The Two-Faced God

Dec. 27, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Janus

Come two faced Janus, lie to us

Bring me to your door, and leave me ambiguous

A sane drunk in the roads middle

Between prophecy and history

The present stands on a griddle

Full of rational ambiguity

We are burning now

Who dream of a happy new year

While to the bottle bow

Seeking anesthesia from old despair

Oh, fallacy of a pagan lore,

Jekyll Janus, will you be also door

And prophet? Mask in the dead history

And usurped memory,

The earth will spin and a new year starts

Around the sun again as youth departs.

So usurper of Mars and Venus, faked

Jupiter, how can you begin

Anything that you cannot create? Wake

Not the ire of the true God to such sin

Yet I must bid you come despite

Since your name on the first month hangs so tight

To our meaningless wisdom and days

A subtle ferment of surreptitious praise

January, new month of beginning

How do I, like you, find new meaning

Or fresh faith for fractured flesh

Recovering youth and dreams I fled?

Speak not! my soul in a new dimension thresh

You affirm the truth sealed in my head.

Copyright (c) 2015 L'nass Shango 

I offer my most sincere apologies to any of you who are true devotes to speculations about time travel, even to those who attempt to garner some credibility for science fiction by quoting Albert Einstein.

But I would like to say, at least from a philosophical perspective, that time does not exist.  Time is not a thing, it is not a river that you can either go back upstream or power your way along into the future.  Time is mere a way of making movement.  That is, if nothing every moved at all. . . if every molecule of your body and the environment around you stayed in exactly the same place, there would be no way to mark time.

Time, then, is a conceptual measuring stick to mark change.  The sun rises and sets as the earth turns, which, for us, defines the passage of a day. Something sadly missed by the writer of the first chapter of Genesis who insists that God was creating heaven and earth, light and day, on day one. . .  separating water from land on the second  day. On the third day, the Omnipotent one made plant life but didn't get around to creating the sun until the 4th day which means that those first three days were just guesses.

A day is simply the rising and the setting of the sun in our experience.  You cannot, as Superman movies might suggest, reverse time like a DVD by making the earth go backwards for a few revolutions.

Though all of the world's religions insist upon trying hallow certain days and seasons as if Christmas and Easter, or Hanukkah, or Ramadan are really anything other than just the continued rotation of the earth, the truth is, there is only change. Christmas is not more holy than Festivus nor do our calendars have any special power. January 1st of 2000 looked a lot like December 31st of 1999. They are just numbers, used to count the rotations of the earth.

And yet, we will celebrate the arrival of a new year this week with rituals that attempt to imbue that turning of the calendar with importance that it simply does not inherently have. The first month of the year is named for the two faced Roman god, Janus. January, falling at that time of year in the northern hemisphere when days begin to be a little longer, was seen as the doorway to a new year.

This is a fairly rare case where the Greeks had no similar god, but in Roman tradition, Janus was the god of transformation, the portal of potential change. In honor of Janus, we still make New Year's resolutions to use the perceived passage of time to make ourselves or our world better.

If you have been thinking about joining a gym and starting to try to get in shape, I suggest that you wait until February first when almost all of the New Year's resolutions of our neighbors will be a part of history. January, the gyms will be packed with people who are, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, demonstrating the triumph of hope over experience.

But I don't want to make light of New Year's resolutions.  If people cannot make a conscious decision to change for the better then there is absolutely no reason for anyone to ever deliver another sermon.  This weekly exercise we engage in exists in part to inform, but surely it is also to inspire, persuade, and encourage us to try to change in ways that more fully embodies our shared values.  In the good ol days we could dispense with informing and persuading and go straight for threats and fear, promises and rewards .... I kinda miss the old days but, as I observed earlier, there is no going back in time so I'm going to try and work with what we have left.

2016 is an election year. I find it interesting that there is conversation on both sides of the political continuum that cries out the desire to "take our country back." The Tea Party crowd has been chanting that slogan for years.... I think that they mostly mean that they want to take their country back from that black guy in the White House.... I'm pretty sure that they would like to make it a "whites only" house.

But it is not just the right wing candidates that want to "take our country back." You can say that in many ways Bernie Sanders wants to take back our country for the middle class, wresting authority and control from the super wealthy. You cannot escape the draw of the Clinton campaign for those who, in spite of his failings, still miss Bill and would like to see the Clintons back in the White House.

But the more remarkable fear-driven, turn back the hands of time, sentiments do seem to be coming from the right.  I never dreamed that anyone in my lifetime would reference the massively illegal and morally bankrupt internment of Japanese families during World War II as a good thing, but recently, the leader in the Republican primaries, Donald Trump, suggested that we put American Muslims in internment camps and defended that policy by referencing how well it worked for us to put the Japanese in internment camps.

I never dreamed that I would ever hear something so massively evil and simultaneously stupid coming out of the mouth of someone who just might become the President of the United States... which makes 2016 look a bit more like Alice falling through the looking glass than it does a 21st century political conversation.

And though it has not been talked about much in the media, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's views on birth control sound like a page out of a 1950's Catholic sermon.

Now, you have to hand it to him, his 8 children bear witness to the fact that he and his wife have evidently practiced what they claim to believe but that he would defend that by saying that artificial birth control is abusive to women and encourages irresponsible conduct is very nearly unbelievable.  Thankfully, Santorum is so far down in the polls as to be virtually insignificant in the race but what concerns me is how many people would really like to return to the security of the past when gay people couldn't get married, most blacks didn't vote, when we could pay Mexican farm workers pennies an hour to do our hard work for us and then kick them out of the country, calling them criminals, and to take health care away from millions of people because they are not sufficiently affluent to be able to pay to stay alive.

Progress never happens in a straight line. Society, marriages, businesses, churches, even friendships, take two steps forward and one, or two, or three steps back.  Progress never just goes forward but it eventually must and going backwards is not really an option.  Lots of people may still hate it, but once given equal rights, gay people will never be forced into second class citizen rolls again.

The new Tea Party governor in my home state of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, removed the right to vote for 140,000 former felons and then reversed the previous governor's decision to raise the minimum wage for government workers to over $10 an hour.  Bevin took away $3 of that, a 30% cut in pay for people who are already living in poverty.
Bevin is a living example of what happens when you move from conservative Fox News chest thumping into actual, real life governing.  I hope that people are paying attention because images of a dystopian future may work for a Mad Max movie but in the real world... they are a bad idea.  Still, everyone on the Republican stage, all devout Christians that they are, still oppose a minimum wage increase and Donald Trump went so far as to say that salaries in America are too high and the minimum wage will have to be lowered in order for American manufacturing to become competitive on the world market.

As they ratchet up the rhetoric in the full swing of the campaign in 2016, I wonder how long it will take for someone to advocate the return of our constitution's defense of the institution of slavery.  No one seems to see the connection between this kind of crazy rhetoric and what actually happens in the real world.

Several presidential candidates are big fans of the NSA's meta-data, large scale invasion of privacy of the entire population but several are emphatic about wanting to monitor and shut down Islamic Mosques where domestic terrorists are being radicalized.  And sure, after the mass murder in San Bernardino earlier this month, there is substantial reason to look into how a guy who was born in, educated in, and who was pretty well employed in the USA could have become so horribly radicalized.  I get it. There are religious and political subcultures that spread a way of thinking that directly leads to violence and terror.

What I object to is that we do not appear to be having a similar conversation about what radicalized the guy to commit the mass murder at a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado last month. Who radicalized him?
Who fed him the false information that Planned Parenthood was selling the body parts of aborted fetuses? Didn't that lie come straight from the mouth of Carlie Fiorina?  We want to deport Muslim Imams who teach hatred and fear, who manipulate and radicalize their followers with misinformation, convincing them that they are victims of inferior people but why do we tolerate an entire news agency devoted to manipulating low information viewers, convincing them that they are victims of people who are inferior to them and literally insisting that their army of frightened, paranoid followers be allowed to arm themselves with all manner of lethal weapons?

I'm all about freedom of speech, but we all know from our middle school civics classes that the freedom of speech does not allow you to yell "fire" in a crowded theater.

The people who try to manipulate the public through fear... and this goes a long way back.... Fear of communists, socialists, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, AIDS, terrorists, Ebola, and now Syrian refugees.... Don't they have some responsibility for the radicalizing of the fringe of their crazy followers?  Can't there be a time when we wake up to the fact that we have never made a good decision based on fear?

The names of the months and the numbers on the calendars mean nothing at all but what is true is that the world will change.... Time is change... we can change for the better or we can change for the worse.  We can make principled, moral, spiritually inspired decisions about how we will shape the world, or we can react in fear like sheep hoping to run into the arms of a pretentious, dishonest, shepherd because we hope that he will protect us.
For me, progress is a matter of moral determination and courage.  As Cezar Chavez said "Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducated the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate a person who has felt pride. You cannot oppress a people who are not afraid anymore."

Be proud of being progressive liberals. Don't be afraid of the future, make the future what you know that it should be.