“The Profanity of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’” Nov. 12, 2017
Roger Ray, pastor
The Emerging Church
Bernie Sanders (Guide to
Political Revolution)
I want to dedicate this
book to the younger generation. You are, in many ways, the most progressive generation
in the history of our country. You have opposed racism, sexism, homophobia,
xenophobia, and oligarchy. You understand that greed and the grotesque level of
income and wealth inequality that we experience is not what the United States
is supposed to be about. You know that climate change is real, and that we have
a moral responsibility to take on the fossil fuel industry and transform our
energy system away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency and sustainable
energy.
What this book is about is converting that idealism and
generosity of spirit into political activity. And when you do that, I have no
doubt but that you and others like you will create a lot better world than the
one my generation left you.
It
was seven years ago when I first delivered a sermon in which I said to you from
this pulpit that offering “thoughts and prayers” is like saying, “I have no
intentions of doing anything about whatever crisis you are experiencing.” I
don’t often remember my sermons quite so clearly but in this case, it was
drilled into my memory by the relatively unexpected death of my father a few
days later.
Dad
was 91. He had outlived my mother, my sister, and virtually all of his own
friends. He died in his apartment in my older brother’s home in Alabama where
he had lived the last months of his life. So, we didn’t plan a funeral. His
remains were cremated and I met my brothers at the cemetery on the Civil War
battlefield in Glasgow, KY. We laid his remains to rest next to my mother. We
were surrounded by a few cousins and immediate family and we left to return to
our homes and our lives.
I
realized that I had taken something from all of you by my previous week’s
sermon. If Dad had lived closer, if you had known him, we might have had a
funeral here, with all of the flowers and buffet meals that go with church
funerals. If we had even had a funeral in Glasgow, you could have at least sent
flowers.
If I
were going to be coming right back to my own home, you might have even exercised
that common southern tradition of showing love by bringing casseroles over to
the house. But, circumstances left you with little you could offer but your
thoughts and prayers and I had just emphatically told you how little such
things mean.
In
the last few months, following increasingly violent mass shootings and huge
public demonstrations against unjust police killings of black motorists, the
use of the phrase, “thoughts and prayers” by too many insincere politicians has
brought the hollowness of that offering into sharp public focus.
More
and more people are now emphatically replying to these political offers of
thoughts and prayers saying, “Your thoughts and prayers are not working,” or
“keep your thoughts and prayers and give us real action.”
I
want to dial this back just a bit because I have said harsh things about this
and now I am hearing similar things being said all over the media. The sincere
and loving root of offering thoughts and prayers is when you really do want to
express your concern for someone but there is nothing that you can directly do
to aid them.
Deb
Pierson, a member of our church who has been either in a hospital or virtually
housebound due to multiple surgeries and the amputation of her leg for over two
years now, suddenly also now has shingles, which she says, is more painful than
any of the dozens of surgeries she has lately undergone. I am so sorry about
her circumstances but there is not much that I can do beyond offering her my
emotional support.
As
you know, we have a fairly large internet audience and many of those people
have no other church connection but us. I correspond with people who are dying
of cancer. I am currently corresponding with three parents who have lost a
child to suicide. I talk with people on the west coast and the east coast, in
England, New Zealand, and South Africa and though I often find myself saying to
them such things as “I grieve with you,” and “I wish that I could more directly
give more support,” what I am saying has the ring of “you are in my thoughts
and prayers.”
Maybe
we just need to avoid using those words because they have become associated
with hypocrisy because they have so often been used by politicians who are in a
position to actually do something to prevent tragedies from reoccurring but who
will choose to do nothing but offer their thoughts and prayers.
I saw
meme that sadly depicts this showing a picture of the Speaker of the House,
Paul Ryan, saying to those who have lost family in mass shootings in Las Vegas
and Texas, “My thoughts and prayers are with you but my votes are with the
NRA.”
Sometimes
expressing sympathy, showing some empathetic response, is all that we can do
but if that is all we offer when we can do more then, well, that is just
hypocrisy isn’t it?
Alexander
Campbell, one of the famous evangelists of the 19th century restoration
movement said that to kneel in prayer asking God for anything for which you
will not then stand and work to accomplish is an insult to God and a
disappointment to yourself.
For
me, the whole practice of intercessory or petitioning prayer is theologically
suspect. It harkens back to a supernatural theistic view of God as a person who
grants wishes and that is the God that most thinking people gave up on in their
childhood. Prayer, the practice of meditation or contemplation, is rich,
beneficial and much to be praised and taught in spiritual communities but the
reading of a wish list at the sky as if God were some kind of 12 month Santa
Claus is embarrassing and I will even say, potentially blasphemous.
Recognizing
that there can be a very laudable and sincere sentiment behind offering someone
your thoughts and prayers, and a very legitimate and helpful way to have a rich
and meaningful prayer life, let me also give voice to the reason why so many of
us find the use of offering thoughts and prayers to be so offensive most of the
time.
It
goes to these paragraphs we used from the introduction to Bernie Sander’s new
book as our wisdom lesson today. Bernie wrote this book for young adults. He
tips his hat to the fact that this generation of young people is the most
progressive we have ever seen in America. Both Republican and Democrat young
people believe in gay rights and favor same sex marriage. They generally
believe in science over magical thinking. They have rejected sexism, racism,
homophobia, and they are much more likely to understand the dangers of
oligarchy than most of our current members of Congress. They want to move away
from polluting energy sources towards renewables and you don’t have to argue
with them about climate change.
However,
and not without reason, they are cynical about being organized. They tend to
eschew both the church and the government.
They
understand the issues and they are aware that they are being handed a world
that is in danger of nuclear war and toxic waste, and that our whole capitalist
experiment is failing the majority of the world’s population. They have heard
their parent’s generation offering their thoughts and prayers in the face of human
tragedy and while they know that we have largely been full of balloon juice,
they are not showing great alacrity for laying their hands on the plow of
meaningful solutions.
I
don’t say that to uniquely point my finger at my daughter’s generation to excuse
my own, I am just painfully aware that time is running out for my peer group. When
you ask people who they believe can be the organizing figure for the future of
progressive politics, too often we hear a litany of names of people who are
older than our current president who is, right now, the oldest president ever
elected to office. I love Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren, and
in my own arena, I love Bishop John Spong, and Jon Dominc Crossan. I’m a big
fan of Noam Chompsky, but I also acknowledge that all of those folks will soon
likely go the way of Howard Zinn, Marcus Borg, and Ellie Weisel, and I will not
be far behind them.
Our
generation is leaving an economic, environmental, and political mess to our
heirs but one of the worst things we have left to them is the assumed though
rarely articulated belief that being aware and cynical is tantamount to having
accomplished something. Figuring out the problem is only half of the solution.
Believing
in climate science and dismissing old prejudices about race, immigration, and
sexual orientation, will not make the world safer to live in, especially if you
are one of the target victims of discrimination. We have been the thoughts and
prayers generation and we need the next generation to be a lot more than that.
We
have taken our churches, our newspapers, our union halls, and human rights
organizations for granted… assuming that they would always be there if we ever
got over our smug cynicism enough to go back to them so it should not come as a
surprise that our heirs do not much attend church, they never read newspapers,
rarely join a union and are dismissive of political parties.
So,
please forgive me if I have left you with the impression that I think that you
should not pray. That is not, sincerely, what I believe. But I do believe that
old African proverb that teaches, “when you pray, move your feet.”
Thoughts
and prayers, on their own, are not enough if you are capable of more. We
shouldn’t pray on our knees. We should pray on our feet, while we are actively
trying to do good things. We feed the
victims of domestic abuse most weeks at Harmony House which is a good thing for
church folks to do but we should also be doing what we can to change our
community where domestic abuse seems to take place at more than twice the rate
of other Missouri cities.
I am
proud of the work we have done providing tents and sleeping bags and coats to
the homeless for years but, folks, shouldn’t those people be living inside this
winter. Sure, they have our thoughts and prayers, our sandwiches and sleeping
bags but it isn’t time to pat ourselves on the back is it?
Pray,
but move your feet. Strengthen the progressive organizations that will give the
next generation the means to meet one another, network, and do more than we
have done.
