Bob Fellner: Respect

10/25/2015


Good morning. If you don't know me I am Bob Fellner. Cheryl and I have been coming down to Springfield for several years because you have a congregation and a Service that fits my understanding of a progressive congregation. It is good to be back. It is because of our similar beliefs; there are some issues that I would like to address. You need to know, I did not always hold progressive views.

One of the nice things about preaching is that I get to choose the topic. In choosing a topic I tend to choose issues that I believe I need to address in myself. There is an assumption here, and I apologize because I assume that if I need to face an issue, so do you. So I apologize to any of you who do not fit the stereotype that is based on my life.

Last month Cheryl and I attended the 60th anniversary of my graduation from 8th grade. There were about 20 former classmates attending. That is about half of our class. Thirteen of our classmates have died over those 60 years. It was a pretty good turnout.

Many memories. It was a parochial school emphasis on the word 'parochial'. We never considered our school as 'parochial. We were a Catholic school. That should tell you something.

Belleville, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis was a small town and it was about 1/3 Catholic. We were taught to believe in our uniqueness. In fact we believed that we had to TRUE path to heaven. If you were not Catholic, you were doomed.

My school, St. Mary's, was located on 18th street. The local public school, Henry Raab was located on 13th street. This permitted to two groups of students pass each other on Raab Ave on our way to school. The Henry Raab students kept to the north side of the street and we stayed on the south side. That was convenient since we could taunt each other without physical contact. We called them Puplickers and they called us Catlickers.

This attitude has been present in Christianity for a long time.

1. It began in the early church with the doctrinal fights over the divinity of Jesus.
2. Later we declared war on Islam when we invented the Crusades.
3. With the Reformation, we not only got to argue on a Protestant vs. Catholic basis, but we were able to build these disagreements into war.
4. Catholic declared war on all heretics when we invented the inquisition.
5. We destroyed Native American cultures by giving the Native American the choice of being baptized or executed.

 At this point, this sermon could go in several directions. We could talk about the influence of religion on our upcoming elections. That could be fun. We could discuss candidate's use of religion to gain votes. The fun continues. Or simply, should religion have a place in our elections?

As tempting as this is, I am not going to address any of these topics. I would simply like to address our attitude in the face of people who disagree with us.

I gave that long preamble about my childhood religious training to give you some idea of my original religious beliefs. (You might call that Original Sin.) It was that early childhood training that led me to become a priest. However, it was in the seminary that I began to change. I attended St. John's Seminary in Little Rock for both under grad and graduate studies.

In the catholic seminary, everyone is a Philosophy major. You can never tell what will happen with a philosophy major. I was encouraged to think on my own. What a novel idea. In that process, I did begin to change.

1. I had to reject an elsewhere God. In fact for a couple of years I rejected God altogether. Even that changed.
2. In the process I rejected Atonement theology. A father who would send his only son to die for sins that I had not yet committed almost sounds illegal. We would arrest such a father for child abuse.
3. The church's teaching on divorce and remarriage is not based on scripture but a celibate's interpretation of scripture.
4. The prohibition on birth control obviously is not mentioned in the bible, but is based on ancient Greek Cosmology. Science has moved past that at least 300 to 400 years ago.
5.  The whole idea about infallibility is one grand circular argument. It is very simple. I am infallible because I say I am. 

By the time I was ordained, I had developed a personal theology that made me a minority. But as a minority, I decided that I had an obligation to help free my parishioners from the bindings that were imposed by Rome. I started some 'theology' classes for our parish. I  discovered that many people were truly interested began to grow personally.

However, I had a problem. It is so easy to isolate yourself and consider the rest of the world a bunch of idiots. I learned rather quickly that this attitude turned people off. I gradually saw the effect that my attitude had on others. Some people agreed with me. But others avoided me as much as possible. I never did anything overtly to imply that someone was an idiot. I discovered that it is next to impossible to disguise these feelings. Even acting kindly toward people, they could tell that deep down, I considered them idiots. When I finally came to a realization of what I was doing, I had to overhaul myself.

As you can tell, I left the priesthood for all of the above reasons and also I wanted to get married. Cheryl likes to point out that my first marriage did not involve her. However, it was in marriage that I learned that a relationship required a change in my attitude. If I was going to believe that I was superior to you because I had discovered the truth, I was never going to have reach you.

I had to change my attitude. That is difficult. Imagine someone with whom you disagree having the same right to an opinion as you. I struggled with this. I finally came to one of those Eureka moments when I realized that the person with whom I disagreed was me 50 years ago.

We all reflect our history and experience. The fact that my background is different than yours does not make you an idiot. What sharing my story and listening to your story does, is allow me to respect you and develop a relationship with you. I have discovered that I can form a relationship with someone with whom I disagree if I truly respect that person. If we do form a relationship, there is no limit to where that relationship will take both of us.

What I had to learn the hard way, is that if I do not respect someone for any reason there is no chance of anything happening. No matter how clever I am or how good of an actor I am, I cannot hide that deep seated negative attitude. Have you ever had that feeling that someone is talking down to you. You are experiencing a lack of respect. I hope that you have not had that feeling about me and if you have, please let me know.

If we respect each other we can actually discuss our differences. That can be the beginning of a relationship. If we want to be able to form a relationship it must begin with RESPECT.

Redemptive Suffering

Proper 24    Oct. 18, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Isaiah 53:4-12                      
4Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.6All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 8By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. 9They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. 11Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. 

It can be said in a much longer form, but for the sake of brevity, the most simple statement of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is this:

1)    All of life is suffering.
2)    Suffering is caused by desire.
3)    You can escape suffering but giving up all desires.
4)    The way to give up desires is by following the eight fold path.

Stated in this way might lead you to believe that all of suffering is bad and to be avoided at all costs. Of course, the Christian religion seems to take a rather different view, to the point of praising martyrdom and making the image of the tortured and crucified Jesus a central symbol of the faith.


I have to credit Scott Peck with this idea since he said it long before I thought of it, but Christians often think too little about the joy of our faith and Buddhists often think too little of the suffering of the Buddha. The two are not mutually exclusive, or in the words of the new Steven Jobs film, suffering and joy are not binary.

But let me be quick to say this, I totally agree with the Buddhist perspective that decreasing suffering the world is an ultimate goal. We talk about environmental concerns, not because we need to save the planet.... The planet it not in danger. The planet with survive no matter what. Human, however, are in danger from pollution. Polluting the planet causes human and animal suffering and it is the avoidance of that inconvenient reality that motivates our environmental concerns.

We are opposed to wars, to racism, to discrimination, to poverty, domestic abuse, and sexual abuse because they cause suffering. So, in that sense, Christians and Buddhists are on the same page. And it is not difficult for me to reject the old Roman Catholic way of thinking of Redemptive Suffering.... That is, that Jesus had to suffer for our sins in order to redeem us from the punishment we so richly deserve.

Any construct of the Christian religion that can be boiled down to saying, "You are so bad that God had to kill his son," cannot bear serious critical thinking. No matter how many times evangelicals say it, the notion that Jesus suffered to pay a price for your sins two thousand years before you were born is utter non-sense and in the modern age, such Iron Age mythological thinking will kill what is left of the church.

I understand why the early church attached themselves to the suffering servant songs in Isaiah. Even as you heard Chris reading these verses from Isaiah 53 this morning, it is all but impossible for we modern Christians to not hear the orchestra striking up in the background as a full-throated chorus takes up Handle's Messiah.

Mark first wrote the passion narrative to mirror this ancient concept of Israel as the suffering servant that will suffer in order to bring salvation to the world. When the prophet wrote these verses 500 years before Jesus was born, he was not thinking about a coming messiah or of any individual. He was speaking of the remnant of Judah.... Finally accepting that through their tiny tribe was not destined to rule the world that they could, through their faith and leadership, literally through their hardships and suffering, could help to save the world.

This is hard for many modern Christians to accept, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, farther from the minds of those 5th century BCE slaves in Babylon, than the hope that some savior would be born to them four hundred years after they were dead. Isaiah was not talking about Jesus or about salvation in the traditional Christian sense.

But, and I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to get to this "but" but this is the "but" that matters in this message..... But there is a sense in which suffering can be redemptive.  That is, there are times when people have accepted suffering, when they have heroically accepted personal risk or even personal sacrifice in order to save others, in order to change the world, in order to being an end to human suffering.

On that first Sunday morning in March of 1965 when black activists seeking the right vote began their march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the state police turned their dogs on them and beat them with batons. Several were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. But two days later, they were back, marching again... still peacefully, taking in their own flesh the beatings that would eventually ignite the conscience of the white majority in America, stemming the tide of racial oppression.

You can easily see that the beatings, imprisonment, and starvation of Mahatma Gandhi was redemptive suffering in the sense that it was only through his exemplary leadership of peaceful, non-violent protest, that the British colonial rule of India was finally ended.

During my own adolescence, there were a lot of us who could see, who knew that the War in Vietnam was immoral, unnecessary, and wrong but it took many draft protestors going to jail, lead among them being Philip and Daniel Berrigan, to wake up American Catholics and a lot of the rest of us to demand a change in our government's policy of neo-colonial warfare.  A lot of people were willing to demonstrate and protest but the Berrigan brothers were willing to be imprisoned.

The Christian reverence for the cross, the reason we have a cross in this little church, is because it is the willingness to suffer on behalf of others when we, especially we in the middle class, can comfortably decide to avoid almost all forms of suffering. We don't live in dangerous neighborhoods.  We will not be drafted, invaded, enslaved, made to flee as war refugees, and other than having to attend some family holiday dinners, we will not be imprisoned against our will.
Many of the people I talk to say that they simply do not watch the news because the suffering in the world upsets them and they would rather not know.

In the midst of a sea of indifference someone who is willing to suffer on behalf of others becomes a shining star, a hero, an inspiration.  Malala Yousafzai was only 12 years old when she began anonymously writing a blog for the BBC about what life was like for a girl in Pakistan under Taliban control.

The New York Times persuaded her to identify herself and a series of reports were done on her work, advocating for education for young girls in these repressed, Muslim controlled areas. It was this month, just three years ago, when a Taliban extremist boarded her school bus and shot her in the face in the presence of all of her fellow students.

Thankfully, Malala survived the attack, though it has left her appearance marred, and it has clearly affected her speech and general health but the attempted murder did not change her devotion to seeking education for girls.  She was hospitalized for months, but two years after the failed assassination attempt, she became the world's youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

She has visited the White House and was not simply honored by being invited there but took the opportunity to school President Obama in how stupid his drone policy is and how he is causing new generations of terrorists rather than ending terrorism.  She is arguably the most famous teenager in the world and she keeps up a demanding schedule of advocacy for others, even though the Taliban have publicly reiterated their intent to kill both her and her father.

It would not be anything to be ashamed of, nothing hard to understand, if Malala went into hiding for the rest of her life. She can live in the United States or in Great Britain and be safe, if only she would be quiet, but she has continued to raise her voice on behalf of young girls everywhere knowing better than anyone what suffering is really like and what fear can be realistic in her world.

In our country, we don't typically see that kind of institutional misogyny but we do see millions, hundreds of millions of people being pushed down and down into poverty, with either no employment or poorly compensated employment.  We are watching the cost of sending our public school graduates to college go up and up so that education is becoming available to a smaller and smaller percentage of our children.

We are seeing labor unions undermined so that it is becoming absolutely rare for workers to have a pension fund or any realistic expectation of retirement at 65 or 70 or 75. You see our senior citizens waiting on tables and sweeping floors all around us....grandmothers in orthotic shoes carrying people's scrambled eggs and toast to restaurant tables.... Grandfathers, with bent backs and arthritic hands, mopping the floors at the mall.

Fifty years ago, young black men and women were joined with white sympathizers and they paid for access to the voting booth through the passage of the Voters Rights Act with their own blood and some with their own lives. Now, our Supreme Court can gut the Voters Rights Act without more than a whimper from the public. In the past two years, Republican controlled state legislatures have sought to make it nearly impossible for 30 million poor blacks to vote.

They cut out weekend voting. They require government issued photo IDs knowing that more than 30 million elderly and poor black families don't have a car and so they don't have drivers' licenses. And to make sure that they don't get a photo ID, Alabama just closed divers license offices in 12 counties with predominantly black residents. In some states, you have to show your birth certificate to get a photo ID and if you can't find your birth certificate, you have to show a photo ID to get a birth certificate.

All of this happens while the media and the church is silent.

Why are we silent in the face of these gross injustices? Who would shoot us in the face for challenging the violence of capitalism run to the point of insanity?  No one.  No one will shoot us. But some will shame us. It is could be uncomfortable. With more than a half of our local peers being ginned up and angry by the constant flow of misinformation from Fox News and Gannett Newspapers, it is uncomfortable to raise your voice for justice, for fair wages, for dignity for the elderly.

Uncomfortable and yet, for persons of conscience, necessary.  I wish we were made of stronger stuff. I wish that we had more grown-ups with the courage of a child like Malala. If we had even a half a dozen members of congress who had the courage and character of Malala Yousafzai we would have a very different country right now.

What I am asking of you, what I implore our listeners on the web to do, is to decide that you are going to care, that you will be informed, that you will use your votes, your voice, your conversations to help fight against poverty, discrimination, the spoiling of our earth, and oppression of the rich and powerful over the poor and the weak.  And, if you can do that, if you can practice that, to grow in your courage so that you too may be willing to bait the trap for evil with your own flesh. Very little progress has ever been made if there were not leaders who were willing to suffer to make it happen.

Where Art Thou?

Proper 23  Oct. 11, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Job 23:1-9, 16-17        
23Then Job answered:
2 'Today also my complaint is bitter;
   his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
3 O that I knew where I might find him,
   that I might come even to his dwelling!
4 I would lay my case before him,
   and fill my mouth with arguments.
5 I would learn what he would answer me,
   and understand what he would say to me.
6 Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?
   No; but he would give heed to me.
7 There an upright person could reason with him,
   and I should be acquitted for ever by my judge.
8 'If I go forward, he is not there;
   or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
   I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
16 God has made my heart faint;
   the Almighty has terrified me;
17 If only I could vanish in darkness,
   and thick darkness would cover my face! 

Prior to her death in 1997, Mother Theresa was one of the world's most undisputed spiritual icons. In fact, in 1997 she and the Dalai Lama may have been the two people on the top of that list, ahead of even the pope. So it is no surprise that Mother Theresa is now on what might be considered to be the fast track for recognition by the Catholic Church as a saint. Her charitable work with the poor and sick of Calcutta has already won her the Nobel Peace Prize and recognition the world over for her selfless compassion.

But a few years after her death, in 2002, her diary was published, against her dying wishes. She had wanted her diary and personal papers burned upon her death but instead her personal thoughts and feelings were made public.  What these papers revealed came as a shock to many who had viewed her as a paragon of faith.

She recorded her feelings of despair and loneliness and for 40 years she said that she had no feeling of the presence of God.  She said, "As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."

When she was young, she had a strong sense of calling to be a nun. She had the religious experiences and enthusiasm that many of us who grew up in the heart of the church can recall, but what she was willing to say in private she was not willing to say in public though many other spiritual writers before her had said, more or less, the same things.

When we are young and impressionable, we tend to take religious teachings very literally and we tend to have the feelings and experiences that we have been taught to expect to have... such is the power of suggestion. As we mature, provided that growing older also includes maturity.... That is not a certainty, unfortunately, but it is a hope that with time our critical thinking skills help us to be more discerning, more analytic about faith and everything else of importance.

Rather than tarnishing Mother Theresa's halo, her record of perseverance in the absence of self-deceiving feelings bolstered her character in my view.
Though the Bible is full of accounts of the miraculous as is much of the religious writing of other faith traditions, our Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, has managed to also preserve what might be called the "minority report" of the Jewish cult.  We have some examples of more naked honesty about the absence of God, the silence, the inaction from on high that comes closer to telling the truth about our mature, adult, experience of life.

Our reading from Job today, the ancient philosopher bemoans:
8 'If I go forward, he is not there;
   or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
   I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
Now, let me be quick to say that the text of Job did not survive without many attempts at editing it to be more sympathetic with the larger context of the Hebrew Bible.  Job is 42 chapters long and I believe that somewhere between a third to a half of its current 42 chapters were added centuries after the original author penned these desperately honest lines.

The faith community cannot always stand too much honesty.  And it is one of the real perils of progressive faith. When you start to get honest about religion. When you acknowledge that God doesn't write books and that most of what people call prayer is little more than wishing, when you accept that whatever intervention that God makes into human history takes place only when people of faith choose to act in accordance with the heart and the ethics of their faith, most people just look for the exit.
Take away the carrot and the stick of heaven and hell, expose the magical thinking of intercessory prayer, and the symbolic nature of sacraments and many people will simply assume that the whole thing is just a charade and they give up on religion entirely.

It is significant to note then, that for 40 years, Mother Theresa kept caring for the poor and dying of Calcutta, when she no longer felt the presence of an imaginary friend. Everything that made Mother Theresa famous, what made the BBC do a special series of reports on her life, what earned the Nobel Prize and made her image immediately recognizable to the world, all of that came while she did not feel the religious confidence she had enjoyed when she was a child.

The world hardly recognized her death, and that is so for the very simple and indicting reason that she died the same week as Princes Diana. Theresa was an icon of faith, character, radical compassion, and charitable accomplishment.... Princes Diana was an icon of beauty and wealth and the media tends to report on what the society genuinely values.

Though I have generally disparaged my first book, Christian Wisdom for Today, for being way too specifically Christian, the part of it that I would still defend, twenty years later, is that the significant stage of faith doesn't start until you have allowed the faith of your childhood to die a natural death and you have experienced the dry nothingness of continually doing just what Job described....

8 'If I go forward, he is not there;
   or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
   I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. 

It is not until you have the distinct feeling that when you pray that not only is no one answering but that, in fact, no one is listening. It is after what St. John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul," in the silence and void that you discover what we mean by the practice of faith. The practice of your convictions.

It is like the old adage that says that character is what you do when you are certain that no one is watching. People who change their behavior or who engage in worship and religious observances out of fear of hell, or desire for eternal life in heaven, or even for the more venial rewards of good luck with their annual physical or increasing their chances of winning the lottery are not really spiritual.... They are just narcissistic in a magical thinking sort of way.

Real faith begins when you have given up on magic and superstition and you are seeking to be and to do what you believe is right and has meaning and substance.  The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, is famous for saying, "People believe that walking on water is a miracle. To me, walking peacefully on earth is the real miracle."

I get that many people will be disillusioned initially when they lose their childhood faith.
And with some regret, I accept that the majority of people will never continue to search until they find a faith that has greater substance beyond the void and the darkness of a silent sky. But for those who will practice without need for either invisible or felt reward, who can practice their faith without prompting from either fear or guilt, then, I believe, the world can be full of miracles that come from living a life of compassion, forgiveness, sincere love, and true friendship.

And this is a matter of evidence based faith because you only have to try it to discover that I am telling you the absolute and unvarnished truth.

The Yen and Yang of Friendship

October 4, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Mark Antony:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar ... The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it ...
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all; all honorable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral ...
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man....
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.... Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Literature professors are fond of telling their students that there are only three or four basic story lines in all of literature.

A little over a decade ago, a Jungian influenced author, Christopher Booker, published a book outlining the seven archetypal tales that make human tell stories.  He identified:

Overcoming the Monster, in stories like Beowulf, Dracula, or even Star Wars and the Hunger Games.

Rags to Riches, as in Cinderella, Jane Eyre, and The Prince and the Pauper.
The Quest, as we see in the Iliad, The Lord of the Rings, and the Indiana Jones movies.

There is the Voyage and Return, you see in the Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit or Gulliver's Travels.

And, of course, there is Comedy and there is Tragedy which were the only two kinds of stories used originally differentiate Shakespeare's plays.
Finally, Booker identifies tales of Rebirth, such as we see in Scrooge's character in A Christmas Carol, or in the Beauty and the Beast, and even in Despicable Me.

I would like to suggest that there is an eighty category that deserves to stand on its own, and that is the story of betrayal. I have long believed that the passion story itself, the story of how Jesus was betrayed and murdered, is an archetypal story.

It won't come as a surprise to any of you though I hope our internet audience will bear with me if this seems a bit shocking, but we have no way of knowing how much, if any, of the passion narrative is historical. Mark originated the account of the triumphal entry, the last supper, the arrest and betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane, the trial and execution.  Matthew, Luke, and John use Mark's story and add their own color and perspective but they do not challenge the core narrative.

None of them, of course, were eye-witnesses so Mark gets to lay down the tracks but when you turn to the first writer in the Jesus movement, the self-appointed apostle, Paul, he does not mention Judas. Nor does he seem to know anything about one of the twelve elect having turned on Jesus. In fact, twenty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul is still referencing "the twelve." The Matthias story in Acts should not be taken seriously.

No, it appears that Mark was creating a narrative that captures an archetypal story that lives in all of us... the experience of having been betrayed by a trusted friend.  If you can't feel the power of the image, then you might need to look in the mirror and see if you are, in fact, the Judas character in your own life story.

The name, "Judas," is a derivative of the name "Judah," that is, Judas is a character created to represent all of Judah, all of Jesus' people, his family, his closest friends.... It was not a single individual who betrayed Jesus, it was, to greater and lesser degrees, his tribe, his family, his disciples, the people he had healed, the people he had saved from persecution, isolation, the people from whom he had removed the stigma of being a prostitute, a leper, a foreigner, an outcast.... They all betrayed him.

I took the familiar funeral soliloquy of Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as another illustration of this type of literature that I would put under the "betrayal" heading.

In the same way that Mark used the historical event of the crucifixion of Jesus as the basis of his passion narrative, Shakespeare took the historical fact that Julius Caesar had been assassinated by members of the Roman Senate and built his story around that historical fact.

In Shakespeare's recreation of the event, he weaves a narrative of false friends and bewildered loyal friends to build up to the moment when the conspirators surround Caesar and they begin to stab him, and as the realization dawns on Caesar that this will be his death, he turns and sees Brutus, a friend he had really trusted and loved, and at that moment Caesar utters the only phase that most Protestants know in Latin, "Et tu Brute?" "You too, Brutus?" You of all people! You, my beloved ally and friend, you are in on this plot too?..... "then die Caesar."

Of course, in real life, a mortal dies from multiple stab wounds, but Shakespeare describes it in the way that it feels... the vicissitudes of life may be whatever they are, but only a true friend can really hurt you.

In my twenty years as an opinion writer for the News-Leader, it was not uncommon for me to receive as many as a hundred pieces of hate mail in a week.  I have endured a few fairly serious death threats and a number of stalkers.  It has been a year and half since my column in the New-Leader ended and I still have one stalker who still regularly calls and sends threatening letters... the simple minded can't change channels very quickly.

But none of that ever bothered me as much as the loss of any single real friend. The hateful criticisms of strangers don't feel good, but it isn't hard to see that if their response to a well reasoned and persuasive opinion column is vitriol and threats that they are telling you a lot about themselves but what they say about me hardly matters.

But when someone who has been a guest in your home, and you have sat at their holiday table, when you have let down your defenses, confided in them, turned to them for advise and counsel.... When they join in with the assassins to surround you outside of the Senate, when they lean in to give you a kiss in the garden with the Roman guards right behind them... that is when your heart breaks.

I believe that the story of being betrayed by a friend is archetypal because it has happened so often throughout history... when someone realizes that their parents don't really believe in them, or when a beloved spouse finds the arms of another person to be their true home... when someone you have sacrificed for, helped through their own life crisis, for inexplicable reasons, rejects you, turns on you, stabs you in the back... it isn't the nails through the hands and feet on a Roman cross that really kills you, it is the kiss in the garden, the triple denial in the courtyard, it is the friends who run and hide when you need them the most.

To love someone is to make yourself vulnerable to them. It is like putting your heart into their hands.  It is only reasonable then, to be pretty doggone selective about who are willing to befriend.

Therein lies the real challenge of forming a spiritual community.  Rationality says to be cautious, to protect yourself, to be very choosy. But a spiritual community is intentionally inclusive.  What is the price of admission to become a part of the community?  Just step across the threshold and you are in! It doesn't matter if you have just been fired, or just been released from prison, if you are homeless, addicted, or terminally ill.... A spiritual community is a welcoming home. But it can be a very one-sided equation.

The faith community chooses then, by our very nature, to accept very real emotional risk. In the old renaissance paintings of the Last Supper or of the disciples in the garden, Judas was almost always portrayed as a dark, hairy, hook nosed, beady-eyed character that anyone would instinctively be wary of ... but in reality, Judas always looks like your best friend... the one you can trust... the one who would never do that to you!

In Shakespeare's story, Mark Antony is able, in three minutes, to change a crowd that was willing to go along with the murder of Julius Caesar into a lynch mob that was ready to go and kill Brutus and everyone else involved in the conspiracy.

Caesar was libeled in the morning and everyone was willing to ignore his assassination. His assassins were criticized in the afternoon, and the mob turned against them.

The disposable nature of relationships, our vulnerability to being swayed by gossip has left the beauty parlor and the barber shop, it has gone beyond yellow journalism, and the tabloid press, and has become a part of our moment by moment participation in social media so that a face book meme or a twitter post can change how you feel about a political candidate, the pope, or your best friend.

What I would like to suggest in the most emphatic way is that recognizing the powerful archetype of the story of betrayal is that you choose to honor love, respect friendship, and choose with all of your might not to be Brutus, not be play the part of Judas. Don't be the kind of friend that should come with a warning label, "Will irrationally break your heart for no apparent reason."

There will be relationships that you need to walk away from but you never, without exception; you never need to intentionally hurt another person. Don't libel, don't slander, don't gossip.  Don't be vulnerable to having your relationships with others affected by gossip. And really, it is up to us to choose not to listen to gossip.

And, so far as I am concerned, you never have to come to me to tell me what someone else said about me.... all I would like to know is why the gossip felt comfortable in saying those things about me to you.

We want to have the moral authority to address the climate crisis, to confront our government about the torture of prisoners and about our drone policy.
We want to be able to make a public case for sane gun laws. We want to be able to confront the hypocrisy of the traditional church for its prejudices against gays and scientists. But we have no credibility at all if the first thing people notice about us is that we have a hard time getting along with one another.

Passionate, loyal friendships give us credibility. Healthy, long lived love relationships give us the authority to speak with moral clarity.

Liberals tend to be a bit too impressed with themselves and to give themselves license to dismiss others out of cynicism and hyper-critical standards that are hypocritical and self-defeating.  As St. John of the Cross said, we will either pass the love test or we will fail entirely. So, my friends, let's study hard to pass that test.