My Faith Journey

My Faith Journey          

December 28, 2025      Dr. Roger Ray

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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."