“Jesus: Without Christmas or Easter”

“Jesus: Without Christmas or Easter”   August 25, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Gospel of Thomas, saying 25    Jesus said, "Love your friends like your own soul, 2 protect them like the pupil of your eye."

It has been a crazy busy week this week. Sadly, huge portions of Brazil are on fire. The Amazon rainforest, home to the planet’s greatest bio diversity and the source of 20% of the world’s oxygen and, incredibly, it is not on fire by accident. The Trump-styled president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, is literally encouraging setting these fires to clear land for agriculture, trading a source of planetary life for short them profits.

In other insanely narcissistic news, this week, Donald Trump claimed the messianic title of “King of Israel,” and described himself as a second coming of God. Evangelicals rushed to defend the president’s blasphemous ego, explaining that he was really just very excited to learn that he gets bottomless free refills of French fries at Red Robin.

Meanwhile, responding to the incredibly stupid trade war Trump started with China, our stock market has tumbled such that I may now never get to retire. Who could have predicted that the Chinese “dictator for life” would try to wait out a president who has two years in office, provided he doesn’t get impeached sooner?

And, of course, my planned October visit to what is, an entirely new country for me, Greenland, has now been added to the list of places in the world where I end up having to apologize to everyone I meet for the crazy American president who thought that he could, 18^thcentury style, simply buy a territory that has tens of thousands of indigenous residents. A proposal to which, citizens in Puerto Rico replied, “Look, if you really want to invest in an island territory. . .”

But with all of this going on, I am going to do what only preachers can do, I am going to ignore all of that, and talk about Jesus. No really, I am. I know it may not be what you have come to expect from me but I feel strongly about adding this bit of biblical instruction to our catalogue. 

When we started our church 11 years ago, we envisioned ourselves to be distinctly different from traditional Christian Churches. 

In our mission statement, printed in each Sunday’s liturgy, we say that we are followers of the message of Jesus . . . 

Every Christian church of every ilk would claim an association with Jesus but what we were trying to emphasize was that we were rejecting the traditional church’s message about Jesus, Jesus who was the son of God, the savior who died for our sins, and sits at the right hand of God preparing to judge the world, sending some to heaven and some to hell. We wanted nothing to do with the stained glass sacramentalism of magical religion. We wanted to associate ourselves with Jesus because of the ethical teachings, the moral direction, the compassionate message of Jesus of Nazareth. 

We literally spent months, meeting every week, to hammer out these principles and to be clear about who and what we wanted to be. Sadly, it is always easier to see the absurd hypocrisy in others than it is to see in yourself. I wrote bold and very controversial articles published in local media about the obvious absurdity of the supernatural claims of virtually all churches but what was nearly invisible to me and to my peers at the time, was that we were over confident in how much we knew about the message of the historical Jesus. 

Over the years we benefited from guest lecturers, Dr. Charles Hedrick, one of the leading founders of the Jesus Seminar, and David Trobisch, one of the world’s leaders in biblical texts and historical analysis, and the famous Bishop John Shelby Spong, and I would add that the video series, Living the Questions, introduced us to many other leading scholars on the topic of the historical Jesus. 

Over the years, it simply became increasingly obvious that to claim to follow the message of Jesus is, in and of itself, a fairly preposterous claim. Jesus didn’t write anything and no eye-witnesses of his teaching wrote anything. 

The gospels in the New Testament are late first century and early second century creations in which, for the most part, Jesus is a character who is used to illustrate the beliefs of the gospel writers . . . but the connection to Jesus is dubious at best. 

Let me illustrate how this sort of thing happens:

Socrates was a public teacher in the ancient city of Athens about 500 years before Jesus. He challenged traditional values and was often ridiculed for being controversial on any number of topics. He didn’t write any books. He held no formal positions. But he attracted enough public attention to himself that, in a tragic miscarriage of justice, the city government voted to execute him. 

Years later, his best known student, Plato, decided to defend his long dead mentor’s reputation by writing two short books: the Apology, and Crito. Plato was present for Socrates’ trial and execution, so, it is likely that a great deal of what he wrote was at least based on historical facts. You couldn’t call his accounts “objective” or anything like a news report because he was a devoted fan. If a husband writes a Valentines poem to his wife describing her as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” that does not mean that he has objectively compared her appearance to beauty queens, models, and movie stars the world over… but, fellas, that shouldn’t keep you from saying it.

But, over the years, in all of the rest of Plato’s books, Socrates is the main spokesperson of all of the important ideas. This is in homage of his beloved teacher but the content of these dialogues is really all Plato and zero Socrates. 

In much the same way that, though I am deeply grateful for my late preaching professor, David Buttrick, none of you hear have ever heard me utter a single sentence that I heard in his presence. He influenced me, but he didn’t give me preaching material. 

We can point to many other historical examples of a famous person being branded with a message long after they are dead but let me just point out one more from the Bible:  The Prophet Isaiah has recorded warnings of the coming conquest of Judah by Babylon, and sermons delivered to the captive slave community in Babylon, and beautiful poetry about the return to Judah and the rebuilding of their nation. That is a preaching career of about 120 years . . . hence, there are those who suspect that this is not the work of one preacher. . . or two, or three, or four. 

So, let me get back to what we know about Jesus. The only person we know of who both wrote a part of the New Testament and was a contemporary of Jesus was Paul. Paul was a first century mystic who never met Jesus and apparently knew almost nothing about it and he assiduously avoided learning anything about the human Jesus who was, admittedly, of little interest to Paul. Paul believed that the world was coming to an end and that God was about to enter human history and usher in an entirely new existence. For Paul, Jesus was simply the agent of that eschatological transformation of time and existence. 

Paul was sufficiently well known for his travels and writing that he inspired a number of copycats and fake disciples who wrote in his name.

There are 27 little “books” or chapters and letters in the New Testament. 

Thirteen of those little books declare themselves to have been written by Paul.

Further, the book of Acts is largely written about him. It is a propaganda piece that is intended to bolster Paul’s reputation though the author adds lots of inaccurate and fairly magical elements to the Paul narrative. 

For very many, very good reasons, Biblical scholars have judged that Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus are forgeries. Still, Paul appears to have actually authored Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. 

Paul is the first writer of New Testament material. In many ways, he invented the Christian religion and preserved the name of Jesus for the generations that came after him. He was interested in basically two things about Jesus. 

The first is that he was killed on a Roman cross. The second is that he was said to have appeared in visions to followers after his death. You might say that at least for the sake of one of his arguments with the church in Corinth, that he was also interested in the Last Supper communion ritual. Otherwise, what the message of Jesus was is of no interest to Paul.

If all we knew about Jesus was from the authentic letters of Paul, we would have none of the Christmas story, none of the passion narrative, and all we would have of Easter is visionary . . . that is, no empty tomb, no physical appearances, no ascension into heaven, no great commission, none of that. 

The most reliable information from any ancient source is when they accidently tell us something that they were not trying to convey. For those who have gone so far as to doubt if Jesus was ever actually a historical person, I think that our best evidence comes from Paul’s description of his conflict, or rivalry, with the original pillars of the church, which he speaks of briefly in his letter to Galatia:

Paul is defending his claim that no one taught him about the gospel but that what he knew was revealed to him directly by God, Paul offers one apologetic note that he did visit Jerusalem and spent a couple of weeks with Peter and he met James, the brother of Jesus.  So, this little fragment tells us a lot . . . it lends credence to the historical existence of Jesus and that he had a brother named James and a close follower named Peter, or Cephas. It also indicates that after the death of Jesus, some community continued to meet in the Jesus movement and that they lived in Jerusalem. 

That may not seem like much, but, seriously, it does historically anchor the Christian movement to some reliable reality. And it makes Paul look like a bit of a narcissist to not bother to try to find out more about what Jesus actually said and taught. It is entirely likely that neither Peter nor James even knew how to write. Paul did and he had opportunity and reason to have given us some solid examples of the real teaching of Jesus but, for Paul, that visit to Jerusalem was all about Paul. 

We do have some fragments of possibly first century writings about Jesus and his teachings. I used a saying from the Gospel of Thomas as our wisdom lesson today. The Gospel of Thomas is a curious collection of sayings that has virtually no narrative to it . . . no accounts of miracles, no birth narrative, no mention of resurrection . . . just teachings, some of which are so obscure and so obviously influenced by Gnosticism as to be of little or no interest to us. 

So far as the gospels we have in the New Testament; John, the latest addition, offers no historical data and a lot of misinformation. Matthew and Luke have been aggressively edited and added onto, and Mark, the oldest of the four, is clearly written under the influence of Paul’s letters, possibly as a companion to Paul’s letters.

All of which is to say, we know almost nothing about what the historical Jesus actually taught. That is not to say that there is not a great deal of wisdom and spiritual instruction to be found in the New Testament, just like the fact that Isaiah was obviously written by more than one person, and, arguably, the second writer in Isaiah is a hundred times better than the original writer. 

But when anyone, including us, claims to be following the teachings of Jesus, they are fooling themselves. There is a Jesus you can see in the gospels who is a teacher of radical compassion. That’s the message of Jesus that I meant to elevate when we started this church. But there are churches all around here that could also claim to be following the teachings of Jesus who are deeply devoted to gospel passages that describe Jesus in divine, almost other worldly, and magical terms. 

I can disagree with those churches and their perspective on the gospel message, but in all honesty, I can affirm that most of the crazy stuff they claim to believe can be found in the New Testament…. Sometimes you have to hyperventilate and look at the text cross-eyed to see it, but most of that heaven and hell, judgment, pray for miracles stuff can be found there. 

So, I read the gospels looking for the moral teachings of an ancient Palestinian sage, and most of my peers in ministry read the gospel looking for stuff about the magic, flying, white guy who somehow ended up in Palestine. 

Depending upon your perspective, this could be good news, or it could be devastating. But the hard fact is that there is no “word of God.” There is no source of absolute truth. There is no clear, cogent, undeniable message of Jesus. There are lots of good ideas in the world. There is a lot of wisdom floating about with religions, philosophy, literature, art, and some even in music but none of it comes in a red-letter edition. 

Soren Kierkegaard was an amazing intellect who also happened to not always be right. Voltaire had amazing insights, and he was anything but perfectly insightful. I am a generally reliable resource of information and guidance except for when I am not and it is not always easy to tell when I am being illuminating and when I am screwing up royally. It should tell you something to know that if you want to look at any of my sermons from my first 30 years of preaching, you will have to send a team of archaeologists to the city landfill to try to find them because I destroyed all 

of the copies. It may also help to know that Plato also destroyed all of the manuscripts of his early work because he didn’t want anyone to see it. . . so we have that in common. Well, what do you have in common with Plato?

We were indoctrinated by our public education. We get brainwashed by religion, by the media, by peer pressure, and the manipulative marketing of advertisers. Very few of us had an independent thought in our heads during our young adult lives and sadly, many give up on thinking without ever giving it a solid try. Frankly, I believe that one of the biggest problems in America today is that most people can tell the difference between an informed opinion and an uninformed opinion. That is, education, study, the scientific method, actual research, is put on balance as being worth no more than mere gossip, and wishful thinking. Information is dismissed as being “just your opinion.”

What got Socrates killed, what probably got Jesus killed, was not that they were handing down wisdom from on high but that they kept asking hard questions. They asked people to question their assumptions. They challenged their comfortable opinions and asked them to think. And if we really want to be a better kind of church than what we grew up with, then our job has to be to provoke people to think, and think again. Or, at least that is what I think, and none of you can prove me wrong. 

“Living Beyond Regret”

“Living Beyond Regret”     August 18, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.Marcus Aurelius

As a tribute to the importance of having a good teacher, the three most famous Greek philosophers, arguably, the brilliant minds that undergird western civilization, were didactically connected to one another. Socrates was the teacher of Plato and Plato was the teacher of Aristotle. It may deserve to be mentioned that Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great, but I don’t want to fall down that rabbit hole. 

In the east, the two most well-known teachers were also contemporaries, Lao Tzu, who is believed to be the author of the Tao Te Ching, and Confucius, the supposed author of many fake Facebook memes. 

There is some talk about Lao Tzu being a teacher of Confucius, but such historical accounts are more romantic than objective. Whether he was directly his teacher or not, it would be difficult to believe that Confucius was not influenced by Lao Tzu. 

With apologies to all women everywhere, I will add a sixth man to this list of seminal ancient thinkers, the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. These six men, all of whom, other than Socrates, were quite prolific, and their recorded wisdom shaped much of human civilization, could sit just in the chairs of our front row here. They all lived long enough to reflect on their own lives and the meaning of life itself. 

In William Martin’s rather embarrassingly free interpretation of the Tao Te Ching he writes (The Sage’s Tao Te Ching by William Martin, p. 1) 

Growing older either reveals or hides

The mystery of existence.

If you are becoming a sage

You will grow in trust and contentment.

You will discover the light

Of life’s deepest truths.

If you are merely growing older,

You will become trapped by fears and frustrations.

You will see only the darkness

Of infirmity and death.

The great task of the sage

Is learning to see in the darkness

And not be afraid.

The occasion for this sermon is, admittedly, a bit self-centered. I turned 63 this past week. I am now older than my father was when he retired and though I have no personal retirement plans at this time, it is clear that, as a man in my mid-60’s, that time is drawing near. 

When Confucius reached the age of 70, he reflected on his life, saying: At fifteen I was committed to learning. At thirty I took my rightful position. At forty, I was no longer totally perplexed. At fifty, I began to understand the unfurling of my true nature. At sixty, I was in harmony with contradictions and ambivalence. At seventy, at long last, I may follow my heart’s desire without going astray. 

In our youth-oriented culture, it is helpful to realize that wisdom does not come until late in life, if, in fact, it comes at all. As our joints begin to fail us and our strength ebbs, it is possible to think only morbidly about growing older and closer to death but the wisdom of the ancients calls us not to despise aging but to use it, to dive into it, as we are freed from the impulsive appetites of our youth, it is possible for us to become more reflective and to find not only a deeper understanding but a deeper way of being.

Soren Kierkegaard said that we live our lives like a ship’s captain who sets sail with sealed orders. That is, we may have a plan for career and family, as well as fortune, but life rarely follows our plans. I want for all of us to live beyond our regrets, but we would hardly be honest if we did not acknowledge that we have regrets.

The religious beliefs that made me want to go to seminary evaporated in the clear bright light of an academic study of faith. Actually being a minister was nothing like what I thought it would be. For that matter, being married was nothing like what I thought it would be. I regret that never managed to create a mutually meaningful marriage relationship. I regret that I was not a more cautious and wise chooser, and I regret that I was not more sophisticated in my relationship problem solving skills. 

There are some years of my life that I would love to have been able to do over, to make different choices, to be more patient, more personally disclosive, more careful in my choices of friends and associations. 

However, as Ben Franklin famously said, “We only learn when we are uncomfortable.” My experience of marriage was a 16-year long toothache but without that abysmal marriage, I would not have been able to adopt my favorite person in all of the world. Whatever price was paid to become Valerie’s father, it was a bargain, and I would do it all again. 

The end of my career in the denomination of my birth revealed the hypocrisy and hubris of organized religion and laid bare some of the most base motivations of false friends and associates, but as traumatic as 2007 was for me, my daughter, and a whole lot of other people, it was that very trauma that set me free to become who I am. It set in motion the creation of this church and allowed me to give full-throated voice to a progressive vision of faith that has drawn an audience of thousands of seekers who also want to meaningfully live a life of faith beyond the crude superstitions of antiquity, and the corruption of organized religion. 

One of the most important metaphors of the resurrection narratives in the gospels, especially in John, is that when the dead body of Jesus was brought back to life, that he still had his scars. There was still a spear wound in his side, and holes in his hands from the nails. There are things that don’t heal, wounds too deep to go away, but they become a part of us . . . they become our teachers. 

Unlike many of my religious peers, I vehemently disagree with the baseless claim that everything happens for a reason. I do not believe that God is a supernatural puppet master who is in control of the events of human history. I believe that the universe is capricious and chaotic, and that most stuff happens, while following the observable laws of nature, just because it happens. The human factor can help or hurt that capricious unfolding of events in life but, as the bumper sticker of a generation ago boldly proclaimed, “stuff happens.” 

But those bad things can convince you that you are a victim . . . that you are unlucky . . . mistreated . . . those things can make you afraid, joyless, and yet, ironically afraid of dying. Or those things can become like Socrates to you, the philosophical gadfly that pushes you towards deeper understanding, towards maturity, wisdom, and insight. 

There is tremendous pressure in the world towards mediocrity, conformity, towards sameness, and compliance. There are a thousand wonderful quotes from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but I chose this one to be our wisdom lesson today:  The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.Because, while a certain amount of social conformity, cooperation, compliance, might be expected from young people who are just starting out in life, who have to learn in school how to put in your time, how to wait for your turn. We teach little kids in public school how to stand obediently in line. But, folks, I’m starting to think that the whole point of getting old is to figure out how to get out of line. 

I understand that there are people who found themselves in a job that was not personally meaningful to them . . . they traded the hours of their days for money to pay for a house, and car, and food, and when they could, they retired.

I get that, but still, I wonder, retire to do what? Is it just to stop going to work? Is it to play golf, sit in a rocker, yell at the neighborhood kids to get off of your lawn? Lao Tzu, Confucius, Marcus Aurelias, and to a large extent, Plato and Aristotle, don’t talk to us about going old gracefully and quietly getting out of the way. They encourage us to become people of substance, to pursue wisdom, and once it is attained, to use it to make the world better. The sage, the gentleman or woman, the philosopher, are not supposed to attain to wisdom in order to bottle it up.

I get why people allow themselves to wonder aloud about whether Biden, Sanders, Warren, or Trump might be too old to be president. Age can slow down mental functions and senility, or dementia can be aspects of aging but, come on, Trump was slow and demented when he was 30 years old. Biden was sticking his foot in his mouth 30 years ago. And, conversely, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the Harvard educated, combat veteran, is really really smart and extraordinarily well spoken. And, when I was finishing my doctorate at Vanderbilt, he was still riding on his big-wheel in his family drive way. 

If he were to become America’s first openly gay president, I would be thrilled about that, but I would be a lot more thrilled if that happened in 2028 rather than 2020. I don’t pick green tomatoes to let them ripen on my kitchen counter. I let em stay on the vine until they are ready to meet some lettuce and mayo. You can be very smart in your 30’s but who was the youngest wise person you ever knew? 

I have to acknowledge an exception. Martin Luther King, Jr. was just 35 when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and he was only 39 when he was murdered. If Gandhi had died at the age of 39, we would never have heard of him. If Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, or Confucius died at 39, we would have never heard of them. If Marcus Aurelius had died at 39, you could have found his name on a list of emperors and you wouldn’t know anything else about him. 

Movie stars, athletes, and models might peak when they are in their 20’s or early 30’s but not sages, statesmen, or philosophers. I miss the days when I ran in mini-marathons and then when to an All-You-Can eat Chinese buffet like it was a personal challenge. But every age of life has its virtues. It has taken you your whole life to get this smart. For those of us who get a discount on our movie tickets and McDonalds coffee, now is the time to use your wisdom to its fullest effect.

         

“Devaluing Humans”

“Devaluing Humans” 8-11-19  Dr Roger Ray        

click here to see the video

Amos 8:4-6

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land,5 saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances,6 buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat."

I grew up in rural Kentucky but even way back then, the only people I knew who had chickens were my aunt and uncle who lived on the family farm. I never had to watch the process, but I knew that there was a one to one relationship between the chickens I had seen running around in the farmhouse yard and the battered and fried variety that Aunt Maxine put on the dining room table.

But it was virtually unheard of for most families, who lived in neighborhoods, to keep chickens. We got our eggs at the store and our chicken either came in a KFC bucket or on a little plastic tray covered in plastic wrap. But a few years ago, it  become fashionable, once again, to keep chickens in your backyard. 

Your friends will tell you about how great it is to have all those fresh eggs. But here is a thing about chickens: they will lay eggs for one or two years, generally speaking, but they will live for up to ten years. My aunt and uncle did not name their chickens. They did not hug their chickens. They did not get excited about collecting exotic chickens nor did they sit around the living room with their friends telling stories about the chickens. 

They had scrambled eggs at breakfast and friend chicken at dinner and that was about the extent of their relationship with chickens. My friends, however, name their chickens, their kids play with them, and after a couple of years, they find themselves running an eggless chicken nursing home.

In fact, my friends, Paul and Josie, and I were recently having dinner with someone who lives on a farm. When this woman casually mentioned cooking her non-laying hens, Josie waited for a private moment to mention to me that we should never hang out with that evil women ever again. 

So, you see, when I say, “I love chicken,” it means something entirely different from when Josie says, “I love my chickens.” But, it is not just farmers and butchers who have to maintain some objective distance from the objects of their profession. Have you ever known a surgeon very well? Can you imagine yourself being a surgeon? Frankly, I can’t. There was never a moment when I was tempted to apply to go to a medical school. Even in an effort to do good, I cannot imagine putting a scalpel, or, God forbid, a circular saw, on a living human being. 

But, there are people we need to have in society who don’t hug their chickens and who are able to put enough distance between themselves and their patients to not think of that person getting a new knee as someone who likes to ride bikes, dance, and play tag with their grandchildren . . . at least during the surgery. 

But you don’t want me to see you that way, right? We don’t want our teachers to see their students that way. A normal person, just a decent person for whom basic empathy and compassion makes it impossible for them to eat a chicken that they are familiar with, and let me tell you, I have had to take care of my friends’ chickens a few times and building a relationship with these pea brained skittery poopers does not happen easily, but it does happen.

So, imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when I heard on the news that a school district in Pennsylvania sent a letter to the parents of students who had unpaid bills in the school lunch room, telling them that if they didn’t pay their bill that their children might be taken from them and put in foster care. I know that you want to think that I am exaggerating and, I’ll admit, if it were not for exaggeration preachers wouldn’t have a job, but this is a hard, cold fact. Here is the letter.

This is a school system with an $80 million dollar annual budget that had a shortfall in the lunch room of $20,000 and this school system, this gathering of teachers and administrators were willing to threaten to take children from their parents and put them in foster care for this tiny fraction of their operating budget. - .00025% or 1/4^thof 1 1000^th% -

Joseph Muth is the school administrator who wrote the letter. He seemed to want to avoid contact with the media. I wanted to show you his picture in case you ever see him in an airport, or at Silver Dollar City, or anywhere that you might convey my heartfelt contempt for him and his ilk. One school district official did quip, “Well, it worked.” 

How does someone whose career is in education, in the care and nurture of children, come to see poor school children in about the same way that my uncle viewed the chickens in his front yard just before Sunday dinner?

The ancient Judean prophet, Amos, rode his donkey up to preach among his wealthy relatives to the north, and made fun of them saying that they could hardly wait for church to be over so that they could get back to making money, buying and selling, squeezing the margins…. He says, “making the measure of wheat small,” to get more money for your product until, he says, you buy the poor for silver and the needy for the cost of a pair of shoes.

How do we get to that point? How does money come to be so important and people become little more than a commodity?

One of the most memorable days of my seminary education was in a pastoral counseling course with the late Dr. Liston Mills. He said to us, “No one can love more than seven or eight people at any time and generally we are doing well if we even care about more than two or three.” I was a student pastor at that time with 70 or 80 church members. I was also doing my clinicals in counseling and I saw 15 to 20 counseling clients ever week. I thought I was a good pastor, a good therapist, and I insisted that I loved all of these people… how could I not?

Mills had a way of saying things like they were just unassailable facts that would make me so mad that I just couldn’t hide my disdain for his hard, cynical, take on human nature. . . I was sitting at my desk here in Springfield when I reflected back on that conversation 20 years later and realized that I was no longer in touch with any of those people I so adamantly insisted that I had loved and could hardly remember the names of any of them. Before he died, I wrote about a dozen letters of thanks and apology to Liston Mills, apologizing for what a difficult student I had been, and thanking him for being the colossal jerk of a professor that he was. 

My point is that no one can love everyone. It is easy to allow ourselves to be dismissive of most of the people in the world. If we are not going to treat people like commodities, use them for profit, squeeze the humanity out of them to take their lunch money, then we have to make a conscious decision not to go down that path.

The handsome young former governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, was forced to resign when someone leaked some of his private chats with leading advisors and aids in which Rossello was revealed to be profane, vengeful and cruel, mocking his political opponents with often misogynistic and homophobic slurs, openly fantasizing about an assassination of San Juan Mayor Cruz, and heaping ridicule on ordinary Puerto Ricans, even those who had died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Granted, he is a fan of President Trump, a sure indication that he is at least a quart low on humanity, but this is what I have seen among the fair skinned politicians throughout the Caribbean and Central America when it comes to how they view their brown skinned citizens. 

We can’t love everyone, on a good day, we might only even care about a few people, so we dismiss people for differences in race, politics, economic class, age, weight, sexual orientation. How could a young governor with political aspirations make fun of bodies of citizens stacked up outside of a morgue in San Juan? How could a school administrator literally frighten parents and little kids with separation and foster care, not even for illegally crossing the southern border, as obscene as that whole mess is, but for $20 or $30 of school lunch room debt?

But, you know, being the governor of Puerto Rico got a lot harder after Hurricane Maria . . . so, some gallows humor with your peers while working in a pressure cooker of recovery. And managing a budget and federal programs in a huge $80 million operation, you just start looking at spread sheets and you take out your #2 pencil and you start looking for the holes you can fill. Humanity gets lost. 

Though I sure do miss Barak Obama these days, I remember reading about his use of drones in Iraq and Afghanistan and being horrified. They would send these robot planes into a village to blow up a house where a suspected terrorist was living, and the explosion would obviously kill family members and sometimes neighbors and kids playing in the street and women hanging up laundry in the back. And I read that the military, to deal with these civilian casualties, redefined anyone in the vicinity of a terrorist’s home as an enemy combatant. Just as many dead people, but if you define them as combatants rather than civilians, then you are not a moral monster, but you just promoted yourself to brilliant military tactician. 

But even that inscrutable inhumanity pales in comparison to the way that #MachinegunMitch McConnell is slow-walking a senate response to the current cry for greater gun control. He is making noises about what the senate will discuss but he is doing in the classic, insincere, slow way that he always does, assuming that the public will be horrified by last weekend’s mass murders for just a few weeks and things will all be forgotten . . . the way we forgot about Sandy Hook, Aurora, Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Stoneman Douglass High School, and the Pittsburg Synagogue. More than a half million Americans have died from guns since McConnell first went to the senate and he is as protective of the NRA today as he was when he arrived in 1984. 

No one can love everyone so, to save energy, I gave up trying to love Mitch a long time ago. 

Look, folks, a couple of months ago, to stop my doctor from whining all of the time, I agreed to start lifting weights again. I have a full set of dumbbells on a rack in my home office that has been gathering dust for the past three or four years, so, I looked up a workout routine for men of a certain age, and set out to do the right thing. 

A couple of hours and a few Advil later, I found my way up to the fitness shop to buy some lighter weights. It was humiliating, but I just couldn’t lift even the lightest weights I had used in my previous fitness routine. I’m a walker and a bike rider, but I’m not sure that I could have bench pressed a can of corn. Love is like that. I’m serious. Love is like that. 

And if we fail to exercise our sincere compassion and empathy for others, we will lose the ability to do it very well. I’m not saying that there is a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mussolini lurking about within in us. We are not monsters. None of us would find any thrill in becoming more like Charles Manson. But I am saying that there is a natural drift towards indifference. Because we cannot love everyone, there is a passive willingness to use people, to take the suffering of others for granted.

 There may be a Joseph Muth within us. Some of the rough, dismissive, elitism of a Ricardo Rossello, or the cruel indifference of a Mitch McConnell may be within us if we do not choose to be concerned about those we do not know who also suffer.

Okay, let me dial that back a bit. I’m over selling this.

I don’t want you to lose any sleep over this. There is no creepy MoscowMitch lurking inside of you, or in your closet, or under your bed. You might have to answer a riddle when you are walking across a footbridge some day but don’t worry . . . he’s not very smart.

At the Abby of Gethsemane, the famous Trappist monastery in Kentucky where I go on retreat, there is a modern statue of a very intent looking and forward leaning statue of St. Bernard of Clarvaux, and there is a sash across his chest that reads, “Amo quia amo,” which translates, “I love that I may love.”  I have stared at that statue for 30 years and it was not until recently that I think that I know what this obscure French saint was meaning to say. I love that I may learn better how to love. I love that I may grow stronger in my ability to love. 

I love those near to me that I may be able to love those who are far from me. I love those who are dear to me that I may one day be able to love those whom I now loath. I know what my counseling professor meant . . . we cannot muster the emotional energy to love everyone the way we may love a spouse, a child, one or two dear friends, but we can refuse to forget that the children of the poor who cannot pay for their school lunch are also children who deserve love. I may not be saint enough to sell everything I own and send the money to Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico, but I will not make light of their suffering nor insulate myself from feeling the grief of those who have lost loved ones. 

No one in my family or circle of friends were shot and killed at Columbine, in Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas High School, or in El Paso, or Dayton but I know this, if we allow ourselves to fall back into indifference that somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 more people will be shot and killed in America by this time next year. 

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Against the all too human tendency to withdraw, to insulate ourselves against the pain of the world by retreating into a cocoon of cynicism and anger, I am asking you to exercise your love, to stretch to love more so that you will remember the children in dog cages in detention centers along our border, the children whose parents are buying them bullet proof backpacks to take to school this year, and the kids whose parents don’t have lunch money to send with them. Amo quia amo. 

Evidence Based Faith

Evidence Based Faith  “Haud Ignota Loquor” (Speak not of what is not known)     

August 4, 2019       Dr. Roger Ray 

click here to see the video

1.    Evolution is true.

2.    The Bible isn’t inerrant

3.    Women have the same rights as men.

4.    Homosexuality isn’t a sin.

5.    Owning a gun isn’t a God-given right

6.    America isn’t God’s chosen country.

7.    Neither Republicans nor Democrats are God’s chosen political party.

8.    The modern state of Israel isn’t God’s chosen people.

9.     Decisions about abortion should be left up to individual women.

10.  No religion has any real information about either heaven or hell.

I don’t typically repeat a sermon or a lecture unless I am on tour but I am going to share some thoughts with you today that I prepared for the Anderson Progressive Theology conference earlier this year which they failed to record very well. So I tried it again in Exeter, England in June and their rented recording equipment broke down just as we were starting the conference so, other than my good friend, Paul Thomlinson who has brought his guitar along with me as I spoke in a Presbyterian Church in Clemson, a Baptist Church in Anderson, and a Unitarian Church in Columbia, SC, hopefully this will be new material to be added to our online catalogue.

I promise you that nothing I tell you today is something you would not hear in a classroom at Harvard or Vanderbilt, Yale, or Princeton; I try to make the best of current academic thought seem to be persuasive and to encourage churches to embrace it, but we are all striving to figure out what it means to be progressive and it is a moving target, isn’t it?

Please allow me to engage you in a little memory experiment. I am going to quote a very familiar passage of scripture and I would like for you to repeat it back to me:

 Ich bin gekommen, daß sie das Leben und volle Genüge haben sollen.

If you speak German, or at least my Kentucky accented German, you might have been able to do it, but otherwise, it is nearly impossible. But let’s try that passage again in English. It is John 10:10, most of you have known it forever:

 “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”

Even if you had never heard the passage before, it probably would not have been difficult to repeat because, as English speakers, we have places in our brains for English words, places created through repetition. 

My 30-year-old daughter has had the same cell phone number for 15 years and I could not begin to tell you what it is. From the beginning, it has been programed into my phone and I have never had to actually dial it in all of this time. I can, however, tell you the phone number from my parent’s home, where I grew up, even though that number has not been active for nearly 50 years. That number, through repetition, cut a groove in my brain and it will be one of the last things that I forget. 

Most of us who have had loved ones who have sunk into the fog of dementia or Alzheimer’s know that even when they can no longer remember our names or recognize our faces, we can start to sing familiar Christmas carols or old hymns, and they will often brighten up and sing along. 

The challenge, then, for progressive theology, is that new information has to go up against centuries of tradition and virtual muscle memory. For a hundred years we have been sending young seminary students to graduate school and, at least in the better schools, they have been introduced to biblical critical studies, helping them to let go of the kind of magical and superstitious thinking of the pre-modern era, and to see scripture and theology from a rational and historical perspective. 

In grad school, generations of students have learned that God didn’t write the Bible. They learned that scripture is not either history or science but rather the product of ancient cultures attempting to articulate their understanding of the world and as such, they provide us with philosophical insights, inspiration, and devotional thoughts expressed poetically in metaphors and stories but not facts.

But these young men and women graduate, they are ordained, they look for jobs in churches, appointments or calls, and what they face are churches that have had very little of the training that they have had, but they have inherited generations of traditional faith experience and teaching. 

Ministers then try to straddle the fence. At least initially, they try to maintain academic integrity while using a kind of coded double-speak to use the language of the church but to, at least in their own heads, change the meaning of the words.

I am not going to make this talk too tedious by cataloging major scholars and seminal books, but I do need to mention this one. In the 1940’s, the German biblical scholar, Rudolf Bultmann began publishing a series of books that were used in graduate schools for more than half a century. Many of us cut our teeth on understanding the historical Jesus and the literary nature of scripture by reading Bultmann. He was a true genius and he was uniquely gifted in making the material accessible to grad students, but I have one bone to pick with him and it is this: He literally encouraged seminarians to use the language of the church but to change the meanings of the words. 

They did, but who got changed in that deal? In the end, the church didn’t change. Ministers either became disillusioned and dropped out of ministry or they conformed to the expectations of the congregations. 

So, this huge gulf grew, between what scholars were aware of; facts, insights, honest approaches to belief, and the church. We have a hundred years of scholarship bottled up in graduate schools of religion, and tens of thousands of churches that have built up defenses to remain intellectually and ideologically locked into the 4^thcentury. 

In the 1980’s, the former Vanderbilt professor, Bob Funk, called together 50 biblical scholars and 100 eager lay practitioners, to form the Jesus Seminar. The stated purpose was to drill down into historical Jesus studies and to present the best of academic conclusions to the world in a way that would finally reach into the pews and change the church. Their methods of voting on passages with colored beads was intended to get media attention and to provoke churches in a way that would wake them up and make them use critical thinking skills in the practice of their faith. Many of these scholars have been broadly published but the most famous are almost household names in progressive churches:

I suspect that you know them well: my friend, John Shelby Spong, Jon Dominic Crossan, Karen Armstrong, and the late Marcus Borg.

Millions of books sold, thousands of conferences, specials on PBS, the BBC and even interviews on popular TV talk shows but the impact of progressive thinking on the church still looks more like a scratch than a reformation. 

Let me give you an illustration:  For several months we had the good fortune of having one of the world’s leading textual critics, Dr. David Trobisch, stuck in Springfield dealing with family property and developing the next phase of his career. So, we had him guest lecture for us in our Sunday class during that period. 

He was doing a series on the use of narrative myth in scripture… brilliant, really helpful stuff, and during the Q and A one Sunday, a longtime member, a good guy who had heard Spong at our church several times, he had heard me for years, and Trobisch for months and he asked, “In the Noah story, I can understand God killing all of the people who were evil but why would God kill all of those animals, they weren’t evil?” 

I was both embarrassed and angry. How could you listen to all of this for years and still think that God actually flooded the whole earth, killing off almost everyone and every animal that wasn’t a fish? I announced, “Look, it never happened. It is just a story.” And David interjected, without even a blink, “But Roger, it happens every time the story is told.” 

That is a very nice, very academic, very existential way of treating ancient narratives . . . it allows you to preserve the story within congregational life but, and here is my beef: It allows people like this very nice guy to just go on believing that God flooded the earth, And believing in angels, heaven, hell, Jesus being physically resurrected, and the prospect of having oft repeated prayers answered. 

We have this divide among progressive scholars. The last Jesus Seminar meeting I 

Attended was in the spring of 2005. Bob Funk was near death, finally succumbing to cancer. One of the founders was giving me some recognition for my work in popularizing progressive faith in the congregation where I worked at that time and Bob Funk flew into a rage. He was very angry at me for still working for a church. Bob had given up on the church ever changing and he felt that I should be working in a media or college environment where I might do more good. 

Bishop Spong, on the other hand, still goes to an Episcopal church most Sundays. He publicly recites the Apostles’ Creed, sings the old hymns, and participates in traditional baptism and communion rituals. No one in the last generation has done more than these two guys to bring scholarship to the church but Bob gave up on the church before he died, and John is still in the thick of it. 

I respectfully disagree with both of them on this point: I do not believe that we should give up on the church emerging from the shadows of the Council of Nicea, but I do not agree that we should placidly go on repeating the language of traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

The world needs progressive communities of faith. We have a lot of important work to do in giving birth to a better, more just, and more sustainable society, but I don’t think that we can get there by just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need a modern reformation that dismisses magical thinking in favor of critical thinking, and lets go of superstition in favor of scientific congruity in an evidence based faith. 

We need to start writing liturgy that does not undermine what we are trying to say in our sermons. The liturgy, the hymns, the anthems, and prayers of our public gatherings are teaching opportunities and, if you look at almost any book of worship from any denomination, what the liturgical resources teach looks like it comes straight out of Darwin’s Waiting Room. 

And the truth of it is, the church was not always mired in this kind of creedal and Biblical literalism. Karen Armstrong is exhaustively clear in her book, A Case for God, that history has been littered with scholars, bishops, and philosophers who were not fooled by literalism in their religious faith. 

No one had a bigger impact on scholarship prior to the modern era than Augustine of Hippo. The 4^thcentury teacher insisted that even though the Bible clearly described the earth as being flat and covered by a solid bowl that separated the waters below from the waters above, that to take that literally would bring shame on the Christian faith since it obviously was not true. In the 4^thcentury, Augustine knew that you had to interpret scripture in the light of science and not to make the church look stupid by denying science on the basis of revealed scripture. In the 4^thcentury, Augustine was saying to the conservative evangelical crowd, “Come on guys, knock it off, you are embarrassing us.” 

In the 5^thcentury, no one less than the prophet Muhammed said that Jesus wasn’t really the incarnation of God because that whole idea is ridiculous. Jesus was a great religious teacher and prophet, but no human is God. Think about it. The claim doesn’t even make sense. It is poetic language at best and not great poetry. 

I won’t bore you with a recitation of everyone who tried to make the world wake up to the difference between literally interpreting creedal religion and the poetic metaphor of trying to express our highest ideals in the crude container of language but over the years you have heard pastors quote major thinkers from Voltaire, to Thomas Paine, Soren Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Neihbur. I suspect that many of us here escaped the mental prison of traditional churches by reading books by Borg, Crossan, Armstrong, and Spong, all of whom have sold millions of books over the past few decades and yet, I am left to worry about the future of the progressive movement.

Even with all of this clear, rational, scholarly information available to people who have read the books, heard the lectures, watched the videos, but it seems like the evangelical world has a strangle hold on society that is so strong that people come down to this false dichotomy:  that you either accept the whole of religion on its face as being literally true or you reject it and become an atheist.

Forgive me for quoting Woody Allen, who is, obviously, a sorry excuse for a human being, but he illustrates my point for me, so we’ll give him a moment of sunlight…. In a commencement speech he delivered years ago, he sardonically concluded by saying, “More than any other time in history, we face a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

The choice is not between being an atheist or a traditional evangelical. There is 500 years of great biblical, theological, and philosophical scholarship that represents the best and highest of human thought and it offers to us a rational, progressive way into a future that allows human dignity, community, sustainability, and profound scientific and technological progress to flourish. 

As the great Dane said: There are two ways in which a person can be fooled. One is to continue to believe what is clearly not true, and the other is to refuse to accept what is true. 

The progressive reformation asks the church to let go of ancient myths and creeds which clearly are not true and to embrace the best of scholarship which is as close to the truth as we humans can get. And embracing that means that we have to change how we talk. It changes how we approach Christmas and Easter. It changes what hymns we sing and what readings we put in front of our people.

Because, as Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Religion has made men confident that they were to rule over women, that homosexuals were inherently evil, and that only Christians were right. None of which is true and all of which needs to go away.

For far too long the church has accepted that there is some mutually exclusive choice we have to make between faith and critical thinking when, I am here to argue, that what we really need to do is marry our faith to our critical thinking. 

First, please allow me to try to rescue the meaning of the word “faith.”

We have tended to use the word to refer to things that we believe because we believe them. We “take it on faith,” or we claim that it is an article of belief. 

There is no evidence of the existence of angels or demons, of heaven or hell, of souls, spirits, ghosts, unicorns, leprechauns, or dragons but history is dotted with individuals who say that they have seen them and insist that they are real. 

It does not come as a surprise, however, that when the Virgin Mary puts in an appearance somewhere, it is always to Catholics. People who report a vision of Jesus tend to be Protestants and people who report a vision of the Buddha tend to be Buddhists. They are not, in many cases, being dishonest. They have had a profound experience and they report it in the language that they know.

When the prophet, Muhammad, had his first vision in a cave in Hira, he thought that he had encountered an evil genie. He, in fact, considered committing suicide because he feared that he had been possessed by this evil spirit. But his wife sent him to talk with her cousin, who was a Christian, and she convinced him that it was the Angel Gabriel who had visited him and that he should go back to the cave and listen again. Muhammad’s wife, Khadija and her cousin, Warqah, gave Muhammad the images and the narratives from Jewish and Christian scriptures and he combined that with his own Arab history of superstitions and personal experiences to produce the Quran. He didn’t actually have a series of encounters with the archangel Gabriel, but he had mystical experiences that he expressed through the language and images he had been given. 

But faith is not about believing in ghosts. Karen Armstrong talks about this at length, describing the early church’s practice of baptism that when a person was lowered into the water, as they came up, they shouted the Greek word for faith, “pistus.” For them, it was an exclamation of courage. In those early years, becoming a Christian was an act of defiance against an oppressive state and its emperor worship. It was not a suspension of reason but a two-fisted grip on courage. 

Martin Luther King has said that “faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” That is not a matter of assassinating your brains. It is a conscious choice to have courage. 

It may not immediately feel like it is related but I need to introduce, or re-introduce another theological concept that is important to what we talk about next, and that is 

“Personification.”

As humans evolved consciousness, self-awareness, their experience of life was interpreted through their emotions. They felt fear, elation, sadness, and desire. And they tended to interpret the world based on their own experience. Storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the change of the seasons, were not matters of meteorology or tectonic movements. 

They projected personhood onto aspects of nature and interpreted events as the emotions of persons. The sun, the wind, thunder, rain, rivers, the ocean, the earth itself, become gods and goddesses, who, like them, fell in love, got jealous, hungry, angry, or sleepy. 

This instinct is not foreign to us, even now. The nature conservancy produced an a

mazing series of short videos in which their recruit actors and actresses with very familiar voices to speak as though they were aspects of nature. Do yourself a favor and look these up on YouTube, they are amazing! Julia Roberts is mother earth. Harrison Ford voices the ocean, Penelope Cruz is water, Robert Redford speaks as the Redwood forest. Personifying these aspects of nature makes nature more relatable, it draws us closer and we are more easily persuaded. 

But is Julia Roberts mother nature? Is Harrison Ford actually Poseidon, the god of the ocean? No, of course not. These are just the images we use to talk about important things… the same way Muhammad turned his mystical experience into conversations with Gabriel and people have, through the years done the same with Jesus, Mary, Buddha, Zeus, Odin, etc. 

While personifications may be helpful in telling a story or as a teaching technique, we should not confuse our illustrations with reality. Now, you might reasonably ask me, “why does any of this matter?” If your cousin goes to a Pentecostal church and speaks in tongues and they really believe that they magically channeling the voice of God or of angels. 

If your Catholic aunt prays the rosary, lights candles at the feet of statues of saints, and wears a scapular under her blouse to keep demons from jumping into her soul, or if your Mormon neighbor still wears magic underwear in the belief that it will protect him from car accidents and plane crashes, what’s the harm?

Well, maybe I could be more gracious and say that it doesn’t matter. Anyone can believe whatever they want. But I have this caveat: 

I think that Voltaire said it best: Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities. 

What goes through the mind of the person who killed all of those Muslims in Christ Church in New Zealand in May? And the guy who killed the people in the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston? Or the guy who murdered all of those people in the Pittsburg synagogue last October? What about when your religious beliefs inspire violence or perpetuate misogyny, homophobia, racism, sexism, or nationalism? 

One of our native sons of Missouri, H. Richard Neihbur says it this way: 

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse. A great deal of the magical and superstitious aspects of traditional religion is just way too easily coopted by people who use it to oppress women, discriminate against gay and lesbian and transgender peopled, and to justify military and terrorist violence between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Religion can promote good things or bad things and we have come to a time when we need to work hard to extinguish the bad and emphasize the good.

As Karen Armstrong famously writes in her autobiography:  If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.

The church has been sold a truck load of snake-oil, being told that you have to put your brain on the shelf and believe any number of totally ridiculous things in order to be a good Catholic or Baptist, or Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist. 

May I remind you that, if you take the narrative at face value, Moses became the founder of a religion by leading slaves in a revolt and an exodus. Buddha, tradition has it, was born a prince but he abandoned the palace and lived in poverty, teaching others to care for the poor. Jesus was a teacher of radical compassion, befriending lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes and foreigners. Muhammad, in stark contrast to the caliphs and sheiks who succeeded him, lived in a tiny house and wore ragged clothes in a lifelong identity with the poor. 

I contend that every major world religion began as a reformation intended to bring social justice to the poor and vulnerable. In each case, after the deaths of the first generation of leaders, the religions evolved into creedal faiths, manipulated by the powerful to control the vulnerable. 

Moses didn’t set out to create a Zionist form of nationalism. He spoke truth to power and told the pharaoh “Let my people go.” Jesus wasn’t some lunatic who thought he was God who was going to die for the sins of the world, he was a teacher who told people to love their enemies and to forgive their brothers and sisters. 

Our religious narratives should not be encased in stained glass windows, repeated in creeds, and diving into wishful thinking about an afterlife. Our faith should be a matter of good deeds, kindnesses, mercy shown to the undeserving, and compassion shown to the sick, the poor, the immigrant, the imprisoned, the grieving, and the lonely. 

Now, there are those who will insist upon reiterating a literal belief on Easter Sunday that Jesus came physically out of the tomb. There are those who, without evidence, will insist that heaven and hell are real, that they have an eternal soul that chickens, pigs, and fish do not have. They may continue to believe in a supernatural theistic friend who lives in the clouds and grants wishes, but I don’t know anything about those things.

What I do know is that more than half of the children in the school system in Springfield are growing up in poverty. I know that one in three girls and one in four boys will be sexually molested before they turn 18. 

I know that millions of people are being refuse healthcare, housing, and access to education in the richest country in the world. I know that more than 30,000 people in my country are going to die from gunshot wounds this year and more than 60,000 will die from drug addiction. I know that our border security is currently holding 15,000 children in tiny, nasty cages, separated from their parents. I know that in 2019 women still earn significantly less than men, on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, no woman has ever been elected the head of state.

And that most churches still think that you have to have boy parts in your underwear to be able to preach, baptize, or serve communion. I will tell you, I have boy parts in my underwear and have never, in a 40 yearlong ministry, used them in any way in the writing or delivery of a sermon or in the administration of religious rituals . . . and I have a strong sense that policy will not change. It is time for the church to get real. 

In closing, let me quote Virgil, who wrote in the Aeneid: Haud Ignota Loquor

Speak not of what is not known. We must get our heads out of the sand and be more concerned with how we live our faith and less concerned about the magical beliefs of our ancestors.