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
