Ideas Are Immortal

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Easter 2025 April 20      Dr. Roger Ray      Ideas are Immortal

The 2005 movie, V is for Vendetta, is set in a dystopian political future in which the government maintains a fascist control of the people through control of the media in a constant barrage of lies and propaganda. I trust my love for this film requires no explanation.

The plot revolves around a character who wears a Guy Fawkes mask who is planning to complete the gunpowder plot of 1605 and succeed in blowing up the Parliament building in order to awaken and unite the people to stand up to their fascist government. 

 

The subtext of the narrative is that Fawkes can still inspire action, even 400 years after his execution. The main character of V knows that he will die in the process of carrying out his plot, but he is assured that his survival is irrelevant. The point is the idea of the revolution that needs to happen, the idea of freedom, democracy, justice, and as such, it is an idea that cannot be killed… ideas are bulletproof. 

 

Though entirely fictional, martyrdom in order to immortalize an idea has many historical precedents. Many of us here can remember June of 1963, when the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thích Quang Duc, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. His public martyrdom drew attention to the injustice of the Vietnam War and was, at least a part, of the turn of public sentiment from support to protest.

 I was in my first year of seminary in the spring of 1980, having only been introduced to liberation theology, when Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by American trained and funded political assassins in El Salvador. One of his aids came and spoke to us in the Vanderbilt chapel the next month, giving us an eye-witness account of the murder of this liberation theology icon. The progressive priests of Central and South America were systematically captured, tortured, and murdered in the years that followed, all with the blessings of a conservative Vatican that chose to ally itself with brutal dictators out of fear of socialism. 

 

The current pope, though he was a part of the machinery that silenced liberationists in Argentina, is now trying to assuage the Catholic Church’s collective guilt by having Romero canonized as a saint, which, of course, Romero would not have wanted, and which entirely misses the point. But, as I have observed before, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The Catholic Church is guilty of having cooperated with the arrest, torture, and murder of their own priests and rather than confess their own sins, they want to elevate the first well known martyr to sainthood.

 Not at all unlike the way our country has treated the 1964 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We cannot canonize saints but we can make his birthday a federal holiday and then name all of the most dangerous, crime riddled streets in major cities after him. Now even conservative politicians try to use King’s name and quotes to polish their own reputations while trying to ignore everything he said, but, ideas are bullet proof, and even from his grave, King still speaks to our hearts.

 Of course, today is Easter in the western world, following the traditional observance of the events of the Christian Holy Week in which the world’s most well-known martyr is remembered. The oldest biblical accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were actually recorded by Paul, a zealous believer who never met Jesus in the flesh and who knew very little about the real story. It  is important to note, in reading Pau, as the first Christian to write about Easter, but even as a zealot, Paul never implies that there was an empty tomb or that anyone had seen Jesus after the crucifixion in any way other than as a vision. 

 

If you read the New Testament in the order in which its parts were written, it is not hard to see how the mythic nature of the Easter story evolved. Paul wrote his letters 20 to thirty years before the first canonical gospel was written. Paul describes the Easter event in I Corinthians, chapter 15, this way: 

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures ⁴ and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.^[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, 

 

Paul never met Jesus in the flesh and wasn’t a part of his ministry. But Paul was an early convert who preserves a tradition that the church has shared with him. He did believe that 3 days after he was murdered, Jesus appeared to Peter, then the 12 apostles, and then to some gathering of some 500 men and women, and finally, he appeared to Paul. But, you see, he says that they way that other people saw Jesus after the crucifixion was the same way that he did…. Jesus appeared to Peter, the apostles, to a congregation of hundreds, and then to Paul . . . in a vision. 

 

Paul would have believed that the body of Jesus was buried in an anonymous grave somewhere outside of Jerusalem, but the body of Jesus was of no interest to Paul. Paul believed that the Christ, the spirit of God, was appearing to the faithful. 

 

The first canonical gospel, Mark, speaks of an empty tomb but reports no appearances. Mark describes Jesus as an ideal martyr whose death does not end his message. Mark seems to want his readers to have similar courage in the face of Roman occupation and threat . . . the courage to become martyrs in opposition of Rome.

 

The Gospel of Thomas, which probably predates what we have in the New Testament, does not mention a resurrection at all. At the end of the first century, the early church added narratives about a physical resurrection as the message of Jesus was being tamed and transformed from a message of liberation theology, a message of revolution against an evil empire, and into an illusory promise of eternal life after death. 

The church, conspiring with the political authorities of the day, tried to kill the idea of radical compassionate revolution and to replace it with what Karl Marx accurately described as being the opiate of the people . . . a religious narrative intended to keep the poor and enslaved quiet and cooperative. 

 

I know that many of my peers in the traditional church think that I am somewhat uniquely radical in my re-presenting of the Jesus narrative, but I will leave it to Thomas Jefferson, who, in a 1814 letter to Horatio Spafford, said it better than I ever could:  the priest has been hostile to liberty. he is always in alliance with the Despot abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. it is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them: and to effect this they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man, into mystery & jargon unintelligible to all mankind & therefore the safer engine for their purposes. 

 

Others have very magical beliefs about the promise of Easter but I think the best interpretation comes from the 20^th century Greek poet, Dinos Christianopoulos who wrote, “They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.” A government killed Jesus but that didn’t kill his teachings. Sadly, however, the church tried to bury his message in magic and superstition, and yet, thousands of years later, some still can hear him calling us to revolution. 

 

A government killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer and generations of seminary professors have tried to make his message tediously boring, but his death reminds the church that it is our job to stand up to fascism. 

 

Our government, working with a despot in El Salvador, killed archbishop Romero, assassins killed Gandhi, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. but ideas are bullet proof. They tried to sweep them under a rug. Since they were killed, governments have tried to silence their voices, tried to scare us with threats of violence and hunger; they buried them, they just didn’t know that they were seeds. 

 

We are not the keepers of a dead religion, encased in magical thinking and silly, childish promises of some kind of literal heaven or frightened with the fires of an imaginary hell. We are the one thing that governments and churches fear the most, we have an idea; and we have refused to be frightened, to be silenced or even to play dead. Because they know, all that stands between us and the end of fascism, what has kept us from real liberation, is that we were not united and aware. 

 

Whether our generation will awaken from its childish indifference or not remains to be seen but this much I know, the world is ripe for a revolution, a reformation, in economics, in government, and in religion. Whether it will happen in my lifetime or not, I cannot predict, I just know that it should.

 

 

Estrangement Among Family and Friends

Estrangement Among Family and Friends      April 6, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray 

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I was called to the home of an elderly widow in my church by the county sheriff. When I arrived, the house was surrounded by police cars and there was a line of law enforcement officers keeping a safe distance from the three German Shepherds growling and barking in the yard. It was a stand-off, and it wasn’t going to end well. This was back in the days before cell phones so I had to go back to my office to call the home to see if they would tie up the dogs and let me come in. "No,” was her answer. She was not going to let the police come in and take her boy.

 

Her boy, a man in his 50’s, was suspected of breaking into a suburban home, raping a little girl, and stealing several items from the house. His mother was not convinced of his innocence. He had, after all, done it before and had only recently been released from prison. The police were patient enough to wear everyone down and they were eventually able to make the arrest without anyone getting hurt. 

 

I did my pastoral duty and visited him in the county jail where he was being held pending trial. I was still in grad school but even then, it was not difficult to reach the conclusion that he was a malignant narcissist. He dismissed his history of pedophilia as mere social conventions and he said that when he robbed houses, the people he robbed came out ahead. He explained that he would take about $500 worth of jewelry and electronics and then look in the paper and see where they claimed to have lost thousands of dollars worth of stuff which they then claimed against their homeowner’s insurance. So, he explained to me, he was really doing them a favor because they came out way ahead on the transaction. 

 

The visit that has lived in my skull from that whole incident was the conversation I had with his mother. She knew that her son was a criminal. She knew that he did horrible things, but she insisted that there was a good man inside of him and that she would never give up on him. I, by profession and disposition, am always inclined to give a person a second, third, or fourth chance. If I don’t believe that people can change then, clearly, I am in the wrong profession. But I will tell you, I didn’t detect a good man hidden deep inside her son and I was perplexed by her loyalty to him.

 

She knew that he was a rapist, a thief, a liar, an addict, a con man, but she loved him and refused to give up on him. A few years earlier, in my own family, my eldest brother had reported to our parents that he and his wife of only two years were getting a divorce and that he was going to be marrying an employee in the retail store he managed who was carrying his child. My parents reacted to this news by taking me and my brother into our room and telling us that our brother, John, had humiliated the family and that we were never to speak to him or talk to anyone about him ever again. So far as they were concerned, John had died.

 

My parents did eventually relent and reconciled with my older brother, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how differently the mother of a rapist and criminal felt about her wayward son and the way that my parents reacted to a son who had made the moral mistake of having an affair. 

My brother went through a pretty rough patch, with the whole infidelity and remarriage thing. In a period of a very few years he was married to four different women without ever spending a day being single, and then, ironically, he became a Methodist minister. Life can take some odd turns . . . you would think he might have become a Mormon but, I stuck it out with him, insisting that my parents show grace to a son who was clearly hurting himself as well as others . . . until, as it turns out, he became an avid Trump supporter which, for me, was a bridge too far.

 

As a minister who has spent my life advocating for the rights of gay and lesbian people and as the father of a brown skinned immigrant, I could not rationalize my brother’s decision to support a homophobic, xenophobic, racist, misogynist for president. What is the price of estrangement? When does it make sense and when is it a moral travesty in its own right?

 

In the early part of my ministry, most of the cases of family estrangement that came to my office were instances of parents feeling morally obligated to reject their gay children. It was often very painful on both sides of the equation, but it was rooted in unhealthy religious devotion and ignorance of both psychology and biology. Still, I have to say that it shouldn’t have been that hard. Any theology that teaches you to reject your own child should be suspect in a prima facie way. Just as my parents who, for both religious and social shaming reasons, believed that divorce was equal to death in my brother’s case, if they had more heart and less irrational shame, they would have seen their way through it immediately. 

 

The Broadway classic, the Fiddler on the Roof, has a father with three daughters, each of whom chooses to marry in ways that rejected their Russian Jewish traditions of the day, but the father’s love managed to remain in a relationship with the first two, but the third one pushed the boundaries more than Tevya was able to accept. No matter how many times I have seen the play or the movie, I still tear up when Tevya rejects Chava (ha’va). It takes me back to the moment when my mother told me that my brother was now dead to us, it takes me back into my church study every time I sat with parents yelling at their son or daughter to just “stop being gay.” 

 

But folks, these clear-cut examples are not why I wanted to bring this topic up today. There are therapists who specialize in counseling with families struggling with estrangement for much more subtle and hard to define issues. None of us who watch that painful scene with Tevya and Chava agree with Tevya, but in context, the Tevya character could not allow himself to conceive of marrying a non-Jew.

 

I accept that there is a price tag on estrangement. There is no such thing as “unconditional love,” or, at least, there shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t tolerate abuse. We shouldn’t, by our actions, imply endorsement of grievous offenses. But our list of cardinal sins evolves, doesn’t it?

 

In the seventh century, Pope Gregory 1^st distilled the teachings of the Bible and the church down to seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. 

That is surely a pious list, but it doesn’t include things like murder, theft, dishonesty, rape, torture, or invading another country on false pretenses. I mean, if we are only going to name seven deadly sins, I don’t think that sloth gets to make the cut. And when it comes to something like lust, you know, St Jimmy Carter confessed to having feelings of lust but having lusty thoughts is not the same thing as having serial affairs, is it?

 

I accept that psychologically healthy able-bodied people have sex. How and with whom they have sex becomes a matter of nearly constant ethical re-evaluation. What is pedophilia in our day may have been a common arranged marriage in another age. Killing someone for being gay is still common in many nations but here, we are shocked when parents refuse to attend their son’s marriage to another man. Ethics is not easy. It requires not just thinking but it requires re-thinking, re-evaluation and change. 

 

In our time, people are spending more and more time alone. An increasingly large percentage of families have instances of estrangement that have nothing to do with the complexities of schedules and geography. Why? Why do we do it? Why do we allow it?

 

Over the holidays last fall, I was in regular contact with a young woman whom I have known since she was in high school. She was a very bright student and a very attractive person who evidently had some itches that she needed to scratch which made her difficult to deal with and a regular embarrassment to her parents. She went through her goth phase, her excessive drinking phase, her sexually acting out phase, and her phase of having constant excuses for not working, not applying herself, and generally not getting her stuff together.

 

Eventually, however, she managed to process whatever attention needs, or resentments had driven her to such difficult acting out, and she got a responsible professional position, started dating a responsible, professional guy, and seemed to get her life on the rails in more or less all of the ways that her parents had longed to see 15 years ago. But now the shoe is on the other foot. She wants to have a closer relationship with her parents. She wants to introduce her boyfriend who may soon be her husband to her parents, but they keep coming up with excuses for why they want to avoid her and emphatically avoid meeting her partner . . . . excuses which, in my professional opinion, would embarrass Charles Darwin . . . excuses that make Tevya’s rejection of Chava seem almost rational.

 

Perhaps we should not judge other people’s choices about such things but while I am not in the family and cannot presume to know everything they are feeling, I am close enough and have listened to everyone so much that I am confident in saying that this estrangement should not exist. Are the parents attempting to exact some kind of revenge for their daughter’s adolescent and young adult acting out? Are they so filled with hubris that nothing that their daughter can do is good enough, perfect enough, to melt the icy wall between them? 

 

Pastorally, I want to say that people in our day have simply become too disposable. 

Again, there is a point at which estrangement is the only logical and practical choice but that point is, I believe, very very rare, especially when judged against how often it happens. 

 

In the Atlantic’s January cover story, author Derek Thompson called this “The Anti-Social Century,” because we are all isolating more, we have fewer friends, fewer real social connections, and, people, we have fractured families that could be healed if people could manage to suspend judgement and resolve to stop trying to control the details of other people’s lives even the details of their thoughts.

 

I have a good friend who lives in rural Arkansas whose daughter is in a polyamorous, inter-racial marriage. And she babysits the grandkids and is lovingly accepting of all of the adults in this rather awkward group marriage. . . in rural Arkansas! My daughter is in an interracial relationship. I am in an interracial relationship, but I wouldn’t be too cheery about it if my daughter was going to marry a guy who was already married and who wanted to keep both wives. My friend has stretched to accept this, but I might be a tad Tevya on that issue. And I, as a joke, told my significant other that she was the only one for me, just her and Hallie Berry and that’s it. She didn’t think it was funny, and I hope she doesn’t listen to this talk, or I will have to go through another round of shaming for having said it the first time. Still, while I would not choose a polyamorous relationship, such relationships exist and, in the end, the fact that other people make that choice is none of my business. 

 

And while I may play racquetball with, have dinner with, even go to a movie and celebrate Thanksgiving with a supporter of a treasonous, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, criminal president, I certainly couldn’t marry one and I am not yet able to accept it in a sibling, but I am realizing that my brother and I are old enough that we may not physically survive Trump’s second term and it is time for us, and by “us”, I mean, “me,” to do better. 

 

If I am waiting for him to wake up and see Trump the way I see him, to repudiate his last three astonishingly stupid presidential votes, then I may be the one who is being unreasonable . . . not entirely unreasonable, but the net results are the same. Estrangement happens but it should be so rare that very few of us would ever feel compelled to choose it. We should love our friends and our family members to the highest degree that we can muster, and it may just be that hubris is the only thing standing in our way.