Detente with Demons

Epiphany 5     February 8, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Mark 1:32-39              
32That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 35In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." 38He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." 39And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I don't typically pay any attention to the National Prayer Breakfast.  I quit going to the local observance more than 20 years ago when I realized that it really was just a public affirmation of the love affair between conservative politics and evangelical Christianity.  They always tried to make the invitation sound like it wasn't that but that is what it always turned out to be, a kind of religious and political PDA that was more than a little nauseating to have to watch.

But on the national plane, the organizers feel obliged to invite the President to be the speaker and even though it is clearly an event for right wingers of both political and religious bent, the President usually feels obliged to attend.  In years past, what few clips I have heard in the news made it sound like President Obama went into hostile territory and tried to polish his Christian bona fides a bit before returning to the safety of the Oval Office.

But this year, this horrible year in which religious extremism seems determined to rush back into the dark ages, our President decided to step out a bit at this event.

He didn't just condemn Isis and Boco Haram, whose attempt at establishing a radical Muslim Caliphate has seen them capturing children and forcing them into marriage or, more honestly, selling them as sex slaves before their 10th birthday.  And, even more shockingly, dousing a fellow Muslim in gasoline and burning him alive in a cage and posting the video on line as if they were proud of their barbarism.

He did condemn those things but he also reminded his largely Christian audience that extremists in the Christian faith had a bloody history as well, all of the way from the Crusades, through the practice of African slavery, and down to the lynching's and Jim Crow history of America. It was nothing that I and many others have not said but the President came in for some outrageous criticisms in response to his Prayer Breakfast speech.

The morning after, former congressman and MSNBC news host, Joe Scarborough, nearly blew a fuse on Morning Joe, mocking the president as a pseudo-intellectual, and screaming about how insulting it was for him to bring up things that happened 800 to a thousand years ago.

Scarborough was shouting and demanding that everyone on the set agree with him, even though most tried their best to look away and avoid being engaged in the rant.
But it wasn't just Scarborough who was enraged.  Rush Limbaugh has nearly blown a fuse and Jim Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia, said that the president's remarks were the most offensive words utter by a president in his lifetime.  And, of course, Franklin Graham felt obliged to demonstrate his lack of comprehension of either history or religion as well as he attempted to represent the outrage of Evangelical Christians.

Though many were wagging their heads and attempting to shame the president, none could actually say that anything the president said was not factually true, and that is what astonishes me.  Of course, Scarborough, trying to bury these things in the distant past, was just absurd denial.

The Crusades were a millennia ago, the Inquisition was 800 years ago, but the American slave trade is not nearly so deeply buried in history and Jim Crow laws and lynchings remain in the memory of almost everyone in the room today.  Lynchings, generally involved hanging, but sometimes victims were set on fire or drug behind a horse or a car until their bodies fell into pieces.

Racially inspired lynching continued right up into the 1960's during the Civil Rights movement and who can forget the 1998 lynching of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, Wyoming... a 21 year old university student murdered on the suspicion that he might be gay.

These events were Christian in more or less the same way that the immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot was Islamic.  We can say that the KKK had nothing to do with real Christianity in the same way that Muslims can say that Isis and Boko Haram are not Islamic but....well, it is not that hard to draw the lines, is it?
There are many official Islamic organizations statements of condemnation of terrorist acts done in the name of Islam but, what worries many of us is that there is also way too much sympathy hidden in Muslim congregations for these heinous deeds.

And while the practice of racially motivated lynchings in America peaked in the 1890's, there was still far too much sympathy for modern atrocities hidden in our Christian churches during the civil rights movement and not a little violent homophobia lurking, right up in to the 90's when Matthew Shepherd was murdered and it is not gone yet.

When we read the synoptic gospels, it is evident that high on the list of the memories of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a memory of Jesus of Nazareth as a demon exorcist.  Most of us have been inclined to read such things with a mixture of embarrassment and skepticism.

Clearly, some of those accounts were primitive descriptions of epilepsy or of mental illness, but the gospel writers described them in very matter of fact ways, as real, present, and disgusting creatures who lived among them.

Of course, I do not take such accounts as being literal but I will assure you that I do believe that there are demons that live among us.  The ancients talked about demons as external things..... that is a trick of psychology that has persisted through the centuries.
Demons, in the sense of grave and horrible social evil, exist for sure but we always like to project them onto something external.  I'm a democrat so republicans are evil.  I'm an American, so Russians are evil.  I'm a Christian, so Muslims are evil.

We know that evil exists.  It frightens us.  Out of fear we do extreme things, militarily, through police action, and in mob mentality.  Out of fear we seek to annihilate the "other." But what the gospels always seem to say is that the demons are actually quite close at hand.  In the passage just before the one we read from Mark today, Jesus encounters the first demon in the gospel in the most disturbing place..... in church.

I always wonder, how long had that demon been there in that congregation and no one else had noticed?  I take these accounts to be metaphorical in nature but that does not mean that they are not true.... It just means that they are more true and true at a deeper level.

We tend to make peace with the demons that are the most familiar to us.  I can tell you, existentially, I grew up going to a segregated school and I didn't even know it was segregated.  I worked with the children of black tenant farmers on neighboring farms and never wondered where they went to school on Mondays.  I was a blissfully ignorant white southern boy who had not spent a moment thinking about the injustice, the violence, the oppression of America's Apartheid until segregation was ended through judicial coercion.

No one at my church talked about the evil of segregation.  The death of Martin Luther King was not mentioned that April week in 1964 when he was murdered.  No one in my church said that he should have been shot but the demon of racism could comfortably come and go from that church for many more years.

The evangelicals who were so offended by the President's prayer breakfast comments do not want to see that there is a connection between Christian extremism and Islamic extremism.  They do not want to see how their history of racism is made of the same cloth as the more current excesses of Jihadists.  But it is.

What I find captivating about the way the gospels describe these stories is that somehow, when Jesus showed up, something about Jesus, something in his character, his demeanor, his honesty, his integrity, made the demons visible..... like turning on the kitchen light in some of my old college apartments would reveal all of the cockroaches living in the student slums.  They would run for cover but there was no denying that they were there.

Our problem is that we get way too comfortable with our demons.... So comfortable, that we like to pretend that they don't exist.  They become so much a part of the scenery that we can get really angry when someone calls our familiar cultural furniture just what it is..... demonic.

We get used to industries that ruin the environment.  We accept that our poor neighborhoods have the most underfunded schools and our wealthy neighborhoods have our best schools and never let ourselves acknowledge that it should be the other way around.  We have twice as many foreclosed upon, empty houses as we have homeless people and yet we insist that there is no solution to homelessness.

1% of our nation holds 90% of our capital assets and yet we say that there is not enough to solve the problems of poverty.  Most political donations are made by less than one in every 100,000 Americans and yet we do not want to be told that we have sold our democracy to the highest bidder.  We drive past payday loan shops and sex shops that sell this week's version of Meth, preying on the poor and the desperate and we do not notice because we are not poor and we are not desperate....yet.

Historically, we have had a tendency to kill the people who reveal the demons of our culture rather than to be outraged by the presence of the demons themselves.  Too much of our society is content to live with the cockroaches and just insist that no one turn on the lights.

I don't know about you, but I want to be more like Jesus.  I want to turn on the lights.  I may not be able to drive out all of the demons but I sure don't want them to think that they can stay hidden when we walk into the room.

Islam needs to change.... And so does Christianity.... And let me tell you, so does Judaism.  But the demons we have to fight are not out there, or over there.... They are there but they are not our problem to solve.... We have plenty close at hand that we need to deal with. First, we have to be willing to turn on the lights and be honest with ourselves.

Sorting out Fact from Fiction

Epiphany 4    February 1, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

1 Corinthians 8:1-13        
Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that "all of us possess knowledge." Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; 3but anyone who loves God is known by him.
4Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that "no idol in the world really exists," and that "there is no God but one." 5Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth--as in fact there are many gods and many lords-- 6yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
7It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. 8"Food will not bring us close to God." We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. 9But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. 10For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? 11So by your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed. 12But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. 13Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.

I have only one friend from seminary with whom I have stayed in contact over the generations.  We don't get to see one another often but when we do it is a loud and long meeting, and even our phone calls rarely clock in at anywhere under either sixty minutes or  60 decibels.

Charles often says that we "fought for our friendship" and the word "fought" is crucial to that understanding.  As a young white man from rural Kentucky, Charles felt that there were a lot of things about racism that I needed to learn from his urban, Atlanta black experience.  He was not always a patient teacher, and the lessons were often adorned with colorful language but, I believe, we finally got there.

But a couple of decades ago the shoe shifted to the other foot.  When Charles heard some of my messages about gay rights and the ordination of homosexuals we discovered that we had another huge issue to discuss.

He was especially unhappy when he heard me call gay rights a "civil rights" issue because he did not believe that the discrimination he had experienced as a black man growing up in the south should be compared to the discrimination being shown to gays and lesbians.  Because I really love Charles Lee, I was more patient with him on this issue than I have been with most people.  Charles was with me in class, he was with me when I graduated.  He was with me when my daughtered arrived from Korea, and years later he stood at the bedside with me as we watched my mother die.  Charles was too important to me to allow our disagreement to damage our friendship.

He and his wife, Wynnett, live in Birmingham, AL and I always spend time with them whenever I am passing through.  This past year, when our friends, Andrea and Jill had moved to Birmingham, it was with some trepidation that I called to let Charles know that I was going to be in town and that I would be staying with Andrea and Jill.

And he said, "Well, are you going to bring them to church?"  And I said, "Well, Charles, they are lesbians."  And he asked, "Will they being doing anything outstandingly lesbian while they are in church?"  He explained, "As long as they don't have to physically demonstrate their sexual orientation during the worship service, I would like to meet them!"

I compromised and agreed to bring them to lunch after church because, well, you know Andrea.... You can never be sure what she might do!

The point being, 20 years ago, Charles, in spite of his excellent education and his long term experience in civil rights work, was not ready to accept that being a homosexual was not a sin.

Ten years ago he was willing to more or less look the other way.  Now, given time and space to let his views evolve, he has repeatedly reached out to Andrea and Jill to help them to feel welcome and at home, even in Birmingham, AL.  This growth has taken place only because I did not insult his faith or his intellect in the process, because our mutual love was stronger than our disagreement.  And in the safety and security of absolutely certain love, he has been able to grow in this area.

Charles called this past week after his grand-daughter had brought her boyfriend home from college to meet the family.  She is certain that this is the one.  The boyfriend in question happens to be white.  Charles said, "Roger, when they left, I realized that I was not really ready for this."  He said, "All those years ago, I thought I had put all of those prejudices behind me but now I realize that we need to carve out some time to talk about this again."

Racism, prejudice, that all too human inclination to divide people, one against the other, doesn't die easily and typically it doesn't die very quickly, nor does it die just because you have decided that you are done with it.

I have prejudices that live inside of me that I do not want.... They are demons that are not welcome.
I have locked the doors of my mind to shut them out and then, when you turn out the lights, you can hear them breathing in the shadows of your character.

Now, it will come as no great surprise to you to hear me say that I do not often cherish the work of the Apostle Paul.  The version of Christianity that Paul writes about in the New Testament, in my opinion, has very little in common with the religious teachings of Jesus and, frankly, I often find Paul to be rigid, misogynistic, and prejudiced but then he will say something that makes me have to pause and give him another chance.

One of the ways that people in the first century divided themselves into racial and religious subgroups was by what they ate and how they ate it.  In the polytheistic world of the growing Roman Empire, small temples and altars were blended into the marketplace.  Most butcher shops were associated, in one way or another, was an altar to one or more gods.  So, if you bought meat in the marketplace, a part of it had likely been sacrificed to one of these gods.

Many pious people in those days would, on moral grounds, refuse to eat meat that had been sacrificed to an idol.  My father, a veteran of WWII, would refuse to ride in a Japanese automobile.  I have met people in Jordan who would not eat an orange if they thought it had been grown in Israel.  I do not eat in local restaurants that display campaign signs for Republican congressman, Billy Long.... If they would vote for Billy Long, how could I have confidence they know how to cook without poisoning us?

This is a basic competency test, right?

Paul is being very matter of fact in this letter to the church in Corinth.  Sacrificing the unusable parts of an animal on an altar doesn't change the spiritual character of either the meat or of the people who eat it.  The color of a person's skin, a person's nationality, religion or sexual orientation is, in the end, of no real consequence, unless, of course, you think it is.

Paul is fairly evolved on this point.  There is no reason to be prejudiced but, he cautions, give your sisters and brothers enough time and safety to get to the same place.  I am convinced of this truth about psychology..... people do not often change because they have been humiliated, criticized, or attacked.  They change when people love them enough for them to feel secure because it is only in that place of safety that we can genuinely give ourselves permission to change.

Now this is a tough challenge for us.  Our little progressive church exists, in many ways, for the express purpose of offering a liberating approach to faith that gives people permission to set aside the magical and superstitious thinking of traditional forms of religion.  Our challenge to conservative ways of thinking often comes across as being condescending, insulting, dismissive and is, on the whole, too controversial for most people to be able to accept it.

So there is a challenge.....how many steak dinners do you have to turn down because someone else in the restaurant believes that a good Christian can't eat meat that has been sacrificed to an idol?  How many times do you have water rather than beer because someone at the table with you thinks that alcohol is always sinful?

When do you put your foot down and refuse to go to a Catholic Church service because Catholics still won't ordain women, or to a Baptist or Assemblies of God church because they still condemn our gay and lesbian friends?  How do we talk about our progressive faith that is free of supernatural theism with all of its angles, demons, lakes of fire and streets of gold in the clouds, with making our traditional church going friends feel like we think they are stupid.... Even when we kind of do think that?

And now you will hear me say something that you do not commonly hear.... Where do we draw the line?  When do we say that we will no longer tolerate prejudice and ignorance?  Frankly, I don't know.  And honestly, I am afraid that more often than not, I have erred on the side of pushing for progress too hard.

What I know from my long term relationship with Charles is that I was able to grow out of a lot of stupid white-southern prejudice because he loved me enough not to give up on me.  And Charles has been able to grow out of a lot of his stupid heterosexual homophobia because I have always loved him in spite of himself.

So, in the battle between being right and being kind, in the contest between awareness and affection, between being insightful and being loving, in almost every case, we probably need to assume that being more loving is not just better but that it is more effective than just being smart.

I say that, not simply because it is incumbent upon preachers to favor love but because it, honestly, it works better.  If I could successfully insult my traditional Christian friends into opening their minds to be more progressive I would have done it a long time ago.

No one ever changes when they feel threatened.  We can really only grow in an emotionally safe environment.  It isn't just that love smells better and makes us feel good, sincere love is the fertilizer in which we all can grow.

Paul was telling his church friends to love one another long enough to give one another the chance to finish growing up.  And that is a message we can all stand to be reminded of from time to time.  You even have my permission to occasionally remind me that I said this in public.