My Faith Journey

My Faith Journey          

December 28, 2025      Dr. Roger Ray

click here for the video 

 

This sermon will bring to a close my 46 year long preaching career. I still have a few preaching events booked for next year but if there are ever new sermons posted on this YouTube or iTunes channels, it will be a special occasion. I’m not sick or tired but I am old, and, honestly, we are out of money. What small reserve we have we will use to keep our rather large catalogue of sermons up on line and to keep our website up so that the ministers who often use my past sermons can find the manuscripts. 

 

But since this chapter of my life is coming to a close, I hope that you will indulge me some reminiscence about how I got to this point, going from being a young rural traditional Christian to be where I am now, a largely humanist Unitarian.

I was only 23 years old when I became the minister of the First Christian Church in La Center, Kentucky while I finished my degree in philosophy at Murry State University.

A year later I moved to the county seat town of Russellville, Kentucky where I served while I earned my seminary degree and doctorate at Vanderbilt. I took my very traditional evangelical faith to Vanderbilt because I thought I was a liberal. I was a liberal in the sense that I was opposed to war, and I was deeply invested in ethics, especially as regards racism, poverty, and civil rights.

 

My graduate school education poked all kinds of holes in the Christian religion that I had learned with its devotion to heaven and hell, the divinity of Jesus, and its devotion to the Bible. I dodged coming to terms with those things by majoring in pastoral counseling, giving my energy to working with alcoholics and drug addicts, and doing counseling with people who suffered from domestic violence and depression.

 

Theologically, I immersed myself in the study of monastic spirituality, especially the work of the famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Devotion to spiritual mystery allowed me to stay in a traditional Christian church when I knew better than to believe in all of the magic and superstition associated with an evangelical faith. 

In 1991 I was 35 years old, I had become a father, and I had been hired to be the senior minister of a large Christian Church in Springfield, Missouri. I had the staff and the financial backing to throw myself into the kind of social justice work that had given my life in ministry so much meaning. Building houses for the poor in the USA and establishing medical clinics and feeding centers in Central America helped me to make peace with my role in a church that still used the language of evangelical Christianity even though I was no longer a part of that faith.

 

I nervously got involved with the Jesus Seminar and began reading the works of Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, and the author who later became my good friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong. In the mid-90’s I was teaching a course on the gospels at Drury University. I used Marcus Borg’s seminal work, “Meeting Jesus Again (For the First Time), as a text book. Folks, there is nothing quite like teaching to force you to come clean with what you really believe. Thankfully, Marcus Borg was an uncommonly kind man who deconstructed the Christian religion in a very gentle way. 

 

But, I can remember sitting in my opulent office at National Ave. Christian Church and reading Spong’s book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and feeling the great gulf between the post theological supernaturalism of Spong and the language and hymns and rituals of the church that kept me employed and allowed me to comfortably raise my daughter in a middle class life.

 

I later confessed to Bishop Spong that it took me a couple of years to finish reading his book about how Christianity had to change because I would read a bit and get scared that thinking that way would surely get me fired, so I would put it back on a the shelf to the right of my big mahogany desk . . . but I was drawn to it, like a cat to a catnip mouse. I didn’t want to finish reading it, but I couldn’t help myself. 

I had one foot firmly planted in the institutional, denominational Christian Church, and the other foot more enthusiastically planed in honest scholarship in a post-theistic way of thinking. 

In 2004 I was invited to be a Merrill Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. I was on Sabbatical at Harvard for just 4 months but it was my first time away from the Midwest, the weekly task of preaching, and the politics of a big church that tried to keep me in a golden cage.

I fully embraced an honest and academic approach to faith and, predictably, I was fired about a year after I got home. I will spare you the details of the mafia styled way my denomination and congregation kicked me to the curb but in a lot of ways, it was the most liberating thing that could ever have happened to me.

 

After a year of working as the director of the Central American charity that I had loved for years, writing for the local paper and teaching, I was persuaded to try to start a liberal, academic, church with no ties to any denomination. That is how I was allowed to become the person you have known in these past 17 years of internet sermons.

 

As hard as it has been to be a controversial preacher for the past 40 years, in spite of all the petty church political battles, and backstabbing associate pastors and staff, I have been very lucky. 

There were enough good people around me who wanted to keep me in a pulpit to donate enough money to start a church. And, speaking of being lucky, a young man I had known as a college student in my denominational days had become an IT expert and he came along and offered to start putting my sermons on YouTube and iTunes. Rob Martin, for want of a more humble way of saying it, made me famous within the progressive religious world. 

 

There was, in the earlier part of this century, a huge appetite for a way of being religious without believing in all of the magic and superstition. I had built a congregation, full of retired ministers and college professors, who challenged me every week to dig a little deeper, to examine the faith we had been taught as children and to come terms with reality. The transformation didn’t happen all at once. Honestly, it took me nearly 40 years to let go of the religion that I had been spoon fed sitting on a little painted chair when I was a toddler in my home church.

 

One of the great psychological truths is that all change is experienced as a loss. Even though I had the good fortune of going to great schools with amazing professors, who were patient enough to liberate me from the mental prison I was raised in, every subtle change was an act of giving up something I had been taught to cherish.  I was raised to believe that holding onto that ancient faith was what it took, not simply to be a good preacher, but to be a good person. 

 

You can learn better theology in your head, even write it down in your papers in grad school, but to let it into your heart is typically a journey of a lifetime. 

In the Unitarian Church where I am now a member, I am only one of several retired ministers, all of whom used to be Methodists, Presbyterians, or Disciples. 

 

Of course, most of the people who break out of the mental cage of traditional religions don’t become Unitarians. They become Rotarians, or bord members at the Y or the Heart Association. Once people realize that whoever or whatever God is, that God didn’t write the Bible and never wanted to send eternal souls to a burning hell and couldn’t bring eternal souls into the rewards of heaven, most of them just take up pickleball and never give church another thought.

 

I have stuck with it and I am, honestly, more involved in my local congregation than I really want to be, but I do it because I still want to be in community with people who know that racism is wrong, that sexism is wrong, that prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community is wrong, and that it is a good thing to show compassion to immigrants, to the poor, the hungry, and the sick. I still go to church because I still want to be a good person and it helps me to be around people who also want to be good people. 

 

I am going to end now where I probably should have started, saying a hearty and sincere thank you to all of you who have donated to support me in this work, those of you who have listened, reposted, and helped us to get the word out about a life of faith that is not mired in superstition and myths. 

 

I owe a special debt of thanks to my silent partner in all of this: Rob Martin, my cameraman, IT expert, and my good friend whose career is now very demanding and even though he has a wife and elementary aged daughter who also need and deserve his time, Rob has stuck it out to keep my content on line. 

I am honored to have had all of you in my life and I will live in gratitude until the sun finally sets on balding head!

More than Just a Story

More than Just a Story    December 14, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray 

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Helena, the sainted mother of Emperor Constantine, used the influence and wealth of her son to build churches in the Holy Land.  Three centuries after the events described in the gospels, she went to Jerusalem to build a church where Jesus was buried and to Bethlehem to build a church where Jesus was born.

I have been to both a few times but then, I have also been to Jericho where a guide showed me the actual Sycamore tree that Zacchaeus climb up into so that he could see over the taller people when Jesus came to town.

Now, Helena was no archaeologist determined to preserve history.  She was a devout worshipper so when she asked people in Bethlehem where Jesus had been born, the locals showed her a shepherd's cave.  She, of course, did not enshrine the cave, she had the entire hill excavated and a replacement cave made in the lower floor of the great cathedral of the Nativity out of precious marble.

Visitors to the Church of the Nativity are often treated to a plaintive tour guide who says that the manger in which Jesus was born is not on display there, not because such a crude wooden item would have turned to dust and ash thousands of years ago but, because it was stolen by the Catholic Church and is housed in the Vatican..... the absurdity of that claim never seems to trouble Israeli tour guides nor the curators of the Vatican's treasures who have no intentions to relinquishing the manger that has no more to do with Jesus than I have to do with managing the caviar trade in Russia.  Sometimes it is hard to embarrass religious people.

One of the most difficult issues in teaching Bible in my college classes is the fact that moderns tend to be so fact literal.  You read the parables where Jesus says that the Kingdom is like a man who had two sons and then another parable says that the Kingdom is like a woman who lost a coin and modern people get mad and say, "Well which is it?  Is it like a man with two sons or a woman who lost a coin because it can't be both!"

I used to sit in the back of our sanctuary and watch world renowned Biblical scholar,  Dr. David Trobisch, patiently teaching us about the gospels, understanding them as stories written to help us understand great truths, metaphors used to open the mind to see reality in new ways, and, inevitably, at the end of the class, someone will raise their hand and ask, "But how do we know that this really happened?"

I complimented David once on his uncommon patience and in the midst of the conversation someone came up to him to demand an explanation for why God would be so cruel as to kill all of the animals on earth in the world wide flood of Noah when it was the people who had been sinful.  I responded, "Don't you understand that it is a sermon and not a bit of history, there has never been a world- wide flood."  And David interjected, "Well, in a way, it happens every time the story is read."

That is the power of story telling.... It becomes real in the moment it is shared in a community in order to bring about something that is real within us. Some of the books that influenced us the most were not text books, they were fiction novels. Some of the most moving and memorable movies we have seen were not documentaries, they were fictional stories that somehow opened our minds to a greater truth. We use fiction to tell truths in a way that we can understand and be changed by those truths.

 

Nothing was ever written about the teachings of Buddha until 500 years after Buddha had died. So how much of oral tradition was actually based on the teachings of Buddha and how much of it was the product of the community that met to remember Buddha? I doubt that there is a single thing that Buddha said that is preserved in Buddhist scriptures and yet, what is attributed to Buddha is often very insightful and helpful.

 

I have serious doubts about whether there was ever a historical character like Moses or King David, and yet, the stories that took written form in Babylon during the Hebrew exile preserve cultural wisdom and symbolic myths that were initially helpful to slaves in Babylon and have continued to have meaning for the faith community for the past 2500 years. 

When St Helena went to Bethlehem, she was looking for the stable mentioned in Luke's gospel.  But that was just a choice she made.  

In Matthew, Jesus was born in a house. The two gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus have almost nothing in common other than the gender of the child.  In Matthew, the holy family lives in Bethlehem but flees to avoid the slaughter of the innocents and ends up settling in Nazareth.  In Luke, the family lives in Nazareth but are compelled in the most unlikely manner to visit Bethlehem for a Roman census and then return to their home after the birth.

Neither account is historically true.  Jesus was, in all likelihood,  born in and grew up in Nazareth (recognizing that the existence of Nazareth is also somewhat historically dubious but let's not wade into the weeds too far).  Neither Mark nor John are interested in the geography or circumstances of Jesus' birth.  Matthew and Luke both have reasons of Jewish heritage to say that he was born in Bethlehem but Matthew and Luke don't compare notes.

The shepherds, angels, stable and the magnificat are only in Luke.  The magi, star, and flight to Egypt are only in Matthew.  The one thing that both have in common is that neither is the slightest bit interested in the historical facts because they are too busy trying to tell us an important story.... And we're still wondering why the Vatican refuses to give that old wooden manger back to the church in Bethlehem where it belongs.

The best way to kill a good story is to try to take it too literally.  One of the great rallying cries of the Progressive Christian movement is that they take the Bible seriously but not literally.  The question we should be asking is, if Luke and Matthew had no facts about the historical circumstances of the birth of Jesus, then why did they write these accounts?  Why?  What do they mean?  What is the message?.... Those are the questions every story teller is actually trying to answer.
Matthew is at pains to tell the Jesus story in a way that proves to us that he is the true Jewish messiah.  He begins his account with a long genealogy tracing Jesus through the family of Joseph back to Abraham and then he tells us that Joseph wasn't really his father... like I said, Matthew doesn't want to be disturbed with any logical facts, he is telling us a story.

Though Matthew will quote Old Testament texts repeatedly through the next 25 chapters of his book to prove that Jesus was the messiah, he completely leaves the Jews out of his birth narrative.  No one in the temple was aware of the birth of Jesus, but some foreign astrologers knew about it, and they traveled across the wilderness to come bring presents.  Astrologers were anathema to Jews.  Practicing astrology is punishable by death, according to Deuteronomy 17 and yet, Matthew, the most Jewish of New Testament writers, is willing to slap traditional Judaism in the face and insist that gentiles knew about Jesus and his own people didn't.

There is a real message of humility in this.  As Michael Franti sings, "God is too big for just one religion."  Matthew tells us a story of a messiah who comes into the world, embraced by those who seek him but endangered by the both the institutions of religion and government.  The priests are indifferent, and Herod tries to kill him, so that Jesus is aided by members of another religion and then is forced to flee as a political refugee.  If you let Matthew tell the story his own way, you see how we Christians are always uneasy around institutional religion, the halls of political power, and we can always look for Jesus among the refugees and the illegal immigrants.

Luke tells his Christmas story with entirely different details but hauntingly similar themes.  For Luke, Jesus is born into poverty and suffers both indignity and rejection by government and religion.

They are forced from their home by an oppressive occupying government and then in Bethlehem, they are not even shown the dignity to be allowed to give birth in doors.  We have all heard all of our lives that there was "no room" in the inn for them but I am inclined to think that Luke had something even more pointed in mind.

Ancient inns did not rent "rooms."  They were not like a Days Inn, after all.  Inns were just big houses largely comprised of a lower floor and an upper room.  Customers just paid to come in, and they found a place on the floor among the other guests.  At what point does an inn keeper in the ancient world tell a paying customer, "I don't want any more money"?

It is possible that Luke is suggesting to us that for religious reasons, it was not simply that there was not room inside, it is that there was no room among all those people for Mary and Jesus.  Again, in Jewish tradition, everyone who is in a house when a woman gives birth is defiled and must make an offering.  Perhaps Luke is telling us that Jesus was rejected by formal religion even before he was born..... something that all of us who have been rejected by either family or faith because we were somehow "unclean" in their judgment should be able to appreciate.

Where do we find Jesus in Luke's story?  Out in the barn, among all of the stuff that you know is found in a barn.  And to whom is the divine birth announcement given?  Not to priests or kings but only to shepherds in the field.
We modern Americans tend to romanticize shepherds but don't kid yourselves....being a shepherd was the real night cashier job at Walmart in those days.  Sheep are smelly and stupid and they have to be watched all of the time.  Shepherds didn't get to observe Sabbath and they were always unclean literally or religiously.

That angels appeared to shepherds who were led to a barn where Jesus was born is a statement that you will find Jesus in homeless shelter for runaway teens where some unwed teen-ager just had a baby.  If you let Luke tell his story his way, you can appreciate why Jim Wallis says that no one goes to heaven without three references from homeless people.

As a Humanist and a Unitarian, I usually cringe at specifically Christian songs and sermons but, putting personal prejudices aside, I can say honestly that the Jesus story is not historical but it is a fictional revelation of the truth; and every time we tell it, we bring good news to the poor, we bring hope to those in despair, we shine a light in dark places, promising justice to the oppressed, the refugee, the homeless and the unemployed.  The story of Christmas is not the first corner stone of a new organized religion.  It is a story that begins our story, our story of standing up to governments and churches, of siding with the poor and the oppressed.... as my favorite musician, Bruce Cockburn, sings, we keep "kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight."

 

Holiday Casualty Count

Holiday Casualty Count           

November 30, 2025    

Dr. Roger Ray

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I hope that you all had a good Thanksgiving whether it was a big family gathering or a Friends-giving like I had at my house. I say, “I hope”, knowing that for a lot of people, traditional family gatherings are something to be dreaded. 

 

I have always said of my family of origin that I believe that I had one of the less miserable childhoods. For 45 years I have done quite a bit of pastoral counseling, and I have heard the horror stories of families with a history of child abuse, both beatings and sexual assault. I have done a lot of work with drug and alcohol addicted people and their family members. And I have known people who lived in such chronic poverty that trying to prepare a holiday meal was more a humiliation of charity or profound hunger. 

 

My family had none of that. There was no violence, so sexual abuse, no one drank any alcohol, and we were pretty comfortably ensconced in the middle class of rural Kentucky. Our house was clean and safe, our clothes were clean, we went to the doctor when we were sick, we went to church every Sunday, and there was a family understanding that the children, unlike our parents, would all earn college degrees.

 

None of the people who scheduled appointments with me in my church office would have described their family in the way that I described mine just now. However, when I did go away to college, and my first college was just 30 miles from my hometown, I was always amazed by my university peers who got home sick. And as the Thanksgiving break loomed large, most of them talked about how eager they were to get to go home. 

 

For me, living at college was an escape from the constant criticism, bickering, judgement, and guilt. What made my peers homesick, what made them long to go home was an anticipation of warmth, affection, acceptance, of having a place, a sense of belonging. While we had a nice house, car, clothes, plenty of good food, medical care, education, and a church life, there were almost no warm fuzzies. No comfortable sense that you could let your hair down and just be yourself. My mother was a puritan lady who was suspicious of happiness. My father was WWII veteran whose mind was wounded by the war’s carnage, and he lived every day in the anger he used to mask his constant fear. 

 

My 3 siblings and I all married young, while we were still in college. That often happens to children who grew up in homes that were devoid of love. You want love, intimacy, affection, but for us, that’s kind of like ghosts …. Something that everyone talks about, but no one has ever really seen. 

 

I shouldn’t speak for my siblings but at least for me, our attempts at finding the love and warm fuzzies we longed for were cursed by the baggage we took from home with us. It took me a long time to understand what was wrong with my family of origin and even longer to learn a better way of creating a happy home life. The harsh perfectionism that ruled our childhoods and made us successful in our careers, never worked well at home. It should have been obvious but, as is true of most things that should be obvious, it wasn’t.

 

My siblings found reasons to rarely be around my parents once they were on their own but my sense of obligation was strong, and I made sure that they were not alone on the holidays until they had passed away. My oldest brother, having at the time the most stable work and family situation, rolled up his sleeves and took on the task of caring for them in their last years. My sister passed away, and I have only seen my brothers at each parent’s funeral. Other than occasional FaceBook comments, we have fallen into the icy silence that is our family inheritance.

 

Ironically, shortly after writing that previous paragraph, I received a text message from my oldest brother telling me that he had cancer that was not responding to chemo therapy and that he likely only had weeks left to live. Forgive me for sharing such a personal issue but it would seem to me to be dishonest to not tell you. For all of us who hope to heal family divisions, we should all be aware that we are not guaranteed another holiday season or, in my case, maybe not even Christmas. Even without a terminal diagnosis, folks, we should view these things with a certain sense of urgency. 

 

I wanted to raise the issue of family conflict today, in the shadow of Thanksgiving, because the great thing about this season is that the second big family holiday is just a month away. If Thanksgiving was a failure in your family; good news, you get a second chance to make it better in just a month!

 The opening line of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, succinctly says:  “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There are libraries full of books about the various hells we create for unhappy families – alcohol, violence, sexual abuse, infidelity, gambling and drug addiction, various mental health issues, and, in our day, political and moral differences. We had a kind of diagnosis in pastoral counseling called “conflict habituated families,” families that simply didn’t know what to do if they were not in conflict. No one could express themselves unless they were shouting or talking through gritted teeth, as if anger is the only motivation for communication. 

 

I spent years sending letters to my siblings reminding them that we could recreate our family. We could be happy and loving if only we could decide that we all wanted that. The most articulate answer I ever received to those entreaties was, “no thanks.” It takes at least two people to play tennis. After a few years of lobbing a ball over the net and never getting a ball hit back, you give up. But still, it didn’t have to be that way in my family, and it certainly doesn’t have to be that way in your family. 

 

In the most severe cases, reconciliation may be nearly impossible. Sometimes there are root causes than should not be dismissed or swept under the rug. 

And sometimes, the burden of resentments is so large that you can’t even imagine letting go of it. 

 

I did my master’s thesis on the treatment of alcoholism and after a couple of years of going to four or five AA meetings every week, I can tell you that I have heard a lot of nightmare scenarios. Most of the time, whenever there is an AA meeting, there is an Al Anon meeting at the same time in another room in the same building. The recovering alcoholics called the Al Anon room where the family members of Alcoholics meet, the “sick room.” That seems dismissive but, I can tell you that it is not entirely inaccurate. Alcohol addiction is not a problem that typically arrives at a family’s door unaccompanied. 

 

But here is the irony: every group has its success stories and often times, it was the sickest people who eventually find their way into being the most healthy. And sadly, a lot of time, the people who seemed to have the most to live for and the fewest serious problems, were the ones who just couldn’t find a way to minimize their conflict and maximize their joy. 

 

I will tell you with some shame that some of my lowest functioning counseling clients, the ones who exhausted and exasperated me, the ones that I wished would just stop wasting my time, turned into some the most remarkable success stories. 

 

You may think that your family is just impossible and maybe you are right but what if they are not entirely impossible? What if there was a chance that your family of origin could become, if not an astounding success, at least a lot more healthy than it has been in the past? 

 

I am not one of those “pie in the sky” preachers who will tell you that everything can be fixed with forgiveness and unconditional love. There are offenses that are so evil that any kind of unconditional love or forgiveness would be, in and of itself, very sick. However, the things that cause distance in most families are typically so venial that they would embarrass Charles Darwin.

The famous Austrian psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, after he had survived a horrifying Nazi death camp during the holocaust, said, “Suffering is like a gas. It expands to fill the space allowed to it.” Even in the torture and deprivation of the holocaust, each individual has a certain roll in choosing how much of your skull you are going to rent to your suffering. 

 

I’m not saying that your drunk uncle didn’t insult you at Thanksgiving. I didn’t say that your parents didn’t who more love and approval to one of your siblings than they ever did you. It may be that your brother even owes you money that he clearly has no plans to repay. 

 

Seven years ago two women coauthored a book that became a NewYork Times best seller that was cryptically titled, “Let that Shit Go.” That’s not to say that you ignore the co-worker who is sexually harassing you . . . report them to HR or maybe even get a restraining order, but don’t let them live rent free in your head. You play a part in choosing how much of your life will be given over to suffering. 

 

At least one over zealous marketing person has even tried to sell coffee mugs with the saying and an image of the Buddha, to suggest that it was Buddha who first told us to just “let that shit go.” And that, I can assure you, is a false attribution . . . however, even though I am certain that Buddha didn’t say it just that way, he did teach that life is suffering and the only way out of suffering is detachment, to let go expectations and resentments, so, in rather coarse vernacular, the Buddha would tell you, before your family Christmas gathering, to try to just let that shit go and save room in your heart and your head to have a more loving and joyous holiday. 

 

Turn on some music. Open a bottle of wine. Tell a non-offensive joke. And try not to make it so obvious that you think that your Trump supporting family members are idiots. That’s my opinion.

 

Lucifer in LA

 Lucifer in LA    

 November 16, 2025    

 Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 

 

 

I didn’t think that I would care much for the Netflix theological fantasy, Lucifer. In fact, I managed to assiduously avoid it for nearly a decade until, for want of other options, I gave it a try. It was mostly what I expected . . . simultaneously childish while salacious with all of the dialogue depth of a Saturday morning cartoon, albeit, with a lot more sex. And yet, I got sucked in for the very reasons I expected to hate it. The characters in the series are mostly based on Catholic mythology but blended with and told in somewhat the style of Greek mythology, featuring demigods with very fragile human egos. 

 

As such it explores and exploits a lot of what I detest about organized religion. Beliefs which hail from ancient times that have somehow managed to survive into the modern world. In many ways, the existence of orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims, is an indictment of the failure of reason in modern civilization.  As Karen Armstrong famously said, "If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology"

On one level, we can say that faith or spirituality is an attempt at interpreting our experience of life through a lens that is focused on ethics, morality, justice, and character. Sadly, however, when the myths and ancient expressions of personification of nature are taken literally, that’s not just juvenile or primitive thinking, it is dangerous thinking that leads to all manner of prejudices, abuse, and even violence. 

 

Just as a footnote: the personification of nature is a gift that comes to us from the most ancient time when humans were first becoming thinking beings. We experience the world through our feelings, our emotions, our person, and so the ancients projected personhood onto aspects of nature, the sun, the moon, oceans, rivers, and forests. Explaining the seasons, natural disasters, rain and droughts, on the moods of the gods, and the chaos of the universe, life and death itself, was explained in mythic tales about the romances and battles between the gods. 

 

These tales can inspire art and poetry but when they are taken literally they discourage critical thinking and blur the lines between reality and make believe.

Last weekend my wife and I went to a Thai Buddhist temple in Melbourn, Florida to participate in the Loy Krathong ceremony in which we floated small boats in a body of water. One of the things I love about Thai Buddhism is that it does not cling to any kind of Buddhist orthodoxy. This ceremony is mostly Hindu and maybe even older than Hinduism. 

Originally, it was in honor of the goddess of the river, seeking favor with the goddess to provide water in times of need but not too much water in the monsoon season. But like everything in Thai Buddhism, it is subject to reinterpretation in a modern age when the meaning of things needs to evolve. Now the emphasis of the Loy Krathong ceremony is respect for the river, avoiding pollution and trying to clean up our relationship with the river. . . not a primitive belief that the river is a goddess who might get jealous and flood your fields and towns.

 

We are on a vegetarian diet this week because my wife wanted to show gratitude to Buddha for having finally gotten her visa to come live in the United States. However, I am aware that the real reason is to help me lose weight. It is a religious gesture aimed at better health, not that Buddha is really keeping count of how much fried chicken we eat.

 

However, western religions seem to encourage adherents to continue to deny reality and invest themselves in fantasy beliefs. It can be funny when, on an episode of Lucifer, he is embarrassed by his angel wings popping out at inconvenient moments, but it is seriously embarrassing when people take that stuff seriously.

 

I would remind you that Harry Reid, the former Democratic majority leader of the senate, in 2007, helped to create a government agency to investigate sightings of UFOs. He did so, not because he believed that he had been abducted and possibly probed but because he is a Mormon and a part of the Mormon list of hilarious beliefs is that God lives on the plant Kolob and that there are many inhabited planets in the universe. There may be intelligent life in many places in the universe but the silly imaginings of Joseph Smith about good Mormon men getting their own planet to rule over in the afterlife should be enough to have made people abandon the Mormon religion generations ago but true believers, like Harry Reid, who for many years was third in line for the presidency of the United States, promote belief in UFO sightings, even wasting tax dollars on the search, in order to support the absurd teachings of his church.

 

I am confident that when Donald Trump says that he is trying to get into heaven, that he does not mean that literally, but, sadly, more than 70% of Americans believe that heaven is real, and about 60% believe that a literal burning hell is real . . . when makes the Lucifer Netflix series as much of a documentary as the evening news. 

 

I am eating a lot of salads and vegetable soups, ostensibly to fulfill a promise my wife made to Buddha, though I know that if Buddha ever lived, he has been dead for more than 2000 years and he doesn’t care or know if I sneak in a hotdog at Sam’s Club, but I am willing to participate in the vegetarian observance because it is good for my health and it is good for the health of the planet. 

 

But when I drive by one of the mega churches in Florida on a Sunday morning and sea the ocean of cars in the parking lot, I shudder to think that so many people continue to indoctrinate their children into the mythological beliefs of conservative Christianity. If I could believe that all of those people were, in community, encouraging one another to greater acts of kindness, compassion, empathy, and greater sensitivity to the differences which are a part of humanity, then I could be glad that such institutions continue to thrive . . . but, sadly, I know that what they are being taught is myths about a God who supports and encourages their belief that women are second class citizens who cannot be trusted, that gays, lesbians and the transgendered among us are an abomination to be loathed and punished for simply existing. I know that they are being trained to doubt science whether that is in regard to global climate change or the efficacy of vaccines. 

 

As Carl Sagan said in the previous century, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Still, if a person painting park benches puts a sign on a freshly painted park bench that reads “wet paint” you can bet that someone will come along and touch it to see if the paint is, in fact, wet. It is not a terribly important claim and yet the cynics among us are not inclined to just believe a sign . . . we will test it. But tell a young teenager that they will go to hell for having sexual thoughts and many of them will have anxiety about the fact that they can’t help having sexual thoughts. What evidence is there for the literal existence of a place of eternal burning punishment and torture? There is none and yet we continue to groom century after century of young people to be gullible enough to simply believe the most extraordinary claim with no evidence at all.

 

Though they often try to deny it now, the Mormon church historically teaches that exceptionally good Mormon men will one day rule over a planet of their own and that sounds just stupid to the ears of those who were not brought up to be Mormons. But how different is it from the claim that we all have immortal souls and that we will not ever die but the righteous will live forever in heaven, enjoying the rewards of our piety. There is no more evidence in support of the classic Christian, “die and go to heaven in Jesus’ name,” that there is for the Mormon promise of your own planet. People who cannot successfully keep a houseplant alive for six months believe that a part of themselves, their essence, their consciousness, will remain intact for billions and trillions of years without ceasing! The absurdity of the claim should embarrass anyone with enough sense to operate a doorknob and yet, this morning, cathedrals and megachurches are packed with doctors, lawyers, professors, and baristas who shamelessly believe this drivel without question. 

 

For nearly 30 years I had to pretend to give lip service to these beliefs when I was a pastor in the Disciples of Christ. I knew better. My staff knew better. I assume that most of our members knew better. But still, there was this employment, denominational prison in which you had to make gestures of agreement with the whole heaven and hell thing. When I finally burned that bridge and decided to start a progressive church without any pretending about ancient myths we latched onto the Jamaican Reggae singer, Bob Marley’s song, Get Up, Stand Up, as our anthem.

 

We sang it church very often, especially in the early days as a reminder of the mental prison from which we had escaped. I wish I could play it for you but that isn’t legal… I’ll stretch the law enough to tell you a part of what the song says:

Preacher man don't tell me heaven is under the earth
I know you don't know what life is really worth
It's not all that glitter is gold
Half the story has never been told
So now you see the light, ay You stand up for your right

Get up, stand up Stand up for your right
Get up, stand up Don't give up the fight
….

Most people think great God will come from the sky
Take away everything, and make everybody feel high
But if you know what life is worth
You would look for yours on earth
And now you see the light
You stand up for your right, yeah

….

We're sick and tired of your ism and schism game
Die and go to heaven in Jesus' name, Lord
We know and we understand
Almighty God is a living man
You can fool some people sometimes
But you can't fool all the people all the time
So now we see the light (what you gon' do?)
We going to stand up for our right (yeah, yeah, yeah)

Folks, do not be easily fooled. Don’t let your religion be about an unknown and unknowable after life. Your spirituality is here and now. Social justice is our religious practice so, even though my preaching career is coming to a close soon, please, don’t give up the fight. 

The Hallowing of America

The Hallowing of America      November 2, 2025         Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

It was 100 years ago this year that America’s most influential poet, T. S. Eliot, published his work, The Hallow Men. Eliot was an adult convert to Catholicism and as is often true with adult converts, he was very ardent about his faith.

Eliot, apart from his rather inexplicable work devoted to cats, was a fairly somber person both before and after his conversion. He seemed to find people to be simultaneously vain and entirely void of meaningful content. And I tend to side with him on that point; there are few things as annoying as an arrogant person who is clearly below average in every meaningful way. As a Catholic, he seemed to view most of his peers as being religious in name but bereft of the kind of passion and devotion that made faith meaningful. 

He opens this poem ominously saying, “We are the hollow men, he stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” I don’t know what made him see the world of 1925, in that time between the two great world wars, as being occupied by animated scare crows, stuffed with nothing but straw in their heads, but the poem ends in judgement:

This is the way the world ends 

This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This poem appeals to me as it seems to go beyond talking merely about good people or bad people. Elliot’s concern was not simply a failure to be a good or a spiritual person, and more than becoming bad, or criminal, or even evil. 

He seems to see the direction of civilization to be going towards something that is not just bad but rather more pathetic. Hollowed out people . . . people with heads full of straw. . . . lacking substance or virtue. I’m going to have to ask you to tolerate me being a bit Socratic today, taking some time to explore what we mean by being a good or a virtuous person.

 

We mean something different, don’t we, when we talk about a good dog or a good cat. A good dog is loyal, brave, maybe even noble. Dogs are pack animals and so they exhibit concern for their pack, their family. They exhibit what we interpret to be love, compassion, empathy, and certain breeds even have a work ethic. These are senseless aspects if we are talking about cats. Humans enjoy living with cats without expectations of courage and loyalty. They interact with us, but what makes a cat a good cat is entirely different from what makes a good dog. And, of course, we could go on to say what makes a good caged bird, or a good fish in an aquarium. Good and bad, in this sense is predicated in the context of expectations.  

 

To a degree, virtue and sin in regard to people is also sometimes based on context. We Americans might easily conclude that Vladimir Putin is a bad person, maybe even a monster, a war criminal. He has led a war against Ukraine with apparent indifference to whether he is killing civilians or members of the military. He has not even shown much concern about the lives of his own soldiers, sacrificing lives and infrastructure, and resources to accomplish an expansion of Russia’s territory and power. We can easily dismiss his value as a good person, but it should not surprise you that there are many in Russia who do not view him this way because they have a belief that Russia should be more powerful, more significant on the world stage. That their superiority to Ukrainians, Poles, and Americans, and British, should be reflected in their dominance of other nations.

 

Even though the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip was provoked by a despicable surprise attack by Hamas terrorists, the way that Benjamin Netanyahu  has conducted that war, indiscriminately killing the residents of the Gaza Strip and taking away food, medicine, housing, and education from a population of 2 million people would make him a war criminal and a monster as well, however, many in Israel, who have lived in fear of their Muslim neighbors, either publicly or privately applaud not only his courage and determination, they may also applaud his techniques. I don’t agree with Russians who love Putin or Israelis who love Netanyahu but you have to acknowledge that there is a reason for their views.

 

We Americans certainly have an existential experience of this same thing. The MAGA supporters of Trump seem to be willing to tolerate dishonesty, anti-democratic actions, deportations, military strikes, graft, and political bribes, largely  because Trump validates their own racism, their sense of American superiority, their prejudice against women, gays and lesbians, and their fear of immigrants, transgender folk, and, apparently, educated people. For about half of us, we easily conclude that Trump is a great threat to everything that might have been virtuous about America and to the other half, he is restoring what they believe to be the rightful inheritance of privilege and American status. 

 

As a pastor, as a theological professional, I contend that we can, regardless of where we live or where we were raised, we can arrive at an objective view of human virtue. We may very well slide into an era of being entirely hollow people but we don’t have to. We can think. We can be honest. We can discern the difference between objective facts and self-serving propaganda. 

 

We seem to have 20-20 vision when we are looking at the past. People in our age can almost universally use the name of Adolph Hitler to represent a pinnacle of human evil and yet, there are young people in many countries, races and religions, who identify with Hitler, his goals and his methods. 

 

Nazis pointed to certain philosophers who seemed to advocate for their perspective. Specifically, Fredrich Nietzsche talked about the Ubermench, the superman, who lived out a will to power, dismissing weaknesses and vulnerability and pursuing personal transcendence and strength. You can see how that would appeal to Hitler, even though I don’t think Nietzsche meant what Hitler got out of his philosophy. But, it is possible for a twisted person to find virtue in what is, in retrospect, obviously sin.

 

Consider the Trump administration’s decision to cut out almost all of America’s USAID program that provided emergency food and medicine to impoverished countries. The argument was made by Elon Musk and DOGE that America does not owe compassionate aid to the poor and starving, a harsh and hard perspective on what it means to be a good American but even if you can go there, when we became aware that there was millions of dollars of food in warehouses that we had already paid for that was being allowed to rot by simply not distributing it, even to the point of not allowing aid agencies to buy it and distribute it when America no longer would. There was, apparently, a preference for making a point by choosing to waste millions of dollars of food by preventing it from being given to starving masses. . . as hard as it is to imagine, there are those who take some satisfaction in even this heinous policy. 

 

The hollowness of our current presidential administration is reinforced daily. Consider the ways in which Trump uses the presidency to enrich himself and his family:

1)   Near the end of his first term, Rudy Guiliani was caught trying to sell pardons, apparently for his own gain as well as Trump’s.

2)   But in this second term, pardons are flying off of the President’s desk for convicted criminals who made large political donations or who invest in his crypto or other businesses and in return, they are relieved of their obligation to pay huge fines to the government for their crimes. In just the past three months, Trump has waved off $1.3 billion in fines in exchange for business deals and political donations in much smaller amounts. Apparently, you not only can buy a pardon from Trump, but you can save yourself more than time in prison, you can shave off hundreds of millions of dollars that you owe the American government in the process. Trump is running the Kmart “blue light special” of selling pardons. 

3)   He recently has asked for more than $200 million from the Justice Department to repay lawyer fees and for punitive judgements against the justice department for indicting him for crimes which he clearly committed and for which he has dodged prison time only by having been re-elected president. 

4)   Beyond this, he sells Trump named products and arranges for federal staff and foreign dignitaries to backdoor millions of dollars into his pocket by arranging for them to spend lavishly at his hotels, resorts, and golf courses. 

Trump may not have actually been very wealthy when he was first elected. Most of his properties were leveraged to the eyebrows, but he is rich now, almost exclusively by taking money from the American people through shameless exploitation. 

 

Though this administration has tried to do everything they can to change the subject and avoid producing evidence about Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and his whole pedophile prostitution business, it becomes more clear every week that Trump’s role was something that he desperately needs to keep hidden. Casting the self-proclaimed super-Christians like Speaker Mike Johnson into a nearly full-time role of concocting lies to protect pedophiles from public exposure and accountability. 

 

I’ve not had any moral expectations of Trump for years because he is clearly a malignant narcissist for whom talk about moral judgement is just a misnomer, but Johnson came into the spotlight amidst proclamations of his Biblically focused ethic and moral superiority. He is now almost the poster child for Elliot’s “Hollow Men” as everything he says is a lie or a misdirection, all just to hold onto power while he funnels government money into his wife’s Christian LLC without ever reporting the mount of her enormous government income. 

 

Texas congresswoman and my personal hero, Jasmine Crocket, tried to pin Mike Johnson down as to the degree of the graft being funneled into the Johnson LLC on the floor of the Congress but Johnson, having no answer that would not be self-incriminating, just stood up and left the house.

 

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang, but a whimper. 

 

If these people are Christians then Christianity no longer means anything. Neither Christianity nor Judaism, neither Buddhism nor Islam, have managed to create a meaningful conversation in this country about character, honesty, public service, self-sacrifice, or virtue. If I may make a suggestion for those of you who are still church goers, especially those of you who are pastors:

Take a couple of months out to study the sayings of Confucious either personally or in a class. Confucianism is not a religion, maybe it isn’t even a philosophy. Most of the sayings you see on the internet that are attributed to Confucious are not real. The real sayings of confucious are moral teachings about how to be a good person, a person of conscience and content. Someone with something more than straw in their heads. Barnes and Noble has a nice $5 collection of the Sayings of Confucious and to get you started, I will copy 4 pages of my favorite quotes at the end of the manuscript for this sermon that you can find on our website. If you can’t find our website, write to me at RevDrRay@outlook.com and I will send it to you. 

 

Dear listeners, Confucius said that “The fault is to cleave to the fault.” You know that the MAGA movement is without virtue, character, substance. You may have been tricked or seduced or mislead in the past, but the fault is to stick with what you know is wrong. Attach yourself to quest to find and embody virtue.

 

The Sayings of Confucius (Barnes & Noble)

 

Confucius                  “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

 

24.       The master said:         “To worship the ghosts of strangers is fawning. To see the right and not do it is want of courage.”      p. 9

 

3.         The master said:        “A man without love, what is courtesy to him? A man without love, what is music to him?”      p.11

 

1.         The master said:         “Love makes a spot beautiful: who chooses not to dwell in love, has he got wisdom?” p. 17

 

2.         The master said:         “Loveless men cannot bear need long, they cannot bear fortune long. Loving hearts find peace in love, clever heads find profit in it.”

 

4.         The master said:         “A heart set on love will do no wrong.”

 

14.       The master said:         “Be not concerned at want of place; be concerned that thou stand thyself. Sorrow not at being unknown, but seek to be worthy of note.” p. 19

 

24.       The master said:         “A gentleman wishes to be slow to speak and quick to act.” p.20

 

9.         The master said:        “Rotten wood cannot be carved, nor are dung walls plastered.” p. 24

 

11.       Tzu-Kung said:           “What I do not wish to have done unto me, I likewise wish not to do unto others.” 

 

The master said:         “This is still beyond thee, Tz’u.”   p. 24

 

 

11.       The master said to Tzu-hsia: “Read to become a gentleman; do not read as the vulgar do.”   p. 32

 

20.       The master said:         “To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.” p.33

 

21.       The master said:         “Wisdom delights in water; love delights in hills. Wisdom is stirring; love is quiet. Wisdom enjoys life; love grows old.”

                                    p. 34

 

28.       “To learn from the near at hand may be called the key to love.” p. 35

 

3.         The master said:         “Neglect of what is good in me; want of thoroughness in study;   failure to do the right when told me, lack of strength to  overcome faults, these are my sorrows.” p 37

 

15.       The master said:         “Living on coarse rice and water, with bent arm for pillow, mirth may be ours; but ill-gotten wealth and honors are to me a wandering cloud.” p. 40

 

9.         The master said:         “The people may be made to follow: they cannot be made to understand.” p. 47

 

10.       The master said:         “Love of daring, inflamed by poverty, leads to crime: a man without love, if deeply ill-treated, will turn to crime.”

 

11.       The master said:         “All the glorious gifts of the Duke of Chou, if coupled with pride and meanness, would not be worth one glance.”

 

17.       The master said:         “Study as though the time were short, as one who fears to lose.” p. 48

 

17.       The master said:         “I have found none who love good as they love women.”

 p. 54

 

21.       The master said:         “Some sprouts do not blossom, some blossoms bear no fruit.” p.55

 

25.       The master said:         “Three armies may be robbed of their leader, no wretch can be robbed of his will.” p. 55

 

Poem which pre-dates Confucius: “A flaw can be ground from a scepter white;

                                                         A slip of the tongue no man can right.” p. 64

 

11.       Chi-lu asked what is due to the ghosts of the dead. 

The master said: “We fail in our duty to the living; can we do our duty to the

dead?”

 

He ventured to ask about death.

“We know not life.” said the master, “how can we know death?” p. 65

 

2.         Chung-kung asked, “What is love?”

The master said: “Without the door to behave as though a great guest were

come; to treat the people as though we tendered the high sacrifice; not to do

unto others what we would not they should do unto us; to breed no wrongs in

the state and breed no wrongs in the home.”

 

Chung-kung said: “Dull as I am, I hope to live by these words.” p. 74

 

6.         The master said: “The man of upright life is obeyed before he speaks: commands even go unheeded where the life is crooked.” p. 83

 

3.         The master said: “The scholar who loves comfort is not worthy the name.” p. 89

 

5.         The master said: “A man of worth can always talk, but talkers are not always men of worth. Love is always bold, though boldness is found without love.” p. 90

 

21.       The master said: “If the tongue have not fear, words are hard to make good.” p.94

 

25.       The master said: “Men of old learned for their own sake: the men of today learn for show.”

 

29.       The master said: “The fault is to cleave to a fault.” p. 104

 

4.         Confucius said: “There are three friends that do good, and three friends that do hard. The friends that do good are a straight friend, a sincere friend, and a friend who has heard much. The friends that do harm are a smooth friend, a fawning friend, and a friend with a glib tongue.” p. 109

 

5.         Confucius said: “There are three joys that do good, and three joys that do harm. The joys that do good are joy in dissecting courtesy and music, joy in speaking of the good in men, and joy in a number of worthy friends. The joys that do harm are joy in pomp, joy in roving, and joy in the joys of the feast.

 

6.         Confucius said: “Men who wait upon princes fail into three mistakes. To speak before the time has come is rashness. Not to speak when the time has come is secrecy. To speak heedless of looks is blindness.” p. 110

 

7.         Confucius said: “A gentleman has three things to guard against. In the days of thy, ere thy strength is steady, beware of lust. When manhood is reached, in the fullness of strength, beware of strife. In old age, when thy strength is broken, beware of greed.”

 

8.         Confucius said: “A gentleman has nine aims. To see clearly; to understand what he hears; to be warm in manner, dignified in bearing, faithful of speech, painstaking at work; to ask when in doubt; in anger to think of difficulties; in sight of gain to remember right.”   p. 110

 

17.       The master said:         “Honeyed words and flattering looks seldom speak of love.”

                                    p. 117

 

24.       “I hate those who mistake spying for wisdom. I hate those who take want of deference for courage. I hate evil speaking, cloaked as honesty.” p. 119

 

1.         Tzu-Chang said: “The scholar who in danger will stake his life, who in sight of gain remembers right, who is lowly in heart at worship, and sad at heart when mourning, may pass muster.” p. 127

 

8.         Tzu-husia said: “The vulgar always gloss their faults.” p. 128

 

17.       Tseng-tzu said: “I have heard the master say: ‘Man never shows what is in him unless when mourning one near to him.” p. 130

 

1.         “Loving hearts are better than men that are near of kin.” p. 134