“Because We are all Connected”

“Because We are all Connected”     June 24, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray    
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Marcus Aurelius -  Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.

 We have one fact stated as undeniable in two entirely different perspectives. The famous astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, succinctly says: We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

And the revered Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, has said that we are here to awaken from our illusion of separation. That is, your sensation of, your belief that you are separate from other people, from the earth itself, is just an illusion.

I like the way that Eckhart Tolle says it: You are not in the Universe. You are the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.

From both a scientific and a spiritual perspective, we affirm one of those very basic facts of existence, we are all connected at the most fundamental level of existence. Why then is there so much apparent division, such rivalry, so much prejudice and partisanship?

In the early days of our church, Michael Larsen captured these two photographs that we have long displayed here in our building. This is a photo of two of our children when they were very young, the picture literally preaches a sermon about the innocence that children can experience before they are exposed to prejudice. A lily-white child and a black child find friendship, affection, joy, in simply discovering the wonder in one another’s faces. This is the natural state of the world before prejudice is taught.

And this picture of Ruth Miller, a senior white woman, the wife of a retired pastor, lovingly touching the face of a young black gay man. This is a better sermon…. This is a sermon about how you can live in a world that fills you with prejudice, mistrust, rejection, rivalry, can be overcome. The connection can be restored. If a church is what a church should be, the church should be a place of healing, of restoration, of literally unlearning the messages of division, prejudice, and partisanship that the world is so full of.

The wonderful song from South Pacific, You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught, prophetically says:

You've got to be taught To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught From year to year,
It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

We learn prejudices from our families, from subtle messages of assumed divisions that just hang in the air, prejudices are portrayed in sit-coms, and whispered in gossip. The little town where I grew up in Kentucky was 90% white, and about 10% black. To the best of my knowledge, there was not a single Hispanic or Asian living there. There was one Jewish family, only a few Catholics, but my father was a case study in irrational prejudice.

He was prejudiced against black people in general, though notably generous and considerate of the black people he actually knew. He hated Jews though he loved buying his clothes from the men’s clothing store owned by our only Jewish family in town. But strangely, he hated Asians, and communists, and socialists, and oddly seemed to think that they were all basically the same. He actually believed that Japan was a communist country because the Japanese are Asian. The only people who were communist who were not Asian were labor union members.

My dad, however, was not stupid. I think that he was inherently, quite bright, but he was gullible. He uncritically preserved the prejudice of his slave owning ancestors, he accepted the anti-Catholic teachings of the Church of Christ where he was taken to church, and he embodied the brain washing of his military training. During WW II

young men taken from the farms of the mid-West were not killers. They were not soldiers. They might have been rough in lots of ways but to turn them into fierce soldiers, they were pilloried with images of Nazi’s burning books and raping American women. The Japanese were portrayed as monkeys with tails and as rapists and murderers. My dad wasn’t stupid, but he was carefully taught by the United States Army.

But that was a long time ago. Where is all of this prejudice and division coming from today? As tempting as it is to blame almost everything on Donald Trump, it isn’t that he invented dog-whistle politics, he is not the author of racism, or xenophobia. But, when he launched his campaign by invoking fear of immigrants saying: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have losts of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people…” he was just throwing another log on the fire of prejudice that has been smoldering in America all along, a flame that had been building up fuel all during the eight years that a black family inhabited the White House, and during the time when the United States government, intentionally or by inference, fed the public on fear of Arab Muslims.

Here is the fact that I am extolling today: We are all connected. There is only the most slight differences biologically between races, slight differences theologically between religions, insubstantial differences based on languages or nations of origin. Every attempt at division is deception. It is trickery, manipulation, it is a lie.

Trump didn’t invent the lie. But he knew how willing that Americans are to believe the lie. You may of seen tweets by the imaginary character, Werner Twertzog, a clever creation intended to dispense wry observations on life in the style of the German film-maker, Werner Hertzog, but this one grabbed my attention as going far beyond clever immitation. It is shockingly true, as we have watched people trying to defend the recent practice of putting babies in cages at the southern border of America, something that would never happen on the northern border of America, that America is waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of our people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 just watches.

There are some seriously messed up things going on in the world right now. I have always been one to ignore those who made constant references to Nazi practices and tendencies but when Trump brought out a group of victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens, it really did look like a page out of Hitler’s playbook.

Hitler used to publish lists of people who claimed to have been victimized by Jews in order to imply that all Jews were criminals. Trump is trying to trick you into believing that all Hispanic immigrants are criminals.

This kind of propaganda can work. The Russians probably changed the outcome of our last presidential election by filling social media with deceptive charges against Hillary Clinton. It isn’t that she, or anyone else for that matter, was squeaky clean but trying to blame her for the deaths at Benghazi or act like the use of a private email server was the most horrible crime since the abduction of the Lindberg baby, only worked on people who were willing to be led by the nose through manipulation into doing Russia’s bidding at the ballot box by delivering their useful idiot to the White House.

I have a three-point sermon today. I can’t usually say that but today it works out that way. The first point is that we are all connected. That is a fundamental truth. It is true scientifically and it is true spiritually. The second point is that the world is being torn apart by those who insist upon dividing us between Republicans and Democrats, between conservatives and liberals, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims, the rich and the poor, the black and brown and the white, the young and the old, the educated and the experienced. Trump’s arrogance and ineptitude increase the chances that nuclear war may break out in Asia or the Middle East or even here. The stakes are high, and we must remain informed and involved.

But my third point is that we must not become what we loath. We have to remain meaningfully engaged but we don’t need to be drawn into the divisive battle in a way that turns us into the kind of people we find to be so dangerous and repulsive.

To that end I really appreciate the meditation exercises that David Ketchum has been leading us in during class time. It seems to me to be vitally true that if we are going to meaningfully engage in fighting the injustice and insanity of the world that we must remain centered, sane, peaceful, and united ourselves.

David asks us to picture ourselves sitting on the bank of a river and when negative forces try to drive our thoughts into anger, hostility, or division, to just come back to that vision of ourselves, sitting peacefully by a river. Of course, in monastic tradition, they often will use an icon to center their meditation, or a candle, or the sound of a bell. Whatever takes you back to that place where you can remember that we are all connected and all the prejudice and division the world is trying to drag us into is nothing but deception and manipulation.

I have lately found myself coming back to this little video of a two-year-old girl dancing to the music of her own soul. I don’t know if she knows that she is black. . . That there are already millions of people who will not hire her, daddy’s who will not let their sons take her to the prom, or movie producers who will never be able to see her beauty.

I don’t know if she knows that she is poor and that most doors to education will be closed to her. I don’t know if she knows that she lives in a dangerous neighborhood and that she might have to fight to even keep her brother alive through his teen years.

Maybe I’m being silly. Maybe I am indulging myself in fantasy. But, I feel like she’s got this.

I don’t usually lose my cool. I don’t think that I get a lot of credit for it but I can actually be quite patient, even in the face of mind numbing stupidity.

But I had a bad day this week… it just so happened that I had a lot of different places to be, several community organizing meetings. And it seemed like a domino effect. Everything that someone said to me was dumber than the last thing that someone had said. The train of community organizing had jumped the track and was headed for the munitions factory.

I managed to just walk out of the last meeting without betraying my thoughts and I searched for a friend who could let me rant for a while and, as it happens sometimes, everyone I normally abuse with my screeds was safely otherwise occupied.

So I just came home and visited this little clip of Coco. The practice of separating families at the border was stopped. Smart and caring people are working to restore the children in dentention to their families. Melania’s coat may declare that she doesn’t really care but a whole of people who do care also vote and November is just 4 months away.

There is still a lot of stupid prejudice in this country but in 2045 there will no longer be a white majority in America and some things are gonna change.

There are bad things in the world. You have had false friends who have betrayed you. Family members who have rejected you. Love relationships that became toxic. People you have loved and needed have just died on you, before you were ready.

Crazy, bad people become heads of state of powerful nations, and CEO’s of major corporations, and sometimes they take charge of the EPA and the State Department. I’m not asking you to deny those facts or forget them, I’m just inviting you to rise above them. Don’t let the bad stuff that has happened rent too much space in your skull.

The people who have hurt you are not lying awake at night thinking about you so why are you wasting your life thinking about them? Don’t do your critics any favors. Take a giant step above the mud puddle they tried to drag you down into.

We are all connected, and the more we move away from the illusion of our separation, our perceptions of differences in race, gender, sexual orientation, nation of origin, or political party, the more we move into the kind of spiritual integrity that we came here looking for in the first place.click here to see the videoClick here to watch on YouTube

"A Moral Apocalypse"

"A Moral Apocalypse"   Dr. Roger Ray    June 17, 2018

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money - modern Native American saying

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I was in high school when I decided to read the Bible from cover to cover. I suppose that is not a surprising thing to hear a minister say, but it really wasn’t all that noble. There were no video games, no computers, no internet, and the TV only had two channels. Reading the Bible was, like, a really exciting option in Glasgow, KY in 1972. I know that I have told you before that the zip code in my hometown was literally “e-i-e-i-o.” The primary difference between Glasgow, KY and a cup of yogurt is that there is an active living culture in a cup of yogurt. Can you feel me?

So, I’m reading the Bible every day, the dull parts took longer and most of it had no apparent application to my life so it was mostly like pouring water on a rock, but it just so happened that in 1973, when I was a newly licensed driver, when my siblings were already gone, my parents decided to go on vacation and let me stay home alone. It was the first time that I had the house to myself.

That week also happened to fall when I was just about to finish reading the Bible. In a quiet and dark house in rural Kentucky, I opened the book of Revelation and very nearly scared myself into become a 16-year-old bed wetter.

As cavalier as I may be about it now, in those days, the Bible was handed to me as being the word of God, if not inerrant, it was at least more accurate than the phone book and nothing in it could be taken as having been wrong. A lot of it didn’t make sense and most of it seemed like history that was totally irrelevant, but this last book of the Bible purported to be telling the future and it was a very bleak future for all but a very very few lucky people.

It was obviously highly symbolic and it repeated itself endlessly in cycles of horrors but what was clear was that the four horsemen of the apocalypse represented horrible ways in which most of the people of the world would suffer death through disease, starvation, warfare, or foreign occupation.

I read this at a time when we were still doing Civil Defense drills, teaching us how to live in a basement for years, waiting for the radiation from a nuclear war to subside enough to allow us to venture back outside. The Watergate hearings were starting and we were still fighting in Vietnam. At least a part of my lizard brain was willing to fall simultaneously into the fear and thrill of believing that God would soon be entering human history in a violent, bloody, and decisive way. It seemed real enough to me and a lot of other people during that “Late Great Planet Earth” period of history.

By the time I got into Bible classes in college and grad school, it became evident that the Revelation was just one of the pieces of first century apocalyptic literature that was willing to give up any hope that the world could be redeemed from the mess it was in during the expansion of the Roman empire.

The Essenes, who authored most of what we call the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” and fragmentary bits of other books of the period, often reacted to the violent occupation of Rome in a religious way, assuming that the world as we have known it was winding down to inevitable death, and whatever salvation they could hope for would come in the form of divine intervention and deliverance into a new and different world, made all the more enjoyable by the reassurance that the Romans and all other rival nations would spend the rest of eternity burning in hell after having suffered a torturous death on earth. Happy times!

But I didn’t really appreciate the power of apocalyptic literature until I first visited rural South and Central America. I was lecturing in a school for lay preachers in the mountains of Ecuador, a tedious day of waiting for my every sentence to be translated, first, into Spanish, and then into the indigenous language of most of the preachers in the room, Quichua. It was evening when we started the question – answer time.

The Quichua are typically quite short in stature. They live hard lives trying to farm on mountain sides in a country that is their ancient homeland but where they are treated as third class citizens… the fair skinned descendants of Spain who typically hold all of the government positions and own most of the businesses are the upper class. The mix blood “mestizos” are second class, and the Quichua, from whom the land was taken, are regarded as being something slightly less than human.

They have national health care in Ecuador but if a Quichua Indian shows up at a hospital, they are either turned away or made to lie in the hallways.

It is a racial divide that has existed for hundreds of years. And so the first question an indigenous preacher wanted to ask me was about signs of the coming apocalypse, which my translators begged me not to answer out of fear that it would launch a debate that would end in a fight.

At the time I assumed that my hosts were steering me away from the topic that interested these native preachers the most because their beliefs were based on a kind of sadly childish reading of scripture but eventually I came to understand that it was more than that. The horror of an apocalypse is based on the perspective from when you see it. In their world, the Four Horsemen were not coming for the Quichua, they were coming for the white people.

For people who have been under the thumb of foreign occupation and racial apartheid for 400 years, an apocalypse is not something to dread. . . it is something to hope for. They were nice to me but it became clear that the whore of Babylon mentioned in Revelation was not, for them, ancient Rome, it was me and people who looked like me who had taken control of their rivers, their coasts, their good farm land. Who treated them like slaves whom they could impoverish and work to an early death while never even becoming aware of their suffering. The preacher who asked me to talk about signs of the coming apocalypse was, through a circum locution, checking to see if I was aware that I was about to be burned in hell.

You see, an apocalypse is a moral thing. It isn’t arbitrary, not even in the minds of 1^st century religious obsessives. An apocalypse is caused by a moral failure, a collapse of decency, sanity, compassion, and intelligence. The Bible tends to describe things through a lens that German scholars dubbed, “Heilsgeschichte,” . . . which is kind of fun for seminary students to say . . . it means “salvation history” or “history told from the perspective of a religious interpretation.”

For we progressives whose theology does not lead us to interpret historical events as the invisible hand of God making things happen, an apocalypse is a catastrophy caused by the moral failing of society. Think about the current crisis on our southern border. We have hundreds of young children being taken from their parents and put into detention in dog cages . . . but this is not a crisis caused by a hurricane, it wasn’t a tornado, an earthquake, a wild fire, or a volcano. This is a crisis caused by the moral failing of government. . . it is policy gone mad.

It could be stopped by a 51% vote of our legislature but you can’t muster a 51% vote because, well, because, there are political and financial issues at stake… there is also the conservative base of voters who have been manipulated for years by tall tales of fears of immigrants and you can’t go all weak in the knees about a couple of thousand crying babies. . .

You see, what makes moral decision making difficult is because there is always someone who is deriving some profit, some benefit, from the immorality. Attorney  General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, tells us that taking these babies from their mommas is the law and the Bible tells us to obey the law. He is backed up by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee, who says that what they are doing is just what the Bible tells us to do.

Now, I’m just a dumb country preacher, but I’m pretty sure that is not what the Bible says.  I remember, shoot, I was just in High School, but I remember it says in Deuteronomy 10 ⁹ You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

And it says in Exodus 23 ⁹ You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

Even in Leviticus 19 ³³ When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. ³⁴ The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

I would even quote Matthew 19 where Jesus says, “suffer the little children to come unto me,” but that would be a bit heavy handed wouldn’t, Mr. Sessions, and you don’t want me to open up a whole can of Jesus WhoopAss on you do you?

Sessions and Huckabee, you don’t fool me. I’m a southern Christian and I’ve been wiping your kind of religious hypocrisy off of the soles of my boots since I was a little boy. Sessions, or Trump, could stop this immediately but instead there are now 50 children being taken from their parents every day. That means there will be two more while we are in here this morning.

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell could stop it in a matter of days… but we already know that they don’t care about this sort of thing. This is a crisis of our own creation. We could stop it at any time we decided to do what is right rather than what is profitable or expedient.

God does not intervene in human history. I know that not many ministers will tell you the truth about that fact. The Bible is written through the lens of heilsgeschichte but we don’t talk that way now.

You already know that the universe itself is morally neutral, chaotic, unpredictable. God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, no eyes, no ears, but ours and if this moral apocalypse is to be stopped, it is we who will do it because it is we who started it.

Folks, let’s get real honest about the partisan divide in our nation and in the world. It isn’t about the power scramble between Republicans and Democrats. It isn’t “red states” against “blue states.” It isn’t the conservative or labor parties in England or even the Shia’ and Sunni divisions in the Middle East. The real struggle, the real partisan divide is and always has been between the haves and the have nots. The haves inevitably control the government and the police and the have nots are trying to feed the kids and stay out of prison.

 

As our country has transitioned away from democracy towards oligarchy, there are a handful of very wealthy families who are pulling the strings of government through political donations. It is a good investment for them. It is not secret why they do what they do. For example, casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who is estimated to be worth more than $33 billion has donated about $200 million to Republican candidates in recent years. If you have $33 billion, then donating $200 million will not mean that you are going to have to clip pizza coupons to make ends meet. But rich people rarely give money away for no reason.

Their donations are really investments. For example, he expects his bought and paid for politicians to keep on-line gambling illegal so that people will continue to come and lose money in his casinos. And that appears to be working out for him. He is also very concerned about American support for Israel, primarily in the form of military aid but also in such symbolic victories as getting the American embassy moved to Jerusalem. His $200 million in donations has bought him billions of dollars in American tax income being spent on his pet causes, which, as you can see, is a pretty good deal.

I don’t want to keep you here all day but to just say the words, “the Koch  brothers,” brings up a whole oligarchy driven apocalypse all its own. Again, an apocalypse looks different depending upon where you are standing when you see it coming at you.

They are an aristocratic family. They donate to support the arts in New York, they give to hospitals and medical research. Among oligarchs, they enjoy a good reputation. However, their money comes from fossil fuels.  They inherited a fortune from their father who made a lot of his money building refineries for Hitler. He even brought back a very ardent Nazi woman to be their nanny. She, however, abandoned the family when France fell to the Nazis in 1940 because she wanted to go and help the Fuhrer to build the new Nazi world order.

This isn’t just mudslinging political jargon, these are frightening facts about the people who call the shots in our political world. Charles and David Koch, who blackmailed their oldest brother out of the family business with threats of exposing his sexual orientation, have sought to monetize the earth in a way that allows them to keep making money off of oil and coal while they kill the planet we live on.

They have invested in voter repression, fake science, they have tried to control the media and the government to keep climate science from tightening their purse strings in a thousand ways but let me just mention one before I wrap up:

Koch brothers picked up an aspiring business partner from their hometown in , Wichita, KS. They made Mike Pompeo, a wealthy man. Then they backed him financially to elect him to congress in 2010. They even installed a Koch lobbyist to run his congressional office, making him, literally, the congressman from Koch. Pompeo went on to become the director of the CIA and now of the State Dept. where he can control foreign policy in a way that serves oil and gas interests for the Koch brothers. He is one of the actually intelligent members of the Trump administration who uses Trump like a puppet to run the government in a way that benefits the Koch empire’s business interests.

They were worth $80 billion when Trump went into office but they made another $12 billion in his first year in office and the future is looking pretty bright for them . . . well, if by future, you mean their financial bottom line over the next few years. They are making profits but, as the modern Native American proverb says:

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream  Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money

But, again, an apocalypse is always judged from where you sit when it comes.

Before they decided to buy the government through political donations, in 1980, David Koch made a run as the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Libertarian ticket. I will not take the time to give you any commentary on this, I just want to quote, verbatim, what David’s platform said at that time:

For the sake of time, let me sum up some of the rest: they want to end compulsory Social Security, the postal service, corporate taxes and all capital gains taxes, and any criminal prosecution of tax evasion. They want to do away with minimum wage laws, public schools, income or property taxes.

They want to close down the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Transportation, the Food and Drug administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and they want all Rail Roads to revert to private ownership and all usury laws should be revoked. And it will come as no surprise to you that they want to end all welfare programs and services for children, because, they say, such government programs are: paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient.

God will not send the four horsemen of the Apocalypse to earth to bring history to an end. But the Koch brothers might. They will bring about an apocalypse of income disparity with the crushing poverty that necessarily follows it. They will spoil the earth, making it uninhabitable, especially for the vulnerable poor, while they gouge the earth and foul the air and water for profit. They will transfer all power into the hands of a few, restricting healthcare and education to the masses in order to keep them frightened and compliant.

This is not titillating religious myth intended to scare children and empower the church. This is a real political movement that has the power of the economy and the government behind it and the only thing that will stop it from happening is if the masses become informed, organized, and motivated to choose morality over money.

I know that I will get a lot of mail this week accusing me of trying to start some sort of class warfare. But folks, as Warren Buffett said years ago, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” I just think that it is high time we start fighting back.

“The Trouble with Kings”    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   June 10, 2018   

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1 Samuel 8:4-20

4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, ⁵and said to him, ‘You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.’ ⁶But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, ‘Give us a king to govern us.’ Samuel prayed to the Lord, ⁷and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. ⁸Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. ⁹Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.’

10 So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’

19 But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, ²⁰so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.’

The United States, a nation of more than 300 million people, has a senate that is limited to 100 members. Our senators are a tiny body of elite legislators who provide oversight to our entire nation. 

Last Sunday, a senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, traveled to Brownsville, Texas to the site of a now closed Walmart that has been converted to serve as a detention center for children who have been taken away from their parents at the border, when they came here to seek asylum. By the way, an asylum seeker is not an illegal immigrant. The legal process for seeking asylum is to show up at the border and ask for it. 

The Trump administration’s ramped up policy is treating asylum seekers as if they are criminals, sending the adults into detention and sending children to facilities where we only hear stories about how the children are cared for. Senator Merkley provided dramatic evidence that not only are reporters denied access to know what is going on, but even a sitting United States Senator cannot even enter this federally funded program to just see how the children are being treated. The for- profit operators of this facility in Brownsville, TX called the police who barred Senator Merkley from entering the front door. It is as if we were living in a new imperial America. 

Later this week, the Senator did gain access to the facility only to confirm what we had feared: that the children in this repurposed Walmart are being kept in small cages, like dog pens. 

This is how it starts, when an American border agent demands that a crying child be torn from the arms of her mother to be housed in a cage, possibly for months, without ever seeing a family member. This is our imperial government at work.

I don’t want to be melodramatic or emotionally manipulative but it is too much to suggest that we should really study this child’s face for a moment because this is what our nation has come to and I don’t think that any of us should be passive about it. What you are seeing right there is a child being traumatized. It may be that she will be released to the foster care system, never to see her family again. She may be subjected to the nightmares we have heard too much about – what really happens to children who disappear into the system. Where do terrorists come from? Why do so many people hate America? If you think about it, it really isn’t all that hard to figure out.

This came at the end of a week when the president declared that he had the right to pardon himself for any and all crimes and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, publicly stated that the president could have shot FBI director, James Comey, and the president could not have been indicted because, he insists, a sitting president cannot be indicted. If you are sleeping well these days, you are not paying attention.

Almost 500 years ago, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, Samuel Rutherford, wrote the book whose title gave us the phrase “Lex, Rex” or “Law is King.” Rutherford wrote as the English Civil War around Charles I abuse of power was being challenged by Parliament and Charles responded to their complaints by dissolving the Parliament. Though Rutherford’s book and the philosophical argument he described in Lex, Rex about limited government power and the need for a constitution to be more important that the whims of the monarch, you can’t say that he was a successful author. He was charged with treason and would have been executed had he not died prior to his trial and his book was the subject of the last official book burning in England. 

His basic argument was that the law should rule over everyone, including the king, a concept that heads of state frequently seem to find to be too limiting.

It is almost impossible to believe that in the last week our head of state’s attorneys actually sent a letter to special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, saying that the President has absolute authority of the judiciary and that he could fire Mueller, or order the investigation closed, or pardon anyone involved. 

And while this is clearly some of the dumbest and most irrational tripe that any attorney has ever written, a large portion of our country is ready to burn copies of Lex, Rex all over again, applauding the fact that our president is placing himself above the law. 

I have received a couple of letters this week from a local pastor who has been shocked and offended by my newspaper column in which I called President Trump “a dangerously incompetent, misogynistic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, racist.” This young pastor tells me that he “thanks God” every day because Trump is president.

And there you have it, a large portion of society is willing to be subjected to an imperial president, no matter how dangerously incompetent, misogynistic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, or racist the imperial president may be. 

I took as our wisdom lesson today the Old Testament lesson suggested by the Revised Common Lectionary from the 8^thchapter of I Samuel. In this church, we do not read passages from the Bible because of our loyalty to church tradition and certainly not because we think that God wrote or inspired the Bible. If I read a passage of scripture in our services it is because it strikes me as being true. The Bible is not the Word of God but it is the collected wisdom of a whole lot of people over a very long period of time and though we respectfully disagree with large portions of it, when you read something like this passage today, every cell of your body stands up and says “Amen!”

The people of Israel, according to the text, had lived as fairly disorganized tribes who had respected the leadership of prophets and judges but they had lived without a king, without a head of state. And they were demanding of the prophet Samuel that he anoint a king for them and he really didn’t want to do it.

Now, mind you, this text was not actually written before there were kings in Israel, and it wasn’t written by Samuel or any contemporary of Samuel. It was written by priests in the temple who had already experienced how corrupt the monarchy could be. The monarch could probably have written about how corrupt the priesthood could be, but priests have a better shot at getting their musings published in the Bible. Even though the account is very one sided, you have to admit, this priest nails it. He records Samuel as warning the people:

 ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.’ 

Beyond the obviously dated illustrations, this is true enough isn’t it? An Imperial President will give tax cuts to his wealthy peers and shift the burden of supporting the nation onto the backs of those who work the hardest and have the least. An Imperial President will spend heavily on the military while cutting the programs that provide health care, education, and basic food and housing to the poor. He will literally enslave the majority of the population through economic exploitation and endanger the world through hapless military threats and misadventures.

What I want to say clearly today, and I hope all of you are with me in this, this passage in I Samuel was not written 3000 years ago to warn us about Trump. Though Trump is our tyrant de jour, this text was written to defame several ancient kings who had already usurped too much of the people’s power for their personal gain. This is not so much about Trump as it is about power . . . that classic observation that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

Sadly, examples are not difficult to find. I know of no swing greater than my own contemporary, the Haitian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide graduated from seminary about the same time that I did. He and I, and people like Archbishop Oscar Romero, were schooled in Liberation Theology. He was passionate about confronting the abuses of the Duvalier dictatorships. So much so that entered politics and was elected president. He attempted to initiate a number of major reforms, nationalizing businesses, raising the wages and the standard of living of the poor of Haiti.

But he got a lot of opposition from both businesses and the military. There were coops and violence and “the little priest” of Haiti was transformed into a violent dictator who used a practice called “necklacing,” in which his opponents had a car tire chained abound their neck, the tire was then filled with gasoline and set on fire.

Aristide was heard to say one morning, “I love the smell of burning tires.” Opposition turned him into just the kind of violent dictator he had despised. Now, I mentioned Oscar Romero because, in El Salvador, Romero took liberation theology to new heights, suffered repeated imprisonments, and beatings, and was finally murdered by an assassin while he was saying mass. Last month, Pope Francis started the process of making Romero a Catholic saint. I mention Romero and Aristide side by side because we have to recognize that while power almost always corrupts, it doesn’t have to. You can choose to do otherwise. 

No one is perfect. No one is immune to the seduction of power, whether it is to make your own life more comfortable, or to acquire more money, or whether it is the ego appetite for power itself, none of us can claim to have never strayed from the straight and narrow. 

We all do exercise power, either by what we do intentionally, or when we choose to stand idly by while injustice spreads like a dark cloud over the earth. It is horrifying that we have elected a narcissist with little intelligence and no relevant experience to the highest elected office in the world. This has been a horrible mistake, exposing some of the greatest weaknesses of our democratic systems. 

However, what I think we really need to drill down on is the psyche of the American voting public that once having elected an aspiring dictatorial tyrant who uses the office to enrich himself and his friends, who legitimizes racial and religious and gender prejudices, and who seems willing to assert power in ways unheard of in America, that those who voted for him are still cheering his every step towards an imperial presidency that looks a lot like a third-world dictatorship.

There will always be another Trump, another Aristide, another Kim, who will worm their way into power and then use it in the most corrupt ways, as long as we allow indifference, fear, hopelessness, to silence our voices of protest, and to slowly erode our freedoms as a people. We have reason to be seriously afraid that if someone as clearly incompetent as Trump is, can do what he is doing, what would happen if an enlightened tyrant were to find her or his way into the Oval Office? 

Trump is a nightmare but there are much more talented people all around him who could bring about a moral apocalypse. I shudder to think of what a Paul Ryan or a Ted Cruz presidency might look like. The Handmaid’s Tale or the Hunger Games could become something like a documentary. 

I know that it is easy to assume that a preacher might be exaggerating but the seeds of this kind of tyranny are already planted in our society.  Cruz’s father is a pastor who has literally said that “My son is an anointed King, destined to take control of all sectors of society.” And before you get too comfortable assuring yourself that it could never happen, please realize that Cruz actually has a law degree, experience in government, and is much more intelligent than Trump and Trump has managed to become an imperial president. All it takes is apathy on the part of voters and it could happen.

There has been endless conversation about how Trump managed to win, whether it was clever manipulation of the Electoral College, or Russian involvement, or split votes for Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, but we should be painfully aware of this: nearly half of all voters did not vote. In fact, if “did not vote” had been a candidate, “did not vote” would have won in 41 states. Fatalism is our real enemy here. Defeatism, the acceptance that the poor and the middle class are just the hockey pucks of the Republican and Democratic parties. We must vote in ways that limit the power of government.

We live in a nation with over 300 million citizens. We cannot do what Samuel suggests and simply live as good people without a government. We have to have an organizing and regulating government to have this many people living this close to one another. And there is no doubt that a dictatorship is a much more efficient way to govern a large nation. There is less waste, less bureaucracy, things happen faster and more efficiently than any democracy. It is, however less satisfying for the citizens. Any one of us might be in favor of a government by enlightened despot as long as we could be the enlightened despot.

It is as Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for everything else.” Absolute power should never be given to anyone, especially not to ourselves. As messy as Democracy is and as inconvenient as giving individual rights to others can be, we have reason to remember what happens when you make anyone a king. 

A few years ago, a local Pentecostal church started a movement to repeal some of the city’s human right’s policies that provide protections to the LGBTQ community. I, of course, campaigned against this repeal and when my neighbors kept stealing my “vote no on April 7^th” signs out of my yard, I power-washed the message in six-foot-tall letters on a 40 foot stretch of my fence. Have I mentioned that some of my neighbors are jerks?

I have been very engaged in the fight for civil rights for the LGBTQ folk for more than 25 years. Not because I am gay, or because I have gay family members. I have put a lot of professional and personal risk into this because it is the right thing to do. But we lost that vote. We didn’t lose it by much, but we lost it. On April 7, of 2015, I was out knocking on doors, encouraging people who had not voted to go to the polls and vote.

My very last door on that day, just a few minutes before the polls closed, was the home of a young lesbian couple. They admitted that they had not voted. 

I told them where there polling place was and let them know that they only had about fifteen minutes to get there. They looked at one another then turned back to me and said, “Not this time. We’ll try harder to vote next time.” I had been fighting for their civil rights from before they were born. Perhaps their lives had not been so hard. Maybe they had not encountered the violent prejudice that same sex couples had endured in Springfield just a decade ago. . . but they very mistakenly seemed to believe that their rights were guaranteed and that nothing could ever take them away. 

And I am not going to blame that couple or the thousands of people like them who just didn’t go to the polls, even though, realistically, the failure of that referendum was their fault. But laying blame accomplishes nothing unless you can be satisfied with smugly saying, “I told you so.” 

We have to try to awaken the sleeping giant of indifferent voters. I spent my day yesterday, knocking on doors and registering voters. There is a better world waiting to be born and as messy and unattractive as that may seem, you are the midwives that will help to give birth to that world.

We need to help the poor, the hopeless, the defeated, the oppressed to become informed voters because we know that the alternative is an imperial king and haven’t we had enough of that already?

This is no time to surrender.