“Finding Balance in a World that Demands Action”

“Finding Balance in a World that Demands Action”             December 17, 2023   

Dr. Roger Ray     click here to see the video

 

As the holiday season arrived again this year, the airways began to shift to the classical holiday songs, one of which we will inevitably hear daily for a couple more weeks is Brenda Lee’s 1958 classic, “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree.” An NPR reporter interviewed the now 78 year old artist recently and in that interview I learned that Brenda Lee was just 13 years old when she recorded that song. 13 . . . and they have been playing that song to death for 65 years. I don’t know what first comes to mind for you when you learned that but what immediately struck me is that this young woman was set for life at the age of 13 on the strength of one song. Now, she went on to have a singing career but, honestly, she didn’t have to. 

 

She is not Elon Musk or Bill Gates rich, but her net worth is over $20 million and I doubt that much of that came from her recording of “Toot, toot, tootsie.” I had a similar reaction when I learned that the beautiful actress who first played Queen Amidala, Natalie Portman, in the 1999 Star Wars movie, the Phantom Menace, was only 16 years old when filming began. I loved the movie but I was immediately envious of the fact that at the age of 16, she was financially set for life. 

 

Of course, there are people who are trust fund babies, born into the security of family wealth, but it seems somehow different when you can see someone move from obscurity into life long security in a single gesture in their teenaged years. 

Our American economy is structured to literally fill us with anxiety from our birth. How are we going to survive? We turn education into nothing more than a means of sharpening our employment prospects, we avoid universal healthcare and tie any affordable healthcare option directly to employment, compounding our fear of the future with uncertainty about where we will live, will we be able to eat, get healthcare, and, “Oh my God,” what if we become disabled, or pregnant, or what if there is another recession, or, “God forbid,” another great depression? 

 

The American economy is built on fear and dread, even though we are the richest country, not just the richest country in the world, but the richest country in all of human history. Maybe that anxiety has helped to turn our Protestant work ethic into national wealth; but it sure hasn’t done much to make us a happier or more mentally healthy society. We didn’t hear much about the hard fought battles to establish a 40 hour work week or to safeguard a two day weekend for most workers, but, I can tell you, whatever semblance of employment security, safety, and fair compensation that we now enjoy, it came with a bloody price tag.

 

Still, in the USA, if you are lucky enough to have paid vacation at all, it is almost never more than two weeks…. 10 paid days off. And many employers offer exactly none. For most of my adult life, as a pastor, I officially had 4 weeks of vacation but my work load was such that I never got to take it. At times, I went years without a vacation, obviously working weekends and holidays, and rarely getting 24 hours off in any week and there was always some board member who thought I was lazy. 

 

But let me just clue you in about paid vacations around the world. 

 Only Micronesia gets fewer vacation days than Americans and they get 9. Mexico gets 14, Canadians enjoy 19 days off, and most of Central and South America gets about a month off every year. Our allies in western Europe are all way ahead of us, Great Britain gets 28 days, except for Scotland which gets 38 days. Most of Europe and Africa get about a month of vacation every year.

What’s more, think about countries that Americans tend to think of as being heartless nations with bad human rights, China gives their people 16 days of vacation every year, Russians get 42, and the nation with the most generous paid vacation in the world is Iran with 52. Because, people, as much as this may come as a surprise to many of you, there is more to life than going to work!

 

When I turned 65, rather than just retiring, I split my job with our friend, David Ketchum. The idea was that we could both work half-time and so we began to figure out different ways of dividing our church duties so that I could travel more. My first 2 week vacation came right after my 65^th birthday. I took my scuba gear to Cozumel where I rented a one room apartment a few miles from the beach where I was surrounded by other international vacationers.

I met a delightful 30-something couple at the pool who were living very frugal lives in a tiny apartment there. He was from Argentina, she was from Kansas, they had met working in a hotel in Australia, and they had decided that they would work for a few months, save everything they could, and then not work until they had to try to go make money again. They were managing to work less than half of the year every year. I have to tell you, I have never experienced so much self doubt about the choices that I have made in my life and career. 

 

I had always taken vacations when I was at the point of exhaustion. I would lay down my axe and take a few days off when I felt drained, burned out, sometimes at the breaking point. They were working only when they needed to pay the rent and buy groceries. I’m sure that their parents thought that they were horribly irresponsible. I would die if my daughter decided to do something like this, and yet, even though they were not saving for retirement and they certainly didn’t own a house or a car, but, guys, they had broken through the myth that we exist only to work. They had conquered the fear of poverty and hunger. 

 

Let me say it again, you were born for more than to go to work every day. I have realized that as I have pulled my work schedule back from constantly leaning forward in the saddle that not taking enough time off is the largest reason why I was not more successful. I was so ambitious, so afraid of failure, that my life was entirely out of balance. I really wanted to be the best pastor, the best counselor, I wanted to be the best preacher, the best at presiding over weddings, baptisms, and funerals. I even took singing and guitar lessons because I wanted to be able to make a positive contribution to the church’s music program . . . which was a colossal waste of money and time. 

 

I don’t wish that I could have lived my adult life as my friends in Mexico were doing it. I didn’t need to be liberated from work for several months out of the year, but I did need to step back enough to find balance, to gain perspective, to understand why working harder and more hours wasn’t making me more popular and more successful. 

 

And what I am going to say now may be more specific to life as a Protestant pastor than to anything else, but when I entered the ministry in the late 70’s, churches had come through a boom time that was all a part of the Baby Boom in post-World War America. WW II created the technological and economic innovations that created the middle class and with it came the suburbs and suburban churches with their huge edifices that later generations struggled to fill.

In 1991 I became the Senior Pastor of this sprawling Georgian Colonial church whose sanctuary seated 250 but the two education wings provided classroom space for 500. In the 1960’s, it had seemed reasonable to this church that they could fill the sanctuary twice every Sunday and fill their Sunday School classes with 500 people every week. But in the 1970’s, as families became smaller and divorce became more common, Sunday School attendance fell off a cliff. In the 1980’s, mainstream church attendance began to fall off precipitously. 

 

But the church of that era still had an active memory of when, in the 50’s and 60’s, they had been full and they were desperate to return to those days without any accounting for how the world had changed. I worked myself to death trying to have a successful 1960’s church in the 1990’s. We tried to rebuild youth groups, children’s choirs, Sunday School classes, church camp, Vacation Bible School . . . all things that belonged to another era. 

By the early part of this century, I realized that we were spending so much money on staff and attractive technology and entertainment, trying to attract the children of that generation, that we could have been more successful if we had just paid them $15 an hour to attend. I was desperate, to the point of panic, wanting to be successful but I never stepped back far enough to realize that a successful church in the 21^st century would not look at all like a successful church of the mid 20^th century. 

 

When I left that church in 2007, the denomination still had ministers filling out annual reports to tell them how successful we were being by telling them the numbers…. What was our average attendance, how many new members were brought in that year, how many new baptisms, how much capital money was raised, what was the weekly offering? They wanted us to count what could be counted without ever asking ourselves what really counted, the things that cannot be counted in any objective way. . . marriages saved, suicides prevented, moral encouragement given, direction, meaning, training in compassion, and real service to those in need. 

 

No one ever asked about those things which, necessarily means that those things didn’t matter as much as donations, attendance, and numerical growth. I wish that I could go back in time and explain all of this to my 35 year old self but I am not sure that I could have believed it back then. 

 

Still, even when I moved pass formal Christianity and the prison of institutional church life, I poured my energy into being a social activist. I fought against injustice with the same passion I had expended trying to fill up a huge church. 

 

We are living in a dynamic time. Somehow, at least half of our country seems to be determined to destroy our constitutional democracy and replace it with a fascist dictatorship that will take away civil rights, oppress minorities, and inflict unspeakable cruelties on people that will make only getting 10 days of paid vacation each year seem unimportant… the worst possible things are increasingly probable for the future of our country and somehow these horrible things seem likely to be voted in by popular vote. It feels like America is living out a constant “opposite day” that makes no sense at all. 

 

I am advocating for intentional balancing in a world that is desperately in need of action, of leadership, of greater personal investment and greater involvement but because the need is so great, leading a balanced life is just that much more important.

 

Because the world seems almost to be teetering on the edge of self-destruction, you should take time to go to the beach, take a walk in the woods, spend an evening with friends, go out and hear live music, attend a live theater production. How long has it been since you had a meal with your family without cell phones or a TV on in the background. Do you know what exhibits are currently at your local art museum? Are you living or just going to work?

 

Spend time with your family. Let your inner child come out to play a bit at Christmas. Wear the ugly sweater, drink the punch, spend too much on gifts, eat too much and regain some sense of yourself and what you are doing with your life. I’ll see you on New Year’s Eve. 

 

“Time Does Not Exist”

“Time Does Not Exist”     December 31, 2023       Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

I would like to begin with one of my favorite quotes from the Buddhist philosopher, Alan Watts, who said that “No carpenter ever claimed to not be able to finish a construction job because he had run out of inches.” Inches, meters, cubits, acres, hectors, miles are simply units of measure. These words have meaning because they are useful in our daily lives, like knowing the difference between a recipe calling for a cup of sugar or a ton of sugar. I can say that “feet” or “meters” don’t exist, but we know what it means when we say that we need six feet of lumber or that people who live up north might get a whole meter of snow. Snow exists, thankfully it doesn’t where I live, but I have seen it and I know that it does.

 

I’m sure that you don’t need any further argument to prove this point. We can all quickly agree that units of measure are merely useful albeit entirely contrived things. What may take more evidence is the claim I hope to convince you of today which is that time, like inches, is just a unit of measure and does not, itself, exist. 

 

Many of us will be engaging in a number of different rituals this evening to mark the ending of one year and the beginning of a new year. Most of us know that even though most of the world agrees on a twelve month calendar year that begins on January 1, and even those who prefer to mark time differently still typically have to at least be aware of this popular agreement. For Buddhists in Thailand, the current year is 2566 and many Muslims would tell you that the year is 1445, both based on the presumed time of their founding prophets but the whole thing is still based on nothing more than general agreement.

 

Our calendar is the end result of centuries of political and religious beliefs and traditions that have us starting our year, not at some logical point like the winter solstice or the spring equinox but rather a nearly arbitrary point in early winter. Our seven-day week is similarly arbitrary and our division of 12 months in a year is terribly odd with one month having 28 days while four months have 30 days, and seven months have 31 days. Few things would make more sense than to give February a couple more days every year so that we would have seven months with 30 days and five with 31 but such a change would be so confusing that it will simply never happen. 

 

We have sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, which is some 12 based way of counting rather than something that would have made more sense like 10 seconds in a minute, ten minutes in an hour, and ten hours in a day, but, again, tradition dictates these imaginary measurements and we are not likely to ever see them brought into some logical conformity. 

 

These fixtures of measurements are so pervasive in our language and our technology that the concepts take on a life of their own, as if they were describing something that was real, which, I insist, they are not. 

 

Boiled down to the most simple concept, what our units of time actually measure is movement. The earth revolves on its axis once and that is a day. The earth revolves, or so it seems, around the sun once and that is a year (the sun is also in motion so we rotate around our star while we chase it through space). But what if the earth stopped spinning? What if our solar system was not in motion? What if the people and plants, the very atoms that make up our planet, were not moving at all? What then, would be the passage of time? Wouldn’t we say about such a state of affairs that “time was frozen?” Because the only meaningful dimension of time is movement. Time does not exist. Time is just a way of measuring movement.

To quote Stephen Hawking, “Einstein’s general theory of relativity, on its own, predicted that space-time began at the big bang singularity and would come to an end … at the big crunch singularity.” (p. 115, Hawking, A Brief History of Time) That is, without matter in motion, there is no time.

 

Einstein and Hawking both talk about the fabric of time bending under certain circumstances but, if I may be allowed to punch way over my head, what they are really saying is that the faster any material thing travels the more the atoms in that material thing, whether it is a clock or a person, slow down their movement and they therefore appear to be in a slower time universe. 

 

If you have identical clocks and put one on the surface of the earth and put the other in a rocket circling the earth, the one on the surface will move forward faster than the one in space. But, men and women, clocks are not time, clocks measure time based on certain assumptions of their mechanics, but motion changes the nature of the mechanics. 

 

But the concept of time is rooted so deeply in our minds that we have come to think of it as being something like a river that flows continually in one direction. We mortals are like little paper boats that are, at our births placed on that river with all of the other little paper boats and we all journey at the same speed until our little boats get waterlogged and sink. In modern times, this has inspired some to wonder if it might be possible to somehow speed our boat up and move forward farther into the future or even to turn around and motor back up stream, into the past. 

 

The notion of time travel began to appear in fiction literature in the 18^th century, but by the 19^thcentury, the idea had caught on so that we get things like the story of Rip Van Winkle, The Christmas Carol, and famously, H. G. Wells’ novel, the Time Machine. Even Mark Twain tried his hand at a time travel piece called, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. 

 

I would like to make a distinction in literature between fiction and fantasy. This distinction may only be useful for the present topic, but it seems important to me to point out that there are fictions which describe events that may have happened or which may happen, and there are fictions which are pure fantasy. 

 

Star Trek, for example, is famous for having predicted a number of things that were actually later invented, such as tablet computers, voice interactive computer software, instantaneous translators, transparent aluminum, flip phones, and pin communicators. On one level, science fiction can look at developing research and engineering and make predictions that seem to be possible or even probable.

They often suffer from excesses of enthusiasm, such as Marty McFly’s hoverboard in a Back to the Future movie that was set in 2015. The Jetsons with their flying cars and domestic robots was set in 2062 and I fear that they will fail on most of those predictions as well. . . still, hover boards, flying cars, and domestic robots are possible and can be realistically discussed with existing science in mind. Such things are science fiction.

 

 On the other hand, in order to make many fiction stories work, they also have to inject a number of things that are pure fantasy. . .  necessary to the plot, but not at all possible, like, for example, the warp drive in Star Trek or Hyper-Space in Star Wars. This is the crux of why I am taking on this topic today. Our language seduces us and makes it difficult for us to tell the difference between what is possible and what is pure fantasy. What I find to be the most frustrating is when people confuse the mere fact that they find a certain aspect of fantasy to be thrilling or exciting and they therefore insist that it is more than possible, but that it is even probable. And that, I submit, is not a matter of personal belief, it is a matter of embracing delusion. . . which is bad for science, literature, politics, and especially religion! A key element of critical thinking is the ability to divide the possible from the impossible. Holding onto delusions is choosing to be unintelligent.

 

Once you abandon a devotion to reality then all manner of insanity is put on the same level of credibility with actual rational thought. Believing that there is intelligent life on other planets in the universe doesn’t require too much of a stretch. The universe is very big and there are a lot of planetary systems which seem to have the right parameters to support the evolution of life as we understand it. However, the distance between these planets is so great that there is no way to get together for brunch. The closest of these planetary systems is about 25 trillion miles away. It takes light over 4 years to get from here to there. 

The popular Astro physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, seems to take great delight in teasing TV interviewers on this topic, wondering aloud why alien spacecraft only seem to appear to military pilots. And he has asked why the images are all so fuzzy, maybe aliens are fuzzy? And why with six billion cell phones on the planet has no one ever shot a decent picture of an alien or a UFO? Tyson accepts that intelligent life probably exists all over the universe, but he also insists that the distances between planets is such that we will never meet them. 

The speed of light is a constant. So far as we know, it is impossible for anything to go faster, and yes, I know that there are theoretical aspects of physics in which it is discussed but, here on Earth 1, we are aware that we can’t even approach lightspeed because the closer you get to lightspeed, the more energy is required to accelerate and it quickly gets to what physicists call, simply, infinite energy, which means plainly that you cannot get there from here.

 

The faster you move, the more atomic movement slows down, so, should an astronaut be able to travel at nearly the speed of light towards Proxima Centauri, even though it took said astronaut 4 years to get there, it would have felt like just a few minutes. However, because mass condenses more the faster you go, the astronaut would also have been crushed to the point of being smaller than a pea. You wouldn’t have so many wrinkles, but you would have gained an infinite amount of weight. 

 

So, giving up on traveling at light speed, what about just trying to go really fast? Odd things happen at very high rates of speed. Like, at 20% of light speed, the movement of hydrogen atoms would feel like you were being shot with a thousand machine guns. 

 

Because of these very real limitations of human space travel, science fiction becomes fantasy with talk about worm holes, hyper drives, warp engines, or even multidimensional universes. Worm holes may theoretically exist, for very brief moments. But if they did exist and you tried to go through them, you would immediately be crushed and in the next moment be torn apart. Traveling through a worm hole is about as scientific as Harry Potter’s magic wand. These are matters of fantasy, conjecture, and Hollywood, not rational thought. 

 

Again, you can find any number of theorists who can very intelligently discuss many of the “what if’s” of physics. If a kind of anti-matter which does not appear to exist did exist, we might be able to stabilize a worm hole in space, not that you could go through it, but, well, my point is: pieces of theoretical physics do not always add up to an intelligent whole. Good for fantasy movies, bad for rational conversation. 

 

If you are still not convinced, if you believe that the evidence exists but it is being kept classified by the government, then please consider this: When, in 2017, when Donald Trump became president and had access to all of our nation’s secrets, do you believe that he went out to Area 51 and saw the crashed alien spaceship and the dead alien astronauts and didn’t tell anyone about it? That would require believing in magic.

 

But a bit more back on topic, theoretically, even though we cannot literally travel forward in time, because speed slows down our atomic motion, if we could travel fast enough, it would feel like we had traveled forward in time. But to travel backwards in time would require every atom in the universe to retrace its movement simultaneously. That is, you would have to make all of the material matter in the world to suddenly and very accurately, move backwards. . . which, presumably, would include the atoms that make up my body which means that I would age backwards until I didn’t exist anymore. Obviously, this is impossible. 

 

Both Einstein and Hawking jokingly reference the grandfather paradox that speculates that you can’t go back in time and kill your own grandfather so that you never came into existence but while time travel does not exist, both Einstein and Hawking had a sense of humor, even though many of their readers apparently don’t. When the comedian, Denis Miller, talks about performing in a comedy club in Birmingham, AL called “I Don’t Get It,” that doesn’t mean that there is actually a comedy club in Birmingham by that name, but it does mean that Miller has some general opinions about the sophistication of people in Alabama. If you are looking up the address of a comedy club named, “I Don’t Get it” well, you might be from Alabama. 

 

For anyone who has had difficulty following me up to this point, please accept this short hand observation:  we know that you can’t travel back in time because no one from the future has traveled back to our time. Or, don’t believe anything you see on the History Channel. 

 

As one of my physics professors said, “The only people who talk knowingly about visits from aliens appear to cite government sources and the government only talks about aliens when things here on Earth 1 are not going well.” She may have been promoting a conspiracy theory of her own, saying that the government distracts us with silly rumors about space aliens so that we don’t think about the ecology, the economy, or government corruption but, I have to admit, her conspiracy theory seems more probable than having visitors from other planets. 

 

The more that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism cling to myths that clearly are not true, the more religion alienates intelligent modern people. There is a great deal about spirituality that can make the world more just, more peaceful, and more healthy, but the pretending to believe in ghosts, souls, eternal life, angels, demons, and magic books is getting in our way. 

 

Our nation is falling behind in basic science skills and even math. This is true, in part, because we think that believing in delusional things is our right. Yes, you may have a right to believe that the Holy Spirit talks to you, that you have ridden on the Millennium Falcon in hyperspace, and Scooby Do sometimes drives your minivan, but if you insist on these delusions, you are choosing to be the opposite of smart. 

 

Somehow, the ability to suspend reality in favor of imagination has corrupted our politics to such a degree that it has taken our Judicial system three years after the January 6, 2021 insurrection to decide if it was really an insurrection when millions of us watched it happening line on TV and, sadly, a lot of us from certain states actually know people who were there and involved in the attempted overthrow of American democracy…. And they posted videos of themselves in the Capitol on FaceBook. 

 

I love science fiction movies, or science fantasy movies. I never miss a Marvel or DC superhero movie or anything in the Harry Potter franchise, no matter what issues exist with actors and authors. But I understand such things to be escapism because reality can be exhausting and sometimes, I need to take a break. But folks, let’s sharpen our critical thinking skills. Let’s be honest with ourselves when we indulge in a reading our horoscope or watching Fox News, we know it isn’t real and we are not going to factor anything from the History Channel into our understanding of history. There are important matters at hand and you are needed back on Earth 1. 

“When the Darkness Stares Back” The world on the brink of war

“When the Darkness Stares Back” The world on the brink of war.     

December 3, 2023   Dr. Roger Ray    click here to see the video

 

It is December and it is now a time of year for office parties, family gatherings, festive decorations, and a flurry of gift giving. . .  but it doesn’t feel much like it, does it? I live in southern Florida now so decorations that involve snowmen and tinsel covered pine trees are always out of place but much more than that, it is difficult to be aware of what is going on in the world and to even fake being jolly right now.

 

We are now in an election year in which we will apparently, once again, have a presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, although, it seems likely to me that Trump will be in prison for two or three profoundly good reasons before next November and if I were betting on whether Biden would still be standing on his own power and capable of feeding himself by election day, I’m afraid that I would be inclined to vote against it. I wish him well, I sincerely do, but I’m from Kentucky and we are used to looking a horse up and down in the paddock before we place our bets on the track and I’m not liking what I see when I see news clips of our president.

 

We’re nearing a second year of war in Europe as the ground freezes in Ukraine and Russia regains the ability to advance against a people desperately locked in a battle to retain their freedom. And, ringing the familiar bells of what could lead the world into a global conflict, the battle between Hamas and Israel threatens to drag the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, and Jordan into a battle that none of us can ignore. 

 

I realize that the media makes money when they can keep us scared and glued to our TV sets and I don’t want to fall prey to that kind of hysteria, but, folks, seriously, there are dire circumstances in the world that we really must not ignore.

 

As a pastor, as a spiritual person, I have grown far beyond the superstition and mythology that concerns itself with souls, God’s judgement, or eternal prospects of imaginary heaven or hell. For most of us, spirituality has to do with our personal striving to be a better person and our corporate work to try to make the world a better place. Given the complexity and severity of our current circumstances, it is no wonder that most of the people I am meeting in my new community seem to want to avoid news about politics or global conflicts. Heaven knows, as the home state of both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, no conversation lasts more than a few seconds before despair is staring you in the face. 

 

We have, over the past two years, been easily decisive in talking about Vladimir Putin being a war criminal and we have confidently sided with Ukraine in a war that absolutely cannot be lost to Russia. Putin’s tactics of attacking civilian populations, stealing and deporting thousands of children to Russia to be brainwashed into being Russian. Hard data is difficult to be certain of, but it seems safe to say that nearly 10,000 civilians have been killed in the 20 months of this illegal war. 

President Zelensky has said that nearly twice that number of children have been abducted and taken to Russia. This is an incomprehensible terror, and it cannot be allowed to continue, and Putin cannot survive this conflict in power. Ukraine simply must win. I’m all for peace negotiations but however this war ends, Putin cannot be rewarded with either land or power for this terrible war.

 

But I want to raise a more specific concern with you today about the war taking place in Gaza. As guilty as the Netanyahu government has been in its mistreatment of residents of the Gaza Strip, there is no plausible justification for the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. They targeted the most vulnerable civilians. They raped women and murdered children, going specifically to childcare centers and setting up snipers to kill the elderly who were fleeing to find safety in underground bunkers. 

 

It was ruthless. It was barbaric. And as much as Palestinians have complained about having been treated as if their lives did not matter, as if they were somehow subhuman, behaving in a manner that gives credence to the belief that they are subhuman certainly doesn’t help their cause in the eyes of the world. They are still holding hostages trying to protect themselves against counterattack by hiding behind hostages and their own civilian population, making demands that they are daily less likely to receive specifically because they are still holding children and the elderly hostage. 

 

There is no nation on earth that would not strike back against such a heinous terrorist attack. It could not be ignored, and it certainly couldn’t be excused. However, folks, the mere fact that Israel has every right and obligation to defend themselves does not give them cart blanch to carryout a virtual genocide in Gaza.

 

There have been about 10,000 civilian deaths in nearly two years of Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, but people, there have been nearly 10,000 civilian deaths in Gaza in the first five weeks of Israel’s military response to Hamas. Yes, Hamas hides in tunnels and operates out of apartment complexes and hospitals. They are terrorists. They don’t fight fairly. But what is Israel if they can excuse such a massive rate of civilian deaths just because it is difficult to target Hamas without collateral deaths numbering in the thousands, most of whom are children under the age of 18!

 

It is not a 1 to 1 comparison. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. It was inexcusable and it is a use of a nation’s military to accomplish terrorist ends. But even though Israel was attacked, they were not attacked by the children of Gaza! And if Hamas were hiding in tunnels under an Israeli hospital, Netanyahu would not order a missel attack on that hospital to kill Hamas militants. Israel doesn’t want to be tarred with the brush of terrorism, alleging that they treat Palestinians as being subhuman, keeping them confined in a virtual open-air prison for generations and killing them indiscriminately when there are hostilities. 

Israeli officials take great offense at these allegations but it sure doesn’t help their case when they show the world through their actions that the allegations are true. 

Even the war in Ukraine has its complicating factors. Prior to the February 2022 invasion, I was willing to say that Putin had a case to make about NATO expansion and he had reason to demand some redress. But his invasion of Ukraine and the war crimes committed at his command has made it clear that he is not a civilized global figure, and he simply cannot be trusted or tolerated in the modern world.

 

But isn’t this situation in Gaza eroding our ability to think of Israel as a civilized player in the global theater? Sure, Hamas is a terrorist organization. Putin is a terrorist with state credentials. But what is Israel? Is this in any way a defensible retaliation for October 7^th attack, or is it more of a genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip? As horrible as October 7^th was, isn’t it increasingly evident that Netanyahu is using public sympathy to carry out what he calls “mowing the grass” to an obscene degree?  I have no idea what Netanyahu’s end goal is. Does he think this is going to force Egypt, or Lebanon, or Jordan to accept all of Gaza’s population as immigrants? Or does he, God help us, actually plan to kill them all?

 

I want to remind you of that famous warning from Fredrich Nietzsche that if you stare into the abyss long enough, you find that it is staring back at you. Netanyahu and other conservatives in Israel have focused so hard on their hatred of terrorists that, it seems, it is difficult to tell them apart. Hamas does what they do without any pretense of civility, but while Israel drops leaflets warning Gaza residents to flee to the south for safety, then they go ahead and bomb the south at the same time. They have a pretense of civilization, but it is like putting chocolate frosting on a brick. If you fight terrorists with same blood lust that terrorists use, you find that the abyss is already staring back at you. 

Still, I get it, if Israel disarmed, their neighbors would kill them all in a weekend. If their neighbors disarmed, we might expect an actual state of peace; but the Palestinians are not going to disarm, and Israel isn’t either, but this is not a battle between aggressors and victims defending themselves. There are serious offenses on both sides and Israel has the bigger guns. 

 

I don’t think that we, as Americans, the nation that has a larger Jewish population that Israel does, a nation that has a dispersed and diverse Muslim population living among us, and the nation that is singularly capable of arming Israel and making it victorious, even though they are massively outnumbered by neighbors who chant, “from the river to the sea,” and they mean it. America holds the real key to Israel’s continued existence but, in my opinion, they have gone way too far, and our support cannot be assumed in the face of what can only be called war crimes…. If you have, for a moment, called Putin a war criminal, you cannot look at what Netanyahu is doing and not see that it is even worse. 

 

I have often articulated my regret that we took Palestinian land to create a Jewish homeland but, right or wrong, the holocaust was a historical event that demanded that the world provide a safe place for the Jews to live and to be able to defend themselves against that ever happening again. It is where it is, no matter how much I may question that decision, it must continue to exist, but not this way.

 

President Biden has explained several times that we had to support Ukraine’s war to maintain their independence to make clear to Xi Jinping that if China invades Taiwan, that they can expect us to help them in the same way. But if we are also supporting Netanyahu with money and weapons, no matter how cruel and monstrous his attack on the Palestinians is, then what kind of signal are we really sending to either Xi Jinping or Putin, or to Iran or North Korea, for that matter? 

 

Putin’s argument always has been that what he is doing is no different from what other world powers do, pointing at our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And if Netanyahu is murdering civilians ten times faster than Putin is, and we are still supporting his war effort, how wrong is Putin, really?

 

If our faith leads us to be the best people we can be, and to create the best nation and the best world we can create, then we cannot have an on again, off again relationship with the moral high ground. If war crimes are wrong for Russia and Syria, and Iran, and China, then war crimes are wrong for the United States and for Israel. 

 

If we are sincerely outraged about the horrible offenses of Hamas on October 7, then we cannot be indifferent to the mass murders taking place in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military. And simply turning off the news doesn’t change anything. Silence, in this moment, is equal to consent.

 

I’m going to try hard to work my way around to something like a Merry Christmas message because, this season of joy really is about our children, isn’t it.

But you know what else is all about the children? Peace. Peace is for 

children. Peace is for Muslim children, peace is for Jewish children and Christian children, peace is for Russian children, Ukrainian children, Palestinian children, and Israeli children. And we grownups don’t have to give it to them or teach it to them, we just have to stop taking it away from them. 

“No One Hears the Sound of a Wooden Bell, and No One Hears the Voice of the Poor”

“No One Hears the Sound of a Wooden Bell, and No One Hears the Voice of the Poor”

 

Nov. 19, 2023   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 

There is an old Haitian proverb that says, “No one hears the sound of a wooden bell, and no one hears the voice of the poor.” It is no surprise that this proverb comes to us out of centuries of Haitian experience of colonialism. Their transiti

on from foreign rule towards democratic self governance has been painful and still, the poor of Haiti could say that their voices are not meaningfully heard.

 

You have heard me say in the past that most of the major world religions were formed in a time of rebellion, a rebellion of the poor against the ruling class, or the rebellion of slaves against captors or invaders. There is a way of reading the Jesus narrative as a message of love and peace that encourages people to be long suffering if not martyrs, to sell all that you have and to give to the poor. But most Jesus scholars also see a tradition that may be older that portrays Jesus as a revolutionary who was opposed to the Roman Empire and those among his peers who had made uncomfortable alliances with the Empire. Which makes the crucifixion a lot easier to understand. For Rome to execute an insurrectionist makes sense, killing a preacher for teaching people to be loving and generous doesn’t really make any sense, does it?

 

Buddha also taught that life is full of suffering, but there is an anti-monarch, rejection of the ruling class in Buddhist tradition as well. Muhammad, unlike the tradition of opulent califs who followed him, lived in poverty, by choice, to identify with the common people. 

 

Just as Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, Muhammad said, “The poor will enter paradise 500 years before the rich.”

 

In the modern era, those of us who try to articulate a spiritual world view, often talk about not simply giving alms to the poor but actually empowering the poor so that their voices will be heard, so that the government really will be compelled, by the ballot box and by democratic government, to treat the rich and the poor, the privileged and the under privileged in the same way. The Kingdom of God is, by definition, a civilization which observes the values of God . . . which is about justice and not just charity.

 

And employer who puts out a box of free canned goods and some frozen turkeys during the holidays for low salaried workers to take home, has confused charity with justice. That employer should be paying the staff enough to buy their holiday dinner with dignity and not have to serve up humiliation first.

 

Most of us were expected to read George Orwell’s 1945 novel, Animal Farm, when we were in school. It is generally believed to be a parody of communism, which starts out with high ideals but quickly evolves into a kind of abusive totalitarianism. But when we look at it today, I’m not so sure that the shoe fits any better on the communist foot than it does on the western democracy foot.

 

In the novel, the animals on a farm have a successful revolution, getting rid of the farmers. After a sort of constitutional convention in the barnyard, the animals came up with seven laws that would guide them:

 

It included such things as “no animal shall wear clothes, or sleep in a bed, or drink alcohol,” but it concluded with the firm affirmation that, “All animals are equal.”

The seven laws were publicly displayed but as the novel proceeds, we see how the pigs were more intelligent, more inventive, than the other animals and they began to reward themselves for their extra responsibility with special privileges. And extra words would appear over night on the laws . . no animal shall sleep on a bed, with sheets!

 

But the one that we all remember the most clearly is the change from “All animals are equal,” to “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

 

Our nation’s founders, sick of rigid European class structures and with heads full of French philosophy, wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are all equal; well, it was 1776 so they said that all men were equal, but they didn’t really mean that either…. White men were a lot more equal than black men. They penned those words about equality in a culture that still defended the institution of slavery, of indentured servanthood, and which, both in practice and in law, regarded women as having little more than a supportive role in society. 

And so, in the name of liberty, equality, and freedom, they wrote a constitution that was riddled with compromises. They were inspired by the ideal of society defined by equality, but they caved into the reality of their day in which black Africans were slaves, poor Europeans were indentured servants, all women were almost without rights, and children could be made to work in both agriculture and industry. 

 

There was, at that time, a vigorous debate about the legitimacy of slavery and so the larger slave holding states wanted to make sure that their right to maintain the institution of slavery wouldn’t come down to a matter of majority vote, a vote that they knew they would lose. The slave holding states were agricultural and so they had much smaller populations than the more industrialized northern states. So the make up of the legislative branch was itself, a compromise. The Congress was made up of a fluid number of representatives, depending upon how many people live in a state. Right now, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, only have one member of congress each because so few people live there. California has 52 and Texas has 38. But the balance was struck by creating a senate in which every state gets 2 senators. North Dakota has two and California has two. 

 

In the eighteenth century, this protected states like Georgia from being ruled by a state like New York but in our time, it means that a Senator from California represents about 20 million citizens and a senator from North Dakota represents fewer than 400,000. Our founders would never have conceived of a state with 40 million people in it. There were fewer than 3 million people in the United States when the constitution was written. 

 

The compromise they made in the late 18^th century to keep the slave owning states in the union has become a matter of gross under representation of larger states and absurd over representation in smaller states. . . which allows my home state of Kentucky to send both Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to the Senate. I can see why people in Kentucky might vote to send those two almost anywhere to get them out of the state, but, you see, it gives them a disproportionate amount of influence in government. That is not one person – one vote, that’s not democracy. 

 

We can say that all Americans are equal, but people who live in the Dakotas and Alaska are about 50 times more equal than people living in California, at least so far as having a voice in the senate goes. And, oddly enough, there are not huge impoverished black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Dakotas or Alaska. That kind of skewed proportion effectively means that the poor in our most populated states can’t be heard as easily as we might hear a wooden bell.

 

The second compromise enshrined in our constitution is the creation of the wholly and exclusively American institution that we call the electoral college. When we vote for a president, we don’t just add up the votes and declare the person with the most votes the winner. In fact, two of our presidents in this century, lost the popular vote but still became president because they won the electoral college vote: both George W. Bush and Donald Trump failed to win the popular vote. 

 

You hear people in our area, here in Missouri, saying that there is no reason to even cast a vote in a presidential election because even if the vote is divided by 51% to 49%, the winner gets all of the electoral votes, and in Missouri, that will be the Republican candidate. 

 

In this century, even though the vote is statistically close, the Republican candidate gets all 10 of our electoral votes. . . the sometimes as high as 49.3% of Missouri voters who vote for the Democratic candidate literally don’t get their votes counted at all. 48 states give all of their electoral college votes to the winner with only Maine and Nebraska dividing their votes proportionally. Because of this, voting in either reliably red or reliably blue states means next to nothing. It is only the swing states that actually choose a president. And there are not many of those.

 

I am saying all of this exactly one year before our next presidential election because you are going to be treated to lots of talk in the news over the next year about Gerrymandering, redistricting, and dozens if not hundreds of state laws intended to suppress voting among poor, immigrant and minority populations. For those of us who are white, straight, middle class, native born Americans, all of this can sound like the buzzing of talking heads in the background. 

 

People like me rarely feel that we are marginalized. We don’t feel, in any existential way, that our government is set up to discriminate against us. I am a liberal in a red state but for most of my life, when I have called one of my senators, the senator calls me back. When I have shown up for a demonstration in Washington, D.C. even our Republican representatives make time to talk to me. They assiduously ignore everything that I say to them, but I can’t say that I don’t have a voice…. It is a loud, irritating, and largely ineffective voice, but it is my voice. 

Having a weekly political column in the region’s newspaper back in the day when people actually read newspapers gave me a megaphone rarely afforded to my ilk. 

But if we are actually spiritual people, defined by our compassionate world view, we can’t ignore the suppression of the votes of the poor and minorities just because we happen to be neither poor nor a minority. 

 

Hard fought for civil liberties are being eroded or blatantly taken away from us. Last summer, women lost control over their own reproductive lives, and many conservatives have the marriage rights of the gay community in their sights. . . and you shouldn’t have to be either a woman or gay to be exercised about this. 

 

As a straight man who advocates for gay civil rights, as a man who advocates for the equality of women, I and people like me cannot be satisfied with simply being an advocate for oppressed minorities of which we are not a part. We white liberals need to give up on seeing ourselves as the saviors of the black race. Men do not need to constantly act like we’re in a leadership role in the feminist movement, and straight people need to promote gay leaders of gay rights and not try to be heroes in our own right. 

 

I don’t regret any of the years that I have spent in publicly advocating for the poor, for minorities, and the LGBT+ community, but it is not my voice the world needs to hear. Those of us in the privileged majority need to make space for the voices of the marginalized. We don’t need to play as saviors and heroes, we need to applaud the leadership that is emerging in each of these groups.

 

After 50 years of civil rights and equality speeches, with all of we liberal clergy members, journalists and politicians, still, when you look at our congress, which has more women than any previous congress, but they still make up only one fourth of the Senate and Congress and the last time I checked, women make up just over one half of the population. 

 

Our current congress has more openly gay members than any previous congress but that number is still just 13 . . . hardly representative of the size of their community.

 

More than half of the members of congress are millionaires and very few have ever been what we would call poor. All of the efforts at voter suppression are intended to have the effect of keeping our congress primarily white, male, straight, and rich and that is just not the America that I know. 

 

We have taken some serious steps backwards in the past few years. I suppose that it was naive to hope that progress would always go in a straight line. But we must not give up. I no longer pray for the the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. 

 

I think that it is time for a new prayer, now I pray for the strength to change the things that I cannot accept and I hope that you do too.