not many very damaging down sides as well.  We should be civil in our engagement with traditionalists who want to keep the church mired in the Iron Age but we should not be passive and we should not mistake cowardice for open minded sophistication.

If the church has a future, we have to strengthen the good things and find ways of extinguishing the bad.  Pretending that everything is just a matter of opinion and that serious scientific inquiry has the same value as wishing and magic is not helpful.  We must clearly and adamantly refuse to participate in the indoctrination of another generation in the language and belief of false religion.

Still, the immanent death of old religions has been prematurely announced many times.  The church has tried to silence scientists and philosophers from Galileo to Darwin, from Thoreau to Sartre, but in the end, they didn't need to fight so hard.  As Theodore Beza observed five hundred years ago, the church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.

No matter how much science and technology have advanced, there is still a huge human appetite for a belief system that stands outside of reason, which defies rational thought and critical review.  Maybe the real world is too complex, too frightening.  Maybe it is just easier to have an imaginary world into which we can escape so that we don't have to feel the pain of hunger and homelessness, where we do not have to fear terrorism, war or being made to flee our homes and become refugees.  Perhaps we can placate ourselves with the slow and subtle changes that seem to nibble away at the prejudices that have plagued race relationships and even the relationships found around our holiday dinner relationships with gay and straight family members.  We have twice elected a black president and marriage equality is spreading to even the most unlikely states.  But is that enough?

Maybe we can deny the vast earth killing pollution taking place as we burn more coal and fracture the earth harvesting natural gas because we recycle our plastic bottles and aluminum cans.  It may be that the old religions of magic and superstition will die a slow death in the Americas and in Africa as it already has in Europe and most of Asia.  Still, it does not seem to me that we have arrived at a place that is beyond an urgent need for a prophetic voice of reason and faith to cry out for more justice and more compassion.

I realize that my journey from the Memorial Hospital where I was born to the Memorial Gardens where my ashes will be interred is a lot closer to the ashes end of that trip than it is to the loud screaming start of my life's journey but I feel that I have a lot more screaming yet to do.  How people of faith will find one another, network and work together in the next generation is unclear to me.

I don't know if free standing, bricks and mortar churches will still exist a generation or two from now.  I don't know that the commitment of resources and the will to keep a community alive will support much of a future for the church as we have known it.

It may be that churches twenty years from now will look more like the Shrine Mosque looks to us today...a once strong and influential institution that just seems sort of silly in the light of modern reason.

I still write columns for newspapers though fewer and fewer people read newspapers.  I am now written a new book project for a generation that does not read books.  I preach to fewer than one hundred people every week while thousands look in on us through the portal of their computer screen who may never join us in putting our progressive thoughts into actions.

While I am glad to have a global audience and am excited that so many look for a message of progressive faith on their computers, realistically, it is the seated congregations that hire the pastors and scholars who generate that on-line content.  If there was not a church that employed me, I would never have been able to earn the degrees or write the sermons and books that now help to feed the public's appetite for progressive religious messages.  To date, every progressive congregation I know of is barely hanging onto existence and another decade may see a sharp decline in numbers of the now retired generation that still goes to church and donates significant financial support to keep the doors open.

As I write these last lines, it is only 7 degrees outside.  I will take food, blankets and sleeping bags to the homeless of our city this week.  Direct response to the needs of those who are in danger of freezing to death makes sense in my religion but none of those people will be kept warm because a few thousand people have nodded in ascent to my progressive ponderings while watching YouTube.

There is a profound need in our world for communities of faith to continue to exist.  Clearly, most people are looking for whatever religious instruction and inspiration they want through in the internet and not in churches or classrooms or even from bookstores and published media.  Face Book memes can have a certain cathartic satisfaction to them but they are not enough to stop wars, save the earth, or solve the challenges of poverty and prejudice.

One of the heroes of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era was Fr. Daniel Berrigan.  Referencing the cross, he once said, "If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood."  I hope that more progressive churches arise out of a shared conviction and willingness to sacrifice as ours has.  I hope that more denominational churches will seriously choose to close the gap between what their pastor's learned in graduate school and what they feel free to say in their pulpits.    And I hope that progressive persons of faith will commit to a disciplined search for one another to network with one another, join in community action and to build new communities of faith.

I hope that new, more relevant, more prophetic and honest communities of faith will rise up from the ruins of a failed form of modern Christianity but whether the church as an institution survives or not, persons of conscience must not stand idly by.

Preferential Option for the Poor

Chapter 15  OUR PREFERENCE FOR THE POOR
Roger Ray, D.Min.

Now, it's not as if fiscal scolds really arrived at their position based on statistical evidence. As the old saying goes, they used Reinhart-Rogoff the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination.  - Paul Krugman, published Dec. 29, 2013 under the title Fiscal Fever Breaks

Money does not exist. Money is a concept. To illustrate this point, the philosopher Alan Watts used the analogy of a carpenter who came to work one day and was told that they could not finish building the house he was working on because they had run out of inches. A carpenter builds out of lumber but measures the lumber in inches but inches are not real.... Inches are a concept.  Money is not real.  It is used to measure the value of things and to make it easier to trade in objects, labor, energy and land.

Actual wealth resides in resources such as land, rare metals, energy sources, food, water, building materials, labor and vehicles. Money is just a concept we have invented to help us to distribute real wealth. Currency only works if we agree on the system and play by the economic rules that create it.

Real wealth is created when we build something, grow something, mine something, or assemble something. Unfortunately, our economic system allows for a great deal of real wealth to be transferred into the hands of people who do not create wealth, they simply own assets or control them through financial instruments and institutions. When we have idle workers who are not building, growing, and making things then our total real wealth is going down. The best of economic systems keeps people working in the creation of real wealth.
When the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, was speaking poetically of the way the world should be, how it could be if God were in charge, he said about workers that:
"They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.  22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.." (Isaiah 65.21-22)

The remnant of Israelites living in Babylon had been slaves.  They built houses for their masters.  They had been gardening to grow crops for their masters.  And their memory of their people was the memory of slavery in Egypt and service to Assyria.  They longed for justice and to them, what justice looked like was an economic system in which the poor got a share in what they produced.

In ancient times as well as in modern times, there is always some pressure on the economic system to give a smaller and smaller share of the produce to the people who are doing the producing and a larger and larger share to people who manage the financial institutions, the government, the land.  From time to time, societies find that they have to restrike a balance between the rich and the poor or their entire society will collapse.  This scenario has been seen on every continent in every age of history.

Often, it is the voice of the prophet, of the religious community, that tries to encourage a civilization to turn back before jumping off the economic cliff of no return.  The liberation theology movement among Catholics in Latin America of the last century, gave us the phrase, "God's preferential option for the poor."
They noted that throughout the Old and New Testaments, there was a distinct preference given to the poor by God through the prophets, apostles and saints.  For those of us in the progressive movement, this awareness of a spiritual concern for the poor can be traced to our choice to see ourselves as being connected to one another.

We have no shortage in our time of politicians who unashamedly cite the self centered philosophy of Ayn Rand.  Rand liked to call her views "objectivism" though some liken it to libertarianism.  It reminds me more of a "I got mine" philosophy than of anything else.  Most of us live in a world somewhere between the extremes of absolute selfishness and of absolute self-abnegation.  Very few have followed the gospel imperative to "sell all we own and give to the poor," and not many more could accurately be portrayed as being an Ebenezer Scrooge.  But between the extremes of Scrooge and St. Frances, there are a whole lot more people leaning towards the Scrooge end of the scale.

Not because it is mandated in scripture or because it is a part of a romanticized view of poverty but because we have chosen a life defined by radical compassion, we will not silent give our consent to an economic system that unfairly, unjustly, even irrationally impoverishes the many to enrich the few.

If you listen to the political rhetoric of our day, we must hate paying taxes and we love to vilify the lazy that live off of public assistance while rarely questioning why the top 1% in America is taking 25% of the money that is being earned in our nation.
We have an economic system in our country that looks fair but is, in fact stacked in favor of the rich.

It is as if you were going to play Monopoly with three friends but the friends started playing thirty minutes before you arrived.  You play by the same rules, with the same dice and an equal buy-in from the bank but they will have already bought all of the assets and set up houses and hotels on the places where you will have to go.

No matter how hard you work, they are going to end up with everything you have.  Increasingly, our system of economics will prevent the poor from ever being able to work their way out of poverty and will erode the middle class out of existence.

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, preached that we need a revolution in how we think about the distribution of wealth. She said, "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."

When economic commentators insist that we cannot pay those who build, grow, or manufacture, our nation's real wealth a living wage because it would "hurt the economy" then you should immediately realize that you are reading an irrational defense of a filthy, rotten economic system that discourages the creation of real wealth in favor of simply transferring existing wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  They are asking you to accept a system in which they have already won and you have already lost before you ever get to roll your dice.

Those who resist raises to the minimum wage or who insist upon legislation that undermines the unions that protect worker's jobs, wages and benefits often cite studies that conclude that it is the greed of teachers, fire fighters, labor union members and selfish young people who want to go to college that is threatening our economic future. They use these studies, as Paul Krugman says, "the way a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not for illumination."

The stock market continues to climb to new heights, making the rich ever more rich, while real wealth remains stagnant or, in fact, is declining, eroding the middle class and undermining the economic future of our nation. We have been sold a malignant myth that wealthy people are job creators. That is a ridiculous claim.  Rich people don't hire new employees unless there is a consumer demand that makes having more employees profitable.  Demand in the marketplace is what creates jobs and demand comes, as more people are able to buy things.

Still, the far right cries out against labor unions, and a president that they insist upon labeling "socialist" while our nation's existing wealth continues to be handed over to the super rich and the middle class disappears before our eyes.

Naomi Klein describing the documentary "The Shock Doctrine" about her important research into the rise of disaster capitalism, says:
We are witnessing a transfer of wealth of unfathomable size.  It is a transfer of wealth from the public hands, from the hands of government collected from regular people in the form of taxes, into the hands of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the world.  Needless to say the very individuals and corporations that created this crisis.

The system that is set up to enrich corporations and is controlled by the same corporations will never be able to change the system into something that will work for the welfare of the whole nation.  But what system works to create wealth and bolster the middle class?

Economist Robert Reich has a very plausible answer, the system employed in the United States of America between 1947 and 1977 when we built America's middle class and created the standard of living that was the envy of the world.  Reich says in his documentary, "Inequality for All":
Look back over the last hundred years and you'll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income -- as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 -- the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats.
Conversely, Reich points out that when we allow the greedy to control the system and grab all of the assets for themselves, the whole system crashes.  He says:

During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion -- as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day -- growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It's no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the nation's total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 -- the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

We tend to assume that great religious leaders were all very poor and that spiritual people must therefore be suspicious of wealth.  Frankly, I think that is counter to what really alleviates human suffering.  Sure, if there were only a hundred apples in the world and we were only a hundred people, no one should eat ten apples.  The truth is that we have put a lot of apple growers out of business and fired the people who pick them.

While we do not trade in the guilt and fear of past religious eras, there is still such a thing as evil.  It is evil to be so greedy that you hoard resources in a way that puts some out of work, forces others to work for poverty wages, and leaves many living on the edge of death.  That's not evil because the Bible says so, even though it does; but it is evil because it causes suffering.

It seems most likely to me that whatever this is of heaven and hell in the universe is what we do with this life and so, having devoted ourselves to seek the greatest good for the largest number of people, working to defeat a system that creates widespread suffering for the comfort of a few so that we can replace it with an economy that puts people back to work and makes the basics of life available to everyone is the only way we can keep from turning heaven into hell.