“A Spiritual Reformation (and this time we really mean it)” a sermon in 2 parts

  Dr. Roger Ray and David Ketchum

click here to see the video

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO    July 25, 2017

Adapted from Ms. Hirsi Ali’s  book, “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now” 

Instead of letting Islam off the hook with bland clichés about the religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.

As it turns out, the West has some experience with this sort of reformist project. It is precisely what took place in Judaism and Christianity over the centuries, as both traditions gradually consigned the violent passages of their own sacred texts to the past. Many parts of the Bible and the Talmud reflect patriarchal norms, and both also contain many stories of harsh human and divine retribution. As President Barack Obama said in remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast last month, “Remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

I was in seminary in 1979 when the Episcopal Church in America sought to update its then 200-year-old Book of Common Prayer. The language of the old Book of Common Prayer was deeply rooted in the English of both Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

My liturgy professor was an Episcopal priest who was on the frontlines of the explosive controversy that was taking place within the Episcopal Church over this sudden modernization of their services.

Anglophiles, it turns out, were less willing to make changes than Catholics had been twenty years earlier when Vatican II set aside their centuries of devotion to Latin in favor of the various languages where Catholic mass was being celebrated. One very staunch Episcopal lady was reported to have said, “If Jesus Christ could see this new prayer book he would turn over in his grave.”

I’ve lived through several contentious reformations in the protestant churches where I grew up and where I cut my teeth as a puppy preacher.

I remember the hot debates about setting aside the King James Version of the Bible in favor of more modern translations.

I watched my home church being torn apart but such momentous decisions as allowing a divorcing elder to remain an elder in the church. I remember the first time women were allowed to serve communion and to be elected to the church board, and finally to be ordained and hired as pastors in Disciple congregations.

And, of course, I have been in the thick of the battle to acknowledge the validity of same sex relationships and to see gay people successfully given leadership positions both in the laity and in the clergy of our churches.

We talk about the Reformation led by Martin Luther in the 16^th century as a

singular event but, in fact, religious reformation is going on all of the time. Luther set a ball in motion that has given birth to literally thousands of variations on Protestantism. In fact, I would argue that the main branch of the reformation led by Luther, in many ways, surrendered after a few generations and essentially went back to being Catholic in almost every meaningful way other than in name.

No one would try to teach a science class with a fifty-year-old textbook. I have taken Spanish I three times at Drury University over the past decade and I had to buy and new and improved textbook every time. I don’t know that Spanish has really evolved as quickly as all that but the textbook industry knows a good thing when they see it.

But when it comes to religion, it seems like our values go in an opposite direction. Even in the pseudo religions of new age adherents, there seems to always be to claim to have accessed some ancient wisdom, almost all of which sprung from the possibly deranged imagination of some modern eccentric, but still, their claim to legitimacy is that they are reintroducing ancient Native American, or Celtic, Druid, or Egyptian insights.

I have loved and benefited tremendously from yoga classes over the past 20 years but I can hardly keep from giggling when some overly enthusiastic instructor calls out Hindi terms and claims to be showing us ancient Hindu practices.

The cross legged, seated images seen in ancient Indian art and sculpture is not so much an example of yoga as it is simply how people sit on a floor when they don’t have chairs. Very little about yoga from even a hundred years ago would appear to be even slightly familiar in a modern yoga studio but there is some resistance to acknowledging that modern yoga practice is good for you for lots of reasons and ancient yoga practice is not. Almost every part of modern yoga is not only not 5000 years old, it mostly was developed since 1960. That is, I am older than almost all of yoga and I have five more years before I can sign up for Medicare.

I am a biblical scholar. I have spent years in grad school studying Christian and Jewish scriptures and I have taken several classes in the ancient texts of other religions but folks, all of those texts were written by people who did not know where the sun goes at night. The plays of William Shakespeare contain some amazing psychological insights into human character but you would not want to use Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet as a psychology textbook.

Just because something is centuries old does not mean that it is superior to modern wisdom. In fact, the literature of ancient religions reflect the best understanding that they had of themselves and the world in which they lived that they could muster. We do not honor their search for truth by denying the truth that is in front of us in deference to some artificial fealty to the maturity of their thought in past centuries. Who would want to go to see a 19^th century dentist or an 18^th century surgeon?

Religions are the language and values specific to a culture, wedded to a particular time in history. It is not that one is right and the other is wrong any more than you can say that Korean is superior to French, or Spanish to German. Religions express the core beliefs and values of a people in a particular place and time.

In ancient Israel, when they were surrounded by hostile and competing tribes, it made sense for a man to have as many wives as he could afford because having as many children as possible helped to build up their numbers. For the same reason, homosexual relationships were discouraged.

By the time Israel was a settled land with all of the usable farm land divided up among them, polygamy fell out of fashion and monogamy became the rule. Still, in the time of Jesus, divorce largely left women and children economically vulnerable so divorce was condemned in the early church.

Religions have to evolve to remain relevant in the modern world. 40 years ago virtually every world religion just knew without a shadow of doubt that homosexuality was a sin, a perversion, and even the American Psychiatric Association had a diagnosis for homosexuality as a mental illness right up until 1986.

Still, in the presence of medical evidence and psychological research, the American Psychiatric Association was able to make changes that still remain out of reach for Southern Baptists, Catholics, nearly all of Islam, and much of Judaism. The sciences are largely eager to self-correct in the presence of new and better information. Religion should do the same thing but there is a sad and self-defeating propensity in organized religion to hold onto the past even when it is clearly wrong.

There are things that are morally, psychologically, and spiritually sick about many ancient expressions of faith. It is time, it is past time, for a major reformation in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism that gets past misogyny, homophobia, racism, exclusivism, and anti-intellectual superstition.

In 1985 Robert Funk left his teaching post to start the Jesus Seminar, an

effort of several hundred religious scholars to close the gap between religious academics and actual churches. He was infuriated by the fact that mainstream pastors would go to grad school for years, learn modern biblical critical skills and then go into parish life and revert to being practitioners of magic and superstition… albeit, usually, not because they had forgotten what they had learned but because they were trying to avoid being fired.

I saw Bob Funk for the last time in January of 2005, just a few months before he died at the Seminar’s meeting in Santa Rosa, California. One of the founders of the Seminar, John White, was telling Funk about what a good job he thought I was doing in introducing seminar scholarship into a mainstream church.

This was not typical of Bob and I am willing to lay most of it at the feet of his advancing cancer and the medicines he was taking, but his face lite up like a red light bulb and he gave me a pretty good cussing for wasting my time in church. He had long given up on the church’s ability to change, to let go of magical thinking, and to become relevant again.

Everyone listening to his little fit was surprised. The Jesus Seminar ostensibly existed to do exactly what I was trying to do but after 30 years, there is not a lot of success to point to. I understand why he had given up. I understand why so many progressive people of faith have given up on the church. I have seen the seamy underbelly of organized religion. I have been ravaged by its evil excesses.

For years I have suffered from public criticism from local pastors and church members who have accused me of not being a real Christian, that my beliefs were no longer the beliefs of the faith they hold dear. Well, I have finally come to agree with them.

I find no particular reason to be exclusively Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish. We look for truth where it can be found whether than is in ancient religious texts or in modern textbooks.

I long ago gave up on supernatural theism

I have no opinions or beliefs about life after death. For me, faith, spirituality, church, has everything to do with the here and now.

It has to do with ethics, meaning, about creating a just society and in finding personal depth and fulfillment. Church is a place for learning, for inspiration, at times, for correction, but mostly it is about being in community. Something about being around people who are, as I am, flawed but trying, a little peculiar yet occasionally saintly, helps me to be a better person.

“Income Disparity – The Lethal DisEase”   

Click here to see the video

July 9, 2017  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor                    

 Martin Luther King, Jr. – “As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.”

       

On Thursday of this week (July 6, 2017), while on his way to the G 20 meeting, our president delivered what was almost immediately being called, the worst speech in presidential history, in Poland.

It sounded frighteningly like he was leading up to a marriage proposal for the first several minutes but then it became clear: this wasn’t a presidential speech. This was a commercial.

Trump recounted the horrors of Poland’s history of invasions and occupations,

praising the courage and the sacrifice of the Poles who stood up to the Nazis and the Soviets to regain and maintain their independence and self-governance. After whipping up the crowds into cheering for themselves, their courage and their military resolve, then the sales pitch started. Trump praised the Poles for meeting their NATO goals in defense spending and specifically for having recently bought very expensive military hardware from the USA.

Then he began to publicly shame the European nations, the leaders of which he would be meeting the next day, for not loving their culture and independence as much as the Poles and for not spending as much to defend themselves from, I don’t know, Nazis and Soviets? Of course, military spending by anyone, anywhere, results in increased sales of American military manufacturing. 

So it was a horrible speech for an American president to deliver but an effective commercial for the American military industrial complex. Like so much of what Trump does, it seemed silly on the surface but behind the curtain it is all about the transfer of money from human services to corporate profits.

Economists have long used the Guns v Butter graph to illustrate the

basic issue of allocation of resources in a national budget. “Guns” represent hardware or capital investments, like roads, bridges, national parks, and, admittedly, nuclear weapons. “Butter” represents consumables such as agricultural subsidies, education, food stamps, and pensions.

Trump’s ideology makes things somewhat more literal

He wants America and Europe to stop spending so much on education, pensions, food, and housing and to shift that money into buying more military hardware.

But as our war in Afghanistan has now been going on for more than 15 years, our longest military conflict in our history, and our attempts to untangle ourselves from a quagmire in Iraq seems to be more likely to expand into Syria and possibly, God forbid, into Iran as well, the divergence of American resources to the war machine is impoverishing the rest of America.

Why does military spending grow under both Democrat and Republican administrations? We all know that the case for war in Iraq was totally fabricated and while the 9-11 attacks may have been planned from caves and training camps in Afghanistan, it was hardly a national effort. Why have we spent trillions of dollars, lost thousands of soldiers and killed hundreds of thousands of citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq? Well, forgive me if this seems too cynical but if you follow the money

You can quickly see that if your ultimate goal is to transfer wealth into the hands of corporations, nothing does it faster than spending on the military. If you spend $150,000 on the military, you create only one job but the same amount of money would create two jobs at a hospital or a school. Europeans look at this and think that they need to divert more money to hospitals and schools but Donald Trump looks at this and wonders what he can do to militarize our health care and education systems.

I would never argue against the necessity for a sane and realistic defense of our nation. I have locks on my doors at home but I don’t have a minefield in the yard with missile-armed drones flying overhead. There is a rational and reasonable level of defense spending and then there is wholesale robbery of the majority of the population to enrich the few.

Of course, I am not only concerned about the posture of the military industrial complex in our economy. The laws of our nation are being molded by special interests from Wall Street investment banks, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, and even the prison industry. I’m asking you to step back, take a wide angle lens view at our nation and ask yourself, “what is wrong with this picture?”

This, I would argue, is at the heart of the problem. As our economy has grown over the past two generations, a shockingly larger percent of the wealth has ended up in the hands of the top 1% of wage earners in America.

As manufacturing jobs are increasingly either exported or automated our supply of unnecessary labor grows which pushes wages down. Class mobility was a larger issue in the settlement of the American colonies than issues of religious freedom. The belief was that a poor person could come to these shores and through hard work and perseverance, become a person of considerable wealth.

That dream has increasingly become a fairy tale as class mobility in America is grinding to a halt. If you are born in poverty in the USA today, you have a 70% chance of dying in poverty. Those who left Ireland, England, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Greece to get out of a feudal economic system would be better off going back to their nation of heritage where class mobility is now much more likely than it is here. In fact, in countries such as Denmark, a child born into poverty is twice as likely to grow out of poverty than is a child born in poverty in America.

The strong social supports afforded to citizens in socialist democracies in western Europe make it possible to work your way out of poverty and the graduated tax structure that places a larger tax burden on top wage earners prevents the income disparity gap from growing to the obscene extremes we have in the USA.

Education is the single most important factor in future earning so that countries with tuition-free universities are obviously going to be much better off than we are here where higher education is becoming so expensive that it unattainable for the poor. Universal healthcare is an easy second in the reasons for greater class mobility in western Europe, again, an obvious factor where we are doing everything wrong while most of the developed economies of the world are pulling out ahead of us.

There are aspects of what is called the “Nordic” economic model that are not easy for American’s to accept. We always seem to be afraid that someone is going to get something for nothing. Conservative talk radio and Fox News pundits are quick to blame our economic woes on the poor whom they describe as “takers” while they think of themselves as the “makers” who are being robbed by the scant social services we offer in this country.

Conservatives reacted with visceral revulsion when President Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren have pointed out that even very successful business owners did not get rich on their own. They depended on a workforce educated in public schools. They benefited from roads, utilities, police, and fire services provided at public expense. They participated in a regulated economic system that made their success possible.

But the fact that they didn’t want to hear it didn’t make it any less true. Faced with the advancing mechanization of both agriculture and manufacturing, the transfer of wealth to the top will continue unless we put some guardrails up that will keep capitalism from running our nation into the ditch.

We have more labor than we need and rather than continuing to allow fewer people to work longer hours for less pay we really must look at how we distribute the fruit of our growing productivity so that everyone is employed and everyone gets a shorter work week, with more vacation time, and an earlier retirement.

Our Protestant work ethic is admirable until it becomes lethal and right now, my friends, it is becoming toxic. We don’t have to work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, until we are 75 years old to produce what our population needs. We can go back to having one-income households. We can raise our own children instead of farming them out for most of their waking childhood hours to minimum wage strangers.

I’m talking about creating a civilization that is worth defending. If we can’t have a living wage, a decent retirement, access to healthcare and education, then what exactly are we defending with our massive army, navy, and air force?

I’m not saying that we need to chain capitalism so that no one can get rich, I’m just saying that we have to restore sanity to our economic system.

The six heirs of Sam Walton

Have more accumulated wealth than the poorest 100 million Americans.

That’s not a picture of a 100 million people…. That’s not even a thousand people…. That’s just a lot of people but still, you see my point don’t you? Sam Walton was really good at running retail stores and maybe his family has earned and deserves to be really rich but do they need to hoard resources that keep millions in crushing poverty, creating hunger, disease, homelessness, and human misery in the presence of obscene abundance?

Of course not! And we need not allow ourselves to accept that just because the super wealthy have created a tax structure that serves them that we all have to just sit back and take it!

And, of course, I am not just picking on the Walton family, though, admittedly, that bunch is the ultimate definition of low-hanging fruit. But the larger reality is that the most wealthy 85 people in the world, a gathering that could comfortably be seated here in this small room, owns more than half of the wealth of the world. If we made those 85 people simply “fabulously wealthy” rather than “obscenely and absurdly wealthy” there would be no more poverty in the world.

When I was at Harvard, I indulged my mild obsession with Søren Kierkegaard over a long weekend and traveled to Copenhagen to see what I could find of the Great Dane. There is not much, a modest grave and a small room tucked away on the second floor of the city museum that had his desk, a few photos and coffee cups. But the largest display in the museum came as a real surprise to me. It had been set up as an educational display for young Danish students to teach them about the history of poverty when Denmark had hunger and homelessness, when the poor were sent to live on a poor farm, before their society had evolved to their current state, where everyone receives medical care and education, where there is no homelessness or unemployment.

I’ll admit, that memory crowded out my enthusiasm for Kierkegaard. I realized that ending poverty is not just a fantasy. It is a very real possibility.

It seems far-fetched in a country where rich politicians are constantly looking for ways to cut Social Security, end Medicaid, and to always try to find ways to buy more guns and less butter.

But you know, without any shade of doubt, that it is morally wrong, spiritually wrong, and economically disastrous to allow this income disparity to go on. You don’t need me to convince you that we need to focus on ameliorating suffering and poverty rather than creating more wealth at the top of the economy.

In the midst of the riots and demonstrations of the Civil Rights movement, then President John Kennedy very prophetically said,

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” America simply could not continue to be America if we did not bring the racial Apartheid of our nation to an end. But poverty was always the subtext to America’s racial Apartheid.

There are two Americas and there are not enough police in the world to maintain

this picture. We not all that deeply invested in Biblical narratives around here but sure I don’t need to remind any of you that

 

it was not the gays, the poor, the liberals, or even the non-religious that Jesus whipped out of the temple…. It was the bankers, the exploitative businesses that were making a mockery of the sacred. I believe that there is an inevitably revolution coming and in this time of transformation, I’m going to be on Jesus side and I trust that you will be too.