Click here to view the video

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

Oct. 30, 2016    Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO   

Roger Ray, pastor           I Samuel 28: 7-19

    “Samhain, All Saints Day, Día de Muertos, and Grief”     

My week began with one of those heartbreaking, sobbing, snotty, phone calls that dads sometimes get from adult daughters. This time it wasn’t a break up with a boyfriend or yet another car accident. This time it was because her cat, the cat she had when she was very young, had died after a good, long life. Grief is the price you pay for loving any living thing. The mortality rate is 100%; there are no exceptions.

Even when death comes in what we might call “the fullness of time” it often still comes as the most unwanted guest. Years ago I kept watch with a good friend at the bedside of her grandmother… a true matriarch of a family that often hinged on her wisdom, strength, and generosity and she was being eaten alive by cancer. Her death was slow and painful… the sort that might make those who loved her grateful for the fact that it was over, but my friend flatly said to me through her tears, “I wasn’t done with grandma yet.”

I suspect that all of us could echo that sentiment regarding old friends, a spouse, parents and grandparents. Even in the short history of this little church, we have had to give up so many of our founding members…. Some who succumbed to long illnesses and others who have simply died suddenly, without enough warning to brace ourselves or to be able to come back in the building and realize that Nelson, or Jim, or Ruth, or Nancy is not going to be here that day or any other day to follow.

My daughter chatted with consoling pet owner friends on Face Book, talking about how Noodles was in kitty heaven and how they hoped that she was happy and among friends. In that moment you would have to have an unnatural disdain for your own mortality to even act like you do not also believe in kitty heaven.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the running commentary inside my head, where I wondered if there was a fish, chicken, cow, and pig heaven for all of the animals we have eaten in the last year…. Or if there is a tree heaven for the firewood, lumber, and forest fires we witnessed. These are not things that a father says to a grieving daughter and these are not things that many ministers can say in public and expect to have a job when the sun sets that day.

My daughter loved her cat and the loss she felt at the news of his death was more than she wanted to feel, and so she poured emotional anesthesia on that grief by telling herself that Noodles was in kitty heaven and that is an emotional choice that all of us know all too well.

A few years ago, just before our first December snow and ice storm, my old friend, Bill Ringo, called to tell me that his son, Billy, had died. He was 39, the divorced father of 3 elementary school aged children, a Persian Gulf War veteran, and a crucial employee in their family business. 

Billy had health problems and we had known for some time that he would not live to be an old man, but we did expect him to outlive us.

I slipped and slid over 500 miles of road between here and Louisville and arrived in time to conduct Billy’s funeral. Billy’s mother, Donna, and I sat and wept together for a few minutes and then she said, “When our parents die we are orphans. When our spouse dies we are a widow or a widower.” “But,” she continued, “when your child dies, we don’t have a word for that.”

I think, perhaps, we don’t have a word for it because it is a pain too horrible to ever say. The mortality rate is 100% but sometimes that fact is still so out of place, so out of time, so horrifying, that it defies comprehension.

Death can rip a hole in the fabric of the universe. Most marriages do not survive the death of a child because that void changes the shape of reality so much that they don’t know what to do with it… there are arguments, blaming, guilt, affairs, alcoholism, and abandonment. A parent who loses a child experiences a pain that has nowhere to go, no logical release, no resolution.

The ancient Hebrew faith did not try to assuage these feelings with promises of heaven and the rare references they made to the house of the dead was not a thing of reward or comfort. They spoke of the dead being “gathered unto their ancestors,” which meant that their bones were buried with the bones of preceding generations.   

During the 5^th century BCE captivity of the Jews in Babylon, they were introduced to the Zoroastrian belief in an afterlife that could be a place of reward, a place where the wrongs and injustices of this world were made right.

That hope crept into Judaism and found full expression in early Christianity.

I was taught a faith that told me to deny my grief, to pretend that I was happy for a friend or loved one who had “gone on to their reward.” I have probably presided over four or five hundred funerals over the past 37 years and now and then, here and there, those funerals have been sincerely joyful. But most of the time, almost all the time, despite assertions of hope, promises of life in heaven, the events are marked with tears and pain.

Priests, pastors, and ministers often have made the horrifying mistake of trying to give a plausible answer when someone asks them “Why?” They speak of God’s will, a divine plan, the unknowable mystery, when they should have the courage to say, “I don’t know.” Or more realistically, “There is no why.”

There are things that are just sad. And some are even more sad because they are also wrong. I think that religious people make a terrible mistake in trying to deny obvious and sincere emotions. No one said to my daughter, “I’m glad your cat died so that he could be in kitty heaven.” They said, “I’m sorry your cat died.” No matter what kind of mythic denial may play around the edges of your mind, the truth is that the cat is dead and that is sad and you should let yourself be sad about it.

If you hear me speak at very many funerals you will surely have heard me quote Edna St Vincent Milay’s poem, “A Dirge without Music”:

I am not resigned to the shutting away

of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look,

the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom. 

 I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes

than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Let me remind you that in a liberal church you are entirely free to believe whatever you want to believe, whatever you are persuaded is real and true and worthy of your convictions and you don’t need my agreement, approval, or imprimatur. But my own belief is that life is temporary and death is permanent. And as such, we are right to grieve, to hurt, to mourn. I don’t have much sympathy with denial that says that you shouldn’t hurt, or grieve, or mourn, that you should have faith in an unseen, unknown, and probably imaginary world of eternity. Not denial, but defiance… as the poem says,

I know that the mortality rate is 100% but I do not approve.  I know that some people die young in accidents, wars, senseless violence, addiction, suicide, and illness. I know that the wise, the talented, the artistic, the loving, will one day grow weak and their days will come to an end, but I do not approve and I am not resigned.

There may be some form of immortality for people, for cats and dogs, for horses and parrots, as well as chickens, pigs, cows, and fish, maybe even spring flowers and ficus trees… I don’t see any reason to believe that there is but such things end up in the category of personal preference.

What I realize is that my daughter’s nearly inconsolable grief over the death of her cat is a precursor to the fact that one day she will have to deal with my death. I hope that when that happens that she has a husband and children with whom she can distribute both her love and her grief so that my passing will be to her both an inescapable reason to grieve and a source of reassuring memory.

No one can tell you how long or even how to grieve. It is a strange path with a lot of deep pot holes in it. Pastorally, I only get worried about someone if it isn’t getting better over time but no one can say what the right pace is.  Somewhere between forgetting and obsessing there is a holy place of remembering.

Beyond all of the scary masks and ghosts of the Halloween, the Day of the Dead, there is a beautiful tradition of Memorial Day, of All Saints Day, and the more loving and compassionate observances that take shape in almost all cultures, that are a time to simply stop and remember what was noble, what was laudable, what was sacred in the lives of those whom we have known and have had to let go back into the mystery of the universe. 

I am not eager for death but I refuse to allow the fear of it to rob my days of life of the potential for joy and meaning that we have in life. There are those who believe that there is some kind of life after death. I do not not share in that belief but whether you do or you don’t, I encourage you to treasure the life you have now… tell the people you love that you love them. Tell them now. Carve out big spaces in your work and home life for friendships, for meaningful conversations, and frivolous entertainment. Live life for its quality and not for its quantity. Lovingly remember those who have preceded us in death.

And if, when we die, it turns out that we do have some kind of meeting on a distant shore on the other side of mortality, you can look forward to being able to say to me for what will probably be the first time:  Boy you sure were wrong about this one.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

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

October 23, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor    “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”

Bartolome De Las Casas , a 16^th century Spanish historian, abolitionist and one of the first Europeans to settle in the Americas: “What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade (in American Indian slaves) as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.”

A ritual recitation is written into the 26^th chapter of Deuteronomy and every Hebrew child learns it very early in life. It begins, “A wandering Aramean was my father… it is a short history of how the Jews became a people and how they came to live in what they called “The Promised Land.”

  ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. ⁶When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, ⁷we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. ⁸The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; ⁹and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

In academic terms, that is called the Hebrew Bible’s heilsgeschicte, it literally means “salvation history”… it is a version of history that is told from the perspective that asserts that God made these things happen for a reason. The salvation history of the Jews is a symbol for the history of the world that followed and the unwritten history that preceded it.

Jewish history begins with a small band of people moving from one country to another in hopes of improving their prospects of having food and a livelihood. Over time, being a part of a non-dominant ethic group in Egypt made the living conditions bad enough that they left in search of a better place. Their own version of that long trip was that God gave them a land flowing with milk and honey, but a historian might say that a group of former slaves who could not best the Egyptian army wandered north until they found a land whose inhabitants were not as militarily well organized and so they killed them and took their land.

Migrations have been taking place since the first early humans wandered out of Africa to populate Asia, Europe, the Americas, Australia and everywhere in between.  Sometimes the migrations were forced, as when the Assyrians carried Israel away to be slaves, or when Judah was carried away to Babylon to be slaves, or when Americans and Europeans captured Africans to take as slaves. Sometimes migrations were forced by famine, as when Jacob took his tribe to Egypt, or when waves of Irish immigrants first came to America.

Sometimes those waves of immigration were instantaneous, as people were forced to leave their land by a foreign power or as refugees to escape a holocaust, as Syrians are now fleeing their homeland or as Jews fled from Germany and Poland in the last century. People move around, and not usually out of sheer boredom.

In the ancient world you might pull off being a pathological land thief by blaming it on God. You understand that the land wasn’t flowing with milk and honey all on its own don’t you?

Ask any farmer, left to her or his divine management, there isn’t much milk and honey to be found. The Semitic tribes took occupied land around a thousand BCE and episodically had control over it for the next thousand years. They became refugees again when the Roman Empire took their land and they got it back when the British and American Empires stole it once again from people who had lived there for two thousand years. And in my little church in rural Kentucky, the 20^th century recreation of Israel was a matter of Biblical proper land title. God promised it to the Jews and now they have it back.

The fact that the sacred book of the Jews gives them title to the land is not exactly evidence or justification but seeing that requires a bit of critical thinking which didn’t often go on in the Sunday School classes where I spent my youth.

A part of our American myth is a poem we learned in grade school:

In fourteen hundred ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

He had three ships and left from Spain;

He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.

He sailed by night; he sailed by day;

He used the stars to find his way.

The poem continues…..

The Arakawa natives were very nice;

They gave the sailors food and spice.

Columbus sailed on to find some gold

To bring back home, as he’d been told.

He made the trip again and again,

Trading gold to bring to Spain.

The first American? No, not quite.

But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.

The poem is a myth, of course, with only some of the names and dates to reflect history. The poem does not say that the Spaniards captured and enslaved the Arawak and those who refused service were slaughtered. There were those who spoke of the Americas as a new promised land, promised by God to Christian invaders. That language survived right up to the time of Abraham Lincoln and continued to inspire the wars waged against the Indigenous peoples of this continent.

There are now about 300 million people in this country but our white European forefathers did not find this place uninhabited any more than the ancient Semitic tribes found Palestine uninhabited, as the modern Jews did not find Palestine uninhabited at the end of WWII.

There are estimates as high as 90 million American Indians living here when European settlers began their migration. There are not many periods in history when you can say that the Holocaust pales in comparison to what our ancestors did to take this land from its Indigenous people.

Of course, it wasn’t entirely a military occupation. European diseases that traveled across the Atlantic in those little wooden ships were more lethal to the Indians than were the swords and muskets of the settlers. Still, once early American settlers discovered the lethal vulnerability of the Indians to those diseases, they did everything they could to spread the germs to do what they did not want to do themselves.

At the end of WWII, Germans were put on trial for war crimes and a number of steps were made to heal the sick mentality that let to the Holocaust.

In Japan, a new constitution was written and an ancient culture had to go back to the drawing board to recon with how they had treated their Asian neighbors in their lust for power.

In Germany, there is no holiday to celebrate the birth of Adolph Hitler. To even suggest it would be offensive to Germans. In the United States, however, we are still holocaust deniers because we still have an official Columbus Day to celebrate the first voyage of Columbus to the new world to begin the legacy of slavery and carnage.

There is no way to put that 15^th century migration into reverse but we can start to be more honest about it. Christopher Columbus was a part of modern history but not a bright and shining part…. Oh, and calling Columbus brave and bright is pretty insulting to the survivors of the American holocaust.

The state of Vermont and the cities of Denver and Phoenix recently joined Seattle, Minneapolis and Albuquerque in the decision to re-name the second Monday in October, “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” It may seem like a small thing but I have to tell you that the dismissive view of the plight of modern day Native Americans has convinced me that we need to actively work to change the way our nation treats these people.

For the past few months the largest Indigenous people’s protest has been going on in North Dakota and it has hardly been mentioned in the mainstream media and the alternative news sources that have tried to cover it, primarily Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, have actually been arrested and threated with years in prison for just telling the story of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Guards have turned vicious attack dogs loose on peaceful protesters and the Dakota Access pipeline project has defiantly dug up sacred burial grounds as they attempt to put an oil pipeline under the Missouri River.  More than one hundred different tribes are now represented in the camped out demonstration.

The Indians prefer to call themselves “protectors” rather than “protestors” or “demonstrators,” because their goal is to protect the land and water from further destruction in the name of profit. As recent history has taught us, it is not a matter of whether or not a pipeline might have disastrous spills, we know that they do, it is always just a matter of time.

Major news networks will almost never mention opposition to a multi-billion dollar construction project, even when water, land, and sacred Native American space is threatened.

I will leave you today with a modern saying which I believe comes from the Osage tribe:  When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

It is a small thing but I encourage you to sign the petitions on the Daily Kos site to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the petition asking President Obama to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

click here for the video

Proper 24     October 16, 2016   Roger Ray, pastor

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

            “A Fearless and Searching Inventory”           

Genesis 32:22-28   ²²The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. ²³He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had.

²⁴Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.²⁵When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. ²⁶Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” ²⁷So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” ²⁸Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” 

New seminary students often struggle with the use of the word “myth” in religious studies. In common parlance, we call something a myth when it simply isn’t true, when it is apocryphal, or just straight up a lie. People use the term disparagingly, like when we say that the “American dream is a myth.” Or, it is a synonym for a lie, like when a reasonable person recognizes that everything Dr. Oz says about the weight loss wonders of his diet products is a myth.

But that is not how we use the word in religious circles. We are aware that there are stories that are repeated in religious books and communities that are not necessarily historical or even factual but the story expresses a truth, an awareness, an insight, that helps the religious community to understand life and to define themselves.

Marcus Borg liked to use the illustration of a Native American story teller who began his story saying: "Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true."

The matriarchal and patriarchal stories in the Old Testament about Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, are not historical but they are myths that helped the ancient Hebrews to understand themselves.

The same was true of other cultures. The myths of ancient Greece and Rome, though they were not historically or factually true, conveyed so much truth about life that we often use the names of characters in these myths to describe psychological conditions. The stories of Oedipus and Electra, give us our Oedipal and Electra complex diagnoses. The story of Narcissus gives us the word Narcissism, and there are several medical terms also drawn from the same body of ancient literature.

You find a lot of psychological insight buried in literature that predates any actual science of psychology by hundreds of years. Five hundred years ago William Shakespeare was indisputably brilliant for describing characters whose flaws and mental defects we all could recognize in the people who used to bug us in school.

The passage we read this morning from Genesis chapter 32, the story of Jacob wrestling through the night with some mysterious figure is one of my favorite myths. I won’t bore you with all of the Sunday School details of how Jacob had gotten sideways with his father, his brother, his father-in-law, and had given him perfectly good reason to believe that many people close to him might just be mad enough at him to kill him on sight, but suffice it to say that he was a fairly bright guy who had done some dumb things and he was, after many years, going home to face the music.

Traveling in a large caravan, he sent his wives, children, servants, and flocks ahead of him and he spent the night before returning home himself all alone in the wilderness. This could be called “the dark night of the soul” in another century but the ancient authors who composed this myth created a mythic alter ego character.

In fact, it appears that the myth was passed along in several different forms.  On the one hand, the text says that he wrestled with a man. But then the man demands that he let him go before the sun comes up, which would imply that it was a demon. But in the final analysis, his refusal to say his while giving Jacob a new name, implies that Jacob has been wrestling with God.

Ironically, artists often depict this battle as Jacob wrestling with a winged angel.  Elements of all of these different versions are echoed in the redacted version we have in our modern Bibles.  I suspect that the most ancient version would have said that he was wrestling a demon since the ancient Canaanites believed that demons lived in the wilderness, but later editors were not happy with Israel getting its name from a demon so that spruced up the final version a bit.

But, as I said, this is a myth. Jacob is probably an invented literary character but even if Jacob is historical, he certainly didn’t wrestle all night with a demon, an angel, or a god. But the story becomes important to later generations because it does embody our own experience of having to come to terms with ourselves. Jacob was literally wrestling with his conscience, his mortality, the meaning of his own existence. Was he a good man or a bad man? Had he been a good husband and father?

Could he be forgiven for cheating his brother out of their shared estate? Could he be excused for stealing from his father-in-law since his father-in-law had tricked and exploited him?

All of those other myths I mentioned, all of Shakespeare’s dramas, we use to diagnose other people, to categorize their mental issues or character flaws. This story about Jacob having to come to terms with his own flaws is different and powerful. He walks away from this dark night with two things, a limp and a new name.

The permanent limp symbolizes the fact that not only are we all flawed but we can’t entirely escape the things we have done wrong. The wounds become the scars that travel with us. The new name represents the fact that we can change, we can grow and become something new.

One of the things I love the most about the Alcoholics Anonymous program is the spiritual insight of the 12 steps… and those insights are not much loved by a lot of the people who really really need the program. That’s why you see TV ads for very expensive recovery programs that say that they are not 12 step programs because a whole lot of folks are way too narcissistic to ever go through what the steps require of a person who wants to regain their sanity and their health along with their sobriety.

You will hear people in A.A. talking about making their 4^th step and to the uninitiated that may sound like a rank or a reference to a period of sobriety, but, in fact, the 4^th step is after you had admitted that you have a problem and decided to seek the spiritual strength to regain your sobriety, then you are asked to make a fearless and searching inventory of yourself.

I’ve sat through lots of meetings with church members as they began their journey of recovery and listened as the old heads in the meeting would guide a newcomer back onto path by reminding them that they are to take a fearless and searching inventory of themselves…. They give one another fairly little latitude to take anyone else’s inventory. They don’t let people talk about their wicked spouse, their unfeeling or violent parents, their mean boss, or the stupid government.

That doesn’t mean that no one ever had abusive parents, or a really deranged spouse, or unfair employers, siblings, nor is it to deny that the government, the economy, the university, or the universe itself is not unfair. It is just that cataloging all of those things usually makes us sicker and if we want to get well we have to take a fearless and searching inventory of our own part in the melodrama that is our lives.

Gandhi once said, “No one can hurt me without my permission.” Now I know that you can immediately start to come up with objections to that saying and you and I both can list any number of times that we were blindsided and hurt by someone we trusted that we had never given permission to do us harm. But this is one of those proverbs you need to sit with for a while, like watching your teabag turn a cup of hot water into a cup of tea…. Let it simmer, be still, and let it seep in…. no one can really hurt you, not in a way that really counts, unless you are somehow helping them to hurt you.

You may need to just dismiss what I’m saying today and I’m OK with that. But let me ask this of you. The next time you are lying awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to go to sleep, mulling over some past hurt, some life crisis, would you take just a moment to remember what I said today about the dark night of the soul… that no one can really hurt you unless you have somehow given them your permission to do so…. Take a stab at making a fearless and searching inventory of your own failings.

Don’t feel like you have to call me at that hour to tell me how it’s going…. I’ve been there; I know what it feels like. The ancient Greek playwright, Aeschylus, a contemporary of Plato and Sophocles, wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

You might be the best and smartest judge in the world but you will not find the happiness you seek through judging others. You may be the only one who really knows what all is wrong with government, religion, banking, the economy, the environment, and you might have a bead on all of the faults of other races, genders, and nations but there is only one person you can wrestle until daybreak who will actually bless you and that is the person you have been the least likely to judge, the one that is the hardest to be honest with, and the one most likely to make you limp after the encounter.

And my most sincere apologies to those who thought religion was supposed to just be comforting.