"Ego and Other Barriers to Community"        August 26, 2018     Dr. Roger L. Ray

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Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig argues that “every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition.”

As of this month, I have been preaching for 40 years. I have delivered more than 2000 sermons and I would estimate that in the first 39 years, delivering more than 1900 sermons, I probably mentioned the name of whoever was president of the United States at the time, fewer than two dozen times. I obviously like some more than others and prefer the most civil rights minded and progressive from among them but, you know, a president is sort of like a taxi driver. They have a job to do and if they do it right they hardly merit being mentioned. I strongly suspect that most of us here cannot even remember the name of any taxi driver we have had unless, of course, that taxi driver wrecked the taxi while you were in it.

In the past year, it has been difficult to write a single sermon that does not mention our current train wreck of a president. I don’t want to talk about, heck, I don’t want to think about him. I don’t want to hear his voice or see his picture. He is never featured in the outlines of sermons that I send to our musicians in advance because I always want to talk about serious topics without mentioning him. But today’s message is about ego and it seems impossible to talk about an inflated ego without mentioning the standard bearer of the disorder. 

But, to be completely honest, some credit is due to our Clementine Caligula for being a master at manipulating the media. 

He has managed to keep himself in the news in a way that initially helped him to get loans for risky business ventures, then won him his own reality TV show, and remarkably, though he was seen as a joke of a candidate for president, he managed to defeat both qualified and unqualified contenders for his party’s nomination, not through brilliant debate performances or persuasive speeches, but more by dominating the news cycle with one embarrassing scandal after another, and by delivering strings of outrageous lies that we somehow couldn’t muster the strength to look away from. 

The novelty candidate, the clown on the stage, actually won the election to be the most powerful person in the world… maybe he won it, actually, probably he didn’t but in the end, that was the official conclusion. I famously place a wager that he would be impeached within his first year in office and, frankly, I didn’t think it would really take more than a month or two. I was wrong, not because there was not ample evidence to impeach him but because I made the classic mistake of assuming that members of the Senate would be forced to act out of conscience, forgetting that most of them couldn’t find a conscience with a search party and a 30-minute head start. 

I do believe that he has over played his hand and that an impeachment trial is in his future. And I don’t want to be a starry-eyed idealist about this, but I want him to be tried for conspiring with Russians to rig our election, for money laundering for Russian mobsters, for emoluments, for self-dealing with government contracts and tax cuts, as well as his own tax fraud and organized crime related business deals.

But I am afraid that it may finally come down to a fatal blow delivered by someone who is as narcissistic and attention seeking as he is. Mind you, I will take what I can get but I am desperately hoping for America to find the moral high ground again and these people just are not that. The fact that our president has evidently cheated on all three of his wives with prostitutes and porn-stars no longer is shocking or news worthy, but prosecutors are trying to figure out if he used his own money or campaign money to pay for their silence and if the payments were made pursuant to winning the 2016 election. 

I have never watched a single episode of any reality TV show, unless, of course, Morning Joe has, in these Trump days, become a remake of the Apprentice. But I can tell you this, over the last several months, I have decided that it is best to shower after I watch the news rather than before. 

Still, in the face of what has become an inevitable impeachment trial, Trump said on a Fox news interview this week that if he were impeached that everyone in America would suddenly become very poor without him steering the economy. This delusional little man sets the high-water mark for the topic before us today, which is about ego.

It is sometimes easier to understand a disorder by looking at its most extreme examples. What has become obvious to the world over the past year is that what Trump wants from being president is adoration. 

He continued holding campaign rallies after he had won the election and when bad news comes his way, his staff plans another rally to drag all of the racists, xenophobes, and neo-Nazis out of the backwaters of America to publicly cheer him on. 

But rather than spending any more time this morning exposing the bloated ego of this pathetic figure, I think the more helpful thing for us to do is to consider how much of this we have to own in our own lives. Because, whether we are arrogant or shy, we all want recognition. We want the approval of our parents, even when our parents, in any objective sense, didn’t have both oars in the water. 

One of the things that corporate researchers have discovered is that many times they get more results in improving employee retention and workplace moral by giving awards, celebrations, and praise than they get from giving employees bigger raises. Once you can pay your basic bills and the wolves are no longer at the door, being appreciated, valued, treated with respect and dignity can mean more than money.

All during my career as a denominational minister, I was given a nice raise every year and, it is probably true that at the time that I left my last denominational position, I may have been the highest paid parish pastor in the denomination but there were several budget meetings over my last several years there when I objected and said, “Don’t give me another raise, just treat me better.” Which seemed impossible for them to grasp. Irrationally hostile board meetings and cabinet meetings were the only way that they knew how to be a church and they were willing to pay me handsomely to endure it. 

I don’t make half as much money now, but I also have not had a therapist or been on anti-depressants, nor have I had to take Prilosec to keep my stomach from digesting itself for ten years! And we’re lucky if we even get around to having a board meeting every year!

Still, we are people, aren’t we? I think that as faith communities go we are among the more healthy examples of how a church can be both free of conflict while taking on hard topics. Generally, churches have to choose, they either take on real issues or they peacefully get along by doing nothing and saying nothing. We have managed to be both prophetic and united, not that there have not been attempts at starting ego battles over our decade together. 

Scott Peck’s book, A Different Drum, is the most helpful book I have ever read about community building. One of the key insights he explains is that a community is always inclusive, to build community you have to let go of racism, prejudices about sexual orientation, class, education, party affiliations, but the one thing that a community cannot be inclusive of is a lack of inclusiveness. That is, when someone wants to divide the community, excluding others within the community, that person has to be excluded. A genuine community is inclusive of everything except the failure to be inclusive. 

As I wrote in our prayer of confession this morning, it is always easier to give recognition and approval when we have already received it ourselves . . . our egos work like that. But if you want to be the kind of person who actually helps to build community, to heal the racism, prejudices, and partisanship that divides our civilization, then you have to be the kind of person who gives acceptance and approval before you have gotten yours. 

There is emotional risk in trying to be healing. It deserves to be noted that while those with huge egos are the most noticeable, I’m guessing that those people are outnumbered by those who suffer constant self-doubt and a rabid lack of ego. It is even possible that some of the most narcissistic people in the world are also the ones who have the least self-confidence. I don’t want to try to psychoanalyze our president, but I have heard more than one professional speculating about Trump’s hunger for his father’s approval which, evidently, he never satisfactorily received. If he were my son, I’m not sure that I could love him either but that’s possibly a personal issue.

Sometimes people who are acting out in the most socially unacceptable ways are not doing so out of excesses of self-confidence but rather the opposite. It is akin to the way that people express prejudice against homosexuals. If you are secure in your heterosexuality, why do you care whether Ted, Sue, Billy, or Alice are either gay or straight? Frankly, as a single straight guy, I wish more men were gay to cut down on the competition for available single women! 

But you know what I mean. . . the only reason for someone to get really exercised about someone else’s sexual orientation is if they are insecure about their own. You can extend the same thing to religion. If people are coercive that you must accept their peculiar beliefs about their invisible deities, then, isn’t that I sign that they are desperate for confirmation of their own faith? If they are secure in their faith, then they don’t need to change yours, right? The more far out and untenable a faith is, the more evangelical their adherents have to be, looking for someone who will confirm their irrational beliefs. 

I’m begging for some empathetic understanding here, some added patience with the people who probably annoy us the most. Everyone needs air and water and food and sleep, and right behind that they also need some emotional reassurance, some acceptance and affirmation if not love and certainty of emotional safety. If you deprive someone of food and water long enough, they will eventually try to take yours. If we deprive others of acceptance and affirmation, they may also try to take yours. 

Have you never noticed that the people who are the most likely to be insulting, to cut you down, and be critical of you are the most likely to be so fragile that if you did the same to them, they would fall into pieces? 

Let me share something with you:  Many years ago, a group of critics in my former church hired a private detective to try to find enough dirt on me to get me fired. Sadly, after eight months and quite a lot of money, he couldn’t find anything. I don’t have a terribly interesting personal life, I am not, after all a member of Congress. But when I finally got to see a copy of this gum-shoe’s final report, it was an amazing document to read. A woman whose husband very publicly bragged about his sexual exploits with paid sex workers told the private investigator that she had heard that I had prostitutes come to my house…. Where I was raising my then elementary school aged daughter. A guy that I had raised money to keep out of jail for embezzling money from his employer told the investigator that he had heard that I used the church’s credit card to pay my personal bills. An out of control alcoholic said that he heard that I drank too much. A married woman who was having what she thought was a secret affair with another woman said that she thought I was secretly dating men. 

Though no one had any actual evidence, they all, page after page, did project their greatest personal embarrassment onto me. I was angry when I read this stuff but after the initial wave of anger passed, I realized how sad each of these people are. They can never get their minds off of their own deep personal pain and embarrassment and the only way they knew to ease that pain was to project it onto someone else. . . someone they thought would never know what they had said. 

It wouldn’t work in every case. Some people have a black hole where their intact ego should be, but don’t you wonder how they might have been different kinds of people if those around them had shown them enough acceptance and approval that they didn’t feel like that had to go take it from someone else? If you found some way to let them know that even though they had endured some real and consequential pain, that you didn’t judge them, that you accepted them, that you believe that they have inherent worth?

I took as our wisdom lesson today this intriguing quote from the Austrian novelist, Stefan Zweig, who said that“every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition.” Many of us spend a good deal of time on social media, posting about our political beliefs, our moral outrage, our contempt for crooked politics, a crazy healthcare system, and an unjust economic system but, if you are like me, you are posting that to be seen by lots of people who already agree with you. So why do we do that? It is cathartic, and sometimes we need some catharsis . . . some days more than others. But what does it accomplish? Or to echo Stefan Zweig, what does it cost you?

What I’m trying to say today is that we humans are, by our evolutionary nature, social animals. We need one another. 

There is no more cruel punishment than solitary confinement. And yet, most people in the world have damaged or deficit egos in one way or another. Most people in the world, regardless of whether they would ever even admit it to themselves, are lonely. They are lonely, and they are surrounded by 350 million people. It is not that there is a dearth of possible connections, it is that we are waiting for someone to take the risk first, to reach out, to give us acceptance and approval and we reserve our own acceptance and approval out of fear of being rejected or hurt. 

We boldly say that we want to change the world. We want to change the political system. We want to stop ICE agents from taking children from their parents at the border, we want to reform the prison system, we want to fix the income disparity problem, and end racism but we are afraid to invite a neighbor to come over for dinner and that, I submit, is perilously close to religious hypocrisy. 

We can only be effective as agents for social justice, we can only have legitimacy as a community of faith that says that love is our religion, if we can be successfully connected in meaningful ways to other people. A labor union has power if the workers can stay united. A political party can influence the outcome of an election if they can keep from cannibalizing one another. A church has an impact on the ethical thinking of a society if they do not become an example of a dysfunctional family that becomes an object of derision rather than a source of light. 

I am not asking that we become saint through extreme personal sacrifice. I’m just saying that you need to get some flesh in the game. Most people would like to be better connected but they are just as timid and afraid of rejection as you are. Sometimes the distance between you needs to be bridged with an honest apology.

One of the people who told a crazy story to that private investigator came to me years later and apologized and then helped us to start this church. Reconciliation is possible, but it takes three things: humility, courage enough to tell the truth, and the ego strength necessary to forgive someone who really buried a knife in your back.

Sometimes all that is necessary is for you to give over a prejudice you have nurtured that really only screams about your own insecurity. Let it go, and risk showing some else acceptance. Imagine how our world might have been different today if only Donald Trump’s father had paid some attention to him before he became a dangerous ego-maniac?

“Sage Advice”          August 19, 2018               Dr. Roger Ray                      

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Proverbs 9:1-6
1 Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.
2 She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. 3 She has sent out her servant girls, she calls from the highest places in the town,  4 "You that are simple, turn in here!" To those without sense she says, 5 "Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. 6 Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."

I have spent a number of nervous hours sitting in court rooms with families who came to witness their sons being condemned to long sentences in federal prisons for the crime of having viewed child pornography on the computers in their bedrooms. Most of these young men were either bi-polar or on the autism spectrum; mental conditions which affected their impulse control, socialization, and decision making.

And yet I have heard prosecutors passionately pleading that the defendants’ mental condition should not be considered. I have heard prosecutors call these young men “animals” and “dogs” who deserved 15 and 25 years in prison. Once, when a mother was overcome with grief at the vicious words of the state’s attorney, and involuntarily let out a gasp, the lawyer turned and pointed to the parents and said, “I would have the parents serving in prison with him if I could for allowing this to happen.”

I’m not defending what they did nor am I in any way defending actual sex offenders, but these young men had never had sex with anyone, never touched a child, never paid for or produced pornography. They allowed their libidinal curiosity to lead them down a bad path and they are paying a heavy price for it with half or more of their adult lives in prison and when they get out, they will still be felons with very limited job opportunities and even very few places where they can legally live.

Compare that with a conversation our current president had with Howard Stern on a 2005 radio show in which he bragged about walking in to the dressing room of underaged beauty contestants in order to see them naked. He said: “Before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” he said. “You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.”

“You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. . . And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”

Folks, there are a 100,000 men in prison right now who have committed sex crimes that, in any rational context, are not as egregious as what Donald Trump not only confessed to doing but bragged about doing. I would even go so far as to speculate that many of those 100,000 men, in spite of their mental health issues and crimes, would be better presidents than Donald Trump will ever be . . . but that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong. 

We Americans like to think that our judicial system, despite all of its flaws, is better than the judicial system in most other countries. We’re America, right? But if our judicial system is better than other countries, then why is our incarceration rate so high?

The hard truth is that our political and judicial systems are corrupt. They are not a little bit corrupt, they are profoundly corrupt. Why is Donald Trump in the White House and 2 million people who have committed fewer and less serious crimes than he has are in prisons and jails and on parole all over this nation?

For the benefit of our podcast listeners who don’t see the pictures, may I ask you to just say it out loud? And not a small amount of money either.

Our system is corrupt in several ways. Clearly, brown and black people walk into a courtroom with a serious disadvantage over white defendants. But of the people whom I personally know who are in Federal prisons for sex offenses, they are all white men from middle class families. One family literally wiped out all of their assets and spent more than $100,000 in defense of their son and it did not make one day of difference in the sentence he received. In this universe, a $100,000 is not big money. 

There was a story in our local paper last week about a 75 year old man in Branson who was found guilty of possessing child pornography. William Walker had more than 174,000 images of children and nearly 5000 videos depicting children as young as 5 years old engaging in sex acts. But he is a friend of local billionaire, Pete Herschend, and he says that he has received treatment at our local “Six Flags over Jesus” church, James River Assembly of God, and the judge, my old friend, Doug Harpool, sentenced him to only 5 years in prison.

Now, I wrote to Doug earlier this year on behalf of a 19 year old man with Asperger’s who didn’t have 1% of that much porn in his possession but Doug said that due to mandatory minimum sentencing, that this kid had to go to prison for 15 years. The reason Judge Harpool gave in this newspaper report for this short sentence was in consideration of the age of the defendant. But I wrote to Judge Harpool last spring about an 80 year old man who was appearing before him on a charge of growing marijuana. This man had been in the country jail for three years, was horribly ill, and should have been released but, though he said that he hated it, Judge Harpool told the media that he had to follow the minimum sentencing guidelines and he sent this sick old man to a federal prison for more years than he could possibly live.

Apparently, letters from me don’t mean much to Judge Harpool and though he says that the age of the defendant in the sex offender case mattered, it sure didn’t matter in the case of the old marijuana farmer. Could it be having a billionaire friend?

It’s the money, isn’t it?

I guess that the law doesn’t apply to you if Pete Herschend shows up in court to say that you are a good guy. I’m not saying that Walker should be in prison longer than 5 years. I’m not sure that there is much to learn after a year or two of a prison sentence; but I think that young men with legitimate mental handicaps should get more consideration than a man who just happens to have billionaire friends. Oh, and getting treatment in a church where the pastors and the members think that they can speak in the language of angels is not legitimate treatment…. If you think that angels exist and that you can magically speak in their language, you need to be in treatment, you don’t need to be giving counseling to anyone else.  Again, that’s just my opinion,… I could be wrong.

I could talk all day about corruption in our judicial system but it really isn’t just that. Folks, I have sat in the board room at Cox Hospital where plaques on the wall declare that they are a non-profit Christian medical facility, and had to listen to conversations about incorporating their insurance company off shore in the Caribbean to avoid American oversight of how they leverage non-profit assets to create a for-profit insurance company, and I looked around the table at local business owners who had made themselves millionaires by awarding themselves contracts for services to the hospital without even having to go through a bidding process. 

If you steal a loaf of bread at the local market to feed your hungry children, you are likely to be arrested and charged with shop lifting. If you unethically take hundreds of millions of dollars out of a local hospital they will name a wing after you and put your statue up in the entryway. 

And if you commit multiple sex crimes against teenaged girls, you might get to be the next president of the United States if you are rich enough. 

Our politicians are largely controlled by their super wealthy political donors. Our court system is corrupted by decisions made based on race, class, political connections, and whose palms get greased in the process. Our healthcare system, our penal system, and even the Federal Communications Commission, are organized to serve the wealthy and the powerful and most of the rest of us are just the serfs who serve the financial interests of the .1%. 

The number one thing in my job description is to stand up in public and tell the truth. Not just any truth, but the truths that our oppressors do not want said. So, if you couldn’t tell already, I showed up for work today. But I have not said anything that most of you don’t know and feel every day. The world is unjust and the rich have a wholly unfair advantage over the rest of us. And maybe everything I have said today leads up to a case for a revolution in this country.

But I want to take you back to that courthouse hallway for a moment. As I said, I have spent a lot of hours sitting with families, often times with church members, waiting for their time in court. It gets crowded and you can’t help but hear the complaints of people who are there for drunk driving charges, for drug possession and sales charges, for domestic violence, and more than anything else, divorce and child custody battles. 

A local attorney told me that 90 cents of every $1 paid to a lawyer in Greene County is paid for work on family issues: domestic violence, divorce, or child custody cases. That’s a lot of money, and, I will argue, money that we should avoid getting ourselves into a situation where we have to pay those bills.

I don’t want to make light of this in any way but do you remember that old 1970’s show, “Hee Haw” with the doctor who, when you told him, “Hey doc, I broke my arm in three places,” he would hit the patient with a rubber chicken and yell, “Well then stay out of those places!”

Again, I am the last person on earth who wants to make light of this topic, or to blame the victims, or to be dismissive of corruption in government, corporations, health care, or the judiciary, but I will say that it is possible to live in a way that generally avoids putting your children’s future into the hands of an indifferent judge.

I am sure that you have also heard black fathers talking about the “talk” that they have with their sons these days, giving them painful but important advice about what it means to be black in America, what it means when police lights come on behind you . . . when holding your hands up in the air can still get you shot, when submitting peacefully to arrest can get you shot, when simply being put into a police van can get you killed, or you can be beaten to death in a police station. 

The talk is not an acquiescence to an unjust world. It is not acceptance or surrender, but it is a talk about survival. Ours is a racially diverse but still majority white congregation just as our community is still about 95% white, so most of the people that I go to court with are not minorities, still, the injustice in America is not just racial, it is also economic, it is a class division, so consider this to be my “talk” with black, brown, and white people. Do what you can to avoid confrontations with the police. Try to stay out of court. Do not assume that the healthcare system or American democracy will save you. In fact, it is best to assume that it will not.

Prison sentences for drug abuse is just wrong. Addicts need treatment, not punishment. Still, avoid buying, using, or selling heroin, meth, or fentanyl . . . please. Family court in divorce and child custody cases can be insane, but please, strive to avoid living with, marrying, or having children with abusive or unstable partners. And for goodness sake, don’t drink and drive. There are websites you can look at on your smart phone in which you enter your age, gender, and weight and how much you have had to drink, and it will tell you if you need to call an Uber. This doesn’t have to lead to a disastrous abdication of your rights and freedom. Addiction tends to get worse. Alcoholism is a progressive disease. Spouse abuse tends to get worse and often ends in murder. Porn addictions tend to get worse. Don’t give in, get help, not at James River, of course, but you know what I mean. 

I realize that you may think that I am entirely ignoring our wisdom lesson today but honestly, it is all related. I don’t often defer to the Jewish and Christian scriptures these days, but I took our wisdom lesson from the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, the book of Proverbs.

If you read Proverbs the way that they were written, not as words from God written by a divine finger, but more as sage wisdom passed on from an experienced wise person to a new generation, then what you find there is just advice about how to live a decent life. You always have to qualify that with being advice from a culture that is removed from ours by both continents and dozens of centuries, but still, a lot of it is basically a very humanist look at how to live to keep yourself out of the clutches of a corrupt government, judicial system or health care system.

The writer of Proverbs personifies wisdom as a woman who is literally calling out to those who are tempted to follow a wayward path towards drug or alcohol abuse, pornography, or a host of unhealthy habits which can be said to be eating too much junk food, not exercising enough, and not physically taking care of yourself, so wisdom calls out to the foolish to come home and have dinner and act like a grown up. 

I want prison reform. I want judicial reform. But until we get that, I want you to stay out of the court house. I want a massively better program of addiction and alcohol treatment programs in this country but we don’t have that right now so I am forced to quote my elementary school counselor, Mr. Mackey, 

Drugs are bad, so don’t do drugs, mkay?

I understand that most people use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate and, believe me, since the November election in 2016, we’ve all had reason to reach for the anesthesia. No one follows their curiosity up stream to look at illegal porn in order to become an addict who one day has their house surrounded by a SWAT team that breaks down your doors and takes all of your computers, tablets and smart phones but I can tell you that it happens thousands of times every year. It is not a path you want to go down. 

What often starts as a celebration with friends, or a needed release from bad news, ends up in a jail cell. Addictions tend to escalate but the good news is that there is a program that can restore you to sanity and their meetings are free and open to anyone who wants to leave crazy town. Just live in a way so that you stay out of the back seat of a police cruiser or the hallway outside of a courtroom. 

No one is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. When you are in trouble you know that I will be on your side but before we get to that point, let me tell you, the justice system is corrupt, the penal system is insane, and non-profit hospitals will take everything you own under the guise of helping you. We want to work together to make the world a better place but recognizing the serious holes in the fabric of society, please, live in a way that does not surrender your freedom to the whims of lawyers, judges, and insurance executives. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh7l8dx-h8M

“Getting Old or Getting Better?”

 “Getting Old or Getting Better?”      August 12, 2018       Dr. Roger Ray

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 Maya Angelou, “Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.”

 August 12^thalso fell on a Sunday in 1956 when I was born a little after noon. I had already been to church that morning, invitro, and have not missed many Sunday’s since. Sixty-two years ago, when I was born in Glasgow, KY, a guy born in this part of the world was expected to live for, well, about 62 years. Were it not for anti-biotics, I would have died from pneumonia at age 16, and even after surviving that, I likely would have had a lethal heart attack or stroke a few years ago were it not for the blood pressure pills that I now take daily.

Without the medical and nutritional advances of the past three generations, I would now be at the point of life where you would not bother buying a new suit and possibly not even green bananas. But people are living longer and if I can succeed in staying out of the crosshairs of my critics, I may reasonably expect to live another 20 years. . . a fact that not only disappoints the readers of my newspaper columns but it presents a challenge to balancing the books of social security and my church pension fund. 

The developed world obviously has benefited the most from these lifesaving sciences but, thankfully, people all over the world have enjoyed a longer life expectancy over the past half century. 

Life expectancy can be a funny thing. 

Man’s best friend may grow old and die in just ten or fifteen years. 

Whereas the seemingly worthless box turtle can expect to live for 50 years

While some breeds of parrots can live to be 100 years old.

Though you shouldn’t count on it in all cases.

For no good reason at all, come edible clams can live for more than 500 years.  

My daughter and her amazingly beautiful tribe of friends, whether they act like it or not, are turning 30 this year 

and they are quite irrationally upset about that fact. Time doesn’t not physically compliment us. I was a runner for many years and when I drive down the road and see someone running early in the morning, I still miss it, but I can’t do it anymore. When I am called upon to do physical labor, I realize that time has taken a great deal of strength and stamina from me. The mortality rate is 100% and yet we seem to never get tired of trying to deny it.

People my age will continue to insist that they are “middle aged” and I wonder just exactly how long that they think that they are going to live. We are not, after all, arctic clams. But we live in a culture that has come to fear aging and to worship youth. I am fond of something the president of Revlon said years ago, he said, “In the factory we manufacture cosmetics but, in the store, we sell hope.”

It is estimated that as much as $16 billion dollars is spent in the USA every year for various surgeries and treatments to fight aging and to look more attractive, much of which is aimed at women who now are paying for more than 300,000 breast augmentation surgeries per year, a quarter of million liposuction procedures, and some 20,000 butt lifts and enhancements. There are no power-point images for this portion of my talk today. 

But to put that into perspective, that’s two and a half times what it would cost to make public colleges and universities tuition free. When the final chapter of the book about the decline and fall of the American empire is written, surely there will be some piece on how we spent more on silicon than we spent on education. 

Ashton Applewhite wrote in his book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism: “The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us.” 

The mortality rate is 100% and that unchanging fact simply should not frighten us or fill us with dread. I liked being young. I enjoyed being able to ride my three-speed stingray bicycle 50 miles to Mammoth Cave National Park just to buy a hot dog and a coke. I liked being about to stay out all night and still be able to go to work the next day. But there were things not to like about being young and there are things too like about every season of existence.

I am not going to bore you today with stories about cultures that venerated their elders rather than their 20-something super models. I have nothing against youth and I have no reason to be venerated. But I will tell you this: a few years ago I took nearly 30 years’ worth of sermons, articles, and papers that I had written and threw them in a dumpster because I would not want anyone to ever see them again. 

There were people in those years who thought I was a pretty good preacher, but I am embarrassed by what I did not know then, and even more embarrassed about what I was absolutely certain of that was completely wrong. There are advantages to every age and I even look forward to the next phase of my life.

Every Monday morning, I meet with our church cabinet for breakfast so that we can hash out church issues over eggs and bacon. Every Monday, we reach a point in our conversation when I announce, “I have to get to the office,” and everyone around the table giggles a bit and someone will offer, “I remember going to the office.” Mary McKenzie will get up from our breakfast table and drive her RV to Alaska to fish for a month or so. Dan Goodwin just decided to spend a couple of weeks exploring China, and Charles McKinsey recently drove up to Iowa where he endowed a cancer ward in a hospital. 

I have been a pastor for a long time. I have seen a lot of people retire, either because they had to or because they were sick and tired of going to work, but not everyone flourishes in retirement. Some people don’t even survive it for long. It may be more true for men than for women, but we are often identified by our career. What we do is what we are. We are not always good at social skills, but we have work connections and when we give up our employment, we are often giving up our identity, our social life, and our self-worth, all at once. 

I was a part of a community building experience a few years ago, designed by M. Scott Peck, in which a group of 30 strangers were to introduce themselves to one another, telling them who you are without telling them what kind of work you do, what your marital status is, or whether or not you have children. You would have been shocked to have seen yours truly standing around entirely speechless. Who am I if not a pastor, a preacher, a writer, and a father? Maybe not anything, and maybe that is a huge problem. 

Suicide is now one of the leading causes of death in the United States, more than 40,000 a year. That’s more than gun deaths or automobile accidents. The largest age group making up that alarming statistic is people over the age of 85. In some cases, I can understand. No one wants to live in chronic pain or to realize that they are rapidly losing touch with reality, but what alarms me is how many elderly people have come to think of themselves as being useless because they are no longer beautiful, or athletic, nor employed. Many have lost their social connections and even family connections. 

One of the most neglected geniuses of the 20^thcentury was the Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist, Viktor Frankl. If you are watching this video at home and you have not read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaningyou should turn this video off and start reading Man’s Search for Meaningright now. I will say in advance, “you’re welcome.”

Frankl liked to quote Fredrich Nietzsche who said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Frankl explained: I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. That is, whether you are old or young, you should have a conscious “why” to live but especially as you approach retirement, you need to have a plan that is more than watching T.V. and wondering when the kids will come to see you. 

Time does not necessarily make us wise. Time can leave you behind in the dust of ancient prejudice and myth while it doesn’t exactly flatter your appearance. If you find yourself being annoying to everyone around you to the point that it seems that there is no one around you, that may be on you. If you are going to be an angry old man, you need to at least be witty about it. Do not use guilt or pity to get young people to gather around your rocking chair, pull your rocking chair up to someone in your own peer group. If you find that you do not enjoy the company of older people, what makes you think that younger people are inclined to enjoy your company. 

I believe that it is vital to have a “why” to existence. Don’t retire just not to work anymore, retire to do something that is more meaningful than going to the office. 

Do not live in the past. Time moves in one direction only. So, stay current on the news. Do not despise new technology. Don’t let your smart phone be smarter than you are. There is a rich repository of history within you but give a thought to what lies ahead. If I gave everyone here a note card that said, “When I retire, I will . . .” then I hope that you would be able to complete the sentence.

When I retire, I want to study physics and astronomy. When I retire I want to spend the winter months scuba diving in the Caribbean. I miss the days when I could put my daughter in a car seat and take her down to the park to feed stale bread to the ducks, but did you know that there are children living all around us who have never been to the zoo and their parents have no plans to take them?

I wish that we could pass a law that mandated that nursing homes and day care centers would have to be built on the same campus so that children whose parents can’t spend time with them could spend their days in a universe of grandparents who could teach them how to read and do math in ways that made sense.

I can remember seeing my teacher burst out crying at the news that John Kennedy had been assassinated. I remember the riots that broke out when James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember rushing home from our church youth group to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I was already a pastor when the Challenger blew up. I was a father when the Berlin Wall was broken down. 

We seniors are living history books and we have some stories to tell but beyond our wealth of memory, we can kindle a vision in a coming generation of a time without war, without hunger, without the crushing violence of poverty. If you still have breath, the world has need of you. Don’t wait for someone to come looking for you or to tell you what to do. Get engaged. Find what you have to offer and use it. Life is to be spent but not wasted. 

“Why We Are Still Here”      August 5, 2018                 Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

The wisdom lesson is a quote from Sean Spyres little sister, Broadway actress, singer, musician, and dancer: Erica Spyres
Life is hard. This is why I do theatre, this is why I talk to strangers, this is why I hate angry conflict and prefer a good old debate. I have depression. I have guilt. I suffer from loneliness. I am defensive and scared. I am also confident, grateful, silly, strong, and try not to take myself too seriously. We all contain multitudes. We have the power to bring out any of these fears or strengths in others and they have the ability to do it to us. Clearly, people are suffering and we must choose to create more joy, more love, and decrease the pain.

 

Mark Twain famously quipped,“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.” I’ll tell you folks the truth, I’ve quit the church as many times as Mark Twain gave up cigars. There are petty ego battles at the congregational level. There is financial and sex crimes and cover ups at the denominational level. And there is just a whole history of deception and manipulation of children, oppression of women, and discrimination against gay people, support for slavery and dictators for which there is no plausible excuse.

If you would like to have a conversation about why any sane person would give up on all forms of organized religion, I can share some excellent hand rolled Nicaraguan cigars and some amazing aged Nicaraguan rum, and we can talk all night long. As Bishop Spong has been saying for 20 years, the fastest growing religious group in America is the church alumni association. 

But that’s not why we are here this weekend. In fact, we are here for the opposite reason. We are here to celebrate the 10^thanniversary of the founding of a church that has tried to swim against the current of traditional religious practice in setting a high standard of proclaiming prophetic honesty and promoting social justice.

When we started, it didn’t seem like a liberal, academic church would have much of a chance of survival in Springfield, MO. In fact, we spent a few months talking about how to start a church and trying to build some enthusiasm for it, but some of my best friends didn’t come to our first service. My old and now departed friend, Rev. Nelson Parnell, later confessed to me that he didn’t come at first because he didn’t want to see me be disappointed by the inevitable failure. 

And even after more than a year of pretty surprising success, no Springfield bank would loan us any money to buy this building. Even some of the people who were fairly involved in our early years, left saying that there was no way that we would survive more than a few more months. Some were so disappointed that their dire predictions did not come true that they literally worked hard behind the scenes to undermine us… not that I’m bitter. Look, I never claimed to be a Jackass whisperer.

 

My British friend, Rev. John Churcher, is fond of saying that most churches barely manage to keep themselves open so that they can keep the graveyard warm. In the last issue of the Jesus Seminar publication from Westar, they asked, the pertinent question, “Is Christianity’s corpse cold yet?”

The Christian religion, for almost all intents and purposes, has died a death of irrelevance. It wasn’t a sudden death. It has been coming for some time now. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, some 75 years ago, warned:

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear ... Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the great Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, said, “Remove from the Christian religion its ability to shock, and Christianity is altogether destroyed.”It is not that we despise the faith heritage of our formative years, nor were we especially eager to see it make itself so morally irrelevant that it is all but entirely now dead. 

Many of us kept thinking about leaving the church and over the years, it eventually left us and went off into some dark corner of society to slowly die of its self-administered poison. A few years we ago we began to refer to ourselves less often as the Community Christian Church and more as the Emerging Church. 

For me, though there are many reasons to give up on organized religion entirely, I believe that there are more reasons to help something that is new and different to emerge from the ashes of our faith history. 

I was intrigued by this somewhat whimsical and very personal statement that Sean’s sister posted on social media a few months ago. 

Erica is an accomplished singer, dancer, violinist, and actress. She is married to a composer with whom she has been in love since they were in college. At the time she wrote this piece, confessing her own struggles with depression and loneliness, she had just landed a role on Broadway that she had been working towards for her entire life. You might have thought that she would have been sitting on top of the world, but life is never all about one thing is it?

She said, Life is hard. This is why I do theatre, this is why I talk to strangers, this is why I hate angry conflict and prefer a good old debate. I have depression. I have guilt. I suffer from loneliness. I am defensive and scared. I am also confident, grateful, silly, strong, and try not to take myself too seriously. We all contain multitudes. We have the power to bring out any of these fears or strengths in others and they have the ability to do it to us. Clearly, people are suffering and we must choose to create more joy, more love, and decrease the pain.

I found it interesting that Erica needed to give a reason for why she was devoted to musical theater and that her reason for performing on Broadway seemed to speak so clearly to why I have elected to stay in the church . . . I suspect that it may say something the same to you as well. Life is hard. There is a lot of suffering in the world. There are still people starving and homeless in rural Nicaragua, in Haiti, there are still millions of refugees from Syria, and people who would flee from North Korea’s crushing hunger and cold if only they could. 

There are millions in America without access to healthcare, there are elderly people who have to choose between buying groceries or buying their medications. 

There are people in desperate need of mental health care who cannot afford it, even though they can afford to go to Bass Pro and buy semi-automatic weapons to allay their paranoia and anxiety. The suicide rate is climbing in America, in part because of economic hard times . . . some are elderly people who can’t afford to retire, or younger people who can’t find a job that will pay them a living wage . . . and, I fear, a virtual plague of loneliness. . . broken families, marriages, friendships. 

But Erica is right, all of this suffering is within us, but there is also passion, intellect, curiosity, meaning, playfulness, love, and creativity. She wants her life in the theater to be her way of, as Bruce Cockburn sings, kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. She wants to use her talents to call out the joy and goodness that too often lies unnoticed, hidden in people’s lives. Honestly, I am not a big fan of musical theater, but I get what she means.

But I do want a church to emerge, one that leaves all of the magic and superstition in the graveyard with its ashes but brings out the spirituality that has a passion for social justice, that is willing to go to the dark places of the world and kick at the darkness until the light can break through. 

I don’t want to wallow in my anger about Trump and conservative legislators who take children away from their parents at the border and hike up college tuition and student loan interest until only the sons and daughters of the privileged can get an education. I don’t want to just post angry memes about Betsey DeVos, and Ben Carson . . . folks, you do know, don’t you, that having an informed opinion doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t get up off your backside and get involved with doing something about it, don’t you? You do know that signing online petitions has no more value than lighting a candle in front of a statue. 

You can become a foster parent, mentor a kid, volunteer in a domestic violence shelter, make food for the homeless. You don’t have to sit and yell at the news on TV, you can network within a healthy faith community and do something about it. 

L. R. Knost, the author of a number of parenting books, writes, "Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you." 

We are still here because I refuse to be nothing more than an opinionated victim in a world that has gone mad. We are not helpless, in fact, we are very powerful as long as we can keep the forces that divide this nation against itself do not succeed in breaking up our communities into nothing more than a bunch of angry individuals. 

Together, we can change the world. Individually, we can post angry memes on Face Book. When poor southern whites realized that they have a lot more in common with their poor black neighbors than the do the wealthy corporate interests that keep fanning the flames of separation and racism. When the unemployed, the uneducated, and the uninsured realize that the jobs, education, and health care they need are being denied to them so that Wall Street bankers can pay a lower tax rate on their million-dollar bonuses than the manager a McDonalds pays on her salary, . . .When progressives realize that we are not a tiny minority but, in fact, the majority of people in America want to protect civil liberties for women’s reproductive lives, most people want sensible gun laws, and the majority of people want universal health care, and the reason that Republicans want to keep university tuition and student loan interest rates high is because the more education a person receives the less likely they are to vote for a Republican, . . . if we could network with one another and stop acting like we are all alone and already defeated, then America really might become great in a way that it has never been great before.

So I am not giving up on promoting progressive faith. To be honest, we still have a lot of work to do in deconstruction traditional religion. A lot of what keeps progressives in the shadows is because so many people are still mentally imprisoned in churches that keep pouring magical thinking and irrational belief systems into their heads. We need to be clear about addressing the perfectly good reasons why people with critical thinking skills have been leaving religious lives by the droves, and redirect a health spirituality into the world changing coalitions where we really can make a difference in absolutely amazing ways. 

You would not want to live in a world that had not been transformed by the faith and work of Gandhi, Black Elk, and Dorothy Day. But who would they have been without their faith communities? Would you have ever heard of Gandhi’s salt march if thousands of people had not joined in with him?

What would the world be today without the influence of Martin Luther King, Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Bishop Desmond Tutu, but who are they if they were not a part of an active faith community?

If you dwell on the perfectly good reasons to become a part of the Church alumni association, you can talk yourself into it, and I can assure you, nothing would please the corporate oligarchy that currently runs this country more than for all of you thinking liberals to stop networking with each other, go back to fighting with each other on Face Book, and never get organized enough to challenge their exploitation of the earth, the poor, and you.

We have changed a lot in our ten years, but one thing has remained a constant. We took this quote from Elie Wiesel, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” We are still here because the world doesn’t need any more angry, cynical individuals. The world needs more organized mobs. We don’t put that on our stationary, but that’s who we are.