Nov. 20, 2016    Community Christian Church     Roger Ray, pastor

  “The Peace That Starts in Your Mind”      click here to see the video 

"Nonviolence, to be a potent force, 
must begin with the mind. Nonviolence of the 
mere body without the cooperation of the mind
is nonviolence of the weak of the cowardly, and has,
therefore, no potency. It is a degrading performance.
If we bear malice and hatred in our bosoms and
pretend not to retaliate, it must recoil upon us and
lead to our destruction."
Gandhi

We have been dying for this horrible election year to come to an end though now, the way that it ended, has, if anything, made the nightmare experience even worse and will now prolong the media commentary and speculation into the foreseeable future.  As those of you who have read my newspaper articles or my most recent book, Progressive Conversations, already know, I have called for the end of the Electoral College for years. I think that the principle of “one person – one vote” is key to meaningful democracy and this 18^th century institution is a distorting burden on our nation.

That being said, regardless of the fact that Clinton won the majority vote, which would have made her president in any other democracy in the world, it didn’t do that in the USA. The media and the FBI and the Russian government may have all medaled in the election process but it is what it is.

I feel confident, it would be meaningless to debate it, but in my own mind I am confident that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump in the election. For that matter, I am confident that Elizabeth Warren, or Michelle Obama, could have beaten Trump and if it were constitutionally possible, President Obama could have won a third term. But, folks, the hard reality that we face is that Donald Trump will become the president of this nation we love and for which many of us are now in grief.

I want to hope for the best and be as positive as possible but I never want to be guilty of avoiding or denying facts.

This campaign was the worst in my memory and there was a great deal of blowing of dog whistles to mobilize support from those who are or who harbor racist, misogynist, sexist, and xenophobic prejudices. And, of course, this weekend, paying $25 million just to settle a fraud case out of court. Folks, this is not normal. There is a litmus test in the gospels which I feel that we must apply here: Matthew 7:16 “By your fruit you shall know them.”

In 1989 Trump spent nearly $90,000 taking out full page adds in all four major New York newspapers calling for a reinstatement of the death penalty in New York to execute the black and Latino youths who had been arrested and charged in the famous Central Park rape case. These five unfortunate men were found guilty and sentenced to prison where they served for nine years. They were eventually acquitted and New York paid a $40 million settlement with them but even still, Trump believes that they should be executed. They have been proven innocent, the state has paid out a huge settlement, and Trump is not willing to acknowledge how very wrong he was about this matter. It is difficult to see this as being anything but motivated by racism and a fairly scary obsession with rape.

The other, more famous and long-term issue that I believe deserves mention is the fact that he spent so much time and money trying to prove that President Obama was not born in the United States.

He carried that smear campaign beyond all reason and with no evidence whatsoever. Again, it forces me to the unavoidable conclusion that the only reason he did this was because Obama is black. To try to cast such doubt on the first black president of the United States is a very telling offense.

There has been a myriad of painful offenses during the campaign but I am at least presently willing to chalk a lot of that up to blowing dog whistles to mobilize his potential voters. Talk among some of his cabinet appointments about how the Japanese Internment camps of the 1940’s is a precedent for how we can now target Muslims, and going back to the aggressive and racist policing of stop and frisk practices…. People, this is all bad stuff.

Still, as we have watched the appointment of some of the most frightening political figures of our time to positions of importance, when you choose advisors and cabinet members with long histories of misogyny, racism, and anti-gay records, it is inescapable to conclude that we have elected the most morally flawed and ideologically backward person to the highest elected office in the world that any of us have ever seen.

Protests have broken out not just all over our country but all over the world. Donald Trump is a bad man. That is not me making a judgement call, that’s just looking at the fruit hanging on the branches… figs don’t grow thorns and thorns don’t grow figs.

News commentators who lately became willing to literally demand that leading Republicans condemn or retract their endorsements of Trump have suddenly nearly swallowed their tongues trying to find a way to be conciliatory, particularly to the millions of people who voted for Trump. 

Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press, publicly apologized for referencing Trump voters as being people who lacked a college education even though the facts are fairly indisputable. Mika Brzezinski has been trying every possible way to back pedal from her repeated statements that anyone who supports a racist, misogynist, dishonest, xenophobic candidate is, themselves, racist, misogynist, dishonest, and xenophobic.

And I want to grant right away that even though I voted for Hillary Clinton myself, I would not want to be labeled as supporting her not-to-infrequent bouts of ethically dubious decision-making. So it is clearly not fair to try to say that everyone who voted for Trump is as prejudiced and morally flawed as he is.

Though I do not know anyone in our city or state who did vote for him, we can be reasonably certain that most of our neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances did. The only people I know with certainty who did vote for Trump are, in fact, members of my own family. My older brother is a Methodist pastor. He and his wife and their kids are all very active church folks. And I can wax eloquent about the good things that they have done, adopting troubled kids, traveling to Russia to work in an orphanage, and showing real compassion to people who clearly did not deserve it in any rational way.

And no one would be more hurt, offended, and angry than these family members of mine if someone told them that they were racists.

And that is the problem with most people who are racist, or Islamaphobic, or, what we used to call “homophobic.” I don’t really like that word.

To be “phobic” means you are afraid of something. I think a lot of people are afraid of Muslims because of the fear manipulation used by the media and our government but I don’t think that anyone is really afraid of gay people. When I am traveling through Alabama, I spend the night with our former church members, Andrea and Jill, and I have them come with me when I meet my brother for breakfast.

For several years he has sat comfortably at the breakfast table with these two women who love each other and whom we all love. He has implored them to come to his church. He isn’t scared of them. He is just willing to vote for someone who wants to rob them of the legal right to be married to one another, to love one another, to adopt or have children. He isn’t scared, he is just willing to take their rights away from them while feeling very proud of his conservative Christian faith.

I love my brother. I love the good things he does. In fact, I love him so much that I am not willing to pretend that being offended by being called a racist and being prejudiced against gays, Mexicans, and Muslims is not at all the same thing as not, in fact, being prejudiced against these people. No one wants to call themselves a racist. No one wants to be found in a basket of deplorables.

David Duke, of Louisiana KKK fame, swears that he is not a racist. I am encouraged by the fact that 40 million people who voted for Trump don’t want to be racist… and I really want to help them to become, in fact, not racist. To move beyond being offended by the fruit that hangs from their limbs for all to see into actually being something else.

Look, if we don’t believe that people can change, what the heck are we doing here? I have quit the ministry a thousand times over the last 35 years but I keep coming back to this singular thought, it comes from Henry David Thoreau, “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a person to elevate his or her life by conscious endeavor.”

If articles and books, classes and sermons, if anything we do makes any sense at all, it has to be rooted in the fact that people can change for the better and I choose to believe that being offended by being called a racist means that you would like to not be a racist and I want to encourage that growth and not put up a roadblock to lock people into their hatred and prejudice.

Here are the facts, not really a matter of opinion, just a matter of being able to tell the difference between a fig and a thorn: Our next president is a bad man. He is striving to surround himself with a lot of similarly flawed people. The people who voted him into office, while not universally racists, misogynist, and xenophobes, are carry the genes or they wouldn’t be able to overlook such obvious moral flaws.

THAT’S WHO THEY ARE…. NOW, LET ME ASK YOU THIS, WHO ARE YOU?

I can’t deliver every sermon through gritted teeth. We can’t be angry and name calling and protesting every day for the next four years.

We have to decide who we want to be because our cause, our mission, has not changed. There is a way to be the loyal opposition and avoid being the loyal antagonists in a way that is noble and useful. Peace in the absence of justice is nothing more than surrender and we must not surrender to injustice. Strengthening the economy, creating jobs, and negotiating intelligent foreign trade agreements are things that liberals and conservatives ought to be able to do together.

But as a spiritual community, we have values that we will not use as trading cards in political battles. Clearly, we are going to have to be very strong in our continued work to bring racism to an end. We must work quickly to help save our ecology. We must continue to oppose the military control of our economy and our foreign policy. Peace, the environment, justice, and human rights are not playing cards to be discarded in order to gain something else.

Our church is just over eight years old. President Obama was elected just months after we began meeting. When we first launched out church we had several elected officials and Democratic Party leaders and employees in our congregation. Within a year, we had lost almost all of them because they could not tolerate the fact that I was critical of President Obama when he appointed a Monsanto executive to the FDA, or made compromises on healthcare for the poor, and expanded the use of drones to kill innocent citizens along with suspected terrorists.

They said to me, “We have worked all of our lives to elect a president like Obama and we will not tolerate you criticizing him.” I get that. Honestly I do. The problem is, of course, the truth doesn’t belong to any political party. But when I was critical of Obama, it was sort of like a family fight. We liberals do that. We parse words and sometimes loose our way because we will sacrifice the good in favor of the unattainable perfect.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. This election has shown us how far outside of the mainstream we really are. It has been interesting watching the very rich Democrats on the news wringing their hands for fear that the Democratic party will “over correct” as they give leadership roles to the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In that anxiety we can hear what low regard the party really has for its progressive wing. We will talk about social and economic justice, as long as the super rich still actually control everything…..I don’t know about you, but I am not surprised.

Eight years ago we elected our first black president. Just two years ago we won equal marriage rights for the LGBT community. I thought the political might of the angry white voters was coming to an end. Now it appears that we have been set back by twenty, or thirty, or forty years.

So who are we going to be? How will we fight off our own inclination to give up? How do we posture ourselves to defend the civil rights we thought we had won decades ago and continue to try to move the ball of social progress down the field against such an array of opposition?

In the entrance to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta there is a statue of Mahatma Gandhi and at the base there is the quote we used as our wisdom lesson today.

When Gandhi sought to free the people of India from British colonial rule, and when King sought to actually accomplish the liberation of the sons and daughters of African slaves who had been relegated to a segregated and abused minority status for a hundred years after the Civil War, they realized that you had to be more than cynical, you have to be more than angry. You even have to be more than informed.

Before the great marches and demonstrations that were led by Gandhi and King took place, they spend weeks in planning, and days in training of the participants so that they could, as Gandhi said, get peace fixed in their minds. They were not starting a riot. They were not trying to incite a mob. They were trying to organize people of character, people with principles, people who were made of the stuff to be moral leaders. They taught participants to firmly fix what peaceful demonstration looked like in their minds and to brace themselves for violent opposition, for ridicule, slander, libel, and insults, to go out and be those people.

Folks, we have a long road ahead of us. Let me remind you, our religion is not a set of beliefs. Our faith is a set of practices. You do not become a great piano player because you believe in music. You don’t become a great artist because you sometimes go to the museum.

Sitting in church will no more make you a person of great moral character than sitting in your garage will turn you into a car.

We have to fix in our minds the non-violent, loving, honest, informed way in which we will embody the kind of world that we believe should exist.

Like you, I am grieving what this election has revealed about the character of some people who I love very much and about the very character of a great deal of our nation. But our grief, our disappointment, must not turn our neighbors into our enemies. We must not allow ourselves to become distant from those who, frankly, need us more now that every before.

What I am asking of you today is what Mother Theresa meant when she said that the world is full of good people. If you can’t find one, be one.https://youtu.be/P7A9pWnNGL0