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Sept. 25, 2016    Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor    “A Religion of Life and Joy”       

“Let Religion Be To Us Life and Joy” by Vincent Silliman

 Let religion be to us life and joy.
Let it be a voice of renewing challenge
to the best we have and may be;
let it be a call to generous action.
Let religion be to us a dissatisfaction with things that are,
which bids us serve more eagerly the true and the right.
Let it be the sorrow that opens for us the way of sympathy, understanding, and service to suffering humanity.
Let religion be to us the wonder and lure of that
which is only partly known and understood:
An eye that glories in nature’s majesty and beauty,
and a heart that rejoices in deeds of kindness and of courage.
Let religion be to us security and serenity because of its truth and beauty,
and because of the enduring worth and power of the loyalties which it engenders;
Let it be to us hope and purpose,
and a discovering of opportunities
to express our best through daily tasks:
Religion, uniting us with all that is
admirable in human beings everywhere;
Holding before our eyes a prospect of the better life for humankind,
which each may help to make actual.

For years I have taunted Sean with my second favorite Voltaire quote in which the French rationalist made the observation that anything that is too silly to be said is sung. You typically don’t want to look to hard at the lyrics of either opera or high church music but today I have taken our wisdom lesson from the words to a Unitarian hymn.

Of course, a great hymn, a really great hymn, starts with a great poem. I may be stepping outside of the realm of my expertise to offer an opinion about either great music or great poetry but for me, a great poem expresses an important idea more succinctly than prose. A poem that has to be explained is almost like abstract art that has to be explained…. If I can’t look at it and know what it is trying to say, it may be an exercise in ego on the part of the artist or the poet but, at least from my consumer vantage point, it isn’t on my list of classics.

A great poet or a great artist is a person who has an important insight and they are struggling to express that insight in the most tight, succinct, and powerfully clear way that they can. 

I have accepted the challenge of trying to write a TED talk which asks people from various disciplines to try to distill their life’s work, the message that they are trying, book after book, semester after semester, conference after conference to articulate and to do it in 18 minutes. For me, this is like trying to turn preaching into poetry.

I have about 4000 pages of sermon material on line right now. If I were to try to sum that up in five or six pages, what would I put in those pages?

1)   The old iterations of religious faith that were based on ancient texts, creeds, myths, traditions, and truth claims has no future in a rational, scientific, and fact based world.

The mere fact that there are mega-churches in major cities and all over the fly-over portions of America that still cling to both ancient and modern myths does not mean that such belief systems will retain any power in our lives. I must hasten to admit that the demise of magical religious thinking has been predicted by rationalists and humanists in the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and in various experimental movements over the past three hundred years and the power of the church has always managed to reassert itself and regain control of global thinking.

The modern emergence of Islamic fundamentalism is, in my estimation, another last gasp of mythology based religion. It is fueled by both legitimate and illegitimate cultural anger, but it is funded by oil revenue and that is coming to an end both by depletion and a transfer to more renewable energy resources. The economic bonanza enjoyed in the past century in oil producing nations in the Middle East, Indonesia, as well as those in Central America and Russia, has a shelf life and their day is coming in our lifetimes.

Most of us here today will live to see the end of gas stations and the oil based economy and the inevitable coming shift in power sources holds great danger for the whole of the world’s population but it is going to happen whether by clever technological advances or by more primitive environmental disasters or by mere exhaustion of the supply; but as the global map and economy changes, so will the religious environment that has been propped up by the rise of the role of crude oil.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are over due for a major reformation. I would love for it to come as a result of critical thinking but if it doesn’t it will come through economic necessity and social transformation. Either way, the best way that we can fight radical Islamic terrorism is to put up wind generators and solar panels. Bombing Isil, Wasabism, and Al Qaeda would be totally irrelevant if we would just stop buying oil.

In any event, my first point is that traditional religions rooted in ancient texts, myths, and magic will go away because they will all be repeatedly revealed to be not only not true but also entirely worthless in interpreting our modern lives.

And to sum up this point, since I mentioned that my second favorite quote from Voltaire is that “Whatever is to silly to be said is sung,” let me conclude the point with my favorite Voltaire quote, “Those who can persuade you to believe in absurdities can then persuade you to commit atrocities.”  Or to put it in the words of the great comedian, George Carlin:

Governments don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. That is against their interests.  They want obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept it.

I hate to have to say this but traditional religious indoctrination is the opposite of teaching critical thinking skills. Teaching children, from an early age, to simply believe what they are told in spite of the fact that absolutely all of the evidence is to the contrary produces a society that has genuine and sincere difficulty in telling fact from fiction.

One need only give a little attention to our public political news to find all of the evidence you could ever need to realize that a huge portion of our society will believe the most ridiculous, false, dishonest, self-serving lies, only because they are being told these lies by an authority figure.

I believe that the practice of religion has done a great deal for the evolution of our culture but we have to honestly acknowledge that it has done a great deal of harm at the same time. Is it possible to preserve what is helpful while discarding what has been indisputably harmful? Which leads to my second point:

2)   Our generation will face a choice: shall we abandon faith communities entirely or can we evolve into an entirely different community that will be relevant and powerful for the future?

In 1822 Thomas Jefferson predicted that "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die a Unitarian." The growing enlightenment, coupled with the persuasiveness of the rational use of the scientific method, gave Jefferson confidence that magical and superstitious thinking was going to expire in his lifetime.

But it should be noted that in Europe and Great Britain, where the devotion to traditional expressions of Christianity has been disappearing for generations, the Unitarian movement is shrinking even faster as more and more people choose “none” as their reply to polls about religious affiliation. In fact, one of the fastest growing religious identities on census questionnaires in Great Britain is “Jedi knight.” And, just to be clear, that is not because there is a generation hoping for flight on the Millennium Falcon, they are telling us that they think that the question is silly.

And, if the question is will you reinvest in a religion that believes in angels and demons, heaven and hell, souls and spirits, a supernatural theistic god who grants wishes from the clouds if only you ask often enough and really really really believe in fairies, then, yes, it is embarrassingly silly. But is there another option? Is the choice only between absurdity or nothing at all, or is there a rational, evidence based, critical thinking version of religion that can both meet the needs of 21^st century people and help to guide us into the birth of the real modern world, the world where everyone has healthcare, adequate food, housing, education, and safety?

There have been ways in which religion has been the opiate of the people, convincing them to accept violent poverty and inhumane living situations so that they can avoid eternal punishment and gain eternal reward.

There is no shortage of historical examples of governments using religion as a means of controlling their population, keeping them obediently harnessed in the plow of supporting the wealth and power of the aristocracy. I can assure you that all of the world’s religions did not start that way.

If there are even shreds of truth to the Moses tradition, he was a liberator of slaves and a slayer of slave owners. The precursor to modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the Persian religion known as Zoroastrianism, invented the concepts of heaven and hell, not as a carrot on a stick to keep the poor in line but as a promise that one day the universal scales of justice would be balanced and the people who had enslaved them would spend eternity in a lake of burning fire.

These ancient constructs were rife with wish fulfillment dreams but they were born in the cauldron a deep desire for a more just society. All of the great religions of the world have been prostituted to serve the wealthy and the government but all of them started as the exact opposite of that.

There have always been some religious leaders who understood the role of faith as a moral guide, that resisted wars, the advocated for the oppressed, that sought to liberate slaves, and free people from the chains of racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty. You have to think of Muhammad who lived in a small house and wore shabby clothes, not the opulent caliphs who succeeded him. You have to think of St Francis and not the Pope. We have the examples of Gandhi, King, and Dorothy Day to offset the more outrageous abuses of the Joel Olsteens and Benny Hinn.

   

There are no Gandhis, Kings, or Dorothy Days without a faith community. My belief is that faith communities are to social ethics what labor unions are to the labor movement. A group of individuals who have grand beliefs about what fair wages, safe working conditions, the importance of health care and pension funds, remain powerless as long as they are not organized. Once they are organized, real change can happen.

If Gandhi had gone on the Salt March in 1930 all alone, he would have just been a crazy little man on a 240 mile long walk. But he wasn’t alone. He arrived at the sea shore with 12,000 followers… which changed a crazy little man into a social movement that freed India from colonial rule.

William Schultz, a Unitarian minister who was the founder of Amnesty International said that the mission of faith is to revere both the critical mind and the generous heart. We must turn our critical thinking into compassionate action and though I would never dispariage individual action, I am confident that we also need collective action. Communities of faith may not survive the 21^st century but I believe that we need them.

3)   Keeping the tradition of my hermeneutical forbearers, I have a third and final point, and for that point I will hearken back to the poem I began with today that enjoins us to let religion be our life and our joy.  I know that joy may not be a word you often associate with religion. In fact, religion has often made us feel guilty about anything that ever brought us joy. The saints often seem to be suspicious of happiness, always listing sins, great and small, and often obsessing about the small.

Our society often seems to obsess about Puritan values while jumping off the cliff into the abyss of excesses in drugs, pornography, greed, and gluttony. The information superhighway, the marvel of the genus of this generation, is mostly used for porn traffic, and social media has taken the place of being social.

We have a dozen different drugs on the market now for erectile dysfunction and now even a testosterone cream to make you want to take the pill!

So senior citizen homes are now rife with STDs, some of us have thousands of social media “friends,” but there is not much joy is there?  There is comfort. There is distraction. There is entertainment. We have activities and diversions but I don’t see much joy. Kids have joy but we seem to be able to beat it out of them with school, church, and the looming prospect of work.

Several years ago I was taking a sabbatical from church work as a Merrill Fellow at Harvard Divinity School and I was taking a course in world religions with Diana Eck. When we were studying Buddhism she had a monk in as a guest speaker, Ven Lama Migmar.

It was 2004 and so we asked Lama Migmar a lot of questions about terrorism, our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and through it all he was gently smiling at us. It felt off, talking about such serious things and seeming him looking at us, almost as if we were being silly.

Someone finally asked him about this and he told us that monks choose to smile as a gift to a world that is often full of violence, fear, and pain. Their joy, the joy of the Buddha, is a gift they give to the world.

I believe that the old forms of faith must pass away and the sooner the better because the world needs for us to bring critical thinking and a passion for justice to a host of issues of racism, poverty, warfare, environmental degradation, terrorism, and disease. But, I think that we must find a way to be joyful in the journey.

We sing about love being our religion. We sing that all we need is love. We come from a tradition in which we call one another brothers and sisters. We talk about our community. But we don’t see a lot of love, fraternity, joy and I want to say that is a non-negotiable aspect of any future that faith has. We must choose it, even when we don’t feel it, we must choose it, work for it, nurture it, feed it. We must exercise our strengths in tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, mutual respect, discovering even the sacred in one another so that we will have the joy to sustain us in the revolution we surely must lead.

Click here to see the videoThe Buddha in me recognizes and bows to the Buddha in you. The Christ in me greets the Christ that is in you.  I believe in the social justice mission of the 21^st century church and I want to be a part of it, as long as it is joyful. Without joy, I’m afraid that the cares of this life will allow cynicism to win.

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Proper 20     September 25, 2016   Community Christian Church

Roger Ray, pastor     “The Gulf Between What Is Legal and What Is Right”  

Amos 8:4-7               ⁴Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, ⁵saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, ⁶buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” ⁷The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

The right for same sex couples to marry is coming slowly to Mexico, in much the same way that it did in the United States. Right now it is only legal in Mexico City and a couple of larger states but President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has made it very clear that they will not be paying for no stinking wall…. Has recommended a nationwide measure to legalize same sex marriage throughout the country.

Mexico may not be all that Catholic anymore but the Catholic church is still very strong there. Last Saturday there was a huge demonstration by the Frente Nacional (Spanish for "National Front") in Celaya… 11,000 people were marching down the street, carrying anti-gay banners and shouting slogans. Then this 12-year-old boy, stepped out into the street and stretched out his arms to stop them. The media has reasonably avoided using his name but they did publish a quote from him.  When asked why he did this, he said, “I have an uncle that is gay, and I don’t like people hating him.”

It has only been a week but this little boy has already been compared to the iconic image of the “tank man” who 27 years ago, stepped out in front of Chinese tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square or Ieshia L. Evans, the 35 year old nurse and single mother who stood up to riot police earlier this year in Baton Rouge.

In the early 1960’s, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was being arrested and jailed on a regular basis, my mother was willing to dismiss the whole of the Civil Rights movement for that reason alone. In her universe, good people obeyed the law, bad people broke the law. There was no way in her evangelical Methodist world view to allow for a righteous person to break an unjust law…. Though that is exactly what King said that we must do.

Today is one of those increasingly rare days when we began with a reading from the Bible… we read this famous text from the prophet Amos who decried how the people just went along with culture… they went along with the market place. Amos was irritated by the fact that people were increasingly aggitated about having to not do business and make money on the Sabbath… they were itching to open their shops and, according to Amos, get back to cheating people.

Let me rescue a bit of that language… when he accused the merchants of “making the ephah small and the shekel great” he was saying that they made the measuring cup that they used to sell grain smaller but demanded a large shekel in payment. If you didn’t know it, the reason why our larger coins have ridges on the edges was to prevent people from shaving precious metals off from the edges.  When coins were actually made of silver or gold, people might fudge a bit and shave off a little of the metal and save it.  Amos says that these guys were shorting the customer on the product but demanding the full weight of the coin.

But that is how the market works, in one way or another. The proposed trade agreement that is in the news these days, the TPP – the Trans Pacific Partnership – has been criticized because it favors corporations over labor… it is a trade agreement largely believed to actually accelerate the growing gulf between the rich and the poor. President Obama favors it, Hillary Clinton helped to write it and said that it was the gold standard of trade deals until Bernie put some pressure on her about it. Tim Kaine favored it until he was chosen to run with Hillary.

I don’t often place bets on politics but I would wager a large shekel that the TPP  will be renamed and passed right after the fall election. The power of the corporations is behind it and all elected officials ultimately work for corporations.

On a recent Public Television interview of Green Party Candidate, Jill Stein, Dr. Stein spoke at length about the problems with the TPP. If you watch PBS and didn’t hear it, that is because PBS edits out anything that anyone says that is critical of the TPP. You don’t hear it being often mentioned on commercial TV but in the USA, corporations have even gained editorial control of Public TV.

I don’t expect much out of CNN these days but last week Wolf Blitzer was interviewing my second least favorite senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul. Paul was reasonably arguing that we need to stop providing weapons to Saudi Arabia since they are using our weapons to kill people in Yemen. Wolf asked him, “But if we do that it will cut our military budget and people would lose jobs in America who build these weapons.” Paul could do little more than just stare at Blitzer who finally continued asking, “So job losses in America are not a concern to you?”

You see how the culture, the market, gets into a flow and people cannot seem to even question the ethics of it. Wolf Blitzer has supposedly been a journalist for years, but there was no way to get even a glimmer of a challenge to the marketplace through his skull, even when you are talking about arming a regime that is killing innocent civilians.

Here in our own state, people have been subjected to an increasingly militarized police force that met protestors in Ferguson, MO with literal armored military trucks with assault rifle wielding officers on top, pointing his weapon at peaceful protesters… trying to provoke them. And no officer was charged with a crime.

My mother would look at Iesha Evans and assume the absolute worst when she saw her being handcuffed by those riot police. The Catholic Church thought they were on the moral high ground when they got 11,000 people marching down a street claiming to be pro-family when they were really just anti-gay, and this one 12-year-old boy stepped out and said to this powerful church, what Iesha said to the police, what the “tank man” in China said to his government, what Martin Luther King, Jr. said to the Birmingham police, that a moral person has an obligation to resist an immoral law.

The first sin in the presence of oppression is to accept being oppressed.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If you will stand up straight, no one can ride on your back.”

You can hate on slave owners all day long, but while wanting to own a slave is the first sin of slavery, being willing to be enslaved is certainly the second sin.

I personally know some of the multi-millionaires who own many of the local fast food restaurants that pay their workers poverty wages. I have served on boards with them and sat at church dinners with them. One goes to the Christian Church in Republic, another is active in the Jewish synagogue, another goes to Ridgecrest Baptist, another goes to First and Calvary Presbyterian… these are people who do not feel any conflict about being very wealthy people who attend Jewish and Christian worship and then abuse their employees who are making them rich.

What they are doing is legal. It isn’t moral, it isn’t right, it isn’t justifiable, but they don’t know that because no one tells them… no one they listen to. And yes, I have told them. But who has not told them in any organized, public, and credible way is the mass of employees they are using up.

I understand that they are afraid of losing the sorry jobs that they do have. They don’t want to get their hours cut. They hope for some promotion that might ease the suffering of their poverty…. Crumbs from the table of the very wealthy. But I have to tell you, the rich will do what is legal until you insist that they do what is right.

All of my life I have heard the truism repeated, “Possession is 9/10 of the law.” No one ever seems to stop and ask, “Who wrote those laws?”

We have a ridiculous tax code that allows very wealthy people to pay almost nothing in taxes… as Warren Buffett has frequently said, his secretary pays a much higher effective tax rate than he does. That is, if you earn a salary from working at a job, you are taxed at a rate that is nearly twice of what a person earning their income from invested wealth pays. Why are you punished for working? Why is the income of the working poor more at risk than the income of the investment class?

Well, who do you think wrote the laws? There are no lobbyists on Capitol Hill representing workers at McDonalds or Panera. There are, however, three lobbyists for every single elected official in Washington representing the pharmaceutical industry. Those who make huge campaign contributions during an election year are buying access to the government…. So they donate to both Republicans and Democrats…they don’t really care which side wins because both sides will end up working for them.

So who does advocate for the oppressed? What made it iconic was that the “tank man” in Tiananmen Square was an unknown. He was just some guy who had been grocery shopping… he was still holding his grocery bags in his hands when he stepped out in front of those tanks. We never found out who he was. He was just some guy, armed with a conscience who was willing to stand up to power and injustice.

It took several days for the media to find out who Iesha Evans was… she wasn’t a pastor, a politician, or a community organizer. She is a single mom, a nurse, and she was attending her first ever demonstration but she saw how the state was abusing their power and she courageously stepped out into the street.

And, as happens in many cases, she was arrested… it looked like the state and the police won if you only took it for that moment…. But her courage caused a dramatic shift in public opinion and public tolerance of overly militarized policing in Baton Rouge.

This little 12-year-old boy in Mexico who stepped out into the street and stopped a procession of 11,000 self-righteous Catholics didn’t get to stay in the street. He was pulled away and the march continued. But, you know what, gay people are going to get their civil rights in Mexico… not because the Catholic Church is going to do the right thing because we both know that they are not, but Mexico will do the right thing because of the courage of this little boy and people like him who just won’t let the state hate the uncles, sisters, and neighbors they love.

We need to be able to recognize a prophet when we see one. The prophets who shake us out of our complacency, the ones who embarrass us because they stepped out in front of the tank, in front of the riot police, in front of a whole bigoted church, while we were just watching from the sidelines… We need to be able to recognize our prophets, and follow them off of the curb and into the streets.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

A couple of years ago we tried to hold a demonstration in front of a local McDonalds to take a stand with fast food workers demanding $15 an hour. After weeks of preparation, not a single fast food worker joined us in the demonstration.

There were about a dozen church folk carrying signs in front of the store and within five minutes there were 8 patrol cars and a paddy wagon in the lot, ready to arrested and carry us away if we slowed down their drive through service.  Don’t forget that day. The government in our community and in cities across America, serve the profit interests of corporations, not the people.

You couldn’t get eight police cars at one time on the north side of Springfield for any kind child abuse, domestic violence, assault, or burglary… you couldn’t get 8 police cars to converge on the same place in five minutes if they were giving away free donuts… but threaten to slow down the service of Egg McMuffins and they are there! Don’t let what that means slip by you.

If, however, there had been two hundred of us out there that morning, it would have been different. If there had been two thousand, then the owners of McDonalds would start to squirm in their pews in the Christian Churches they attend. They will do what is legal for as long as they can. When they believe that we won’t tolerate their abuse any longer, then they will do what is right. It is up to us to decide how much longer we will let legal be good enough.