Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
"You must be your own lamps, be your own refuges. Take refuge in nothing outside yourselves. Hold firm to the truth as a lamp and a refuge, and do not look for refuge to anything besides yourselves." Buddha
Most of us here remember and were likely a part of the turbulence of America in the 60's and 70's. Walter Cronkite, looked into the family rooms of homes across America and told us "what was what" with the authority of a wise grandfather. On Feb. 27, 1968 he told us that our national leaders had gotten us into an unwinnable quagmire in Vietnam, giving the rest of us permission to voice our opposition to that ill-conceived war. Our confidence in the reliability of government continued to fall all apart as we moved into the televised Watergate Hearings when we found out just how corrupt, small and fallible the famous and the powerful could be.
We saw the dismantling of America's apartheid with its segregated schools, neighborhoods, public restrooms and drinking fountains. In the midst of all of the upheaval and insecurity, most of us went to a church where we encountered the word of God, and we spoke with certainty about the Lord Jesus Christ... about our fear of hell and our hopes for heaven.
Even if we questioned these things, there was crowd pressure to pretend that we did not question. The certainty of the solid institutions in the rest of the world might be crumbling.... The divorce rate climbed, women were empowered in the workplace and in government. We saw jobs that had been reserved for white men being given to women and minorities but the one exception was church where it was and is in 2014, still legal to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender, their sexual orientation, their race, and their age.
Religion has often offered a safe harbor from tempest tossed seas. Americans enslaved black Africans, taking away their freedom, separating them from their tribes, their families, their property... but we gave them Jesus. We made them slaves but we promised them heaven.
What white America did not expect, is that unlike all of the millions of Bibles given to college students by the Gideons over the decades, some of the sons and daughters of African slaves actually read the Bible.... They read about the slave revolt and escape recorded in Exodus. They read about prophets who foresaw a time when those who built houses would get to own one, and that one-day the tenet farmers would own the farm.
Out of the black church, the civil rights movement emerged and the meaning of religion began to change. We were less interested in heaven and more interested in justice... less concerned about personal piety and more aware of social sin and evil of an economic system that kept them in poverty. Religion, for us, is not what it once was.
For most of us here, that old evangelical certainty is entirely gone. We have, as I have often said, given up false certainty for honest uncertainty. We now know with certainty that our government can lie to us and manipulate us, that the marketplace does not have our best interests at heart, that corporations would use us for kindling in their fire places if they could.
And we know that we cannot simply open our Bibles to find certain answers to any of life's most important issues. There is insight there. We can find inspiration, we can dialogue with it....
But unlike an elementary math book, the answers are not in the back of the book. We have to look for them, struggle for them.... And, more importantly, what we know with certainty one year is subject for debate the next year.... Truth becomes a moving target that no one can give to you and that you can never own.
We are still in the minority, I know. We are surrounded in Springfield by a denomination most noted for their belief that God's Holy Spirit enables them to literally speak the language of angels. America still leads the world in the percentage of the population that believes in angels. Even in underdeveloped nations with almost no public education, people have been able to think through that little bit of that mythology but in the good ol USA, 55 to 80% of us still believe that angels are real.... More than the number of people who believe in global warming.
But in our area, a significant portion of the population not only believes that these invisible heavenly creatures exist, they think that by spewing consonant sounds out of their mouths that they are actually speaking the heavenly language of angels.
Uncomfortably, a retired Assemblies of God executive lives across the street from me and sometimes our under-paid federal employee who delivers our mail will put his mail in my mailbox. I don't read it of course but I have seen that my neighbor actually subscribes to a magazine just for those people who speak the language of angels.....It is 2014.... Newspapers are going out of business because no one reads the news anymore but there are still enough people who think that they magically speak the language of non-existent imaginary beings that they still have their own print magazine.
And you wonder why I stay half-mad all of the time! People, it is time for us to wake up and to try to wake up the community around us.
Tradition has it, that as the Buddha was dying at the age of 80, his few remaining followers gathered around him and he told them, "You must be your own lamps, be your own refuges. Take refuge in nothing outside yourselves. Hold firm to the truth as a lamp and a refuge, and do not look for refuge to anything besides yourselves."
Buddhists have religious texts and doctrinal teachings but unlike Jews, Christians and Muslims, Buddhists never had 10 Commandments, their insights were more like suggestions. More importantly, while the major religions of the west have focused on "salvation" eastern religions have not .... We have almost single mindedly focused on how we could secure our place in heaven.
For eastern religions, especially Buddhism, the goal was not to attain to heaven but rather to find enlightenment. In fact, the name given to Prince Siddhartha, the "Buddha" means, "the awakened one." Just as "Christ" was not really Jesus' family name, "Buddha" is a description, not a name.
And as what happened to the historical Jesus, Buddha's name and memory were stolen and associated with elaborate myths, superstitions and religious peculiarities, but if we may take this death bed teaching as something that comes closer to his true message, his real character, he was telling his followers not to even take his teachings too seriously.
We love the core message of the historical Jesus but in this century, as we seek enlightenment, we have to recognize that it may be necessary for us to disagree, even with Jesus, with Buddha.... Maybe even Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders... as we seek what is true.
I'm not being a relativist. Everyone has a right to their own opinions but they do not have a right to their own facts. You cannot meaningfully talk about your own truths... truth is either true for everyone or it isn't true. That's part of what I really love about science: it seeks to articulate what is true regardless of how popular the truths are, what public opinion about them might be, or even what the popular vote is. Science is true regardless of who believes it. Religion, real religion, in that sense, should be more like science.
And you know, you would not be using a hundred year old science book to teach a modern science class and for the same reason, we need to be very careful about we use ancient religious texts. Where ancient scriptures inspire us to noble values and causes they are great, where they are used to pour concrete around harmful prejudices and superstitions, we need to move on.
In spite of the needs that face us in this decade, most of organized religion is still trying to engage itself in the belief that the church is a haven in a heartless world, a virtual Noah's ark, keeping the faithful safe from the storms that rage outside....for those of us who spent too much time at the bottom floor of that ark after a couple of months at sea, we know how uninviting the traditional church can be.
Setting aside the religion that is a distraction from reality, we turn to face what is with new courage. When Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is among you, we progressives should have stood up and yelled "amen." The Kingdom is not in the afterlife but it won't be in this life either if we fill our heads with superstition and magic.
Now, I said that when the Buddha was dying that the few followers who were still with him gathered around him. Buddha had been popular and he died in obscurity. It took a long time for people to realize how valuable his teachings were.
We have seen that in the modern era. Had Martin Luther King, Jr. not died when he did, he also might have been lost in obscurity as his supporters were falling away and his associates were fighting with each other.
One of the great thinkers who created American democracy, Thomas Paine, who literally gave the United States its name, only had six people at his funeral because of his criticisms of traditional religion but time has validated his insights.
Truth is not subject to popular opinion. Truth is true even when almost no one believes it. Still, the good news is this, we can give birth to the Kingdom, through our own conscious choice. We can solve the challenges of poverty and homelessness. We can end wars. We can give health care to the sick and lift the yoke of oppression and discrimination off of the shoulders of minorities.... the world is only waiting for the people of God to wake up.
There is a modern proverb that teaches that no one can do you harm without your help. No one can really hurt you unless you are willing to pretend that you are asleep.
Tradition has it that people asked the Buddha if he was a god or a son of god, and he replied, "No." And so they asked, "Who are you, why should we listen to you?" He said, "I am awake." That is my highest hope for myself, and my best hope for you.
The Buddha that is in me, honors the Buddha that is in you.
