https://youtu.be/9er5saw4oxQ

"Drunken Priests and Baby Talking Prophets"
Isaiah 28:7-13 7 These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink;  the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink,    they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment.  8 All tables are covered with filthy vomit; no place is clean.   9 ‘Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from milk, those taken from the breast?  10 For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,    line upon line, line upon line,  here a little, there a little.’   11 Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12  to whom he has said, ‘This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose’; yet they would not hear.  13 Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them,  ‘Precept upon precept, precept upon precept,    line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little’;  in order that they may go, and fall backwards, and be broken, and snared, and taken.  

      We live in a time when fewer and fewer people go to any church and yet the few churches that are thriving are the ones that get bigger and bigger.  Our culture is choosing greater and greater anonymity, less formal connection. We may have a thousand friends on Face Book but we don’t know anyone to go with to see a movie and many of us barely know the names of the people who live around us.  The spontaneous back yard barbques and neighborhood pick up football games rarely happen. As sociologists have famously noted, more people go bowling than ever before but fewer join bowling leagues.   And, so far as the rapid decline in church attendance goes, I have to admit that we are a part of the problem.

      We are a very small church but we provide religious content for 10,000 people a month who simply sit and watch one of my sermons on YouTube rather than come to a place like this and actually meet people and bind together to pass along a cogent faith and organize volunteer efforts to get involved in the community in meaningful ways.  So why did we start this church and why try so hard to keep it open? Is this community underserved for churches?  That is, are there empty seats in the synagogue or in any of the big Catholic, Baptist, Assemblies of God, and Methodist churches in the area?   There are, of course, thousands of open seats and pews in town this morning though I suspect that you are not much tempted to go sit in those pews and seats.

     We get to a place like this after we found that we simply did not fit in those places.   Both by our unwillingness to assassinate our brains and their unwillingness to accept us because we were female, or gay, or divorced or, in some cases, because we read books and asked questions, we had become the church alumni association.  Some of us thought our way out of traditional religion and some of us were asked to leave.   We open our minds to the wisdom found in other faith traditions and feel entirely free to reject the doctrines and creeds that once chained us in the darkness of irrational superstition, prejudice and falsehood.  

     We are not just self congratulatory philosophers who have rejected the myths and neurotic fear and guilt of the dark ages... hopefully, we will also put hands and feet and heart into our shared faith as we serve the poor together and bring prophetic witness to the social justice causes of our time.  With both food for the hungry and visible opposition to the institutions that create poverty, oppression and violence we have claim a living faith and not a dead philosophy.   The old main stream denominational churches are trying to figure out how to survive in the face of declining numbers and increasing irrelevance and we keep trying to figure out how we can do more.  It may have been fittingly symbolic that our first few Sundays we met, we were not in a country club but rather in a funeral home parlor because we had a body to bury.  We needed to bury the church that we had left and that had left us.

     We had to eulogize a faith that was full of lies, magic and superstition, dead ritual and choking doctrines marked by creeds that sound more like a fanciful incantation in a Harry Potter movie than something gown up people would repeat in the 21st century.  Still, we recognize that the path we have followed was a well worn path that stretches back through the millennia. Isaiah was a poet and a prophet and someone had hurt him pretty badly because even across 2700 years you can hear his anger.  He describes the priests of his day, the keepers of institutional religion in two competing images.  On the one hand he makes the Temple sound like an episode of Tosh.0.  The priests are drunk, stumbling, falling over themselves and, he says quite graphically, vomiting everywhere.  I'm certain that is not a literal description but we know what he means.  What they had to say had the approximate value of drunken vomit.  The other image is a bit less obvious in translation.

     The powerful priesthood who preside over the huge Temple, the pinnacle of institutional religion are, the prophet says, are as sophisticated as a baby that is taken from the breast. He repeats the phrases that their religion is to them, "precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little."    In Hebrew, what he is saying is intended to make this sound like a baby babbling.... it says, "cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav, siershom, siershom."  They are just babies, or drunks.... either way, the prophet asks the question, "Who can they teach, to whom can they explain what is real?" because all that they know is "cav la cav, cav la cav, sav  sav, sav la sav"...... any resemblence that bears to a Fox News program is not just coincidental.

     The churches of our birth were not much concerned with liberation from oppression, fighting poverty or racism.  Though there were heroic and wonderful exceptions, most stood back and watched the civil rights movement. They were silent about the war in Vietnam.  There were the Berrigan brothers somewhere.... there was Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dorothy Day out there getting arrested and being interviewed by Time Magazine but most of us were kids in churches that said pledges to the flag, asked you to pledge your money while they told you about what they had read in the funny pages and made allusions to their favorite sports teams.    All the while expecting you to worry about your soul that you had never seen, and to be anxious about a hell you had never seen, and to lust for a heaven you have never seen and to feel badly about being such a horrible person that God had to kill his own son to make up for your sins......cav la cav, cav la cav, sov la sov, sov la sov..... etc. etc.

     When I was a college student, one of the thinkers I heard regularly condemned from the pulpit was the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell.  In the middle of the 20th century he was begging the modern world to think critically about both religion and government and critical thinking is the one thing that magical superstitious religion cannot stand.  He said: "I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive.  The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true.  I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system."  This is what frightened traditional religion. The suggestion that you only believe what there is good reason to believe..... believe what can be seen, tested, repeated.... because from the time of Constantine, religious people have been asked to repeat rituals, to kneel, genuflect, speak in tongues, weep, shout and empty their wallets because everyone around them was doing it and their parents did it and their grandparents did it.  

     I'm not saying that it was all bad.  There were people who were helped. There were families that stayed together, there were people who reformed criminal or addictive behavior and who controlled their impulses based on their experiences in churches but what happens when you find out that the snake oil you have been taking has nothing in it?  How much of your time, emotional energy, your resources have been poured into believing in superstition and trying to make yourself believe that repeating magical phrases and participating in magical rituals would somehow make imaginary angels and demons do your bidding?  We wasted our time, our energy and our resources while governments sent our young men and women to die in wars fought over land and resources while they told us it was for Jesus and freedom.  We bowed our heads and closed our eyes while corporations treated workers like lumps of coal thrown into the furnace of profit and banks used the people's money to make themselves rich while keeping the people groveling for a chance to have a home or a car to use to get to work to earn money to give to the bank.

      Moses was a liberator of slaves.  Jesus, Mohammad, Zoroaster, Gandhi, Romero, King, were liberators.  They reached out to the poor, the orphan, the sick, the oppressed..... the church, however, has asked women to shut up and be obedient, the church has made gay people suicidal for just existing and treated blacks and immigrants like objects of perpetual charity.... to be given a holiday basket at Thanksgiving and worn out clothes the rest of the year but never to be treated as equals.    Cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav...... man I am so done with that.  In the 21st century, in possession of endless information at our fingertips, science, rational thought, critical thinking.... anyone still sitting in a big church trying to learn how to speak in tongues or waiting for their turn to light a candle in front of a statue or trying to make themselves believe that their Holy Book really is the one true magical formula written by the finger of God is like a bird in a cage where the door has been left open.  

      It is one thing to stay in the cage when you have no choice but those days are over.  It is time to grow up, time to sober up, time to set aside the superstitions of the dark ages and embrace the faith that made the Berrigan brothers set military draft records on fire, that called Martin Luther King into the streets to march, and Dorothy Day to feed the poor and shake her fist at the government and businesses that made them poor.  Three thousand years ago, the prophet said:  11 Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12  to whom he has said, ‘This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose’; yet they would not hear.

      Perhaps, Isaiah, they would not hear, but we hear you.  This is rest.... to give rest to the people who have been shut out of jobs, schools, hospitals and homes. To tell the bandits on Wall Street and the powerful on Capitol Hill that we will no longer bow our heads and close our eyes to their abuses.  And we will tell the priests, pastors, ministers and evangelists to keep their promises of pie in the sky when we die until we see them meeting us to help lobby Florida’s legislature to end this for-profit industry that is filling your poor schools to prison pipeline. … that will drug test members of the state legislature rather than the recipients of public assistance, that will get treatment for the addicted and housing for veterans, the physically and mentally sick, the victims of capitalism run mad who they have ignored.

     I will give them my undivided attention to let them explain to me why I should believe in the Trinity, heaven and hell, substitutionary death, sacraments and intercessory prayer when they first tell me how they are going to turn the minimum wage into a living wage, and guarantee access to health care for the sick, jobs for the unemployed, homes for the homeless..... when their religion has a way of stopping the wars in Syria, and Mexico and can keep those flying killer robots out of the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan but until then, their religion is to me nothing but line upon line, line upon line and, frankly, I have better things to do with my time

https://youtu.be/cH7aznmFty8

February 7, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor           “Honest Questioning and Uninformed Certainty”    

Mark Twain — 'What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.'

May favorite painting in the world hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is a ten-foot wide canvas by Jules Bastien-Lepage depicting Joan of Arc as a 13-year-old girl standing in her parents’ garden. Faintly you can make out the images of the three French saints whom she believed spoke to her. There is a look of intensity and mild shock on the child’s face as she instructed by these disembodied voices to inspire a rebellion in France against British rule.

I have kept a print of this painting over my desk where I write my sermons for 20 years. Her determination, sacrifice, and zeal inspire me. However, it should also be noted that Joan of Arc was certainly a schizophrenic or at least suffered from some form of dementia. The voices she heard were not really the voices of the long dead French heroes. The voices came from inside Joan’s skull.

Still, it would be a mistake to write her off as being simply schizophrenic. She was a brave, young woman of great faith. She was inspired and she inspired a nation and she courageously went to her death defending the voices that both she and her accusers should have known were not real. And, I suspect, many who followed her into battle might also have believed that the voices were not real.

But the voices were spurring the French to fight for their liberation and that was a voice they all heard in their own hearts.

Our evening news is often marred with images of religious fanaticism. Wars, beheadings, suicide bombers, representing a jihadist view of the world… like Joan of Arc, in part inspired by deranged faith, and in part fighting for liberation from Western dominance or for power and dominance the way that people always have.

We can admire strong faith. We value courage. We sympathize with the goals of self-determination and freedom from oppression. But as religious people, I think that we need to take a very sober look at the issue of certainty.

Fundamentalism demands fealty to absolute certainty. It gives people false confidence that they possess absolute truth about things that no one can know.  Even Muhammad’s first reaction to the visions he experienced  was to doubt that they were real.

Muslim fundamentalists never want this part of Muhammad’s history to be repeated, but after his first religious vision, he assumed that he had been possessed by a demon, what in that culture was called a “jinn” or an evil genie. Again, you might suspect some sort of dementia when anyone says that they hear voices and have visions but among religious enthusiasts, you might have expected Muhammad to come running down the mountain after his first vision, full of joy and enthusiasm, euphoric about hearing a divine message delivered by an angel.

But in his own account, he was struck with self-doubt and feared that he needed to kill himself to be rid of the jinn that had taken over his mind. His wife, out of concern for him, sent him to stay with one of her cousins who was an Ebionite.  Ebionites were Jewish Christians who believed that Jesus was a prophet but was not divine. They rejected the letters of Paul and kept Jewish customs.  It was this cousin, Waraka, who told Muhammad that his vision had been of the Archangel Gabriel. She was the one who taught him about the Ebionites’ view of Biblical narratives and beliefs, much of which, not so miraculously, ended up in the Quran.

Now, I do not say this to be disrespectful, though I am certain what I have just said would put me in some physical danger were I saying it in the wrong country. I offer these observations as a corrective, not a rejection.

History museums are full of the artifacts of dead religions related to gods whose names are no longer remembered. Any religion that is too dogmatic, so certain of its own absolutes that it cannot bear questioning, doubts, or changes in direction is destined for a shelf in a museum.

Fundamentalism will not save Islam, it will destroy a beautiful religion. Fundamentalism, literalism, conservatism, will not save Christianity, it will, in stead, make it so irrelevant and out of touch with reality that it will take its place along side other outdated superstitions and magical thinking.

The realities of the universe and of God are simply too big for any one religion. God is not defined or controlled by religious beliefs. God does not recite or write creeds. 

As Gandhi said, God is not a Muslim, Hindu, Christian, or Jew. God has no religion.  I’m not saying that all religions are the same. They are not. I will say, however, that there is no right religion and that there are healthy and unhealthy ways in which you can be a member of any one of them.

The current pope of the Roman Catholic Church, Francis, seems like a very open minded and, at least for a Catholic, a fairly progressive person of faith. His predecessor, I don’t think that anyone could rationally have described Benedict as having been either open minded or progressive but they were both not just Catholics but popes within the last decade.

There are hundreds of millions of Muslims you will never hear about in the news who are hard working, moral, sane, peaceful people who are loving and devout people of faith. We should no more put them under the same heading of jihadist terrorists than we should be put in the same group with Christian Identity or the KKK.

I love the quote from Mark Twain that we used as our wisdom lesson today, that it is not what religious people don’t know that should worry us but rather we should be terrified of things about which they are certain.

All that being said, I want to be clear that problems are not always corrected by going to the opposite end of the spectrum. Religious certainty about things that cannot be seen, verified, tested, or in any way validated is just idolatry, and as you have heard me say many times, all idols are slated for destruction. That kind of certainty is virtual insanity.

However, that does not mean that all beliefs and teachings are of equal value. It doesn’t mean that we can’t know anything, learn anything, grow and improve.  Yes, a sincere faith should question everything. You should be able to ask any question, examine any truth, but you should not be afraid to step out of the shadows and act confidently on what you know to be true…. And there are things that can be tested, examined, observed, and determined to be true.

I don’t often suggest songs to Sean since he seems to know almost everything there is to know about music but I sometimes hear a song being played on one of my news podcasts that I listen to every week and I stop in my tracks, look up the song and send it to Sean.

He is doing one today that I wish we could use on our video but I think we would be breaking a ton of laws to do that though I will risk repeating the verse that made me know that we had to use it in our services:

Who are you to deny your fellowman his human rights


nobody says that you have to agree but you have to let others be free


These are not opinions I am right and you are wrong


your arguments are worthless and your reasoning is flawed


your mind can't be free when it's locked inside an ancient book

When it comes to things about which no one can be certain, we can entertain all kinds of ideas in open, humble, conversation. But there is no room for dogmatism.

But in a world where a governor can decide to poison the water of an entire city just to save a little bit of money, killing a few, lowering the IQs of many, and negatively affecting the mental and physical health of tens of thousands of people, there is no respectable way to be neutral.

When the prejudices of the majority can keep women’s pay less than mens, can so corrupt the judicial system that only poor minorities are ever executed… when we fill our prisons with young people who were caught with marijuana while we fill Caribbean luxury resorts with the bankers who manipulated the market place and brought about a world wide recession then neutrality is something to be ashamed of and not defended.

I believe that the church has historically been guilty of acting like they had absolute confidence about things that cannot be known and about which they seem almost certainly to be wrong, and they have remained indifferent towards the injustices all around them that not only can be known but you have to try to not have the facts thrown in your face on a daily basis.

When it comes to speculative theology, let’s show some real humility. When it comes to social justice, let’s start showing some real courage.  Maybe we shouldn’t have put a cross in this church that is more interfaith than it is Christian but it is here and it should be a reminder to us that Jesus was executed by the state and he was not executed for having the wrong religious beliefs. Don’t ever kid yourself into believing that Jesus was killed for healing the sick and telling people to love one another. Even Rome didn’t kill people for acting like Mr. Rogers.

The cross is a reminder that Jesus wasn’t a moderate and when it comes to matters of justice, we shouldn’t be either.