Right Speech

August 30, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Before you speak, ask yourself if what you are going to say is true, is kind, is necessary, is helpful.  If the answer is no, maybe what you are about to say should be left unsaid. Bernard Meltzer

My father was a stutterer.  The professionals who study stuttering do not agree on its causes.  Some say it is a neurological problem, others say that it is environmental.  It does tend to run in families and is more prevalent in some social subgroups than others.  And generally it is a malady of childhood that resolves itself in time.

In my father's case, however, he was the only one in the family who had the problem and it got worse as he got older.  I am certain that his horrific experiences in WWII made it worse.  For him it was a nervous disorder and it was a serious handicap that made him self-conscious and held him back from having the confidence to further his education or his career.

Like the country music singer, Mel Tillis, my dad could sing without stuttering but when he was upset about something, which he was a lot of the time, he could hardly talk.

So, when in graduate school I came across research into stuttering, I was naturally very interested.  Researchers were surprised to discover that among many Native American tribes, there was no instance of stuttering and in their native languages; there was no word for stuttering.
As with anything anyone says about the Indian nations, you can't generalize the whole of what amounted to many different tribes with some unique genetic markers, but still, something that is a problem for about 1% of the population everywhere else to simply not occur in many native tribes was remarkable.

Further research indicated that the tribes where there was no stuttering that children were raised fairly permissively with no expectations placed on them for any public performance competition in speaking, storytelling, or religious rituals.  That is, kids grew up not being shamed or pressured into situations where they were judged harshly and in the absence of fear and shame, there was no halting speech, no anxiety about peer judgment or rejection.

And even those who want to insist upon a neurological explanation for stuttering have to admit that all of the effective treatments are psychological... not to say that physiology doesn't play a part but it seems evident that stuttering is just one possible reaction to a mean world.

There are lots of birds, animals, fish, and even insects that have developed language of sorts that they use in their mating rituals, in hunting, defending their territory, and even in nurturing their young.  However, humans, the most evolved and advanced of language capable beings are the only ones that have developed the ability to destroy another person's life simply through the use of language.... Which, if anyone is watching my grammar closely, might cause one to question the use of the word "evolution" in this paragraph because evolution implies improvement.  The ability to insult, slander, destroy people's reputation, rob them of self-confidence, and push them to the point of self-loathing or even suicide, can hardly be called an evolutionary advance.

Ironically, the better we have become at communicating, the more efficient we have become in using communication to hurt people.  In marriage counseling, we teach conflicted couples to talk to one another while touching one another.  The more distance there is between two people the more likely they are to use abusive, angry, or violent language.

If there is a table between you, or if one is standing on the other side of the room, the conversation is more likely to turn ugly.  It is very difficult to raise your voice when you are holding hands looking into one another's eyes.  However, turn that into a phone call, or a letter, or especially an email and things can get ugly pretty fast.

Social media sites on the internet are great for staying in touch with family and friends, showing pictures of our kids, sharing our travels and some people even feel obliged to share photos of their meals and keep us up to date on the antics of their cats.  But social media, because it is communication at a distance, is also rife with insults, put-downs, slander, gossip, and lies.

The New Testament, written two thousand years before the launching of Face Book, includes a stern warning in the third chapter of James that says that the tongue is like a small flame that can set a forest on fire. If James had only known about how you could comment on line about people's articles, or send hate-filled emails to total strangers around the globe, he might have called the tongue a flamethrower rather than a small fire.

Even humor is something we should take seriously.  Almost every joke has a victim.
We talk about negative humor but it is nearly impossible to tell a joke that doesn't come at someone's expense and the rhetoric only heats up when the brunt of our jokes is a public figure, especially a politician who is running for office.

I took as our wisdom lesson today, a quote from an unusual source.  Bernie Meltzer was a popular radio talk show host in New York during the 70's and 80's. Even though the title of his show was "What's Your Problem?"..., which, in his New York studio, could have been translated, "Hey, whatsamatta you?" he was still concerned with civility.  He said:

Before you speak, ask yourself if what you are going to say is true, is kind, is necessary, is helpful.  If the answer is no, maybe what you are about to say should be left unsaid. 

There are things that are true that are neither helpful nor kind. There is a way that you can be so right that you are wrong and one of those ways is by pushing a personal agenda in a way that harms others unnecessarily. There are times when you can be satisfied simply with knowing that you are right without trying to get your spouse to acknowledge that fact! We should not remain silent about important things out of fear but there are times when we can choose to be silent out of love or basic kindness.

We have heard a lot in this campaign year about "political correctness," and even when Megan Kelly asked candidate Donald Trump a serious question about his dismissive language about women, Latinos, and the Chinese, he dismissed the question as being just another political correctness matter and the crowd burst into applause.

And, I'll admit, as a writer and a public speaker, I also sometimes find it infuriating to be called out on what seems to me to be harmless and insignificant issues.  I got called out a few months ago for using the word "transgendered" in an article in which I was defending the civil rights of our local trans community.

Because for many people who are changing their gender identity, it is not a past tense event but an ongoing and sometimes even a fluid thing.... So they prefer to be called transgender rather than the past-tense, transgendered.  It seems a bit picky to me except that I am not a member of the trans community and so maybe I should just call them what they want to be called.

In a sermon a few years ago, I referred to a bi-racial child as being mulatto. I had no idea that the word was offensive.  In fact, it is a Spanish word that is used in Latin America where it evidently is not offensive but it is here.  Again, I am not the son of a mixed race marriage so maybe I should just not use a term that offends people who are.

After becoming a father by means of international adoption, after sleepless nights, bottles, dirty diapers, added expenses, babysitters, clothes, shoes, and even college, now and then someone will ask me, "Do you know anything about her real parents," and when they ask that all I can think of is if there is a good place to hide the body of the person who asked me that insulting question...because the two teenagers who had sex in Seoul, Korea one night 26 years ago are not the ones who folded the laundry, paid the tuition, and rushed to several scenes where she had wrecked her car....again.

People who never adopted a child may mean no harm in asking such a question but I'm suggesting that it is in everyone's best interest for them to watch what they say.

Jeb Bush got himself in trouble recently by using the term "anchor baby" in reference to the children of illegal immigrants who gain American citizenship by virtue of being born here. It's one of those messy little provisions of the American Constitution!

He tried to mend fences with the Hispanic community by saying that he really wasn't talking about Hispanics, he was just talking about Asians.... Which was a fairly incomprehensible move to me but I am no one to explain the reasoning of Republican candidates.

It even strikes a tad close to home for Louisiana governor and presidential candidate, Bobby Jindal, who was born in Louisiana to non-citizen parents who were here on student and work visas who only became citizens after Bobby was born.... Oh, and Bobby is not his real name... it is the name of his favorite character on The Brady Bunch.

His name is Piyush Jindal... that's not relevant except that I wish that he could remember to be both thankful for how he gained his citizenship and be gracious to others whose claim to citizenship is not much different.

I am, in that regard, an anchor dad.  My daughter's only claim to American citizenship is because she was adopted by an American citizen but I think that America is a much better place because she is here. I hope to be able to feel the same way about Piyush Jindal but he is testing me a bit.

You see what I meant about humor almost always having a victim?

This church came into existence with the state purpose of being a prophetic church that spoke the truth to power, as a voice for the poor and the marginalized.  We speak the truth in public protests, demonstrations, letters to the editor, and we would even in town hall meetings if only our congressman would hold town hall meetings that admitted anyone other than his donors.

The challenge I want to bring to you today is to be bold, courageous, outspoken, well-informed, and prophetic, and I am asking you to do your best to do those things in a way that is kind, considerate, even loving because this world can be so mean that it can make a child stutter, and make many more hide their gifts and their potential because they are afraid of being criticized or shamed.

We want to bring light and not so much heat into the world. We want to be the salt of the earth, not the anti-freeze in people's Gatorade. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with us.

Who is a Terrorist Today?

August 23, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." Mignon McLaughlin

It will soon be two years since this world lost one of our truly bright lights.  Nelson Mandela died as the beloved former president of South Africa, the first national leader of that country who was of black African descent.  Trained as a lawyer, Mandela worked against the colonial policies of the white minority government of South Africa.

During the sixties, when we were trying to break down the walls of segregation in our schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches, in South Africa, the machinery of Apartheid was being strengthened.  Here, a majority white population was just starting to come to terms with their abuse of an impoverished and vulnerable black minority.

In South Africa, where whites were in the minority and the sheer population of Blacks was so large, the white government sought to violently and with uncommon cruelty, to keep the black majority in poverty and in submission.

Nelson Mandela's brilliant opposition to Apartheid made him a target of the government.  He was put on trial in 1962 under the charge of trying to overthrow the government.  He spent 27 years in prison on an island where the temperatures were almost always over 100 degrees.  He did manual labor in that sweltering heat and his eyes were so damaged by the bright sun shining on the rocks that he had to wear sunglasses, even indoors, for the rest of his life.

Most of his fellow prisoners died in that nightmarish place.  Mandela endured, with nothing but a bucket for a toilet, no bed but the concrete floor, he survived their brutal torture and starvation.  Peace activists around the world advocated for Mandela's release and the government finally offered to release him if he would take an oath never to resort to violence in the pursuit of black liberation.

Let me tell you, after a week on Robben Island, I would have taken any oath to get free.  But Mandela refused to swear to something that he did not mean, and he could not revoke the black African's right to fight for their freedom.

In the end, he did not have to.  When he was released, working with such amazing peers as Bishop Desmond Tutu.  In 1993 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  In 2002, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

You probably knew all of that but what you may not have known is that the United States kept Nelson Mandela on the official terrorist watch list until 2008.  President Bush removed him from the list to avoid the potential international embarrassment of still having him on the list when he died.

Both President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared him to be a terrorist because he opposed the white Apartheid government of South Africa, and both the United States and Great Britain were heavily economically invested in South Africa.  Anyone who threatens our profits can easily be seen to be a terrorist.

Even though there were many votes in congress during the 70's and 80's to oppose Apartheid, those efforts failed, in large part due to the tireless opposition of then Congressman Dick Cheney. . . . that man has been charming for decades!

Our church is very young, just seven years old this month, but the month before we held our first service, Nelson Mandela, one of the most beloved international heroes of peace and racial harmony, was still on our terrorist watch list.

Folks, the Apartheid government of South Africa was guilty of all kinds of violence that could easily be seen as terrorism... terrorism against the majority of the people in South Africa but our government called Mandela the terrorist and supported the white Apartheid regime.

When you think about the heroes of modern times... Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers, Oscar Romero, all of these people were labeled as communists, socialists, anarchists.  All of them spent time in prison.  Most of them were tortured and several were murdered.  During their active life time, the established powers of government, banking, and even of the church labeled them as being dangerous, as terrorists, and criminals.

It is only in history that they are redeemed and remembered as being the transformative characters of our age. They had to be willing to be reviled, threatened, alienated, lied about, smeared in the media, and abused and to still stay faithful to the cause of justice and liberation.

Mandela was kept on a rock in the ocean where he was not even allowed to have access to news.

They would sometimes manage to steal a bit of an old newspaper and they passed it around among the prisoners like it was the most precious of commodities.  They wanted Mandela to believe that the world didn't care, that he had been forgotten.  They wanted him to believe that what he said, what he did, didn't matter... that no one noticed, that the world had not changed and would not change.

27 years, and he kept the faith. I can't think of anyone in the Bible whose story would compare to the story of Mandela.  He was a modern saint but to our government, he was a terrorist and we should never ever forget that.

The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said:  "A reasonable man adapts himself to the world, and unreasonable man insists that the world adapt to him. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."

The unreasonable women and men of our current history may be the ones we will later recognize as the most important thought leaders among us.  Of course, what I really hoping is that one of you will be sufficiently unreasonable that you will be that person.

I don't want to use the pulpit to encourage cynicism but I do want to foster skepticism.  I know that those two might sound an awful lot alike but I want to take just a couple of minutes to try to make an important distinction.

Cynicism can become its own reward.  Cynicism, as Father Henri Nouwen said, can paralyze an otherwise generous heart.  Cynicism can quickly excuse you from any responsibility to care.

You can decide that the church is corrupt, that politicians are corrupt, that corporations are corrupt, you can literally say, with B. B. King, "Nobody loves me but my mama, and she might be jiving too!" That gives you permission to just exit from concern.  You can stop going to church, you can stop voting, you can give in and shop at whatever store sells what you want at the cheapest price without regard for how they treat their employees or if their products you are buying were harvested or manufactured by virtual slaves.

Cynicism is the modern sacrament... you can declare yourself a cynic and official stop giving a tinkers damn about anything or anyone.

Skepticism, on the other hand, is the active employment of critical thinking.  As a teenager, I watched the evening news and when they showed President Nixon looking square into the camera and saying, "I'm not a crook," even then I was thinking, "I bet you are a crook."

I had been raised by a WWII vet who took patriotism seriously. But I read the articles written by draft protesters who were in federal prisons or who were in exile in Canada, and even as a pre-driving teenager, I could see that the war in Vietnam was being sold to my country under false pretenses.... That the people in the government were wrong and the people in prison were right.

But I didn't stop loving my country.  I didn't stop voting, I didn't stop caring, and I didn't stop working to make my country better.

When I was a child in Glasgow, KY, we had a fiery prophet as our pastor at the First Christian Church.  In the late 1950's, he was working to integrate the schools, to end capital punishment, and finally to organize labor unions in the local sewing factories.

Church members muttered about him, including my parents.  They call him a communist.  They accused him of spending more time on politics than on faith and they fired him but even as a child, I could see that he was right and my church, even my parents, were wrong.  But in honor of Brother Paul Duncan, I didn't give up on the church that fired him.  I went to seminary and I resolved to make my church better.

Cynicism gives you permission to head for the exit.  Skepticism means telling even the nation that you love, the church that you love, the family that you love, that you just are not going to believe their lies.  Cynicism gives you a reason to throw in the towel and give up, skepticism can open your eyes and give you the motivation to double down.

In 2003, I was the senior pastor at National Ave. Christian Church, and when Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and when President Bush was leading our country into war with Iraq, I spoke out against the war, and led public protests.

The phone rang one morning and I took the call from a dear, sweet, loving, older woman in the church who had been a faithful supporter of mine in a sometimes-unsafe church environment.  And with the sweetest of southern charm, Ann said, "Now Roger, I know that you are a very smart man but do you really believe that you know better than President Bush about whether we should go to war with Iraq."

I hesitated.  I loved Ann and she loved me.  And pride and arrogance are like cancer in the parish ministry.  After and uncomfortable silence I said, "Ann, I don't have the benefit of the classified briefings of the President but I have reason to believe that he is lying to the American people and I am confident that my position is right."

I don't want to give into cynicism.  I don't believe that our government always lies to us.  I don't believe that all corporations always decide to do what is most profitable and never to do what is just right.  And even through I have been fired and treated badly by my former denomination, I don't want to let myself dismiss the whole lot of them as being either moral cowards or mafia styled criminals.  Several of them are but not all of them.

We have reason to be skeptical when politicians want us to go to war with Iran.  They have lied to us about Vietnam, they lied to us about Iraq, and though there are things that concern me about Iran, if you wanted to put a nation on the lists of sponsors of terrorism, the USA has objectively earned a spot much higher on the list than Iran and if we are concerned about terrorism, we need to get our own house in order before we invade anyone else.

Be skeptical, but don't be cynical.  Be critical thinkers, but don't criticize if you are not willing to work to make things better.  And above all, be unreasonable people.... Reasonable people always just go along with the lies and the majority and you will never do any good that way.

The Moral Vacuum of Insatiable Greed

August 16, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Mahatma Gandhi
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
John Kenneth Galbraith  The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

On our long list of things to be mad about in the world, out of nowhere came a different kind of story that momentarily took our minds off of police shootings or unarmed black teenagers, figuring out who is responsible for creating Isis, and why we had to lose Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the same miserable year.  For several days, the world had a new person to hate, the previously fairly obscure Minneapolis, dentist, Walter Palmer.

Palmer actually had enjoyed a certain celebrity among big game hunters but last month he mistakenly killed one of the oldest, most rare, and most beloved lions in the world, Zimbabwe's rare black manned lion, Cecil. And though Palmer has since apologized and said that he did not know that Cecil had been lured off of a game preserve and was wearing a tracking collar, after they wounded and two days later finished killing Cecil, Palmer saw the tracking collar, cut it off and hid it in a tree.  He was then so horrified by what he had done that he, reportedly, turned to his native guides and asked if he could kill a really big elephant the next day.

It is not that anyone thought that killing Cecil was more important than recent human tragedies; it was that it just made no sense at all.  There is no friction in Minneapolis between the dentist community and the lion community.

He had to go half way across the globe, spend a ton of money, and then lure a harmless lion out into the open to shoot it.  It was an obscene act to satisfy a nearly incomprehensible and arguably mentally perverted need to kill a rare, indeed, an endangered, beautiful, beloved and majestic animal.

It is an obscenity of excess.  There is a market for rare meats around the world.  I don't know how tired you have to become of beef, chicken, and fish to feel like you need to eat a bear, or a lion, or a rhino, I know that I have not felt any such appetite.

There are of course those who see little difference between killing a cow and killing a lion and though I am sympathetic with people who are vegetarians by reason of conscience, I do think there is a matter of self-preservation involved.

For all of the fear and hype about sharks, or Ebola, or even Isis, in the past year, only one American has died from a shark attack, one from Ebola, and only one from Isis, but cows killed 22 Americans .... I'm just sayin.... Do the math. I'm just doing my part to keep Americans safe.

But there is a serious moral issue here and one that is not always easy to define or to understand.

Spiritual people of every world religion have gone through phases of emphasizing the value of self-denial, of living an ascetic life, without possessions and in an embrace of poverty.  Others have seen the accumulation of wealth as a sign of God's blessings.

The Buddha taught that the middle way is more sane, more balanced, more distinctly human.  You know me, I'm never one to praise moderation when it comes to our passions for justice and our commitment to radical compassion, but when it comes to our appetites, the middle way is clearly the lane we are looking for.

Capitalism often seems to teach that there are no boundaries.  There is an element in our society that seems to believe that more is what we are to always strive for.  Our appetites for food, sex, money, land, things, power, can run over us and turn decent people into moral monsters.

Like a lot of my peers, I have struggled with my weight for most of my adult life.  I don't feel like I am a bad person but I know when I try to fit my hips between the old theater seats at the Gilioz or at the Landers that whether I'm a bad person or not, I am a big person and I would be more healthy and more comfortable if I could be smaller.

And not to make this too personal and certainly not to invite unsolicited diet advice (which is considered justifiable cause for homicide), but I have to concentrate on the difference between wanting to eat because I am hungry and wanting to eat for the sheer entertainment or pleasure of eating.  Foods that taste good are a form of entertainment, regardless of whether my body actually needs food.

For a lot of us in the middle class, we can afford to buy virtually anything that we want to eat and so we have to make a conscious decision to eat smarter and not simply to consume because we can.
One of the most helpful continuing education events we held at the university when I sometimes teach was when we invited the poverty specialist, Ruby Payne, to come do a seminar for us.  She described the different ways in which our economic classes approach their family dinner this way, she said, after dinner:

A poor father will ask his children, "Did you get enough?"
A middle class father will ask his children, "Did you like it? Did it taste good?"
And a wealthy father will ask his children, "Did you enjoy the experience?"

For those whose lives are often marked with food insecurity, just making sure that your children are fed is a source of real anxiety.  For those who are not especially afraid of hunger are concerned with making sure that their children as having a good life and not just getting the bare necessities but are, in fact, enjoying their meals.  The wealthy might not really enjoy even good food if it is not served in an environment that is also esthetically pleasing.

All of these things have to do with how we have trained our appetites.  I eat beef and chicken but I would take no pleasure in going onto a farm and personally killing the animals that would end up in the skillet on my stove.  I don't understand the pleasure people get out of hunting but I recognize it as being a part of how humans function in the food chain and I do not judge someone who hunts for food.... Though hunting endangered species or even entirely impractical sources of meat is an extreme of appetite that we should not be afraid to label as being evil, sinful, extreme to the point of mental illness.

The Desert Fathers, the ascetic monks who lived in the Alexandrian desert in the early centuries of the Christian movement, sought to challenge the power of their appetites so that they could devote themselves to spiritual causes.  They taught that if you will not even satisfy your thirst for water, that you will never long for wine, and that if you never take your fill of bread, you will not crave to eat meat.

Many of our appetites do not have a natural stopping place.  We have to decide that we are going to be in charge of ourselves.  The Apostle Paul spoke critically, in the 3rd chapter of Philippians, of those "whose god is their belly." People who have lost all impulse control, who never willingly say "no" to any of their appetites..... a spiritual weakness facilitated in modern times by credit cards and Payday loans that allow people to indulge themselves in the present moment what they ultimately cannot afford to have.

Our society rarely questions our appetites and in fact encourages indulgence, excess, hoarding, and greed.  The liquor industry runs ads telling people to drink responsibly but they know that alcoholics purchase four out of five drinks consumed in America.  If it were not for the addicts, most beer and liquor companies would go bankrupt.  Casinos post signs encouraging people who have a problem with gambling to seek help and yet, they know exactly who is in the building, how long they have been there and how much they have lost.... If they were concerned about gambling addicts, they could easily turn them away at the door of the casino but, in fact, their bottom line is entirely dependent on addicts.

I am no prude and I am opposed to censorship in almost all forms, but I know that very many people find that they quickly move from being occasional viewers of porn to being fired for watching porn at work.  WebMD estimates that there are nearly 450 million pornography websites now which is about one for every six people who have access to the internet.  Clearly, this is not just couples trying to spice up their love life.... This is a social addiction that can hardly be seen as anything short of a malignancy.

We have advertisements beamed at us night and day through every form of media.  We are encouraged to buy, consume, indulge and to never think of the consequences to the earth, or how our excesses cause scarcity for others, or even how indulging our appetites can create an obscene and abusive industry on the other side of our consumption in which there are victims without number.

We have to be smarter than the marketplace.  We have to be more decisive than the alcohol industry, the gambling industry, the sex industry, and even the automobile and clothing industry.  We have to decide to live sane lives, balanced between necessity and obscenity.

As Gandhi said, in matters of conscience, you cannot depend on majority opinions.  There is no substitute for critical thinking, for self-examination, and for choosing to live a sober, and meaningful life that does not exploit the poor or the earth nor even the animals that share our earth with us.

Somewhere between only eating salads and indulging in an appetite for killing endanger species there is a sane place where we can all live.

This Must Be Said

August 9, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.  William Blum

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.  Marian Wright Edelman

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, or steal bread.  Anatole France

As you might gather from the wisdom lessons today, I want to talk about one of the biggest problems, or maybe one of the most significant opportunities, facing our nation at this time.  I want to talk about money, both capitol and income, and its unfair and very unequal distribution.  A topic which is arguably the most important issue facing our nation today and one that was not even mentioned in three hours of presidential candidate debates this week.

And to get to what I want to say, I want to remind you of two important parts of what I suspect was our shared childhood experiences.  And these two images are very far apart.

The first is that popular board-game that was born in the early 1900's and marketed for most of the 20th century by Parker Brothers, called "Monopoly."  In those hot Kentucky summers before anyone had air conditioning and when daytime TV was all soap operas, the kids in my neighborhood would all gather at Mickey Huffman's house because his house had a naturally cool basement.  And we would lie on the cement floor of Mickey's basement and play monopoly for hours.
You all know how the game is played.  Everyone starts with an equal distribution of cash and then you roll the dice and move your game piece around the board.  If you land on a property that no one else had bought, you can buy it if you have enough cash, and if someone else owns it, you have to pay them to rent the spot for a turn.

It usually takes a couple of hours of combining strategy with the roll of the dice, but one player starts to rise and the others start to sink until, one by one, players go broke and have to drop out of the game and one person wins by making everyone else go broke.

Of course, for us, the real point of playing in the first place was so that we could hang out together in a cool place out of the sun.... so the winner would start going off script and loaning money to other players to keep them in the game.  Everyone is happier when everyone is still playing and still has a stake in the game.  Sadly, the real world rarely works this way.

The other image I want to call to mind, and one that might not have the same power for those of you who are much older than I am but I find that there are fewer and fewer people who fall into that category!....I want to ask you to think for a few minutes about the popular TV show, Star Trek.

It was brilliant and sometimes even prophetic for the time in which Gene Roddenberry was writing those scripts. One of the most adamant aspects of Roddenberry's view of the future was that there was no money.  There was no accumulation of wealth and no profit motive to anything that anyone did.  There was no price set on food, drink, clothes, or even living quarters.  Everyone had what everyone needed. There was to be no currency in the futuristic Federation. Roddenberry was able to imagine a lot of things in the 1960's that did later come into existence but a society in which the basic necessities of life are simply provided without any need for currency we have not seen but, if you let yourself think about it, it is not only doable, it is logical to do so.

The concept of accumulated wealth based on a dollar value of property and investments is how the rich stay rich and how the poor stay poor.  Imagining a way of sharing space, food, and resources without currency and without hoarding is crucial to a sane future.

One of the most purchased but least read books over the past two years was the French economist, Thomas Piketty's book on Capital. I am guilty as charged, I bought it and assumed that I had gotten the point in the first twenty pages and left the other 800 for posterity.  The indisputable fact is that we cannot resolve poverty if we allow the wealthy to hoard most of the assets.

It would be like trying to join in on a game of monopoly after your friends had been playing for an hour.  You might get the same starting cash from the bank that everyone else got at the start of the game, but if the property is all owned already, all you can do is fairly quickly fail.  But that's exactly what we do in our economy.  We tell new college graduates from poor families that they have the same chance as everyone else but the truth is, virtually all of the winners in a capitalist economy are the ones who start out with capital.
As Anatole France said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, or steal bread."  The people who have capital are the ones who have the influence to write the laws, they own the banks, they control consumer lending, and, surprise of surprises, they always end up on top of the pile of money.

We think of Great Britain as being more class conscious than the new world nation of the United States, and maybe that was true, but if you are born poor in Great Britain, you have a 30% chance of staying poor for the rest of your life.  In the United States, if you are born in poverty, you have a 42% chance that you will always be poor.  Compare that with a nation that has a socialist economy, like Denmark, and there you have nearly an 80% chance of working your way out of poverty.

In the USA, the system is designed to keep the rich, rich and to keep the poor, poor.  It has not always been this way.  The great American middle class rose up in the years following WWII at a time when the economy was much more balanced with both personal and corporate taxes.

In the years when we were playing monopoly, the highest tax bracket on the wealthiest earners in America was 91% and even with tax deductions and loop holes, the best a wealthy person might hope for was to get that down to about 50%.  In those days, the average difference between an entry-level employee and a CEO was 1 to 50.  Now the rich pay approximately 10 to 15% of their income in taxes and yet CEO pay is 350 times the pay of an entry-level worker.  The NewsLeader this week listed some corporations where the ratio is 80 to one.....this is the stuff of revolution!
It is true that our tax code has become horribly complex but seriously folks, why do you think that is?  Do you honestly believe that fast food workers have lobbied for all of these amendments and complications in the tax code?  Do you see McDonalds employees banding together to demand special consideration for their tax posture?  The tax code is complicated because the powerful wealthy have fought for every form of favoritism imaginable until the system is rigged so that they cannot lose.

When we were young, there was a national passion for what we called the "War on Poverty." But the War on Poverty has become, in many ways, a war on the poor.  We blame the poor for being poor when the system is structured in such a way that they could hardly be anything else.

The middle class is taught to despise the poor and to blame their own hardships on the recipients of public assistance. In Arizona and Florida, governors have proposed administering drug tests to all recipients of food stamps and other forms of public assistance.  In Arizona, after spending millions to test 150,000 people, they found a total of 3 people who tested positive.

There was about the same results in Florida except that in Florida, the drug testing company was owned by the governor.  So Rick Scott makes millions of dollars on a program he initiated while saving the state nothing by humiliating tens of thousands of citizens.  And there was no impeachment, no criminal malfeasance charges, and blue-collar workers still largely believe that the very poor are their enemies.

It reminds me of KKK members who are almost universally very poor, uneducated, and low functioning white people who believe that they are superior to blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Catholics, and the gay community.  When, in fact, poor whites have a lot more in common with poor blacks than they ever did with their white managers and employers.

Conservatives who defend the system that keeps the rich on top of the economic pile, constantly try to get the poor to fight with each other because when the poor stop fighting one another and start to organize there will be a redistribution of wealth and that can happen in one of two ways:

It can happen peacefully through the reintroduction of a fair and justly progressive tax system, or it can happen violently through revolution.

I'm in favor of the peaceful method but as a person spiritually devoted to justice, I'm willing to say to the wealthy, it has to happen, one way or the other.  Peace without justice is just surrender and there is nothing about our faith that would make surrender look like a legitimate approach.

If I may return to the Monopoly game again.... When one person wins, even they have lost because they can't keep moving their piece around the board over and over if they have put everyone who used to pay them rent out of business.  This is what unbridled greed never seems to realize.  I will say more about this next week, but when winning is defined as impoverishing everyone else, then even the rich lose.  If you destroy your customers, you are out of business.

A year ago, when Seattle decided to raise the minimum wage in their city to $15 an hour, the 1% went nearly crazy announcing that this act of economic compassion towards the poor would result in massive layoffs and job losses that would kill their economy.  What has actually happened?  Unemployment has gone down by 25% because people who earn low wages spend every bit of a wage increase that has resulted in a huge boon to their retail economy.

How hard is it to understand that if you impoverish people, they won't spend money, and if you pay them a fair wage, they will spend it?  Only those blinded by an evil degree of greed can believe that they are better off if more people are suffering.

As Marian Edelman said, we do not have a shortage of money in America.  We have a shortage of morality, of decency, and compassion. If the church has any reason to exist, surely it is to increase compassion, inspiring our civilization to be more decent, and to make more moral choices.

What is certainly clear is that if we were hoping for some moral leadership from anyone in the huge field of Republican presidential candidates, that we have to accept that there is no getting blood out of a turnip.

Either you are the light of the world or we need to learn to live in the dark.

Believing What Is True

August 2, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

"There may be a conflict between soft-minded religionists and tough-minded scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective worlds are different and their methods are dissimilar. Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Disney animated version of "The Little Mermaid" came out in 1989.  It so happens that my daughter was also born in that year and so the VHS tape of the children's movie was a part of early, and, tediously, a repetitive part of my life for a few years.

When she was about three years old, while watching Ariel singing with her beautiful voice, Valerie told me, very matter of factly, "That's me." "Oh," I replied, "you are a mermaid?"  "No," she said, "That's me singing, that's my voice."

Of course, my three-year-old daughter had no way of knowing about Jodi Benson who voiced the character of Ariel and many other Disney roles, she just knew that she had always loved that song and he assumed that she could just claim it as her own.

Now, it wasn't true, it wasn't realistic, but it was understandable for a three-year-old.  What is less understandable is that for 500 years, white European descendants have told themselves that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas.  It was not until the last generation that people have begun to challenge the notion that anyone can claim to have discovered a continent that already had 90 million people living on it.
On this, our seventh anniversary of being a liberal, progressive, outpost of a church in the midst of the reddest of red American states where we are surrounded by the Assemblies of God seminary and colleges, a right wing Southern Baptist seminary and colleges, and even a state university with no religious affiliation that often seems to act like a right wing religious college, we have tried to very publicly, even globally, keep offering a progressive religious message.  But we must remember that our message, our perspective, our insights, our scholarship, did not begin with us.

We have lots of people around here who may think that we are all alone, but we are not. It has always been our stated goal to close the gap between the classroom and the pews, to bring the best of religious scholarship into corporate life of the church.  That has been so rare that it may seem to many like we are the first or the only church that does it but we are not.

There were early American progressives:  Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Paine, to name a few. But even some of the religious leaders who would seem to most people to be more mainstream, were really progressives.

I know of no better statement of what we mean when we say "evidence based faith" than this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that we take as our wisdom lesson today.  Fifty years ago, when he was a very young man who had recently graduated from seminary, King spoke to the alleged divide between science and religion saying:


"There may be a conflict between soft-minded religionists and tough-minded scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective worlds are different and their methods are dissimilar. Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary."

Many of us have felt like we have stumbled into this demythologized way of thinking and living as if we were Christopher Columbus setting foot on a previously unknown continent of liberated thinking that allows religion to do what it does best, which is to contemplate meaning and ethics, and let's science and reason do what it does best, investigate, discover, analyze and record.

None of the ancient biblical writers were trying to be deceptive or misleading.  They tried to account for the world in the best way that they could.  They were often wrong about history and science, but they were surprisingly insightful, at times, about people, ethics, about living and loving and forgiving.

You look at a fairly embarrassing passage of scripture, like Genesis 6 and Numbers 13 that refer to the giants, called the Nephilim, who once roamed the earth who were the product of the sons of God having affairs with the daughters of earth.  In Numbers the text says that we are like grasshoppers compared to them.


These texts are obviously echoes of ancient myths that found their way into the Bible but when people in those days happened upon the fossilized bones of a dinosaur when they had no knowledge of any such animal having ever lived on earth, and given how anthropocentric humans always are, they could only assume that these were the bones of giants.  Some ancient cathedrals actually displayed dinosaur bones as relics of the Nephilim, not because they were stupid or because they were trying to be deceptive, but because it was, for them a logical explanation.

What is stupid is to take an uninformed explanation and turn it into a doctrine or a creed and declare that you have to believe that it is true in spite of better evidence and reasoning.

The Great Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, said that there are two ways to be wrong.  One is to believe what is not true and the other is to refuse to believe what is true.  Anyone can be guilty of being mistaken about the facts but when you hold onto a mistaken world view once you have had the facts revealed to you then you are choosing to be stupid and that, men and women, I submit, is a great deal of what is wrong with modern religion.

The absurdities of traditional Christian creeds have been exposed over and over to the point that there really is no excuse for thinking people to keep trying to reinvest themselves in primitive myths.  Robert Ingersoll, a 19th century lawyer, a hundred and twenty years ago, said: The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation.
It is too absurd to seriously discuss and yet so many people seem to be resigned to that mental prison.  Michael Larsen posted a meme on his Face Book page yesterday that show Jesus in a cloudy heaven surrounded by angels and the caption read, "Love your enemies, while I torture mine in hell for all eternity."  How can people not see the inherent lunacy of this?

Many Americans have become so disgusted and so disillusioned with how backward the church is, how much science denying, other worldly mumbo-jumbo it dispenses, that they have given up on the church and looked outside of our own culture for some guidance.

We are fortunate that the Dalai Lama has become so proficient in English that he has become a real source of light to those who will not hear reason from Christian scholars.  The Dalai Lama has said: This is my simple religion.  There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

In our church, we do not owe any fealty to any ancient books or to institutional constructs that define god or faith narrowly or absurdly.  We are on a path of discovery, not unmoored from our Christian heritage in the instructive teachings of Jesus, the prophets and the saints, but not obliged to parrot their views of science, history, or even of morality and sexuality.

We have willingly given up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. In seven years time we have moved from being a liberal, progressive, Christian church for a handful of church alumni association members in Springfield into being a global church, affirming the faith traditions of all of the world's religions while being primarily focused on a fact based approach to spirituality that addresses the real and profound needs of people and of the earth itself.

I love the church we have become and I look forward to seeing who we will be in another year, or two, or three.  I hope that there will be more members of our tribe and that we will find sympathetic faith communities springing up all over the world.

We didn't invent progressive faith but we are trying to make it look good.