Keeping Religion Real

Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
Feb. 6, 2011     Epiphany 5  

Isaiah 58:1-10                                  
Shout out, do not hold back!    Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.  2 Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. 
3 'Why do we fast, but you do not see?  Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?'
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day,  and oppress all your workers. 
4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.
 Such fasting as you do today  will not make your voice heard on high. 
5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:  to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house;
 when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? 
8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard. 
9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, 
10 if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

Matthew 5:13-16                                                                                        
'You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
14 'You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

On Thursday mornings when the guys are lining up to be served for lunch at Bill's Place, we pause for a moment of prayer.  I'm not sure that we are supposed to do that in a Burrell operated program.... In fact, I'm pretty sure that we're not, just like I know that it is not legal for us to be serving food there at all.... We are not, after all, health department approved and the city has passed an ordinance against expanding homeless services on Commercial Street but I feel like, being the kind of church that we are, that we should do a couple of things that are illegal every week.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, moral people are obligated to break immoral laws.

Besides, for all of the things that Jim Payne might have been arrested for in his life, seeing him handcuffed and carted away for feeding the homeless would seem like a real triumph!

But when I am there, I am the designated prayer.  We have a lot of folks who are better cooks than I am so I am rarely called upon to actually do anything any more complicated than bringing the paper plates but I say the prayer and I'm not usually too imaginative about that.  I thank God for the food and for the generous people who donated it and cooked it.

And I always add something to the prayer, asking God to help us to leave that meal inspired to show compassion to the people we meet who have not eaten, who are too paranoid to come into a crowded building.... Who are too frightened to leave their stash of collected old clothes and canned food that they have hidden in a storm sewer.  I don't want our guys at Bill's Place to see themselves always as victims in need of a handout..... they too will encounter people who need a hand.

They too can be a part of solving someone else's problems.  Most weeks, after we have served lunch we set out some take away foods.... Sandwiches or something wrapped that they can stick in their pocket for later.  I always like to imagine that some of those sandwiches and brownies are handed off to someone they encounter who is also hungry.

If you wait until you are all fixed up to show compassion.... If you wait until the house is paid off, the kids are out of college and your pension fund is fully funded.... If you wait until the world presents no real threat to your future comfort to show kindness to those who are in crisis then, my friends, we are going to find ourselves living in a very mean world.

When I looked at the scripture readings in the lectionary for today, I said to our musicians that I would like to have this text engraved in the stone of the walls of our church.  This says it for me.  Isaiah chides the hypocritical religion of his audience.... People who act like they are great friends of God while they go about trying to line their own pockets without caring about anyone else.  He quotes his fellow Jews who ask God,

3 'Why do we fast, but you do not see?  Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?'


Religious people can feel so sorry for themselves.  We pray, we go to church.  We have a fish emblem on the back of our luxury automobile and we have a big Bible on a hand carved olive wood stand from the Holy Land on the coffee table in our mansion's living room..... why doesn't God do more for us?

Isaiah loves to answer questions like that.  He explains to them:

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day, and oppress all your workers. 
4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today  will not make your voice heard on high. 
5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?

I don't want to necessarily make light of the popular religion which says that you have to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.... Even though that concept can be found no where in the Bible... the word "personal" isn't even anywhere in the two thousand pages of the Bible.  Just because Jesus never said anything like that and wouldn't have even understood the point of it is no reason for us to make fun of it.

But if you take the sum total of the expressed values of the cultural religion which bears the name of Christianity while having virtually nothing to do with Jesus and what he taught..... having a personal relationship with Jesus, inviting Jesus into your heart... being saved, being born again, being baptized in the spirit.... All of the rituals, sacraments, texts and liturgies..... you can do all of that stuff but if you rise from your prayers to go out and abuse your workers, to fight with your peers, to promote your own interests over the interests of everyone else then your religion is subject to derision, not necessarily from me or from us but by God.

Or at least that's what Isaiah says and who am I to argue with him?

Many mornings I start my day with coffee and an hour watching Morning Joe on MSNBC.  Joe and Mika are intelligent hosts who represent both conservative and liberal perspectives and they have a lot of important and intelligent guests but one morning when the subject of labor unions came up I was shocked that everyone on the set was united in their insistence that labor unions must make concessions on wages and benefits, on job security and health care in order to get the economy going again.

You can be a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative but when millionaires get together to talk about how the middle class ought to make sacrifices for the good of the aristocrats then they all start to look a lot the same.

I know that there are examples of abuse and greed among labor unions, and as soon as we get rid of the multi-million dollar bonuses on Wall Street and the seven figure salaries in the banking system then I think we really ought to take a look at some of those labor union issues.

So Isaiah is willing to patiently school his listeners in how to make their religion more relevant... remember now, Isaiah is not a politician.... This is not politics.... This is scripture.... Don't ever let anyone tell you that making religion relevant and real takes it out of the realm of spirituality and turns it into politics.  I'm not reading from some socialist handbook or communist manifesto.... This is the Bible and this is what Isaiah said that God expects from people who pray, and worship, and get born again:
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:  to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

If you don't do those things then your other religious gyrations are really just a disappointment to yourself and an insult to God.  I would have this carved on walls of our church because this defines our defiant view of the prevailing religious environment which is so hypocritical and so laden with magical thinking and superstition and self serving idolatry.

But we know all of that.  If you have attended here for two or three weeks, you probably could have rehearsed most of this stuff yourself.  The one thing I want to add to this conversation today is the awareness that Isaiah did not deliver this sermon on Wall Street or to a gathering of investment bankers or millionaire television hosts.

This is not the prophet who preached in Jerusalem before the fall of Judah.  This isn't even the poetry of Second Isaiah. This comes out of chapter 58, the third phase of writing.  This is a sermon preached in a ghetto in Babylon.  A sermon preached to slaves, albeit slaves who had been allowed a certain amount of personal property and business.  Even among the poor, there is a pecking order.  Even poor white farmers in my native Kentucky often had one or two slaves back in the 19th century.

Isaiah is not speaking to the well healed, not the rulers or politicians, not the plantation owners or the people with big shops in the market place.  He is speaking to people, many of whom are barely getting by..... people in the middle of what you might call a 40 year long economic down turn.  It was to these people that he was preaching that if they are not willing to share their bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into their own shack, to cover the naked with their own worn out clothing that their worship, their prayers, their songs and sacrifices were insulting to God.

I wonder sometimes how the very wealthy can stand themselves.  I wonder how a person with millions of dollars can fail to do everything in their power to address homelessness, hunger, the uninsured sick, the talented kid who can't afford to go to college, how do they turn their backs on the world in which they live.  And it is a great sport among we well intended middle class folks to console ourselves with thoughts of what we would do if we were among the elite club of the super rich.

It is a great pass-time but it has nothing at all to do with this text.  This text was not addressed to the super rich.  It was, in very truth, addressed to the barely getting by poor.  We can play "what I would do if I won the lottery" later.  Right now we're being asked to consider whether our religion is just a self serving, self deceptive joke, or if we really plan to take our faith to heart and do something godly with it.

Ah, people so often tell me that they are looking for a church where they can feel comfortable..... and I have to say, "well this isn't it."
If you can feel comfortable with what is being said in church then you really aren't much of a church.... Not one Isaiah would be caught dead in, that's for sure.

In the Sojourners community in Washington, D.C. they have a soup kitchen where they serve a hot meal to a couple of hundred homeless people every day.  Some of the people who once had to come there to eat, after they had gotten on their feet, gone back to work and had shelter, would come back and volunteer in the soup kitchen.

One of those former guests, a woman Jim Wallis called "Lucy," was, according to Wallis, their designated prayer.  Every day, before they unlock the front door to let the guests come in and be served, they would pause to pray.  And Lucy would pray, "Dear Jesus, we know that you will be among the people in line to eat today.  We pray that when it is our turn to serve you that we will show you kindness, that we will treat you with respect, that we may show some gratitude for those who served us when we were on the other side of the serving line."

Men and women, you are the salt of the earth.... Without you there is not much compassion, not much kindness, not much hope.  You are the light of the world.... Without you there is no hope for justice, no end to violence, prejudice, oppression.

And so, let us work together to untie the poor from the yoke of oppression,  to unlock the handcuffs of injustice, to liberate those held in bondage to poverty and discrimination.

Give us the courage, even in our economic insecurity, to share our bread with the hungry and to open our lives to those who are homeless, to open our closets and share our coats and boots with those who are cold and ill clad. Let our light break out of the bondage to fake and symbolic religion that we may, in fact, be God's own family.

The Blessed Community

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, Pastor
Jan. 30, 2011  Epiphany 4

Micah 6:6-8              

6 'With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?


Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old? 
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?


Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?' 
8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Matthew 5:1-12                                                    

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

3 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5 'Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

7 'Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

8 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

10 'Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 'Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you on my account. 12Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The unending popularity of courtroom dramas from Perry Mason to Law and Order speaks to our inability to turn away from the intensity of a pitched battle for justice.  We watch these dramas, in part for the suspense and in part because we cannot but take sides and hope for justice to prevail.

This was not lost on even ancient societies as we see courtroom dramas creeping into literature, even in Plato and Shakespeare, as well as in scripture.  A lot of the most dramatic pronouncements in prophetic material are set in a courtroom trial, often between God and the nation of Israel.
The trial begins, in this case, a few verses prior to the reading we just heard from Dr. Hedrick.  In verses 1 and 2 of Micah chapter 6, we read:

Hear what the LORD says: Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice.

Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the LORD, and you enduring foundations of the earth; for the LORD has a controversy with his people, and he will contend with Israel.

The accused is Israel and God calls upon the mountains to be the jury.  What is the charge?  Israel is on trial for being faithless.  Just like in a good Law and Order, before you ever get to trial, you already have seen scenes from the crime.  You know about the victim and you are pretty sure about the perpetrator.  When God accuses Israel of faithlessness you can be safe in assuming that God has the case pretty well made.

But as God, in the role of the prosecuting attorney, approaches the trembling defendant who knows just how guilty he is, the first question out of the prosecutor's mouth sounds more like a stereotypic Jewish mother's complaint.  In verse three, God asks Israel:

"O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!"

Like a woman asking an unfaithful husband, "When did you get tired of me?  Why did you lose interest in me?  What made you forget about our life, our children, our future?"

Or, like a Puritan mother taking the family on a guilt trip, God reminds the defendant of how much God has done for them, how God has protected them, saved them, provided for them:   "For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery"

The defendant has nothing to say in this trial.  Guilt is both obvious and assumed.  So what do you do?  What does the jilted wife expect now?  Jewelry?  Roses?  Dinner out every night for a month, six months, a year?  What can the children of a wearied mother do to show contrition for their indifference.... Take out the garbage every day, run the vacuum, do the dishes?  What, indeed, do you do to appease an angry God?

In the ancient world, the usual fine for misconduct was sacrifice..... some lamb or dove spills its blood for your sins.  You make a cash offering, burn some incense and bow your face to the floor of the temple.

I overheard two business people talking at breakfast this week.  They were attending a conference that was going to run over the weekend with sessions on both Saturday night and Sunday morning.  They were discussing the fact that they didn't want to miss going to church because, as one said to the other, "I can't afford to have God mad at me."  They were checking their iPhones for a Saturday night mass or a Sunday morning early mass which would allow them to both be seen at the conference by their peers and be seen in a pew by God.

Micah mocks the people's desire to appease God with offerings..... Olive oil, which is precious in their society.... Used for cooking, to light lamps, to make soap and for grooming, to pour out a small flask of oil on the altar is considered a real sacrifice but Micah says, "do you think God will be impressed if you pour out a river of oil..... ten thousand rivers of oil?"

God is not interested in seeing you spill the blood of some lamb from your flock or a bird you caught in a net and wouldn't be impressed if you were even willing to sacrifice your first-born child.

And when you read that you need to recognize what an indictment that was of the whole temple sacrifice system, a total repudiation of what we would call organized religion.  In the Abrahamic covenant, there is an understanding that when you mess up you make a sacrifice and everything is cool between you and God.  God wants obedience and that is no different from the majority of what we see in organized religion all over the world today.

But that kind of sacrifice/obedience covenant isn't the only way to think about having a religious life.  Among the tales of the Hassidim we have a comment from a prominent rabbi who said that God gives us each a shirt with two pockets. In one is the message, "I am dust and ashes." In the other is, "For me the universe was made."

And in defense of traditional religion, it can be said on the positive side that guilt and fear has been used to help create a civil, stable and decent society in which murder, theft, dishonesty and infidelity have been threateningly discouraged, and that is not all bad.  But, just as our justice system was put in place to protect the weak from the abuses of the powerful and to make everyone equal in the eyes of the law, the real truth is that our justice system has been perverted to give the powerful even more power over the weak and the search for justice in the justice system is like looking for a black cat in a dark room that might not be there at all.
Though there is something to be said for imposing a sense of civility and responsibility on society through organized religion, what we have seen, all too often, is the loss of human dignity through abusive manipulation and control.

In that other pocket, the one with the message that says, "For you the universe was made," there is a sense of self worth, of self-respect, of character.  If I were married, I would not want my wife to be faithful to me because she feared being caught and punished but rather I would want her to be faithful out of respect for both me and for herself.  I am not interested in a relationship based on either legalism or obedience.  What we would all want is a relationship based on affection and a personal desire to be a good person.

Micah emphatically says that is the only kind of relationship with God that makes sense.  We do not impress God with church attendance, Bible study, prayer or offerings.  We do not bribe God, appease God or pay a fine to God.
Our corporate worship, prayer and study are to enhance a love relationship with our Creator and to inspire one another to greater lives of charity and justice.  

And so, Micah says:

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
 Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?' 
8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? 

We regularly find ourselves in a rather ironic position within the progressive movement.  Most of us have found ourselves fairly despising organized religion but not willing to give up on having a meaningful relationship with God.  We have been nervous about every step we have made in forming a worshipping community.  We have anguished about buying a building and forming a board and committees because we do not want to fall back into the symbolic spirituality of organized religion from which we have escaped.

We have not sought to associate ourselves with any church structures or denominations and I spend as much time with reflective advisors in private conversation as we spend here in corporate worship, meticulously asking ourselves, "Are we doing the right things?  Are we going about this in the right ways?"

Our progressive church is certainly a part of a modern reformation in Christianity but it is not really anything new.  From time to time, throughout the centuries, spiritual communities have had to put the message of fear and guilt back in their pockets and take a look at the message in the other pocket.  What does God really expect of us?  To live lives in pursuit of justice, to deliberately show kindness and mercy and to have the kind of humility which calls us to live not as the strong and the weak, masters and slaves, rich and poor but rather as brothers and sisters.

Micah wrote, calling people from a covenant based on obedience and appeasement to a living relationship of genuine character expressed in social justice and in radical compassion.  That same correction seems to be the prevailing theme of the preaching of Jesus in the early first century.
You can point to many of the best known of the saints through the centuries whose names become synonymous with attempts at calling the church away from symbolic religions of ritual and manipulation into genuine and living faith which is expressed in mercy and love.

St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard, and certainly many of our most familiar modern spiritual leaders, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Mother Theresa were all calling us from symbolic religion into the light of an honest and loving relationship with God which expresses itself in doing justice and loving kindness.

In that sense, we are really just plowing old ground.  But, the fact is that reform movements have a nasty history of slowing down, responding to the pressure to be mediocre, to fit in, to go back into the safety of a symbolic faith and the security of organized religion.

To stay honest, we are committed to continuing to ask ourselves the hard questions, eschewing any dogmatic or doctrinal answers to the complicated issues in life.  We are committed to maintaining a close relationship of compassion with the poorest people we can find.  And we are devoted to the idea of building a genuine community among ourselves, caring for the sick, supporting those who grieve, and giving safety and healing to the broken.

It takes kindness and humility to build a spiritual community, both of which are symbolized in the joining together of a diversity of hands in this banner.... And it takes a commitment to social justice to make sure our faith is relevant, and that is symbolized in our second banner that bears the commitment that we will never again stand idly by in the face of injustice.

We do not meet in fear and we are not defined by guilt.  I would remind you to rummage around in your pocket now and read again that message which tells you that it was for you that this universe was made.  You are not ashes and dust, created to cower before an angry God.... You are treasured, esteemed, valuable in the eyes of God and so we lovingly return to God the favor of imitating God's values of justice and mercy in the way we live our lives.

Unity in a Partisan World

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
January 23, 2010    Epiphany 3a

1 Corinthian 1:10-18                  

10 Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. 11For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. 12What I mean is that each of you says, 'I belong to Paul', or 'I belong to Apollos', or 'I belong to Cephas', or 'I belong to Christ.' 13Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. 16(I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) 17For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Like most of you, I have followed the daily progress of Arizona congresswoman Gabby Gifford's recovery from a gunshot wound to the head two weeks ago.  Of the tens of thousands of people who are shot in America every year, Gifford's case has grabbed the hearts and minds of Americans in a unique way, in part because it was such a crazy attack on a sitting member of congress but also because her case was set in a backdrop in which she had warned conservative critics that their militaristic rhetoric could result in an assassination attempt.

While it is tempting to point an accusing finger at Sarah Palin for having specifically put rifle crosshairs on a poster targeting Gifford's congressional district, that would be both morally wrong and it would be crediting Palin with more influence than the half-governor deserves.  But that is not to say that she is not a part of the problem.

The motivations of this particularly disturbed shooter are hardly relevant.  There is not much to be gained by trying to sort out the logical sequence of thoughts in the mind of a mad man.  But we absolutely must look at some of the elements of the environment in which this shooting spree took place.

The law which restricted the private ownership of semiautomatic weapons with huge banana clips of ammo sunset a few years ago, fueling the civil war in Mexico where such things are illegal to sell..... but we supply the criminals in Mexico from more than 6,000 legal sites along our southern border.  I cannot imagine a plausible case for a private citizen to own an ammo clip with 30 or more bullets in it.  Somewhere between gun rights and gun insanity there is suppose to be a line drawn by a responsible government and that line has been erased.

I have high hopes that Congresswoman Gifford's survival will usher in a new day of intelligent discussion of gun rights and social responsibility in the way that Bill Brady's survival of a gunshot wound he received during an assassination attempt on President Reagan, prompted the original assault rifle ban.

We don't know how much of Gabby is left inside of her brain though we are encouraged by reports of her recovery from Houston where her Astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, is able to both keep her company and finish training for the last mission of our space shuttle fleet.  These are larger than life Americans whose plight should help to change the face of politics and political discourse in our nation.


Indeed, it already has, as both politicians and pundits have had to dial back their hostile rhetoric in light of the obvious connection between their words and the trigger of a mad man's gun.  Congress took a week off and even after they had reconvened, their predictable vote to repeal health care reform has taken place in a calm, almost embarrassed quiet.

I cannot blame the Sarah Palins, Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the right for creating a polarized environment of hateful political speech without also seeing that the people who articulate my personal views on the left and my own little journalism contributions as pouring more gas on the flames from our wing of political thought.

The news of the shooting in Arizona came to me one day after I had submitted my last opinion piece to the NewsLeader and so, four days after the shooting, my column appeared with more vitriolic invective than even one of my normal pieces, and I was embarrassed by how insensitive my own language looked in ink surrounded by a world still gripped in horror from this multiple murder and wounding event in Tucson.

Paul writes to this little beleaguered church in Corinth that they should stop arguing among themselves and come to agreement.  In some ways, this is one of the most hypocritical and naive things you will read in the Bible from the hand of Paul.  Did Paul always agree with his peers?  Did Paul back away from an argument?  Was Paul a peacemaker in the church?

If you missed a few weeks of Sunday school classes when you were growing up let me turn to the back of the book with you for the answers to those questions: no, no and "heck no."  Sorry.... We're in church now so that's as strong as it gets.

Paul was a change agent.  A prophet.  He confronted governments and religious officials and yet he chided the church for having quarrels.  Still, preachers have been trotting this text out to club their congregations into quiet submission for centuries because there is something in us that just feels, that just innately knows, that people in church should love one another and get along even if people don't do that in any other setting in life.

And we have a particular problem with this dilemma specifically because we are a unique sort of church that does not easily fit into the surrounding landscape.  We exist to be an alternative religious voice in this city.  Our mission is to speak the truth to power which other churches will not stand up and speak and which the authorities would like very much to keep entirely quiet.

The religious majority in this area would love nothing more than for us to pipe down and blend in.... to agree with the majority and not rock the boat.  But we have a message of liberation for the oppressed; we have an imperative message of justice for those who keep feeding the institutions of oppression.  We have a message of hope for those who have been rejected and harassed by a kind of spirituality with breaks the hearts and spirits of so many people.

The challenge for us is to speak without becoming guilty of the same excesses we have hoped to correct.  To discover some means of bringing light without just generating heat.

On the one hand, we have a majority of churches which are so filled with cowardice that they will not say anything about anything that matters to anyone.  And we have another set of churches that is unafraid to speak but they are almost always on the pro-war, anti-gay, anti-women, pro-wealthy class side.  As Jim Wallis used to say in class at Harvard:  The left doesn't get it and the right gets it wrong.

There are things which need to be said.  There are columns which I need to write.  There are things which are so wrong that we need to show up and demonstrate on major roads holding signs in our hands..... or at least stand on the steps of a cathedral holding candles as the state prepares to execute a prisoner.

Silence is not an option.  Just going along to get along is not an option.  I've quoted these modern proverbs so often you should be able to say them with me..... only dead fish always swim with the current..... the middle of the road is only for yellow lines and dead armadillos. I feel obligated to remind the pastors of our local churches that Jesus of Nazareth was not nailed to a cross for being a moderate.

Sometimes, I have noted, that people will respond to some of my newspaper work with some really hateful entries on the NewsLeader blogs and if I can avoid responding in kind, if I can calm myself down enough to make several attempts at engaging them as rational adults, they will drop their swords and enter into conversation.  Now, it is not my nature to respond patiently and with kind entireties.  My gut level reaction to an unwarranted insult is to be just as rough in response.  And, I can honestly say, after years and years of experimentation... nothing good ever comes from that.

Now, the people who already agree with me will enjoy a good zinger but that is not speaking the truth to power.... That's just painting moustaches on dangerous dogs.  On the one hand, standing up and fighting is at least showing the courage to not just lie down and play dead.  I am deeply disappointed by the majority of churches, which, during times of great moral crisis, appear to be doing the best interpretation of a cadaver that they can possibly do.

We've taken Bob Marley's song, "Get Up, Stand Up" as an anthem for our movement but in light of the attempted assassination on Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, I think that there is another step we need to talk about.

Yes, have the courage to break out of silence.  Be willing to take sides.  Be willing to push back against the majority, to change the status quo and I think we can cut ourselves some slack for not always doing it in just the right way as we have tried to get our legs under us in the progressive movement.

But even though Paul had made people so mad that they wanted to kill him almost everywhere he ever went, when he caught word that the people he loved....

Church members whom he had lived with, shared meals in their homes and cared about, that these beloved people were arguing with each other..... some would get mad and leave the church or, even worse, stay and try to cause trouble for everyone else.... Paul just knew that was wrong.

He had empowered them to stand up to their occupation government, to traditional religion and, in many cases, to their own families, but he still needed to see them standing together and that is no easy task.

Still, I believe that is the task we must also face.... Perhaps we must face this task with more earnestness than any other church.  We have dared to ask the hard questions of our faith and now we must also dare to show respect to those who reach different conclusions.

I would like to remind you that a couple of years ago we took some time to study the biographies of some of the great religious leaders of the modern age.
We studied how Gandhi found the courage to stand up to the British Empire and to challenge the morality of colonialism everywhere, but he did so with a deep commitment to peace.  Most churches are in hiding.  They don't confront the issues because they don't want to rock the boat.  Revolutionaries challenge oppression but they provoke armed revolt in the process.  Gandhi had the courage to stand up to oppression but he also had the courage to love his oppressors and to withstand beatings, starvation and imprisonment.

He never approved of violence but rather offered his own life as a sacrifice for peace.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Gandhi's example and in the civil rights movement in America, King would spend days in worship and preaching with demonstrators, concluding in their being asked to sign a pledge of non-violence before they took their march into the public square.

They knelt on sidewalks as police dogs and fire hoses were turned on them.  They suffered insults, beatings, imprisonment and many were murdered but they did not take up an armed revolt.  Father Daniel Berrigan once said that in the fight with evil, we must sometimes bait the trap with our own flesh.  That, men and women, may, in very fact, be our challenge.

John says that Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment.... That they love one another.  I'm going to split the difference between Jesus' one commandment and Moses' 10 commandments and I'm going to utter five pastoral suggestions:

In order to speak the truth in love I believe that we should resolve to -

1. Don't be petty.  Ending a friendship, leaving a church, or ignoring another person should never be done lightly or for reasons you would not be willing to have publicly displayed on the front of your house.
2. Use respectful language.  We need to be careful about saying things for shock value or just to knock other people off of their comfort.
3. Determine to listen to those who disagree and try to understand their beliefs.
4. Look for common ground.  People who defend abortion rights are not really murderers and people who oppose abortion are not women haters.  We have common ground in avoiding unwanted pregnancies and we could spend our lives in that arena without ever fighting about the extremes.
5. Disagreements are bound to happen but we should be people who decide in advance of any argument that we are going to be the first to forgive or the first to apologize, whichever one applies the most.  Reconciliation should not be just a nearly dead church word.... It should be something we work on all of the time.

Most of the time I stand up here and encourage you to be people of prophetic courage.  Today I'm complicating that by saying that you, and I, should also strive to be loving in the way that we are courageous.  It is easy to love the poor whom we help.  They are grateful and unjudging.  Now we must learn to forgive those who do not believe that they need to be forgiven.  To tolerate those who are not yet ready to tolerate us.  To bring light into the darkness and healing where there is brokenness and unity where there is division.

Faith that is Personal but Never Private

Community Christian Church                          
Roger Ray, pastor  
Jan. 16, 2011      Epihany 2

Isaiah 49:1-7

49:1 Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me. 

49:2 He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. 

49:3 And he said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified."

49:4 But I said, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God."

49:5 And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength-

49:6 he says, "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."

49:7 Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, "Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."

 

I have often thought that football is the modern replacement of ancient religions.  Football, like most primitive religions, is brutal, sexy and involves grass stains and scantily clad young virgins..... or at least that what they are intended to represent.

Football teams represent certain cities or parts of the country and they inspire primitive, animal like enthusiasm from fans who go shirtless and paint their faces and blow horns as if they were Mel Gibson in Brave Heart.  Small towns send their teams out to do battle with the teams from neighboring towns accompanied by the cheers and symbols of two armies going to war.  When people say that football is like a religion around here, or, in my home state of Kentucky, where basketball is a religion, we come close to the way religions got started.

In their most primitive forms, ancient religions formed around the god who was associated with a particular place.  A city's god lived in the heavens directly above that city, or, more specifically, that city's temple.

When city states went to war, it was as if the two gods were going to war and so they carried the symbols of their gods with them..... that's why there's generally an eagle on top of the American flag pole, just as there was an eagle on top of the Roman battle flags.

When you have seen pictures of the Ark of the Covenant made famous in the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, it is portrayed as a box with two angles on the top.

But scholars assume that the actual historical item was more like a throne, a chair for Yahweh to sit upon as God accompanied the Israelites into battle. When you lose a war.... When the ark was destroyed and the Israelites were carried into slavery in Babylon, they asked themselves, what was for them, a serious and reasonable question, why would we sing the songs of Israel in a distant land?  That is, Yahweh is up in the clouds above Jerusalem, how could he possibly hear us all of the way over here in Babylon?

God's lived in a particular place and even the evolution of the image of the winged angel is reflective of that fact.  The word "angel" means "messenger."  Gods had angles that they could send, flying through the air, to deliver messages for them.

I keep referring to this as primitive religion but I have not called it "ancient" because it is sometimes quite current.  You can have, after all, a primitive religion in the modern era.  You may recall the hot water that General William Boykin got into a few years ago when he publicly described our war on terror as a war between our true God and the false god of the terrorists.

Though the Bush administration made him try to whitewash that speech the truth is that what he said was consistent with things he had said in previous years.  He was involved in the failed rescue attempt of Iranian hostages during the Carter administration and even though the mission failed, he attributed the lack of casualties to the fact that they had stood and prayed in the dessert that God would go with them into battle and that God had protected everyone who had prayed with him.  General Boykin is a man of very sincere faith but I'm willing to label it as being primitive because it harkens back to these kinds of anthropomorphic images of God moving from one place to another to defend the army of one state against the army of another state..... in a way that makes shouting "Go Bears" a kind of prayer.

Our scripture lesson today comes from that time when the defeated armies of Judah are now living in captivity in Babylon.  During their generations as slaves, they had time to try to understand what it meant to be children of Yahweh.  With their nation, their city state, destroyed, they began to allow themselves to think of God as being more than a war God who went with them into battle.... A magical amulet to protect them and only them.

They found that they had faith, they had an experience of God, they had a spiritual life, even though most of them had never seen Israel, never saw the temple, never heard the shofar and the call to prayer in Jerusalem.  In short, they came to believe that they could have a relationship with God who was no longer tied down to one geographic spot.  And if Yahweh could be known in places other than Jerusalem, maybe geography is not relevant at all.

As the slaves were being set free, as they were being allowed to go back to Israel to rebuild their nation, at least some of them began to be aware that they didn't need to go back, build and altar and sacrifice sheep and doves to feed their god, to build their god's strength back up and become the god of their private little piece of real estate again.

And so the prophet begins to shout.... In verse 1:

"Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you people from far away!"

Isaiah is now throwing his arms open to address Jews and Babylonians, Egyptians, Africans, Europeans.... And then he begins to speak in the most intimate way imaginable about God..... God doesn't sit on a throne in heaven.... You don't meet God on the battlefield carrying your God's throne with you into war.

The prophet speaks of the womb.... The Lord spoke to me before I was born.... God called me by name when I was still in my mother's womb...... The prophet says to those slaves who were about to go back and rebuild their nation that God had been inside of their mother's wombs with them, knitting them together, fashioning their bodies, giving them strength and insight and power.... Not to go out and build up the cult of Judah and Judah's god but to become a blessing to every nation of the world.

For God said, "It is too small a thing that you should serve only me.... I give you as a light to the nations that my grace, my mercy, my compassion, my message of wholeness may reach to the end of the earth," in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran and North Korea.  And if the people of those nations do not think of us as a blessing then it may be that we're not going about this the right way.
You may have noticed the bumper sticker I have recently been displaying on my car.  It says:  It's hard to convince people that you are killing them for their own good.  I understand that we don't live in a world in which we can just hold hands with the people of every nation and sing Kum Ba Ya together.  The world can be very dangerous and there is a limited supply of food, water, housing and space which will always make it necessary for nations to arm themselves and defend their borders.  However, we will never fight our way into friendship with any nation.

One of my professors at Vanderbilt, the late Dr. Herman Norton, was a retired two star general who had been a chaplain during WWII.  Dr. Norton told us that he believed that the reason that Japan was one of America's closest allies just ten years after we had dropped atomic bombs on two of their most populated cities was not because we had simply defeated them in war.  Dr. Norton said that the reason our enemies became our friends was because of the way the American occupation forces behaved once they had taken over the island nation.

Japan did not, in any tit for tat sort of way, deserve to be treated well.  When the Japanese had invaded and occupied countries, rape and torture had been unconscionably common.  Dr. Norton said that the people of Japan had braced themselves to be treated similarly by the American occupation forces.  They expected to have their women treated with disrespect and their men with contempt.  They expected their holy places to be destroyed and their culture radically changed.

Instead our occupation forces were ordered to show respect to the Japanese people as our government worked to rebuild their factories and retool the country for peaceful industry.

We were so successful in that project that Japan became not just an ally and trading partner but they became a source of concerning economic competition.  In many ways, the greatest strength of our military was the strength of restraint which, though certainly not perfect, generally did not seek to take revenge against the civilian population of a nation which had attacked us at Pearl Harbor and who planned to invade our west coast and came perilously close to being able to do it.

You know, we invaded Canada a couple of hundred years ago under the leadership of then General Benedict Arnold.  Though sometimes testy, we have the longest most peaceful border in the world between the United States and Canada.  Can you imagine a day when we would have the same feelings about Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and North Korea that we now have about Japan, England and Canada?  And could we get to that point without having a bloody war first?

Though the survival of the Jewish nation was anything but certain when a band of released slaves prepared to leave bondage in Babylon to return to their ruined homeland to rebuild.  They might have had lots of reasons to be uncertain of their own survival.  But even in their weak state.  Even with no one willing to buy bonds based on their future success.... Isaiah dared to dream that they would do more than just survive.

The prophet wanted the people to believe that just going out into the wilderness to build a temple and a walled city for themselves was too small of a dream.
Isaiah wanted to drop the defensiveness and competition of being a nation which existed to serve itself, with a religion centered around a god who sat atop their highest mountain.  Isaiah wanted them to become a blessing to the whole world.... And it's hard to convince people that you want to bless them if you keep threatening to kill them.

I called it primitive religion.... The Red Hot Chili Peppers called it "shallow" in the song Sean sang for us as we began.  "We are not the center of this .... Universe, and what is something worse, I will not serve in fear of such a curse.... Shallow be thy game."  Because, as they conclude, "if you only serve yourself (then) your religion is irrelevant."

The Unity Beneath All Division

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor  
January 9,2011
            

Isaiah 42:1-9            

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. 
2 He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; 
3 a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. 
4 He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching. 
5 Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out,
   who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: 
6 I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
   I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, 
7   to open the eyes that are blind,

 to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
   from the prison those who sit in darkness. 
8 I am the Lord, that is my name; my glory I give to no other,
   nor my praise to idols. 
9 See, the former things have come to pass,
   and new things I now declare; before they spring forth,
   I tell you of them.

Acts 10:34-42                                          

34 Then Peter began to speak to them: 'I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. 36You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all. 37That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 38how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; 40but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, 41not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. 43All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.'

One of the people who started what we now call the Progressive Christian movement was a Baptist preacher in New York over a hundred years ago.  Walter Rauschenbusch, who was obviously of German descent, but more importantly he was a part of a very pious Christian family of excellent scholars.

As his studies led him into the higher criticism of the Bible, he slowly and with a lot of resistance, began to accept that what he had been taught to believe about the inerrancy of scripture and certain literal interpretations of biblical accounts was just wrong.  And once you tear away that mythology, that superstition, and you begin to hear the message of Jesus coming through the centuries, you begin to realize that Jesus was a teacher of a kind of radical compassion.

Rauschenbusch decided then to accept a job as the pastor of a congregation in that part of New York that was already called "Hell's Kitchen."  And it was there in that turn of the 20th century Baptist Church that the social gospel movement was born as Rauschenbusch realized that things like abusive land lords and poverty level salaries were, in fact, matters of upmost spiritual concern.

Those of us who have received a seminary education in the past fifty or sixty years are all pretty familiar with Walter Rauschenbusch's story but mostly you only hear him referenced now and then.... Possibly because his name is so hard to pronounce but more likely because his work set off a series of great spiritual leaders who eclipsed him in so many ways that we tend to focus more on his successors than we do on him.

I mention him today, both with respect for his important work and because of something that so many people know about.... And that is his sister.  One of my professors at Harvard made a passing reference in one of his lectures to Rauschenbusch's conflict with his sister Emma and that thread turned out to be much more interesting that rehashing Walter's work in Hell's Kitchen.

I would hesitate to say it just this way anywhere but here, but one of the most ridiculous absurdities in Baptist tradition has been their insistence that only a man can be a preaching pastor unless, of course, a woman decides to be a preaching pastor on the mission field and, evidently, once off of American soil, gender no longer matters.  This massively stupid policy resulted in the export of some of America's most highly motivated spiritual leaders to the four corners of the earth.

Almost everywhere that they were successful, male leadership would swoop in and take over and, in almost every case, manage to screw things up enough to bring the female founded congregations to an end.  That's just for free ladies, my actual interest in Emma is along a different line of conversation.

Emma went to India where, it was her intention, to tell the Hindus about Jesus and turn them into Baptists.... Which she did for a number of years.  But her heart was changed by her exposure to Indian culture, something which happens very often in the case of missionaries to go to distant lands to tell them how wrong they are about their religion..... once they get there, once they get to know the people and to understand their faith and the insights of Buddhism, or Hinduism or Islam.... Emma, like so many other missionaries, found herself becoming more sympathetic with her Hindu neighbors and less enamored with the faith of her rigid father and her surprisingly conservative brother.

Walter was able to see that conservative Baptist teachings had obscured the teachings of Jesus but he had no sympathy with those who went off dabbling in other religions.... Such as, for example, his sister, Emma.

Her awareness of the ethical implications of the Christian faith led her to lean heavily on reforming the cast system of India but what she discovered there was a surprisingly liberated view of women which made her look back across the ocean at her brother's insistence that his wife keep a quite presence in their home with considerable disdain.  Walter was shocked at how becoming a missionary had turned his sister into a feminist...... as masters are often shocked to discover that once freed, their slaves were not really happy being slaves.

When Walter Rauschenbusch moved into Hell's Kitchen and got to know the poor immigrants who lived there, he was able to identify with them, have compassion for them and to see that it was his Christian duty to help them both directly and by changing the structure of the economy that continually victimized them.  He was not equally able to see that his wife and his sister were every bit as fully human as the poor immigrants he learned to love.

Emma, identified with the Hindus of India, and similarly made dramatic breakthroughs in setting aside her learned prejudices and, in time, she realized that her famous and well-celebrated brother was something of a blockhead.

I mention this matter of the famous Rauschenbusch family conflict in reflection on our reading from Acts this morning which tells us about a dawning awareness on the part of Peter, the apostle, that the gentiles whom he had always been taught to believe were inferior or at least that they were so very different from Jews that they could not possibly be considered as prospective followers of Jesus.

I had Jeremiah do an awful lot of scripture reading this morning but the only sentence which I really want you to focus on is in the very first verse of our reading from Acts.  Peter says what Walter Rauschenbusch was later able to say about poor immigrants and what Emma Rauschenbusch was able to say about women and Hindus.... It is there in verses 34 and 35:

"I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who ..... does what is right is acceptable..."

That realization becomes a major theme in world literature, music, movies and in our family lives.  In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevya is challenged to give up the aspects of his tradition which captured his daughters in loveless lives though Tevya, like Walter, had an incomplete transformation because he could not let his heart go far enough to approve of his youngest daughter marrying a gentile.

Look, it is even a theme in our science fiction movies.... The Xmen series of films is all about mutants and non-mutants accepting one another.  The most expensive film ever made, Avatar, is about the violent misunderstandings between the invading humans and the native Na'vi on the planet of Pandora.

It seems like we never get tired of this story of white man meets Indian and the Indian becomes European and the settler becomes an Indian.

We keep telling this story, in one form or another, because, it seems, we have never yet gotten it just right.

When populations were more isolated, it was not uncommon for a mountain village to evolve a theory that the people on the other side of the mountain have horns and devil tails.  No less a scholar than St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote his great apologetic philosophy arguing for the existence of God because he had heard of but never met the Muslim Turks.  For even a genius like Aquinas, to think that someone did not believe in Jesus and the God of the Bible could only mean that the were, in effect, atheists and so he wrote voluminously to correct the belief that there is no God.

We are, quite predictably, both fascinated by and irrationally afraid of people who are different from us.  Those of us born and bred in the land locked core of America will spend our hard earned dollars to travel to the Caribbean, to Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia to see different people, hear different languages, taste different food and learn about different cultures but then we will start to sweat if we see a woman wearing a Muslim head scarf at the mall, or realize that we cannot communicate with the people who are putting the shingles on our house or if an inter-racial couple moves in next door.

One Indian or Asian doctor at the hospital is interesting or exotic but if we see dozens of immigrants filling the roles of physician, pharmacist, priest and professor, then we panic a bit.

St. Peter had grown up believing that gentiles eat blood, worship idols, have orgies and they bath infrequently..... according to Luke, it took God performing a miracle right in front of his eyes for him to come to the realization: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who.... does what is right is acceptable."

Peter was able to let go of the division between Jews and gentiles.  Walter Rauschenbusch began to show Christians how to let go of the divisions between the rich and the poor.  His sister, Emma, helped lead the way in bringing equality to men and women.  Martin Luther King helped us to see that we need to judge people on their character rather than the color of their skin.

We've spent the better part of the last generation trying to work out a way to let go of our prejudices about sexual orientation and the failure of diplomacy between the people of the Middle East and the peoples of Europe and America has shown us that we still have a lot to learn to get to the place where we can say with Peter, "I now see that God shows no partiality," so that we can someday say that we don't show partiality either.

Newsletter - January 3, 2011

In This January 3, 2011 edition:
Report on Sunday, Jan. 2
Looking Ahead
Community Concerns
The Church Door

Report on Sunday, Jan. 2
It was a painfully cold day outside but we started 2011 with an excellent worship experience inside!  We had 64 folks here and received an offering of $3751.14.  We have also collected quite a bit of food for Crosslines and additional donations of $160 towards food purchases.  Again, many thanks to Rob Martin for taking over our website management.  If you miss a sermon or newsletter just visit our website at www.spfccc.org.

Looking Ahead
This week and every week unless otherwise noted we'll have the Pastor's Cabinet meeting in the conference room on Tuesday at 4 p.m.
Our musicians meet in the sanctuary on Wednesday evenings to rehearse and plan future music selections.
On Thursdays we provide lunch for the homeless at Bill's Place and we are host an A.A. meeting in our conference room at 5:30 p.m.

Sunday, Jan. 9 - Col. Ron Hertenstein will be presenting in our 9:15 a.m. class on transactional analysis.  Our worship leader in the 10:30 service will be Jeremiah Moorhead, one of the case managers from Bill's Place.

Monday, Jan. 10 - Our volunteers will be serving commodities at Crosslines from 8:15 a.m. until 1:30 p.m.

Tuesday, Jan. 11 -  An execution vigil will be held at the cathedral with a candle light vigil on the front steps on Jefferson St. at 6:30 p.m. and a prayer vigil in the chapel at 7 p.m.

Sundays, Jan. 16, 23 and 30 - We welcome Dr. Charles Hedrick back to our sanctuary to lecture in the 9:15 class from a recent Jesus Seminar in which he spoke to the topic of Jesus as a wisdom teacher.

Community Concerns
We continue to be prayerfully concerned for Dan McKenzie and Jim Starkey, both of whom are receiving chemo treatments and are convalescing in their homes.  I know that an occasional sharing of some home made treats lets them and their families know that they are being remembered.

The Church Door
Launching into a new year, I spent some time in conversation with the pastoral cabinet last week about how we can best support the church's growth in the coming year. Finding new members of the church is always a challenge in this rather religiously conservative area but an equally challenging dilemma is the whole matter of retaining the folks we have.

It is, sadly, very easy to leave a new church because no one has very deep roots in the community.  Most of our members were not active in any church prior to coming to ours and it is very easy to return to the church of the Sunday paper or weekends on the lake.

In answer to the question of how to grow deeper, more committed relationships among our church members our cabinet had several ideas but most of them could come under a single heading of:  We need to have more fun.

Because we are committed to being a church which addresses both social justice and the inconvenient truths of our society we can come off as being rather "heavy" and as being always very serious.  In fact, I am aware that I have often been guilty of being so intense about the topics which seem important to me that it becomes rather telling that I'm not taking much time off to pursue such fundamentals of life as joy, health, entertainment and happiness.  

Like millions of other people at this time of year, I am making a new resolution to eat better and exercise more.  But I am also going to make it a point to schedule time for building friendships and having more fun.  My friend, Andrea Zamora, and I have decided that Monday evenings, when a Celtic band plays at Galloway Station, that we are going to try to be there from 7 till 9 every week.  We invite anyone else from our community who wants to engage in friendly conversation in a really hole-in-the-wall smoky bar to join us.

I also want to encourage more group dinners among members, at church or at our homes.   I would also love to participate in a regular book or movie discussion..... something which would, perhaps, be less formal than the classes we offer at church in which five or six or a dozen people meet in someone's home to watch and discuss an important movie or discuss a new book.

Others suggested more "get to know you" events at church.... something like a "speed dating" arrangement where we have a series of short "interviews" with other members in order to get to know them.

While I think it is great that we have both many young families and many seniors and I do not want to segregate our community based on age (or anything else) it may be that there are some really important social connections to be made by people who are in similar stages of life.  People with pre-school children really need the support of other parents with kids and people who are retired often have time and social needs which are unique to their situations.

What ideas do you have that you would like for me to share with our cabinet at our meeting tomorrow afternoon?  And if I put out a sign up sheet for another round of Dinners For 8 to be hosted in member homes, how many of you would like to participate?

Let me hear from you.

The Liberating Truth

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor  
Jan. 2, 2011   Epiphany 1

John 1:1-13                                                            

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

Charles Elliot was the president of Harvard at the turn of the twentieth century.  A hundred years ago he made the claim that a liberal arts education was available to anyone who was willing to read a set of classical literature which could be contained on a five foot shelf.

It wasn't a novel idea to him.  Throughout the modern era, as universities were evolving, a certain set of classical books were considered to be the core of what it meant to receive an education.  Elliot was challenged to compile a list which constituted the state of that five foot shelf in the beginning of the modern era.

He did compile that list and you can still buy the books of the five foot shelf as the very expensive set of Harvard Classics, which, even still, would be a collection of considerable importance including works from great philosophy, literature, religion and science.
You could argue that liberal arts education really ought to return to some kind of core collection of general knowledge because that shared awareness helped to form the basis of communication among educated people, all of whom you could safely assume to have a basic awareness of the content of the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and, the guy I'm interested in today:  Plato.

Long after liberal arts colleges began to abandon the five foot shelf of classics, law schools retained a commitment to reading Plato's Republic which is a philosophical dialogue which seeks to define the concept of Justice.....a concept which seems not to be rapidly becoming extinct in what we euphemistically still call the American Justice System.

It is my personal opinion that law schools have abandoned the ideal of educating lawyers in the art of the pursuit of justice in favor of simply learning the techniques of the practice of law.  Similarly, I'm afraid, that divinity schools have ceased to emphasize training ministers to pursue the truth in favor of simply being able to recite traditions.

The word, "philosophy," is a combination of two Greek words:  philos and Sophia, meaning, "lover of wisdom."  The word, "theology," is from the Greek words:  theos and logia, meaning "words or wisdom of God."

When we read John's prologue to the gospel we see that he is using some of these very heavily weighted words which we really should not read over too quickly.  We translate the Greek of John to say, "In the beginning was the Word."  Literally, it says, "in the beginning was the logia" or "logos" which does not mean simply "word."
It does not mean, "the Bible" or simply "the word of God" as we tend to use it in modern religious circles.  The logos is wisdom, truth, the knowledge of God.

In the Old Testament book of Proverbs, wisdom, "Sophia," is portrayed as a divine woman who was with God in the creation.  John ignores the gender of wisdom in Proverbs and is saying that Jesus is the embodiment of the wisdom, the truth, the light which was co-creator with God from the beginning of time.

Clearly..... I hope it is clear anyway..... John is also mimicking the book of Genesis which starts by saying:  In the beginning God.....  John, though he predates most of the works on Elliot's five foot shelf, was writing three hundred years after Plato's works had become foundational to all educated persons.  John would be familiar with Plato.  Paul would certainly have read Plato and it would not surprise me if even Jesus had heard something about Plato.  Jesus grew up in a little Jewish town, Nazareth, which was within sight of the Roman university city of Sepphoris.

It is reasonable to assume that if the family of Joseph were carpenters then it is likely that they worked for Roman families in Sepphoris and Jesus would have been able to listen to some of the open air discussions of the works of Plato and Aristotle.

John uses the word, "logos" and interplays the words "light" and "darkness" into this poetic introduction to the gospel to give it the weight of all of that theological and philosophical tradition.  Some scholars think that he took the poetry of a hymn to the logos and adapted it to his purposes here, weaving in the names of Jesus and John.

What John wants us to know about Jesus, before he tells us anything about what he did or how he died, is that what he represents is a commitment to knowing the absolute truth.  Jesus, for John, and I pray with all of my heart that it is true of us as well, is that what is unique, powerful, and vital to understanding Jesus is that his message was to bring the light of truth to a world which is often captured in the darkness of ignorance.

And, quite conveniently, no one explains this idea better than Plato.  Plato's longest and most complete work of philosophy is The Republic, his treatise on justice.  Within that work Plato articulates the most famous allegory in all of philosophy, the allegory of the cave.  And that, is what I would like for us to spend a little time with this morning.

Plato sets it up this way:  There are a group of men chained into a cave in such a way that they can only see in one direction.  Behind the men there is a large fire which is the primary source of light and the only light they have ever seen.

Between the men and the fire there is a pathway across which other men carry large puppets so that the shadows of the puppets are cast on the wall in front of the imprisoned men.  Now, you just have to play along here.... In this entirely improbable situation, these men have spent their entire lives looking only at a wall where all they could see were shadows.... But not even shadows of real objects.... They only saw shadows of puppets which are, as you know, simply imitations of real things.  And the shadow was not cast by the bright light of the sun, but only a more dim and inferior light from a fire.

Of course, since these shadows of puppets cast by the light of a fire is all they have ever known and so, they assume that they are very well informed people who assume that they know everything that there is to know about the real world.

Any similarity you see here to people who sit and watch Fox News all day is purely coincidental...., as the proverb says, if the shoe fits.....

Now, as Plato continues, one of the men eventually breaks free.....it was, after all, bound to happen.  He turns around and sees the fire, the puppets and the other men chained looking at the shadows.  He has the dawning awareness that the world is a great deal more than he had ever imagined.  He is aware, that he has been tricked.  That everything he has ever believed about the world was based on myths, deception, lies and partial truths.

Plato tells us that he then finds his way out of the cave, and after a lifetime of imprisonment in near darkness, he is initially blinded by the light of the sun.  Slowly, gradually, his eyes adjust and he sees the things which he had once only known of as the shadows of puppets.  He sees trees, animals, hills, buildings, people...... excited by his discovery of the truth, he returns to the cave to tell the men chained there the truth about the world.

Of course, upon returning to the darkness, he initially stumbles, falls and in his excitement and apparent blindness, the men in the cave assume that he has gone mad and that everything he is saying is utter foolishness, the insane ramblings of a blind and crazy man.  Plato brings it home saying, and I quote:
 And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?

It is not very hard to see how John is using these images to describe a world in which it seems that most people are chained to a wall and that all they know about the world are shadows of false images cast on the wall by the light of an artificial light.  They are chained in the darkness of ignorance but they get very angry when they are confronted with truths which are inconvenient or challenging to their comfortable mythology and prejudice.

I don't want to be and I don't want our faith community to be in any way condescending towards other churches or individuals.  Still, we know that by opening our minds to leave the cave, to question traditional faith, to search for truths which are beyond the superstitions of primitive ages, and beyond the assumed prejudices of our own time, that we are alienating ourselves from the people who really like to watch the shadows of puppets on the wall of a cave.

We've spent a lot of time chained down in the darkness ourselves.  We understand the temptation to just be like everyone else.... To fit in.... to keep quiet about our questions, our doubts and sometimes our certainties.  But I don't think that we'll be forever alone.

A hundred years ago, when Elliot first came up with his list of books for the five foot shelf, the Wright brothers had just proven to the world that men and women could fly.  A decade later a 14 year old boy in Utah invented the television.

A few years later refrigerators became available, then cars.  People began to realize that for most of the history of the world, we had discriminated against women for no good reason and laws began to change which allowed women to go to college, own property, vote and eventually tell men what they had been thinking about them for more than ten thousand years.

Two generations ago we began to disassemble the racial apartheid which had divided the world for centuries.  In the past generation, we've finally begun to awaken to the fact that being gay is nothing we straight people need to either fear or envy..... twenty years ago we began to openly accept gay artists, musicians and hair dressers..... finally, it seems, we are willing to accept that we have always had gay pilots in the air force, admirals in our navy, and soldiers on the battlefield.

The darkness of prejudice and superstition.... The fear which keeps us entrenched in an economic system which creates poverty, a health care system which supports illness more than health, and a religious system which perpetuates ignorance rather than the truth can be dispelled if only we have the courage to ask the questions and claw our way into the light.

As John said, "5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

This is our year to stop being afraid of the dark and to learn to live in the light.