Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
I Corinthians 12 4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
So much has been happening in the news this week that conservative commentators have hardly had a chance to either bring up Bengazhi or to explain why Obama Care is a job killing failure even though we have just had fifty consecutive months of job gains and have managed to sign up 17 million people for health care.
There are several things I want to comment on today but first I want to reveal the thread that ties this disparate list of events and thoughts together. We pick up the unifying concept in this passage from Paul's letter to the church in Corinth in which he is expressing some considerable displeasure with how they have been acting.
The church was having some internal squabbles... people were not getting along. There appears to have been some considerable posturing on the part of some people who wanted more authority, more recognition than they were receiving. There was nothing new there.
And, to be entirely honest, people are not the same. Some people are more vital to the existence of a church, or a family, for that matter, a business or a nation, than others. We declare a moral principle that all people are created equal but that goes to their value as human beings.... We may be equal but we are not the same.
Paul acknowledges that they are different and that some have more talents, more gifts, more ability than others but he makes an important claim.... And this claim is at the heart of what it means to be a religious person... this claim is vital to the difference between a person who has progressive opinions and a person who is a spiritual person. He says, you can see it at the very ending of our pericope, in verse 7, "everyone has gifts...for the common good."
This is a way of seeing the world that you either agree with or you don't agree with it. I stand up here and I tell you that we are all connected, that the welfare of one is the welfare of us all. You can go home and watch Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Cosmos and as a scientist; he will tell you that we are all connected from a perspective of chemistry, biology and physics.
You would hear the same sentiment echoed profoundly in the teachings of Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. Still, it is not universally acknowledged.
We've had a number of fatal shootings in the past two weeks. Following a rampage at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Richard Martinez, whose son Christopher was a victim in the incident, went on TV and emphatically blamed his son's death, not on the individual shooter, but on the collective of NRA influenced politicians. And he posed the question to gun rights enthusiasts, "What is your right to own a gun compared to Christopher's right to live?"
The political sideshow made famous in the 2012 election cycle known as Joe the Plumber, replied through the media. He said, "Your dead kids don't trump my constitutional rights."
And there you have the crux of the conflict between a narcissistic worldview and a spiritual worldview, between a generous worldview and a compassionate worldview, between individual rights and the common good.
The TV talk shows have been abuzz in the past month over a very complex and rather long book by the French economist, Thomas Piketty. His exhaustive review of the evolution of capitalism in the industrialized world has documented both mathematically and historically what many of us have been aware of more intuitively for sometime... that is that the growing income gap between the wealthy and the poor is pushing us towards a social and economic disaster.
And more than income disparity, Piketty talks about the capital disparity in the world. As land and precious resources are increasingly transferred into the hands of the few, no amount of hard work, discipline, sacrifice and ingenuity can get a person out of poverty.
As Bishop Desmond Tutu said, "When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land." In an economic system where an elite minority holds the capital assets, everyone else must become a servant to those who have the capital.
Piketty pointed out that it was the progressive tax system in the United States following WWII that made the United States the economic power that it was. The more we undermine that progressive tax rate...
the more we fail to invest in infrastructure, in education, technology and medicine, the more the capital assets of the nation are transferred into the hands of the elite. This process ends in choking the economy and creating widespread poverty and suffering.
Still, the political conversation revolves around whether we will continue to allow this to happen or not. The budget proposed by Paul Ryan seeks to escalate this spiral into national poverty by cutting infrastructure and education investments by $1.2 trillion to give further tax cuts to the super wealthy. You would think that someone would have to be crazy to propose something like this but.... Well.... I don't really have a "but" to that statement.... You would just have to be straight up crazy to not realize that the current transfer of wealth into the hands of the elite is going to destroy this nation and take away anything that meaningfully could be called either freedom or opportunity.
Consider the case of the controversial prisoner exchange that took place earlier this week. President Obama orchestrated the release of Bowe Bergdahl from an Afghan prison controlled by the Taliban. In order to win his release, our President agreed to release five Taliban prisoners from our infamous prison in Guantanamo Bay.
There has been public outrage about this for several reasons, most importantly because the prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay were said to be especially dangerous people who hate America.... Perhaps because we have kept them in an off shore prison for a decade without ever charging them with a crime or putting them on trial.
The other big reason concerns Sgt. Bergdahl himself. None of us have all of the facts but it appears that Bergdahl may have deserted his post after becoming disillusioned with the war, the army, and America's given reasons for occupying Afghanistan.
Before his capture, he had written to his parents: "And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."
I have heard commentators railing against Bergdahl and his parents, even to the extent of blaming him for the deaths of several soldiers who later died while on patrol, perhaps a part of their patrol was a search for Bergdahl.
Still, I want you to try to see this in terms of the nation as a whole and not just the responsibility of a 23-year-old soldier as an individual. Deserting while on the battlefield does endanger your peers. This is not a small or insignificant charge.
However, he had been lied to. You have been lied to. Why are we occupying Afghanistan 12 years after we blew up whatever terrorist training camps were there prior to 9-11? There are those clamoring now for Bergdahl to be put on trial and to be sentenced to several years in an American military prison for having deserted his post. Where is the hue and cry for putting our current and former presidents on trial for having lied to us to get us into these wars?
Why is the congress not being held responsible for sending 22 year old boys and girls onto a battlefield under false pretenses and expecting them to die in defense of what has become little more than a smoke screen for the continued transfer of capital into the hands of the elite?
As Elizabeth Warren has been pointing out, for what we have spent on these wars, we could have made going to college in America free to all citizens. And you have to understand; an awful lot of the soldiers who are in Afghanistan and Iraq are there because they couldn't afford to go to college without first serving in the military.
But our congress won't even agree to lower the interest rate on student loans. We have impoverished so many Americans, and cut support of our universities and trade schools so that anyone who has the ambition to further themselves through education is then enslaved by a student load debt that keeps them from being able to own a home or even to plan to have children!
Our congress then is literally enslaving these students with a loan burden, not because the loans cost us so much but because they are making $10 billion a year in profits from the labors of young people who are just trying to get started in life.
Yes, it is a sobering thought to release five Taliban prisoners who are highly motivated to strike back at us.... But don't kid yourselves, five people are a drop in a bucket containing millions upon millions of others who have seen through the smoke screen just like Sgt. Bergdahl did. We need to stop counting on our fingers and toes and start looking at the big picture.
It is not one ballet dancing, California raised soldier who got himself into a bind in Afghanistan and it is not a couple of hundred prisoners that we keep off shore where no one can see what we are doing to them.... It is not the individuals, it is the whole. We are all connected. So do we need to keep Bergdahl in prison or should we trade five or six members of Congress who helped to send him to Afghanistan with a gun in his hands be traded to the Taliban in exchange for Bergdahl? Should Bergdahl be put on trial or should the president who told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the senators who voted for a war on false pretenses and an illegal occupation be put on trial? And in this Senator McCain and Senator Clinton are equally guilty.
Is Edward Snowden a bad guy for giving away classified American intelligence? Should he, as Secretary of State Kerry has suggested, come home and strand trial or should the White House administration that has carried on illegal spying on American citizens in the first place be put on trial?
Private Manning is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking documents regarding war crimes committed by our own soldiers against Afghan and Iraqi citizens.... Manning is in prison for revealing the truth... the war criminals were not charged, reprimanded, demoted or even subjected to public shame. We blame the poor for being poor. We lie to our young soldiers and put them in prison when their conscience gets the best of them.
Should Manning be in prison or should the people who authorized torture under the shameful nomenclature of "enhanced interrogation" be behind bars?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should stop looking for individuals to blame, put on trial, drag through the media and lock away either into a tiny Pashtun jail, Gitmo, or the Fed Med. Maybe we need to start realizing how we are all connected... that your dead kids really are a lot more important than my right to have an arsenal of weapons in my basement. We can realize that among the hundred thousand civilians we have killed in Iraq were people who were just as victimized by terrorism as we believe that we have been.
Bergdahl, Snowden, and Manning are not our enemies.... Each of these young men made questionable decisions with possibly dire results but each one simply stood up in the midst of a society that was going morally way off the rails and tried to do something to wake us up, to make us pay attention, to remind us that we are not the kind of people who torture prisoners, who spy on millions of innocent people or who occupy the lands of foreign nations.
Is it just me or does it seem to you that the longer we are engaged in a war on terrorism, the more we seem to look and act like terrorists?
The wealth, technological skill, scientific knowledge and ingenuity of this nation is not for a handful of billionaires.... It is for the common good.
The freedom and liberty this nation loves is not a club we use to destroy other nations, occupy their lands and steal their resources... it is, from this pastor's point of view, for the common good.
