“Making Reality Bend to Our Beliefs”
Sunday, April 9,2017 Community Christian
Church
Roger
Ray, pastor
Matthew
21:1-11 21When they had come near
Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two
disciples, 2saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you,
and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them
and bring them to me. 3If anyone says anything to you, just say
this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” 4This
took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, 5“Tell
the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on
a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” 6The disciples
went and did as Jesus had directed them; 7they brought the
donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8A
very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from
the trees and spread them on the road. 9The crowds that went
ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest
heaven!” 10When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in
turmoil, asking, “Who is this?”11The crowds were saying, “This is
the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”
So far as we know, the oldest version of the Palm
Sunday story and the passion narrative is found in the Gospel of Mark. Matthew,
Luke, and John copy his basic narrative and add their own color and commentary.
The narrative is brilliant, poetic, full of symbolism and metaphor, so much so
that I have to admit that I am dubious about whether it is original to Mark. In
fact there are a few hints still buried in the account.
For example, Mark doesn’t mention palm fronds in
what we commonly call the Palm Sunday account. Mark says 8Many people spread their
cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the
fields. Mark
places the events around Passover, which is either March or April, and even in
Israel, there are no leafy branches in the fields in early spring. So Matthew,
Luke, and John change the leafy branches to palms because they are evergreens
and would have been available in the spring. Still, it is a hint that Mark is
borrowing from a tradition that used cut branches which Bishop Spong insists
would associate the time of Jesus’ death with the Festival of Booths which is a
fall harvest festival when Jews cut branches and built temporary dwellings in
the fields.
Mark may have moved the story from having happened in early fall
to early spring because the symbolism of Jesus being killed when the Passover
lamb is sacrificed was symbolically valuable. The gospels are not trying to
give us a technically true account of the death of Jesus, they all are trying
to record a theologically persuasive version of events. They are not being
dishonest in a literary way, but if you are trying to be fact literal in your
reading of the Bible, it looks more like a Sean Spicer press conference than it
does a history book.
This upsets a lot of modern evangelicals because they want the
Bible to be true from Balaam’s talking donkey, to Jonah in the whale, to Jesus
walking on water. They emotionally need for it all to be not just poetically or
metaphorically true, they need for it to be factually true in the historical
specifics and that expectation only leaves them set up for their faith to come
crashing down around their ears when they actually study the text.
When Matthew takes up Mark’s narrative, he wants to ad a whole
lot of quotes from the Hebrew Bible. In Matthew’s mind, every time he can
associate Jesus with some image out of our Old Testament, it just makes his
whole narrative more believable. So, where Mark has Jesus send the disciples in
to get a colt for him to ride on, Matthew wants to quote from the 9th
chapter of Zechariah where the prophet writes:
Look, your king is coming
to you,
humble,
and mounted on a donkey,
and
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’
Now, what
Matthew should have known, in fact, I can hardly imagine how he could not have
known it far better than any of us, is that Hebrew poetry used repetition
rather than rhyming.
The
second line often repeats the first line in a slightly different way. It is
just a writing style in Hebrew poetry, so when Zechariah says that the king
will arrive riding on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey, he is just
writing poetry but Matthew takes him literally. He has Jesus riding into
Jerusalem on the back of a donkey and a colt.
Try to
get a mental picture of that… were his legs so long that he straddled both
animals or was he riding in Dixie Stampede style, with one foot on the back of
each animal and he was standing up like a stunt rider? If you take Matthew at
his word, the Triumphal Entry starts to look a little bit like a circus doesn’t
it?
It has
taken me a while to get to my point, and I can only apologize for that, but
here it is… Matthew is not a bad guy, he is not fundamentally a dishonest guy,
in fact, we have good reason to assume that he was, well, a saint; but he is
playing fast and loose with the facts in order to make reality bend to his
beliefs. He believes that Jesus is so important that Old Testament prophets
were literally either unconsciously or consciously talking about him in secret
language for hundreds of years.
Ancient
writers would often glide easily between fairly factual accounts of events
right into the most magical and superstitious sorts of flourishes. And a lot of
that unmoored way of writing was self-serving.
You can
actually take the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, quite seriously when he
is talking about national events. When he says something about himself, you can
count on it to be a broadly exaggerated, self-aggrandizing bunch of lies. We
are, of course, looking at Josephus and Matthew across the critical gulf of a
couple of thousand years but it is not only an ancient problem.
So, when
Vice President Pence says that global warming is a hoax but the Genesis account
of Noah’s Ark is historical, then you realize that he is not simply being dishonest,
he is choosing a way of viewing the truth that serves his purposes. He has
chosen to take a very conservative evangelical view of history and the world so
believing that ancient myths are true and that modern science is not allows him
to do things that are horribly destructive to the planet, to women, to the
poor, and to minorities but it all fits with his view of reality. And he can do
these horrible things while simultaneously assuring himself that he is being,
literally, godly.
Now,
sitting here a thousand miles from Washington and light-years away from
evangelical ideology, we can wonder if he really believes in Noah’s Ark and if
he really believes that global warming is a hoax and you might think that he is
being stupid like and fox, and maybe he is, but what I find rather more
challenging is that he might honestly, really and truly, absolutely believe
that way. And to the extent that Mike Pence and millions upon millions of other
people in the world are capable of confidently believing things that are
absolutely false, we need to come to terms with the real challenge that we face
in trying to pull our civilization into a more fact-based way of thinking about
religion, politics, economics, and science.
This week
it was revealed that Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security Advisor,
had asked to have the names of American citizens who had been caught up in the
monitoring of foreign agents revealed, at least as it related to the 2016
election. This would be a violation of basic privacy laws if it was done for
purely political reasons. However, the people she was wanting to document were
not just private citizens working on the Trump transition team, they were Trump
transition team people who were secretly meeting with Russian advisors on the Seychelles islands to establish
a back door between Trump and Putin….
And if that seems impossibly
complicated, let’s just say that Rice was investigating treason. By the way,
the guy Trump sent to the Seychelles was none other than Blackwater founder,
Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVoss, our ridiculously unqualified
Secretary of Eduction…. You can’t make this up.
When you add up all of the connections
between Trump and Putin in both the tampering with the 2016 election and in the
whole issue of Russian sanctions and multi-billion dollar oil deals, it seems
inescapable that at some point in the next year someone will be asking Trump
and several of his associates if they would like to have a blindfold and a
cigarette before the firing squad loads their rifles.
Still, there is very little change
among the loyal Trump voters for whom historical facts can hardly put a dent in
their ideological view of reality. And what is worse, the Trump surrogates have
been appearing on the news shows telling us that the real crime is not the
treasonous connections to Russian spies but, and you would have to have heard
this to believe it, but they want us to believe that the real crime was Susan
Rice investigating the treason! This is bending reality to fit your beliefs.
Turning self-serving prejudice into alternative facts . . . like insisting that
Christianity is superior to other religions, or that everyone is born Muslim.
These are not facts but billions of people treat such prejudices as if they
were facts.
A couple
of months ago, Trump’s treasury secretary absolutely promised that there would
be “no absolute tax cut for the upper class.” But the next month, when the
“repeal and replace” bill came out to do away with Obamacare, the bill provided
for tax cuts of $158 billion to the wealthiest Wall Street investors, $145
billion to insurance corporations, $25 billion to the drug giants, and $20
billion to medical device corporations.
Had this
bill passed, it would have been the largest single transfer of wealth from the
poor and middle class to the top 1% in the history of the world, all under the
political promises that Trump was going to take care of the forgotten middle
class, that he would make healthcare better, less expensive, and that everyone
would have it.
Lying to
the masses while trying to transfer wealth to the super rich would make an
honest person collapse under the weight of the guilt. But when you can
successfully blind yourself to reality under a blindfold of ideology, then it
doesn’t even feel like lying . . . alternative facts become a legitimate
choice.
Evangelicals
can resolutely hold onto a worldview in which Jonah can live in a whale, snakes
and donkeys can talk, and angels and demons are real. The super-rich can assume
that they are entitled and absolutely anything you say or do to the dumb masses
of unfortunates is justifiable as long as it serves their purposes. It sounds horrible
to say it that way but I implore you to look at it… you might think that Trump
is just a rube, but Paul Ryan is a bright, educated, and experienced politician
and he wrote the healthcare bill that would, before it did anything else, give
$350 billion to the super wealthy while kicking 20 million people out of health
insurance, at least one of whom would be yours truly.
And Paul
Ryan thinks of himself as an ardent Christian while advocating for a
legislative move that would have directly caused the premature deaths of
millions of poor people in order to give more money to several thousand people
who don’t know what to do with all of the money they already have.
Under the
guise of pursuing justice and accomplishing a conservative Christian set of
goals, Ryan, Trump, Pence, and their ilk are attempting to do things that are
indisputably evil. And yet, next week, hundreds of millions of people will go
to churches where their priests and pastors will tell them not to worry about
what happens in this life because they are all going to live in perfect bliss
for all eternity as soon after their health care is canceled.
So, while
my liberal friends are devoted to being mad at Ryan, Trump, and Pence, I have
to say that I have less than warm feelings about my peers in ministry who keep
setting up their church folks to be herded to the slaughter like sheep.
I don’t
want to appear to be against evangelical religion for the sake of promoting a
more progressive view, but folks, the hard and unavoidable reality for me is
that constantly feeding people a line of absurd beliefs and calling it faith,
insisting that believing the absurd without question is a virtue rather than a
process of slowly assassinating your brains, only sets populations up to follow
the likes of Assad, Putin, and Trump and in that sense, religion is typically
the sock-puppet of dictators.
As you
have heard me quote Voltaire many times before, “Those who can make you believe
in absurdities can get you to commit atrocities.” As long as religious leaders
keep teaching people to put reason on the shelf so that they can believe in
Noah’s Ark and not recognize the current fact that the sea levels are rising
and we might really need to build an ark to survive, then religion is the
partner to all of the world’s tyrants.
A healthy
spirituality can foster forgiveness, generosity, grace, love, and good deeds.
Unhealthy spirituality gives us bad government, a lethally unfair distribution
of wealth, and indifference about killing the planet.
Our
church exists to promote a healthy spirituality. We have a large on line
audience but I wish that this place could become the largest congregation in
town. I wish progressives could become the leading force in the future of
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism because until we do, we
can’t really expect Republicans, Democrats, or tyrants to change much.
I know
that a lot of our generation’s progressives have given up on religion and
anything that has anything at all to do with church and I never argue with them
because I think that organized religion has such a trail of carnage and lies in
its wake that I can’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to give it another chance.
But as
bad as organized religion has been, please consider the fact that the
government of the United States is acting like an oil company that happens to
have a large standing army and a nuclear arsenal. Schools are less concerned
with teaching critical thinking and more intent upon teaching technical skills
so that the population can better serve the profit motive of corporations.
Churches
that deny reason, churches that ignore science, churches that teach obedience
to the exclusion of teaching prophetic challenge to power, have been a boil on
the butt of the world for centuries but without the faith communities that
continue to teach, encourage, organize, and inspire justice, compassion, and
social action, then I fear that we may be facing a leaderless future.
When our
grandchildren ask us “What did you do during the great Trump crisis?” let’s
make sure we can tell them with a straight face that we were kicking and
screaming the whole way!
