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.
