Beyond Tolerance

Easter 5    April 24, 2016      Community Christian Church of Springfield

Roger Ray, pastor               “Beyond Tolerance”  

John 13:34           I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

The Chamber of Commerce in Springfield, as it is in most cities, is comprised of business owners, employers, and sales people who band together to foster a successful business environment. About 20 years ago the Chamber asked their members what they needed from the available labor pool that they were not finding.

What emerged out of that questionnaire was the most amazingly blind program that reeked of classism and entitlement thinking that could only happen in a truly economically tiered society.  What these employers said that they needed was more depth of character out of their employees.  So the Chamber came up with a list of 12 qualities that they wanted to partner with the school system to teach in a Character Education program.

The proposal read like a wish list of slave owners describing what they wanted from their slaves.  The twelve character strengths the employers wanted included things like “attitude” which meant they wanted their employees to be cheerful and friendly at work, in spite of their miserable working conditions, low salaries, and tedious jobs. They wanted them to be “dependable” which meant that they wanted them to show up for work on time, ready to work, and to be willing to passively cooperate with erratic work schedules like when a fast food manager wants employees to come in and work for two hours during the lunch rush, then clock out and sit around for three hours, and then come back and click in for two more hours in the dinner rush. 

And they wanted their work force to be loyal, that is, to praise their masters even when to do so required fundamental dishonesty.  But they also but honesty on their wish list but they interpreted that as being not stealing from their employer even when many employers steal from their employees by making them work off the clock several hours a week.

So, I was still a fairly young pastor who was new to the community and the president of the Chamber of Commerce was a member of my church board and was in charge of personnel…. Which, in that church, meant that he personally set my salary and benefits package based on just how “loyal” I was to him.

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that it took me nearly two years to convince this moral monster to join the Presbyterian Church down the street but what came out of this absurd slave-owners-teaching-slaves how to be sing and dance while they worked “character ed” program was the fact that a large coalition of local churches rose up and objected in loud protest, something that almost never happens.

But before you start to applaud let me quickly tell you what united the church community against the Chamber of Commerce. It was the inclusion of the word “tolerance,” which several of our local churches thought could be used as a code word for tolerance of homosexuality and they were not going to just stand idly by and allow the Chamber of Commerce to teach children not to be prejudiced.

I was offended by the Chamber’s assumption that the biggest problem with our classed society and violent wage disparity was that the poor refused to whistle while they worked but for my religious peers to hold press conferences and write newspaper editorials decrying tolerance as a character value was an outrage.

In both the newspaper and from the elevated pulpit of the big denominational church where I worked, I thundered against the churches that demanded that the world tolerance be removed from the list. As usual, in such fights, I did lose and they won. The Chamber and the school system agreed to remove tolerance from the list and they added courtesy…. Because we southerners know how to mask prejudice and hated a touch of courtesy and a syrupy “well bless their hearts.”

In the midst of my campaign to keep tolerance on the list … a list whose very existence I had protested and found to be morally repugnant…. Folks, this job gets complicated sometimes…. A elderly retired minister in my church came by the door on his way out of church and in place of the usual innocuous “good sermon pastor” handshake, he raised his finger to my face and said, “Tolerance is not a religious value. Tolerance is just a weak and meaningless thing. Love is a religious value.”

Prophets almost never like to be corrected, especially when engaged in full-on moral outrage. But this was one correction that has stuck with me through the years.

We don’t typically think of tolerance as a noble character virtue. 

We may say of a couple who have stayed married for decades in a conflict riddled marriage that “they barely tolerate one another.” None of you, if you looked into your beloved’s eyes and said, “I love you” would be satisfied if they replied, “And I tolerate you.” Tolerance is better than open warfare but it isn’t much of a goal.

Let me ask you this, I don’t want to see a show of hands but for those you who are here and those of you listening on the internet, do you personally know someone who has had an abortion? A lot of you, especially a lot of you are members of a traditional religious family will think that you do not know someone who has had an abortion.

But let me tell you, there are between one million and one and a half million abortions in the United States every year. Since only women of childbearing years get abortions, that narrows the field considerably and when you stretch that out over the decades since Roe v Wade, it is likely that somewhere around one in three women have had an abortion. So, folks, if you know as many as three women, you know someone who has had an abortion.

Based on my experience, a whole lot of those women want to discuss the decision both before and after having an abortion with people they know will not judge them…People who will listen empathetically to them. That is to say, they want to talk to someone who they believe will love them and not just tolerate them.

My phone rang one afternoon and the woman on the other end of the line was crying and was clearly barely holding herself together.

Over the years, it has not been uncommon for women to talk to me about this important decision but this phone call was different. It wasn’t from a member of the church. The call came from one of our YouTube listeners who lives a thousand miles away…. Someone I had never met, never corresponded with, and would never meet.

I’m glad that she felt that she could trust me after having listened to my sermons for several months but I had to ask…. Can you not talk to your pastor, your school counselor, your parents…. Isn’t there someone in your life that you believe loves you enough to talk to you about this?  And I get that sometimes you want anonymity at a moment like this and I was certainly a safe choice for an anonymous confidant, but as the father of a daughter who is of child bearing age, it kinda made me want to track down her father and slap him until his teeth rattled.

Because, fathers, your daughters should instinctively know, they should be confident beyond any shadow of doubt, that in their darkest moments of life that you are their hero, that you are in their corner, and when no one else can be trusted that you can be trusted to love them without fail.

And this is something that you cannot tell them and convince them of at the last minute. They already know by the way you have talked to them at the dinner table, how you read to them at night when they were going to sleep… they know from how you packed their lunch for school and cleaned the gravel out of their skinned knees whether you are tolerant or whether you are loving.

Our little church meets in a rebuilt and repurposed building that for 40 years was a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall. For forty years, people sat in this room and were taught that if any member of their family, whether it is your mother, or your daughter, if they left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to either go to another church or to no church at all, that you were not to speak to them, associate with them, have meals with them, or in any way show approval of them.

That’s extreme, but over the years we’ve had any number of former Catholic and Assemblies of God members who kept the fact that they were coming here a secret from members of their family because it would have caused conflict in their family.

And yet, we want Palestinians and Israelis to get along peacefully. We want most of the Middle East to forget about a century of colonial exploitation by the west and just sell us their natural resources at a price where we can take all of the profit. Tolerance will not create the world we want to live in. Tolerance is not enough.

I have talked about marriage and family relationships so far, and we started today with this very nice verse from the gospel of John in which Jesus tells his disciples to love one another… that in fact, the definition of what it means to be a Christian is the evidence of genuine affection for one another.

That’s a nice thought…. It doesn’t describe a lot of what most of us have experienced from church, but even that is not at the crux of the matter.

When the Jesus seminar scholars looked at the gospels with a critical eye, trying to made an educated guess as to which of the teachings found there actually originated with Jesus and which were a product of the later church that were added later to the Jesus narrative, the one line that virtually all of the scholars could agree on was a teaching that was so radical, so unique, that they agreed that it not only originated with Jesus but it may have been the teaching that made him stand out in the first place.

That is a line that is found in the 5^th chapter of Matthew and in the 6^th chapter of Luke where Jesus says, “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you…bless those who curse you.”

Man, that’s hard. It is nearly impossible. I think it is safe to say that on one does it all of the time…the bigger question would be, does anyone do it, ever?

In a recent TED Talk, Palestinian born Aziz Abu Sarah talked about his journey from hate to love. Aziz grew up in a West Bank neighborhood where every morning, when his mother packed his lunch, she made sure that she put a whole onion in his lunch bag. The onion was not for Aziz to eat, it was to use in case Israeli soldiers fired tear gas in the streets where he was walking to school. Palestinian mothers believe that if you cut an onion in two and hold it up to your face, it will help you to cry out the tear gas and it will keep you from being overwhelmed by the gas.

Now, I have no idea whether that technique works, I suspect that it doesn’t, but the fact that his mother had to think about such things is what should help us to get out of our own heads for a minute and imagine what it must be like to grow up in a conflict zone. Aziz talks about how his older brother was arrested by the Israeli police on suspicion of having thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers. He never confessed to the crime but his interrogators literally beat him to death trying to get a confession out of him.

This early childhood trauma wounded Aziz deeply, it hurt him and made him so angry that he did become a violent protestor against the Jewish occupiers of his land. But at some point, he decided to try to understand his oppressors. He visited the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. He studied the history of his enemy’s pain. He even began to study Hebrew and the Jewish faith, not to convert but to understand.

Through studying the people who had taken his land and had murdered his brother, he found that he could empathize… not to ignore their offenses against Palestinians but to realize that the cycle of retribution would, as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “An eye for an eye will eventually make all of us blind.”

Aziz and a couple of Jewish partners now run a tourism business in Israel, sending both a Jewish and a Muslim guide with each group, to give both perspectives on their land’s history and conflict. They take Muslims to celebrate Friday night Sabbath meals in the homes of Jews and they take Jews to Friday prayers in Mosques in the hopes that mutual understanding can lead beyond simple cease-fire and tolerance, towards real friendship and love.

St Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Imitation of Christ that to fully understand another person is to entirely forgive them.  Folks, I think that is true. Our talk about love in religious communities needs to be more than esoteric verbiage. It can’t be just an ideal placed so far beyond us that we never even really try.

John records Jesus saying that we should love one another… that seems like a good idea and we should try it more often. Matthew and Luke record Jesus rolling up his sleeves and getting real with us…. You should love your enemies… and that is hard stuff. It doesn’t happen naturally or easily and I think the only way to get there is to understand them… and that takes time and effort and it means that you have to take people seriously even when what they believe and how they think seems totally ridiculous and entirely wrong to you. You don’t have to agree to understand.

You need to be the kind of mother that your son will never have to wonder if you will still love him if he tells you that he is gay. You need to be the kind of father whose daughter will know that you will be her strongest supporter, no matter how she may have messed up.  You need to be the kind of Democrat who can patiently listen to a Republican neighbor and them calmly explain to them why they are wrong. … I didn’t tell you that I had this all worked out yet, but I think you know where I’m going with this. Good luck.

Søren Kierkegaard:  Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.    

I'm More Victimized than You Are!

April 17, 2016    Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor  “I’m More Victimized than You Are Competition”

Scott Peck     R.L.T.           “Sooner or later, if people are to be healed, they must learn that the entirety of one’s adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions. If they can accept this totally, then they become free people. To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel themselves victims.”           

This is the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is the reference guide used in the practice of psychology for diagnostic purposes when you need to be more specific than just saying that someone is neurotic, or character disordered, or just plain nuts. My copy is an old version, the one that was in use when I was in graduate school.

I have not felt a need to invest in any one of many updated versions because, quite frankly, and this will be the only time that you will ever hear me say anything that sounds remotely like sympathy for the Church of Scientology, but psychology is not really a hard science. I am grateful for my grad school training in counseling but I have accepted all psychological diagnoses as being approximations and broad-brush descriptions and almost never absolutes.

There are any number of people that I would consider to be sociopaths that other people seem to think of as being excellent candidates for the office of the President of the United States, so, clearly, diagnosis has a lot to do with the perspective of the person doing the diagnosing.

There is a reason why there has never been a definitive book written about how to successfully raise children. There is no manual for how to have a successful marriage.

There have been hundreds of attempts at both of those and I will confess to having read a lot of them but anyone who has raised three or four children can attest to the fact that the same techniques and methods of child rearing do not work uniformly with all children. Creating a successful marriage or a happy, productive child is not like baking chocolate chip cookies by your mom’s recipe that works perfectly every time.

I studied both psychology and theology in graduate school and when I had finished all of my graduate degrees I decided to learn how to fly because after spending a decade studying in fields that were full of opinion, conjecture, and often unfounded prejudice, I wanted to do something that was logical, precise, and exacting.

Everything that I do in my profession is a matter of best guesses and debatable opinions but when it comes to landing an airplane you turn on the fuel pump, set your flaps, lower the landing gear, step on the rudder to crab into the wind, set your rate of descent, and just above the runway, you step on the rudder to straighten the plane with the direction of flight and flare slightly to set the plane on the pavement. There really isn’t any other way to do it if you plan to walk away from the landing.

But people are not airplanes, and living is much more complicated than landing though, for pilots, there is a relationship between living and landing.

All that being said, still, because we seek to lead meaningful and joyful lives, we cannot help trying to understand ourselves, our relationships, and the quirky, neurotic, and sometimes character disordered people whom we love.

This book is M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. I own a lot of books but this is the only book at my house that is held together by a rubber band. It is significant to add that this is not my first, second, third, or fourth copy of this book. During the author’s lifetime, I spent a good deal of money and traveled considerable distances to meet him, talk with him, and to hear him lecture.

There is a fairly common joke about psychiatrists and psychologists that acknowledges the frequently confirmed fact that they tend to be the most ill-adjusted, screwed up, and unhappy people on the planet. In that vein, I can confirm that Scott Peck was the king of those people.  He smoked, drank too much, had lots of psychosomatic illnesses, and he was not only a philanderer but he frequently gave himself permission to have sexual relationships with his patients. He was one of the most deeply flawed geniuses that you will have ever heard of.

His flaws are such that you would not be generally inclined to be tolerant of his failings though, in his defense, the one thing that I genuinely appreciate about this troubled person is that he was totally honest about his failings and took full personal responsibility for them. To me, this fact adds to the weight of the genius of his written insights.

We take our wisdom lesson today from Peck’s history making bestseller, The Road Less Traveled, where he says that no one is ever free until they can fully accept that this life is the sum total of their personal choices. When we fail to accept that our lives are the result of our own choices then we are forever victims, at least in our own minds.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you cannot be hurt by unloving parents, treacherous friends, accidents of birth, prejudice, discrimination, and the capriciousness of the universe. What it means is that you can either take responsibility for your life through the choices you make or you can make yourself miserable by always trying to blame the universe for why you are unhappy or unfulfilled.

In fact, most of the substantive meaning of life comes from our willingness to address and overcome difficulties. Denying and avoiding the challenges of life is the source of almost all neuroses. As Jung taught, all neuroses are merely a replacement for legitimate suffering.

The premise of Peck’s book is that suffering is a part of life. Whether our lives are miserable or joyful will depend upon how we address the inevitable suffering the universe brings us…. Literally, scheduling it, managing it, denying it power or authority in our lives, and transcending it.

He outlines four basic tools for leading a meaningful life.  They are life practices, disciplines. They are: learning the ability to delay gratification, the practice of taking responsibility for your own life, making a fierce dedication to reality, and the ability to balance priorities and time.

These four tools of discipline are especially vital to younger people who are trying to make their way through life.  We have an amazing number of seductive hurdles that trip up younger people before they can learn to delay gratification, all of the way from permissive sex and too available drugs to credit cards and a false sense of security in the future.

Balancing is also a really tough one to learn, in making the choices between a more comfortable life-style in the present moment against rational planning for retirement. Between having a successful career and being successful with your friendship and your family.

But the two skills that seem to elude many who are older, who have matured beyond child rearing and even their working years, are the ability to take responsibility and being dedicated to reality.

Several years ago, as a part of a sermon, I put a blank notecard and envelope into all of the bulletins and I suggested that people think of someone who used to be their friend, or a family member that they no longer spoke to, and that they take that card and write a letter that started them on a path of reconciliation. 

We say a prayer of confession in church every Sunday. Everyone knows that no one is innocent, no one is perfect, we all make mistakes. I just wanted to make the obvious pastoral suggestion that rather than just generally confessing our sins by reading a prayer in out of the liturgy that each of us individually think of someone to whom we owe an apology…. Someone we have alienated by our own misdeeds, through dishonesty or indifference, through gossip or tretchery… take responsibility, write out a personal confession and hold out an olive branch to start the process of reconciliation.

These are all core religious values, right? Confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, love and all that… but do you know, there were over three hundred people in church that day, and after the service, I went through the pews and picked up every single one of those note cards. 

I had worked for that church for 16 years and I had no idea that they were all entirely innocent of all wrongs.  Not that being their pastor in any way makes me their boss but, seriously, don’t we all know someone that we could mend fences with if we were willing to show some humility, some honesty, to be adult enough to take responsibility and say, “I was wrong. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”?

And that ties into the fourth tool of discipline, being dedicated to reality.  People are never so creative as when they are massaging their life narrative to convince the world that they have been victimized by others, by market forces, the capriciousness of nature, or the fact that someone else always seems to win the lottery.

When Ronald Reagan was president, he talked about how moved he was when he was a soldier in WWII and was present for the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. He in fact, spent the entire war producing films for the military in California. Defenders of Reagan’s wrote in the Washington Post, that he had processed the color film taken at the liberation of Ohrdruf and Buchenwald and that it affected him so much that he came to believe that he was there. He even kept a copy of the video to show to his children, telling them that he was there.

Everyone has a right to their own opinion but no one has a right to their own facts. Everyone is sometimes mistaken about their memories but to suggest that someone could be mistaken about whether they spent the war in sunny California or if they had been deployed to their European war front is just plain crazy. If you want to look that up in the DSM, you should try the diagnostic criteria for either schizophrenia or the more common political malady, pathological liar.

Reagan’s absurd story about being in Germany at the liberation of Nazi concentration camps is extreme but I can tell you as someone who has listened to the accounts of marriage conflicts that lead up to divorce from countless couples over my 35 year history as a parish pastor, I can tell you, simply placing yourself on the wrong continent is not the most extreme way to misrepresent reality.

So, my friends, here is the good news. You do not have to live another day as a victim. That can all end before you walk out to the parking lot. But here is the price tag…. You have to be willing to be honest, oriented to reality, responsible and willing to actually be the spiritual person that you tell other people that you are. It seems like a high price to pay but I promise you, there is liberation and health in that way and there are monsters and insanity in the other. That may be a broad sweeping generalization but you must remember, I am a theologian.

Learning to Tell a Story

April 10, 2016
David Ketchum


Our last reading this morning, from Tim Minear, was included, in part, as a gift for my 13 year old. It's from a TV show created by Joss Whedon that tells the story of a vampire with a soul who fights on behalf of the weakest and must vulnerable on earth and, sometimes, beyond earth. There's something wonderful about having a wisdom lesson that was initially spoken by a vampire who is, at turns, mopey and heroic and has a penchant for saving the world.

But I also chose it because it connects both with what makes life meaningful to us as human beings and how we make and sustain meaning in a world that is often overwhelming in its complexity, beauty, and cruelty. The sentiment that - "If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Because that's all there is. ... Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world." (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0512846/quotes ) - resonates very deeply with me, imbuing the ordinary acts of life with purpose, even in the face of my own extraordinary smallness, or the intractability of systemic injustice, or the vastness of time and space. As Loyal Rue put it, "any existential losses incurred by naturalizing religious meanings may be fully compensated by an acquired sense for the mystery and sanctity of nature itself." (Religion Is Not About God, 17)

Yet the sentiment doesn't exist by itself. When I read that "the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world" or consider the grandeur of "the mystery and sanctity of nature itself," what's happening inside of my brain is that I am remembering stories. And it's these remembered stories that make the meaning, that give me a context to understand that, because "nothing we do matters," "all that matters is what we do." My first lessons in ecological justice are embedded in the grief I felt when my cousins needlessly killed the garter snakes in my grandma's garden, or the joy I felt climbing a tree, swaying in the breeze under the moon. And even my first steps at learning to resist the horrors of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy came when, even as a child, I saw that the same people who hurt me were socially permitted to hate certain others on the basis of color or gender or sexuality or religion or class or ability, and that our suffering and our liberation were bound up together.

I remember what's happened to me, what's been shared by others, what's been sung and written. It's how I keep in touch with what is most wonderful and beautiful in life, to celebrate and be grateful. And when I get discouraged, when there's barely enough energy to do the bare minimum, I return to the memories and to the stories I've lived and heard to find the energy and insight I need to keep going. We do this a little bit, I think, automatically and haphazardly, but it's a skill we can also cultivate. bell hooks has written about something like it in her description of "collective black self-recovery" -

"Memory need not be a passive reflection, a nostalgic longing for things to be as they once were; it can function as a way of knowing and learning from the past, .... It can serve as a catalyst for self-recovery. ... We need to keep alive the memory of our struggles against racism so that we can concretely chart how far we have come and where we want to go, recalling those places, those times, those people that gave a sense of direction." (Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 40)

And hooks is right to emphasize this, for all of us dreaming of and working for a community where everyone's voice can be heard and needs met. Because most of the time in most of our lives, we are hearing the stories told by those who stand to gain from injustice or who are simply so deeply enmeshed in our culture that they unintentionally but still powerfully repeat what they, and often we, have been socialized to learn. They tell us a tale that makes the current order of things sound, if not natural, then at least inevitable. They want us to believe that the way things are is the best they'll ever be, or that things are already getting better. They want us to believe that, if we'll only be patient and not agitate, not rock the boat, we'll keep progressing toward equality and liberation. They don't want us to
remember the stories, whether our own or those handed down to us. They don't want us to remember the hard and persistent work of those who dared to say "no" to injustice. But they do want us to remember our heroes as merely unique individuals, as exceptions, instead of remembering them in the context of the communities they belonged to and that came together to make a difference. They do want us to feel insignificant, powerless, overwhelmed, indifferent, resigned to the way things are. "We need to keep alive the memory of our struggles," wrote hooks, to know and learn from the past so that it "can serve as a catalyst for self-recovery."

And this is why doing things like studying the Bible is still important to me. These stories and poems are part of our history of "recalling those places, those times, those people that gave a sense of direction," and of refusing to stand idly by, whether we are reading the texts themselves or remembering how they've inspired and directed trouble makers and prophets through the centuries. Or, all too often, we learn how the message of justice and wholeness has been betrayed, reduced, destroyed by those in charge. Hermeneutics is not a nostalgic longing; it is a political act. Or, as Lerone Bennett put it, "An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor." (*in G. Pritchy Smith, "Relationship Among Knowledge Bases for Diversity" in Teacher Education,
Critical Pedagogy, Critical Inquiry, and Story, Storied Inquiries in International Landscapes: An Anthology of Educational Research, edited by Tonya Huber-Warring (Information Age Publishing: 2010), 7)

So in the lectionary readings for today, one of the scripture stories we are invited to remember is when Saul, soon to be Paul, had a change of heart. It's a familiar one: an evil man convinced he is doing good goes in search of more victims; something unexpected changes his mind; the evil man becomes a good man and takes up the side of his innocent victims; the good man spends the rest of his life advocating for a message of grace and justice. It's an exciting tale that begins with Saul on his way to Damascus to hunt down, as the text has it, "any who belonged to the Way, men or women". If you've been reading Acts through, you already know what Saul is capable of doing; you know that Saul doesn't just 'breathe threats,' but he follows through with arrests and murders. Just one chapter earlier,
the narrator tells us that, even while godly people were still in mourning for the death of a friend, Saul began to 'destroy the church.' In other words, Saul was so callous that he didn't even give his enemies the dignity or breathing space to grieve before he struck his next blow. Saul is sub-human, zealous and scary. So the stage is set. Our evil antagonist re-appears in the theater of the mind, and the crowd lets out a muffled chorus of boos and groans.

This set-up is important. You can imagine a very different story being told by those who found Saul's murderous acts virtuous. From that perspective, Saul would begin as a hero, a faithful champion of orthodoxy and conservative values. And the story would unfold as a tragedy, a betrayal with an inevitable and well-deserved bloody ending.

But the author of Acts isn't telling that story. Saul is our Bad Guy, and we know to be wary. We're meant to be surprised when things change, and even a little mistrustful - that's why there's a flashing light and a voice from heaven, to reassure us. The story-teller knows it's going to take something special to make us believe. So we have the disembodied voice of Jesus speaking from heaven, in those classic lines, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" And Saul recognizes that this is not someone with whom to trifle, answering "Who are you, Lord?" And the voice says, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do."

This has all the makings of a great story. Just at the edge of tragedy, as Saul nears Damascus with a heart full of malice and a head full of plans for persecution, there comes, literally out of nowhere, the intervention that brings a last minute rescue. Saul's companions are speechless, and Saul is made blind in a burst of light. Our friends are safe, our Bad Guy is incapacitated and this previously feared enemy is now helpless enough that he has to be led by the hand, and so overwhelmed that he stops eating and drinking. The ever-listening crowd in our minds, who knows not to rejoice in the misfortune of anyone, nevertheless stifles a cheer.

Now the narrator adds a new actor, a humble disciple in Damascus, one of the ones whom Saul would have presumably arrested. This disciple has a miraculous vision, too, telling him to go and help Saul. At this point, the story-teller expects all our minds to start screaming, "No! Don't go! It's a trap! That guy will kill you!" Our emotions are aroused. We're still gloating over the defeat our Bad Guy has suffered. We're not ready for mercy. And that's why, I think, neither is Ananias. We quickly identify with Ananias and let the fellow speak on our behalf. He talks back, politely, and says, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name."

And so we come, I think, to the point of the story. Because the ethereal answer is this: "Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel...." This is the highlight, the climax of the story. Even when Ananias goes and restores Saul's sight and baptizes him, it has the feeling of a foregone conclusion. The real miracle here is that Saul has become Paul. And instead of persecuting the disciples in Damascus, he spends days with them and begins teaching in the synagogues.

Religions have been very good at preserving stories like this that help us make sense of our own lives and the astonishing cosmos in which we awake each morning. This is one of the reasons Rue could say that, often, "religious life is the sanctuary of existential meaning." I am fascinated by the questions that surround these stories, about why someone told these tales, and why other people thought they were important enough to keep telling, again and again, through generations. I'm also fascinated by how the same stories can be told in ways that produce very disparate results. Some of our meaning-making machines get wired up in very different ways, with neurological twists and turns that lead us to surprising, and not always wonderful, places. And we can become so delusional, so attached to those stories and beliefs, and so unaware of how they run our thinking and acting, that we, with all our wonderful potential, recede into the background. Instead of actors, we become mere scenery.

But in contrast with Rue's important and often true point, naturalizing religious texts and experiences isn't inevitably a "hostile act" that destroys meaning or undermines faith. In this case, Saul's conversion story, though fantastic, still feels very relevant. In a society in general and in an election year in particular where the sides are increasingly drawn in permanent ink, where the issues are polarized to the point that supporters of certain political candidates spontaneously and regularly attack courageous protestors, I hear the lure of the Good versus Evil plot line even more than I usually do. When, for example, I cast my vote in the primary election last month, the person in front of me asked for a Republican ballot. A tiny but very visceral part of my mind immediately played images of Trump and Rubio and Cruz and cried out, "Evil! This is a Bad Guy! Stay away! He's going to punch you and persecute you and your friends!" I read our biblical tale of Saul and Ananias while thinking about how people over thousands of years have had to wrestle with divisions, injustices, and violence. We want the world to be a beautiful place where everyone's voice is heard and needs are met, and we believe it is possible. But how does Saul become Paul? And, just as importantly, how did the people of Damascus come into right relationship with Paul?

We wrestle with these kinds of questions in our imaginations and in our realities. And to make sense of it, or to try to make sense of it, we tell stories. Which is probably what inspired Terry Pratchett to write that "The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise [person]'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee."

But the way Pratchett goes on in his many books of stories, you get the idea that there is more to this insight, or that this insight doesn't quite go far enough. For it is in the telling and re-telling of stories that wisdom has a chance. We need communities, and we need to support communities, who care about justice, who understand systems of oppression and domination, to take up the pen, the brush, the stage, the drum, the microphone. We need all manner of art to help us think about these questions and stumble
toward an answer. We need folk stories and historians. We need Role Playing Games. We need good friends and good conversations over cups of tea or on long walks. We need the singing of songs and the telling of tales.

We need to learn to listen, to interrogate our own complicity with the way things are, so that we can resist. We need to learn to tell our own stories, to find out how we got here and what we really think, so that we can understand and then resist the ways in which we've been conditioned into acting a part that often contributes to oppression and marginalization of others. We need to listen to the stories of others, so we learn we are not alone, and so we can understand how our stories and the systems of domination intersect, and so we can push the boundaries of our own understanding. We need to read outside what is familiar to us, especially to read and listen at the margins when we have become accustomed to seeing the world according to the Powers that Be. And we need to be reminded of
what's gone before us, to be proud and celebrate and to be sad and grieve. We need to learn what has worked, what hasn't worked, and why. In other words, we need to hear stories where we are Ananias, on the right side of justice and grace, discerning what to do next. And we need to hear the stories where we are Saul, in desperate need of a painful change.

Because in the hearing and telling of stories, Pan narrans has a chance to become Homo sapiens. In the hearing and telling of stories, wisdom can be born in us, in our communities and as a community. But we have to pay attention. We have to listen not just to the stories, but for what they mean and how they change us. We can choose the stories we hear and the stories we live with attention to what we care about, with attention to kindness, justice, and community.

I started with a line from the TV show Angel, and I'll wrap things up with some words from Angel's creator, Joss Whedon, when he was asked, "What is the world? What is existence? Why are we here? How can I, and us, feel more sane and purposeful in our own lives? And how do you represent that philosophy in your writing?" Whedon responded -

"The world is a random and meaningless, terrifying place and we all -- spoiler alert -- die. Most critters are designed not to know that, but we are designed [uniquely] to transcend that. To understand ... What we have right now and right here has as much meaning as anything we're afraid of. ... The main function of the human brain is storytelling. Memory is storytelling. ... And from the very beginning we're learning to tell a story about ourselves. ... We come here to celebrate exactly that: storytelling and the shared experience that it gives us, how we live with each other." (http://deadline.com/2015/07/joss-whedon-comic-con-dr-horrible-2-firefly-avengers-1201474472/ )

That's a pretty fair explanation of why I keep listening, keep remembering - whether these are stories of Jesus and Saul, or those of us gathered together in this room. I've only been part of the story of the Community Christian Church since last summer, and most of your own stories have only come to me in pieces along the way. But I want to listen and understand. And I am glad to add paragraph or page to the narrative of this community, perhaps in our ongoing tale of conversion, where together, in a city in which I have found it so difficult to live, we turn it around, offer kindness instead of hate, and justice instead of a tired resignation to the way things are.

Because, in the end, it turns out we don't need a voice from heaven. Our own, very earthly voices can call one another to a more beautiful and just and altogether wonderful way of life. Like Saul becoming Paul, if we can learn to listen rightly, we will know, as the storytellers put it, what we are to do and how we live with each other.