I Guess the Devil Did Go Down to Georgia

I Guess the Devil Did Go Down to Georgia        3-28-21    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

I am reminded this morning of the scifi spoof series, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the 

Galaxy when the giant computer created to find the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, took millions of years to come up with the very disappointing answer of “42.” I normally try to pick just one topic for our limited time together each week but life, the universe, and everything have demanded some kind of rational response to anti-Asian prejudice, gun violence and gun laws, shocking voter suppression moves, mental health issues and the ways in which white supremacy is tying it all together.

 

Like a lot of people of our ilk, we had hoped that the November election would be the end of a nightmare in America in which the darkest elements of our nation’s id had been validated and allowed to run wild in the streets. I don’t know why that I allowed myself to believe that we could simply turn a page and normalcy would return. It seems silly now, but in the light of day, we recognize that we have a lot of work to do to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And, in the words of our Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, “failure is not an option.”

 

The November presidential election set records for the total number of votes. Trump actually got more votes in in 2020 than he got in 2016, but, thanks to energetic voter registration drives and “get out the vote” efforts, especially across the south, Biden got even more votes. 

 

We have to soberly note that he still barely won the electoral college vote because that strange 250-year-old compromise with slave owning states is still empowering the former slave states with disproportionate power in our presidential elections. The electoral college system, an institution that exists in no other democracy in the world, is a part of what Isabel Wilkerson so brilliantly describes in her book, Caste, as being a part of the racist studs in the walls that hold up our nation. Racism continues to be an almost invisible part of the very bones of America . . . hard to understand and even harder to get rid of. 

 

Trump and his most ardent followers were not merely sore losers in the election. They simply couldn’t believe that it had really happened. Trump’s phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president desperately demanded that Raffensperger do what is clearly massively illegal and anti-democratic, and just find an extra 11,780 votes for Trump because there was just no way that he could have really lost Georgia. Of the myriad legal liabilities our former president faces, that phone call may be the event that eventually sees Trump in prison. 

 

But the delusion was not Trump’s alone. The insurrection we experienced on January 6^th was, in large part, a violent and coordinated effort fueled by an unconscious white privilege that pushed people to take back an election that they felt had been stolen from them, not by rigged voting machines, voter fraud, or a conspiracy of foreign nations, the deep state, Democrats, or deep space Jews with laser beams. It was votes cast by people of color along with a many of my tribe, a rare species of white people who still have an intact conscience. 

 

The insurrection was idiotic. Genuinely stupid people, manipulated by genuinely evil people, to attempt something that simply could not succeed. But folks, evil isn’t always stupid. The Proud Boys, the 3%ers, the various racist militia groups that stormed the Capitol Building on January 6^thwere not the brains behind sustaining the white privilege that has ruled our nation for 250 years. 

 

The strategists in Republican states were not buying bear spray and “stop the steal” flags, no, much more insidiously, they went to work to suppress the votes of people of color. In the past three months, more than 250 state bills have been introduced by Republican legislators, across 43 states, to try to limit the ability of minorities to vote. Though they try to spin it as stopping voter fraud, what lies behind that is a deep-seated belief on the part of white conservatives, that black and brown people really shouldn’t be allowed to vote. These people are so convinced that they should be in power, that they will subvert democracy itself to be sure that they are in charge of our nation.

 

Now, let me point out, that while they are actually convinced that a minority of voters should be the decision makers, they would not agree to something like only allowing people with doctorates vote, an education and information based version of Jefferson’s preference for only allowing white, male, land owners to vote. They would not agree to only allowing people whose IQ was higher than 140 vote. They are not interested in having smarter, or more educated, or more informed people making decisions . . . this is white privilege in its most pure form. In fact, some of their heroes are the QAnon, conspiracy theory riddled, uneducated, knuckle dragging, mouth breathing, dangerously unhinged people in America, but they believe that they should be in charge. Because they are white. It is that simple.

 

The most offensive and obviously racist of these new voter suppression laws are in Georgia. After Georgia voted for Biden in November and then, in the Senate runoff races in January, Georgia elected two Democrats, one of which is a young Jewish journalist and the other a seasoned black pastor, Georgia Republicans went to work, not to change their message and policies to attract more diverse voters, but to make it harder for minorities to vote. For years they have been closing voting places in poor neighborhoods, shortening the voting period and hours, but after the senate wins in Georgia, they have tried to made it illegal to vote on a Sunday, a day when black churches take bus loads of church members to vote in their “souls to the polls” programs. And, since they have made voting places so few and so crowded that lines can be hours long, they have also made it illegal to give food or water to those who are forced to stand in line for five to eight hours. 

Let me say that again, Georgia has made it illegal to give a grandma, who has been standing in line for five hours, a drink of water. The Charlie Daniels classic that sings: the “Devil went down to Georgia, looking for a soul to steal,” might have to be updated. It looks like the Republicans in Georgia have already given up their souls for any chance to cheat and steal in order to stay in power. This is racism so naked, it is impossible to hide. 

 

Even in the now hotly debated use of the filibuster in the Senate, we see how this Senate rule has been primarily used to suppress voters rights for blacks for 160 years. Last year, when Barack Obama referred to the filibuster as a vestige of Jim Crow era practices, I didn’t even know what he was talking about, but a flurry of well-done media reports has catalogued the dozens of times that filibusters have been used to block voting rights legislation. 

It was predicable when Strom Thurman famously led filibusters of the Civil Rights Act in 1957 and 1964, but when Rand Paul filibustered an anti-lynching bill just last summer, how can you be in favor of lynching in 2020? And now, now in 2021? There is a voting rights act bill set to go before the Senate that can wipe out some of these shameful and obviously racist attempts at limiting minority voting but if the Republicans can filibuster it, they will. Literally, democracy itself is at stake if we don’t overturn the filibuster rule.

 

In a different but strangely related topic in this “life, the universe, and everything” message, after seven mass shootings in as many days, there is the predictable conversation about doing something about our insanely lax gun laws in America to make it at least a little more difficult to buy deadly firearms, especially the ones that have no application to hunting or home defense.

Although mass shootings make up only a fraction of the total number of people killed by guns in the United States every year, there is a chillingly similar theme that runs through most of them. The vast majority are using a weapon that is eerily similar to the weapons used on a battlefield. An AR-15 has been used in most of the mass murder instances in the past few years. This is a weapon that used to be banned and could easily be banned again. This could be managed by a simple vote in a functioning government, if only we had one of those.

 

The most recent mass shooting took place in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. 

The shooter had a history of mental health issues, but it deserves to be said many times over that the mentally ill are much more likely to be the victim of crime than they are to be the perpetrator of a violent crime like this one. In this case, the shooter appears to have been regularly bullied specifically because his mental health issues made him different, and therefore a target. Friends said that he sometimes had outbursts but usually got over it quickly and was an OK guy. 

 

What turned this young man into a mass murder was not the uncommon nature of his mental problems but rather the ready availability of a military styled weapon. Which is true of many of the cases in this list I just showed you. Untreated mental illness is an issue of concern in America but that is complex. It is impossible to tell which person who suffers from paranoia or who sometimes has delusional thinking might one day turn violent. What makes the difference is the easy availability of these kinds of weapons.

 

There are people with issues of instability in England, in France, in Germany, and Mexico, and Egypt, but they don’t have these mass murders because these weapons are not easily and readily available to them. The time when these events could be portrayed as unavoidable mysteries is long past. Most people in America do not want these weapons on the market. Most law makers know that they could solve this problem in a week if they only had the political will to do it. And, most Democratic lawmakers will vote on a measure in the next few days to do just that, but the predictable thing is that the Republicans will use filibuster and cloture rules to keep it from passing. 

Some of that is because of the political donations of the now tremendously weakened NRA, but mostly because they are catering to that element of their base that already believes that the NRA is too lenient, that group of genuinely crazy voters who think that they should be able to buy hand grenades and shoulder launched missiles if they want them. 

40,000 Americans die of gunshot wounds every year, and more than 100,000 are wounded, some very seriously disabled, because guns are too readily available to the general public. If we regulated guns the way we do cars, demanding licensing and liability insurance, those statistics would change overnight. Every other Western Democracy has done it. Only in America are our politicians on the right so corrupt that they continue to suffer this inexcusable carnage. 

 

But there are two sides to this equation . . . there are the corrupt and immoral politicians to allow this untenable situation to go on, and there are the people who keep voting for them. That people like Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, James Inhofe, and the laughably ignorant Ron Johnson, are returned to the Senate in election after election would almost make you doubt that evolution has actually happened. Missouri has a lot to apologize for in having sent Josh Hawley to the Senate, but Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida continue to keep us from appearing to be uncommonly irresponsible voters. 

 

With Columbine, Sandy Hook and the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school shootings, we learned that our children, even the little ones, are not safe in school. But we have also learned that going to the mall, a movie theater, to church or synagogue, or mosque is also no safe. Even the grocery store can be a place where you learn to look for exits, leave if you see a suspicious looking character, and you just never know what place might be unsafe to go because our government has placed our lives in the hands of every unstable, angry, paranoid, self-pitying person in America. 

 

But Georgia, Georgia, that beautiful state that has come to embody the deepest divides in our nation. They were largely responsible for voting Trump out of office and putting the Senate into the hands of Democrats, while still embodying some of the most toxic politics married to racism in America. 

 

My final issue today is the much talked about mass murder of people in Asian spas in the Metro Atlanta area. This one was similar to the others in that the shooter was an unstable young man who was able to LEGALLY buy a 9 mm hand gun just before he went on his shooting rampage, killing 8 people, six of whom were Asian women, the apparent targets of his rage.

 

I have anguished over this one because I believe that there is so much that needs to be said and yet there is so much that can be said wrongly or misinterpreted. My daughter is a beautiful Asian woman. She has been my only child since she was 4 months old. I have experienced, firsthand, the way in which Asians are both admired as model immigrants, while perpetually being made to be somehow, never quite American. And Asian women are hyper-sexualized, made out to be the objects of fetish and fantasy, but never quite entirely given status as equal people. 

 

My former in-laws were uneducated racists in Memphis, TN. My introduction to anti-Asian prejudice took place before my daughter even made it to these shores. When we told my former wife’s family that we would be adopting a little girl from Korea, my wife’s mother burst into tears and announced that Asians were all drug addicts and that if her mother gave her up for adoption, she must be a whore and that our little girl would grow up to be a drug addict and a whore. I was barely still a part of that family that Christmas morning, and it wouldn’t be long before I started the paperwork that would make me a single father. 

 

There were other incidents along the way. Bullying on the school bus began in kindergarten so that I drove her to school myself every day until she was old enough to dive her own car.  It seemed more legal than dealing with the elementary school bullies on the bus myself. In our largely white community, she was both minority and novelty. I discovered in school that she was asked to pose on the front row of a choir photo, a choir she was not a part of because the school wanted the choir to look integrated. In Middle School she was made a cheerleader without even trying out for cheerleading because they needed to integrate the squad and even though there were dozens of black students in the school, they chose one of the three Asians to be their person of color. 

 

In the end, she always preferred navigating her own way through the largely white world in which she found herself, rather than to have me fight her battles for her . . . something I was always eager to do. But when this guy bought a gun and traveled to three Asian spas to kill the women who were the objects of his obsessive lust, my daughter was shaken, as were Asian women and men, parents, grandparents, and children all over America. 

 

Evangelical religion played a role in this. The shooter not only suffered from sexual obsession, he also suffered from tremendous religious guilt. He had even spent time in an Evangelical sex treatment clinic, trying to overcome his obsessions. So, his church both filled him with guilt and hopelessness and after he committed these horrible murders, murders that had the fingerprints of irrational guilt-ridden religion all over them, the church met to dis-fellowship the shooter, saying that he was not one of them when, in fact, he is the logical outcome of their toxic theology. 

 

In the same way that this whole wave of anti-Asian prejudice is the product of Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric, attempting to blame the pandemic on Asians rather than his own incompetence and criminal indifference. Here is the part that I need to be really careful about . . . just as I said about the shooter in Colorado, yes he was suffering from mental illness but you can’t portray everyone with mental illness as being a more likely murderer. . . they are more likely to be victims than they are victimizers.

 

In this case, the land mine that the media has tried to avoid is the apparent fact that this young man in Georgia had been to Asian spas for sexual attention. That these spas are often fronts for brothels is not something that can be much disputed, but we must not suggest that because some of his victims may have been sex workers does not mean that they in any way deserved to be murdered or that their deaths are any less to be grieved than the deaths of people at a country music show or in a grocery store. I have not attempted to discover if these three spas were actually selling sexual services or just massages because, folks, it doesn’t matter. 

 

But it did matter to this young fundamentalist. For him, the women he desired were somehow less than human. They held powerful sexual allure, but their value as humans was not considered when he decided that killing them was a way to put distance between himself and his lust. To kill a person, you first have to take away their humanity inside your own skull.

 

When my father was sent to fight in the Pacific during WW II, they did not teach the soldiers about Japanese art, poetry, literature and sculpture. No, they showed them caricature drawings, depicting the Japanese as having the ears and nose of monkeys, sometimes even with a monkey tail. It is easier to kill a monkey than it is to realize that person on the other side had been taken from their school and family, just like you had been, to kill the other children of the poor on the other side of the globe.

 

It seems important to me to add regarding this particular crime that there are many layers of racism and abuse involved here. There have been a number of important documentaries done on this whole business of Asian spas. One excellent piece of reporting was done by Lisa Ling on CNN just last year. Many if not almost all of the women who work in these spas are trafficked. They were recruited in China and Korea, told that they could come to America and be actresses, models, or even schoolteachers. 

 

But, instead, they were put into this massage sex business against their will. Their passports are taken from them. They are housed together, given little or no exposure to English. They are moved around the country to make sure that they never make friends or even find an ally among their clients. This is well documented. The police know what is going on here. And yet, right here in our small city of Springfield, MO, the international headquarters of the Assemblies of God, home to several Baptist colleges and seminaries, mission centers, and mega churches, we have at least a dozen such spas operating in the open. There are more than 20 in metro Atlanta. You see them along interstate highways. They are in cities and even small towns all over America. 

 

Now, do you believe that if there were English speaking, American, white young women being forced to work in these sex shops that the police would ignore them? I’ve lived here for 30 years. The ones on the north side of town appear to have been there all along. But if that was Sally, and Rhonda, and Erica, and Mary working in those back rooms, do you think it would take all of 24 hours for the police to raid them and shut them down? I don’t. What makes the difference?

 

It took this horrific shooting in Georgia for most people to become aware of these businesses, but they are rooted in a largely unconscious belief that Asian women are prostitutes, which, though illegal almost everywhere in the United States, it is ignored by the dominant culture because this is the role relegated to these women. 

 

So, they were victimized by those who recruited them and forced them into the business. They are victimized by a culture that is indifferent to their plight so that they get no police intervention or protection, they are vulnerable to their managers and their customers and now even to a disturbed young Christian evangelical with a brand new 9 mm pistol. 

 

Laws against prostitution are, I assume, well intended. We don’t want women being used this way and we don’t want men to be sexually irresponsible or to encourage sex that is not a part of a committed relationship. However, government regulation of morality never really works, and it creates a place in society for this kind of abusive and criminalized business. 

 

The painful reality is that you cannot legislate the sexual appetite of society away and, like with alcohol and drugs, trying to outlaw their use creates organized crime and greater levels of violence, illness, abuse, and, in this business, trafficking of defenseless young women. 

 

The joke about the Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy’s giant computer, Deep Thought, telling them that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is 42, is, even if 42 is the right answer, it doesn’t explain the complexities of life or solve any problems.

 

While right wing media is obsessed about cancel culture and the loss of Dr. Seuss books they had never heard of, the de-gendering of Mr. Potato Head who never had anything more gender identifying than a moustache, and going all #MeToo on Pepe Le Pew, there are real things going on that they don’t want to think about. 

 

The Republican Party is trying to keep millions of people of color from voting. More than 40,000 people are being shot and killed in America every year because our gun culture is not properly regulated, licensed, and insured. And right now, there are between 50 and 100 women forced into sex slavery in this small town and thousands more in the states around us, which is just a part of the anti-Asian prejudice that has gone almost unmentioned by anyone for a hundred years. 

 

The good news is that these horrible problems have been largely solved in most western democracies. We need only look across the pond towards the democracies in western Europe where guns are effectively regulated such that their fatal shootings are typically less than 1% of ours. Where voting rights are guaranteed, and drug use and prostitution have been decriminalized while sex trafficking is aggressively prosecuted. 

 

I realize that the answers that work among our allies won’t sound good in an evangelical Sunday School class, but Evangelical ideas are what have gotten us into the mess that we are in now, so doing what we have been doing is very obviously not the answer. I’m saying that we need to be less puritanically pious and more intelligently compassionate. 

 

If you don’t like gun control, if you oppose voters rights, and you don’t want to decriminalize prostitution and drug use, then I am eager to hear your solutions to these cultural problems because what I know that we have to agree upon is that the status quo is not acceptable. 

All that I can really add is, “don’t panic” and don’t forget your towel. 

 

The Unforgivable Sin?

The Unforgivable Sin?              March 21, 2021   Dr. Roger Ray

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Like a lot of teens of my generation, I discovered the novels of Kurt Vonnegut like a breath of fresh air apart from the assigned readings in my school. Vonnegut wrote what even he described as “trash” fiction, but he peppered his books with matter of fact recounting of historical events, some of which were based on facts and a lot of which were just snarky imagination. The book that made him famous was Slaughterhouse 5 which was full of both dark humor and bits of hope, as well as very frank exposés of how corrupt and hypocritical that people are, while reassuring readers that it didn’t really matter much because we’re all pretty messed up.

 

Though 50 years have passed since I read his work, I remember his account of the invention of the photograph in the early 19^th century being followed up by an assistant to the inventor being arrested for trying to sell photographs of a woman having sex with a pony. Like any good fiction writer, Vonnegut gave specific names and places to the alleged arrest of André Le Fèvre, in the Tuileries Gardens, even though there is no historical reference to such an event.

 

Still, his point was fairly accurate. Pornography, sometimes exaggerated and disgusting pornography, has been a ubiquitous part of civilization since long before the erotic paintings in first century Pompey. The closest we came to pornography in my home of origin was the underwear section of the J C Penny catalogue and the nudity in the National Geographic magazines my uncle sent to me. But Vonnegut’s more earthy depiction of human depravity made me feel a lot less guilty about the occasional sojourns my adolescent friends and I were making into more ribald literature available at the local drug store. 

Almost every museum of fine art contains more than one Renascence era painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastien. And most visitors to those museums stop and look and ask themselves, “Who was St. Sebastien?” which is more or less the point. Historically and religiously, he is a minor character of third century Christianity who probably never existed, but the story goes that he was tied up to a post naked and Roman soldiers shot him with arrows. 

 

That made him a perfect subject for artists as the world emerged from the Dark Ages because it gave them an excuse for painting an athletic nude male, even tied up in a kind of kinky way, add a few arrows and call it “religious art.” When its real purpose was something else entirely. For centuries, we have debated what is art and what is pornography, what is culture and what is indecent. 

 

Most of us can remember when John Ashcroft was the Attorney General and the 

Justice Department spent $8000 to put a blue drape to hide the bare breasts of the statue of Lady Justice in the Supreme Court building because, right-wing evangelical Ashcroft didn’t want her boobs showing when he gave a press conference in the Supreme Court. With the rather expensive drapes hiding Lady Liberty’s chest, we only had to see one boob during Ashcroft’s press conferences. But I digress.

 

It is all a bit reminiscent of Lilly Thomlin’s one woman show, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe, in which she plays a delightfully schizophrenic street dweller who is trying to explain to some imaginary space aliens the  difference between an Andy Warhol painting of a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a photograph of a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. “This is art. This is soup. Art. Soup.”

 

The sad fact is that our civilization has just never been able to make sense out of our sexuality. And pornography, as a part of our sexuality, confuses us even more. We are simultaneously repulsed and intrigued. 

I was a seminary student in 1980 when my then-wife and I went to the only theater in the small Kentucky town where we lived to see, Blue Lagoon, which featured the 14-year-old Brook Shields in what is broadly considered now to be child pornography. I don’t think anyone would have called it “art” but no one at the time was calling it child porn. In fact, it got a PG-13 rating in 1980 but it would not be a film that could even be legally made today. 

 

I did my clinical field education in local mental health offices and, in those years, you  could still find copies of the first clinician’s reference book, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, on the shelves. It is now in its 5^th edition, but the first edition listed homosexuality as a diagnosis of a mental disorder. The DSM II updated that in the mid 1970’s to “sexual orientation disorder” but homosexuality was considered to be a diagnosable disorder in one way or another right up until 1987.  

The World Health Organization only removed it in 1992, though they retain a diagnosis called “ego-dystonic sexual orientation” which is still used to label homosexuals as having something inherently wrong with them. You see, determining who is sexually normal and who has some kind of mental illness or moral deficit is a moving target that even the world’s largest associations of the best trained psychiatrists and physicians cannot seem to either agree upon or get right. 

 

Religious people often like to believe that their sacred scriptures outline a divine plan for sexual purity but, I have to tell you, as a biblical scholar, the preponderance of scripture supports not just polygamy but concubinage and it shrugs at capturing neighboring nation’s young females to become breeders within the tribe. 

 

In modern times, most of us who try to find a defensible, ethical approach to human sexuality, have landed on concepts of informed consent. It is apparent that children cannot give consent but who is a child is a subject of debate in different times and places. It’s a touchy subject, but the Muslim prophet, Muhammed, consummated his marriage to a 7-year-old when she was just 9 years old. 

 

While every state sets the minimum age for marriage at 18, every state also has loopholes for exceptions, with parental consent. In the first decade of this century, more than 160,000 girls were married under the age of 18, some as young as 12. This is, in my opinion, tragic, I only mention it to say that, as a society, we are still a long way from clarity.

 

The two things we all seem to agree upon is that rape and sex with a child is always wrong. Some politicians still use the troubling term, “forced rape,” as if all rape is not forced and children, even when consenting participants, cannot ethically be considered capable of consent. Beyond that the #MeToo movement and preceding cases such as the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 have gone a long way towards educating us about sexual harassment that enlarges both the social ethics and legal conversations about sexual morals. 

 

The sudden rise of the internet has complicated the sexual landscape. Much like Kurt Vonnegut’s clever but fictional account of how quickly photography was turned into a means of distributing pornography, the internet immediately became a means of accessing porn without going to a sleazy interstate highway sex shop and running the risk of encountering someone you know. Early estimates were as high as 90% of internet traffic was pornographic but now that most of us have one or two computers logged on all of the time, we work on the internet, research, post, and socialize on the internet but still, more sober estimates indicate that more than a third of internet traffic is still pornography. 

 

Given the diminishing returns from exposure to pornography, it tends to become increasingly rough, with more than 80% involving violence towards women and not a small amount involving children. Rape is illegal but watching a video portraying rape is a part of TV shows, movies, and most of the pornography on the internet. Watching a child in a sexual act, however, is a crime for which many people are now serving time in a federal prison of up to 20 years. Though we seem ready to accept that watching a video that portrays rape does not cause the viewer to become a rapist, we still insist that watching child porn turns the viewer into a predator even though research shows that assumption to be false.

A friend of mine asked me to go to court with her when her son was being sentenced for possession of child porn. He was in his early 20’s. A nice kid who had some impulse control issues related to a bi-polar disorder. He never had sex with an underaged girl or made any attempt to do so, but in the privacy of his own room, without the knowledge of anyone else, he had fallen into a spiraling dark hole of watching porn that involved teenaged girls. You might think that a person like that would be court ordered to receive counseling, they might be restricted from owning or having access to a computer or a smart phone. They might even be required to do a great deal of community service and report to a parole officer for three or four years.

 

No one, and least of all me, believes that viewing child porn is a victimless crime. There is a point of origin and those who produce these videos are worse even than what Kurt Vonnegut’s trashy imagination could cook up. But the people who accidentally find themselves wandering around these dark pages of the web, rarely know when they have crossed a boundary from what might be thought of as normal curiosity into a universe that is inherently evil. By the way, did all of you who saw the Blue Lagoon get up and walk out when you saw what it was about, or did you watch the whole movie?

 

But what happens to tens of thousands of young men like my friend’s son, is a 15 year sentence and a lifetime on a sex offender registry that governs where they can live, what kind of work they can do, and even what kind of assistance they can receive for education or job training. 99% of offenders are men. 83% are white. Only 5% have ever had sexual contact with a child. 

 

Our judicial system barely makes a sentencing difference between a young man watching videos on his laptop in his bedroom, and a predator who snatches a child off of the street to rape and murder them. And, in fact, as the parents of any one of these thousands of young people in prison will tell you, if their son or daughter had merely shot and killed someone, they would get out of prison sooner, have a shorter parole, and they would not be on the career-ending, and in many ways, life ending, registry of sexual offenders.  

 

With more than two million incarcerated Americans now and more than nine million on parole, we have clearly lost our way as a society, reflexively imprisoning people who need help, often, help with addiction. Hundreds of thousands of people are in prison because they had a drug addiction and I feel like our judicial system is finally recognizing in more and more countries and in more and more states here in the USA that these people need treatment and not incarceration. But we are hardly having a conversation about the absurdity of how people who become addicted to porn are being imprisoned and then forced to live with the stigma of being a sex offender for the rest of their lives.

 

I have participated in conferences and support groups for families of these people. I have published newspaper articles and written sermons, but I can tell you, it is hard to generate sympathy for people who are obviously over sentenced and chronically punished, because, somehow, this is still the unforgivable sin.

 

What I find to be especially sad among the families of these young men is that the whole family often finds themselves being ostracized and cut off from their families, their friends, and even their spiritual community.

 

I wish that we could be confident that our spiritual leaders would be experts in giving love and support to those who have made a mistake or even to those who have committed serial offenses but all too often we find churches, synagogues, and mosques to be ill-equipped to deal with sex crimes. When you don’t know what to say, it would seem that you could at least sit and listen, but the unsavory nature of the crime makes most people want to avoid contact and to pretend that it didn’t happen. 

 

When I was in grad school in the early 80’s, our professors confidently told us that pedophiles could not be cured, and that the perversion only tended to get worse and more violent. This was based on clinical opinions that were not supported by any meaningful research. Habitual viewers of child porn, porn addicts, and even child molesters generally do respond to treatment. Still, society is, generally speaking, altogether comfortable with viewing these offenders as being disposable people. Those who love them, parents, siblings, and friends often find themselves being shunned. 

 

I don’t take these biblical accounts as being an accurate recounting of historical events; I think that they are moral lessons but whether you read it literally or, like me, you read it literarily, there is a story in the 9^th chapter of John’s gospel about a time when Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who had been blind from birth, an indisputably sad thing. His disciples asked Jesus, “Whose fault is it that this man was born this way? Is it because of something he did or something his parents did?” Jesus is reported to have sidestepped the guilt question, avoiding laying blame, Jesus told him, “This man’s suffering is an opportunity for you do a good thing,” literally, to “play God.” 

 

Those of us who would claim to be spiritual, or to be in favor of loving families or meaningful friendships, need to remember that our “super power” is the ability to show compassion in the midst of terrible and sad events. I have tried to make it clear that the rush to judgement in the case of those condemned to the sex offender list for life is exaggerated and almost always inappropriate. That is not to say that they are innocent, but since none of us are innocent either, maybe we can dig deep for that better part of ourselves that can act to show mercy in other people’s darkest moments. 

 

My Sister and Brother’s Keeper

My Sister and Brother’s Keeper        March 14, 2021    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 

Genesis 4: ⁹Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ ¹⁰And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! 

 

After a year of living with this pandemic, I had the good fortune to receive the Pfizer vaccine recently and so I now have a reasonable confidence that even if I am exposed to the Covid-19 virus, that I am not likely to become seriously ill. Which has given me a little more freedom of movement, but caution is still very important until most other people have been vaccinated.

 

I recently had a real melt down after an attempt at going to a public place. I try to walk several miles every day for health reasons. Exercise is not really an option for me, I am aware that it is the only way to maintain my health. But when it is raining or when the sidewalks are covered in ice, keeping up that discipline gets to be more challenging. On a recent bad weather day, after consulting with my physician, I went to our local mall to get in my steps indoors. I had not been to the mall for year, and I was pleased that, at the entrance, there were large banners announcing the rules that everyone had to wear a mask at all times, that there are directional arrows on the floor to keep the flow of human traffic appropriately separated, and there were even markers on the floor to help everyone know what six feet looks like.

 

However, the hundreds of people in the mall were wandering about in much the way that a herd of cows would….. without masks, and paying no attention to the directional arrows on the foor, or to the distance needed to make being indoors together a little safer. 

I am pretty well protected by my vaccine but I know that I am in a tiny minority and that I was surrounded by people who, though they may not have had any particular malice in their hearts, that is, they didn’t come to mall set on killing some strangers, but in their indifference to the virus safety measures we have all had hammered into our skulls every day for a year now, could only mean that they would rather give a deadly disease to random strangers than to be bothered with properly wearing a mask, and maintaining some distance. 

 

I really don’t want to believe that most of the people in my small mid-western city are evil but based on the evidence at hand, it seems to be inescapably true. Which, initially makes me very angry but when the rage subsides, what I am left with is profound sadness. I had no idea that most of my local peers could be so beset with depraved indifference, an almost casual acceptance that their carelessness is precisely what is prolonging the pandemic and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. 

 

The pandemic will eventually be more or less over. We will eventually get to the point where this is not such a lethal event, but when it is over, what will we have learned about ourselves? How has it changed us, or, more to the point, how has it failed to change us?

 

With your permission, I would like to process our present ethical dilemma theologically.

 

I grew up in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) the more progressive of the four American denominations spun off by Irish Presbyterians during the massive revival period of the mid-19^thcentury. 

It will seem like an almost crazy issue to our ears, but what caused the major rift between the founders of my heritage and Presbyterians was the controversy between infant baptism and believers’ baptism. In an age when the Bible was thought to be absolutely true and detailed obedience to the demands of scripture were considered to be determinative of salvation, with either heaven or hell hanging in the balance, you want to get the details right.

 

The founders of my mother church, Alexander Campbell and Barton Warren Stone, felt that baptism was crucial to being in a saving relationship with God and that infant baptism just didn’t count because the person being baptized had not made any personal choice in the matter. If you recall, the gospels all include a large role for the Hebrew prophetic preacher known as John the Baptist. The practice of Baptism is not an ancient Jewish practice, but it wasn’t entirely invented by Christians either.

 

In the ministry of John the Baptist, it appears to have been a kind of ritual bath in which penitent Jews could renew their faith by confessing their sinfulness, and getting a kind of fresh start in life. Some historians also believe that it was used during times of evangelical Judaism to baptize gentile converts to the faith, especially for female converts. Men had a more ancient and a rather more painful and bloody ritual to undergo but I don’t think there is any reason to discuss that now.

 

One flaw in the legalistic interpretation of the gospel’s take on baptism being for forgiveness of sins is the fact that all four gospels also give accounts of Jesus being baptized, and if baptism was for forgiveness of sins and Jesus was said to be sinless, in fact, the spotless nature of his semi-divine soul was crucial to the interpretation of his death being sufficient for the salvation of the world, then why was Jesus baptized?

 

I realize that this is a very foreign religious exercise for those of us who long ago abandoned such legalistic and creedal Christian beliefs, but, if you can get your head into that space . . . if baptism is for the forgiveness of sins and Jesus was sinless, why on earth did all four gospel writers give us detailed descriptions of Jesus’ baptism?

 

I will confess that when I was a puppy preacher, this was actually a problem for me. I just couldn’t understand why I was supposed to take baptism so seriously, to teach classes for young people every spring and to hold Easter Sunrise baptism services year after year, when, the event of the baptism of Jesus made the whole thing seem to be suspect.

 

I have to credit my homiletics professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. David Buttrick, with delivering one of the truly memorable lectures of my graduate school career on just this topic. He was certainly one of us, in that he was not a biblical legalist, he was not a supernatural theistic religious person but so far as the preaching value of the four accounts of the baptism of Jesus goes, Buttrick said, “No one gets to live innocently in this fallen world. Even if you can make yourself believe that Jesus never personally committed a sin, he wore clothes, ate food, and slept in houses, all related to industries of slavery, oppression, and abuse. 

 

If you know that the wheat in the bread in your hand was grown, harvested, and ground by slaves, can you innocently eat it? If you know that the wool in your robe came from sheep cared for by slaves, sheered by slaves, combed, washed and spun into thread by slaves, can you then dispassionately wear that robe? 

 

And, again, please bear with me as I wade into the weeds a bit farther, we modern Americans have been raised with the notion that sin is always personal. Just as the revivalists of the modern era have insisted that those who would be saved must first accept Jesus Christ as their “personal” savior. I have created tremendous discomfort in a number of clergy gatherings when I have pointed out to my evangelical peers that the word “personal” does not appear in either the Old or New Testaments. That no one in the Bible ever accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior. The concept would not have even made sense in the first century church.

 

In almost all of the Bible, sin is primarily social sin . . . it is a culture that mistreats the poor, that enslaves neighbors, and takes advantage of immigrants. There are person sins, but the big ones, the ones that really matter, are societal. If this is the first time you have ever heard this concept discussed, your reflex reaction will be to dismiss it. I can only ask you to take some time to think about it and consider it with an awareness of the biblical narratives.

 

It is, of course, obviously absurd to believe that anyone, not even you, could live an entirely pure life, with no impure thoughts, words, or deeds, but even if you could, unless you lived on an island all by yourself, if you live in society at all, you are participating in the collective sin of culture. 

 

There are virtually no bananas on the grocery store shelves that were not grown and harvested in virtually slave conditions. Have you ever eaten a banana? Almost all coffee is grown in cruel, slave like conditions. Did you have a cup of coffee today?

 

And if you are concerned about dogs being left outside in the cold, have you ever seen a hog farm, a cattle farm, a chicken operation, a turkey farm? Are we innocent of animal cruelty or participating in forced labor, or even child labor, if we wear clothing made by children, eat produce grown and harvested by forced labor, or eat the meats produced through animal cruelty? 

 

This awareness has driven many people, including notable persons like Gandhi, to eat a vegetarian diet, to make their own clothes, right down to spinning their own cotton, and living in a community sharing in gardening and construction and even sanitation duties. But no matter how hard you may try; nobody gets to be innocent.

 

I took as our wisdom lesson for the day a couple of verses from the 4^th chapter of Genesis that will be very familiar to those of you who grew up in a traditional church. It is a part of the story of the Bible’s first family, that sorry fit of jealousy that drove Adam and Eve’s two sons to fall into a lethal conflict. Cain killed Abel and a very anthropomorphic representation of God shows up in the narrative to confront Cain. God asks him, “Where is your brother Abel?” 

 

On the one hand, this is a specific question within the events of a specific pair of brothers, but, of course, that’s not how the Bible really works. It isn’t about Cain and Able, it is about you and me. It is about all of us. Cain asks the question that everyone in this pandemic plagued world must answer, “Am I am brother’s keeper?” Am I somehow responsible for the whereabouts, the well-being of my sisters and brothers? What about the strangers at the mall? 

What about the people who are afraid to go ahead and get the vaccine? What about the people who live in countries that are too poor to buy vaccines? 

 

What is it to me that entire villages of Eskimos in Alaska are collapsing under the weight of virus infections? Why is it a concern of mine that parts of Central and South America are awash in virus infections with no hope of a vaccine on the horizon? Am I responsible for the well-being of random coffee plantation workers in Nicaragua, banana plantation workers in Costa Rica, coconut and palm farmers in the Dominican Republic? 

 

If the stupid people in the mall who will ignore a full year of warnings and media education about how to stay safe, choose to place themselves, their own children, and total strangers at risk, what does it matter to me if I get my 10,000 steps in?

 

Folks, I am, right at this moment, wearing clothing that was manufactured in a South Korean sweat shop. And what is more, I adopted my daughter 32 years ago from South Korea where her birth mother was an unwed teen, working in sweat shop making clothes to be sold in America. And you, my friends, are not much more distantly connected to this industry than I am. Check the labels in your clothes and even your shoes. You are, consciously or unconsciously, supporting forced child labor.

 

And I drank a lot of coffee before I came here, and I am likely to have a fruit smoothy before this day is over with fruit harvested by slaves in Central America. I still eat meat. I try to live lightly on the earth. I invest in renewable energy, avoid over packaging, I don’t shop at Walmart, and I try to buy locally grown foods, but you don’t get to live in this world innocently. 

I acknowledge that obviously none of us are innocent, none of us are pure, but the question I hope this sermon asks is, “Are you trying as hard as you reasonably can?” And when it comes down to observing the basics of limiting the spread of a deadly virus, what possible excuse does anyone have for not wearing a mask, washing your hands, and keeping some distance between yourselves and others? 

 

I’m not asking to raise your own sheep and cotton, to weave your own cloth and makes your own clothes. I’m not suggesting that you never eat imported foods or become a strict vegetarian. But if you won’t do the easy stuff that could stop a tidal wave of deaths, then how can you tell yourself that you are not evil?

 

Am I my brother’s keeper? You bet I am! Are you your sister’s keeper, are you responsible for helping to make her world safer, healthier, to give her a shot at living a full life? You bet you are! And for those of us who, by nothing but chance, were born in a wealthy country, are we the keepers of Haiti, Columbia, the Sudan, and Myanmar? There is currently a shortage of vaccines in the world, but a lot of wealthy nations have already purchased future production, more than enough to vaccinate their entire population two times. Is that just? Is that fair? Is that in any way defensible?

 

Now, to be fair, President Biden announced last month that the US would donate $4 billion in vaccines to poor countries, we just haven’t done it yet. Who has? Russia and China, in part for international relations and, in part, because if we vaccinate all of the USA and Europe but leave poor nations mired in Covid-19, then there will be a steady supply of new mutated viruses that will not be stopped by our vaccines. 

If we want the pandemic to end in the USA, we have to make sure that the pandemic ends everywhere. It is the right thing to do ethically, and it is the right thing to do selfishly.

 

I am glad that my health and my age made it possible for me to be vaccinated but it is not lost on me that being recently vaccinated is also purely an accident of having been born in America. More specifically, being born white and belonging to the professional middle class in America, advantaged me once again. My significant other, Silvia, is a professor in a university town near Chapeco, Brazil. 

 

Now that I am vaccinated, I was planning to go see her, but we have decided this week to delay our reunion until it is safer. Chapeco is currently in near collapse from Covid-19 infections. I wish that I could go and walk through the airport vaccinating everyone I see but that is not how the politics of vaccines work. 

 

Again, you may not feel connected to what is happening in South America, but you just are not that far off. We can all celebrate the genius of the pharmaceutical scientists who have given us several highly effective vaccines in just one year. 

But what does it mean for me to be vaccinated if Silvia cannot be? And more than that, all of the millions of people in Brazil who, by no fault of their own, happened to have been born south of Texas?

 

I know that it is uncommon for me to mention the Bible at all in our progressive community but if you can indulge me just a little more. There is, in scripture, both an awareness of our obligation to those who are near at hand, the people who drink from the same spring with you, the people who walk in the same mall as you do, as well as those who do not speak English, can’t shop on Amazon.com, and who live where there is no prospect of a vaccination program.

 

The prophet Ezekiel said, (Ezekiel 34.18) Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? You may think that because you personally feel safe that you don’t have to worry about the safety of the people around you, and that is true if you don’t mind being a despicable human being who doesn’t deserve to live . . . . did I say that out loud?

But even though we have not gotten to be consistently concerned about those who are leaning over the same fountain for a drink as we are, it is too small a thing for us to be concerned with the other people at the mall and to not care about the people in the poorer nations of the world. When the Hebrews were being liberated from their long captivity in Babylon and allowed to return to Judah and rebuild their temple and their culture, the prophet Isaiah wrote, speaking for God, 

(Isaiah 49:6) ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
   to raise up the tribes of Jacob
   and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
   that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’ 

 

The remnant of Israel was the opposite of a global superpower. They were not wealthy. They were not powerful. They were dependent upon the charity of foreigners to even have the lumbar to begin rebuilding their temple, but even then, Isaiah wanted for them to remember, it is not enough that their nation be restored for their own welfare alone. 

If they were going to be lucky enough to be restored at all, they had to realize that their good fortune meant that they needed to be a blessing to the world.

 

Is the Modena, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson and Johnson vaccines a blessing for Europe and America or are these vaccines a blessing to the world? That, my friends, depends entirely upon who we are. Are we deplorable, narcissistic, self-serving bastards, or are we decent and compassionate folks? Honestly, I can’t wait to see the evidence.