Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.The word "intifada" is an Arabic word that means to "tremble" or "shake." In the years leading up to the first Intifada in Palestine, I was a graduate student taking a course in Biblical archaeology. I joined with a group of other students and pastors to take a tour of historical and archaeologically important sites in Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel. I was a student of ancient Middle Eastern history but my awareness of current events was stunningly shallow.
― Albert Einstein
I wasn't alone in that naiveté, several of us were unprepared to deal with the aggressive searches and interrogations of heavily armed Israeli soldiers, or the sometimes threatening, virtual theft by some of the peddlers and shop owners. It seemed like four or five times a day, someone was standing in front of you just itching for a fight or at least a loud confrontation.
In one old city shop in Jerusalem, I objected to a floor to ceiling poster of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi flags draped around the walls and I was immediately surrounded by a dozen angry vendors yelling at me about why the then American President, Ronald Reagan, was much worse than Hitler.
I was rescued by a small group of Israeli soldiers who game me a quick lesson in local current events.... "Intifada" pretty well described my trembling reaction to the whole event.
The leader of our little band of students and tourists gathered us up in the hotel lobby for a sermon. He said:
If you squeeze a lemon, you get lemon juice because that is what is inside of a lemon.The easy days don't reveal much about us. You find out what is in you when you are scared, when you are under pressure, when the world is squeezing you.
If you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice because that is what is inside of an orange.
When you are squeezed, when you are put in a difficult situation, what comes out of you? Anger? Impatience? Hostility? Or is it love, understanding, empathy?
Our good friend, I would say the "patron saint" of our church except that he is neither dead nor Catholic so I guess he doesn't get to be a patron saint, but the biblical scholar and author, Bishop John Shelby Spong, has been a huge inspiration and influence on the founding and shape of this church.
In a series of recent essays, Bishop Spong has been saying that he is convinced that the church is now in need of a radical reformation on the scale of the 16th century Reformation that was started by Martin Luther.
This is not a huge departure from what Bishop Spong has been saying for a generation through his books, Why Christianity Must Change or Die and A New Christianity for a New World, but as he approaches his 85th birthday, the good Bishop is not pulling any punches.
A reformation of the sort that Luther started is not merely a shift in creeds or beliefs. It knocks the underpinnings out from under nations, schools, cultures, and marketplaces. Prior to the Reformation in the 16th century, international authority rested with the church, largely in the person of the Pope. Kings and rulers had to contend with church authority in almost every aspect of life.
The Protestant Reformation removed authority from the Pope and the centralized church and gave it to individuals. Though princes and kings snatched up a lot of that authority, the ideological move was from an authority shift from the Pope to the Bible, generally called "the word of God."
Of course, we all know that the Bible is interpreted in millions of ways to serve the prejudices of the person holding it but what Bishop Spong is so clearly articulating is the fact that modern Biblical scholarship in combination with modern science has left the claim that the Bible is the word of God standing naked on the street corner, revealed for being the fraud it always has been.
The notion that a supernatural theistic God wrote a singular book that is to remain as an ultimate authority over human life for all of time is patently absurd. So ridiculous, it is embarrassing that virtually all of us fell for it for a huge portion of our lives.
Because it was the teaching of the church, Catholic mothers and fathers rejected their own children because they were gay. Because it was believed to be the teaching of the Bible, Protestant fathers and mothers rejected their own children because they were gay. Catholics and Protestants wasted their lives living miserably in toxic marriages because the church or the Bible demanded that they make a mistake they may have made as teenagers a life long tragedy.
Bishop Spong rather flatly says that the church invented the imaginary concept of hell in order to control people. Fear of judgment and lust for heavenly reward has been a way for the church, the synagogue, and the mosque to control their adherents with an eternal carrot and stick.
That mentality still holds sway in most of the western world and a great deal of the east. And just like in Luther's Reformation, the death of the old underpinnings of society is accompanied by violence, wars, terrorists, and the ever-present kings and princes scrambling to grab up the power that is left on the table.
The mosque and the church do not want to give up their power though the charade they have orchestrated throughout history cannot stand the light of reason and science. So what takes its place? What happens when the carrot and stick neither scare us nor tempt us?
Rose Hamid, a Muslim woman, a flight attendant, stood up in a political rally in South Carolina this week where Donald Trump was speaking. She rose in silent protest to the anti-Muslim rhetoric that has been a part of many of Trump's events. She was wearing a hijab that had these words printed on the front: Salam - I come in peace.
It was a mild disruption.... A little squeeze, just a silent, little squeeze, one middle aged American Muslim woman standing up in a crowd of thousands of conservative Americans.... What did she reveal? I don't want to talk about the political candidate and the stupid things that he says.... I don't want to waste my precious time on him.... But I do want to think about what is inside of fellow Americans when we are squeezed, even just a little bit.
When the crowd started yelling threats and condemnation, when she had to be escorted from the hall by the police.... how much hatred, how much irrational prejudice must be in us if it flows out so quickly, so easily, under almost no pressure at all?
In the Protestant Reformation, moral authority left the Pope and was awarded to the Bible and yet both Protestants and Catholics continued to believe and to do very similar things. In our time, in the reformation, the intifada, the culture shaking changes before us, neither the church nor holy writ will be a moral guide. Given in what we see in some of the political displays and language of this election year, one is forced to wonder what will keep us from eating one another.
We have seen, here in our own short history as a church, that when people are freed from the belief that there is a supernatural entity sitting above the clouds who expects you to be religious, who expects you to worship, praise, fear judgment and to prayerfully and piously seek entrance into heaven.... Once that carrot and stick is gone, of people just move on.
They are squeezed by modern scholarship and they find out that what was inside of them was not some noble spirituality that wanted to make the world a better place.... It was ancient fear and lust.... In the absence of those false motivations, they discover that there is not much left.
And I understand... truly, I do. People are often angry when the truth of religious deception is revealed. Many feel like they were manipulated and lied to by religion and the reason that they feel that way is because they were manipulated and lied to. We can't always block the exit long enough to say, "oh but there is so much more."
Freud believed that people created God as a kind of super and judgmental parent in the clouds above us to help us to control our behavior. And, in a sense, religion has functioned in that way as long as the ruse could be maintained that we all had an eternal future, either on streets of gold or in a lake of fire. Take away the giant, judgmental, parent in the clouds and.... Well, you get a Donald Trump rally.....
Seriously, though I am clearly an advocate of evidence-based faith, I want a spirituality that is rooted in reality and conversant with scientific methods and facts, but facts alone do not lead to either morality or a meaningful life.
More than 2000 years ago, Plato tried to describe a society governed by rational thought, headed by philosopher-kings, in his most important work, The Republic. Plato writes this book as a dialogue largely between his teacher, Socrates, and his older brother, Glaucon. Once Socrates has completely detailed this utopian society and persuaded his listeners this this is the most just and reasonable way to run a nation, Glaucon asks the piercing question, "but who would want to live there?"
What is on the other side of the reformation that Bishop Spong describes? When society is cut from the moorings of a judging parent in the clouds or a divine book of rules, how do we choose not to be ruled by either cold logic or emotional hysteria?
What we see in a lot of our political events are the signs of an untethered society in which democracy de-evolves into the majority lording it over the minority... just as unbridled capitalism leads to the rich exploiting the poor. What we really want is not just a society freed from religious fear and guilt, or a society freed from tyranny only to become little tyrants. What we want is a good society.... A society that is able to balance individual freedom with social responsibility.
What I believe to be vital to the present day reformation, what Bishop Spong has not yet discussed though I hope he will.... Is the need to do exactly what Albert Einstein said that we must and that is to move beyond the illusion that we are all here as separate individuals seeking our own satisfaction and fulfillment.
Modern physicists tell us what ancient Buddhists have always taught us.... We are all connected. My child has a better chance of staying healthy if you get your kids inoculated against childhood diseases. My neighbor gets to live in a less crime-infested neighborhood if all of the people in the neighborhood earn a living wage. Your grandchildren have a better chance at having clean air and water if you and I stop dumping toxins into the rivers and sewing the wind with our carbon fumes.
Liberated from the myth-enhanced fears of eternal punishment or even the fantasies of how you would live if you had won the lottery, we are left to rationally and factually recognize that Christians and Muslims are all made of the same star stuff as Buddhists and Hindus and that all of us need to grow up and let our various faiths draw us closer to one another rather than constantly trying to cook up some new reason to go to war with one another.
Lemons and oranges don't get to choose what comes out of them... they can only give what is naturally grown within them. We do get to choose, but you don't want to wait until you are being squeezed to make that choice.
No one chooses to continue to remain in a progressive spiritual community because you think that God demands it or that there is some lake of fire you are trying to avoid or a heavenly mansion you are trying to occupy. We keep coming together because we are trying to choose to be the kind of people who, when squeezed in the coming reformation, will produce wisdom, maturity, kindness, compassion, love, friendship, and justice, acceptance, tolerance, and goodness.
If the self-serving, saber rattling, xenophobic sentiments we are hearing in this election year are any indication of what is in the soul of America, then, my friends, we have our work cut out for us.
