God v God

These progressive sermons are available as podcasts at:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485

Proper 4 -    May 29, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor   “God vs God”

1 Kings 18:20-21, 30-39

²⁰So Ahab sent to all the Israelites, and assembled the prophets at Mount Carmel.

²¹Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” The people did not answer him a word. ³⁰Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come closer to me”; and all the people came closer to him. First he repaired the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down; ³¹Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord came, saying, “Israel shall be your name”; ³²with the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord. Then he made a trench around the altar, large enough to contain two measures of seed. ³³Next he put the wood in order, cut the bull in pieces, and laid it on the wood. He said, “Fill four jars with water and pour it on the burnt offering and on the wood.” ³⁴Then he said, “Do it a second time”; and they did it a second time. Again he said, “Do it a third time”; and they did it a third time, ³⁵so that the water ran all around the altar, and filled the trench also with water. ³⁶At the time of the offering of the oblation, the prophet Elijah came near and said, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. ³⁷Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” ³⁸Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench. ³⁹When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.”

Shortly after the war in Iraq was launched, Lt. General William Boykin was tasked with finding and either killing or capturing Osama Bin Laden. Perhaps because his previous assignments to fly helicopters into Iran in 1980 to rescue hostages in our embassy or his 1992 assignment to arrest Pablo Escobar in Columbia had been so successful. Boykin is a very religious man, so religious that a military psychiatrist had once said that he was not fit for duty, but he was given this task of finding Osama Bin Laden and he took it on as if it were a religious crusade. 

In fact, in a speech he delivered to an evangelical Christian event in 2003, he actually said:  "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

He encouraged his Christian audience saying, "We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this.” That same year he told another religious audience that his boss, President George W. Bush was, “in the White House because God put him there." And see, all this time cynics like us thought he was put in the White House by five partisan Supreme Court Justices! It is indeed true that the Lord works in mysterious ways!

Though Bush tried to distance himself from Boykin’s anti-Muslim statements he was not fired. He retired from the military in 2006, leaving Osama Bin Laden for another administration to find. However, Boykin was recently fired from the teaching position he took in Virginia in retirement, reportedly for refusing to allow transgender students to use the restroom of their choice.  Bigotry against Muslims never seemed to hurt his career but the transgender community is well organized. Legislators in Texas, North Carolina, and South Dakota, well… and Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, …. As well as Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin… it appears that stupid bigotry is not regionally contained.

Now, it is obvious that General Boykin is one of the most shocking un-self-aware people ever to be in a position of leadership but I didn’t tell you about him simply to mock him for his ignorant prejudice. I mention him today to tell us something about ourselves.

It is like what Melissa Harris-Perry recently said about Donald Trump, the mere fact that Donald Trump is a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and violent man it is that his candidacy, in his popularity, is hold up a polished mirror to America.

Trump is irrelevant but what he is telling us about ourselves is that we an “id” a dark side of ourselves, that is still very racist, very anti-immigrant, very intolerant of other religions, still quite sexist, and still longing for authoritarian rule by a wealthy elite. If our nation did not harbor those horrible qualities, Trump would not be so poplar among voters. Trump is like a presidential dipstick and it is increasingly evident that America is a couple of quarts low on intelligence, morality, and civility.

Our lectionary reading today is from that well-known contest recorded in I Kings of the Hebrew Bible. In the 8^th century, not long after civil war had divided the Jewish state into the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, came a king, Ahab, who married the daughter of a neighboring king in Tyre. Ahab’s foreign-born wife, Jezebel, persuaded Ahab to abandon the Hebrew’s religion and to worship the Assyrian god, Baal.

History is always written by the victors and religious history is written from the perspective of what eventually became the orthodox view of history. So the Bible tells us that Ahab was even and his wife, Jezebel was even more evil, because they were straying from the Hebrew’s faith.

Of course, you must see, that if they had been successful in this religious reform and these ancient religious texts had been written by the priests of Baal, then Ahab and Jezebel would have been portrayed in stained glass windows in churches all over the world and they would be remembered as the Abraham and Moses of our religion.

There is more at work here than meets the eye. These texts were all redacted in the temple cult in the southern kingdom of Judah so their rivals in the north always get to play the bad guys. If it is possible to have less journalistic integrity than modern newspapers, the people who wrote the Bible had an agenda that trumped any concern about accurately recording history.

So they tell a story about how a wicked king and his horribly evil wife tried to lead the people astray but God’s superhero, Elijah, managed to kill the bad guys and restore the true faith. This narrative is just the gravy that covers the meat of the politics that was playing out beneath the religious language.

The tiny kingdoms of the ancient world had shifting loyalties and alliances that helped them to survive. Ahab didn’t meet Jezebel on Match.com, theirs was an arranged marriage to bring these two weak kingdoms together in an alliance, primarily against their stronger southern neighbor, Judah.

In the ancient world, the gods were conceived as living in heaven just above the temple where they were worshipped. Yahweh wasn’t just the God of Judah; Yahweh lived in Judah, just above the clouds above Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem.

When the Jews were taken into captivity in Babylon, they literally believed that they were too far away from God for their God to hear their prayers. The Gods of the ancient world were associated with a nation, with a place.

In almost every case, the God of any given nation was a war god. The Ark of the Covenant, described in Exodus, was probably originally a large throne that warriors carried into battle to symbolize the presence of God on the battle field.

The graphic battle between Elijah and the prophets of Baal represented a clash of nations…. Asking which culture would survive.  The battle of the United States against the nation of Iraq was portrayed by General Boykin as a battle between the Christian God and the Muslim God and Boykin was willing to say that our God is greater than their God…. A sadly sophomoric yet theological way of saying “My dad can beat up your dad.” And, in this case, he was right because his dad is armed with sophisticated artillery, and is backed up by a navy and an airforce, and their dad had none of that.

A great deal of the hostility between the Muslim world and the west is articulated in religious language but the real fear is cultural domination. If their cars, electronics, clothes, and even their foods fall to western influence… if their TV shows, movies, and music all come from Hollywood and New York then, they feel, what it means to be who they are is being destroyed.

France and Spain have long had laws that mandate that their TV and Radio stations play at least 40% of their content from France or Spain and at least 60% from Europe, to keep the USA from destroying their culture but now with satellite providing most of the TV and music, national governments are losing control.

The USA dominates the world, our culture, fashion, and fast food are pervasive the world over and yet we all know people who get scared out of their minds if they see a woman at the mall wearing a Hijab, or if they see Spanish signs at Home Depot.

And somehow, extremists on both sides, somehow want to us to believe that the real issue is that Allah and Yahweh are locked into a death match in a heavenly arena.

The story of Elijah is told in I Kings to encourage the kind of xenophobia that Gen. Boykin articulated, that the Iraq war wasn’t about controlling the oil fields of the Middle East, it was to prove that Christianity is superior to Islam. No one wants to send their sons and daughters to fight and possibly die defending low gasoline prices but they may be willing to sacrifice their own children to preserve, not simply our brand of religion, but to defend country music, NASCAR, Levis, Coke, McDonalds, Jack Daniels, and bacon.

You know that if Muslims ever run our grocery stores that bacon will become a black market product just like heroin and crack cocaine!? When politicians talk about fighting for our way of life, they are talking about bacon! They are talking about our consumer culture and our specific tastes. Fanatics may focus on the tenets of one faith against another faith but governments, whether they are western or eastern, are concerned with economics and power.

Jews and Muslims fight in the Middle East. Hindus and Muslims fight on the Indian subcontinent. Muslims and Buddhists fight in Indonesia. The largely secular or Christian west is willing to fight anyone and everyone all over the globe but I will say this and as soon as I say everyone in the sound of my voice will know instinctively that what I am saying is true:

Scrape away the hocus pocus from all of the world’s religions and underneath all of the rituals, creeds, and holy books, we’re all just trying to figure out how to be better people.  We have nothing to fight about.

We are all just trying to figure out how to make our lives a little better, to make the world a little better for our children and our grandchildren. And at the heart of what it takes to make us better people and to make the world better for our kids is to flatly refuse to be manipulated into another war that sends the poor of America to fight and kill the poor of another nation. Let the people say: 

Spiritual Love (try giving a damn)

May 22, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor    “Spiritual Love (try giving a damn)”          

Rumi, 14^th Century Sufi Mystic - Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. 

Emmet Fox - “There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer: no disease that love will not heal: no door that enough love will not open...It makes no difference how deep set the trouble: how hopeless the outlook: how muddled the tangle: how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world...”

                

Back when Caitlin Jenner was still known as Bruce Jenner and Chelsea Manning was still captive in a prisoner of war camp known as Bradly Manning, the local Human Rights Commission asked me to write an essay for our paper promoting sensitivity towards the transgender community. I had to admit that I knew very little about the topic. So the commission was kind enough to arrange some interviews for me with a couple of young transgender activists.

After some research and the interviews, I wrote a short essay in which I basically tried to tell our community that, though fairly rare, the whole transgender thing is a real issue. Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia and the physician and parents have to make a choice…. And about half of the time they make the wrong guess.

For others the struggle is entirely internal, a soul and spirit virtually captured in a body that is the wrong gender.

Like everything else about sex, gender roles, and self-understanding, it is complex, confusing, and some people end up going back and forth as they struggle to discover themselves and the role that is right for them.

And, like every other essay I have written for the Springfield NewsLeader, there were several people who were eager to point out to me why I was wrong, and not Christian, and un-American, and whatever… but they were not very enthusiastic about it because, like me, most of them had either never met a transgender man or woman or if they had they didn’t realize that they had…. Which is almost always they way that works.

But now, with Catlin Jenner very publicly and very often demanding that we accept her, both as a woman and as an out of the closet Republican, and with even President Obama getting into the fray over school restroom policy, I find that even I keep changing the channels every time the news wants to update me on who said what ridiculous or uninformed thing today.

I am interested in reports on what is said in the Georgia and North Carolina legislature in the same way that I want to go to the sewage treatment plant and watch what is coming out of the spillway.  I’m sure someone does have to worry about that but I just don’t want it to be me.

Social media, the magical Book of Faces, is where we go now to take the pulse of our culture and it was there, after I made some comment which I am sure was absolutely appropriate, insightful, and informative; a southern gentleman assigned himself the task of politely correcting me.

He told me about how he had a gay uncle whom he loved but his uncle had never made a public issue of his sexual orientation. He didn’t expect everyone to have to deal with his private life and his partnership with another man.

And who among us, whether we have ever said it out loud or not, has not felt that way. I get tired to being told not to use certain words, or to be expected to get engaged in a topic that just doesn’t involve me, or my family. And it’s especially difficult for a white, male, heterosexual, in the middle class…. How many of you in my situation had to have “white privilege” explained to you four or five times before you ever started to get it?

This particular critic was a white, male, heterosexual who would never be denied a marriage license, no matter how many he wanted in the course of a lifetime.  He would never walk into a public restroom and nervously look around to see if anyone was going to beat him up just because he needed to pee. And yet, he was just a little too precious to be bothered.

It would not surprise me if I have already lost the majority of our online audience just because I have mentioned the trans issue and some of you who are here may be staying just because you are too polite to walk out on me, but substantively that’s not really what I am talking about. What I really want to talk about is love.

Beyond all talk about romance, intimate affection, or whatever Victoria’s Secret could possible be…. I mean, really, what on earth could she be hiding? … I want to talk about love as that spiritual dimension, that decision to give energy to others that a self-serving narcissist would never understand. 

We began this morning with the admittedly rather trite sounding and possibly annoying claim of Emmet Fox who says: “There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer: no disease that love will not heal: no door that enough love will not open...It makes no difference how deep set the trouble: how hopeless the outlook: how muddled the tangle: how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world...”

Let me grant that there is a bit of over-statement here, maybe even hyperbole, but even though we might poke holes in this grandiose claim, still, can you give him the leeway to see that it is, in fact, mostly true.

A lot of the self-help gurus who write popular books, who get TV shows, or who run retreats for wealthy people to go to exotic places and feel sorry for themselves, are as devoid of substance as a bowl of onion soup…. Leo Buscagalia couldn’t hug away a real problem, Deepak Chopra tries to string together important sounding words but if you tried to actually analyze a sentence of his speeches you would want to stick a pencil right through your eyeball, and I don’t have time to get started on Tony Robbins who is, in my estimation, the king of con men, but here is the really frustrating thing:  Every one of these guys has actually helped a lot of people.

Yeah, I have to act like I am happy about that fact because they are so irritating.  All of these self-help gurus are, no matter how much they fumble and lie along the way, giving people encouragement to stop thinking about how they have failed, how they are broken and in need, and they are giving them permission, in many cases, to drop barriers and love others, to express caring, vulnerability, sincere concern for the welfare of others… and when they do that, their lives do dramatically improve.

And though I think I have some fairly sophisticated training in pastoral counseling, I know that the single most important part of any counseling appointment that I conduct is not my blazingly insightful advice or amazing diagnostic skill, it is the fact that I listen and give them the impression that I care about the problem and that I want for them to get better.

I would hate to see the statistics comparing the success rates of a caring bartender and professionally trained psychiatrist but, in many instances, I’m going to say that a caring friend is the most helpful and meds dispensed by the bartender are often better than what the physicians writes down in her or his notes and what the pharmacist putts in a bottle. 

You may not have ever had to deal with a controversial sexual identity issue in your immediate family but we have all experienced sorrow or loss that took us out of the normal path of our lives. When you lose a parent, or a spouse, or, God forbid, one of your children… if you go through a divorce or a bankruptcy or an extended unemployment, you often find out how thin the sincere empathy of your friends can be.

People may be very sympathetic and attentive for a week, maybe two, usually no more than six weeks, but six months later it all still feels like it was yesterday to you. And if you can remember how that felt to you, when the phone never rang when you needed for it to, when people were not available when you needed them, when you were not being included the way you used to be… then you know what I mean when I say that there simply is not enough love in the world because it is love that gives us the energy to respond to needs that are not necessarily our own.

It is love that keeps us from being impatient. I’m not talking about romance or any warm fuzzy feelings, I’m talking about the clear and sacrificial, determined decision that you are going to give a damn about things that don’t happen to hit you personally right between the eyes.

Substantive love was always more about the decisions you make than the emotions you feel. Feeling is easy, doing the right thing when you are tired, stressed out, bored, or annoyed, that is hard. It is a lack of love that makes us feel the need to retreat, stop caring, to insulate yourselves from any demand that you care about the people who are the victims of discrimination or who, due to illness, broken relationships, finances, or race are standing at the margins of a society that would be helped if you just cared a little more.

Love is, at its core, a generous emotion. Healthy marriages should strive for mutuality but that is not the basic nature of love. And while I don’t want to throw any unnecessary insults in the direction of Hinduism, I want to say that Karma, if it exists at all, is unreliable. Most of the good that you seek to do for strangers will not be rewarded if it is acknowledged at all.

In fact, my older brother is fond of reciting to me the proverb, “no good deed goes unpunished.” In my 35 years of parish life, I have found my brother’s philosophy to be much more reliably true than the karmic sense that good intentions render good results in return.

As progressives, we’re not trying to infuse the world with love because we are trying to storm the gates of heaven with our virtue, nor do we seek to gain adherents to our faith, nor personal reward… we do it because, if I may be allowed to say it twice, we are trying to give a damn. I’m just saying that we could probably do a little better if we tried.

Can Religion Still Be Useful?

May 15, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor       “Can Religion Still Be Useful?”     

— Archibald Macleish --  Religion is at its best when

 it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. 

It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking 

we have all the answers for everybody else. 

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

A century ago, the journalist and scholar, H. L. Mencken was known as the “sage of Baltimore.” He is having something of a resurrection on the internet these days as Donald Trump has risen to the point of being the Republican nominee for President. Mencken seemed to be almost prophetic in a satirical quip he published in the Baltimore Sun in 1920 when he said:              

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

In 2016 it appears that we have the potential of making Mencken look like Nostradamus though I certainly hope that it doesn’t happen.

I have always enjoyed the bits and pieces of satire and political wisdom I have run across from Mencken but my recent interest has sprung from my discovery of a book he wrote about the evolution and state of religion entitled, Treatise on the Gods.

About 25 years ago, when I first began to teach college classes in religion at Drury University, it was, for me, something akin to walking out of a deep fog into bright sunshine.

I had earned both a seminary degree and a doctorate from a top tier divinity school but it wasn’t until I had to teach New Testament classes that I actually let that education pierce the too comfortable assumptions that I lived with as a Christian pastor. When I had to try to teach undergraduate students about the historical Jesus, using books written by Marcus Borg and his peers in the Jesus Seminar, was when I began to take my academic life into my role as a pastor, a professor, and as just a religious person.

I had known it for years, but I had never let myself say it simply before I had to emphatically say it to a room full of young college students:  Jesus wasn’t God. And even God wasn’t God in the supernatural theistic way that we had been brought up to believe. I spent the next several years retooling what I personally believed and how I viewed what it meant to be a pastor, focusing on the ethical and transformative message of faith while slowly dismissing all of the creedal, ritualistic, and superstitious aspects of traditional religion.

For a long time I was willing to assume that my professors at Vanderbilt and Harvard and the famous writers of the Jesus Seminar  were the first generation of progressive, honest, religious academics. I was willing to credit such writers as Borg, Spong, Armstrong, and Crossan with being unique geniuses who had finally been able to rescue Jesus, Christianity, religion itself, from the confused mire of magical thinking that had held it fast for centuries.

You don’t hear me say this often enough but, my friends, I was wrong. For the most part, the writers we most often name in the progressive movement were not doing very much original scholarship.

Spong, Borg, Crossan, and Armstrong were and are certainly brilliant writers, but they are much more in the vein of popularizers than they are original scholars. Most of what they were saying in their books was said before, much of it a couple of hundred years ago but certainly in the era of Tillich, Neihbur, and Bultmann, early in the 20^th century… it is just that it is hard to read and understand Tillich, Niebuhr, and Bultmann.

But there were contemporaries in more popular writings who were trying to tell us to come out of the Iron Age and to take a serious look at the tenants of our faith. Our provocative and progressive wisdom lesson today is a quote from Archibald Mcleich, an early 20^th century poet. You have often heard me quote from the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who literally begged the public to come to its senses.

And, in 1930, H. L. Mencken wrote this: What the faithful Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would laugh at it…”

Mencken carefully and with painful clarity, describes the evolution of religion from the roots of primitive superstitions and the magical thinking of children and he popularly published it for our grandparents to read when they were young adults.

Why did these insights remain hidden in the fog of magical religious beliefs? I believe that many such helpful and thoughtful works remained largely hidden from public view for the same reason that Mark Twain insisted that his own critical take on organized religion remain unpublished until fifty years had passed after his death.  The priests and pastors whose livelihood and authority depended upon the deception obviously fought against any enlightenment, but the public also resisted, just as they fought and are still fighting in many quarters against Darwin’s work on human evolution.

There was a huge revival movement in the United States following WWII and while the generation following the war saw religion losing its footing in Europe, it became larger than ever in the USA, empowered by radio, then TV, and finally by the sound and video technology that made the mega church a possibility. I don’t know why American’s reacted so differently to the loss and grief experienced in the war than did Europeans or even the defeated Japanese and German people, but where they became increasingly disillusioned about religion, Americans forgot their rich heritage of religious academics and even ignored the insightful work of pre-war journalists, essayists, poets, and novelists, and rushed back into the embrace of magical thinking.

More than half of Americans believe in angels.  We think of Islamic countries as being full of religious fanatics but a much larger percentage of Americans believe in angels than does the population of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In fact, a much larger percentage of Americans believe in angles than believe in global warming. Nearly half of us believe in ghosts and in UFO’s.

And, of course, here in Springfield, the largest church in town in populated with people who not only believe in angels but they believe that they can speak the unintelligible language of angels.  When a guy at a Star Trek convention speaks in Klingon, he generally knows that he is faking….

At our local “Six Flags over Jesus,” they are right now waving their hands in the air and speaking gibberish and telling themselves that it is the language of angels.  And, sobering for me, when they leave there they will return to teaching in our public schools, broadcasting the news on our local TV stations and, some of them will take their place on the bench of our city council.

Is it just me or do you think that teachers, political leaders, and medical professionals should have a basic and reliable orientation to reality? And if we are indifferent about this, is it any wonder that we are not really doing anything about global climate change, renewable energy, sustainable building, or mass transit…. And we actually have lengthy battles at city council meetings about the extent to which women can expose the underside or side of their breasts in public and one councilman who was clearly bottle-fed, has virtual panic attacks about nipples. He can single-handedly make our city look like a giant Darwin’s Waiting Room.

Religion, at its root, is not about beliefs, creeds, or rituals. It is about conduct. It is a way of life. It is a courageously philosophical search for meaning and reality. Our faith should challenge our penchant for violence, our passive acceptance of warfare, our indifference about the poor and the addicted who live all around us.  Our faith should make us want to live lives that are congruent with our core values.

The fake hair and spray-on tans of politicians becomes emblematic of the falseness and irrationality of most of our nation’s religion. We can be better than that and I don’t think that we should ever again settle for less.

As Mencken discusses in some detail, when you are an infant, you cannot distinguish between yourself and others, nor even yourself and objects like furniture and toys. The infant assumes that her mother’s voice is her own, that the rattle in his tiny fist is a part of him.

As soon as a child is able to distinguish themselves from other things, they assume that all things are sentient just like they are. Just like a dog that will bark at a rose bush because a thorn stuck him, assuming that the rose bush meant to do that, a child will assume that stuffed animals and dolls are actually alive and have thoughts and feelings.

At a very early age, children can’t tell the difference between a cartoon and a real person, between Disney animation and a movie. All of these are precursors to a religion based on a personification of nature, of the sky.

Ancient people believed that the sun was a god, later they believed that it was a chariot driven by a god, and even later, at the dawn of Jewish and Christian faith, it was a heavenly body directed across the sky by God’s hand.

The first people who realized that the sun was a burning mass of gas whose gravitation keeps the earth in orbit around it were severely punished for telling the truth. When I have published in our local paper that the stories of Noah and Jonah are not literal history and Jesus was not really divine, the local Baptist Area executive published a letter saying that I was not a Christian and our local Council of Churches would not let us join even though we contribute money, food, and volunteers to their projects.

Folks, the truth is out there…. And it is not on the X-files. There is a modern proverb that says, you cannot fault a child for being afraid of the dark but we can fault an adult who is afraid of the light.

H. L. Mencken claims that there is no difference between a magician and a priest and I know all too well why he said that. But we can be the difference.  We know that our religion is about living a life of prophetic witness and compassionate sacrifice. Beyond all sacred texts, sacraments, rituals, and creeds…. The truth is available to us and we will only live in the fog if we choose it. I pray that we will not ever again be afraid of the light.

These progressive sermons are available as podcasts at:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485