Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Matthew 21:28-32
28"What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' 29He answered, 'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. 30The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir'; but he did not go. 31Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. 32For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.
I had our handicap accessible toilet replaced this week. We've had the plumber out to work on that restroom several times and we finally decided that we just had a bad brand in there and needed to replace it with a better quality toilet. I like our plumber, I trust him, so I just left the door unlocked and told him to take care of it.
When I went in to, as they say, inspect the plumbing, I was arrested by the brand name on the ceramic throne. "Church." Being a person who professionally deals in literary metaphor, I couldn't quite convince myself that this was mere coincidence. It is an unpleasant association.... Church and flushing....religion and sewage.
It isn't what I remember. That's not how I want to think about it. When I was young, my religious education was certainly full of the kind of superstition and magical thinking that I want so much to flush away these days but regardless of what was in our Sunday School books that we hardly read, what I encountered in my church were people who were trying to be good people. They were trying to be faithful to their spouses, good to their children, they valued honesty, hard work, study and they used words like "forgiveness," "mercy," and "love," no matter how far short they may have fallen from those noble ideas.
There is a saying in TV journalism that reminds us that airplanes that crash are in the news, the thousands of airplanes that take off and safely land are never mentioned. If all you know about aviation is what you see on the 10 o'clock news, you would assume that most airplanes explode and kill everyone on board because those are the only ones we talk about. However, nothing could be farther from the truth.
In religion, we talk about the priests who are pedophiles but it is rather less likely that you heard about Father Manuel Garcia Viejo who died Thursday afternoon. He was the second Spanish priest who was a physician who died from Ebola in recent weeks.... Priests who were also physicians, living a life of poverty and serving the sick in Sierra Leone long after they were old enough to have retired. They are the airplanes we don't hear about.
But it is still undeniable that there has been a lot of flush worthy news about religion lately. Islam, as I studied it in graduate school, is not the Islam I am hearing about in Iraq and Syria these days. The fact that ISIS even claims to be Islamic should inspire true Muslims everywhere to rise up and defend their noble faith.
Samira Saleh al-Naimi, a leading civil rights lawyer in Iraq, was known as a defender of the poor and she was an outspoken critic of ISIS. She was taken from her home with her three children and her husband watching and she was tortured for several days and then publicly executed by firing squad in Mosul this week in response to something she had posted on Face Book that was critical of ISIS.
When Islam was born in the 5th century, Muslim women were afforded more equality, more freedom, more respect than where their Christian and Jewish contemporaries. It deserves to be pointed out that these modern extremists that not only don't want women to be able to speak out do not want women to even be allowed to go to school and become literate would not have a Quran if they had been in charge in the time of the prophet Muhammad. The prophet did not write the Quran... Muhammad was according to tradition, illiterate, but his wife was not. It seems likely that the whole of the Muslim faith is dependent on the fact that there were literate and scholarly women in the family of Muhammad who not only wrote for him but who also instructed him in the stories of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
That so much of the Muslim world has taken a turn towards oppression of women, in spite of how arrogant it may be for a Western Christian to say this, is just not true Islam. The religion of the Taliban, of ISIS, of al Qaeda is not Islam. It is not the religion of Muhammad, it has more in common with what we flush into the sewer.
I hate to cave into any kind of ebullience about warfare but if you will give me just a little exception in my anti-war posture. Among the few Arab nations that are joining us in the air attacks against ISIS is the United Arab Emirate. One of their fighter pilots led the mission this week and that pilot was a woman: I am sorry that the news has released her name because, much more than even Malala, this woman has now made herself a target for assassination.
But Maj. Mariam Al Mansouri wanted to be known. She wanted the woman hating men of ISIS to know that a woman was fighting back.
I am frightened for her because the extremists have a long memory and she will not ever be safe again but I am proud of her and I could only wish to more like her.
Toxic religion is dangerous. My objection to our rush to be baited into another war.... And we should all be clear about this, ISIS is releasing videos of beheadings because they want us to come and attack them and, since it is what they want, I am convinced that it is the last thing that we should do. You can bomb people but you cannot bomb an ideology. The only real answer to toxic religion is healthy religion. The only meaningful response to mental illness is mental health.
The only way to correct ancient myths and superstitions is to consistently, loudly, emphatically, teach a science based, truth based approach to life and faith.
We were shocked by the news yesterday that a man in Oklahoma, a man with a criminal history and who was in the process of being fired from a Moore, OK food processing plant, claimed to be a convert to Islam and used that excuse to commit a gruesome murder of one women who worked with him and tried to kill another.... One he stabbed, and the other he beheaded. It is, of course, no accident that women were the targets of his rage.
Though the news emphasizes the religion of terrorists and murderers when they claim to be Muslim and rarely mentions their religion when they are motivated by radical forms of Christianity we should not be deceived into believing that there are harmless forms of magical thinking and dangerous forms of magical thinking. Magical thinking, superstition that denies knowable reality, fosters the belief that imagination and personal conviction is as good as actual facts and that is something we must resist wherever it shows up.
The religion that deserves to have a church, and the church that deserves to be flushed is, in my opinion, typically easily divided between the church that asks you to believe in non-sense and the church that asks you to behave with substantive character defined by personal sacrifice, not the sacrifice of others.... By forgiveness of those who have offended you, not by narcissistic claims of innocence. We need a religion that teaches the facts about our planet and the narrow and fragile environment that allows for human life. We need a faith that demands a higher and higher standard of friendship, community and love and not one that leads to compliance to cult-like militaristic obedience.
Jesus, in our scripture lesson today, makes the difference very plain. A man told his two sons to go out and work on the farm. One obediently said that he would go but he didn't. The other stubbornly refused but then thought better of it and complied. Real religion is not in your head. It is in your hands and your feet.
Don't bother inviting Jesus into your heart if your heart is full of the sewage of misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia, moral indifference, and arrogance. Jesus said that the sex workers and corrupt politicians are more likely to be friends of God than the people whose religion is all in their heads.
The real church is not one you sit on.... The real church will be out on the farm .... Changing the world. That's the church I want to be a part of and I hope you do too.
