Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Luke 1:46b-55We 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.
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."
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.
