Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Psalm 72:1-7, 12-14
1 Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king's son.
2 May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.
3 May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness.
4 May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.
5 May he live while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.
6 May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.
7 In his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.
12 For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.
13 He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.
14 From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.
Strolling along the downtown streets of our fair city during a First Friday Artwalk, I stepped in one of the more edgy galleries and I found myself almost immediately offended, which, for those of you who know me, is no small accomplishment for an art gallery.
In their packaged novelty area, they had for sale a small rubber Jesus toy, one of those stretchy, malleable dolls that was clearly intended to simply make fun of Jesus. I'm no fundamentalist and I have about the lowest Christology of anyone in the ministry but an intentional effort at insulting the likeness of Jesus seemed to be a very low class and entirely unnecessary attempt at insulting people who do esteem Jesus as a religious figure.
I was reminded of the Chinese poet whom I heard years ago reading a poem about how she felt the first time she saw a bottle of our cheap American aftershave, Jade East, bottled in a green glass container made to look like the Buddha. You may remember it. You literally screwed off Buddha's head to pour out the contents.
It is not difficult to imagine how shocked we would be if we walked down the toiletries isle of Walgreens and saw some Asian brand of aftershave being sold in bottles that looked like a crucifix that you had to screw off the thorn crowned head of Jesus to dispense the cheap cologne.
This week the issue of religious intolerance, satirical religious cartoons, and terrorism has been on all of our minds. Ever since 9-11, any violent crime committed by someone who claims to have been motivated by their religion, specifically, their Islamic faith, has been news.
I want to take a few minutes with you today to try to put these horrible, frightening, and undeniably evil events into a rational, honest, perspective.
First of all, we have to acknowledge that the content of our corporate news, on TV, radio and in print, does not fairly represent what actually happened in the course of any day.
Quietly, without much fanfare or media attention, an estimated 6000 people in Missouri have died because our legislature, for purely partisan reasons, refused to participate in Medicaid expansion. This was an entirely predictable outcome and it was entirely preventable. The victims of this narrow-minded political decision were just as innocent as the people killed in Paris this week, and they were our neighbors, and there were 200 times as many of them.
Is it better to die by the hand of an Islamic terrorist in a Kosher grocery store or by being denied health care by your allegedly Christian state representatives?
You may have a preference but from my perspective, the body count is significant. And when you mention the body count, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that we still have more than 30,000 gun deaths every year in America, virtually none of which are at the hands of Islamic terrorists. You are about a million times more likely to be killed by one of your gun-toting neighbors in the NRA than you are by a member of Isil. This kind of domestic terrorism is so popular that the media and our elected officials are afraid to talk about it but if we are being honest, when it comes to terrorism, there is no place quite like the good ol USA.
This week, most news outlets stopped running commercials while they gave full-time coverage to the dual standoffs in France, ginning up the fear of millions of Americans who were glued to their TV sets. All the while our local hospitals are full to overflowing in a flu epidemic that is hardly mentioned and will, inevitably, take many more lives than all forms of terrorism. The flu has always been more dangerous than Islamic Fundamentalism so rather than being scared all of the time, if you really want to make yourself more safe you should cover your mouth when you cough, wash your hands regularly and use hand sanitizer after we shake hands during the Passing of the Peace.
People who claim to be Muslim who commit violent crimes are always identified in the media as being Islamic. However, when Tim McVeigh bombed the Murrow Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was not identified as being a "Second Amendment enthusiast." When Scott Roeder shot the Kansas abortion doctor, Robert Tiller, he was not identified as a Catholic terrorist.
We know better than to assume that Scott Roeder represents Catholicism or that Tim McVeigh represents gun enthusiasts.
Islamic terrorists do not represent Islam. Thousands of French Muslims joined with other Parisians in demonstrations immediately following these horrible murders. At Friday prayers at mosques in Paris, devout Muslim's carried signs that read "Not in my name."
The news media rarely makes more than a symbolic effort at putting these crimes into any kind of rational perspective and we absolutely must be smarter than that. But rational perspective demands that we also be carefully honest.
Terrorism committed in the name of Islam is not reflective of the majority of Muslims. It is not a healthy form of religion. But, admittedly, it is way too common. And even though only a tiny fraction of Muslims are party to religious violence, way too many of what may be called "main stream" Muslims, are far too sympathetic with these violent crimes.
Even the Imam of what has been derisively named the "Ground Zero Mosque," Imam Abdul Rauf, a religious leader widely heralded as a moderate voice of reason, displayed an uncomfortable degree of sympathy for the terrorists who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo. On the set of MSNBC, he likened the derogatory cartoons of Mohamed to shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.
His point was that there are rational limits to freedom of speech but his analogy was a false equivalent. Charlie Hebdo is an equal opportunity offender. I have also felt offense at some of their cartoons.
Similarly, I thought that the movie, "The Interview," was offensive. A movie about assassinating a head of state, even a really bad, ridiculous dictator head of state, is in bad tastes and probably shouldn't have been made. But once that ridiculous dictator attempted to keep it from being shown, he went too far.
Imam Abdul Rauf was not asking for equal treatment for Muslims in the west, he was asking for special treatment and that he does not deserve. I detest Seth Rogan movies because they are stupid and offensive in their vulgarity but I downloaded "The Interview" to cast my $6 vote in favor of freedom of speech.
I don't find the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo to be very funny. In fact, I would generally say that they are unnecessarily offensive and shouldn't be published but that is a far cry from saying that they can't be published and it is a million miles away from approving of violence in response to their vulgar publication.
I enjoy satire. I indulge myself in forms of humor that probably ought to be outside of the confines of my profession but I'm just not very sensitive about comedy. But if I enjoy the way that cartoonists, or South Park, or stand up comedians make fun of conservative politicians, or conservative religions, then I need to keep a stiff upper lip when it is my ox that is being gored.
The Muslim world, if they do not want to remain isolated in Islamic nations, is going to have to evolve. Bill Maher has been calling we liberals out about how much deference we have shown to the Muslim world.
Maher is a comedian, albeit, an uncommonly intelligent entertainer, but he is not a religious scholar. A lot of what he has said about all religions is more rooted in personal prejudice than it is in information but when he points out that sympathy for terrorists is not confined to the fringe elements of Islam, he is shining a light on an important though uncomfortable truth.
Far too many Muslims in mosques that are not limited to Saudi Arabia and Yemen but are also found in Germany, England, France and in the United States are sympathetic if not sometimes enthusiastic about Islamic terrorists. I am willing to concede that point to Bill Maher.
And I am unwilling to lay the blame for the provocation of Muslim communities that have not assimilated and have not been economically successful in Europe and in the United States squarely on the doorstep of prejudiced Europeans or Americans. You don't hear Asian immigrants complaining about a lack of opportunity even in places where they have suffered from discrimination.
Where I differ from many pundits and from my beloved Bill Maher is just this: These terrorists were not radicalized by culturally insulting cartoonists or movies. They were radicalized by two centuries of colonialization, economic exploitation and virtual slavery, and by two crazy illegal wars of invasion and occupation by western military powers in the Middle East.
Terrorism is the military response of the poor to the oppression of well-armed, uniformed occupation forces from rich nations. When two mentally ill and very provoked men shoot up a magazine office it is of the same cloth as the murder of innocents who are described clinically as "collateral damage" when our drones kill a suspected terrorist while also killing children playing in the street and women hanging out laundry behind the house where we believed the terrorist was plotting diabolical plans.
You may think that dying as collateral damage from a drone fired missile is to be preferred to being blown up by a suicide bomber but I can guarantee you that the deceased innocent victims cannot tell the difference. If we want less terrorism in the west then we need to stop terrorizing the Middle East.
And finally, no rational review of this topic could be complete without also making the frank observation that even though the Christopher Hitchens sorts can be quite annoying about their anti-religious views, no atheist adherents have ever tried to kill anyone for not agreeing with them.
It is not sick atheism that provokes terrorism. It is sick religion. And at that juncture every one in this room and everyone who joins us on line must be a part of the solution.
Religion is, in all frank honesty, often the repository, fertilizer and genesis of insanity. We cannot pretend that magical thinking and superstitions are morally neutral. Once your thinking is disengaged from reality then your conclusions can become absolutely crazy.
If we are to preserve the ethics and good works that are the products of a healthy spirituality, then we need to aggressively deny space to the kind of irrational thinking that fosters terrorism in all of its forms...and for the sake of clarity, let me enumerate a representative list:
- Shooting innocent people because they have shown disrespect for your religion
- Blowing up marketplaces, office buildings, or theaters because they symbolically represent your sense of personal oppression
- Invading foreign sovereign states for political or economic gain
- Torturing prisoners
- Keeping people in prison without due process or without being charged with a crime
- Economically or socially oppressing minorities because of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or nation of origin
- Executing prisoners
- Failing to recognize that poverty and ignorance are forms of violence and they cannot be tolerated in the presence of abundance.
- Maintaining a virtually unregulated arsenal of lethal weapons in a nation that has turned a blind eye to tens of thousands of murders every year.
Against these and all other forms of terrorism, let us never allow ourselves to wallow in indifference.
