April
3, 2016 Community Christian
Church of Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, Pastor “Accepting Not Being
Accepted”
Thomas Merton "One of the first signs of a saint
may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In
fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least
be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God
really
comprehends. And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the
abstract norms of 'perfection' to his own life. He cannot seem to make his life
fit in with the books."
Over the past few years Bishop John Shelby Spong
has become both a personal friend and a special friend to this congregation.
Being no stranger to controversy, he tried to give us a little advice when he
was here two summers ago. He began his lectures that year by telling us about
the Australian metaphor about cutting down tall poppies.
When you are growing a bed of poppies, there are
always a few that grow significantly taller than the flowers around them and
the gardener will cut those poppies down to keep the flower bed even. For all of the talk about gifted education
and magnet schools, our public school system is horribly guilty of holding back
gifted thinkers to make them conform to the average expectations. Even here, in our gifted education program,
you do not have to have been a gifted student to become a teacher in the gifted
program… not to slight our many excellent teachers in our public schools, but a
teacher with an average IQ is not often very enthusiastic about students whose
IQ may be 40 or 50 points higher than their own.
My own college teaching experience has been
limited to teaching an occasional adjunct class for Drury University but I have
been close enough to university politics to see that the professors who are
refused tenure are almost always the brightest professors we have had who were
voted down by peers who felt inferior and wanted to make sure that no one
joined their department who made them look bad.
Bishop Spong said that the church has a tendency
to do the same thing. The same mindset that made the church of past centuries
condemn Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler, is alive today.
Within the church and within most aspects of
society there is a tremendous amount of pressure to conform to the norm but
there is also a great deal of pressure towards mediocrity. Notice how many
churches either demand or imply that women cannot take on leadership roles…a
demand made by men who do not want to have their place in society undermined.
Many churches state or imply that women should
not even seek higher education. Families often do the same thing. They may want
their children to succeed at the same economic and educational level that they
have but they fear being made to feel inadequate if they excel. I have friends
who were offered full scholarships to prestigious schools and their parents
refused to allow them to go. When I was
invited to be a visiting fellow at Harvard, my own father asked me not to go
because it was simply too far outside of our family’s rural Kentucky roots.
Though my former denomination had many excellent
scholars who both earned degrees and some who taught at Ivy League schools,
these people were never recruited into leadership within the denomination.
Those posts always went to people who had attended denominational schools, the
poppies that never raised their heads above average.
Albert Einstein observed, Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds.
The latter cannot understand it when a [person] does not thoughtlessly submit
to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses their intelligence.
I often hear from listeners to our podcasts and
YouTube videos who are members of a renegade Sunday School class in their
traditional churches. They gather in an out of the way basement classroom and
listen to us or to videos posted by such dangerous rebels as John Spong, Karen
Armstrong, and Michael Dowd but they are not allowed to incorporate progressive
ideas in the church as a whole.
And I understand that people don’t want to rock
the boat…. They don’t want to alienate friends or make themselves unwelcome in
their family church but I do want to remind you of one of my favorite quotes
from the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell: “A reasonable man adapts himself to the
world, and unreasonable man insists that the world adapt to him. Therefore, all
progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”
We have to be willing to be unreasonable. We
have to be willing to appear, at times, to have lost our minds, in order to
break out of the mold of mediocrity and virtual surrender to a social order
that is increasingly divided economically and which is in danger of
surrendering the progress we have made in past decades in women’s rights,
racial harmony, and civil rights.
There is a lot of pressure within churches,
among the clergy, in classrooms, and in the pews to never stray too far
from the language and beliefs of our parents and grandparents. It is often cast
as a matter of disloyalty, not only to a denomination or a religion, but as
disloyalty to a family to change churches, change beliefs, to allow your mind
to expand to take on new insights, bigger ideas.
I would remind you that the only fish that always
move with the current are the dead ones.
I’m not inviting you to be contrarian or to take a superior or
condescending attitude towards others, I’m just saying that if you are
unwilling to question the status quo, if you are unwilling to look at new ideas,
and discard old, mistaken beliefs, then you are choosing irrelevance and death.
We have been told that we don’t get enough
sunlight in this part of the United States to make solar power economically
practical, though Germany gets fewer hours of sunlight per day than we do and
they are making a near total switch to solar and other renewable energies. We have been told that it would be
impractical to make higher education free in the United States but other nations,
not only Western Europe but among nations that want to be competitive in the
future, even in Central and South America, they are realizing that subsidizing
higher education reaps an economic benefit for everyone in the society, even
those who are already retired.
We have been told that we cannot have single
payer health care in the United States because the insurance lobby is too
powerful but every other western developed nation has already done it and they
all used to have insurance companies just like we do.
If you believe that it cannot be done, then you
are right. If, however, you do believe that it can be done, then you are also
right. The real prison that keeps the status quo locked in place is a mental
prison… it is the belief that we cannot do it, we cannot make progress, we
cannot grow out of old prejudices, myths, and ego battles.
The famous monk, Thomas Merton, said that one of
the first signs of a saint is that other people did not know what to make of
them. When you look closely at the lives of the people you hear me most often
referencing as the heroes of modern faith, they all suffered betrayal,
criticism, and rejection from the people who worked the most closely with them.
Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and I can tell you, even our own local legend,
Sister Lorraine Bibel who started all of our homeless services around the
Kitchen and the Missouri Hotel was largely shunned by her own sisters in the
convent and allowed to die in a nursing home, almost forgotten by those she had
led and inspired for decades.
Sister Lorraine could be difficult, political,
and combative but she turned compassion and good will into homeless services
that helped tens of thousands of people over the years and the people who took
her place when she retired have managed to squander almost everything that she
established so, give me a difficult, political, and combative nun with a vision
any day over a whole team of professionally trained non-profit managers who will
follow the rules into extinction.
Our American middle class is in danger. Our
school system is inadequate for the 21st century.
Our higher education system is pricing itself
out of reach to more and more of our future leaders. Our health care delivery
system is the most expensive in the world and near the bottom in delivery of
results. Our infrastructure is crumbling
to such a degree that not only in Flint, Michigan but in many other American
cities such as Durham, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and, where Sean and I
will be next weekend, Columbia, S.C. they are having the same problems.
There are three classic sources for challenging,
unvarnished truth: Investigative
reporting, a tenured professor, and a prophetic pastor. The world of journalism
appears to have given up and accepted that they are left with only propaganda
and entertainment. The university, once a solid source of education and
insight, is increasingly either unavailable or unreliable. And the prophetic
church, well, what I hear from people all over the world is that they can’t
find one anywhere near them.
So, my friends, the challenges are real.
Solutions are available but we just have to decide if we are crazy enough to
believe in the future or not.
