“Spiritual but not Religious…”    Oct. 29, 2017    Dr. Roger Ray

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Matthew 22:34-46                              When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

    Bill Nye, a.k.a. “The Science Guy” has added his voice to the chorus of genetic scientists who insist that race is a human construct. As he said, if someone from Papua New Guiana has a child with someone from Sweden, their child is a human. Looked at from a perspective of DNA, there really is no such thing as African, Asian, Native American, Latino, Caucasian, or Eskimo. The differences among humans are subtle and insignificant.

I don’t get to talk about philosophy very often and I’m sure most of you can count your lucky stars for that but there was one philosopher that I studied in college that didn’t make much sense to me at the time who has come to make a lot more sense to me in recent years.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was a British and Austrian philosopher who talked about the philosophy of mind and of language. I remember my professor explaining his existential argument by saying that if you look down at a table that you are not seeing the same table you would see if you looked at it from beneath it. That hardly seemed like it was worth the price of tuition but the real point of it is, the truth of a thing depends entirely upon the perspective from which you see it. And you know me, I’m all about evidence based faith and I like to root my reality in scientific facts but perspective is a huge determinant in what truth you experience.

It is true that there is, from the perspective of science, no such thing as race. We are all humans but if you ask a black person if there is such a thing as blackness, that is, has growing up being identified as a black person had any influence on you?  Well, their reality is not the reality that Bill Nye is talking about. White privilege is real, minority prejudice is real, gender discrimination is real, and while scientists may be trying to defuse the assumptions our society has accumulated around race, the fact is, race is still real. Maybe not from a scientific perspective, but from a lived, realized, social perspective, it is very real.

We are all decent people here. None of us want to be racists. All of us would like to eradicate racism from our society and I believe that we have made progress in lots of ways but there is a great deal more progress to take place. When the Black Lives Matter movement began there were a lot of us, good, well-intended people, who made stumbling and somewhat confused responses to say “all lives matter.” Even Bernie Sanders, when he was first being confronted by Black Lives Matter protestors, said exactly those words, “all lives matter.” Bernie is a Jewish liberal in Washington, D.C., being in a minority is not new territory to him, but even a seasoned, progressive liberal who had marched in Civil Rights demonstrations back in the old days, still couldn’t see the table from the black side of the street.

The truth is that there has never been a time in modern American history when it wasn’t obvious that white lives matter. We have a long history of institutionally and individually insisting that black lives do not matter. And so the alternative needs to be said. And those of us who believe that we are “woke” to this issue, even those of us who are in inter-racial families, need to calm down and listen, ask more questions than we offer opinions, and see if we can grow our way out of racism.

Not since the days of the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 has the issue of sexual harassment been in the news since the case of Harvey Weinstein gained media attention. Sex scandals are not at all uncommon in the past generation but the coercion of sex from women by powerful men has been an especially nauseating bit of news. It is not hard to imagine that there were not a lot of applicants of women wanting to date Harvey for his natural good looks but his use of money and power to force himself into the lives of women has been especially disgusting, along the lines of the whole Bill Cosby case.

Still, I have to admit that I have a negative gut reaction to hearing people like George H. W. Bush being lumped together with the likes of Cosby and Weinstein. When a man in his 90’s who is confined to a wheelchair gives himself permission to inappropriately touch women who are standing close to his chair, I’m willing to insist that the difference between a confused, sick, old man and the kind of predator that we have seen from younger and more aggressive people in power . . . but I am not a young woman who has been groped. I have an opinion, but this is not a time to listen to the opinions of old, white, men. We need to listen to women who have been victimized.

And, yes, especially as a younger pastor, I can tell you that I have been groped by little old ladies during my nursing home visits. There was one little lady at my former parish who came through the greeting line at the end of the service every week and would reach around behind me for a squeeze and after a while she started coming through for a handful and then going to the back of the line and coming through a second and third time. It was annoying, but I knew that she was suffering from dementia and, folks, it is different for men. I didn’t feel objectified. I wasn’t afraid of assault. I didn’t feel that my credibility was in question.

I am aware that men can be sexually assaulted and I know that an alarming number of boys have suffered the worst kinds of sexual assault and humiliation, but what I am specifically saying here is that while there may be a huge difference between what George Bush did and what Harvey Weinstein did, it is time for men to be quiet and listen . . . we might learn something on this topic if we will wait to hear what the table looks like from another perspective.

I am aware that there are also false allegations and there are people who are trying to make their reputations by making claims of victimization but if you lead off with that reply, you are telling legitimate victims to remain silent because they will not be believed. I get called into these conversations at times, especially when the offense takes place within a family and I know how dangerous it is to give credence to a false allegation. I know how delicate a thing that a reputation is but our first response needs to be affirmative. We need to believe the people who come forward with complaints before the list gets to be as long as it was with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein even insisted that he deserved a second chance. He has settled out of court in 8 different cases! What does he mean by a second chance? He has had a second, third, and fourth chance and quite a few more after that . . . and that was the reported cases. I think we’re looking for a prison with no exit in his case.

Still, I find myself changing the channel or skipping a podcast when this story comes on. I feel that I have heard enough and with Congress set to shift another huge portion of the tax burden onto the backs of the poor and middle class to give even more tax favoritism to the super wealthy, and with our President still threatening to get us into a nuclear exchange with North Korea and maybe even Iran, stories about men behaving like pigs just doesn’t get to take up all of the news cycle.

But, as Winston Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; and courage is what it also takes to sit down and listen.” We progressives are a lot better at speaking than we are at listening. Most of us spent most of our lives being silenced by employers, parents, pastors, and schools. We spent most of our education learning how to stand in line and how to color inside of the lines and when we finally broke loose, and learned how to get out of line, how to color without lines, we lost an appropriate sense of balance.

You cannot accurately describe the world only from your perspective. The universe does not revolve around your navel. We like to say that we are spiritual and not religious. We like to say that love is our religion. And our collective rejection of creeds, dogmas, and institutional authority has been vital to our liberation but on this week when we observe the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, for all of the freedom and independent thinking and scholarship that was born in that Reformation, there were also an uncountable number of wars, factions, heresies and abuses. The Catholic church was and is guilty of any number of abuses but have you ever heard of the Assemblies of God?  The Mormons?  The Church of Christ? Do you know what the Jehovah’s Witnesses have put people through?

I appreciate the fact that the Unitarian Universalists have commonly taken up this theme in many of their congregations. But it has to be more than a slogan. In the well known passage from the 22^nd chapter of Matthew that we used as our wisdom lesson today; Jesus is reported to have said that the greatest commandment is to love God and the second is like it, that we love one another. I’m in no position to edit Jesus but since I’m pretty sure that Matthew edited him, I’m going to give it a stab.

I’m going to insist that the two commandments are really just one. Think about it, what does it mean to love God? If you stop there, full-stop, period, just love God, that doesn’t mean a thing. The only way to love God is to love other people.

I can tell you that I am totally devoted to the Persian god, Ahura Mazda, but unless you know more about Zoroastrianism than I assume you do, that isn’t going to mean a thing to you. The only way to be sincerely spiritual, the only way to have a faith that has substance, is to literally be on the side of love and that will necessarily mean putting our own egos on hold now and then so that we can listen, learn, understand, empathize, and have real compassion for those around us.

Bill Nye is not technically wrong, from a scientific perspective. There is no race beyond our social constructs. And the world’s religions are all more full of balloon juice than they are substance and yet, the social reality we are living on the under side of the table is that there is still a lot of racism, sexual harassment is a nightmare, and people are still fighting and dying for their own version of an ancient religion that is still important to them.

I am proud to be among you. I am sincerely proud of your willingness to protest, demonstrate, write, speak, and advocate but I don’t want us to forget that love also demands that we listen, to see the table from another perspective, and to accept that our own views are not always either right or universal. That’s just my opinion, I’ll let you decide if I am right.

                                                          

“Dedication to Reality and Balancing”

“Dedication to Reality and Balancing”     Oct. 22, 2017    

Dr Roger Ray, pastor

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M. Scott Peck, (The Road Less Traveled, p. 51) 

"What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner . . . The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.”

I personally and our church collectively owes a lot to the work and the character of Bishop John Shelby Spong. We studied several of his books before we first hosted the good Bishop here in Springfield and his three visits to our church over the past few years has grown our on-line audience and given us both encouragement and global credibility.

But my relationship with John Spong didn’t start out smoothly. Like most pastors who received a academically credible and progressive theological education, I had formed a pretty comfortable barrier between the books that I read and the papers that I wrote in grad school, and what I said and taught in my churches post grad school.

I cannot even remember who first put his 1999 book, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die” into my hands but I know that my initial reaction was very negative. In the pages of this important book, Spong was demanding that people like me stop this foolish “cat and mouse game” of keeping biblical and theological scholarship a secret from our congregations. It was time for Christians to get honest, to become congruent between what we knew was true in the classroom and what we said was true in the pulpit.

I kept getting mad and putting the book back on the shelf of my study. I could not believe that there was anyway to be break down the barrier between the superstition of religion and the honesty of theology and keep my job. And maybe I was right, because the more I became convinced that it was time to be honest about these things the closer I got to being fired and kicked to the curb by my denomination.

In Scott Peck’s, The Road Less Traveled, he describes the four tools of discipline necessary to leading a decent life. Last week we talked about the first two: the ability to delay gratification, and the willingness to accept responsibility for our own lives.

This week I want to talk about the other two, which are: a dedication to reality, and balancing. Being dedicated to reality, honesty, the truth, seems so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said. If you can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary, well, that is the basic meaning of what it means to be schizophrenic, right? And yet, any minister who has been educated at a top, secondary, or tertiary seminary in the past century who is still talking about a literal heaven, hell, souls, angels, demons, and a terribly judgmental father in the clouds, has already crossed the Rubicon into an indisputably schizophrenic way of living. There is a reality they know inside their own skulls, and a separate reality they talk about under their steeples.

A lot of us have a map of reality that we drew up early in life that helped us to navigate our childhood years.

That map of reality may have been crucial to their survival in a chaotic, or dysfunctional home but when you move into adolescence and take on the responsibility of living independently as a young adult, it becomes necessary to make changes to that map.

Being dedicated to the truth means that you both have to constantly examine and re-examine the world but you also have to re-examine the examiner. You have to be willing to question your most closely held beliefs. Anything that you are not allowed to question is probably false. If you have a religious or political belief that cannot be question, there is probably a reason why it can’t be questioned, and that reason is this: if you expose it to the light of facts and reason, it will be shown to be false.

Religion can be especially vulnerable to this refusal to face facts but in the past few years we have seen how much this also affects politics. I continue to be stunned by the fact that we actually launched an all-out war on Iraq based on the obviously false claims that they were somehow involved with 9-11 and that they were harboring weapons of mass destruction.

Somehow, the Bush administration was convinced of Mark Twain’s maxim that a lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth. And in very short order news agencies were repeating the obviously false claims, staring at us through the screens of our TV’s in our living rooms where a huge portion of the population came to believe it… I guess, did they really “believe” it, as in, they thought it was true, or did they believe it because it fit into their map of reality that told them that we had to go kill thousands of people because thousands of Americans had been killed by a handful of terrorists?

I rarely implied on Easter morning that Jesus had physically come out of a tomb in Jerusalem, nor did I make inflated promises in funeral sermons that the dearly departed was now enjoying eternal bliss in an invisible heaven, but I spoke in a way that let my audiences believe that I believed those things. I artfully spoke above the heads of my congregation in a way that left me with a false sense of integrity while coddling their childish superstitions.

George W. Bush knew that Iraq wasn’t involved in 9-11 and that they posed no existential threat to our security but they were a conveniently disarmed foil, and how he waved off the deaths of thousands of American soldiers in that war is still just mystifying to me.

But he was an armature compared to President Trump and his revolving cast of White House spokespersons who use the circumlocution of “alternative truths” to put lipstick on the pigs that are their daily series of lies.

Now that ta reform is the policy agenda de jour, Trump keeps saying that America is the most taxed nation in the world, which is clearly not true. And when confronted he will say that we have the highest corporate taxes in the world, which is also not even close to true. But he keeps saying it as if saying it more and more emphatically will somehow make it true.

George Orwell coined the proverb that, “Truth is treason in an empire of lies,” but now we have a president who openly discusses jailing journalists who tell truths that he does not like or that he does not want to have told. Telling the truth is now portrayed as treason in the United States of America.

We have come to expect this in Russia, or North Korea, or China, but it may now be more true here than in the worst of tyrannical dictatorships in the modern world.

It is difficult to believe that this is happening. We are used to politicians lying when they make campaign promises in order to get elected that cannot be fulfilled. When Regan promised to cut taxes and simultaneously increase military spending AND balance the budget, anyone who had ever passed first grade math could have easily seen that this was not true and yet he was handily elected in 1980 and by 1984 when his promises had been shown to be false, he was re-elected by a public that had a very sketchy relationship with reality. Of course, all the while, they were going to churches that regularly lied to them so, in a way, they are used to it.

As Voltaire said, “Those who can convince you to believe in absurdities can get you to commit atrocities.” One of the most important aspects of citizenship is to refuse to believe the lies of politicians. We must demand honesty, a devotion to the truth, and a total rejection of false propaganda.

The same can be said about religion. You can do me no greater favor than to challenge the truth of anything you hear me say from this pulpit. Those of you who listen to our podcasts and videos, as dangerous as this can be to your church relationships, please, don’t be afraid to ask your priest, your rabbi, your imam, or your pastor, “Is that really true?” “Do you really believe what you are saying?”

I would love for pastors everywhere to be set free from the cage of keeping what they know to themselves while feeding falsehoods to their parish. When we are in grad school, our work is subject to peer review and it should be no different in the pulpit.

Where we most often fail is in the discipline of dedication to reality. I meet people all of the time who tell me that they read my columns in the Springfield NewsLeader and most of them feel obligated to add the caveat, “But I don’t always agree with you.” I try to be polite about it but, seriously, what is agreement? Too often, we have equated truth with preference. What you like, what you prefer, what you wish was true, is the single most irrelevant thing in the world.

When someone takes me to task about the facts of an article, I always stop to check my facts and seriously look into their objections but when they come at me with name calling, or angry dismissal, so far as I am concerned, they are just telling me that I hit the nail on the head.

Trumps largest failing is his narcissistic refusal to examine himself. Thinking people already know that he is full of balloon juice. What is sad is that he doesn’t slow down for a minute to let the fact that he is a liar work its way down into his self-awareness.

Still, it doesn’t do us any good to sit here in judgment of our President, or the Pope, or the Mormon Church, or Evangelicals, if we are not willing to examine ourselves.

The last of Peck’s four tools of discipline is balance, and again, it sounds deceptively easy. The best illustration I know for this one though comes from the hand of Aristotle when he talked about anger in his work on ethics. Quite prophetically, the philosopher wrote:  “Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.”

As Scott Peck says, even discipline must be disciplined. You can fail to have integrity if you never get angry and you can fail to have credibility if you are always angry. Balancing is related to the schizophrenic aspect of a dedication to reality. Peck cites one female client who went wildly between severe isolation and careless sexuality, unable to make good distinctions between the people to whom she does not open her door at all and those she allows directly into her bedroom.

One of the most painful exchanges I’ve had in recent years was with a church member who came into our community with unbridled enthusiasm, virtually immediately pushing me up onto a pedestal as soon as they arrived in town. Three years later there was a sudden reversal in attitude that digressed into what looked like playground bullying.

Liberal churches all suffer from fairly high rates of turnover. People come, get their immediate needs met and too often just move on. Others come for a single issue and become disillusioned when they discover that their single issue is not our only issue. And, of course, I’ve something of a lightening rod myself and so a reasonable person can certainly find issues with which to disagree with me.

But this woman was so eager to find my clay feet that she just fabricated an offense. And I told her, “I never said what you are telling people that I said.” And she replied, “Well, maybe you didn’t but you thought it and if you thought it that is as bad as saying it.” And I replied, “But I didn’t think it either, nor anything like it. In fact, my thoughts are the opposite of what you are saying.” She staunchly insisted, “I know what you think.” I tried to reason with her, “Do you know what other people think?” “Do you actually hear the thoughts in other voices?” I cannot say that this tactic worked well in conversation but you see how a failing in both a dedication to the truth and in striking an appropriate balance becomes, if not mental illness itself, at least a schizophrenic like conduct.

In both of these dimensions of discipline, dedication to reality and balancing, we are obligated to keep trying to hit a moving target. Our understanding of reality needs to be constantly re-examined, and as our understanding of reality changes we have to restrike a new balance of beliefs and behaviors.

We say that we are on a spiritual journey rather than that we have arrived at some religious graduation ceremony. Our church is not what it was five years ago and certainly we are quite different from what we envisioned ten years ago when we were planning our first meeting.

Our original members all came from decidedly mainstream Christian heritage and as we have closely examined the claims of traditional Christianity, we have found the need to pack a lot of that stuff away and consign it to history.

We have reached out to gain a deeper understanding of other major world religions and while we find wisdom and insight in these other traditions, we can also see that there is a good deal of primitive superstition clinging to all world religions.

What we have come to accept, though it isn’t always comfortable, is that there are no absolutes and we have to personally shoulder the responsibility of being forever in transition, looking for truths that we can no more capture than we can a beautiful morning, or the toddler years of our children. Reality is always on the move and we are either becoming something new or we risk becoming irrelevant fossils.

My old friend, Bishop John Spong, was right in his original assertion:  Christianity has to change or die. What I hope we all realize is that the same is true for us as individuals. Our faith has changed but as progressive as we are compared to the religious landscape, the superstition of others was never the yardstick we used to measure our own faith. We’re on our own, accepting that we have given up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty, in a lifelong search for meaning, relevance, and purpose.