Christmas Stories

Christmas 1  Dec. 28, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Luke 2:8-14
8In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.10But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see--I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." 13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14"Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"

Helena, the sainted mother of Emperor Constantine, used the influence and wealth of her son to build churches in the Holy Land.  Three centuries after the events described in the gospels, she went to Jerusalem to build a church where Jesus was buried and to Bethlehem to build a church where Jesus was born.

I have been to both a few times but then, I have also been to Jericho where a guide showed me the actual Sycamore tree that Zacchaeus climb up into so that he could see over the taller people when Jesus came to town.

Now, Helena was no archaeologist determined to preserve history.  She was a devout worshipper so when she asked people in Bethlehem where Jesus had been born, the locals showed her a shepherd's cave.  She, of course, did not enshrine the cave, she had the entire hill excavated and a replacement cave made in the lower floor of the great cathedral of the Nativity out of precious marble.

Visitors to the Church of the Nativity are often treated to a plaintive tour guide who says that the manger in which Jesus was born is not on display there, not because such a crude wooden item would have turned to dust and ash thousands of years ago but, because it was stolen by the Catholic Church and is housed in the Vatican..... the absurdity of that claim never seems to trouble Israeli tour guides nor the curators of the Vatican's treasures who have no intentions to relinquishing the manger that has no more to do with Jesus than I have to do with managing the caviar trade in Russia.  Sometimes it is hard to embarrass religious people.

One of the most difficult issues in teaching Bible in my college classes is the fact that moderns tend to be so fact literal.  You read the parables where Jesus says that the Kingdom is like a man who had two sons and then another parable says that the Kingdom is like a woman who lost a coin and modern people get mad and say, "Well which is it?  Is it like a man with two sons or a woman who lost a coin because it can't be both!"

I sit in the back of the sanctuary and watch Dr. Trobisch patiently teaching us about the gospels, understanding them as stories written to help us understand great truths, metaphors used to open the mind to see reality in new ways, and, inevitably, at the end of the class, someone will raise their hand and ask, "But how do we know that this really happened?"

I complimented David once on his uncommon patience and in the midst of the conversation someone came up to him to demand an explanation for why God would be so cruel as to kill all of the animals on earth in the world wide flood of Noah when it was the people who had been sinful.  I responded, "Don't you understand that it is a sermon and not a bit of history, there has never been a world- wide flood."  And David interjected, "Well, in a way, it happens every time the story is read."

That is the power of story telling.... It becomes real in the moment it is shared in a community in order to bring about something that is real within us.

When St Helena went to Bethlehem, she was looking for the stable mentioned in Luke's gospel.  But that was just a choice she made.  In Matthew, Jesus was born in a house.
The two gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus have almost nothing in common other than the gender of the child.  In Matthew, the holy family lives in Bethlehem but flees to avoid the slaughter of the innocents and ends up settling in Nazareth.  In Luke, the family lives in Nazareth but are compelled in the most unlikely manner to visit Bethlehem for a Roman census and then return to their home after the birth.

Neither account is historically true.  Jesus was, in all likelihood,  born in and grew up in Nazareth.  Neither Mark nor John are interested in the geography or circumstances of Jesus' birth.  Matthew and Luke both have reasons of Jewish heritage to say that he was born in Bethlehem but Matthew and Luke don't compare notes.

The shepherds, angels, stable and the magnificat are only in Luke.  The magi, star, and flight to Egypt are only in Matthew.  The one thing that both have in common is that neither is the slightest bit interested in the historical facts because they are too busy trying to tell us an important story.... And we're still wondering why the Vatican refuses to give that old wooden manger back to the church in Bethlehem where it belongs.

The best way to kill a good story is to try to take it too literally.  One of the great rallying cries of the Progressive Christian movement is that we take the Bible seriously but not literally.  The question we should be asking is, if Luke and Matthew had no facts about the historical circumstances of the birth of Jesus, then why did they write these accounts?  Why?  What do they mean?  What is the message.... Those are the questions every story teller is actually trying to answer.

Matthew is at pains to tell the Jesus story in a way that proves to us that he is the true Jewish messiah.  He begins his account with a long genealogy tracing Jesus through the family of Joseph back to Abraham and then he tells us that Joseph wasn't really his father... like I said, Matthew doesn't want to be disturbed with any logical facts, he is telling us a story.

Like Matthew, his story is full of powerful irony.  Though Matthew will quote Old Testament texts repeatedly through the next 25 chapters of his book to prove that Jesus was the messiah, he completely leaves the Jews out of his birth narrative.  No one in the temple was aware of the birth of Jesus, but some foreign astrologers knew about it and they traveled across the wilderness to come bring presents.  Astrologers were anathema to Jews.  Practicing astrology is punishable by death, according to Deuteronomy 17 and yet, Matthew, the most Jewish of New Testament writers, is willing to slap traditional Judaism in the face and insist that gentiles knew about Jesus and his own people didn't.

There is a real message of humility in this.  As Michael Franti sings, "God is too big for just one religion."  Matthew tells us a story of a messiah who comes into the world, embraced by those who seek him but endangered by the both the institutions of religion and government.  The priests are indifferent and Herod tries to kill him, so that Jesus is aided by members of another religion and then is forced to flee as a political refugee.  If you let Matthew tell the story his own way, you see how we Christians are always uneasy around institutional religion, the halls of political power, and we can always look for Jesus among the refugees and the illegal immigrants.

Luke tells his Christmas story with entirely different details but hauntingly similar themes.  For Luke, Jesus is born into poverty and suffers both indignity and rejection by government and religion.

They are forced from their home by an oppressive occupying government and then in Bethlehem, they are not even shown the dignity to be allowed to give birth in doors.  We have all heard all of our lives that there was "no room" in the inn for them but I am inclined to think that Luke had something even more pointed in mind.

Ancient inns did not rent "rooms."  They were not like a Days Inn, after all.  Inns were just big houses largely comprised of a lower floor and an upper room.  Customers just paid to come in and they found a place on the floor among the other guests.  At what point does an inn keeper in the ancient world tell a paying customer, "I don't want any more money"?

It is possible that Luke is suggesting to us that for religious reasons, it was not simply that there was not room inside, it is that there was no room among all those people for Mary and Jesus.  Again, in Jewish tradition, everyone who is in a house when a woman gives birth is defiled and must make an offering.  Perhaps Luke is telling us that Jesus was rejected by formal religion even before he was born..... something that all of us who have been rejected by either family or faith because we were somehow "unclean" in their judgment should be able to appreciate.

Where do we find Jesus in Luke's story?  Out in the barn, among all of the stuff that you know is found in a barn.  And to whom is the divine birth announcement given?  Not to priests or kings but only to shepherds in the field.

We modern Americans tend to romanticize shepherds but don't kid yourselves....being a shepherd was the real night cashier job at Walmart in those days.  Sheep are smelly and stupid and they have to be watched all of the time.  Shepherds didn't get to observe Sabbath and they were always unclean literally or religiously.

That angels appeared to shepherds who were led to a barn where Jesus was born is a statement that you will find Jesus in homeless shelter for runaway teens where some unwed teen-ager just had a baby.  If you let Luke tells his story his way, you can appreciate why Jim Wallis says that no one goes to heaven without three references from homeless people.

The Jesus story is real, and every time we tell it, we bring good news to the poor, we bring hope to those in despair, we shine a light in dark places, promising justice to the oppressed, the refugee, the homeless and the unemployed.  The story of Christmas is not the first corner stone of a new organized religion.  It is a story that begins our story, our story of standing up to governments and churches, of siding with the poor and the oppressed.... Of kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.  Merry Christmas my friends.

Angels, Virgin Mothers, and the Power of Myth

Advent 4  Dec. 21, 2014
Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray

Luke 1:26-38
26In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."29But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 30The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." 34Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" 35The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. 36And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 37For nothing will be impossible with God."38Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her. 

2014 is drawing to a close now and not many of us are going to miss it.  We have been pummeled with horrible news. Much of which reminds me of when Mark Twain said, "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened."  We have spent months being warned about the tragic mistakes and cover up in a scandal around Benghazi, which, after several investigations, turned up no scandal, just a very sad and violent attack and equally sad and mentally deficient politicians trying to scare us.

Many of the same have tried to frighten us with images of bloody murders committed by members of Isil.  And, of course, the special in the run up to the fall elections was the outrageous misinformation campaign about the threat of Ebola in the United States.  Winner of the award for biggest "pants on fire" politician in America had to be a United State's senator from our neighboring state of Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts, who rolled all of the talking point fears together and warned that Ebola infected Isis terrorists could stream across our porous southern border to kill us all.

You could not make this stuff up.

But, for the more informed, beyond the fake Benghazi stories, the hysterical Ebola scare, and the push to get us involved in the tribal civil wars of the Middle East again, there have been some pretty sorry things going on.  You only need to consider how much air time was given to these exaggerated issues to realize the gravity of the news blackout on matters of real importance, like the fact that 90% of the growth in our current economic recovery has benefited only the top 1% of the wealthy in our country.  To the best of my knowledge, that hugely important fact has hardly been mentioned.
The political power of people like the Koch brothers continues to bend public policy toward making them richer as seen in the push to build the Keystone XL pipeline that will poison our air and may poison our water and will do very little for anyone other than Koch industries.

The news has covered a series of horrifying police killings of unarmed black men and there have been demonstrations in many major cities... enough to make elected officials pay attention. However, the demonstrations have also revealed the prevalence of racial prejudice among uniformed officers in cities across America as well as in otherwise seemingly sane people we all thought were our friends.
Recordings were made of some of the most egregious CIA torture practices but the CIA managed to destroy most of the evidence before they were investigated, though enough evidence remained to make every thinking American more than a little nauseous.

Here, at the end of this racist, violent, infected, impoverished, politically inept or corrupt year, finally comes Christmas.....and you thought that I had forgotten!

Having demythologized the New Testament's birth narratives, we don't go nuts around here with crèche scenes, we don't have a hanging of the greens service, there is no Advent wreath and no midnight candle light services.  But having swept the angelic hosts from the skies and mucked out the stall where the cattle have been lowing... along with other things... I would like to take a more sober look at the story of Jesus' birth.

The first versions of the gospels did not contain a birth narrative.  Mark never had one and it is fairly obvious that the nativity accounts in both Matthew and Luke were tacked on long after the original works were composed and made popular.

But modern progressives need not be too haughty about having figured out that the virgin birth account and the incarnational theology of the first century are not fit for modern consumption.  The people who wrote these birth narratives knew were babies came from.  Even if you had prudish, puritanical parents like I did, you don't have to spend too much time around the farm to get the birds and bees story.

The gospel writers were not gullible or ignorant.  They were storytellers.  Stories of heroes and super humans who were born of divine parentage have been around as long as there have been paintings and writing.

The ancient rulers of Egypt were depicted as standing under gigantic images of their gods to support their claims that there was divine blood in their veins.  The Greeks and Romans had hero stories of semi-divine historical characters who were only half human until current rulers began to wrap themselves in the mantle of divinity.

The gospel writers did not think that they were writing historical accounts of the birth of Jesus, they were writing a polemic, a sermon.  When early Christians announced that "Jesus is Lord," what they were specifically saying is that "Cesar is not lord," or, more completely, "I have chosen the message of Jesus over the authority of my government."

That was a dangerous thing to say back then.  Standing up to government authority.... Well, you could end up living like a prisoner in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for a couple of years as Julian Assange has, or be exiled in Russia as Edward Snowden is.

Just as Chelsea Manning is in prison for leaking information about war crimes committed by American soldiers though no American soldiers were ever put on trial for the murders of civilians that Manning exposed.

And, now that we know with certainty about the CIA torture of prisoners, you might expect criminal prosecutions.  So far only one person has been sentenced to prison related to American torture of prisoners.  Was it the guy responsible for chaining a naked man to a wall in a cold cell until he froze to death?  Was it the agent who beat his prisoner so hard that he put out one of his eyes?

No, so far, the only CIA agent in jail is John Kiriakou, and he has been in prison for two years now for leaking information to the media about our torture program.

So, you see, saying that someone other than Cesar is lord can be a very dangerous thing to do.  But the gospel writers knew very well the stories about how their rulers had miraculous virgin births.... That the Cesar's were incarnations of God.  They had read on the Roman coins that the Cesar was their savoir, their lord.

And so, they wrote about Jesus being born of a virgin, not because they were so stupid that they didn't know where babies came from but because they were so brave that they were going to adorn a Palestinian peasant with the accolades usually reserved for their rulers.

You have always heard the Christmas story told with an emphasis on the humble circumstances of Jesus' birth but I want you too see that it was not told this way as a "rags to riches" story.  It was told this way as an alternative to the glorious royal stories of Hebrew Kings and Roman dictators.
It was told this way to say that Jesus comes into the world where there is manure on the ground, in the stinking part of town where people live in barns and abandoned buildings, under bridges and in cars that don't start anymore.

The narrative, and I invite you to do with it what you will, but the narrative insists that God is not indifferent.... God isn't cloistered in some cathedral or temple... God isn't simply standing behind the king.... Saying the prayer at the opening of the day in Congress before any congress members have bothered to arrive and take their seats.

God, these narratives say, enters the world where the CIA tortures prisoners, where the media purposefully deceives, where the government is run by the corporations it is supposed to regulate, where police authority is exercised along racial lines, and where the poor are having their pensions taken from them to pay bigger bonuses to bankers and corporate bosses.

Because the gospel writers didn't want you to accept that the corruption we experience is the last word or that things are the way that they will always have to be.  I try to avoid anthropomorphizing my religious language but in the Christmas story it seems almost necessary to say it this way....
Yes, the world is violent, unfair, discriminatory, and the wrong people always seem to have the power but you should not let yourself believe that God does not know and does not care about your plight.  The Christmas story says that God was born right into the middle of all of it, at the bottom rung of the ladder, chained naked to a wall in Abu Ghraib, born in the back seat of Ford Tempo whose heater doesn't work.  God enters the world as a refugee, an unemployed grocery union worker, a retired employee who is made to feel like his meager Social Security check is some kind of a hand out after paying into the system for 50 years.

Your life story is known to God.  You are not alone.  We are not the silent, compliant, subjects of the throne, no matter who is holding the scepter this year.  For unto you is born this day a savior, who lives among you as a voice of justice, a voice of reason, a heart filled with compassion, and a generous advocate for you.  Let the people say, "hallelujah."

Mary: The First Christian Revolutionary

Advent 3   Dec. 14, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Luke 1:46b-55
46And Mary said,

"My soul magnifies the Lord, 47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 

                                              48for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 

49for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

50His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

51He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

54He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

55according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever." 

We started this church in the summer of 2008.  Our vision statement included the idealistic notion that we would try to give to this city a healthy spiritual community.  We specifically said that we were going to start a healthy spiritual community because we had all just come from one that was pretty unhealthy.... Toxic... dangerous.... Deadly.

So, we believed, we would wipe the slate clean and start all over without all of the petty political bickering of denominational politics, and the humiliating dimensions of ego battles in organized religion.  There were only fifty or sixty of us and about a fourth was one family group.

We began timidly, meeting in borrowed space and after a few weeks we had the courage to sign a lease for rented space and an office in a conference center.  The patriarch of the family that made up such a large portion of the church, paid the deposit and the first month's rent to get us started.

So you can imagine my surprise when he called me early one morning just a couple of months later to say, "I'm out, I'm never coming back."

I managed to get him to explain that the reason he was leaving.... And, of course, the rest of his clan left with him.... Was because I had written a column for the local paper in which I condemned our military's practice of torturing prisoners of war.

We had hints and rumors early on in the war on terrorism.  Then there were pictures of the abuse from the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison and our special prison in Guantanamo Bay.  The CIA's Inspector General's report that was released this week comes many years after we already knew enough to be outraged.

And so I asked my former friend, church member and benefactor, "So you are going to go to a pro-torture church?"  And he said something that I will never forget.... He said, "I will find one where I won't have to hear it mentioned."  Which, I suspect, is just about all of them.

I was crushed.  I was pretty sure that the church wouldn't survive.  We didn't have enough members; we didn't have enough donations to survive losing that many people.  And I was crushed because this was the sort of thing that I thought we had left behind.... The kind of church where you have to reel in the message to keep from stepping on anyone's toes... the kind of church where you are expected to talk about religious things but never real things.

I don't want anyone to think that I am brave.  I'm not.  I'm a coward.  I've spent most of my life being afraid.

I've led demonstrations and rallies, I married gay people to one another under threat of being fired, sued and even murdered but I was always afraid.  I just did it anyway. But that does not mean that I am a brave person.


What I knew then, what I believe now, is that the church where torture is never mentioned is, in every meaningful way, a pro-torture church.  As Elie Wiesel said, "Take sides.  Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed."  There is no way to be a healthy church and to say to the truth, even painful and inconvenient truth, "you have to just hush up if you are going to come in here."
This week, as news commentators have been discussing the Inspector General's report, I keep feeling like I am in an AA meeting.  When I was in grad school, I was doing my research on addiction recovery and I went to AA meetings four or five times a week for a couple of years.

I went to enough meetings that I became familiar with the certain stock, off the shelf stories.  A guy who was there because he was court ordered to go to AA would tell us about people he knows who drink more than he does and who have worse driving violations that the offenses that landed him in this church basement.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has demagogued through news shows, talking about prisoner abuse in Vietnam, in Russia and China, to say, "They drink more than we do... they drive worse than we do."  Donnie Deutsch chimes in that given our losses on 9-11, whatever we did to protect ourselves from future attacks cannot be judged by anyone.

They always try to use the "ticking time bomb" defense, as if we had a prison full of suspected terrorists on 9-11 and we were sending Jack Bauer into their cell to beat the location of the hidden nuclear weapon out of them.

Of course, it was none of that.  We didn't have people to interrogate for more than a year after 9-11.  When we did, we were picking up anyone we could find, and, if you can bear for me to say it, we even picked up a bunch of kids and used "enhanced interrogation techniques" on them.

My old college roommate is a military language specialist and though he is even older than I am, he was called up and deployed to Iraq to interrogate prisoners. Alan has made fun of me for 30 years for being so politically engaged and he has always tried to get me to relax and just accept the world the way it is.

But between back-to-back tours of duty, Alan came home for a couple of weeks in January of 2005.  He saw his wife in California and then drove his old car from California to Washington, D.C. so that he could be on Pennsylvania Ave. when George W. Bush's motorcade came by from his second inauguration.  And my very non-political, just roll with the punches old roommate, stepped to the front of the crowd as the president's limousine passed and he pulled down the pants of his uniform and turned his backside to the President of the United States.

Alan explained to me, "I'm being forced to interrogate children who had been caught stealing food because they were starving as if they had information about terrorist attacks against the United States."

He said, "I am angry and I am ashamed of my country." Ironically, he was not arrested for this display of protest.... I suspect that everyone who saw him, even though they didn't know any of the details, still, they could understand why.

The Inspector General's report hasn't told us much that we didn't already know or suspect.... We just didn't want to talk about it.  We still want to act as if it all happened in the heat of the moment after 9-11, when, in fact, it went on for nearly a decade.

Even some of my friends have posted a dramatic image on Face Book of a man falling to his death from the burning twin trade towers that carries the caption, "This is why I don't care about how we tortured terrorists."

Because we don't want to think about it, we tell ourselves that we only tortured terrorists during the heat of battle.  Yesterday's front page of the New York Times reports on interviews with 26 different people who were tortured, some over a period of years, whom the CIA later determined had no connections to terrorism and who had committed no crime.

We tortured some prisoners during WWII and documented the fact that it didn't work... you don't get go information that way.  There were some incidents again during Vietnam and those only confirmed what we already knew.... It doesn't work, it only turns us into what we hate.

What I find to be especially ironic is how much chest thumping is involved in the defense of our use of torture, as if it is the strong and the brave who favor torture when it is clearly the cowards who wet themselves every time they feel scared... as if being afraid is a reason to throw your humanity, your values, your beliefs out the window..... so much for the land of the free and the home of the brave!  As Jon Stewart has said, if you abandon your principles when times are hard, then they were never really principles, they were just hobbies.

For the most part, religion is a hobby.  Church, in almost every case, is a life enhancing activity.... Not a life changing, challenging, informing activity.

Look at our music, especially the music for this season of the year.  If you buy into the Christmas narrative.... That God became incarnate in a human man-cub... what does our music say about this absolutely amazing event?

O little town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie.... Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the new born king,..... Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing ore the plain....

To hear how the church has treated this ancient narrative you would think that it was just the sweetest thing.... Just precious... darling, even.

Sean is singing parts of the first Christmas carol, if I may call it that, for us today.  Mary's song as recorded in Luke.... Now, let's be clear.... I'm not taking that as a historical record.  I don't believe that an angel appeared to Mary and told her that she was going to bear God's son and then she burst into poetic singing.

This account is a creation of the early church but it is an important creation of the early church.  How did they interpret the birth of Jesus?  What was the significance of the Christ event in their minds?
You may not read Latin very well but let me tell you, it wasn't about, "away in a manger, no crying he made."  The early church says that Mary's immediate response to the angel was a revolutionary declaration.  Luke has this teenaged girl saying what Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez never had the nerve to say:

52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

A preacher could get fired for talking about revolution, about kicking the powerful off of their thrones and returning power to the people.  Why, people would leave the church if you started talking about a radical redistribution of wealth so that the hungry would be filled and the rich would be sent empty away.

This is not disguised.  This is not secret code.  This is in the Bible!  It is in chapter 1!  This is the introduction, if you don't get this you don't understand the rest of the story.

The Geometry of Time

Advent 2    Dec. 7, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Isaiah 40:1-11
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 2Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
3A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5Then the glory of theLord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." 6A voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. 7The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. 8The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.
9Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" 10See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

You can confidently say that there are two kinds of people in the world.  There are those who divide the world into two types of people and there are those who do not.  It is somewhat more complicated to divide all of the religions of the world into two groups but for conversation's sake, I'm going to go ahead and give it a try.

Every world religion attempts to make sense of our experience of the world through certain beliefs and rituals.  It is never a clean break, but religions tend to view time in one of two ways.... Generally speaking, religions of the eastern world tend to think of time as being circular, moving through repeated patterns. And religions of the west tend to think of time as being linear, going from creation to some kind of end.

Belief in reincarnation is more prevalent in eastern religions and, I suppose that the belief that you get multiple shots at life takes some of the urgency out of it.... You don't have to be afraid of going to hell for eternity, sure, you might come back as a cockroach but if you can be a really good cockroach then you have a shot at coming back the next time as something more interesting, like a dolphin or a hawk.

Religions that have a linear view of time view life like shooting an arrow... whatever direction the arrow is pointed at the moment of death, that's where you are going to go forever and so we Jews, Christians and Muslims are much more concerned about the afterlife, guilt and sin than are the eastern faiths.

This is, of course, a generalization.  There are aspects of linear eternity in eastern religions and there are aspects of a circular view of time in western religions.  Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have more or less annual calendars.  Jewish and Christian calendars are based on a lunar calendar that is modified by solar equinox and solar solstice and the Muslim calendar is only lunar which means that Muslim holidays move in their time of year because the lunar calendar only has 354 days in it.

The observances of Passover and Easter can move back and forth but they are always in the spring.  The Muslim observance of Ramadan is always moving 10 and a quarter days backwards each year so that Ramadan will, over a period of years, move from spring, to winter, to fall and then summer.  This year, Ramadan started on June 29, next year it will start on June 18th.  So, every 30 years or so Ramadan, Passover and Easter end up at about the same time and I am sure someone in retail marketing is already trying to figure out how to make that work as an interfaith spring buying season.  I think that will be in 2021 so, remember, you heard it here first.

So, which religious tradition is correct? Is time linear or is it circular?  It is not hard to find evidence in nature to support either one.  Trees lose their leaves in the fall and get more in the spring.  Our flowers and farm fields appear to die every winter and them come back to life in the spring.  The earth itself grows dark and cold and then comes back long days and hot weather.  And we go to sleep, and wake up.  We get sick and then we get better.

But we also see linear aspects to the world.  A tree will lose its leaves and come back in the spring for several years but eventually they do all die.  When we are young, our teeth fall out and we get a whole new set....but when those fall out, Mother Nature doesn't really have a solution for that.

We grow old and we die and though people may have strong personal beliefs about their conscience living on in another form, what we see is that they die and though they may live in a heavenly mansion on streets of gold, they won't be showing up at the house for Christmas dinner.

There are aspects of time that are circular and there are others that are linear.  Sometimes that line is fairly short, like the life of a single individual person, or it can be fairly long, like the life span of a species such as the dinosaurs or jellyfish.

I apologize for taking so much time in this introductory walk through comparative religions and you can be forgiven if you forget that there are 354 days in a 12 month lunar calendar by the time you get to the parking lot.

The larger point for me, at this point in history, is that both types of religious descriptions of time can be deceptive.  If you believe that life is always circling around in every repeating cycles, then you can be relatively indifferent about what you are doing in this life, assuming that you have a virtually infinite number of second chances....when reality may be better symbolized by how many complete sets of teeth you can reasonably expect to grow in a lifetime.

And a linear view of time that ends up in either heaven or hell for eternity can also have its very deceptive implications.  People will deny themselves the very joy of living at all, either out of fear of eternal punishment or out of lust for eternal reward.... Neither of which is known to exist outside of religious imagination.

Soldiers of all religious stripes have marched into the jaws of death under the promise of an afterlife reward.  Perhaps even more deceptively, our current marriage of evangelical Christianity to politics and the corporations that profit from coal and oil, are destroying the earth in a lust for current profits backed up with the absurd religious assurance that Jesus will come back and usher in the heavenly Kingdom before the earth becomes uninhabitable.

When the new Republican majority takes over the Senate next month, Oklahoma's senator, James Inhofe will be the chair of the Senate's environment committee.  Inhofe has repeatedly rejected climate change science and in 2012, defended coal and oil interests by quoting from the Bible.  He said:
"My point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

What is outrageous to me is that our neighbors to the west keep re-electing this guy but given our voting record and considering the senators who represent our neighboring states, maybe we shouldn't be too surprised, but the implications of this kind of denial of science is serious.... And serious in a lethal sort of way.

My favorite TV show is HBO's "The Newsroom."  In fact, if there is a fictional character that I wish that I could actually be, it would have to be the prophetically courageous, truth telling, Will McAvoy. But in a recent episode, the leading character got set back on his own rump while interviewing a fictitious EPA executive who, in a very deadpan manner, basically said that we have already put so much carbon into the air that there is nothing we can do to reverse the damage done to the earth.

He predicted that the child has already been born who will die from a cataclysmic collapse of the environment and that within the foreseeable future, that sea levels could rise by 80 feet.  Now, thankfully, this is a fictional TV show and not a documentary but, the truth is that we have done enough damage to the environment that even if we never started our gasoline burning cars again and never burned another lump of coal in our power plants, over the next few generations, sea levels are going to rise by several feet and many of our favorite vacation spots and costal cities will only be accessible to people who are wearing scuba gear.

This will cause mass migrations, and economic woes of potentially cataclysmic proportions and there is nothing we can do to stop it now.... But that doesn't mean that there is no reason to start living smarter now.

The world's major religions, the world's most powerful governments, and the world's largest corporations have all been guilty of treating environmental scientists as if they were Chicken Little going around screaming hysterically that the sky is falling.  Now, it is too late to keep the sky from falling because time really is linear and we've been going in the wrong direction for most of the last century.

Many of us were guilty of using our credit cards when we were young as if the future was always going to be so bright, that our income was always going to be much larger in the future and carelessness in the present was of no great consequence.  And we all took some unnecessarily draconian hits as we fought our way out of those imprudent mistakes.

Our relationship with the environment is no different.  We have foolishly believed that our careless stewardship of the earth would always be corrected by a new wave of technology and if not something salvific out of the scientists and inventors whose warnings we so casually ignore, then at least God would step in and wind the clock back for us.

The sobering message of progressive faith is that the messiah we have been waiting for is looking back at us in the mirror every morning.  We are the one we have been waiting for.

The people who can change the world for the better, who can lessen the impact of past mistakes and set the course of time in the right direction have already been born.... In fact, they all decided to go to church this morning.  Let's hope that their spirituality is substantive enough to make real change in the course of history.