“The Lost Year or Our Year of Losses”

“The Lost Year or Our Year of Losses”         May 30, 2021       Dr. Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

Miriam Kirmayer: Clinical psychologist and friendship expert writing for the BBC
How will the pandemic affect friendships?

Feeling connected to our friends is one of the single most important predictors of our physical health and emotional wellbeing, and loneliness is quite literally toxic for our health. My hope is that as painful as the current distance is, it’s also a reminder of how precious our friendships are and a not-so-subtle nudge to reflect on how we can cultivate more meaningful connections.

We will eventually resume our shared activities, playdates and events. But we can also benefit from shifting our narrative about the importance of our friendships as adults and recognizing the steps we can take to cultivate closer, more fulfilling relationships.

  

       We come to this Memorial Day weekend with a shared yet historically unique sense of grief. There have been 600,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the United States during the pandemic, more than 3.5 million around the globe. We are beginning to see the end of it here, with declining numbers of infections and a rapidly deployed vaccination program with now several kinds of vaccines which are very nearly miraculously effective. 

I am leaving for Brazil tomorrow morning, where the virus is still spreading faster and the death toll will shortly rival our own, but even there, vaccines are finally reaching the people whom I personally know and love, and will, by the end of the year, catch up with our progam.

But the end of this pandemic will not become a return to normal. Some things have changed that will never be the same. This is our last Sunday to meet in this familiar music venue and pub because it has now been sold to new owners and it will re-open under a new name. 

Some of my favorite local restaurants have closed and will not be reopened. Any drive around town will reveal how many retail shops are now closed and how many familiar services have economically collapsed during the pandemic.

I have no idea how many churches will not survive the long months of on-line-only services. Our little seated congregation was in slow decline for several years prior to the pandemic and months of quarantine have accelerated that decline towards the inevitable transition for us to become an almost exclusively on-line church. I cannot tell you how much that has grieved me on many levels, both personally, and as an advocate for progressive faith. 

I have long believed that the old traditional forms of religion, which have honestly been out of date and often worse than irrelevant for 200 years, would pass away, unmissed, and that new, progressive communities of faith would emerge and grow strong. I, frankly, cannot even relate to the appeal of traditional Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, all of which is more magical thinking and denial of reality than it is actually helpful, rational, ethical teaching, but what I see, at least on the local horizon, is the success of toxic religion and the demise of academic, relevant, nurturing faith. 

Which is why David Ketchum and I have resolved to keep our progressive messages alive on YouTube an iTunes for as long as we can find enough support around the world, to keep offering an informed, progressive perspective to our thousands of listeners who have come to depend on us as a resource. 

We have rented an office here in Springfield which will serve as our business office and recording studio, and out of that office we will try to coordinate some local service efforts as well as occasional gatherings for the remnant of progressives in our area. 

David is very involved in various support groups serving the gay, trans, and non-conforming community, as well as coordinating English language Buddhist services, and working with the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, Native American, and other poverty related concerns. 

My semi-retired life will involve dividing my time between Springfield, Missouri and more travel. I am going to open my calendar to begin to book speaking engagements in other states in those churches that are now emerging from their own quarantine. So, if anyone of you listening would like to try to get on my speaking schedule, just be sure that you can cover travel costs, and I will do my best to come be a part of a Sunday in your faith community. I’m inexpensive but I can’t subsidize travel, so invitations that begin with, “the next time you happen to be in Calgary, Scotland, or Boston,” please understand, that’s not how this works.

I cannot resist taking this opportunity to say a memorial word about our own journey as a church. In 2007, I had a parting of company with both the church I had served for 16 years and the denomination of my birth. I plan to write a book about that whole fiasco over the next couple of years, but while I felt that my days of preaching were over forever, I did agree to lead a book study that fall for people who wanted to talk about how traditional churches had failed us, both intellectually and morally. 

We talked about the social justice issues that really should define ministry and the kinds of things ways that our former churches had wounded us and driven us away. 

There were former Catholics, Pentecostals, as well as Unitarians, Disciples, and Methodists in that gathering. And after coming to a point of general agreement on what the core ethics of church really should be, one woman finally ventured, “Well, why don’t we just start our own church?” Which is, on the face of it, a very reasonable question.

I went to the blackboard and began to write down the elements of a traditional church service and as I wrote, I asked for a show of hands among the 50 or so gathered folks, of what elements would be a part of our new church’s service . . . some wanted to do away with hymn singing, some insisted on praise hymns. Some wanted to do away with intercessory prayer, others thought that such prayers should be the primary focus. Some wanted a fairly traditional theology, they just wanted to be inclusive of people of different sexual identities, and those often excluded from traditional services, such as the divorced, the chronically poor, or racial minorities. 

After lengthy conversation, we realized that we could not describe a church service that more than 6 of the people in the room would attend. This is often the curse of liberal groups. You can agree on 80 or 90% of the core elements of what being a community of faith is about, but if you can’t have 100% that is exactly what you personally want, then you pick up your toys and head for the door. 

I had gone to work for a non-governmental relief agency doing medical and housing work in Nicaragua. I didn’t expect to ever go back to church. Not because I didn’t miss being in community. Not that there were not aspects of church services that I desperately wanted to have in my life, but because, quite simply, there were no churches I knew of that were worth going to. 

This is something I discovered in my years as a graduate student at Vanderbilt. In the divinity school, there were a couple of dozen professors but, over the years, I realized that only three or four of them actually attended any church. I asked one of the professors that I was close with why he didn’t go to church and he said, “I’m still waiting to find one that is worth supporting.” 

I totally get that. In a recent program I did with Jay Thomlinson, the host of the progressive news podcast, The Best of the Left, we discovered in the breakout session that my involvement had lit a fuse among the participants who all wanted to tell their story of how they had been traumatized by the church they attended when they were young. In fact, David and I are hosting a meeting on Zoom on Tuesday evening of June 22 to discuss overcoming religious trauma. 

A lot of churches have done a lot of good over the decades, but it is difficult to tell if they have done more good than they have done harm.  There have been very many good things, but there has also been a huge amount of harm. The majority of churches, synagogues, and mosques still sharply discriminate against women, gay, lesbian and trans folk, they ironically seem to be typically silent in the face of racism and are only interested in symbolic charity in the face of poverty, rather than real, prophetic, change to our economic system that creates poverty. And even the more socially liberal among them, still teach people to believe in magic and fairy tales which, I believe, contributes to the general dumbing down of civilization. 

We’re trying to figure out how to preserve the good, without perpetuating the harm.  And that is not nearly as easy as you may think that it would be!

Over the past 14 years, we have gone through several evolutionary iterations. For years, we tried to grow into being a full-service church, with classrooms for all ages, choirs, mission trips and projects, but even with a huge expenditure of energy and resources, we couldn’t satisfy enough people at the same time to sustain those efforts.

For the past few years, we have accepted that our primary focus is not on Springfield, MO and certainly not just on ourselves, but that our most important role is to produce relevant, current, progressive material for a global audience. 

I wish that we could have done both. I wish that we could have built up a flagship for progressive people here and everywhere, a laboratory where we could show other groups around the country how to start and sustain a church and I think that we did exactly that for several years, but with or without the pandemic, we were going to economically run out of steam. The world is changing rapidly and for us to remain relevant, we are also going to have to make changes, and not all of them will initially feel good to everyone. Inevitably, today, we will find ourselves still at the same point where I was with my book study group in the fall of 2007. No one will get everything that they want but we must become what progressives around the globe need for us to be. 

When we started our church, we leaned heavily upon the writings of the world’s most famous religious scholars: Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Jon Dominic Crossan, Sister Joan Chittister, and my good friend who has been here with us on three different years, Bishop John Shelby Spong. But theses “A” listers have gotten old on us. Marcus Borg has passed away. Bishop Spong has suffered a stroke. Sister Joan is now 85 years old. 

Even though the talks that Bishop Spong delivered here continue to be very popular on our YouTube channel, even a decade ago, these pillars of progressive thought were only producing a few new talks every year. We produce more than 50. And our content does not focus, as the previous list of scholars typically have, on rehashing interpretations of ancient religious texts; we are trying to offer a spiritual perspective on current events. 

Their work will remain an important resource but, in a world where Donald Trump happened, and a global pandemic, an insurrection, and the threat of international hacking of water, energy, and flight systems by global bad actors, we need more than occasional talks about the Bible. And we need more than violence and fear porn that passes for news with partisan, divisive commentary. 

We will endeavor to inform you of things the news often avoids. We will try to speak on behalf of those most often ignored. We will try to inspire and if nothing else, at least get people to think about ethical situations in a new way. And beyond angry and cynical reactions to unsavory current events, we will strive to be a source of hope. 

We will try to create community in our area through regular service projects and gatherings and we will hold regular zoom meetings and events for our global audience. We hope that we can count on you for your support to keep us employed, at least on a part time basis, so that we can continue to be a full time source of challenge to governments, corporations, bigots, and fascists…. Because you know that you want us to. 

 

Tired of Childhood Poverty Yet?

Tired of Childhood Poverty Yet?   May 23, 2021     Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

The pandemic relief bill that President Biden is on the verge of signing contains a child benefit plan that resembles Blair’s in its ambition. Most families will receive $3,600 a year (paid monthly) for each child age 5 or younger, and $3,000 a year per older child. Other provisions in the bill will further lift income for poor families. The benefits phase out for many households making six-figure incomes.

Luke Shaefer, a University of Michigan professor, told the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that the child benefit was “the most transformational thing” in the legislation. My colleague Jason DeParle, who has covered poverty for years, wrote that “the child benefit has the makings of a policy revolution.”

Over all, the legislation will reduce the child poverty rate this year to about 6 percent from about 14 percent, according to projections by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia. The biggest declines will be for Black and Hispanic children.   March 9, 2021 New York Times, by David Leonhardt   If I were to ask those of you here and ask our viewers on-line in whatever city you live in, “how many homeless people are living unsheltered in your community?” Do you think that you could take a stab at it? Not the number of people living in homeless shelters, but how many are living under bridges, in sewers, in tents hidden in wooded areas, or even in city parks? It is a fluid number, of course. But for most of the year in Springfield, we estimate that there are about 500 people, mostly men, but some women and some children, sleeping hard outdoors. I walk a lot, for exercise, so I walk down streets where there is typically almost no foot traffic, and I will hear them or see them, near major intersections, mostly near the places where they sit, holding signs, asking for donations.  Usually, when the police realize where they have established a camp, they will come and clear them out. The highway department will even cut down a grove of trees and mow the weeds to reveal the most popular hiding places. We don’t usually hear about them until one is found dead, most commonly in the winter, from freezing. There are hundreds of them all around us, you would be surprised by how many live within a mile of your home, you just don’t see them, and I will add, even when you do see them, you probably do not consciously see them.    You don’t know them, you don’t want to get involved, you don’t want to spend energy on them, and, frankly, no one can care about everything. But I wonder, do you know how many elementary students are in our school system? Do you have any idea how many of them are black, Native American, Latino, or are immigrants? What’s more, do you know how many of them woke up that morning in poverty? I was not a fan of the 2009 animated sci-fi movie, Avatar, but there was one thing about it that continues to be memorable to me. The greetings that the indigenous people of the planet, Pandora, greeted one another saying, “I see you.”  In the more intense exchanges, it was intended to convey a reassurance, “I see you, I understand you, I get you, maybe even, I respect you, I love you, you are not alone.”   I’ve been a pastor since I was 22 years old. I can still remember driving up to my student church and seeing a sign painter, painting my name on the illuminated sign in front of the church in Russellville, KY. I didn’t know that was going to happen. I hadn’t thought about it, that my name would be on stationary, business cards, signs, in newspaper stories and eventually, when they got around to inventing the internet, on websites, YouTube, iTunes, and lots of publications.    Within the church community, at least, I have an identity that I have carried every day of my adult life. People see me, recognize me, some may love me and some may despise me, but I know that I am seen in this context.    But my most common personal pastime is to go out to venues like this one in the evening to hear live music, usually to hear my friend Paul playing. So, I end up at a table with Josie and Paul comes to sit with us during breaks, but even when we go to hear another band, other musicians want to come up and talk to Paul and Josie. Paul is one of the most gifted guitarists I know and everyone who either is or aspires to be a guitar player, wants to come and talk to him.    In that context, I am nobody. I can’t play an instrument, I can’t sing, and Sean can tell you, I can’t even clap in rhythm. I sit there silently stroking my beard as if I were a Greek philosopher, lost in thought, because, while I enjoy consuming music, I have nothing to offer.  But sitting with Paul and Josie is like sitting British royalty in a nightclub. People come up to talk to them and will interrupt our conversation and sometimes literally lean over me to talk to them as if I were a piece of furniture. Sometimes entirely blocking my view of the stage for two, or three, or four songs.    And folks, I’m 6’2”. I’m not going to tell you how much I weigh but I assure you, I don’t have to jump around in the shower to get wet. But they don’t see me because, heck, I’m in a music venue and I am not a musician. I keep thinking that someone might ask me to explain the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard to them, but it never comes up. No one seems to be innately curious about how Marcion influenced the final form of the New Testament. And the fact is, Marcion was a huge influence and the story is really interesting . . . never comes up.    I am often the center of attention here on Sunday morning, but if you see me sitting out there on a Thursday night, I’m just a bump on a log. I might get really frustrated if someone is talking through Paul’s performance of Blackbird, but, other people just don’t have to notice me on Thursdays.    So, the fact that you don’t know how many school children woke up in a homeless shelter, tried to find their homework and the backpack in time to get on the bus, is not much of a surprise. They don’t have college degrees. Their names are not featured on stationary, business signs, or websites.  They have not published books, bought a house in your neighborhood or even had a job. And, they tend to be short, really short, and some of them don’t even weigh as much as my right leg.    What’s more, the ones that are growing up in poverty have a very high chance of remaining in poverty for the rest of their lives. They are likely to never earn degrees or have their names painted on signs. They are not even likely to live as long as the children who didn’t grow up in poverty. Now, you can define poverty in lots of different ways but if you just consider the percentage of kids in the Springfield School system who are on free and reduced lunches . . . that is a fair yardstick of poverty isn’t it? What percentage of our 12,000 kids would you guess are receiving free and reduced-price meals in school?    It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if it was 1 in 10, here in the richest country in the world? But what if it is more than that? What if it is half of them? You don’t see them, unless they are members of your family, but there are thousands of them. And the truth is that 60% of the kids in this city are growing up in poverty . . . but folks, that’s just the average. More than 90% of the kids who go to Campbell, McGregor, Weaver, Williams, and York elementary schools are growing up in poverty. 95% at McGregor. By the way, do you know where McGregor is?  It is on West Madison, just a few blocks west of Missouri State. 95% of them living in poverty and will probably never make the journey from McGregor to sit in a classroom at Missouri State.  Success in life is something of a race. That is how our competitive economy works. You have to compete. You have to be one of the best, if you want to get ahead. But in a real race, don’t all of the runners who are racing for the same finish line at least get to start on the same starting line? You know, if it is a 1000-yard dash and you make most of the runners start a half a mile back from the starting line, that’s not much of a race, is it?   Childhood poverty in America is nearly invisible to those who are not immediately familiar with it. School teachers know. Social workers know. Eventually, employers will know when they can’t find an employee who can read an instruction manual or make change at a drive through window. But most of us never see these kids until their trajectory has been, if not written in stone, it is very near to it. Poverty is a form of violence and it puts stress on families that often lead to crime, substance abuse, mental illness, and domestic violence. These children often become parents while they are still children, and all too often due to no choice of their own.   Most of us have known young couples who were putting off having children until they could afford it. Which, in many cases means, they never have children. The United States doesn’t typically give new parents paid leave to be with their baby. Childcare options for the poor are typically pretty awful to non-existent. Only the poorest of the poor get access to healthcare.  We patch this problem with some after-school programs, some backpacks with canned food for them to take home on the weekends.  We give kids in shelters a backpack with school supplies in them, that’s all helpful, but, have you ever had to put cardboard inside your shoes because there was a hole in the bottom of your shoes? Did you ever have to walk through the rain in shoes that just had cardboard in the bottom?    Can you imagine how it might change those kids lives if their parents were just getting a living wage or if, imagine this, the greater society just gave parents an extra financial shot in the arm every month?   Whenever I am trying to explain social ethics, I like to draw it down to a manageable size . . . think of a shipwreck on a tropical island with a hundred people on board and 20 of those 100 are little kids. How many of those 20 would you feed? How many would you educate? How many would be taken care of when they were sick? All of them, right? Because you would know their names. You would see them every day. You know their parents, and you wouldn’t dream of giving one of them a swimming pool and a pony and letting the other 19 go without clothes or shoes.    If we could just draw it down to a size where we could really see them, we wouldn’t tolerate what is going on every day in our own city. It is hard to fix a traumatic childhood.  I stay mad about how children have been treated at our southern boarder, not just during the Trump administration but for years before that. Sure, Trump made a bad situation worse, but still, do we really have to have grades of childhood trauma? But you don’t have to go to Texas or Arizona to see children in traumatic circumstances.    As terrible as the Covid-19 pandemic has been, it has given to new Biden administration an opportunity to look around and see what really needs to be changed in this country. There have been stimulus checks for almost everyone, unemployment subsidies, Payroll Protection grants, and now there is this infrastructure bill that has tons of money in it to fix roads and bridges, to upgrade our power grid, to put in cyber protections for our water, gas, and electricity systems, but a lot of it isn’t traditional infrastructure. A lot of it is humanitarian.    Maybe it is because the first lady is a schoolteacher. I suspect that Jill Biden has schooled Joe Biden in some facts of life over the past few years. You may be aware that President Lyndon Johnson, for all of his failings, did what he did for the Civil Rights Movement, largely because he had started out in life as a public school teacher in a poor Texas school system and he had seen what child poverty looked like. He had seen them. He remembered their names.    Those of you who have listened to me for the past couple of years know what I cannot deny today that I had no confidence that Joe Biden would be a transformational president. I knew that he would be a lot better than the last guy but the old sneakers I wear to cut my grass would make a better president than ol whats-his-name. But Biden is turning out to be more progressive than I ever dreamed and this infrastructure bill, if it gets passed, will put Biden up on the stage next to Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.    He has proposed to give parents a monthly check, that for a family with four children, would come to about $1000 a month. Not enough to live on. Not enough to make you want to have more kids just to get the money, but enough to lift 5 million children out of poverty and make life a lot better for the other 5 million, moving them closer to the starting line in the race that they are going to have to run in to survive.    This not a unique stroke of genius. Tony Blair did this in Great Britain 20 years ago when he was Prime Minister. But no one has ever suggested anything like this for American children and I am not too proud to say that it is “about damn time.” Let the congregation say, “Amen.”   As cynical as we can be about government and corporations and the media, good things can still happen if enough of us get behind a really good idea and push – push like we really want to make it happen.    It isn’t perfect. I don’t know why people like us have received stimulus checks during the pandemic and then this infrastructure bill is just getting half of the children in poverty out of poverty….. I would have voted for getting 100% of the kids out of poverty before employed corpulent clerics got anything, but we must not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.    The stimulus bill, as proposed, does not have a very good chance of making it through the Senate but it has even less of a chance if we don’t speak up and support the humanitarian parts of this proposal.    I can speak to the ethics of this situation as a spiritual person but I can also speak to it as a patriot. There are no foreign powers, not Russia, not China or North Korea, nor terrorists, either foreign or domestic, that pose a greater threat to the future of America than income and capital disparity. The wealth gap in the United States will end this country if we don’t stop it and I know of no more effective way to do that than to pull children out of poverty and put then on the starting line with everyone else. Because, even if you can’t see them now, 20 years ago, you will want to see them sharing their gifts with our nation in science and technology, in medicine and government, in your neighborhood, and married into your family.    We have been forcing America’s potential to grow up in poverty and you and I both know that is nothing but mean to them and stupid for all of the rest of us. And now, we can start to change it. If, that is, we are tired of looking the other way.

Religion and Socialism

Religion and Socialism      May16, 2021    Dr. Roger Ray     Click here to see the video

Karl Marx, in Theses on Feuerbach

  "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."  

 

Taken from Tikkun magazine, July 2020

The most commonly understood conception of socialism is that of economic redistribution of material goods and wealth, to achieve economic equality throughout the society. A facet of this economic definition is that the means of production in society would be controlled by the many (or the working class or the state) rather than by the few. These primarily economic definitions of socialism reflect the importance of material conditions and economic justice, but they neglect an equally important aspect of socialism, the humanistic essence of socialism. That essence is about human emancipation from the realm of necessity, beyond material and objective reforms, to the realm of liberation. The different definitions are not just a matter of emphasis. At issue is a profound philosophical and existential difference in viewpoints about the nature of human being. 

https://www.tikkun.org/blog/2020/07/24/spiritualized-socialism-and-socialist-humility/

After meeting with President Biden last week to work on his proposed stimulus bill, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in Congress, sent out a fundraising tweet to his base saying, “I just met with Corrupt Joe Biden and he's STILL planning to push his radical Socialist agenda onto the American people, I need EVERY single patriot to step up... Fight back."

 

It is, of course, difficult to imagine how you can have any hope of bipartisan negotiation if the people you are trying to have serious negotiations with are going to leave a meeting and immediately start calling names like a 3^rd grade playground bully. 

Not many people own a Joe Biden tee-shirt. Biden is not the kind of politician who inspires people to put big flags in the back of their pickup trucks and drive around town making fools of themselves, but he is also anything but corrupt. He is America’s grandfather now and while we might not want him to hold the remote to the TV for the whole evening, most of us realize that he is doing a better job than we thought he would and that, in almost every event, his heart is in the right place, even if it isn’t beating all that vigorously anymore. Calling him “corrupt” has nothing to do with Joe Biden and it has everything to do with just how partisan our country has become. We are so divided that if a Republican sits down to talk to a Democrat, they have to make faces and pretend to gag as they walk away from the conversation.

 

But more, calling Joe Biden a “radical socialist” is so unhinged from reality that McCarthy should have choked on the words, but “socialist” has become a buzz word in our public conversations now, a word used to describe almost anything that is intended to do almost anyone, some good. But I don’t want to take McCarthy to task for his absurd hostility today because he is only parroting what he has heard on Capitol Hill for his entire political life. 

 

What I would like to do is to very clearly, and very honestly, talk about what socialism is and what socialism isn’t and, hopefully, talk about the relationship between socialism and communities of faith. This will be an unnecessary and repetitive review for many of you, but I invite you to take the link for the YouTube or iTunes version of this message and send it to everyone you know who uses the word “socialism” to dismiss any government program that is intended to expand healthcare or to alleviate poverty. 

I beseech any of you here or anyone who listens to tell me if you can find anything that I say today to be anything less than 100% true. I want to eschew any partisan bickering and get down to talking seriously about what is true and what is deceptive name calling. If I vary from the path of what is absolutely true, even a little bit, I want you to call me on it because I really want conservative and progressive people in America, in Great Britain, in Germany, and Brazil to unite around honest political dialogue.

 

There are many technical ways of defining socialism. In the most radical form of Socialism, as advocated by Leninists, is where the state owns all property and all means of production, and the state doles out resources to create economic equality in the entire population. Conversely, a radical form of capitalism, largely based on Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” would allow for an entirely unregulated economy, ostensibly guided only by the “invisible hand of the market,” which leaves the powerful and the rich to use and abuse both resources and people without any boundaries.

 

Virtually every country in the world has rejected both extremes and has tried to find some way to navigate bits of both worlds to allow for profitable business while reserving certain assets to be held in common. You cannot, for example, buy a river. And as much as many resorts and private communities try to bend the rule, you cannot own the actual beach where land meets the oceans. We consider certain parts of the world to be a public property, accessible to all. 

 

And while I can privately own my home and yard, or a farm, I cannot, for example, just pour toxins on the ground or into the air that might negatively affect the land, water, or air of others. We live in a hybrid world of private property and public property.

 

Everyone who fears socialism, almost without exception, still drives on publicly owned streets that are protected by publicly funded police forces, their homes are defended against fire by a publicly funded fire department, and they shower in socialist water, heated by socialist electricity, and often eat meals that include ingredients at least subsidized by public resources and they are protected from poisons by public agencies that keep our foods free of poisons. 

 

These things have not always been public. There was a time, when harnessing electricity was relatively new, when electric lines were only run to the homes of those who could afford to pay private electric companies to string wire to their houses, but, largely due to the political influence of some famous social justice ministers of the day, the labor saving and safety benefits of having electricity came to be seen as a public good, and the business of generating and distributing electricity became a publicly managed resource, just like water, or, for that matter roads and city streets. 

 

We have not always had city and county fire departments, there was a time, at least in parts of Europe, when fire fighters were employed by fire insurance companies. These fire insurance medalians, like this British one picoted here, were displayed on your home. You had to buy fire insurance for your home if you wanted fire fighters to show up if your house caught on fire. 

This came to be seen as a service that needed to be extended to the rich and the poor alike. 

 

Education was not always publicly funded, but we realized that the whole of society is better off if everyone has basic literacy and math skills. Even the most greedy capitalist has to recognize that they need to be able to hire workers who can read and write, and they need to be able to move products and customers around on streets and roads, and they need to be in a civilization protected by a national military, a local police and fire department, and basic judicial and governmental regulations. The “invisible hand” of the market doesn’t put out fires, build roads or bridges. There is no market place without public, socialist, infrastructure. 

 

You may have started a business and built it into an economic empire, but it was the public services of education, utilities, the infrastructure of roads and bridges, that made your success possible. If we talk, not so much about socialism and capitalism as about what makes sense to do privately and what makes sense to do publicly, a public water and sewer system makes it possible for us to have cities, but private wells and septic systems make it possible for people to live on farms or in the country. It is not that one is right, and one is wrong, it is that one works in one context and not in another. You would not want your neighbors, living on a small lot in town, to all have septic tanks and, God forbid, wells, but you would not want to limit where a person could live to where we can economically run a sewer line. If we stop bickering, we can see the logic of both compassion and economic practicality.

 

We developed public schools both to give everyone a chance to gain the skills to earn a living but also to give the future workforce the education necessary to be a productive employee. You have the option of paying for a private school if you can or want, but we realized long ago that everyone should have access to education.

 

In the 21^st century, we are realizing that a K through 12 education will not make us competitive in the high tech future of the world and so the proposal that we pay for additional education, community college, technical school, and some advanced professional training, is hardly a jump from free market capitalism to radical socialism. It is simply an awareness that for our country to be competitive in a global economy, and to avoid impoverishing large portions of our society, and thus making them dependent on public aid or charity, we are probably going to have to do what other successful nations are doing, which is to provide more education.

 

Often, when “socialism” is used as a curse word intended to dismiss a policy or a politician, critics are wanting to call up images of long lines in the Soviet Union, or poverty in Cuba, or violence in Venezuela. But the better example is most of Western Europe, not that they have become a Marxist-Leninist form of socialism but that they have simply struck the balance between private and public funding in a way that favors the majority of people rather than only the few. 

When you look, just as one example, of how Democratic Socialism works in Norway compared to how our rather unregulated Capitalism is working in the USA, you can see that Norway has one third of our poverty, they have longer life spans, lower crime, lower infant mortality, much higher rates of home ownership, more vacation time, paid parental leave, and, at the bottom line, people who live there are much happier, on average than are people in the USA. Yes, they have marginally higher taxes, but they make much larger salaries and have a better retirement. So, would you want one third of a small pizza or one fourth of a large pizza. 

 

I hope I didn’t lose you on the large and small pizza illustration. I am aware that in the 1980’s, when McDonalds was expanding and putting most rival fast food restaurants out of business, that A & W tried to compete with the McDonalds Quarter Pounder by offering a Third Pound burger at the same price but people didn’t buy it because they thought that a quarter of a pound was bigger than a third of a pound. Which only serves to support my claim that Americans need more education.

More currently, recent surveys find that about a quarter of Americans currently say that they will never take the Covid-19 vaccine. Almost all of these vaccine hesitant citizens are Republicans. That, I’m afraid is just a fact. Which, if I may be allowed one bit of interpretation of that fact, I find this to be more evidence that Americans need more education. 

 

It is not unreasonable to argue that some things can be done better privately and often at a lower price. Evidently, private space programs are outperforming NASA at the present moment. And, while private schools are often judged to be better than public ones, we have not found them to be less expensive. We have not, however, found that private companies can compete in a head to head, quality and cost, comparison with the United States Postal Service, or with the Universal Healthcare offered in most western democracies. 

 

We Americans tend to love our privately owned cars, but they would be worthless without publicly provided highways and streets. 

 

What I am hoping to persuade everyone to see is that we could not be America if we did not have a blend of private and public ownership of some things. We politicize things like vaccines, education, and healthcare to our peril. The question is not one or the other, the only real question is where is the best place to draw the line.

 

But the title of this sermon is “Religion and Socialism.” I have tried to pull the term, “socialism” from the garbage heap of partisan political ignorance and to describe the practical and mutual community benefits of a healthy combination of competitive profit seeking and public property and programs. But let me try to put all of that economic policy practicality under the religious umbrella of religion.

 

I would remind you that all of the major world religions began with a primary focus on the plight of the poor and the moral demand to share resources with those who are in need. If you take their myths of origins seriously, Judaism began with Moses leading a slave revolt delivering an enslaved people from bondage and leading them to a land of their own. Zoroastrianism began among the slaves of Persia, seeking equality and justice. Buddhism began when the Buddha left the wealth and class of royalty to live among the poor in balance and harmony with all. Jesus preached good news of liberation and justice to the poor, reached out to the sick, the hungry, the poor, and the foreigner. And Muhammad sought to unite the tribes of Arab people to end conflict, greed, and discrimination. 

 

Each of those religions were mutated into tools of the powerful to give governments control of the poor, but that is the opposite of how they began and what they are supposed to be. 

 

In the 4^th century, Pope Gregory the Great reminded Christians that in the gospel story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, “we do not read that he snatched the goods of others but that he used his own unfruitfully; and avenging hell received him at death, not because he did anything unlawful but because he gave himself up utterly and inordinately to the enjoyment of what was lawful.” He said that the rich passively hold themselves to be innocent even when they monopolize for themselves the common gifts of God because the earth belongs to everyone alike.

 

We invent currency, tax systems, and governments to distribute goods and services for the common good. America has allowed the wealthy to write the laws, control the banks, create the tax systems so that an inordinate amount of the earth’s goods, what clearly belongs to everyone, is now hoarded by a smaller and smaller fraction of the people of the world. In the USA, the top 1% now owns 42%, almost half, of all of the wealth in the world. Three million Americans are obscenely wealthy which makes more than half of Americans, some 165 million people, live in poverty. It is legal, but it is obscene. It is legal but it is morally wrong.

The gulf between the rich and the poor has not always been so great. Over the last 40 years that gulf has grown so large that it threatens to bring down the whole world’s economy. But, after 40 years, you start to assume that this is the way that capitalism has to work. It isn’t but many unreflective people think that it has to be preserved.

 

Our governor in Missouri, has recently refused to accept federal money to continue the $300 a week unemployment payments many of our neighbors have received during the pandemic. He believes that these payments are keeping people from working for starvation wages and so he is stopping them, rather than allowing the invisible hand of the market to force wages up to the point of being a living wage. Morally, if you pay anyone less than a living wage, you are not creating jobs, you are just exploiting poverty. Please, convince me that I am wrong.

 

Now our compassion-less governor is also refusing to fund the Medicare expansion that we all voted for. Only in Missouri can the legislature ignore a public vote because they don’t agree with it! Tens of thousands of Missouri’s poor die due to lack of access to healthcare, but their lives are not a matter of concern for a governor who only wants to widen the economic gap between the rich and the poor. Which, if we had an ancient Persian here, they could tell you that the Zoroastrians invented hell specifically for people like Governor Mike Parsons.

 

You all know that I, unlike Pope Gregory, do not believe that hell exists. . . but that does not mean that a whole lot of people don’t deserve to go there. 

 

The Zoroastrians invented the concept of hell specifically to console the Persian slaves that the rich would be punished for how they abused the poor. 

      Their theology may have been misleading, but their ethical insight was spot on. Because, you know, that those who defend an economic system that keeps half of Americans in poverty in the richest country in the history of the world really ought to go to hell. That may be just my opinion, but in your hearts, you know that I am right. 

 

“Some Culture Needs to be Canceled”

“Some Culture Needs to be Canceled”       May 9, 2021    Dr. Roger Ray

Click here to see the video

Allison Gaines - While some have complained that cancel culture is negative, I think it acts as an important social filter. If someone’s words or actions are offensive for many people, one should consider the intent of the speaker. If the intent was to alienate or mock marginalized groups of people, then the public has a right to recognize this and withdraw their support. In the digital age, consumers have a variety of materials they can read or view. Thus, they should have the freedoms that come along with that choice. Social media has provided a network of communication amongst consumers from all walks of life. It’s only logical that some people are offended by some content. They have the right to ignore or boycott brands, actors, and companies who use vulgar obscenities. In response to public outcry, corporate executives and policymakers have to weigh the risks of ignoring the voices of the general public.                                               

Earlier this year, Anna Malaika Tubbs, currently a Ph.D. student at Cambridge, released a book that really needed to be written. It is entitled Three Mothers, and it pieces together what can be known of the women who raised the three black men who helped to reshape the world in the 20^thcentury: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Three women who have been largely overlooked by history but whose hearts and minds shaped the civil rights leaders to whom they gave birth, and more importantly, gave inspiration.

 

I am painfully aware that Mother’s Day is not a universally happy holiday for everyone. Sometimes a mother gives a child a head start in life and sometimes they give their children something to be overcome through years of therapy. Sometimes they do both. But as Malcolm X said, “The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.” Malcolm’s mother, Louis Little, was an immigrant from Grenada, who spoke several languages, and she taught her children by putting newspaper clippings on the kitchen table with a dictionary. The children were daily assigned the task of comparing current events with what their white teachers were teaching them in school. Each of these three leaders had mothers who instilled a love of art, poetry, music, literature, and culture in them as a way of defying the narrow path that the predominant white culture wanted to put them into. 

 

Berdis Baldwin taught her son James, Alberta King taught her son Martin, and Louise Little taught her son Malcolm, they taught their black sons to be aware of the culture that would seek to hold them down and they taught them to dream big dreams. 

We often remember little Ruby Bridges this way, being escorted into a New Orleans segregated school by white, male, federal agents, as depicted by Normal Rockwell. But the historical fact is better portrayed by the movie, because she was walked to school every day holding the hand of her mother, Lucille. Ruby walked into an angry crowd of racists day after day, holding Lucille’s hand. And she said that she was only afraid once; there was an angry white woman holding a child’s coffin with a black doll in it, yelling at Ruby that she was going to lynch her. But, Ruby said, her mom looked at her and said, “That woman is not going to hurt you, I’ll see to that.” And Ruby believed her and was never afraid of the crowds again.

 

Martin Luther King’s older sister, Christine, remarked, “I have to chuckle as I realize there are people who actually believe M.L. just appeared.” Every great hero of history had mentors, teachers, and for many of them, their mother may have been more than their first teacher, she may have been their greatest teacher. 

 

We have a Latin saying in philosophy, Ex nihilo nihil fit, “out of nothing, nothing comes.” We are born into a culture and even though cultures are always changing, we tend to accept the culture into which we are born, the status quo, as being the way things have always been. We can turn to both history and anthropology to understand male dominance, white privilege, homophobia, nationalism, and the assumption that whatever religion you were born into is the only true religion. 

The Irish playwright and political activist, George Bernard Shaw, said: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ If we simply accept the status quo, if we only preserve the culture we inherited, then nothing will ever come of us, we will never produce any progress. No one becomes a prophet by trying to preserve the way that things are. 

 

I don’t want to bore you by just stating the obvious and I don’t want to indict mothers or fathers who just want their children to be safe, but, folks, if you teach your kids to adapt themselves comfortably into a sick society, are you doing them a favor? My parents never wanted me to rock the boat. They wanted me to be successful within the confines of a capitalist system where I was born on third base by being white, male, and straight, and it took me a long time to realize how the game was rigged, but once you see it, you cannot unsee it. 

 

Would you rather raise another Jeff Bezos or another Colin Kaepernick? 

 

 

In my relationship with my Brazilian girlfriend, I am inheriting these two delightful, dark skinned nieces. I have offered to tutor them in their English classes, and I think I am going to start with Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Sure, they’re young for that, but my mom took me to Bible class when I was younger than them and I didn’t understand a word of it at first. I think that if this doesn’t make sense today, it will, and it will too soon. I wish that I had read it to my white nieces and nephews before they grew into adults in Kentucky and Alabama…. And that is all that I am going to say about that. 

 

It takes critical thinking and courage to find the ways in which culture really needs to be changed, improved, advanced. The media tends to train us to think with our visceral emotions. 

This meme points to the hypocrisy of how the political right tries to use social agenda triggers to control those whose only way of thinking is angry and fearful reactions. I would remind that that early last month, we were having news reports of mass shootings almost daily, and it was in the midst of that, that Republicans started talking about trans women competing in women’s sports. They will not consider anything to lower gun deaths, but they will try to stoke fear of transgender folk. Women’s athletics is just the current version of the debate about who uses which restroom. 

 

And just for the record, there are no known instances of a trans person molesting anyone in any restroom. In fact, it is safe to say that the most anxious person in any public restroom is a trans person who is only hoping that they can pee without getting murdered. More than 20 trans folk have already been killed this year for being trans, one was right here in Springfield. How many people, for comparisons sake, have been killed this year for being straight? 

 

Especially when you consider that less than 1% of the population is trans, and more than 97% report being straight, let’s be realistic and call that 90%, shall we? 

If trans people were so dangerous, you would think that you would hear about some trans folk killing straight people but that’s a story that doesn’t seem to show up in the statistics! That doesn’t exist but there actually is a legal defense called the “trans panic” defense to excuse the murder of trans people, usually women, by men who are very insecure about just how straight they really are. 

 

It is nice having a live audience again after all of these months, so let me ask you ladies: You are about to get on an elevator and one of these two people are getting in with you. Which one seems the most creepy to you, Tucker Carlson or this lovely trans woman?  Being nervous about being alone with Tucker Carlson may be entirely rational, but transphobia is not. 

 

I am especially disturbed by the same brand of lawmakers who wanted to subject 

women, who were seeking an abortion, to a transvaginal ultrasound, violating women vaginally who may well be seeking an abortion because they have already been sexually violated . . . and now these same really creepy politicians are wanting to subject female athletes to a visual inspection of their genitals…. Is it too much to ask to get Republicans to just leave our private parts alone? Just don’t, don’t look, don’t touch, don’t insert, . . . just don’t!

 

What does your mother want for Mother’s Day, I’m guessing that I know the top two things on mom’s list: Equal pay for equal work, and for Republicans to stop thinking about her vagina all of the time. Now that would make for a Happy Mother’s Day!

 

The right often cries crocodile tears about “cancel culture,” over such things as Mr. Potato Head becoming simply “Potato Head,” and Theodore Geisel’s family trust deciding to remove some of Dr. Seuss’ early work from publication because, like most people of his time, he had a lot of unconscious racism in a few of his books that no one read anyway. But, in these cases, there was no one complaining about a toy being called a male nor did anyone pressure the heirs of Dr. Seuss to update their catalogue, the toy maker and the Seuss trust just recognized that culture has grown.

 

It may be that originally naming sports teams “Red Skins” or “Chiefs” or “Braves” was more honorific than derogatory but if Native Americans say that it is offensive to them to have caricatures and cartoons of their ancestors used to sell sports paraphernalia, then isn’t it just a matter of curtesy for us to respect their feelings?

 

When the United Negro College Fund was established, the word “Negro” was not considered to be racially insensitive. When the NAACP was started, the term “Colored” was not considered to be racially insensitive. 

But there is just so much racism in America that even benign words become bastardized over time, and an oppressed people will demand respect and recognition from the larger culture, sometimes, at first, it starts with a change in language. 

 

I’m still not good at remembering that trans people generally prefer that they be referenced with the pronouns “they” and “them” which, in my harshly trained grammatical mind, still sounds plural and not gender neutral singular, but as you hear in the news every day that trans people are still being victimized in state legislatures, the military, in public restrooms, and girls’ track meets, we’re being asked to change our language in the hope that it will help to change our prejudice.

 

Getting it wrong and being corrected, as in my case, repeatedly, is a part of helping our culture to become sensitive to the unique needs and triggers often common in the trans community. And, yes, sometimes that may feel like cancel culture when you are starting from a point of fear and prejudice, but, if, in your heart of hearts, you really want to become a better person than you are now, then you just have to accept that some of the culture that we have been really comfortable with needs to be canceled. 

 

I came of age quoting the famous serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. What I am saying today is that this kind and gentle perspective might be a bit too much of a light hand in a country with as many problems with prejudice and discrimination, beset with the violence of poverty and a government entrenched in indifference. So, I don’t use the classic form of the serenity prayer anymore. I have a new prayer:

There are some things, mothers and fathers, that you should not teach your children to accept.

So now, let’s pray for the serenity and the courage to change the things that we should never have accepted. . . we will seem unreasonable at first, but who wants to fit in well in a sick society? Have courage my friends. Challenge the status quo. Question authority. Be as unreasonable as you have to be.