“Nevertheless,
She Persisted” Lent 1 March 5,
2017
Community
Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor
Genesis
2:15-17; 3:1-7 15The Lord God took the man and
put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And
the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of
the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
3Now
the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God
had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree
in the garden’?” 2The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of
the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3but God said, ‘You shall
not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall
you touch it, or you shall die.’“ 4But the serpent said to the
woman, “You will not die; 5for God knows that when you eat of
it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6So when the woman saw
that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and
that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and
ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then
the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they
sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
It seems strange to say but I feel the need to
categorically assert that I have had no contact with any representative of the
Russian government either during last year’s election or before. And further, I
will not recuse myself from being appoint as a special prosecutor in this
investigation of Russian hacking in the 2016 election because I might be the
last person in North America who has not had contact with a Russian spy,
diplomat, or representative in the last year!
I do have occasional Face Book conversations
with one of our listeners who is Russian but I can assure that that Mikhail
Lapyansy is a Russian Jew who lives and teaches in Queens specifically because
he does not want to have contact with the Russian spies that seem to be so much
a part of the Trump administration’s “friends” list.
For a country that has an economy no bigger than
that of Italy, the frequency with which we hear of connections between Russia
and the Trump administration is difficult to understand.
One of Trump’s first foreign policy hires was a
young oil industry executive, Carter Page, who made his chops speaking in
Russia against American Cold War tactics of economic sanctions and calling for
a more cooperative relationship between Russia and the USA. He has lately been
seen stumbling over his tongue trying to act like his many contacts with
Russian operatives during the election were purely friendly matters.
Early last year, Trump brought Paul Manafort whose
most recent campaign experience was his work as a consultant to former President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, a
Russian puppet.
By August, Manafort is forced to
resign after the New York Times breaks a story about $12 million dollars in
cash being given to Manafort from a political party in the Ukraine.
And you all remember what happened
when Mike Flynn was appointed to be Trump’s National Security Advisor and it
was discovered that he had lied about having contact with, you guessed it,
Russian officials.
And, of course, unless you have
been hiding in a cave for the last few days, we have the nearly constant buzz
about the fact that our chief law enforcement officer, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, swore under oath, “I declare that
I have had no contact with Russian representatives,” when, in fact, he had them
in his office, texted with them, called the, and met with them at the RNC. For
all I know, he is renting out his spare bedroom to a Russian spy through Air
BnB.
Our 45th president
keeps telling us that he doesn’t know anyone from his administration that had
meetings with the Russian Ambassador and yet the LA times just confirmed that
Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, met with the Russians in
December at Trump’s home in Trump Tower!
We keep nibbling around the edges
with resignations, apologies, excuses and recusals but the elephant in the
room, what everyone is wanting to talk about but are afraid to do so, is the
apparent fact that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian operatives to
leak materials critical of Hillary Clinton at just the right times to hurt her
campaign and to swing voters towards Trump.
My personal speculation about this
is that they had no serious hope that they could win and they were just pulling
out all of the stops to keep from losing in an election day blood bath. If
Trump had lost, no one would be looking into his and his staff’s contacts with
Russians but now that he is the President of the United States, if this
collusion is proven, he will almost certainly lead to a domino effect of
impeachments and indictments and it is not too far of a stretch to use the word
“treason” in this conversation.
The issue for me has nothing to do
with perjury. The issue is not that they are all lying to the media and even
lying under oath. The issue is, why were all of the Trump campaign and
administration people talking to Russians in the first place? There is no
plausible explanation for this behavior that can stand up to public scrutiny.
The news is happening so fast that
it is hard to keep up with what should horrify us. Trump announced that he
approved the XL Keystone pipeline project to proceed on the condition that the
steel pipe be manufactured in the United States. Any guess where 40% of that
pipeline is still coming from? Russia.
And to further protect oil and gas interests, Trump has ordered the gas
fracking companies to stop measuring methane levels at their wells and he
ordered the funding cut for our satellites that monitor global climate change.
Folks, I suspect that most of you didn’t hear any of that in the news but you
heard it in church….what does that mean about the state of our media?
I don’t want to trivialize such an
important sequence of revelations but I currently have a $20 bet with Mark
Rowland that both Trump and Pence will be impeached by the Ides of March next
year. And, though I appreciate all of you who donate to this church that pays
my salary, I can assure you that there is no one within the sound of my voice
who wants to give me $20 as much as Mark Rowland does next March 15th! He doesn’t think it will happen but he really
really really wants to lose this bet.
I’m not happy about this. I am not
happy about seeing my country humiliated this way and I am really not happy
about the fact that if Trump and Pence are impeached that Paul Ryan will become
the 46th president. As Joy Reed said this weekend, Ryan wants to
repeal the 20th century. He wants to replace public schools, Medicare,
and social security with a handful of vouchers that amount to keeping the poor
ignorant and making certain that they die young.
Replacing one authoritarian despot with another
authoritarian despot is not progress. We knew on Nov. 8th that we
were going to have a hard time for the next few years but as cynical as I was
about what Trump would really do, I terribly underestimated how insanely
destructive he really would be. What sounded like red meat for his low
information base turns out to be his actual plans for governing which means
that he is actually as crazy as his rhetoric sounded.
But I have seen one silver lining in all of this
and that is not a small thing. We had a scripture reading this morning. A
highly symbolic story about what Catholics called “the fall” when Adam and Eve
disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. There is a lot going on in this ancient
Hebrew narrative but I want to make only one observation about it: The thinker in this narrative, the one with
speaking lines, the one who made decisions, was the woman.
It is not a true story…. After all, there is a
talking snake in this narrative and if you take that literally you are probably
in the wrong church right now. But what was the temptation the snake presented?
It was wisdom. The woman chose to risk disobeying God, she gave up the blissful
life of basically being a cow in a feedlot, in order to be awakened, to be
aware, to be wise.
Adam has no speaking parts here, he is involved
but he evidently just lumbered up and said, “What’s for dinner?” Honestly, I
think that a woman wrote this narrative and maybe one day when the world is not
on fire I’ll take the time to talk about interesting nuances of scripture again
but don’t hold your breath.
The election of this misogynistic president at
least has awakened the social consciousness of this generation’s wise women. In
spite of the lies told about the crowds, the people who came out for the
inauguration were very small by comparison to the inaugurations of Barak Obama.
But the women’s march the next day… that was, to quote my favorite Vermont
senator, “huge!” And the crowd in Washington was nothing compared to the
women’s marches in cities all over America and, in fact, all over the world.
We even had a big march here in Springfield. I
was speaking in Florida that week and I got to attend the march in Sarasota and
the energy was electric!
The evidence for how awake the wise women of
this moment have become was seen when my favorite Senator from Massachusetts,
Elizabeth Warren, was trying to very rationally read into the record an
important piece of testimony regarding the character of Jefferson Beauregard
Sessions from the late Coretta Scott King, and the least popular senator in
America, Mitch McConnell, raised an objection and told her to take her seat.
Mitch explained, “She had been warned….” Did you
like the litany I wrote for today? They warned Rosa Parks…. They warned
Sojourner Truth…. They warned Dorothy Day….nevertheless….
Mitch said about Elizabeth Warren, “She had been
warned…nevertheless, she persisted.” Mitch has all of the perceptive
forethought of a kid who decided to hit a hornets’ nest with a baseball bat. I
will issue this plea this morning to all of my listeners in Kentucky: please
get me into some pulpits in Kentucky when Mitch is running for re-election.
Don’t worry about paying me. I will pay you for
the privilege.
Like a lot of other people, I had hoped to get
to vote for Warren last fall and I am afraid that she will be a bit too long in
the tooth to make a run in 2020 but folks, we must not be lured into the trap
of waiting for a savior to rise up and save us from the ravages of the current
administration.
It is not Hillary Clinton, or Elizabeth Warren,
it is not even Hawaii Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard though I have to tell you I
have high hopes for her. There is no messiah in the 21st century who
will rescue us. It will take the three million women and men who showed up for
the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the nearly one million who marched the
same day in Los Angeles, the thousands I marched with in Sarasota, and the
hundreds who marched here in Springfield. It will take all of you who chose to
take a bite of the fruit of wisdom rather than to sit back and complacently
hope that things turn out better in the future.
You have all been warned… nevertheless, the
future is counting on you to persist. I am naive enough to believe in you.
