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Dr. Roger L. Ray
March 18, 2018 Numbers 21:4-9
4From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the
Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the
way. 5The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have
you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food
and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” 6Then
the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the
people, so that many Israelites died. 7The people came to Moses
and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against
you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses
prayed for the people. 8And the Lord said to Moses, “Make
a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall
look at it and live.” 9So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and
put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look
at the serpent of bronze and live.
We
have been accustomed for many years to seeing people proudly proclaim their
Christian faith by sporting an ICTHUS emblem on the back bumper of their car.
The fish symbol is inspired by an early Christian symbol for the church. The
Greek letters spell “Fish” but for the faithful, each letter is the first in
the words “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our Savior.” 
Iconoclasm being the
first order of humor, several young cynics have been seen sporting the emblem
for a made-up religion that is popular as an anti-Christian evangelical
backlash. This is the sign for the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Not
to be outdone, South Park fans have created a Cthulhu emblem that borrows from
the fish symbol but adds some of the dragon and octopus features of this
mythological monster of the deep. No one does iconoclasm like South Park.
The
real message of the knockoff emblems is that they are refusing to respect or to
any longer show deference to ancient religions that, at least for them, no
longer have any authority or influence. The cults of the Flying Spaghetti
Monster and of Cthulhu are just statements of derision and a rejection of all
religion.
The past generation has
witnessed the excess of televangelists and millionaire mega-church pastors.
They grew up in the time when the Catholic Church was sacrificing its estimable
position of global influence by at first denying and then trying to hide
hundreds of thousands of cases of clergy child molestation.
Whether you were a
practicing Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, or not, our culture
tended to give automatic homage to religious leaders, especially the Dalai
Lama, the Pope, and to certain well known religious figures such as Billy
Graham, Gandhi, and Mother Theresa. But a newly empowered and liberated
generation no longer feels any obligation to feign respect for anyone or
anything that does not deserve respect and, frankly, I’m on their side.
I’m
still a man of the church. I am a pastor, a preacher, and a religious writer
but rather than waiting for the culture to mock our ancient beliefs and texts,
I think that it behooves us to lead the way in religious reform, cleaning out
our closets, boldly backing up a dumpster to the garage, and getting rid of
stuff that has been collecting in the churches for far too long.
When we think of
religious reformation we usually think of Martin Luther’s Protestant
Reformation of 16th century fame but it wasn’t the only one and, in
fact, religions are always reforming.
In the 8th
century BCE, the Israelite king, Hezekiah, led a reform in an attempt to unify
the competing tribes of Judah. We have grown up with the claim that Judaism is
a monotheistic religion but I assure you that it didn’t start out that way and
there were a whole lot of missteps along the way to modern monotheism.
We
have read the Exodus accounts of Moses creating a Jewish religion in where
there was only one God and in which there were to be no images of either God or
humans, not even of birds or beasts. But in the time of Hezekiah, not only were
their several hilltop altars devoted to various rural gods, there was, in the
courtyard of the temple in Jerusalem, a bronze snake on a pole.
This was not, in fact,
uncommon in Palestine of the ancient world. It was some kind of idol that was
associated with a cure for snakebites. Examples of what we somewhat derisively
call the “Nehushtan” have been found in
archaeological sites around the region.
There
is some reason to believe that the snake on the pole was a part of the
evolution of the later Greek symbol for medicine, the caduceus, a staff carried
by Hermes. This may or may not be true but what I know is not true is the
reading we heard from Numbers this morning. That, in a word, is fake news,
written into the Biblical narrative as a 
plausible
excuse for why there was an idol of a snake right at the doors of Yahweh’s
temple in Jerusalem that people were coming and making sacrifices to. It was a
way in which a “wanna-be” monotheistic culture could say, “idols? We ain’t got
no stinkin idols!” when, in fact, they had several. The account of Moses being
told by God to put a bronze snake on a pole is a three-thousand-year-old
variant of the claim that the recent Trump tax-cut bill was intended to benefit
the middle class. Both the church and the state have a very bad habit of making
public statements that fit their need to feather their own nest but which have
little or no basis in fact.
When the church, through
misplaced devotion to ancient creeds, sacred texts, or sacraments, remains
faithful to clearly dishonest and reality denying beliefs and practices, we are
giving evidence to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Cthulhu crowds. What the
church and our current president often seems to miss is the very basic fact
that if you want to retain credibility, you have to remain credible.
When I was serving a
church in Louisville, KY, I was much more engaged in counseling than I am now
and there was a psychiatrist there, Dr. Norton, who was almost a Gandalf figure
in my life. He seemed to be both magically wise and penetratingly insightful. I
had a very troubled teenaged girl in my congregation who seemed bent on
self-destruction: constantly running away from home, and throwing in her lot
with drug pushers and pimps.
I will never forget one
especially poignant meeting the family and I had with Dr. Norton. The girl lied
constantly, both to get out of school, and to deny virtually everything that
she had ever done, and Dr. Norton said to her, “With every lie you tell, you
become a little less human, a little less solid. You can literally turn yourself
into an invisible ghost who has no family, no friends, no connections because
no one will ever care about anything you say since it is just as likely to be
false as it is to be true.”
Think about how the last
year has affected all of us. Early last year we could hardly tear our eyes off
of the news. We were constantly enraged by almost every crazy thing that our
new President said and did, and as the months have worn on, it is not so much
that we have come to accept this kind of dishonesty and insanity as the new
normal as much as it is that Trump is literally disappearing before our eyes.
He started out as a horrifyingly unqualified President and he quickly became an
international embarrassment and now, day by day, he just seems to disappear. I
don’t know about you, but I just don’t find him to be worthy of my energy, not
even the energy of my disgust.
I still hope that he is
impeached and, when you think about foreign emoluments, illegal collaboration
and collusion to undermine an election, traitorous deference shown to dictators
and murderers, I’m pretty sure that he and many members of his administration
will be spending a lot of time in prison if they manage to escape a very short
amount of time in front of a firing squad, but as tragic and horrible as our
current state of affairs has become, I just don’t think that he deserves to be
looked at, listened to, or given any credibility whatsoever.
He
is a ghost, and folks, ghosts don’t exist.
Trump has become like the
tabloid papers in the grocery checkout lane… everyone glances at the headlines
when you are trapped in a slow moving line but no one but the most gullible
would ever buy a copy.
My fear is that the
church is starting to be share that role in the minds of the kind of people who
are more willing to believe in climate change than in Noah’s magical zoo boat,
who believe in geology, the fossil record, and physics, than who believe in a
flat earth approach to religion.
It behooves us to
regularly and publicly state that we do not take the Bible literally and we
acknowledge that a great deal of it is comprised of historical falsehoods and
morally reprehensible teachings that deserve to be apologized for and not
defended. As Dorothy Parker said in one of her infamous book reviews, “This is
not a book to be set lightly aside, it should be thrown with great force.”
It
is a document full of historical inaccuracies, absurd miracle accounts,
fabricated characters, and a lot of misogyny, homophobia, racism, nationalism,
and both cultural and religious exclusivism which has turned most mainstream
churches into the equivalent of Darwin’s Waiting Room.
In the old days, people
like me used to make fun of preachers who cherry picked their favorite Biblical
passages but now I realize that we have to very intentionally and energetically
cherry pick the Bible. To do anything else would turn us into sociopaths! In
fact, in 2018, we have to cherry-pick the Bible, the newspapers, our TV news
shows, and even the constitution because if the 2nd Amendment really
does mean that absolutely anyone can have absolutely any kind of gun they want,
whenever they want it, then the 2nd Amendment belongs on the trash
heap with talking snakes and winged angels.
There was a time when we
were told to “take it on faith” and that equated to blind obedience. That kind
of unthinking devotion doesn’t make for being a good Christian, Jew, or Muslim,
it doesn’t make for being a good husband or wife, or even a decent friend.
I am grateful to Karen
Armstrong who writes about the practice of baptism in the early church at a
time when choosing to become a Christian might also necessarily imply that you
are going to be cut off from family, the synagogue, or temple, and that you immediately
become an enemy of the state subject to execution.
She
says that when a person was lowered into the water to be baptized that they
came up shouting the Greek word, “Pistus” which King James translators usually
rendered as “faith” but it implied loyalty, or commitment, or, as Armstrong
suggests, “courage.” Faith was not so much blind belief as it was a courageous
decision to try to lead a moral and meaningful life that rejected the worship
of the Emperor and all of the violence, greed, slavery, rape, and exploitation
that it represented.
Our faith tradition is
not rooted in slavery, military conquest, colonialism, pedophile priests, or
magical incantations and rituals. We are devoted to the teachings of the one
who taught us to love our enemies and to pray for those who have injured us. We
are disciples of the one who told us sell what we own and give to the poor. . .
Who told us that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Jesus told
us to forgive the one who offends us, not merely 7 times, but 70 times 7!
As Karen Armstrong says,
our faith is a matter of practice. You do not learn how to swim by believing in
swimming. You learn to swim by swimming. You learn to love by loving. You learn
to forgive by forgiving. You learn to be a good person by choosing every day to
do the better thing rather than the easier thing, to be generous rather than self-serving,
to consider others rather than yourself.
In
these stressful days, a lot of important things have come into focus. You know 
that
I was pretty hard on President Obama at times. He saved the banks rather than
saving home owners. He tended to be pro-corporation more than pro-union, and he
sure did seem to cave into military actions rather than trying to earn that
Nobel Peace Prize he was given a bit too early in his career. 
But
I have learned something important this year. Sometimes you can’t get your
priorities straight until you learn to see things in context. Obama wasn’t
perfect so far as my values go, but he was a good man, an exemplary husband, a
devoted father, a role model and a man we could all be proud of, and I miss
that. I am not nearly so concerned about having a Republican or a Democrat or
even a Democratic Socialist in the White House as I am concerned about having a
good person, a good woman or a good man. As the pop song says, “Sometimes you
don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”
I just want for us to get
it back. I want America to have a good government and I want the Church to
resume being a good Church again. I want honesty and integrity from both before
they both disappear from view.
