Moral Mondays: the Whole World Is (not) Watching

Moral Monday Sermon   May 18, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, Pastor

A Zen Story                    
During the civil wars in feudal Japan, an invading army would quickly sweep into a town and take control. In one particular village, everyone fled just before the army arrived - everyone except the Zen master.
Curious about this old fellow, the general went to the temple to see for himself what kind of man this master was. When he wasn't treated with the deference and submissiveness to which he was accustomed, the general burst into anger. "You fool," he shouted as he reached for his sword, "don't you realize you are standing before a man who could run you through without blinking an eye!"
But despite the threat, the master seemed unmoved. "And do you realize," the master replied calmly, "that you are standing before a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?"

You may have seen it on the news.  Certainly, several of you were there on Thursday morning when we gathered with a few union organizers and fast food workers to try to launch a strike at the McDonalds on West Kearney.

There were only about 25 people carrying signs and marching at 6 a.m. when the managers unlocked the doors.  The management had intimidated all but one of their employees into changing their minds about marching with us but several members of this church marched and chanted on their behalf for a living wage.

If there had been 500 of us, we could have closed the store down and forced a conversation with owners.  If there had been 200 of us we could have at least blocked the drive-thru and put a noticeable dent in the morning's business.


Within minutes of our arrival, the Springfield police began to show up in force.  Just as they did the first time we tried to stage a demonstration at a different McDonalds.  The north side residents in the poor neighborhoods of this city have a hard time getting the police to respond to crime in their area.  I have heard complaints that 911 calls to help in cases of domestic violence or even rape can take one to two hours.

However, within fifteen minutes of 25, mostly retirement aged church members and do-gooders, there were 8 patrol cars with almost as many armed police officers on the ground as we had sign wielding senior citizens.  I don't say that to take a jab at the police whose job it is to keep our city safe and to fight crime.  We were, after all, potentially violent and dangerous criminals.  I have always felt that I personally have the potential to be a Hamburgler myself... only fear of the police restrains me.

I do believe, however, that we should take a moment to consider the juxtaposition of a handful of labor sympathizers standing in the cold in front of a fast food restaurant with a congregation of police cars, armed officers and a paddy wagon standing at the ready to haul us off to jail if anyone slowed down access to the menu board where people ordered the food like substances they wanted for breakfast.

The majority of the children in that neighborhood live below the poverty line.  Some of their parents work for $7.50 an hour at McDonalds.  In that part of town, most of the young girls will be sexually assaulted before they graduate or drop out of school.  Most of the young boys are far too familiar with violence.
We cannot afford sufficient police presence to make their worlds safe.  We cannot afford to pay their parents enough to raise them out of poverty.  But, as a society, we will spend tax dollars extravagantly to protect commercial business.  That, my friends, is a fact.  It is a fact that I witnessed with my own two eyes on Thursday morning.  It is a fact that we must acknowledge and allow to sink into our awareness.

I'm leaving as soon as we dim the lights in our sanctuary to drive to Raleigh, NC where I will participate in the Moral Monday March that will take place there tomorrow.  I've been wanting to go since I first heard of these demonstrations taking place in the capitol of North Carolina last year.  The movement was started by Rev. William Barber, the state president of the NAACP and an ordained Disciples of Christ minister.

I met William Barber at a conference I attended a couple of years ago and, I will confess, that my first impression was not all that great because he is quite a traditional Christian thinker and I was looking for soul mates in the progressive movement.  But though we are not standing on common ground in our approach to religion, he is a very smart man and he has become a very effective man.

When the state legislature meets in North Carolina as they continue to try to restrict access of minorities to voting places, as they continue to try to take back the rights of women to manage their own bodies, they are faced with growing numbers of demonstrators marching in the streets of Raleigh, NC.


Raleigh is a fair sized city of about 400,000 people, two or three times the size of Springfield.  The first official Moral Monday March of this year was held in February.  The NAACP estimated that 80,000 marchers took part in that event.  That's enough people to snarl ever downtown street and to literally make the ground shake as they walked.

I couldn't go then but I wanted to attend the next march and so I started calling around to see when I could be certain to get one on my calendar.  The day that I called I couldn't find anyone at Rev. Barber's church who could give me a schedule.  There was no one in the state office of the NAACP that could help me.

So, Barber is a Disciple minister.  I used to be a Disciple minister.  I pulled out my trusty Disciple directory and I called the Disciple church in Raleigh to find out when the next march would be.  The pastor was not in but the office administrator was more than happy to help me.

But she told me, "Rev. Barber, no, I have never heard of him.  Did your say, Moral Monday?  I have never heard of that either and, I'm just as sorry as I can be but I don't know anything about any demonstrations here in Raleigh."

I'm not saying that it would be impossible not to notice tens of thousands of largely black people marching past the Hillyer Memorial Christian Church at 718 Hillsborough Street in Raleigh because I have noticed that it is very easy for people to look right past what they don't want to see.


On Thursday morning, while we stood and shouted, "This is what democracy looks like." And we yelled at the cars turning into McDonalds to order their egg McMuffins and bacon, egg and cheese biscuits, that "low pay is not OK," they ignored us, pulled up to the window and gave their money to employees who can't afford a car or an egg McMuffin and whose children will endure unspeakable violations and violence because we do not regard them as being worthy of a decent living.

They don't know the words to the labor union organizing songs.  They have never been taught that it is only be refusing to cross a picket line that anyone ever got a 40 hour work week, or weekends off, or paid vacations, or access to health care.  They don't know that it is only when the pilots support the flight attendants, and the carpenters support the plumbers, and the electricians support the teachers, that anyone ever gets a decent wage, the opportunity to retire when they are old and a chance to see the doctor when they are sick.

The cars filled with people talking on their cell phones, rushing to get to work or school, could not be inconvenienced to just this one time, go somewhere else for a breakfast sandwich... to make a little sacrifice out of compassion for the poor people all around them.  They don't know.

They won't hear about it on the news.  They won't learn about it in school.  Heaven knows that they are not likely to hear about it in church.

Two years, when the police were breaking up Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that had spread across the country, protesters often warned the police, "The whole world is watching."  The same warning was often heard shouted during the Arab spring as millions took to the streets to demand freedom from oppressive governments.

But the whole world wasn't watching.  We watched for a moment.  But we know more, right now, about Justin Bieber's drunken run-ins with the law and Miley Cyrus' naked efforts at gaining public attention than we know about the plight of millions of innocent people in Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan.

The revolution will not be televised. The corporate media will not tell you about it.  The public schools will not teach the real history and philosophy of labor.  The churches that worry primarily and exclusively about their own survival will not challenge the machinery that creates poverty.  The politicians who gain their seats in power by the largess of wealthy donors will not tolerate it.

The revolution will not be televised.  The revolution will not happen until people of faith decide that they are willing to no longer play dead.  I'm ready for some resurrection up in here.  How about you?

The Price Tag of Integrity

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Easter 4a    May 11, 2014

1 Peter 2:19-25  
19For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. 20If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God's approval. 21For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. 22"He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth." 23When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. 24He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. 25For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

Nature does not know about good and evil.  Nature is morally neutral. We talk a lot about defending the earth, protecting and restoring the environment, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson as recently observed, you really don't have to worry about the earth... the earth will be fine no matter what we do.  The question is whether human beings will survive.

Whenever we talk about preserving the environment, what we really mean is keeping the environment in that narrow and delicate zone in which humans can survive.  Dinosaurs come and go... but nature lives on.  Various species of plants, birds, fish and animals come and go but nature is indifferent.... Nature is morally neutral.

At the core of the Genesis myth of human awakening is the dawning awareness of good and evil.  It is that knowledge that separates us from the rest of nature and the rest of the animal kingdom.

We project human emotions onto animals and some people are convinced that there is more than instinct in their pets or even in certain marine and wild animals but if you will permit me to make this fundamental observation:  A snake that eats a bird's eggs is not evil or malevolent, it is just a snake.  And a hawk or eagle that eats a snake is not getting revenge, it is just doing what hawks and eagles do.

The arguably unique claim that we humans have is that it is possible for us to sin... we can choose to do what we know is evil, whether it is a crime or not, we know that we are not neutral players in human history.  Our actions have moral dimensions, even when we want to insist that they do not.

A great deal of what we call mental disorders is, in one way or another, a reaction to our awareness of the fact that we are moral players in society.  Scott Peck wrote in the Road Less Traveled that most people who seek psychiatric help are either neurotics or people with character disorders.  The two are, basically, opposite sides of the same coin.

The neurotic tends to take too much responsibility, making themselves miserable with feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  People with character disorders make everyone around them miserable by blaming everyone else or the universe itself for their actions.  The neurotic frequently says, "I ought to..." or "I should..." while the character disordered person will say, "I had to.." or "I couldn't."

Now, it is entirely possible to be a character-neurotic but today is Mother's Day and so we should show some deference to the people who are able to simultaneously belittle themselves for all of their inadequacies while making everyone around them feel somehow guilty.  I am, of course, speaking only of mothers who attend churches other than ours.
Seriously, neurotics can be tedious to deal with, but character disorders seem to be the ones who are in charge of the public narrative in our day.  Most of us are the heroes of our own plays.  Whenever we describe the events in our lives, we rarely describe anything that ever happens as having been a failure on our own part.  Someone else, or bad luck, the weather, the government, our parents or the opposite sex are all somehow conspiring to make our lives not go the way that they should.

Our natural, animal instincts lead us to avoid suffering, to make sure that we get enough to eat and the safe, warm, confortable sleeping spot... our conscience is what tries to justify those choices to ourselves and others.

Again, when we turn to that myth of beginnings in the book of Genesis, when Cain has killed Abel and God asks Cain, "Where is Able?" and Cain replies, "Am I my brother's keeper?"  The unspoken answer, the answer you are suppose to feel rising up from your heart rather than from reading it off of the page is, "Yes, yes I am my brother's keeper."

What gets "mom" on the short list of things we value along with "baseball and apple pie," is our awareness of mom's who genuinely have suffered, sacrificed, worked, to care for and improve their lives of their children.  Giving birth does not make someone a mother any more than being the male actor in propagation makes you a father.

A character disordered person can have a child for selfish purposes... to have someone to love them back... to have someone to care for them in their old age... to shape another person as an extension of themselves, like "Mini-Me" in an Austin Powers movie.  If you love a child only when they reflect your personal values, your religion, your beliefs, then you have never really loved the child and, in fact, are not deserving of even the greeting card holiday that is either Mother's or Father's Day.

I was asked recently if we have a lot of gay people in our church and when I thought about it, I realized that we have more parents of gay people than we have gay members.  We have, over the years, been more likely to inherit a church member who had to struggle to come to terms with the sexual orientation of a son or daughter and could not, in good conscience, continue to go to a church that either directly or by default, condemned their children.

It is heart breaking to realize how many people remain in churches where they try to "pray away the gay" so that they can make their children more like their parents.... There is nothing sacred or noble about that.... It is just sick... a kind of sick we call narcissism.

Both character disorders and neurosis are, in a way, a reaction to moral compulsion we feel to take responsibility.  A healthy form of spirituality is to embrace that moral responsibility in a factual and realistic way.  Neurotics go to extremes and make themselves emotional invalids, character disorders find a way to completely deny the reality of the morality of their actions.

It may be unfair to pick on just one person to illustrate my point but here in Missouri, any time we can use someone in Arkansas as a negative example, it feels fair, doesn't it?

Many of us in this part of the world have made the short drive down to Bentonville to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum, which is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.  The architecture of the buildings is worth the trip, the landscaping on the campus is stunning and the ever-growing art collection is soon to be the American rival to the self-love expressed in the French collection of the Louvre.

Of course, with a budget of around a billion dollars, how can you fail?  A billion dollars.... That's a thousand million dollars that the Wal-Mart heiress, Alice Walton, has donated to create this museum that is free to the public.  Why did she do this?  She explained that she and her family had been looking for a way that they could give back for all of the wealth they had accumulated through Wal-Mart.

Their wealth has come to them through vigorous union busting, by teaching their under-paid employees how to apply for public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, subsidized child care... shifting their labor costs onto the backs of tax payers while they keep an international army of poor people living in poverty to fatten the bottom line of Wal-Mart stock dividends.

The widow of Sam Walton and their three children together have as much wealth as the bottom 42% of America's economy...one family has as much wealth as 150 million Americans, many of whom work for the Walton family.  How on earth could they give back?..... an art museum!

I don't usually say anything about Mothers' Day because there are so many people for whom that has not worked out too well.... Those still grieving the too soon loss of their mother, those who always wanted to be a mother and never could be, mothers estranged from their children and those of us who never felt the sincere warmth of the kind of mother for whom the emotional tributes of this day are inspired.  But there is a spiritual quality we look for in all of us that I believe lies at the root of what makes motherhood a status deserving of praise.

It is moral responsibility. I admire the Crystal Bridges Museum but I never drive away from it without recognizing the sacrifices made unwillingly by millions of impoverished workers to allow a single family to enjoy the appearance of largess.

We honor mothers because in the USA, unlike most of western civilization, women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn because women sacrifice promotions in their careers, forgo advanced degrees, leave the office in time to pick up kids at school and put a meal on the table, coach the soccer team and direct traffic in front of the school so that their children will have a better life.  Don't think we don't notice.... Ok, I noticed!

There are no ads on TV tempting you towards responsibility and virtue.  Every bit of media stimulation speaks to your appetite for a more sparkly diamond, a nicer home, more alcohol and a more attractive spouse but nothing tells you that there can be something redemptive about meaningful self-denial.  You are likely to only get that here so I hope you can hear me.

How Jesus Lives in the Church

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Easter 3a  May 4, 2014

Luke 24:28-35
28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29But they urged him strongly, saying, 'Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.' So he went in to stay with them. 30When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.31Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 32They said to each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?' 33That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34They were saying, 'The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!' 35Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Many of you came to us from churches that taught you to take biblical stories fairly literally.  Most of you grew up as Catholics, Baptists or members of the Assemblies of God or the Church of Christ.

Many of you have expressed both shock and a tinge of outrage when you have learned that most of the Bible's history is not historical and that none of the miracles or other worldly claims should be taken literally.

I didn't grow up in a conservative church through I sure did grow up in a conservative part of the world that, even after the passage of half of a century has only evolved to the point of being sufficiently liberal to elect the likes of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to represent them in Congress.

The church I grew up in, even in the 50's and 60's was a labor union organizing, school integrating, capital punishment opposing, war protesting congregation with a prophetic and academic pastor.

But I did have a flirtation with fundamentalism.  As a college student majoring in philosophy, I was naturally drawn to religious debate and I found myself, for all of the wrong reasons, married to a very ardent member of the hard right wing, non-instrumental Church of Christ.

We were both students at Memphis State University and as involved in the Church of Christ campus ministry there as were any of the full-time paid staff members.  I was just a 19 year old sophomore but I was so curious about Biblical studies that I audited classes at the Church of Christ Graduate School of Religion.

Now, there were right wing evangelicals there who were as literalist as any reality denying televangelist you have ever seen but that was not true of the Bible scholars.  Even there, even 35 years ago, even in the heart of the deep, deep south, the Bible professors were telling us not to take talk about incarnation, substitutionary death or even resurrection literally.

I strongly suspect that none of the students sitting around me in class who were going on to become Church of Christ ministers ever breathed a word of this in the churches that would later employ them, but I know, because I heard it with my own two ears, that they were exposed to a critical understanding of scripture.

This came to mind for me as I read over the scripture reading from the lectionary for this third Sunday of Easter because there was a day when, in a fit of adolescent self confidence, I challenged one of the graduate students about the resurrection of Jesus by quoting this Emmaus Road text from Luke.
He was not more than three or four years my senior but he looked as if my ignorance was breaking his heart as he shook his head and looked at the floor.  He said, "Can't you see that this is just an early church sacramental myth?"  And, I had to be honest, I not only didn't see it but I didn't know what the word "sacramental" meant.  It was a painful conversation.

And just as an aside, I want to assure you that while monolithic churches like the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Church, the Lutheran Church, etc. may have all kinds of parish pastors and priests who deal in magic and superstition day in and day out, they all have scholars among them who know better.  The Catholic Church has some of the most amazing scholars in every field of religion but their work unfortunately tends to stay bottled up in graduate schools, rarely finding a footing in either the church or the Vatican.

But Biblical scholarship can be sort of like looking at a "Where's Waldo" puzzle.  You can't see Waldo at all until the moment you do see him and from that moment on, any time you look back at that puzzle, your eye goes right to him. Once you can see how the gospels were constructed to teach a theological message but not to give a historical account, it is so obvious that you can never go back.

The disciples and the members of the early church had some kind of profound experience of the continued presence of Jesus after he was dead.  They tried to articulate that experience in ways to pass along both their experience and to tell successive generations that the same potential existed for them.
Paul, the earliest of Christian writers, does not claim that there was an empty tomb on Easter morning or that the literal body of Jesus showed up at meals and church gatherings.  The earliest layer of Christian tradition described resurrection as being visionary.  The resurrection accounts were always metaphorical with even the same authors occasionally contradicting themselves.

Luke, who wrote both the gospel we are reading today and the book of Acts, in the former says that Jesus ascended into heaven on Easter day but then in Acts he says that Jesus appeared for 40 days and then ascended to heaven.  Of course, Matthew, Mark and John don't say anything about an ascension at all... they conclude their metaphorical accounts in other ways to suit their literary needs.

All of the resurrection accounts are symbolic and formulaic.  They all serve the intended message of the writer.  They are not eyewitness accounts of a historical event.

If this is the first time you have ever heard anyone say this, then you are feeling some of what I felt that afternoon in Memphis nearly 40 years ago when this student pointed out to me that all of the resurrection appearances happen on Sundays and each had something to do with the theology of the book in which they appear.

This text, the Emmaus Road account, is literally a metaphorical description of early church worship.  Our services are structured in basically the same way.  The text begins with Jesus explaining the Hebrew Bible to the disciples just as our services begin with a scripture or wisdom reading followed by a sermon that hopefully illuminates the reading for the congregation....

I don't know how often you say to one another on the way home, "did not our hearts burn within in us when he taught us," but that's the idea of the text.

And, just like us, following the proclamation they gathered at the table and broke bread.  No one recognized the presence of Jesus until he broke the bread.  So, while this is not a literal account of an Easter event, it is a symbolic message that says, you will encounter the resurrected Jesus when you meet in community, share in a discussion of scripture and celebrate communion with your brothers and sisters in the faith community.

And then, in the narrative, Jesus simply disappears but the disciples are affected by the encounter.
So, if the resurrection accounts are not to be taken literally, what is the intended message?  What does resurrection mean for the church two thousand years later?

If either our good friends and Bible scholars, David Trobisch or Charles Hedrick, were here preaching this message today, this is the point where they would stop talking and sit down.

A good Bible professor will basically tell you that what you grew up believing is absurd and indefensible.  This is what the text meant to the author.  But when it comes to posing the question, "What does this mean for you or for the church today?" they would leave that entirely up to you.
And that, my dear friends, is the difference between a Bible scholar and a pastor. You are always welcome to completely ignore us but we feel compelled to tell you what we think it should mean to you!

Seriously, the most obvious and the most likely reaction to being made aware of the fact that the Bible should not be taken literally or historically is to then be fairly dismissive of it.  You can tell your friends, I used to consider myself to be a Christian but then I found out the Bible was just a bunch of myths and metaphors and now I don't care anymore.

Which is pretty much how we all feel about Greek mythology, right?  We read the Iliad and Odyssey in middle school but we don't then start to worship Zeus or pray to Aphrodite for a prom date.  You read it and it affects you the way that a lesson in history, or sociology affects you but it does not dig down into your psyche the way a religious message might.  And you no more believe that Jesus turned water into wine than the Greek god, Bacchus, was said to have turned water into wine a thousand years before the story was attached to Jesus.

There is even evidence that the priests at the Bacchanal temples rigged up a fake duplication of the miracle annually, locking a drum of water into chamber over night where secret tubes drained the water and replaced it with wine to amaze the faithful each year.

But Luke is not trying to sell his readers on Christian hocus-pocus.  They knew their accounts were not literal but they also knew that they were true.  They describe Jesus appearing on Sundays as a metaphoric way of saying that whenever a few of you are gathered in his name that his is in the midst of you. They didn't literally see that with their eyes, but they experienced it.

And some people are going to describe that spiritually and others would describe it psychologically but what you can see from the spread of the faith and the survival of the faith is that people continued to experience something that was life altering and profound.  For me, the hocus-pocus gets in the way of the deeper reality that is symbolized when we gather, discuss wisdom teachings and share a symbolic meal.

Faith communities are not immune to melodrama, gossip or petty competition but what Luke, and John, and Matthew hold out to later generations in their Easter story is that is a potential for a life altering encounter in community that is not available on any other day of the week.

The old religious hocus pocus was convince people that they had an invisible soul that was destined for an eternity in an invisible place of torment but the church, that created the problem, was also the only institution that could sell you a cure.... A cure that not only would cost you morning a week and a lot of money but would also involve denying you almost everything in the world that is pleasant for a person to do.

That is not Luke's story... it is not my story and I hope that one day soon the old bad theology of threat and cure will pass away and we can get back to a serious understanding of what the gospel writers meant when they referenced the faith community as being the body of Christ.

Healthy spirituality has been so obscured by unhealthy religion that it would be easy for those who, once liberated from mythological religious manipulation, to toss the whole business without ever slowing down to see the value of true community.

The literal can hide the real.  Magic and make mystery seem absurd.  But as Tillich said, sometimes you have to kill the little god in order to be able to see the big God.

Behind all that is wrong about traditional religion stands a reality, clothed in mystery, and promising personal transformation and if I can take these texts seriously, it is found only in community.

Allow yourself to suspend doubt for a moment.... Let yourselves believe what the gospels say is true... that the resurrected Jesus is found within the people standing around you.  How is he to be revealed?

Certainly he will not show himself by dissecting one another through gossip and criticism... he will not be found by enumerating and cataloguing one another's irritating qualities or bad habits, nor will he be found through dismissal of those who lack physical beauty.  Still, there is a way and discovering that, I can only leave up to you.