Thinking about Another War

Proper 8   June 28, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

2 Samuel 1:19
Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places! How the mighty have fallen! 20 Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon; or the daughters of the Philistines will rejoice, the daughters of the uncircumcised will exult. 21 You mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew or rain upon you, nor bounteous fields! For there the shield of the mighty was defiled, the shield of Saul, anointed with oil no more. 22 From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan did not turn back, nor the sword of Saul return empty.
23 Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely! In life and in death they were not divided; they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
24 O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you with crimson, in luxury, who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.
25 How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
26 I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

1:27 How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished!

We have a text before us today, a text that describes the woe felt even by the winners of an ancient war.  But we are gathered here today at the end of an emotional week filled with both great sorrow and with, may I say, almost astonishing joy.

We entered this week still reeling from the murders of nine innocent people who had gathered in prayer and Bible study in Charleston, SC.... We entered this week struggling with both grief and our determination to make certain that these lives would not be forgotten, that their deaths would mean something.  There have been predictable delaying tactics and symbolic opposition but if I may say it just this way....things have gone so unpredictably well that it seems as if news commentators at Fox have almost been afraid to face the cameras in their studios.

Fifty years ago, as the Civil Rights movement began to draw numbers and show signs of potential victory, states across the south began to see Confederate flags in their cheap gifts shops and small minded state legislatures decided to display that flag as a part of their state flag or in their state capitols in order to tell the sons and daughters of African slaves to stay in their place.

In recent years the presence of those flags, especially in states where the black population is actually nearing a majority has become increasingly insulting.  The evil little man who murdered those nine members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston wanted to start a race war but because of the grace, the love, the willingness to forgive and to grieve without violence, on the part of the survivors in Mother Emanuel Church, there not only has not been a race war.... There has been a race peace.

Alabama and Mississippi have voluntarily taken measures to remove the Confederate flag from their capitols and I have confidence that the same will be true in South Carolina.... In fact, I hope to be there to see it with my own eyes..... I start driving tomorrow morning.

Friday I was still trying to enjoy the Supreme Court's decision that upheld the Affordable Care Act without gloating..... I'm really trying to keep the schadenfrueda out of my heart.... Some days, it is harder than others.

I was preparing to listen to President Obama's funeral eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinkney when the news arrived that the Supreme Court of the United States of America had rendered a decision that now ends the legal battle for marriage equality in America.  I started my public life of protest and demonstration during the Vietnam Era.  I'm not used to good news.  I'm used to being on the right side but in the minority, having to be satisfied with small gains, little victories, bits of progress around the boundary lines.

Real progress in eradicating racism, defense of access to health care for the poor, and equal rights for the LGBT community in one week is just about more than my 58 year old heart can stand.

In simpler days, when things are more stable, more predictable, most of us could not name more than two or three justices on the Supreme Court but in this turbulent era most of us know every member of the court, how old they are, who appointed them, where they go to church and often when one of them has a cold.

From the time the high court gave George W. Bush the 2000 election, which he did not win, to their decision to turn our government over to the highest bidder in the Citizen's United decision, some of us have had difficulty praying for their good health. Please allow me the luxury of understatement today, I am trying my best to be nice.

I had one mother and one father, none of my siblings are gay, and I'm not gay but the course of my life pushed me into a position where I either had to publicly defend gay rights or hate the man I had to look at in the mirror every day.  It was never my fight personally, but it has been my Waterloo, Little Big Horn, and D Day for most of my adult life.

The Supreme Court does not have the power or the authority to wipe out prejudice, but you would have to have a cold hard place in your chest where your heart is supposed to be not to recognize that we have won.  Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, our sisters and our brothers are free at last.

So let's take a moment for our viewers on line and those of you gathered here today to congratulate one another, to thank those who have kept up the drum beat, who have worked, sacrificed, been fired, and taken personal risks to see this day arrive.  The most controversial and difficult battle of our adult lives is over and we have won.

Please, let's try not to gloat, name call, demean, or alienate those who hear our "amens" and "hallelujahs" with sorrow.  Let's try to create a path for them to find their way into the celebration of the breaking of chains and the liberation of love.

Expanding health care coverage, removing exemptions for pre-existing conditions, and offering subsidies for those of us who don't have group insurance has lowered health care costs while bringing better health care to millions.  Removing the absurd restrictions the gay and lesbian couples in America have suffered under will stabilize families and will actually have a sizable boost to the economy in home ownership and joint pension and investment holdings.

This week's political "wins" have almost no downside.  But there are battles that even when you win, you have still lost.  If I may return to this Old Testament text we have before us today from 2 Samuel, and I don't expect any of you to be especially interested in the history of ancient Judah, but let me just say that this passage comes at the end of a civil war and it is spoken in voice of the guy who won the war and yet he is full of lament and grief.

David has won a throne.  He is king but both his foes and his friends lay dead on the battlefield.  How the mighty have fallen.

Before we invaded Afghanistan or Iraq, more than 20 years ago, Sting sang this line in a song about losing faith:
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse
Sometimes musicians are prophets.  There may have been times in history when nations went to war to resolve their differences and there were boundary lines drawn and issues settled.... I'm not a historian, I'm willing to believe that sometimes that method worked and had defensible outcomes.  I'm pretty sure, however, that those days are now over.  The unintended outcomes of military solutions are almost certain to be worse than the goals that are accomplished.

There are things to hate about Isis, there are human rights violations enough to sicken our souls in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, in China, in Russia, in Israel, and in the Sudan.... There are crises that cry out for solutions but almost none of them have solutions that can be found at the end of a bayonet.

Shortly before he died, Howard Zinn spoke at Boston University and in that speech he pointed out what should be the obvious fact that:

Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.

Maybe it has not always been this way but it has certainly been this way during my adult lifetime.  We send the children of the poor in our nation to go and kill their children of the poor in another nation and then we sit back and are astonished that it never turns out well.

No one disputes the fact that Saddam was a bad guy but by invading the country we have only made matters worse, killing ten times as many innocent citizens as Saddam killed and, after such excessive violence, we created Isis and now the survivors are much worse off.

I'm not saying that we should do nothing in the face of tyrants and human rights atrocities, I just think that we need to recognize that military action will almost never provide the solutions we want.  Saudi Arabia beheads many more citizens than Isis and, in fact, this year they are on track to set a record and they are one of our closest trading partners.  We have influence in Saudi Arabia and we are not using it.

For centuries there were regional wars between Spain, England, France, Germany... but they are too smart to do that anymore.  70 years ago Germany was bent on world domination but they made the mistake of using armies to accomplish that.  Now they are nearing domination of Europe though advances in technology and the marketplace.... While we are footing the bill for most of their national defense.
China has often been portrayed as a looming competitor with the United States so we're trying to build up a navy big enough to contain a continent while they are building solar panels and wind farms.  We may very well fall into the same trap that snared the Soviet Union in the 1980's.... we may exhaust our nation's resources on military expenditures until we defeat ourselves through economic collapse while China becomes the dominant world player through superior infrastructure and technology.

It should be obvious that our navy will be as useful as a manual typewriter in a computer lab.  We have had the luxury of fabulous national wealth to allow us to go on as if it were 1945, dragging our feet on developing national health care that other nations took care of 50 years ago.  While other nations are making higher education either free or at least very affordable, we are creating for profit colleges and making education less and less accessible, literally dumbing down our nation through economic mismanagement.

I'm grateful for the advances we have made, especially in matters of social liberties though even there we are decades behind other developed nations.  But nowhere are we more out of sync with reality as we are in the universe of military spending and foreign policy.

If all you have is a hammer, the whole world can look like a nail.  I know that we can be smarter than that, and as a pastor, as a spiritual person, as someone who hopes to stir the conscience and inspire the hearts of people, I know that we can be better than we have been.

We need to send more teachers and engineers abroad than we send soldiers.  We don't need more drones and fighter planes; we need alternative energy sources so that we can stop fouling the earth's atmosphere. We don't need more aircraft carriers and battleships; we need to be building water purification plants and desalinization facilities to give clean water to the world. Nothing creates peace like a stable economy and safe environment.

America has been rich and we have been powerful.  Now, in the 21st century, it is time for us to be smart and good....And then we can again say that the United States is the greatest country in the world.

So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and -- yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It's not that we're going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we'll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably -- inevitably -- the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it's not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. and to think, you know, we're at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we're sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.

We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start.

In the Wake of the Emanuel AME Church Murders

Proper 7    June 21, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Job 38: 1-2, 4-7
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?            
I'm working on a new book, a collection of essays edited from the last several years of my columns in the Springfield NewsLeader. The last essay I worked on before shutting up for the day on Wednesday was one about gun control entitled, "America after Sandy Hook."  After that December 2012 tragedy in which a lone gunman killed 20 children and six adults, it had seemed like reform was inevitable. 

Though we have between 80 and 90 gun deaths in America every day, this incident, this nightmare, this horror of the deaths of so many children in one school on one day.... Surely this would cut through the opposition, the indifference, the NRA bribed congress and we would finally find some sanity in America.  There was a lot of talk, some promises, but the weeks went by and people got interested in other things.... Paula Dean was caught saying the "n" word.... The Duchess of  Cambridge had a baby...George Zimmerman was found to be not-guilty when we all knew that he was.....people forget, they move on....and the deaths of the children in Sandy Hook Elementary ended up meaning nothing at all on a national level.

When I got home Wednesday evening and sat down to watch the news, like all of you, I found myself going back to the familiar territory of shock and horror.  A racially motivated young man went into the Wednesday evening prayer meeting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC and executed, murdered, shot, the pastor and eight other church members while shouting out racial epithets from a hundred years ago.... Emotions, beliefs, prejudices, that should be as consigned only to ancient history just as the Confederate flag that still flies over the capitol in Columbia, SC should only be seen in a history museum.

Two weeks from today I will be preaching at the Unitarian Church in Columbia and if that flag is still flying over the capitol I may not be out of jail in time for our service the following Sunday but I am sure that you will understand.

Today the survivors of this horrible mass murder have the sympathy of the world.  Sure, the media and the web have been ablaze with the absurd outliers.... The NRA board member who said that now deceased Pastor, Clementa Pinckney, was personally responsible because he objected to people being allowed to carry concealed weapons into church.... Or the Fox News commentators who initially tried to deny the racial nature of the murders saying that it happened because liberals have led a war on Christianity, some even saying that we pastors should arm ourselves so that we could shoot anyone who threatens us....but these people are too stupid to be allowed to rent any space in our skulls.  They should be summarily ignored and not even be shown the attention of being ridiculed by TV talk show comedians.

Just as I have resolved not to mention the names of shooters in these mass murders and I do not want to recount their story or in any way make them famous for being such evil people, I don't want to dissect the misinformation and propaganda being spewed by conservative talk shows and by Fox News.  I just want to implore you to do the one thing that will hurt them all the most.... Don't watch their news programs, don't listen to their radio programs, and don't repeat the names and messages of murderers.

There is very little reason to even talk to the kind of people who say, "guns don't kill people, people kill people."  I dare say that there has never been a person so deceived as to have ever believed that mantra but anyone who says it has already abdicated any fealty to reason or information and I have no interest in engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.

Still, I recognize that this is not just a gun issue.  I know that the mentally ill have much greater access to lethal weapons than they have access to counselors and appropriate medications.  And I know that there is a serious addiction problem in our nation and that many of the worst crimes committed in our nation are committed by people under the influence of drugs.....illegal and prescription drugs.

And, in the case of this mass murder in a church, there is clearly and unmistakably a racial motivation. And the opponents of gun violence will try to play the game of diverting attention and blame to all sorts of other issues to prevent the one conversation that this nation must have which is that no other developed nation has this kind of problem and the only difference is that those nations have strict gun laws and we don't.

There are literally millions of responsible gun owners who know how to handle, store, and keep their guns safely but when there are hundreds of millions of guns floating around in our nation, there is no reasonable way to keep all of those guns safe.
We do everything that we can conceivably do to minimize deaths from car accidents or product safety issues and yet we do everything possible to make it easier and easier for a crazier and crazier population to kill more than 30,000 Americans a year.

As tragic as the Emanuel Church murders were, those nine deaths represent only 10% of the people that were killed by guns on Wednesday in America!
The NRA uses their lobbying power to do everything they can to keep us from talking about the annual carnage in America. They have made it illegal to sue gun manufacturers for product liability.  They have made it illegal for the CDC to even research and keep records on gun deaths.  They fight even the most obvious and minor restrictions on the number of guns you can buy, the amount of ammunition, the kinds of weapons or even things like cop killer bullets and hundred round drums for semi-automatic weapons.

I am all about reasoned debate and a negotiated solution to any problem but when you don't have anyone with whom to negotiate in good faith.  If facts, information, research, and critical thinking are ignored or suppressed, then we just have to stop feeling that we have to gain the agreement or the permission of the most militant of NRA gun enthusiasts.  They have demonstrated themselves to be, as Jon Stewart has observed, more dangerous to Americans than Isis, and we need to give them no more space in the conversation than we would give to any domestic terrorist organization. We don't need the permission of the NRA to bring sanity back to America.

The lectionary reading before us today is one of those alternative voices from our ancient scriptures.
Most religious people, then and now, were inclined to insist that God is in charge of everything and that everything happens for a reason.  God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked.  We have told one another that the Lord will provide, that the Lord is our shepherd, that the Lord will never give you more than you can bear, and, I love this one, "all things work together for good for those who love the Lord."

But the person who wrote the Book of Job was calling BS on that line of religious jargon.  He had seen the wicked prosper and the righteous get nothing but a raw deal. Job, for 40 chapters, shakes his fist at heaven and tells God that the world is not fair, that horrible things happen that don't make any sense, and, in point of fact, not only do not all things work together for those who are faithful but in fact, the faithful often seem to be the first be the objects of genocides, false arrests, holocausts, beheadings, bombings, and mass shootings during a prayer meeting.

In the end God actually shows up in the Book of Job and confirms Job's accusation is true... he tells him that the world isn't fair and that he doesn't get an explanation... it just is.

Hundreds of years later some ancient Palestinian fundamentalist wrote a theologically terrible new ending to the book and tried to make everything seem okay because Job got new kids, a bigger house and new cash but that's not how the real world works.

And here, men and women, I'm coming down firmly on the side of the minority voice of scripture.  The universe is not going according to some Divine plan.  The universe is capricious, full of chaos.
The universe is devoid of meaning, entirely, unless you bring meaning to it.  Lots of religious people have been quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.'s response to the church bombing in which four children lost their lives more than 50 years ago.  King talked about "redemptive suffering".... Suffering that means something because it changes the world.  You can say that Christ's suffering on the cross, Dorothy Day's imprisonments, Gandhi's hunger strikes, Romero's beatings at the hands of the police... you can say that these are redemptive suffering but I will tell you that there were just examples of senseless violence UNLESS someone makes it mean something.

The universe is capricious and chaotic and devoid of meaning unless you bring meaning to it.  The deaths of those 20 children in Sandy Hook Elementary were not redemptive because we let them die in vain.  We didn't get gun laws changed, no far from it, gun sales skyrocketed.  And all of that insane talk about "Obama's gonna take our guns,".... Both times that Obama has been elected, gun sales went through the roof.... They have not been able to keep ammunition in stock on the shelves at Bass Pro Shops here for years, the most dangerous people on earth buy it up as soon as it arrives.

Suffering in injustice is not automatically redemptive.  It isn't automatically anything at all.  What you do about it, how you react to it, how you change the world.... That makes it either just 9 more graves in a Charleston, SC graveyard, or this event becomes the moment when the world is changed.
 In John Irving's wonderful fiction novel, Cider House Rules, the aging Dr. Larch keeps telling one of the orphans in his care, Homer, to be useful.

The setting of the novel involved ethically challenging circumstances around abortion and caring for unwanted children but the advice of Dr. Larch reaches through the pages of fiction into our real life situations.  Homer does not want to take Dr. Larch's place as the sometimes physician to orphans and sometimes illegal abortion doctor because he does not want to play God.  Dr. Larch points out that in fact we owe it to the world to play God because to do nothing is, in effect, playing the part of an evil god.

Pastors often disappoint me because they try to remain popular by always taking a neutral position on every earthly moral dilemma which is the opposite of what we have pastors for in the first place.  As Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, said, "Take sides.  Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed."

I wish that evil were personified and living in a single crazy shooter who we can arrest, put on trial and execute.... I wish it was that simple..... but you know it isn't.

Blood has been spilled... innocent blood... this can be the blood of martyrs or it can be just the blood of victims of a violent crime.  How you react makes the difference.  I implore you, this time, don't get distracted.  Don't forget.  Don't move onto the next exciting news story.  Stay on this one until it becomes redemptive.  Make yourselves useful. Sacrifice for social justice. Being neutral doesn't make you good unless your goal is to be a paperweight.

I am begging you to play god.

American Exceptionalism Revisited

Proper  6    June 14, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Ezekiel 17:22-24
Thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.

On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.
All the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the LORD have spoken; I will accomplish it.

Mark 4:30-32
He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."                 

Visitors to the famous Tower of London are treated to what might be called a "home on the range" displays of English history... because, while you will see the Crown Jewels and many historical artifacts, "seldom is heard a discouraging word" about England.  Twenty years ago, when I first visited the Tower of London, which had been used as a prison during the 16th and 17th centuries, they were displaying a rather more honest depiction of what it had been like to be a prisoner in this above ground dungeon.

The torture devices where shocking.  Iron skull masks with spikes pointed inward that could be screwed tighter and tighter to kill a prisoner over months of agonizing pain.  There were racks and whips and weapons that, frankly, made me mild suspicious of everyone with an English accent.

But now, if you see a commercial with someone with an English accent on TV, you can bet that they are trying to sell you something that is either terribly over priced or that it absolutely does not work.  For some reason, in spite of having had to fight a very bloody war to gain independence from England, Americans are still so smitten with the Brits that we will believe almost any manner of hogwash delivered to us with an English accent.

Growing up in the former British colonies, we were reared on movies like Mary Poppins, and nearly every Disney animated cartoon from Peter Pan to 101 Dalmatians, to view the English as being terribly sophisticated and the authors of modern civilized behavior.  This is, of course, nothing but deceptive propaganda.

Every nation creates a narrative for itself in which they can narcissistically put themselves on a pedestal and declare that their nation is the greatest nation in the world.  If you remember the comedy film released a few years ago, Borat, this sense of absurd self-worship was especially on display as he sang a fictitious version of the national anthem of Kazakhstan.  It gets too ribald for me to repeat here towards the end but it starts out saying:

"Kazakhstan greatest country in the world - all other countries are run by little girls. Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium! Other countries have inferior potassium...... Kazakhstan, friend of all except Uzbekistan, they very nosey people with bone in their brain."

Of course, Borat, was an entirely fictional comedy but, you know, laughter is, psychologically speaking, a pleasant reaction to surprise.  That is why you don't laugh at old jokes.... If there is no surprise, generally speaking, it isn't really funny anymore.
But even though Borat is trying to be funny by being so absurd, think about some of the nationalistic claims nations really do make that no longer surprise us.

Christians and Jews treasure an ancient book in which Jews three thousand years ago wrote about themselves that they are God's chosen people and that God gave them a land that was, ironically, already entirely occupied by another nation. Now, if you think about it..... that's more absurd than saying that your potassium is better than everyone else's potassium and that the people in Uzbekistan are nosey and have a  bone in their brains..... and yet,
Thousands of years later, we have American preachers standing up in pulpits announcing that the Jews are God's chosen people and God have Israel to the Jews without ever noticing how very ironically convenient it is that a book they wrote gives them clear title to a land they stole by killing its inhabitants and swearing that God told them to do it.

And no less a person than Abraham Lincoln used this imagery to describe the United States of America as "God's almost chosen people," and claimed that the Almighty was using him to accomplish the Divine goal of making America a new promised land that was established by killing the people who lived here and taking their land.  We don't laugh at these claims only because we grew up being taught to believe that such outrageous claims were true.

We still celebrate Columbus Day as a national holiday in America even though we know that Columbus landed on Caribbean islands and led in a wholesale genocidal slaughter of the natives he found there and led in enslaving the survivors.

Europeans began importing captured African slaves to work on those island plantations, only after they had worked the indigenous people into extinction.  Please forgive me if it seems that I am belaboring this point but I wanted to set the context for these two passages of scripture we are looking at today.

Our first text is from that confident and self-laudatory passage in Ezekiel in which the prophet poetically says that God is going to take a little sprig of cedar (representing the tiny nation of Judah) and will make it grow to be the tallest tree in the forest and all of the birds of the air will come and build their nests in its branches..... a very poetic way of saying that they will one day dominate all of their other nations of the world.

Our second lesson is from the gospel of Mark where Jesus makes fun of Ezekiel's image of Judah as a dominant nation.  Jesus says, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

In spite of the way that text was read to us in Sunday School, let me invite you to hear the subtle joke that Jesus is telling.
The mustard plant was not the tallest plant in the garden... it only grows to be about 18 inches tall.  It is not a strong plant.... It dies in the first frost... and no bird that valued its own survival would build a nest in a plant so close to the ground.  In fact, in spite of how much nutritionists tell us today, people in Jesus' day only fed mustard greens to their cattle.  Kale, spinach and mustard greens only became edible when non-Jews realized that when you cook them with bacon that they are actually quite tasty, though decidedly not kosher.              

Jesus was making the nationalism of his peers sound more like a scene in Borat than a passage of sacred scripture...which might help to explain why they killed him.  Jesus was not a politician who said things to appeal to his base... he tried to help his own people to be self critical, to think about the absurdity of domination.

When our Declaration of Independence was published, it talked about the high ideals of liberty and justice but we know that in 1776 the majority of people were not afforded either liberty or justice.... Certainly not black African slaves, not indentured servants, not the Indians and Mexicans we were killing to take their land, and even the majority of the population, meaning all women, were not afforded the justice or liberty of full citizenship.

America has not become a great nation because God chose us as Divine favorites or because this is an economic promised land.... We become great when we ended slavery, when we extended the right to vote to women, when we paid reparations to the Japanese who were interred and robbed of their property and businesses.  And we have the potential to be more exceptional when we get real about immigration laws, especially when it applies to Latinos who are living in lands that we stole from them.  And we will have nationalistic bragging rights when we finally find the morality to bring an end to poverty.... A task which we can easily accomplish whenever we decide that we are willing to stop currying favor with the rich and start to treat the poor as if they were our brothers and sisters.

May I take just a moment to remind you that each of those very real and substantive steps towards justice did not come about through legislative decree... they happened when Americans decided to set aside the propaganda and to deal courageously with the truth.  Congress didn't provide the moral leadership, it was radicals who suffered abuse and imprisonment.... People like Dorothy Day, like Black Elk, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Listen to our political rhetoric today.... Jeb Bush can say that single mothers should be publicly shamed in order to prevent irresponsible behavior... but he is not called a radical.  Rick Santorum can say that gay couples are the moral equivalent of man on dog sexual relationships and he is not thought of as being crazy. Marco Rubio can deny all of the scientific evidence that points to human causation of global climate change and yet he is called the savior of the Republican Party.

But let Ron Paul suggest that using drones to kill thousands of innocent civilians should be stopped and he is described as being unelectable.  Elizabeth Warren says that we should stop making money off of student loans to struggling lower and middle class families and refinance those loans at the same rate we charge banks and corporations to borrow money and she is said to be an extremist.  Bernie Sanders points out that income disparity is killing the American economy and driving the middle class into extinction and he is called a radical who is too far off the scale to be a serious candidate.

Clear, incontrovertible, scientific and mathematical facts are being labeled as crazy, while militaristic, classist, misogynistic anti-poor, anti-immigrant, and totally irrational religious claims are passively accepted and go unchallenged by our corporate owned media.

What this church is trying to do is to speak a word of sane, rational, and critical thinking reality to a nation that wants to be exceptional but can't quite stand the light of reality....we're just trying to do when Jesus did when he talked about mustard seeds... most of the religious universe thinks we crazy which only means that we need to be louder and more persistent.

Winston Churchill famously said that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.  Well, my fellow Americans.... I think that we can now officially say that we have tried everything else and now it is time for us to do the right thing.