“Choosing the Right Rather than Choosing the Winner”'
April 30,
2017 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger Ray,
pastor
H. L.
Menchen, Treatise on the Gods
Their
prayers always go up for kings, not for rebels and reformers. During the
American Revolution, the priests of the established church were almost
unanimously loyal to King George, and during the Civil War the clergy of the
South remained faithful to the Southern economic system, and to slavery as a
part of it. The great religious reformers have never preached the liberation of
the masses. Luther, Calvin and John Wesley were all on the side of authority.
The Catholic church is for it everywhere today, and more intransigent it is the
better the church likes it. Thus the patriotism of a priest is hard to
distinguish from the patriotism of a stockbroker. When he is found questioning
the established order it usually develops, upon inquiry, that he is also
questioning the tenets of his church, and is on his way to heresy.
After enduring nearly
nine years of intense public scrutiny and totally unprecedented levels of
vitriolic, racist, partisan and sometimes conspiracy theory driven criticism,
as the Obama’s prepared to become the first black family in American history to
leave public housing so that a white billionaire could move in, Michele Obama
endeared herself to the nation by telling reporters that all during their
growing up in the White House, she had told her daughters to hold their heads
high and to not reply to the criticisms they were witnessing. She said, “When
they go low, we go high.”
I trust that I am not
alone here when I say that I miss the Obamas terribly. I miss their class,
their confident and calm demeanor, and their ability to suffer indignity
without reprisal. Good on them. And as a pastor, I can only applaud any
examples of civility and respectful language in the midst of heated political
discourse.
But I heard one
feminist commentator say recently, “With all due respect to Michele Obama, I
think that when they go low we need to grab a shovel and bury them.”
The
heated rhetoric of recent years, fueled by social media and right-wing talk
radio, and given some credible substance in the 24-hour news channels that give
more partisan red meat to their viewers than actual facts is a huge social
problem. It makes voters demand virtual insanity out of their legislators which
has given us a congress and a senate that is about as useful as giving a
bicycle to a fish.
So,
sure, civility is called for. We all need to reign in our rhetoric and try hard
to speak the truth in love but what our wisdom lesson from H. L. Menchen’s, Treatise
on the Gods, is pointing out is that the church, and I can probably very
safely add, the synagogue and the mosque, have often chosen symbolic
patriotism, civility, and loyalty over the truth. Organized religion may throw
roses at the concept of speaking the truth in love but they are much more
likely to get the love part right at the expense of the truth.
I certainly don’t agree with all of the conclusions Reza Aslan
reached in his very popular book, Zealot, in which he describes the historical
Jesus as being a radical, anti-empire, reformer, but I think we can safely
agree with the basic premise that Jesus was not killed because he healed the
sick, fed the hungry, and taught children to obey their parents, and neighbors
to love one another.
If we can deduce anything from the historical clues left as echoes
in the first century written accounts, Jesus was executed by the state because
he challenged their moral authority, their violent control of the people, and
their economic exploitation of the poor.
Please don’t get tired of hearing me say this because as I have
been mapping out my sermons for the next three months, I realize that this is a
fact that will be standing over a lot of what I plan to say…. In all of modern
history, there has really been only one war and that a continuous one…. The war
of haves against the have-nots.
And this may be painfully obvious but please give me a moment to
spell this out clearly. You can tell the truth about the monetary motivations
for modern warfare while still respecting the young men and women who serve in
the military. Most recruits for the past 45 years were going into the military
out of economic necessity. Low paying jobs and high college tuition drives the
children of the poor into military service.
Once inducted, no one is more subjected to daily infusions of
propaganda than are these soldiers. The high unemployment in their hometown and
the lack of opportunity for higher education that drove them into uniform is
driven from their heads as they are repeatedly told that they are answering a
high calling of the defense of freedom. Vietnam didn’t threaten our freedom,
Korea didn’t threaten our freedom, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Haiti, Panama,
didn’t threaten our freedom. In each case we deployed the children of the poor
to go kill the children of the poor in another nation to defend economic
interests.
And please don’t try to change the subject to terrorism, if we
were concerned about American safety we would outlaw handguns. Terrorists
present much less danger to American’s lives than not getting the flu shot.
Again, let me be very clear:
I didn’t say that everyone who enters the military does so for economic
reasons. I am sure that there are those who feel drawn to a career in the
military for reasons of family heritage, to bolster a future political career,
or out of genuine patriotism, but we have a saying in psychology – when you
hear hoof beats you think horses and not zebras.
Most of the people we recruit into the military come from rural,
poor, families and while their heroism and personal sacrifices are to be
applauded, respected, honored, and compensated from health benefits and
counseling to a decent retirement – we don’t have to pretend that they are in
Afghanistan defending our freedom.
I’m going to come back to the topic of the government’s
manipulation of the poor in military adventures over the next few weeks but for
today I want to return to this observation that H. L. Menken made nearly a
century ago…. That in matters of state, the established church is almost always
on the side of power. During the Revolutionary War, most established churches
supported the British king. During the Civil War, almost every southern church
supported not only the military cause of the South but the institution of
slavery as well.
Luther, Calvin, Wesley, all knew which side their bread was
buttered on. Right up the later half of the last century, when some Catholic
priests in Central and South America were finally siding with the poor in the
Liberation Theology movement, most met their deaths with the approving nod of
the Vatican itself.
And, frankly, for all the reasons we have to like current pope, if
you want to continue to like him, you probably should probe too deeply into
what he was doing during the round up of liberation priests in Argentina. There
are wonderful exceptions but, in general, the Catholic Church has behaved just
as Menken said, in service to whoever was in power.
None other than our nation’s own founding
father, Thomas Jefferson, wrote: “In
every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is
always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for
protection of his own.”
We may tend to err on the other side, being
always a tad eager to jump on the ethical failings of governments and
corporations and it may be that we should accept a certain degree of criticism
about how lovingly we articulate the truth…. There are, paradoxically, ways in
which we can be so right that we become wrong.
But the one thing that the church, the
synagogue, and the mosque must do in this present moment is to clearly and
unapologetically tell the truth. Our good friend from the progressive movement
in Great Britain, John Churcher stays in touch and just this week forwarded an
article to me from a British newspaper that was saying basically what our
Senator Elizabeth Warren was saying yesterday about the 100 day mark of the
Trump administration.
Both listed the lies, the broken campaign
promises, and the thus far failed legislative attempts to ban Muslims from
entering our country, to end Obamacare with a huge tax give away to the
super-wealthy, and this silly, one page tax reform proposal that would, at
best, give hundreds of billions of dollars to the super wealthy and do nothing
at all for 98% of wage earners in America. Mix that in with scandal after
scandal in the West wing from dealings with Russian spies and conflicts of
interest in the business world, and we cannot avoid saying that this is the
most inept, corrupt, and dangerously flawed president in modern American
history… but both Senator Warren and the Jonathan Freeland article from the
Guardian that John sent to me said that the one good thing we can take from
these first 100 days is the apparent fact that protest works.
The
missteps of the Trump administration have mobilized opposition in ways that we
have not lately witnessed in American history and that mobilization has shown
itself to be effective in ways that we might not have dared to hope. Freeland
concludes: Donald Trump is
as bad as we feared: delusional, dangerous, dishonest. But there is another
lesson from these 100 days. Even when faced with the greatest menace,
resistance is not futile.
When
we started this church in 2008 we hired a local fabric artist to make two
banners for us that would at least be suggestive of stained glass windows that
we would hang in the windowless conference room where we were meeting at the
time. This one to my left, the winged lion, is taken from the familiar art
depicting the gospel of Mark but rather than a quote from the Bible, we took as
our motto a quote from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize speech in which he said that
the ethics of the whole of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures could be summed
up in a single phrase: Thou shalt not
stand idly by.
Wiesel
said then that the holocaust only happened because people who knew better, who
had a more sensitive and refined conscience, held their tongues and though hurt
and horrified by what happened, said little and did nothing.
That
is a mistake that we are resolved never to make again and though we started our
church just months before Obama was elected, now, more than ever, our motto
must be reaffirmed, we are resolved that we will never stand idly by and watch
in silence and inaction in the presence of great social evil.
