Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
In the same way I saw an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times. And what is that ancient path, that ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times? Just this noble eightfold path: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration...I followed that path.
--Nagara Sutta
Henry Davis of Ferguson, Missouri had the misfortune of being a black man with the very ordinary name of Henry Davis. It was a misfortune because there was another black man named Henry Davis who was suspected of having committed a crime in St. Louis Co.
When Henry Davis was arrested in the fall of 2009 he was taken to the police department where they discovered that this Henry Davis had a different middle name and a different social security number than the Henry Davis they were looking for. They decided to hold him overnight anyway.
When they tried to put him into a one bed holding cell that already had an occupant, he objected. When he objected, five officers took him out of the cell and beat him severely. All of this is absurdly incompetent, violent and inexcusable but that's not why I am telling you Henry Davis' story this morning. It is what happened next that makes me want to talk about this in relation to the first step of the eight fold path of traditional Buddhism.
When Henry Davis was arrested he was just a welder living in Ferguson, MO who had not been charged with any crime.
After his false arrest and completely unethical beating at the hands of the Ferguson police.... he was charged with property damage because.... Wait for it.... Wait for it.... It appears that Henry Davis, while being beaten, got some of his blood on the uniforms of the officers who were beating him.
http://rt.com/usa/180680-ferguson-henry-davis-blood/
Now, standing here in a pulpit that is 200 miles removed from Ferguson, MO and five years removed from the incident, it is clear to us that this was just nuts.... This wasn't simply abuse of authority or even extreme police brutality.... This was crazy.
It is obvious to us but it wasn't obvious to them. Prejudice, as you have heard me say before, has its own logic. Absent the kind of mindfulness, the kind of dedication to reality, absent the courage of self criticism, prejudice becomes a short hand form of logic that interprets everything around your own comfort, convenience and profit.
The police had made a mistake. They complicated that mistake with a violent crime against an innocent citizen. And in order to not face charges themselves, they created an embarrassing charge against their victim. This, I assure you, happens in less bloody and extreme ways in interactions between human beings all of the time.
In his famous and still very helpful book, Scott Peck writes in the first section of The Road Less Traveled, that there are four tools of discipline necessary to lead a sane and happy life. They are:
1. Delaying gratification
2. Acceptance of responsibility
3. Dedication to truth
4. Balance
I would personally put them in a different order but Peck was certainly influenced by Buddhist thought in this list. It seems to me that in our day the third one, dedication to truth or reality, is more urgent. Thirty years ago when this book was first published, we did not yet have 24 hour news networks and newspapers employed actual journalists. In our day, where propaganda and prejudice pass for news, the public is increasingly distanced from a healthy orientation to reality.
We will insist that something is true because we want it to be true. The general public still thinks that Obamacare is bad but if you ask them if affordable health care is good, if you ask them if they think that insurance companies should not exclude pre-existing conditions from coverage, or that insurance companies shouldn't be able to cancel your coverage because you are sick, then the overwhelming majority of citizens favor every aspect of Obamacare, they just don't like that policy that that black man came up with.
In fact, in some polling, we see that the majority of Americans approve of the Affordable Healthcare Act while still opposing Obamacare because they don't know that they are the same thing. At a certain level, that is just a matter of being uniformed. But there is a difference between ignorance and willful ignorance.
To quote Scott Peck again, one of the most useful definitions of evil is just that: willful ignorance. Being stupid is not a crime but denying reality and willfully ignoring facts is, if not evil, it is certainly the gateway to evil. It is this disengagement from reality that allows for racism and misogyny to continue to exist. A failure to have this "right view" that the Buddha taught allowed us to ignore readily available evidence and to engage in a lethal, bankrupting, and decade long war in Iraq, leaving behind billions in assets and weapons for an army of terrorists to become a nightmare for the people of Syria and Iraq.
But, to be completely honest, we have to acknowledge that religion has played a role in this as well. We teach impressionable children to force themselves to believe in angels, demons, souls, in heaven and hell, and all manner of reality denying magical thinking and then we are surprised when they don't vote or act rationally in matters of great importance.
Progressive faith asks us to invest ourselves in evidence. The Buddhist faith has always insisted that the spiritual path is devoted to reality in a right view, right speech, right action, and even a right occupation.
Prejudice and even traditional religion asks us to believe without evidence or even to believe in spite of contrary evidence. The eightfold path calls for mindfulness, concentration, it asks us to be aware, focused, informed and caring.
We come into the world as screaming narcissists. There is nothing wrong with that.... That's how babies survive. But we expect them to grow up. Within a few months we want them to be able to hold their own bottles and then to feed themselves. We expect them to learn to control their bodily functions and their emotional outbursts.
When they get to be a few years old, we expect them to learn to tell the difference between a cartoon and reality, between imagination and experience. Eventually, they need to be able to figure out for themselves that there are no monsters under the bed and that their bad dreams are just bad dreams but not bad realities.
Somehow we have not expected the church to grow up. We have allowed the church to confuse imagination with reality, to invest bad dreams with waking reality and to fail to come to terms with the real spiritiual challenges that face us.
We can all by sympathetic with a child who is afraid of the dark. My modest proposal is that we no longer tolerate an adult religion that is afraid of the light.
We choose to follow a path that is devoted to reality, that struggles to say the right things, do the right things, to concentrate, focus, to balance the personal good with the social good, to follow a spiritual path that not only heals our own lives but offers the hope of substantive salvation to the world.
