“Speaking for the Unknown God” 
Easter  6    May 21, 2017   Community Christian Church of Springfield 
Roger Ray, pastor       Acts 17:22-31   

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²²Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. ²³For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, ²⁵nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. ²⁶From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ ²⁹Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. ³⁰While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”  

 My father used to delight in teasing the residents of his retirement home, telling them that he could not read. Though he did attend a one-room school in rural Kentucky, complete with a wood burning stove and a dirt floor, he could read. However, what was true is that he did not read. I can remember seeing him read some from the newspaper and sometimes from the Readers Digest but he did not read books. Rather frustratingly, he didn’t even read the books that I wrote.

His relative lack of education and curiosity did not, however, prevent him from being a remarkably opinioned person. He would often preface his short speeches to his grown children by saying, “I don’t really know anything about it, but…” And though he lived to be 92 years old, neither I nor any of my siblings ever screwed up the courage necessary to suggest that if he knew that he didn’t know anything about the subject that he might do himself and the rest of us the favor of not talking about it.  I’ve seen him hand feed grizzly bears… I never felt that it would be smart to tangle with him.

Besides, growing up in a home where you could simultaneously announce that you don’t know anything about a topic before making broad declarations on the same topic may have uniquely prepared me for a life in ministry where speaking confidently about things that cannot be known is more or less the professional rule.

Our wisdom lesson today is one of the assigned lectionary readings for this Sunday. It is the almost certainly fictional account of Paul speaking on the Areopagus in Athens. Not to cast too many aspersions Luke’s way but the book of Acts is largely a propaganda piece written to prop up Paul’s status in the early church to give the rest of his letters more credibility. Though the author tries to write a great deal of it like he had first hand knowledge of the events, it appears that Acts is almost entirely fictional.

However, if you just look at the speech he alleges that Paul delivered to the gathered philosophers in Athens, he sort of makes Paul sound a lot like my dad. At first Paul praises the Athenians for having a statue to the unknown god, a sort of artistic tip of the hat to the great mystery of the divine that is unknown and unknowable. Then he immediately turns to tell them exactly what the unknown god is like and what god demands of all Athenians and, indeed, everyone everywhere on earth. And, wonder of wonders, it happens to be just exactly the religion preferred by Paul, faith in Jesus Christ to protect your eternal soul on the day of judgment.

Nowhere is there a connection from the unknown and unknowable to the concrete specifics that there is such a thing as an eternal soul, or a final judgment, or a risen savior who used to be a Palestinian preacher.

Though, in Paul’s rather more arrogant presumptions, he didn’t start by saying “I don’t really know anything about it,” but in true Pauline style, he started by saying, “You don’t know anything about it but this is your lucky day because I know everything about it.”

An awful lot of religion is practiced in more or less this way…. naked, unsubstantiated truth claims. You can assume that the religion of your birth is right, or you might choose a religion because you like the rituals, costumes, or even the location of the house of worship. People often say about their search for a faith or for a church that they are looking for the place where they feel “comfortable.” To which I normally reply, “If you are comfortable here then you are not listening.”

I’m not interested in a faith that makes me feel good, I’m interested in a religious practice that helps to make me good, that inspires me to grow, change, evolve, and, as Ben Franklin said, the only reason we ever change is because we are uncomfortable.

For progressives, I have this modest proposal: stop talking about what you do not and cannot know and focus on what you do know or can learn. I’m indebted to my friend, Michael Dowd, for the term and the sharpness of the focus of talking about evidence-based faith. Michael travels around the world now talking about the use of science, of research, of facts, to construct a new worldview, a new faith, but the idea is not original to him.

I can’t claim to know much about Quaker tradition but our own David Ketchum is a practitioner of the quietist tradition who just happens to be kind enough to tolerate my insistence upon using so many words to express my faith. But a few weeks ago David chanted an adapted quote from Jesse Holmes, an early 20^th century Friends writer that captures this thought so very well. He wrote:

“Meaningless phrases and irrational theologies

have been molded into rigid, authoritative institutions

perverting and stultifying the adventurous, creative spirit …

[So] I propose to a fairly intelligent people of a partially scientific age: [May we] stop the pretense of ... respect ... for teachings which lack … evidence or probability.

[May we...] substitute a religion based on actual repeatable, describable and testable experience, and which has some connection with the genuine values of life:  

[to] join heartily in a[n] … effort for an uplifted humanity;  

[to] refuse to continue systems which involve contests

in indiscriminate killing and destruction;

[to] dedicate [our]selves to ... mutual service,

refusing all incitements to seek power over each other

[and … ] everywhere [seek] harmony, good–will, understanding, friendliness, [so that we may] indeed … renew and revive the purposes of prophets, statesmen, scholars, scientists, and good people since the world began.”

-Adapted from Jesse Herman Holmes (1863–1942), published in “‘Our Christianity’?” Universalist Friends 39

Obviously, there are more things that are true that cannot be proven than there are truths that can be proven. There is room in religion for a full-throated approval of mystery, of the unknown, of that which transcends our capacity to intellectually describe but anything for which there is no reason probably also does not deserve discussion and it absolutely should not be a part of assertion. If you believe something for which you have no causative reason, that is not religion, that’s imagination.

That is, if you don’t know anything about it. If nothing can be known about it, have the humility not to act like you know, or that you can assert in any creedal way what cannot be known.

There may be life after death though there is no evidence to prove it, so why would it make any sense to say that the Christian, or the Muslim, or the Zoroastrian, or the Buddhist views of the afterlife is the right one? You might become an angel and live in heaven when you die but there is more evidence that you will become fertilizer and until you have some reason to believe otherwise, then I think we need to assume that we all have a future as fertilizer. Hope anything you want. Believe whatever pleases you, but have the decency not to make promises of things you cannot be at all certain of.

More importantly, there may be angels and demons, but there is no evidence for them and believing in such speculative creatures is purely a matter of personal preference. But there are 900 children in Greene Co. in foster care…. There are 500 people who are homeless, there are thousands of locals who are addicted to either heroin or methamphetamine…. These are facts and religious people really need to be paying attention to what is known and not what is nothing more than wishful thinking.

And sure, anyone can believe whatever they want but we should not be lulled into thinking that it doesn’t matter. If you believe that women are inferior to men, if you believe being gay is a sin, if you believe that everything that happens is somehow a part of a divine plan, such that you are relieved of any responsibility to strive to correct poverty or to respond to natural disasters… then those beliefs are not simply personal, private beliefs, those beliefs are poisoning our society.

We not only can make judgments between healthy and unhealthy spiritually, honestly, folks, we must make those kinds of distinctions. As Karen Armstrong wrote in her autobiography:  “If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.”

Look, if the bank sends you a notice that your checking account is over-drawn, you can’t just call them and say, “That’s your opinion. In my opinion, I have tens of thousands of dollars in my checking account.” But what I’m talking about is infinitely more important than your checking account. If you instinctively know how to be rational and deal in facts around small amounts of money, why do we act like we have sushi for brains when it comes to our core life beliefs?

All I’m saying is what many people have said before me, when it comes to religion, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

“The People are Revolting”  
May 14, 2017    Community Christian Church     Roger Ray, pastor

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Aristotle’s Politics, Book VI, Chapter 5

Poverty is the cause of the defects of democracy. That is the reason why measures should be taken to ensure a permanent level of prosperity. This is in the interest of all classes, including the prosperous themselves; and therefore the proper policy is to accumulate any surplus revenue in a fund, and then to distribute this fund in block grants to the poor. The ideal method of distribution, if a sufficient fund can be accumulated, is to make such grants sufficient for the purchase of a plot of land: failing that, they should be large enough to start men in commerce or agriculture.

In the midst of our adult class’ discussions of Noam Chomsky’s latest book, Requiem for the American Dream, I ran across a BBC interview with Chomsky in which he is defending his rather outrageous statement that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. The last time a Jewish guy said such radical things the government had him killed and his followers swore that he rose from the dead!

Chomsky defended this extreme statement by citing one issue in specific: the effective push to destroy the planet’s ability to support human life. You may call it deregulation, or job creating environmental policy, but the net effective is accelerating the already alarming degree to which human activity is changing the global climate, poisoning the air, water, and earth, and rolling back protections on food and drug safety. Whether these measures are not intended to kill off the human race or not is immaterial. The net effective of their program will do just that.

The problem is that we progressives already see these points and agree with them and those who do not see them, though they would swear that they had no desire to exchange the long term prospects of the human race for short term economic profits, they resolutely refuse to face what we call “facts.”

While deriding consumers of Fake News, science deniers, and the shallow end of the theological pool, gives the rest of us a bit of consolation and satisfaction, as a form of persuasion, it appears to be an utter failure. And as much as I respect the intellect of Noam Chomsky, calling the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in history is not likely to get many Republicans to sit down for a free and open exchange of ideas.

If it is not too late for me to even pretend that I can be a part of reconciling the deep divide in America today, I would like to call upon two of Chomsky’s own favorite resources he used in his book that come from before there was a Republican and a Democratic party in America, and, in the case of Aristotle, long before there was an America.

There are ways in which America is, or at least was, the greatest nation in the world. We certainly have not perfected either freedom or democracy and we have never had what could be called an entirely fair free market economy that was tethered to the common good and service to democracy but I think that it is fair to say that we have done a better job then whoever was in second place for most of the past century.

But pure democracy and an unregulated free market will inevitably lead to either anarchy of the Mad Max variety or a wealthy aristocracy of the sort that Mel Brooks parodied The History of the World, Part 1, where, during the French Revolution, Count DeMony visits the king and tells him that “The People are revolting” and the king replies, “They sure are, they stink on ice.”

But he claims to love the peasants when suddenly he turns to shoot skeet but rather than the traditional clay pigeons being thrown in the air, the king is shooting at peasants.

The complete insensitivity of the ruling class toward the suffering of the poor is often portrayed as either a primary factor or at least a contributing factor to most of modern history’s revolutions.

Aristotle was aware 2500 years ago that without some regulation, democracy and a free market would have a fatal flaw and that mortal vulnerability is called poverty. From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, anyone who has thought seriously about Democracy and the free market has realized that a nation endowed with both would, within a very few years, self destruct without some protections in place.

Now, we’re a church, and church folks can generally be assumed to be opposed to poverty. Granted, that a whole lot of religion treats poverty like a pious project that we just spruce up and give a fresh coat of paint now and again to keep our halos polished but underlying most spiritual traditions is a compassionate desire to elevate the lives of the poor.

But what about the Ayn Rand dimension of politics and banking, or the Ayn Rand in stained glass/fake religion we see in so much of modern politics? Minus the influence of a spiritual and compassionate perspective, what is their attitude toward poverty? 

I would like to argue that if the rich want more than anything to get richer, that mere greed should also motivate them to want to elevate the health, education, and hence, EMPLOYMENT of the poor so that they will get busy creating wealth and paying taxes.

Again, as St. Chomsky points out, in America’s early days, our founders set limits to Democracy so that the poor could vote and have an appearance of a voice in how the country was run, but they made sure that their votes didn’t count for much and that power remain in the hands of corporations and the wealthy. Aristotle proposed that we solve the same problem differently, that is, pay the poor enough for them to actually rise out of poverty…. Hopefully enough to become landowners but if not that, at least business owners.

And here, men and women, we have to acknowledge that either way works if your goal is merely to maintain peace and stability but if you want to really get the money machine going, creating wealth and growing the economy, then, honestly, the compassionate way works best. Being concerned about the nutrition, healthcare, education, and employment of the poor is not just a Jesus solution, it is an Adam Smith “Wealth of Nations” solution.

Republicans and Democrats don’t have to be at lager heads about universal healthcare, free college education, and replacing the minimum wage with a living wage if only we can get Democrats to realize that we want to grow the economy and if we can get Republicans to realize that short-term economic goals work against their long term best interests.

Democrats need to stop thinking in terms of food stamps and public housing and start thinking about free college education and better salaries. And Republicans need to stop thinking about exporting labor and building more prisons and get behind policies that really will lift all boats.

Let me give you one example from before Republicans and Democrats were a thing.  When Adam Smith left Scotland to see the newly birth democracy in America, he wrote about how our freedom of movement in labor was going to accelerate our economic growth so that we would shortly surpass Europe. In Europe and in Great Britain, labor was too tightly controlled by apprenticeships and trade unions. In the newly formed USA, laborers could freely move from place to place and from trade to trade based on skill and demand. This is obviously much better for both the laborer and the economy.

But two hundred years after Adam Smith published this praise of American labor freedom, we had accidentally killed the goose that laid the golden egg by tying healthcare to employment. Health insurance, which is crucial to modern life, can become so expensive that a person can’t leave a job where they have health insurance to go start a new business, become an inventor, or even quit work for a while to earn a degree or take job training.

What the old apprenticeship and trade unions did to impede the circulation of labor was nothing compared to our prison of health care being tied to our jobs. There were a number of reasons that America became a world dominating economic force but chief among those reasons was a work force that was free to move, innovate, invent, and change based on opportunity.

Take that away and our economy slows to nearly imperceptible growth. And, for the truly market driven among us, if a national health care program were enacted tomorrow by the time the markets closed the stock value of old corporations such as the automobile and high tech industries would skyrocket to new heights. The most expensive thing on any new car, refrigerator, or air conditioner today is the healthcare costs of their retired workforce. Remove that one thing, and American products immediately become much more affordable on the world market….remember when Detroit was the city that every city wanted to be? It could be that again if only we could see beyond the end of our noses.

I’m no diplomat and I have no desire to disguise the thousands of pages of liberal ire I’ve expressed about the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the rich but I am saying that facts are not partisan and that capitalism doesn’t have to become economic cannibalism. There is a way that America became greater than its peers among the nations of the world and we have, out of greed and moral laziness, surrendered much of our progress.

I think that we religious, bleeding heart, liberals can find a way to work with self-serving conservatives to make America great again if we can just get the 1% to agree that even they can be more wealthy if the 99% have an improved standard of living. 1% of a bigger pie is better than 50% of a tiny pie.

Chomsky is probably right in saying that the Republican party is the most dangerous organization in the history of the world.

All I’m saying is that they don’t have to stay in that spot. We’re here to help whenever you are ready.

Reflections on Prayer, a sermon delivered at Community Christian Church by David Ketchum on May 7, 2017

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One of the most common barbs thrown against religious folk is aimed at prayer. Prayer is a waste of time, prayer doesn’t do anything, prayer is superstitious, and prayer keeps us from doing things that actually make a difference. And it can be hard to argue with this, especially when we hear glib recommendations in the face of natural disaster or human tragedy. And it’s even worse when prayer is recommended as a way to make us more submissive to systems of oppression, when we’re asked to be patient, pray a little, and hope things will turn out okay. As an example, I have no patience or interest in notions, like those espoused by one minister, to pray that a god will grant Donald Trump wisdom out of the air, because “As Christians, we should pray ... that our elected officials will seek God and His will. … God alone can change the heart of the king if the people of God would seek His will and not their own.” Leaving off my objections to that statement, I especially object to this kind of thinking when it is part of a resignation to the way things are, such as when the pastor went on to write, that our current president “has been chosen, by the people and by the divine will of God. Now let us honor God by honoring [our current president] as we ‘render to God’ what He (God) sees fit to do in America.” (https://www.adn.com/opinions/2017/04/17/christians-should-honor-president-trump-2/ ) I do believe people, even a person like Donald Trump, can have a change of heart. I don’t believe it comes through wishful thinking, but through the hard work of social change, through communities organizing, resisting, and embodying a better, more whole and peaceful and just way of living with one another. When it comes to injustice, we need to say ‘No!’, not just say our prayers. 

So I’m sympathetic with the criticisms. However, I am sometimes frustrated with them, too, because I think we miss an opportunity to understand why humans pray and what happens when we pray. Most of these attacks are really directed against supernaturalism in general, and not prayer itself. From a sociological perspective, even the frustrating requests become much more interesting, though also equally disturbing. Prayer says a lot about the people praying. It’s a very human thing, reflecting our deepest desires, insecurities, frustrations, fears, and aspirations. I suspect this is why many people are so slow to have a willingness to pray in public. We understand, at some level, that we are revealing more than we might be ready to share. I myself have had some strange lessons in the course of my religious journey, some laughable, some embarrassing, and some painful.

In my experience growing up in the Southern Baptist church, prayer was mainly sentimental. Prayer requests for healing and help were very common, but mainly used to elicit sympathy and support from one another. We were expected to say that we believed our prayers would be answered with divine actions like healing, but I don't remember anyone really having a sense that this would be the case, unless it involved collecting money. God's ways were inscrutable, beyond our understanding and even expectation. Prayer requests also provided a convenient and pious cover for one of our favorite pastimes, which was gossip. 

All this changed when, as a teenager, I became increasingly involved in summer bible camps and local youth meetings that my elders somehow thought were good ideas. In particular, I became immersed in a local charismatic church that turned out to be spiritually abusive and dangerous, although this wasn't apparent at the beginning. We were taught, for example, that taking any medicines or seeing a doctor was blasphemous, and that god would reward our faith if we took risks to be faithful to him. Eventually, the limitations of the teachings became painfully apparent; first, one of the youth minister's children died during childbirth (due to refusal to get medical care). A year later, another child was barely rescued by the mother, who sought medical care for a life threatening condition. The mother was considered to be in sin and they were divorced. Eventually, the minister moved away to start again. Did I stress enough that teachings on prayer can be abusive and dangerous? 

Gratefully, I came a little closer to a more stable and helpful understanding of prayer during my freshman year of college, especially regarding prayers for healing, that carried me through until I could form a more mature and rational approach. The crucible for that process of understanding was the final illness and death of my maternal grandmother. A couple of evenings a week and each weekend, I would return to my parents' house and spend hours sitting with and praying for my grandmother, who had moved into my old room when she required hospice care. Over several months, my prayers were markedly different, not focusing on changing some god's mind or giving instructions for what should be done and to whom, and not confronting illness as a demonic attack or death as an enemy. In my readings, I had picked up the teaching that “No prayer goes unanswered, if the one who prays is changed.” Praying for my grandmother opened my heart to the terrible pain and suffering in the world, even as it was filled with compassion, empathy, and love. 

In sharp contrast to either sentiment or miracle, I began experiencing prayer as the embodiment of love. I found that the answers to my prayers were demonstrated in the expressions of care that we shared together - in planting flowers and installing a bird bath outside the window, in quietly sitting while finger-picking familiar hymns on the guitar, in hearing confessions and fears and questions of death in prayerful acceptance and love, in cooking whatever meal sounded best in the moment, whether it would be eaten or not, and in sharing stories and memories of life. My grandmother died, and our prayers couldn’t change that painful journey. But I began to learn how to pray, quite accidentally, through that sharing of love, life, and death together. 

In hindsight, it was probably then that I began approaching my spiritual practice more like a Quaker, though I did not have the community or language at the time. But I can recognize, growing from that part of my life, the wisdom expressed by David Johnson: “A Quaker prayer life arises from a life of continuing daily attentiveness … . The difficulties we experience in inward prayer are preparation for our outward lives. Each time we return to the centre in prayer we are modelling how to live our lives.” 

These days, I still set aside time to pray, usually a fair bit of time each morning and a briefer time before bed. It mainly looks like meditation. I sit on a cushion and bring my attention to my breath, situation or relationship, with kindness and curiosity. I come into a deeper awareness of how each moment is an unfolding of all the causes and conditions that came before it. I come into a deeper understanding of how all conditions arise and cease. I get a glimpse into how my reactivity arises out of years of social and psychological conditioning, buried and usually unnoticed. And, over time, insight, patience, goodwill, generosity, and even, at times, wisdom, begins to grow. Following the Quaker tradition, I make frequent use of advices and queries. Following the Franciscan tradition, I alsouse liturgical prayers from time to time. I sometimes light candles and incense, and you may even catch me chanting Christian, Buddhist, or humanist texts. But the heart of my prayer life is keeping silence. 

It was in this silence that I discovered that prayer could be a way to honestly confront my attitudes, assumptions, and habits. Prayer could make a space to feel frustration, rage, grief, or confusion without having to be dragged around by those emotions. Through prayer and meditation, I could become familiar with how those emotions, and their often torturous thoughts, would come and go, what triggered them, what soothed them, what risks they raised and what wisdom they offered. Similarly, I could recognize and feel more at home with joy, kindness, wisdom, and gratitude. I could begin to influence my automatic reactions through a kind, persistent practice of attention, meditation, and prayer. And during the rest of the day, I began to notice that I had more empathy for myself and others, more patience, more flexibility and creativity. When I did have strong reactions to my experiences, I also had more space around those reactions, more ability to choose how to respond. To remember Johnson’s words, “The difficulties we experience in inward prayer are preparation for our outward lives. Each time we return to the centre in prayer we are modelling how to live our lives.” 

The wisdom of this approach is also why I am not too upset when someone mocks and laughs at the idea of prayer. In fact, I think it has its place. It helps keep me honest, because I truly don’t want to substitute sentiments for actions; I don’t want to cover up suffering with piety or delusion. I want my prayer life to be a model for how I go through the day, with curiosity, openness, kindness, gratitude, and a passionate commitment to social justice and equality in community. And this is why I think it can be helpful if we look at what is actually happening when people pray, both psychologically and sociologically, both within us and between us. Instead of focusing on whether prayer brings about supernatural results, which is a pretty irrelevant question to me, we can ask: Can we uncover any of the functions prayer might play? Can we uncover any wisdom from the practice of prayer that can help to us work together for social change in the direction of social justice, either as a caution or as a model? 

As it turns out, it is a pretty easy exercise to get a sense of the very human functions that prayer can play, for good or ill. Some of the common ones include: 

• To say thank you 
• To express deep emotions like outrage, grief, or joy 
• To cope with powerlessness, fear, frustration, and uncertainty 
• To identify our aspirations and needs 
• To practice and rehearse relationship skills 
• To demonstrate group belonging
• To influence our attitudes and perceptions
• To calm ourselves and even experience feelings of transcendence and bliss

One of the more interesting lines of inquiry in the last few years has taken a similar approach, with the conclusion that prayer does indeed change things. But what it changes might come as a surprise to those who tend to think about prayer mainly in supernatural terms. For example, in 2010, Florida State University psychologist Nathaniel Lambert and his colleagues tested the relationship between prayer and forgiveness. By having two groups, one with participants that prayed “one single prayer for their romantic partner's well being” and the other with participants that “simply described their partner,” they discovered that “those who had prayed for their partner harbored fewer vengeful thoughts and emotions: They were more ready to forgive and move on.”[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127134607.htm ]

In other words, prayer changed the person who prayed (the study did not try to measure change in the one prayed for). Prayer changed their thinking, their feelings, and their actions, in turn creating conditions for changing theirrelationship with the other person. The researchers offered this hypothesis on why prayer worked this way -

“Most of the time, couples profess and believe in shared goals, but when they hit a rough patch, they often switch to adversarial goals like retribution and resentment. These adversarial goals shift cognitive focus to the self, and it can be tough to shake that self-focus. Prayer appears to shift attention from the self back to others, which allows the resentments to fade.” (ibid.)

 Research has also been done on the impacts of Buddhist lovingkindness, or metta, meditation on the brain. Fredrickson's report in "Open Hearts Build Lives" (http://www.unc.edu/peplab/publications/Fredrickson%20et%20al%202008.pdf ) concludedthat the participants’ positive emotions tripled during the brief study. 

“Rather than becoming bored with or jaded to the effects of meditation, our participants seemed to be building a dependable skill for self-generating positive emotions again and again. These findings are especially noteworthy given that most of our participants were novice meditators and our meditation workshop lasted only 7 weeks. … individuals began a mind-training practice that increased their positive emotions and, in turn, their personal resources and well-being. … when people open their hearts to positive emotions, they seed their own growth in ways that transform them for the better.”

 Similarly, Hutcherson, Seppala, and Gross documented how "Loving-Kindness Meditation Increases Social Connectedness" (https://contextualscience.org/system/files/Hutcherson,2008.pdf ). They discovered “Even a brief (7-min) exercise in cultivating positive regard was sufficient to induce … small to moderate” changes - an especially important resource in a time of “rising societal isolation and distrust”. 

 This kind of meditation may be especially helpful for naturalists, agnostics, humanists, nontheists, post-theists, transtheists, atheists, and others who might not want to use language or rituals associated with theistic and supernatural forms of prayer, since metta is a quality to be cultivated and doesn’t require addressing any supernatural being. But metta is also appropriate for people in religious traditions. It is a very simple practice that many will recognize as compatible with their own prayer life, or that skeptics can practice without any religious convictions at all. 

And, for me, it is a wonderful practice that helps bring prayer and meditation into my daily life, how I relate to myself, to others, to those who suffer injustice and those who inflict injustice, to the very earth itself. My prayers are deeply connected with how I live, how I embody those prayers. Being centered in love, after returning and resting in this attention, I can go back into the world with the equanimity and strength to pay attention to the deep suffering and deep needs around us. I can go back into the world with a heart overflowing with kindness, compassion, and joy. As Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine monk and director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, has taught: “Meditation, we soon come to realise, is a way of love because it is a way of attention.” 

 But there is a further consideration for me. How do we build a bridge from prayer and meditation as personal practices that bear the fruit of love, kindness, and wisdom, to communities of faith that bear the fruit of justice and peace? One of today’s lectionary readings contains an iconic verse about prayer. In this memory of the early church, Acts 2:42 notes that the community of faith “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Whatever we think about the prayers of those followers of Jesus described in the book of Acts, we cannot say that their prayers made them passive, apolitical, or ineffective. In fact, this was a community that “had all things in common.” This was a community that was so committed to social justice and equality that “they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” They had “glad and generous hearts.” And, it should be emphasized, they weren’t exceptions. These weren’t the unusual idealists who stood apart from the crowd. The Book of Acts goes out of its way to say that this was everybody, “All who believed.” This was the community that would insist, as the book of James has it, that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (1:27) Practices, such as prayer, connected that community to what was best in their cultural memory, to have regard for the most vulnerable, to show respect and care for one another, and to do so on the basis of radical equality. 

 In this description, I am reminded again of James Cone's wisdom. In situations where we face systems of oppression, which is a fair description of most of the world for most of the last 10,000 years, we “have only two alternatives: (1) to accept the oppressor's value system and thus be contented with the place set for them by others, or (2) to find a completely new way of looking at reality that enables them to fight against oppression.” (God of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury Press, 1975; page 33) For me, prayer can be one of those paths toward “looking at reality” in a way that empowers us “to fight against oppression,” to continue in faithfulness even when we might otherwise succumb to discouragement and despair. By cultivating a relationship with our daily experiences that is oriented around grace, and oriented around honesty that is also wise and kind, we have an alternative to acquiescing to the way things are. In the place of prayer, there is a refuge for justice and mercy, a refuge where we can find healing, courage, and grace to sustain us. Prayer, meditation, sharing hospitality, sharing teachings, and other spiritual practices can be not only community experiences, but community expressions and a community’s embodiment of that fight against oppression. By participating in the community, we engage in practices that shape our perceptions, influence our emotional and interpretive reactions, and give us opportunities to act on our convictions. From a psychosocial point of view, this is what that description in Acts 2 was all about. 

But there are challenges. As we can see both from the long history of humanity and the recent history of the religious right, prayer can be used to bring out the worst in us, to justify hatred and discrimination and oppression. For those who have been involved in coercive and abusive religious groups, shedding all of these religious and spiritual practices can be cathartic and healthy. For those who have never been involved, these practices often look, at best, unnecessary. For those who are oriented around a supernatural understanding of faith, these practices can easily degenerate into sentiment, demands for miracles, or similar pitfalls. And, as progressive faith communities emerge in this mix, we face the challenge of how to knit ourselves together, how to cultivate community that centers around praxis, around the changes we agree are necessary for humans to live together in a just, peaceful, whole way. If we are going to make use of spiritual practices in spiritual community, we need a sociology of prayer. 

I’ve had a very modest goal this morning. I haven’t tried to define prayer, or whether one needs to pray to something or someone. I haven’t tried to categorize all the different ways we can pray, from liturgical to silent, from giving thanks to making requests. And I’ve only dipped into the research, without trying to argue that you should or shouldn’t pray. My modest goal is simply to encourage us to explore all the resources that are available to us.

This world is both beautiful and terrible. Humanity is both beautiful and terrible. The line between the two is very fine, between the sublime and the brutal, and the burden is sometimes overwhelming. Joy that cannot be contained, sorrow that cannot be contained. There is only room in my small heart if I make the room. So I make it my practice to make the room, to take the bounds of this small life of mine and make them boundless, my heart and mind wide open both to the suffering and to the exuberant joy of living. I read and sing and walk and plant wildflowers. Paying attention, I learn how to love. 

I began this talk by noting that prayer says a lot about the people praying, and, despite all the baggage, a sociology of prayer invites us to reflect on what type of community we are, what kind of community we’d like to be, and how we’ll get there. Because, for me, prayer is an act of faith, in the best possible meaning of the word: that we do not have to resign ourselves to the injustice of oppression, or humanity to the vacuous pursuit of accumulating money, power, and pleasure; that we do not have to lose ourselves in the resistance to this injustice, but that we can preserve our own humanity in the face of it, by finding ways to care for the earth, for each other, and for our shared future. And that is the best prayer I can think of, or know.