Loving without Owning

March 29, 2015
An Observance of Baptism at Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

On Children by Kahlil Gibran        
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

One of my favorite gospel stories in John is the account of the healing of the man who was born blind.  In the 9th chapter of John, we read this story about a man who has been blind from birth and Jesus, according to the narrative, heals him but he performs this miracle on a Sabbath Day and so, John describes and ensuing controversy created by this violation of religious rules.

The part that I really love is when the religious leaders ask the man who had just been healed of a life-time of blindness where Jesus was, the man was able to say, "I don't know."  I love that.  The way John tells this story, Jesus was able to give a man a gift that was unimaginably wonderful and yet let him entirely free... free of guilt, free of obligation...free, indeed, of even knowing what Jesus did next.

He gave him a gift and left him free to do whatever a man who was finally set free from the limitations of blindness needed to do.

It is the freedom that attracts me to this passage of Kahlil Gibran's Prophet.  I find most of Gibran's work to be pretty shallow sophistry but I have never been able to get this passage about children out of my head.

His suggestion that we should not make our children into little replicas of ourselves. Our children do not belong to us.  They belong to the future. We give them life.  We care for them when they are sick.  We feed and house them.  We protect them when they are young and we worry about them for the rest of our lives.  But we do not own them and if we are good at being parents, they will leave us without the feeling that they owe us anything.

I hope that my daughter continues to visit me frequently in the future but I do not demand it of her and I fully accept that if I want to make that vital transformation from parent to friend, that I have an obligation to be a good friend.  I need to let go of any control, be sparing in offering opinions, and to be enjoyable when we are together.  I will do my best not to be a burden to her as I grow old and I will strive to leave her enough of an estate to make a difference in her life.  But there is no more contract between us.... Just love and a lot of great memories.

She has told me not to worry about retirement that when the time comes she will just move me into her house but I am afraid that she has told her mother the same thing and I know that I couldn't go through that again!... but I digress.


But talk about setting your children free into the future without tying them to the past has very real implications.  The religious and the non-religious, the conservative and the liberal, all have passionate feelings about children, specifically about babies, but opinions without personal sacrifice is just a spring board into hypocrisy.

The 19th century American evangelist, Alexander Campbell, said that if you get down on your knees and pray for something that you are not willing to then stand up and sacrifice and work to make happen that you are not only disappointing yourself, you are also insulting God.

For the past 40 years we have been vigorously debating whether or not a woman should have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.  The religious right joined arms with Catholic leadership in condemning abortion under virtually all circumstances.  And while those of us on the left have been inclined to support a woman's right to govern her own reproductive life, we have tried to call our sisters and brothers on the right onto the common ground of supporting children when they are born with good schools and access to health care.  That is a conversation that we seem to be having difficulty getting started.

In fact, a decade ago I published a column in which I pointed out that the abortion rate went down by over 50% during the Clinton administration, not because of restrictive laws regarding abortion but because of low unemployment and rising wages.  When women believe that it is economically possible for them to properly care for a child, then abortion becomes less and less likely.  Under economic hardship, it becomes more likely.

Conservative administrations try to make abortion illegal and if they can't do that they make it nearly impossible to obtain.  Now, in the state of Missouri, we have only one abortion provider and that is in St. Louis.  We have added a 72 wait that would require a young woman from our area to make a 400 mile round trip and spend three nights in St. Louis to obtain her legal rights.  So, I pointed out that it is one thing to make life hard on the poor but it is another thing to actually do something about it.  Conservatives pay lip-service to the value of human life while fostering the economic circumstances that make abortion happen more often.

I've received a lot of hate mail in response to my columns over the years but that was the only column that inspired a lengthy bit of hate mail from a local Catholic nun.  That may seem funny to you but I can tell you very honestly, that sister had some talent with a poison pen!

We may never all agree on the moral issues around reproductive decision making but if we cannot agree on making the personal and social sacrifices necessary to give newborns health care and decent housing and an opportunity to obtain a decent education then the rest of the conversation is really just smoke and mirrors hiding our selfish hypocrisy.  I assume that I don't need to say more about that.

Gibran talks about our children being the future and that sentiment has been really driven home to me this week as I learned that Chile has decided to make going to college tuition free... and they are doing it by adding a 24% tax on their corporations.

I was jealous when I heard that Germany was going to make their colleges tuition free.
Allowing the children of the poor to receive the same education as the children of the middle and upper middle class is a vote for the future generation in any country. In Germany, it was logical. Germany is very economically successful right now and they want to remain very competitive in the European and global market.

But Chile is a very poor nation that is not competitive at all.... Which is why it makes even more sense for them to sacrificially subsidize the education of their college kids.  Chile is deciding that they want to be the next first world economic power and they are doing it by liberating their children from the hurdle of college tuition or student loans.  At both ends of the spectrum, Germany and Chile, are sacrificing for their children.

You should already know but I am going to state it for the record, that is the opposite of what we are doing in the United States.  We are cutting education from our state and federal budgets so that the cost of going to college is constantly rising making it prohibitive to all but the economically secure.

As my next girlfriend, Elizabeth Warren, has been ardently pointing out, we are not only not helping our college students to go to school, we are burdening them with high interest student loans so that we can make a profit off of them!  (Look, Elizabeth, if you are watching this video, let's not let this get weird.... I know that you are happily married.... I was just kidding).

Every day our government loans money to banks at nearly 0% interest for the banks to use for their own profit.  But student loan rates are set to double this summer, ending up at over 6%.
We have members of this church whose student loan payment is higher than their house note and that fact alone makes them delay if not forego making the decision to have children.  What does that say about the future of America?

Germany and Chile are investing heavily in their young people's education, our government is currently taking over $50 billion in profit from poor and middle class students and so far has refused to even allow student to refinance at a lower rate if they can get a better deal at a bank.  We are feeding our own college students into the gristmill to make profits for the present moment as if we did not believe that America even has a future.

Look, we talk here about evidence based faith.  We talk about a spirituality that matters.  We need to get honest about how our talk and our actions don't match up when it comes to children.  Are children are the future and so we owe them a shot at a decent future and that takes more than telling them that we love them and saying that they are important.

Here in Missouri we need to expand Medicaid so that all of our children have access to health care.  We need to adequately fund our schools which means paying our teaches enough to keep good people in those positions.  We need to make our colleges and universities tuition free and make student loans interest free.

We need to shut off this insane school to prison pipe-line.  We need to decriminalize non-violent drug users and put resources behind addiction treatment rather than incarceration and life-long criminal records... in short, we need to stop stealing their futures before they get out of pre-school.

These may sound like big things.  You may feel like these things are out of your grasp.  But in a democracy, exactly whose grasp are they in?  If our kids are to have a future we have to stop saying that we care and start acting like we care, which includes voting as if it mattered.... Because it does.

Letting in the Greeks (and Mexicans, Haitians and Muslims)

Lent  5      March 22, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

John 12:20-23
20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, 'Sir, we wish to see Jesus.' 22Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23Jesus answered them, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

Max, a Mennonite pastor in Iowa City, was snatched from his home in the early morning hours of March 3rd, while his wife Gloria was in the shower and his four children were still asleep.  He was not abducted by criminals nor was he arrested by a local police force for some egregious crime.  Max Villatoro was arrested in immigration sweep aimed at deporting undocumented immigrants who were, officials said, the worst of criminal offenders.  What was Max's crime that brought the INS to his door?  He had applied for an Iowa drivers' license.  The consoling reassurance offered to his four children who are now between the ages of 7 and 15, is that if Max applies for legal immigration status and stays in Honduras for the next eight years, he may be approved to return.

All that Gloria has to do is support those four American children here in the USA for the next eight years while they grow up without a father.  Every case of undocumented immigration is not like Max and Gloria and every case of deportation is not as silly and unfounded as this one clearly is.  And I understand that no government can have totally open borders and still manage their economy and their crime rate.

I'm not saying that illegal immigration is not an issue, in fact, I'm saying that it is an issue... it is an issue that impacts crime, unemployment, school systems, taxes as well as families and that to this point our nation has not responded to the real issues in either a compassionate or a realistic manner.
There really are very few ethical issues about which our Jewish and Christian heritage is more clear than the issue of immigration.  In the early portion of Deuteronomy, in the giving of the law to the nation of Israel, it says in Chapter 10 that God is a defender of the weak and that the people of God are to be kind and generous with the aliens who live among them because, and this shouldn't be hard to understand, they had also been aliens in their heritage.

That really ought to translate easily for Americans because with very few exceptions, our families were once aliens in this nation.  I believe that my first patriarchal ancestor fled to America to keep his head on his shoulders after Cromwell fell out of power in England but, like most white people in America, I am certain that my family tree is made up of all kinds of northern Europeans who came to these shores to escape economic hardship in England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Holland and Eastern Europe.  Our black sisters and brothers generally have a much more ghastly tale of surviving the journey here in chains but as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, we came here in different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now.

Our Latino sisters and brothers have a more complicated tale.  Most of them carry both the blood of indigenous tribes and the blood of southern Europeans.  We tend to talk about them as if they are all immigrants but, in fact, most of the southern United States was once northern Mexico.  We occupied and took Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and Colorado.

In the mid 19th century, our federal government often tried to buy these territories from Mexico but they refused to sell at any price.  Abraham Lincoln was in congress when he bemoaned the fact that President Polk decided to use our army and navy to take what we could not buy.  Lincoln said: "...the president unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced a war with Mexico....The marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, un- provoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us."

A hundred and fifty years later, white Americans look around in these former Mexican states and ask, "How did all of these Mexican's get here?"  It may not be possible to simple create a unified North America in the way that the European Union seems to be coming together but something that recognizes the fact that there have not only been 19th century land grabs and deportations but we have been a player in the perpetual poverty and violence found in much of Central America.

It is the drug trade that is fueling the civil war in Mexico in which more than 40,000 Mexicans have lost their lives.  The drug money comes almost exclusively from the United States and almost all of the weapons and ammunition comes from the United States.  There are six thousand gun shops along our border with Mexico and there is only one legal gun shop in Mexico.... So when I say, "do the math" on that one, there is not much doubt.

We export sweat shops and prop up banana republics to keep fresh fruits and vegetables coming our way and we give them our used military equipment and ask them to stop their drug cartels and then we sell weapons to the drug cartels.  We are playing both sides of fence and then insisting that poor working families stay there because we don't want them bringing their criminal conduct here.

And even in that there is no small amount of hypocrisy.  We talk about e-verify and do sweeps to gather up and export undocumented workers but we always manage to turn a blind eye when migrant farm labor is needed to move up the west coast and the east coast when it is harvest time.

And even in our little entertainment Mecca of Branson that mothballs itself after the Christmas holidays, you don't seriously think that there are hotel maids and cooks that can afford to just take off from December to March on the salaries they earn there do you?  Branson is all white on stage and all brown behind the scenes.... Brown and undocumented.  And the farmers and business owners don't want the situation changed.  Otherwise they would have to pay a decent wage and have to comply with employment laws that they now conveniently ignore.

Xenophobes in the Tea Party and right wing talk radio talk about how the undocumented get on welfare, use up tax payer provided services and threated to cast Democratic votes....but, of course, the undocumented actually pay into Social Security and Medicare but they cannot draw benefits, so they are being forced to subsidize our tax system.  And they cannot vote without first obtaining citizenship no matter how long they live here in the shadows, mowing our grass, nailing in our roofing shingles, making our beds, cooking our food, and harvesting our groceries.

Behind all of the yelling about building a fence and blocking citizenship is just smoke and mirrors for insisting that no one change the status quo.  So we keep a cheap labor force that cannot go to court to protect their rights, have access to services, or even have a voice in the government they serve and support.

The most common trick of a stage magician is to get you to look at Bambi, his scantily clad assistant, or to watch the pigeon flying out of his hand while he is setting up his real trick with the hand you are not paying any attention to.  The most common trick of politics and the media is to get you to be mad at someone who is no threat to you so that you don't realize who is really robbing you blind.

I resist making references to Nazi Germany because unless the think you are comparing it to rises to the level of murdering 6 million people then you are wearing the analogy out.  But, if you will allow me in this instance to reference the fact that the Nazi's needed someone to blame for the social and economic woes of post WWI Germany and the Jews were a target made believable by constantly telling and retelling the same lies over and over again.

The real villains of society are always looking for someone to scapegoat to keep the sheep-people bleating about all of the wrong things.  Last summer, my second favorite economist, Robert Reich, said:
"The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion (and I would like to add, "illegal immigration"). It's insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street's gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy."

It is like the current conservative sand storm about wanting access to what Hillary Clinton wrote in her private e-mails but they don't want to accept responsibility for very publicly writing a treasonous letter to a foreign government that most of them signed.


I began today by reading a rather peculiar couple of verses from the gospel of John.  I don't think that this text accurate describes anything that Jesus actually said but rather it is an example of John's literary way of helping to transform the historical Jesus, who was likely a painfully sectarian Jew, into a more ethnically inclusive religious figure.

In this narrative, some Greek speaking Romans asked to have a conversation with Jesus, a request that had to be handed up the chain of command from Philip, to Andrew, to Jesus.  Jesus does not even reply directly to the request but, again, in this fictitious account, says something that seems to our ears to be entirely off topic.  Andrew says, "There are some Greeks who want to talk to you," and Jesus replies, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified."

In the Roger Ray's literal translation this reads, "Andrew says to Jesus, 'Hey, there are a couple of white guys who want to talk to you.' And Jesus replied, 'It must mean that this is the end of the world.'"

The fear, xenophobia, paranoia, that keeps the world divided into racial, national, tribal, class, and religious warring tribes needs to come to an end. That can only happen when we consistently refuse to be drawn into prejudice against whoever the real abusers try to scape-goat and we make a conscious effort to understand one another across racial, religious, class, national and even political divides.  Then the world as we have known it will come to an end and we will have a chance to see all of the sons and daughters of human kind glorified.

Coming to the Light

Lent  4    March 15, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

John 3:14-21
14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17 "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their  deeds were evil.
20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.
21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God."

I had a free day between lectures during my recent tour of Great Britain and my hosts in Glasgow Scotland very generously took me on a tour of their art museum, the university and the historical collection housed there.

Later we drove a few minutes south of the city to visit the remains of Antonine's Wall, the farthest north border of the Roman Empire.  The Romans wanted to rule the world and they did a pretty good job of accomplishing that.  They moved their boundaries from Caspian Sea all of the way through Europe and England right up to Scotland where Emperor Hadrian just decided that the Scots were too tough to beat and he built a wall there to keep the barbarians out.

Antonine', a successor in the second century, wanted to best Hadrian by pushing the Scots back another hundred miles.  He was only marginally successful for a very short time.  The Scots simply refused to be occupied and the Romans were, in a few years, beaten back to Hadrian's Wall.

Much of what they left behind is on display in the history museum on the campus of the University of Glasgow.

Less than a century ago, people in our area heated their homes by burning firewood in a fireplace, they carried water into their houses from a well or stream, and they had an outhouse in their backyard that stood over a hole in the ground.

Nearly two thousand years ago, the Romans had paved roads, sewers, aqueducts and they heated their homes against the cruel Scottish winters with under the floor radiant heat from hot air.

Samples of their household items along with their art, architectural facades and armament are awe-inspiring.  I have a feeling that if the Romans had managed to harness electricity and to develop the internal combustion engine that they no only would have conquered Scotland but we might all be speaking Latin right now....  Veni, vidi, vici

The culture that produced our New Testament was primitive in many areas of what is, to us, commonly understood science.... But in many aspects of philosophy and art, we may still be far behind.  They were giving birth to western civilization, battling the violent, ignorant, and dark aspects of humanity.

Of course, during my rather occasional access to the news while I was watching from across the pond, I realize that our civilization was struggling at a few rather similar points..... 47 American Senators sent a letter to the government of Iran to scuttle treaty negotiations aimed as preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

The Prime Minister from Israel spoke to our Congress, basically encouraging us to start a war with Iran because that would stabilize the middle east.... This is the same Israeli politician to who told our congress in 2002 that if only we would take Sadaam Hussein out of Iraq, that would stabilize the Middle East.... And yet this guy got the longest standing ovation in congress given to anyone in modern history as if he were a reliable source of information.

All the while, our politicians and media keep up the drum beat to make Isis the rock stars of terrorism because of their horrifying practice of public beheadings, still, both our government and most of our media is silent about the fact that Isis couldn't hold a candle to our long time allies, Saudi Arabia, where the government publicly beheads between 50 and 100 people a year, every year, and have been doing so for decades while taking huge amounts of support from American tax payers.

Mean while, our elite Secret Service, charged with protecting our first family, was found to be driving drunk on the White House lawn in the wake of their having allowed intruders into the White House, an armed racist nut job onto an elevator with the President and who have lately been found drunk in the hallways of foreign hotels after the prostitutes they had hired had locked them out of their rooms.

Just across the state line, young white college students raised in privilege yet still afraid of their dark skinned neighbors who have not yet tasted opportunity, sing racist songs to bolster their courage to defend a segregated social life against all decency and reason.

And, of course, here at home, we have been racing back towards the dark ages, limiting the long standing rights of women to manage their own reproductive lives, maintaining enforced poverty in low wages, restricting access to health care, and in nine days we'll go to the polls to see if our neighbors will take away civil rights protections from gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the trans community.

We have advanced technology but our civilization has not kept pace with the progress made in medicine, physics, and engineering. In many ways, it seems that our advanced communication techniques and our superior college and university systems have made us less informed and more morally indifferent.

So, when we read the New Testament, even though I have often reminded you of the clearly true fact that it was written by people who didn't know where the sun goes at night, an objective review of the current news could easily lead us to the conclusion that our culture doesn't know how to tell its left hand from its right.... So there is some attentive humility needed here.

The passage before us today is mostly very familiar to us.... Even if you only watch wrestling or baseball, you know John 3:16.... For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that those who believe in him might have eternal life.

And if you read on, the author further illuminates his views which, if I read it in context, I would insist that he is saying this as a corrective to some of the more threatening moralizing of Paul's letters..... he says that Jesus did not come to condemn but to save.

When I was younger we used to study the Bible to try to figure out how every line in it agreed with every other line in it.  It wasn't until much later that I realized that the Bible is not a single unified message from God to humanity it is rather a very public debate between groups of religious communities that very sharply disagreed with one another and they were often earnestly trying to correct one another.

One of Marcus Borg's last book projects before he died was to print the New Testament in the order in which it was written so that you could see how the thinking of the faith community was evolving in the early years....and, admittedly, not always evolving for the better.

But in this beautiful and much loved passage from the last of the canonical gospels, John, the author seems to be throwing reassurances our way.... God is not hostile towards us.  God does not view us, as the American revivalist preacher of the 18th century declared, "Thy God doth despise thee as a man who holds a spider over a flame."

No, John says, God loves you and sent Jesus to us to communicate that love.  But, again, if you keep reading, John still draws a very disturbing line in the sand, saying, Jesus didn't come to condemn those who believed in him, BUT!!! Read verse 18
Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

You think we are progressing towards a religion of love and away from all of the fear, guilt and judgment and then you see he was just building Hadrian's wall so that the decent civilized folks could be on one said and the crazy, barbarian, Scots would have to stay on the other.

I absolutely reject John's exclusivism in suggesting that Jesus was a talisman you hang around your neck to keep God from hating you.  What I have been trying to say to you for years.... And I apologize for how often I have said it indelicately as if you had to be jarred into rethinking this issue.... We do not despise the Christian Bible because it has cultural blinders.... We can love it because it has many great cultural insights to teach us.

But we can also debate with it just as it debates with itself.  John was talking about love in the midst of a violent empire.  He didn't get it all right and he wasn't entirely consistent about it and no one on earth in any period of history should know more about that than we do!

John was trying to set aside a religion of obligation, of piety, fear and exclusion.  He wasn't able to do it all at once.... And I'm right there.... It has not been a straight line for me from rural Kentucky evangelical faith to a more open and loving progressive approach and I still have some demons that need to be sorted out because such things do not go away easily.

John tried to project his insights onto the blank screen of a supernatural theistic God in the heavens above us who was the one who loved us.  I am convinced that all of that talk about the God who is up there is a fundamental failure to acknowledge that what can be known of God is known within the community.

It is not that a heavenly God has decide to forgo judgment and warfare against us and to love us in spite of ourselves.... The harder reality is that we have to forgo judgment and warfare against one another and to love others... and no just the ones who block your path in the grocery store aisles or who take up two parking places in the mall parking lot.

We have to love Muslims.... The peaceful ones and the ones that are acting really crazy right now.  We need to love immigrants.... The ones that came here two hundred years ago and the ones that came last week.  We need even to love the people who are going to vote against civil rights for our gay sisters and brothers, and for fraternity brothers that keep alive racist sentiments that were born in the shadow of the Civil War and have never been rooted out of our psyche.


White college students don't hate black college students.  They are afraid of them and the fear makes them do things that perpetuate the reasons why they are afraid.  Christians don't hate Muslims.... Its just that many Christians have been taught to fear Muslims.... And our one hundred year history of bombing Muslims perpetuates the very real reasons why we should be afraid.  Republicans and Democrats don't hate one another.... They fear being removed from power, from being moved from privilege to disadvantage when, clearly, their partisan bickering is hurting everyone.

John tries to make it sound noble.... God knew that we are crazy, violent, greedy, partisan, racist, homophobic, and dishonest but God loved us anyway and was willing to sacrifice for us to heal us.  What we need to say that we recognize that we have been lied to, disappointed, rejected, victimized, made to be simultaneously afraid and angry, wanting to ignore the world, right after we get revenge.... But we have decided in stead to love and to love in a way that will require some personal sacrifice in order to heal the world.

If you could bomb terrorists, punish criminals, and undermine political adversaries to make the world a prosperous and peaceful place, I would be all for it.... But we have tried that and it has not worked.

John says the way is through deciding not to judge... not to condemn... and to love sacrificially.  I don't think that we have tried that yet.  I think it might work.