“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.