Trumping the 'How' of Living with a Larger 'Why'

Community Christian Church        
Roger Ray, pastor  
April 24, 2011       Easter

Matthew 28:1-10    
After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. 4For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, 'Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come; see the place where he lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples, "He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him." This is my message for you.' 8So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9Suddenly Jesus met them and said, 'Greetings!' And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, 'Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.'

A great deal of my professional life has been lived out on the Opinion page of the Springfield NewsLeader.  As a columnist, I find it irresistible to read everyone else's column and the opinion pages in other newspapers.  A few years ago I realized that one of the most tedious aspects of opinion columnists is how often we bring up Hitler and the Nazis to compare such venial things as a failure to fill the potholes in the city streets with the Holocaust.

I have vowed never to bring up the Nazis unless I am talking about something on the scale of genocide.  Unfortunately, that still gives you a lot of opportunities to talk about the holocaust.

Genocide has been sadly common in history, even in Biblical history.  As much as Jews have a right to decry the 20th century holocaust against their people, we know from Deuteronomy and I Samuel that the Jews carried out genocide against the Canaanites and the Amalekites.

The Roman Empire always tried to conquer and then simply annex nations to make the land and the people a part of the empire, but when a nation would not assimilate, Rome would kill everyone they could find.  Julius Cesar did that in what is now modern day Switzerland and in France, killing millions and enslaving the survivors.

In the next century, when the Jews proved to be too unruly to govern, Emperor Titus had Jerusalem leveled and all the inhabitants killed.  In fact, even when the city was rebuilt a hundred years later, Jews were only allowed to enter the city on one day of the year to go and mourn at the only place where one stone had been left on another, the western retaining wall of the Temple mount.... Now euphemistically called the "wailing wall" for the two thousand years of mournful prayers said there.

Jesus was born and died during the Roman occupation but the gospels were not written until two generations had passed and the nation of Judah had been destroyed.  Paul wrote about the resurrection of Jesus in the decades after the first Easter but Paul did not speak of an empty tomb and he did not give any details of the events of Passion Week.

It is not until the eyewitnesses were either dead or quite elderly that Mark wrote the first account of the passion narrative.  Mark was not from Judah and was probably not a Jewish convert.  But clearly, Mark was heavily influenced by the suffering servant songs of Isaiah and by the substitutionary death described in Psalm 22.

Jesus Seminar scholar, John Shelby Spong, says that the passion narrative in the gospels does not attempt to describe what historically happened but they are an artful and loving account of who these things happened to.

It is often upsetting to church folks the first time they hear that the gospels are a combination of historical events, biblical imagery and metaphorical interpretation but let me invite you to think of that famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River.

It is a historical fact that Washington and his men crossed the Delaware on Christmas day of 1776.  But the German born artist, Emanuel Leutze, who produced the famous painting, not only wasn't there but he wasn't even born yet.  Seventy-five years after the Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware, Leutze combined his knowledge of history with his immigrant's enthusiasm for his adopted nation and its political father to produce the huge mural that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Leutze wasn't a liar.  He wasn't making up a myth.  He simply took what little he could know about an event that happened before he was born and produced an image that captured both the event and how the artist felt about the subject.  That is what we have in the gospels.

Mark took his passionate faith in Jesus and combined that with what he knew of the Hebrew scriptures which had been taken as messianic images and he combined that with a metaphorical use of the historical fact of the crucifixion of Jesus.  What I'm telling you today about the context of that writing, that it was written on the heels of a holocaust.

 In fact, it may well be that Mark began to write as the holocaust was taking place.... Possibly even writing because any surviving eyewitnesses were being systematically slaughtered.



Mark, then Matthew and Luke and John, painstakingly recount the betrayal, judgment and murder of Jesus.  Mark declares that even though he was certainly dead for several days that on Easter morning his tomb was found to be empty... which is simply a poetic way of saying that Jesus is not really dead.

Mark does not go so far as to say that Jesus could be seen physically but he introduces a young man at the tomb who tells the women who had come there that Sunday morning that they should go and tell his disciples to go back to the Galilee and that they will see him there.

The Galilee is where they had seen Jesus healing people.  That was where he spoke a word of good news to the poor.  The Galilee was where he had lived and traveled with his disciples but what I want you to realize is that when Mark first wrote these words there was still blood on the grass in Galilee that was not yet dry.

Jesus was a distant memory, but the holocaust was fresh.  The account of the resurrection of Jesus was not a historical claim; it was a defiant word of hope.  Matthew takes Mark's account and edits it.  He adds some additional quotes from the Hebrew bible and he feels the need to have Jesus physically visible on Easter but the fundamental message does not change. In fact, he says the same thing the young man in Mark says to the women at the tomb.... Tell the disciples to go to the Galilee and they will see me there.

When I first went to the Galilee, I went as a seminary student.  I was studying biblical archaeology.  I honestly wasn't interested in even the ancient Byzantine churches or the Crusader castles.  I wanted to visit sights of biblical importance.  But along the way my tour bus stopped at the Holocaust museum.



I was not a student of modern history. I knew a little about the Holocaust but my awareness exploded that day.  We then visited the Children's Holocaust memorial and it was several years after that before I was able to stand to read anymore about it.

Since that time I have twice had occasion to meet Elie Wiesel from whom we take the quote on our worship banner.  After the Holocaust, the mantra among the survivors was "Never again."  But what Elie Wiesel wanted to say to the world was that it never would have happened if persons of good will had not been willing to stand back and let it happen in the first place.  He says that the ethical message of the whole of the Bible is just this, "Thou shalt not stand idly by."

Wiesel's account of the Holocaust in his book, Night, was the memory of a teenaged survivor of the death camps.  It is so graphic and so horrible that for many years publishers refused to print it because they simply did not believe that the holocaust could have been so bad.  After a decade had passed and photographs and messages from the camps were distributed, the awful truth became undeniable.

But the writer whose experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps who really brought meaning to the event for me, and by association, a deeper meaning to the New Testament's Easter accounts, was Viktor Frankl.

 Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist when he and his family were arrested and taken to the camp.  He was separated from his wife, who went to another camp, and his children, who went to another, all never to be seen again.  As he was taken into the camp, they took away his clothes, his hat, his shoes but he was trying to hold onto a manuscript of his life's work, his research which he was preparing to publish.

A soldier took the papers from him and destroyed them in while Frankl looked on.  The point, of course, was to break any spirit remaining in the captives.... To fill them with despair, to remove any resistance or will to escape.... To make them slaves or simply to make them compliant as they were being murdered by the hundreds of thousands.

Frankl was forced to do slave labor and to endure starvation, bitter cold, and he had to endure the dawning awareness that his wife and children would not survive the camps.  What he said about that was, that they can take everything away from you.... Your home, your possessions, your family, your life's work, they can take your freedom, they can take your health but what they cannot take is your ability to decide who you are and how you will react to the mistreatment.

Through the eyes of a psychiatrist, he made note of the differences between his peers in the camp who gave up hope and who became ill and died and those who appeared weak and had no chance of survival but they did manage to live through the torture to eventually be liberated.  He concluded that those who have a reason to live, those who believed that there were people waiting for them, who depended on them..... those who believed that they had something important to accomplish in life....

Those people survived.  He concluded that if you have a sufficient "why" to live, that you can live with any "how."

I believe that the basic historical facts of the Passion narrative are true.  I believe that Jesus was not a part of organized religion and that as a spiritual teacher who was outside of the salary and donation structure of religion that he was a threat to the temple priesthood.

And I believe that Jesus taught and lived a life totally free of ownership of property or obligation to employers and that as such he was a threat to the whole banking, marketplace system.

And I believe that Jesus taught and lived a life of total liberation, refusing enslavement and servitude and as such he was a threat to the government.  I do not find it hard to believe that the priests, the governor and his own family members and friends conspired together to kill him.

But written against the backdrop of one of history's worst genocides, what do we make of the resurrection story?  One of the great things about being in a progressive church is that there is no one to say what you are supposed to believe about that.

I will, however, tell you what I believe.  I believe that even though they could kill Jesus they could not kill his message.  They could strike the teacher and even destroy the city where the church was first born but the faith community continued to be reborn, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword, because the church had a why to live that was bigger than circumstances ..... even when their circumstances involved trying to survive genocide.

I believe that the church has survived as a sign of the resurrection of Jesus.  I believe that we survive because the world has a reason to expect something of us in the future.  We have a reason to live.  There is a need for us to be witnesses to that same message of liberation for which Jesus died.... That same message of social and economic justice, for which Jesus died, that same message of spiritual wholeness apart from any denomination or bishop or pope giving our franchise legitimacy.

You are the resurrection community.  Don't play dead.  Don't accept life as a victim.  You are not slaves and you need not stand idly by.  We are the resurrection of Jesus..... as long as we keep the message alive, he will never be found in a tomb.

The Passion Narrative as Archetypal Story

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
April 17, 2011    Passion Sunday



Jerry Block and Sheldon Harnick, took an old Yiddish short story about a dairyman and his daughters and turned it into a musical play in the 1960's.   Producers turned Block and Harnick down for years saying that their play was too Jewish to be of interest to anyone who did not have eastern European Jewish background.  However, Fiddler on the Roof became the longest running Broadway play at that time and has since been translated into more languages than any other stage play.

The popularity of Fiddler is certainly not rooted in the wide spread awareness of the travails of eastern European Jews at the turn of the 20th century.  Its power derives from the way it explores such universal topics as love and marriage after 25 years and three kids.  It explores how a father feels about his grown daughters getting married.  It expresses what many people have felt about faith, nationalism, oppression and displacement.

It seems odd to think about Fiddler on the Roof being sung in Japanese and acted out in Tokyo but it is very popular there.  Really good stories help us to express our own feelings and to understand our own lives.  The classics of children's stories do not become classics accidently.  They become classics because so many children feel like Jack, living in poverty and threatened by giants.... Or like little girl walking through a forest inhabited by either figurative or literal wolves.

Regardless of how you interpret the religious dimensions of the story of the betrayal and murder of Jesus, the story has the power of an archetypal classic.

It contains elements of betrayal by a beloved friend, abandonment by fickle friends and the shallowness of public opinion.  It places the main character in a mortally vulnerable position in front of hypocritical religious leaders and unethical political figures.  It speaks to every mother who has lost a son unjustly.  To every friend who realized that they had failed to speak up or to act to come to the defense of another.

The passion narrative has also found an audience in every language, on every continent and in every century.  Imagine what it would be like to read it from the perspective of a poor southern black family the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered.  Imagine hearing it through the ears of the poor Salvadoran peasants after Arch Bishop Romero was assassinated.  Imagine being a Hindu and reading the passion in the weeks following the murder of Gandhi.

Everyone, at some point, can see themselves in the Jesus role, as having been unjustly judged, betrayed by a friend, and misunderstood by family, lovers and neighbors.  But to really understand the passion, you must also see yourself as Gov. Pilate, or Herod, or Peter or even Judas.  And you have to realize that if the story were being read this morning in Afghanistan or Iraq the evil empire would not be Rome, would it?

Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote Jesus Christ Superstar after growing up in traditional religious schools but always wondering about the role of Judas in the Biblical account.  Why did Judas do what he did?  What was his motivation and how might he have told the story differently?  In Weber's imagination, the sometimes two dimensional characters of religious accounts of the death of Jesus take on more complex and more believable third dimensions.

The famous and much more recent attempt to tell the story by Mel Gibson focuses almost exclusively on the aspect of torture and to do that seems to miss the point of the story entirely.  Jesus was not the first nor was he the last to die miserably in unjust circumstances.  We tell the story of Jesus because we are able to feel it at so many levels..... through the eyes of Judas who came to see Jesus as a disappointment, a narcissist who failed to do what he could for his own people.

Through the eyes of Peter who believed in Jesus but not enough to risk his own hide.  Through the eyes of Pilate, who somehow seemed to sense that Jesus had integrity which the governor did not but who could not seem to bring himself to do the right thing.  Through the eyes of Mary, who loved, adored, possibly desired Jesus but who still did not understand her own simultaneous love and fear.  And through the eyes of religious leaders who prefer the institution to the faith the institution was created to foster.

Today we invite you to enter the story again, singing "ho sanna" with the fickle crowds who danced in the Triumphal Entry but who yelled out, "crucify him" four days later.  We encourage you to sing with the apostles who were too drunk with prospects of their own importance to comprehend what was going on all around them.  And we invite you to feel with both Jesus and Judas what it is to betray a friend and to be betrayed.

Obviously, we only have the time to present about half of the music from this iconic opera in our service today.  We do not get to over hear the confused disciples asking what's the buzz.  We don't get to see the argument between Judas and Jesus about Mary and about Judas' own decision to betray his friend.  We won't have time for Pilate's pensive remembering of his dream or to witness the moral outrage of Jesus clearing the temple.

Still, I hope that it is enough to spark your memory and to allow you to remember the world's most important story again.  Unless there is a cold hard place where your heart is supposed to be, you should be able to feel the passion yourselves.

A part of me wants to ask you not to applaud today because the story is, itself, sacred and deserves our respect but I know that some of today's performances will be so shocking that you will need to applaud and, frankly, we'll need a few moments here and there to get instruments and equipment ready.

We are using a mixed media today.  We never do that but some of the music we judged to be crucial to the telling of the passion required orchestration and more voices than we could bring in.  Let us move back and forth between the classic film and the voices of people you know, re-telling a story which defines us.

Our spiritual desire for justice, true friendship, substantive love and a meaningful life is rooted in this story which has been translated into every language of the world and remains a fixture in every culture. You and I are in this story.  Our deepest pain is here and somewhere between the characters lays our greatest source of hope.

Can We Live Again?

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
April 10, 2011   Lent 5

Ezekiel 37:1-14              
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2He led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3He said to me, 'Mortal, can these bones live?' I answered, 'O Lord God, you know.' 4Then he said to me, 'Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.'
7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9Then he said to me, 'Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.' 10I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
11 Then he said to me, 'Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely." 12Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.'

In a couple of weeks, our sanctuary will be full.  Easter will bring out most of our members and, if this year is like other years, we'll have quite a few visitors as well.  Which is great.  We're always looking for new visitors.  But I know that Easter brings out a particular kind of church goer.

The occasional church goer, the nominally religious person, comes out on Easter to hear the story of how Jesus was dead and buried and was discovered, a couple of days later, to have risen from the dead.  And, with the appearance of the revived Jesus comes the message that none of the rest of us will stay dead either and that those of us who know the secret formula and the secret handshake, have a reasonable expectation of living forever above the clouds in eternal reward.

And those occasional church visitors, the nominally religious, will walk back out to their cars thinking..... "How can anyone really know?  I wonder if any of it is true...."  Of course, they have good reason to wonder.  No one knows anything about life after death.  Anyone who tries to tell you that they know anything about it is either lying or they would not be able to reliably pass a psych review.

It reminds me of that fabulous passage in Lewis Carol's "Through the Looking Glass" in which Alice tells the obviously quite mad White Queen that she can't believe impossible things and the animated chess piece replies, "of course you can, why I often believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Many of us where brought up to believe that faith meant, exactly that, convincing yourself to believe entirely impossible things when, in fact, believing impossible things has nothing to do with faith.  Believing impossible things is, with all due respect to the White Queen, insanity.

God is not impressed by anyone's willingness to impersonate schizophrenia.

Now, two weeks before Easter, we have this reading from Ezekiel which gives a chance to think about resurrection as a metaphor rather than a promise of eternal life.  Ezekiel describes a vision, and a vision, like a dream, is not supposed to be understood literally.

In his vision, the Lord takes Ezekiel to a valley filled with dry bones.  The valley is not identified.  Given the time and circumstances of Ezekiel, it is tempting to think that he has been taken to the scene of Judah's last battle where the Babylonian armies slew the armies of Judah and the survivors were carried into captivity.

You can think of that plain in Israel, around the fortified city of Megiddo but you could think of a lot of other battles as well....such as the Battle of Culloden when Bonnie Prince Charles led his Scottish kin into a battle for freedom which resulted in a bloody massacre... Charles, himself, being one of the only survivors and he survived by dressing as a woman and running away.  The British army was ordered to run through Scotland and kill every man who was strong enough to lift a sword.  One of the most tragic instances of ethnic cleansing in British history.

You could think of the Battle at Little Big Horn.  General Custer had written to a friend, "There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry."  Even Custer did not survive that massacre.

But, of course, we use military language to describe more than military history.  We talk about "crossing the Rubicon" or "going to our Waterloo," not because we are literally marching with Napoleon or Caesar.

There is no one here who has led such a charmed life that when you read Ezekiel's vision, that God took the prophet out into a valley scattered with the dry bones of personal tragedy, defeat, hopeless circumstances and God asks the ultimate question:  "Son of man, can these bones live?"  And Ezekiel gives him the answer that we've heard echoing around in our own hearts for so long...... "I don't know."

Here, my friends, is the issue of faith.  Faith is not a matter of trying to fake insanity while you are in Sunday School and returning to normal behavior by the time you get home.  Faith is a question of hope in the face of defeat.  Can these bones live?

Resurrection isn't about what happens after you die.  It is about what happens when you feel like your life is over.... When you have been fired... or incarcerated.... Or diagnosed.... Or abandoned.  Can these bones live again?  And, for the most part, we reply, "I just don't know."

The NAACP is starting a billboard campaign around the country.  The billboard reads:  Welcome to America.  Home to 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners.

I've done a lot of visiting with prisoners in city, county, state and federal prisons and I can tell you that almost everyone there has worked out a perfectly plausible story for why they don't deserve to be there.  And, based on the fundamental difference between America's incarceration record and, say for example, the incarceration rate in Communist China, you might be inclined to think that most of them are telling the truth.

But, fact is, most of the people in prison are guilty of committing some crime, whether or not it deserved incarceration.  But, even still, guilty or innocent, what do we want the future of these people to be?  If we are not going to wholesale slaughter them, then why won't we let them get job training, education, rehabilitation?  It is as if our society wants to drop people in the valley of dry bones and make sure that they never ever get out.

I come from one of those salt of the earth families in middle America.... We were a family of worker bees.  My dad didn't join a labor union.  We didn't protest the Vietnam War.  My folks got up, went to lower middle class jobs.  They came home, cut the grass, mopped the kitchen floor and paid their bills.  My parents lived their lives right in the middle of their lane, never straying over the white lines or the middle line.

I never had a DNA test done, but my life bears no similarity to theirs at all.  I have not just crossed the white lines on the edge of the highway, I have spent most of my life bouncing from sidewalk to sidewalk.  I've had times of great ebullience and success and I've had times of humiliation and failure without much time in between.  I have lived my life at the extremes.

In both my personal life and my professional life, I've found myself in the middle of this metaphorical valley of dry bones, and if not God then the entire universe has asked, "Son of man, shall these bones live?"  And I've had to honestly reply, "It's not looking very good..... I don't think so.... I don't see how.... There is no way out of this valley of death."

And if you've ever been there, the universe begins to ask other questions..... "do you want these bones to live again?"  And sometimes the answer is, "No."  "No, I've had enough.  Defeat looks like a gift.... Like a chance to lay down my sword and shield and just lie down with my ancestors."

I think that the real matter of faith begins when God asks, "Do you even want to want these bones to live again?"

I've been doing weddings for more than 30 years now.  I don't give warranties, I just say blessings.  But sometimes people get confused about that.  People I married decades ago have had children and become grandparents and sometimes they still call to see if the warrantee is in effect.  "I just wanted to call and tell you that I just found out that when Robert was away for a few months, working in another state, that he had an affair..... what should I do?"

And I said, "What do you want to do?"  And she said, "I don't know."

It starts slowly..... you have to want it.  You have to connect the little things.... You have to remember the good times.... You have to believe the good times are not over.... You have to forgive... you have to rebuild trust and that is not a quick or easy thing.  You connect a little part to a little part, and then little parts to bigger parts:

The toe bone's connected to the heel bone.... The heel bone's connected to the foot bone... the foot bone's connected to the leg bone.

Do you remember that time we went to the Brown Hotel for New Year's Eve?  Do you remember when Sam tried to set up a brewery in his garage?  Do you remember when little Robert got back from the Persian Gulf?

The leg bone's connect to the hip bone.... The hip bone's connected to the back bone.

"Son of man, can these bones live?"  And I said, "You know."  And the Lord commanded me, "prophesy to the bones."  Tell the bones to forgive.  Tell the bones to have hope.  Tell the bones that they should connect to the back bone and find their faith because God is a God of resurrection and not of defeat.

I don't think we should go into prisons and try to baptize prisoners so that they will go to heaven when they die.  I think we should go and baptize prisons so that they will let my people go.

The vision of Ezekiel is not about life after death.  Oh men and women, do not waste your time wondering if you will live after you die.  If you must worry, worry that you may never start to live.

Can these bones live?  You bet they can.  Just add faith and stand back and watch.

You, as Told by Your Parents, Neighbors, the Church and Total Strangers

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
April 3, 2011   Lent 4

John 9:1-41                                              
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' 3Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. 4We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' 6When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes, 7saying to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam' (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, 'Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?' 9Some were saying, 'It is he.' Others were saying, 'No, but it is someone like him.' He kept saying, 'I am the man.' 10But they kept asking him, 'Then how were your eyes opened?' 11He answered, 'The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, "Go to Siloam and wash." Then I went and washed and received my sight.' 12They said to him, 'Where is he?' He said, 'I do not know.'

13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, 'He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.' 16Some of the Pharisees said, 'This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.' But others said, 'How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?' And they were divided. 17So they said again to the blind man, 'What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.' He said, 'He is a prophet.'
18 The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight 19and asked them, 'Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?' 20His parents answered, 'We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; 21but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.' 22His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. 23Therefore his parents said, 'He is of age; ask him.'
24 So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, 'Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.' 25He answered, 'I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.' 26They said to him, 'What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?' 27He answered them, 'I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?' 28Then they reviled him, saying, 'You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.' 30The man answered, 'Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.' 34They answered him, 'You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?' And they drove him out.

35 Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, 'Do you believe in the Son of Man?' 36He answered, 'And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.' 37Jesus said to him, 'You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.' 38He said, 'Lord, I believe.' And he worshipped him. 39Jesus said, 'I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.' 40Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, 'Surely we are not blind, are we?' 41Jesus said to them, 'If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, "We see", your sin remains.

In the Historical Society of the Christian Church which is located in Nashville, TN, you can view the personal effects of Alexander Campbell, who was one of the 18th century founders of the Christian Church.  Along with the predictable books, Bible's, notes and writing desk is a little black bag which looks like the little black bag we used to associate with a doctor when making a house call..... for those of you who remember what those words mean.

The 18th century evangelist's bag was, in fact a doctor's bag because, at that time, medical training was a part of the education of a minister.

The clergy, often being the only educated professional in a frontier community, were often called upon, not only to pray for the sick but to be the person most likely to heal the sick.  Even now, ministers are expected to make visits to church members who are hospitalized because in the back of our minds the clergy are still associated with healing.

If you ask yourself, "How did Jesus become well known?  Why did people come out to see him as he traveled around the Galilee?"  And then you read the gospels to see what he did, healing is a big part of that.  Jesus was one of many traveling religious teachers who cast out demons, healed people and who sometimes were said to perform miracles but, as we know from historical documents, they were also expected to pull a bad tooth now and then.

In John, there are no demon exorcisms.  Also, in John, Jesus doesn't tell parables.  That there are so many demon exorcisms and parables in the other three gospels of the New Testament and none in John is an interesting subject in and of itself but since we are looking at a text from John today, let's allow him to speak for himself.  In John, Jesus was a healer and a miracle worker.

John calls the miracles "signs" and he lists them in a kind of ascending order from easier smaller signs to bigger and harder miraculous events.  He starts with turning water into wine and ends up raising Lazarus from the dead.... From favorite bartender to reverse mortician.  Today's account of healing a blind man is near the top of the list of miracles because that is a particularly hard thing to do.

Now, normally, I will get very nervous about anyone trying to find multiple layers of meaning in a gospel text. Normally, when we are looking at Matthew, Mark or Luke, I prefer the most simple and straightforward interpretation of the text because I do not think that the other gospel writers were generally trying to be very complex and sometimes when they do try they tend to lose their way a bit.

But in these early chapters of John, John is being very crafty.  He composes narratives in which the real meat is never just lying on the surface.  This is an account of a healing and a tough case to be sure, but healing accounts are kind of cheap in the world of religion.  Lots of religious healers healed a lot more people than Jesus did and we don't get dressed up and go sit in big buildings to talk about them...... Jesus is different.

This rather long narrative, if it were about the healing, could be shortened to a tight little paragraph.  What John is really wanting us to see in this narrative has relatively little to do with the man who was healed.  Sure, the guy was blind, and that is no small thing, but what John wants us to be aware of.... What he wants us to see is that the man was living in a world full of blind people.  Blindness, after all, isn't always about the eyes.

So, to start with, let me ask you to ignore the beginning portion of this text.... Let's pretend that the actual event being reported is not all that important and let's look at the rest of the text.

In the very beginning, Jesus is just walking along with his friends and his friends are people watching.... Which is pretty normal.

If you notice, when you are walking through the mall, most people aren't carrying any packages.  Ostensibly, you go to the mall when you need to buy something but the truth is, most of the people who are at the mall are not going to buy anything, they are just there..... looking at the people.  "Man, she's fat..... she really ought to do something about that."  "Can you believe she wore that in public?  Who dressed her today?"  "Did you see who he was with?  He must have money or something?"

We go to the mall as consumers but not always consumers of clothes, shoes and Aunt Annie's Pretzels.  We consume one another.  We eat the flesh of the people we feel superior to.

The disciples saw a man who had been blind from birth and they asked Jesus, "Who sinned that this man was born blind?  Was it something he did or was it his parents' fault?"

The disciples, other than Judas, all get to be saints later on.  They have churches named for them and they are all up in stained glass windows around the world but on this day, they saw a man who was blind and they didn't go over to him and comfort him, or help him, or give him anything.... They didn't try to heal him or suggest that Jesus give it a shot.  What did they do?  They discussed him.  You have to wonder how the blind man would feel about that.  It was a religious discussion.... And I guess that makes it some better, but behind the religion was still just gossip.... Who's fault was it?

"Did you hear that Tim was in a car accident?  Yeah, he was hit by a drunk driver and he was injured pretty badly..... but he wasn't wearing a seat belt."  "Who sinned, this guy or his parents?"

And then, if you skip on down a few verses to verse 8.....Something wonderful has happened...a miracle.... A real gift from God.  And verses 8 and 9 say:
8The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, 'Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?' 9Some were saying, 'It is he.' Others were saying, 'No, but it is someone like him.' He kept saying, 'I am the man.'

The neighbors, the other people walking around the mall, saw that the man was no longer blind and they began to talk, "See, I told you he was faking it... he was just trying to get people to feel sorry for him and give him some money.... What a lazy, dishonest fraud!"  "Well, you know, I believed it, in fact, I know he was blind.... This has to be his twin brother."

You know, sometimes when someone is blind people assume that they are deaf too so they were just discussing him and finally the man himself interrupts them at the end of the verse, "Guys, that was me.... I was blind but now I am not."  Amazing how you can clear things up if you'll just go to the source.

Mark Twain said that a lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth.  When it comes to gossip, a lie told, repeated, exaggerated, and asserted becomes the truth rather than the facts.
In this story, a man has had something wonderful, unheard of, fabulous happen to him and people are not rejoicing, they are trying to figure out how it is something bad.  And, of course, they get help.

They took the man to the religious professionals to find out what they should think about this thing.  In verse 13 we read:

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind.

And then John throws in the killing detail:

14Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.

The only proverb which I have come up with on my own is this:  If you light a candle in a dark place you'll draw bugs.  I came up with that after several years in the ministry when I realized that no matter what good thing I ever did, some self-righteous.....person.... would try to find fault with it.  It is a form of spiritual gossip.... The basic goal is to assert that my spirituality is better and more important than your spirituality.  As you see in verse 16:

16Some of the Pharisees said, 'This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.' But others said, 'How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?' And they were divided. 17So they said again to the blind man, 'What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.' He said, 'He is a prophet.'

I think it is interesting to see how the man who was healed is growing in his estimation of Jesus.  When he first told the neighbors about what happed he said, "The man called Jesus," but now he says that Jesus is a prophet and in the end of the text he acknowledges Jesus as the messiah.  Who is teaching this man?  Well, in the end, you have to admit that it wasn't Jesus because he admits that he doesn't even know where Jesus is.

Jesus did him a favor and then left the scene.... He didn't hang around for applause.... He didn't get any recognition.  He just did a kind deed and kept moving.  Who, then, is teaching this man?  His critics.... Just his critics.  I've learned some of the most important lessons I've learned in life from the people who have publicly criticized me.  Rarely has the lesson been what they wanted to teach me, but I am grateful for the learning opportunities none-the-less.

Well, the day which started out as easily being the best day of this guy's life takes yet another turn towards the neurotic.  The religious leaders, not being able to summarily condemn Jesus for doing this horrible thing, call in the man's parents.

In the past couple of centuries we've gotten kind of formal about the official attitude about parents.  We have a Mother's Day and a Father's Day and we are supposed to come to church on those days and, no matter how you spin it, we're being asked to worship our parents.

But I know that a lot of the people lingering in the greeting card isle are sorting through the "you were always there for me" and the "you are my inspiration" and the "I will always love you more than life itself" trying to find the card that says, "You are my dad."  Or, "Thanks for giving birth to me."  Because saying anything else would be a bit over the top.

In a perfect world, your parents would always be your biggest fans and your most reliable advocates.  And some people get to live in that world but not the guy at the center of John's story.
The parents are called in to be questioned because their son has gone and gotten himself in trouble by being healed.  You would think that the parents would be planning a big celebration.... They would be introducing their son to all of the relatives he had never been able to see, they would be leading the cheerleading section.  But their son is in a bit of a tight spot and, well, they don't really want to get involved:

The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight 19and asked them, 'Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?' 20His parents answered, 'We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; 21but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.' 22His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews;

Then tension in the narrative continues to escalate until the man is excommunicated from the community..... what a twisted tale!  The way John tells this story about a blind man is that he was born blind but eventually is able to see Jesus the way that John sees Jesus but as the man is healed, the miracle reveals just how blind everyone else is, especially the self-righteous religious folks but his parents, neighbors and the other people milling around the mall don't come off very well either.

I could go on all day about this narrative and I'm sure some of you are afraid that I'm planning to do exactly that but to bring all of this to a relatively compassionate conclusion I want to go back to the original question that started this whole story about blindness and how we can learn to see.

The story begins with the disciples asking Jesus why this man is blind.  They assume that someone has screwed up and that is pretty well reflective of how we think about most things.  Whose fault is it?  Who lied?  Who cheated?  Who stole?  Who was drunk?  Who has the most salacious moral failing?

Jesus ignores this way of seeing and interpreting the meaning of peoples' lives and he says to them..... and please listen to this because this makes the difference between being blinded by gossip and prejudice and having your eyes opened to really see.  Jesus says in verse 3:

3.....'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.

The truth is that probably the man and his parents had sinned and so had everyone else at the mall and the church but that is not the point.  Jesus saw the man's crisis, not as something that someone had done wrong but rather he saw the crisis as an opportunity to do something good, something holy, something kind and compassionate.

Are the homeless people in Springfield homeless because they are alcoholics?  Because they are addicts?  Because they are criminals who no one will give a job?  Is it because of the Republicans who have ship wrecked the economy?  Are they homeless because they are lazy Democrats waiting for a hand out?  Are they homeless because they have mental health problems and they are too unstable to solve their own problems?  Take your pick.... Most of the guys I know fit into at least three of those categories.

But here is how John tells us that Jesus sees them:  They are homeless to give you an opportunity to show compassion.  Why did your son's marriage fall apart?  Was it his fault or her fault?  Or is it an opportunity for you to show that your spirituality is based on forgiveness, a suspension of judgment and a heart devoted to compassion?

Wouldn't you love for people to look at you and your failings this way?  Wouldn't you love for your parents, your neighbors, your pastor, to see your crises, your screw ups, your mistakes and accidents as just an opportunity to be love in action?  And it wouldn't it be nice if we could learn to see that way too?

Blindness is for people who don't want to see what Jesus sees.

Tales Told in the Light of Day

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
March 27, 2011  Lent 3

John 4:5-24    
5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink'. 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?' (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, 'If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, "Give me a drink", you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.' 11The woman said to him, 'Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?' 13Jesus said to her, 'Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.' 15The woman said to him, 'Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.'
16 Jesus said to her, 'Go, call your husband, and come back.' 17The woman answered him, 'I have no husband.' Jesus said to her, 'You are right in saying, "I have no husband"; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!' 19The woman said to him, 'Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.' 21Jesus said to her, 'Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.'

It is never really advisable to preach a sermon in segments since the audience changes pretty dramatically from week to week.  Those of you who were not here last week must simply take my word for the fact that today's gospel lesson is the other half a single piece of fabric in which John lays two mirror image conversations side by side.

Last Sunday we read the Nicodemus narrative in which Jesus has a conversation with a leading Jewish man under the cover of night.  Today Dr. Trobisch has read the second portion, which is a conversation with a member of a rather hated racial minority and a woman at that, and they are talking in broad day light.

Nicodemus was a religious leader with whom Jesus might have talked in the open quite appropriately but he came sneaking around at night.  In first century Jewish tradition, a woman doesn't speak to a man outside of her own family and certainly doesn't speak to a man in public.

This text doesn't look particularly sexy to our eyes but to it's original audience, this text begins with a good deal of tension.  An unaccompanied woman is speaking to an unaccompanied man whom she does not know.  A first century audience might have expected this Samaritan to proposition Jesus but it was actually Jesus who spoke first to her.

He is exhausted.  He is leaning against a well.  She came to draw water.... At least that is her ostensible purpose, and so he asks her for a drink of water.  Like the "whites only" and "coloreds" drinking fountains of the Jim Crow south, she replies that since he is obviously a Jew, he probably wouldn't want to drink out of her jar.

There is taunting here.

The Jews and the Samaritans had a 500 year old racially fueled mutual hatred.  At one point, when the Jews wouldn't let the Samaritans participate in Temple worship, they built their own temple on another mountain and the Jews eventually destroyed it.

When Jesus was a kid, some Samaritans came into Jerusalem just before the Passover and spread human bones around the temple, defiling it so that Passover services had to be canceled.... Both economically and religiously, it was tantamount to having to cancel Christmas in our day.

No one had to explain the polarized nature of this exchange to John's audience.

The issues, races and religions of such prejudice change through the centuries but we all know the name of the tune and the steps to the dance.  In recent years we have seen the two party system in America become so rife with prejudice that it has resulted in shutting down progress on a host of important issues and literally causing the shut down of government in some cases.

What we can see very clearly is that as long as every issue is defined as being partisan, that no intelligent solution ever emerges and even the compromises which are finally unleashed out of this insane environment looks more like Frankenstein's monster than anything produced by intelligent and well intended statesmen.

But we're familiar with the polar battle lines.  One is pro choice, the other is pro life.  Both patting themselves on the backs for belonging to the moral camp while the lives of children and young women are reduced to being little more than political talking points.

The Samaritan woman at the well had come to the well alone, which could be interpreted to mean that she had already let go of the normal moral standards of that time and place in which women tended to perform such tasks in groups so that they could keep one another safe from inappropriate contact with men.  You can see that as either being intentionally immoral or as being rather more liberated and non-conformist.

Still, faced with a lone Jewish man who was asking for a favor, she went right back to the familiar battle lines.  "You are a Jew so you must think this.  I am a Samaritan so I must behave this way."

There is almost always a good deal of truth behind racial and political prejudices.  Not all Americans who travel abroad are ugly Americans but everyone who has traveled very much has met the ugly American.  French people are not always irrationally arrogant but you don't have to spend 7 consecutive days in Paris to find out where that stereotype comes from.

You may recall a few years ago when Jesse Jackson, when talking about the immorality and irrationality of profiling, said that even he had become one of those people who became frightened when a group of black teenagers was walking behind him on a city street.  The issue is that if we treat all black teens as if they have criminal intent.... If we treat all Republicans as if they are self serving aristocrats, and all Democrats as if they were lazy welfare junkies, and all Arabs as if they were terrorists, then we are likely to continue to find our prejudices confirmed over and over again.

When Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman, he ignores her race baiting and makes the conversation personal.  He didn't speak to her as someone who was a stereo-type of all Samaritan women, he spoke to her as an individual human being who had personal tragedies and vulnerabilities and who was in need of an opportunity to forgive herself and to have a fresh start.

Yes, it is true that a disproportionately large number of black male youths have criminal records.
But it is also true that when unemployment goes down the crime rate goes down even faster.  Being afraid of the adolescent malcontents walking behind you on a dark city street is understandable but if you stop thinking of them as a stereotyped class and start to realize how angry that poverty and hopelessness can make young people then you realize that the solution to your fear is not more police and more prisons but more jobs that pay a living wage.

If getting a part time job at McDonalds is all that you can hope for in your future then turning to crime is a matter of survival.  Prejudice is a kind of psychological short hand.... It allows you to form an opinion of blacks and whites, latinos and Asians, Republicans and Democrats, southerners and those other people..... "Yankee" doesn't seem to quite capture it does it?

My good friend, Ron Hertenstein, is a Republican, a retired Air Force Colonel, and you can well imagine that we sometimes have fairly spirited conversations about how to understand global events.  But when Ron says that there has never been a terrorist who had a full-time job then he is articulating a point which conservative and liberal, Arab and American, Republican and Democrat needs to sit up and deal with as a fact, not a prejudice or an opinion, but a fact which cuts through the fog of prejudice and gets down to the real point of why our difference so often become irrationally expressed in violence.
Meaningful employment with a realistic expectation of earning a living wage could be the answer to the problems that we are trying to solve with airport security, deployed armies and air assaults against foreign nations.  If every time you hear the word "Muslim" you immediately think "terrorist," you'll never remember the tried and true phrase, "it's the economy stupid."

Of course, it's not just the economy.  And the differences between Jews and Samaritans had many more complex nuances than simple religious prejudice.  There were some substantive issues, some annoying differences, and some competition for territory and resources.  But Jesus wasn't Judaism and this woman wasn't the Samaritan nation.

He disarmingly cut through the surface junk that stood between them and spoke to the woman as an individual.  In this particular case, she was a woman whose personal life had become a narrative unacceptable to either Jews or Samaritans... unacceptable to her family and her people..... the talk about living water may not have made immediate sense to her but what was unavoidable was that he knew her and yet he accepted her and spoke to her as a fully human person and that is what had been missing in her past five husbands and probably in her mother, father, siblings, neighbors, Samaritans, Jews, Republicans, Democrats and church folks.

I want to ask you to look at the front cover of your bulletin at those 8 points we re-print nearly every week.  Let's look at points 4 and 5 again this morning:

4. By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to): believers and agnostics,
conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, women and men,
those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
those of all races and cultures, those of all classes and abilities,
those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope. 

And we could add here:  Samaritans or Jews, Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, Fox News viewers or MSNBC fans.  And this matters because of number 5:

5.  Believe that the way we treat one another and other people is the fullest expression of our beliefs

A religion that needs to be better than the neighbor's religion.... Nationality which needs to see itself as being some how exceptional.... Classism or race identity which needs to be superior all add up to a religion that isn't worth keeping.

When people visit here they often want to know what it is that we believe but no matter what we tell them, after they hang out here for a few months, nothing we print on the cover of the bulletin matters unless the way we treat one another is obviously worthy of all of the high sounding things we say and sing about and pray about.  May God bless our community to always be more than the surface issues, more than the printed page, more than the labels and prejudices of day.

As St John of the Cross warned his community five hundred years ago:  We either pass the love test or we will fail entirely.  Study hard my brothers and sisters because the love test comes at us every day.

Under the Cover of Darkness

Community Christian Church  
Roger L. Ray, pastor
March 20, 2011    Lent 2



John 3:1-17

The first great philosophical writings came to us from the hand of the Greek thinker, Plato, in the 4th century B.C.  And Plato did every undergraduate student for the past 24 centuries the incredible favor of writing in the form of dialogues, conversations which took place between both famous and fictional characters of ancient Greece.

Sometimes his dialogues described actual historical events and sometimes the entire setting and characters were made up in order to examine a particular idea.  But because he wrote in the form of a play he was able to convey subtle meanings in the choice of settings and characters.  For example, Plato personally despised the Greek playwright, Aristophanes, because Aristophanes had written plays in which he ridiculed Socrates which helped to turn public sentiment against Socrates leading to his execution.  So, whenever Plato uses Aristophanes as a character in a dialogue you can bet that any lines coming from Aristophanes are not to be taken seriously.

More subtly, however, things like a conversation which is taking place between two characters who are walking, if they walk through a respected area of Athens, which Plato considered to be the capital of all great thought, then you can give what the characters are saying added weight.  If they walk outside the city walls of Athens, among the common and uneducated people, you can take it for granted that this is pretty weak material.


Students of philosophy have always known to take the setting of a conversation very seriously in interpreting the dialogue.  It took Biblical scholars several more centuries to realize that we should look at Biblical narratives in a similar way.

The authors of our four gospels described the sermons, conversations and miracles of Jesus in a way to help us to understand the significance of both who Jesus was and what he said and did.  How they presented that material and in what order and in what circumstances affects the message itself.

The gospel text before us today comes from this very well known conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus.  It is very important to notice that this dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus in the third chapter of John is set in juxtaposition to the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in the fourth chapter of John. The settings are like mirror images of one another, a set of opposites.  Nicodemus was a highly respected religious leader, the Samaritan woman was a non-Jew who had a horrible reputation.

Neither conversation may be an account of something that actually happened.  John uses Jesus, the Samaritan woman and Nicodemus the way that Plato uses the characters in his philosophical dialogues.

Reading John's accounts in this way, it is important to notice then, how John sets this up in the first verse and a half:

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2He came to Jesus by night
It was entirely appropriate for Jesus to speak publicly with Nicodemus and yet he came to Jesus in secret.  In the text we will read next week, from the 4th chapter of John, we see the contrast.  It was totally unacceptable for a Jewish man to talk to a woman who was unescorted and yet they did so privately in an open setting.

In both dialogues, Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman keep trying to talk about surface issues, religious ideas which are out there somewhere but not of great personal importance.

Jesus kept taking the conversations deeper, confronting them with the most important truths about their own lives.  We say that honest gospel preaching is "speaking the truth to power."  Saying the things that people don't want to have said, what they want to pretend isn't true, naming the elephant in the room that everyone tries to pretend doesn't exist.   Jesus confronts Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, in very different ways, with their need for total transformation.

Nicodemus slips around at night to question Jesus privately.  But the way John writes it, Nicodemus doesn't even get to get a question out of his lips.... Notice how, in verses 2 and three that Jesus cuts him off and answers a question which has not yet been asked.... As if Jesus already knew the real reason why Nicodemus was there:

and said to him, 'Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.' 3Jesus answered him, 'Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.' 4Nicodemus said to him, 'How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?'

John has really written a brilliant dialogue here.  Nicodemus is something of a tortured soul.  He is a member of clergy.... A sort of church official, with power, standing, resources, respect.... But in his own heart he is pretty sure that he is a fraud which is OK as long as everyone around you is also a fraud.

But then Jesus comes to town and, darn it, it seems like Jesus isn't really a fraud.  He is not an official.  He does not have standing in the church.  He has no job, no money, no title and, by all reason, he shouldn't have any power and yet people flock to him and make him important even though institutional religion had shut him out.

John doesn't tell us much about Nicodemus but the text is heavy with implication.  John doesn't have to tell us because we all know him, or someone like him.  Did he come out at night to see if he could find an Achilles' heel?  Was he looking for a way to prove to himself that he didn't have to take Jesus seriously?

In the philosophical study of logic we call this the "ad homonym" fallacy.  If you can't refute what the teacher is saying, try to find some way to attack the personal life of the teacher.  This is what false piety almost always does.

I recently wrote to our state's senators to object to the proposed defunding of the Planned Parenthood programs in America.  Education and treatment regarding sexually transmitted diseases, appropriate education in contraception and women's health issues are under attack in this congress.  This is a matter of great importance to millions of young women.

One of our senators responded with a form letter which was written to appear very pious, posturing as being morally opposed to abortion while, in fact, gutting the programs which have the best track record of preventing unwanted pregnancies.

This is the religious game that Nicodemus was playing.... Sounding pious while playing dumb.  Jesus knows that Nicodemus feels like a fraud and he is trying to offer him a way out.... A way to start over, to begin again.

But then Nicodemus falls back on another favorite religious fallacy.... The fallacy of literalism.  Jesus is trying to say something profound, something life changing, something liberating, but Nicodemus, by imposing a literal interpretation on his words, tries to make him sound ridiculous...... "a grown man can't crawl back into his mother's womb can he?"

Literalists in religion use the Bible the way most of us use a toilet plunger.  You only get it out in the most unspeakable moments to deal with issues you don't want to see or think about.  A literalist will point at a biblical text condemning homosexuality which is buried in texts about not eating cheese with meat, or eating shrimp, or wearing blended fabrics..... but they will never allow you to be a literalist about anything which condemns them..... only about what condemns people that they would rather flush down the toilet anyway.

You don't use a literal interpretation of the Bible in order to understand the Bible, you use a literal interpretation to hide the meaning, to twist it, to change it.
The scriptures teach us to love, to forgive, to show compassion and tolerance but in the hands of a literalist the Bible justifies wars, racism, sexism, it gives you permission to turn your backs on the poor and to judge even your own children.

As often happens in a dream, or in Plato's dialogues, certain characters show up only to represent an idea, to utter a line, and then they disappear.  In the midst of the conversation, John just stops talking about Nicodemus and Nicodemus disappears from the reader's mind.

He has served his purpose.  He represents religion which is textual, based on rules and beliefs, but is devoid of spirit.  Surely it is not Jesus who concludes this passage, suddenly speaking of himself in the third person as if he were Bob Dole or something.  It is John interpreting what we have seen by putting Jesus beside someone who represents institutional religion.  And what does John say?  Look at verse 17:

17 'Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.' 

There is a tremendous amount of pressure on the church to fold itself up in the darkness of literalism or of ad homonym, to act pious but stay out of the way....To sound religious without ever shining the light on anything of importance.

You hear me say things like that and you may be inclined to think that I am overstating the case but let me ask you this.... Why isn't there a loud and obvious anti-war movement among religious people in America?

There were some rallies, some songs being sung, a few signs being carried back in 2002, maybe a little in 2003.  We are now engaged in a war that is on the verge of its tenth anniversary.  Are we tired?  Were we mad when it was George Bush's war but now we complacent because it is Barak Obama's war?  When a liberal is awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace and then uses the podium to mount a defense of pre-emptive war, does the church then forget about everything that Jesus said?

Where has the voice of the church been as services to the poor have been cut?  Unemployment assistance, affordable housing, Planned Parenthood, nutrition programs for poor mothers and children..... how is it that the rich can take a mortgage tax deduction for their second and third homes, their vacation homes but we can cut homelessness assistance programs because the federal budget is in trouble?

And who talks about this?  Is it the church?  Who are the famous preachers in America now talking about the war, talking about poverty, talking about racism and sexism?  I marched with hundreds of people on Martin Luther King's birthday through town to hear a speech about how we should all volunteer more for community service.

Does the NAACP think that Martin Luther King got shot for organizing boy scout troops to pick up trash beside the highways?

No, men and women, do you know is talking about war, and injustice, about tax inequality and housing and health care?  Comedians.  The best preachers in America today are Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert and Bill Maher.  And they don't have very nice things to say about the church and, frankly, why should they?

We have a Congress that can outlaw Yard Darts because they are dangerous but they can't outlaw semi-automatic weapons and if you can't laugh at a Congress like that then you.... Well, how did John say it..... "people loved darkness rather than light"...... yeah, that stings.

But I don't mean to sound too negative about all of this.... Not that there is not a lot of darkness enshrouding religion these days.... But there is a solution.... We can be born again..... we can decide to step out of the darkness and into the light.  We can learn to love the truth and hate the lies..... we can kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

The Happy(?) Fall

Community Christian Church  
Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
March 13, 2011   LENT 1

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7  
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.'

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, 'Did God say, "You shall not eat from any tree in the garden"?' 2The woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3but God said, "You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die." ' 4But the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not die; 5for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.' 6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

I received word via e-mail while I was in Belize this week that Peter Gomes, the famous chaplain and Biblical professor at Harvard, had died.  He was an amazing man.... Both brilliant and entertaining.  I took a class on Biblical interpretation from him in 2004.  On the first day of class, he stood before the class and announced, "There will be no questions asked during our lecture sessions this fall because I have a great deal to say and you have a great deal to learn so it's best if we just accept that fact and get started."

It seems pretentious but I feel a great deal like that today because I have a great deal to say to you today and precious little time in which to say it and evidently what I have to say is not commonly known.
I need to also add the caveat that I am not all that comfortable talking about it because I want to talk about the relationship between women and theology which makes me fairly uneasy for several reasons: not the least of which is that I am not a woman and because the relationship has very often been an abusive relationship, and, honestly, because my own history with women should readily demonstrate that there are serious gaps in my knowledge.

Still, it has become painfully obvious to me that the conversation sorely needs to be had. I keep meeting women who are either out and out afraid to get involved with the church or who are so angry at the church that they would rather burn it down than set foot in it.

I had allowed myself the luxury of believing that the bad old days of religious oppression of women was a part of a distant 19th century past.  And if not that, at least the current generation of young educated women would have to learn about religious discrimination against them the way a young African American now reads about the institution of slavery..... as something they have heard of but never experienced.

The truth is that while many mainstream Christian denominations have been trying to eradicate the lines of gender prejudice for generations, most more conservative expressions of Christianity have been doing their best to erect higher and higher walls to divide the genders.

And, it should be obvious, where you can establish a foundation of discrimination in religion then you preserve a justification for discrimination in employment, economics, legal structures and domestic relationships.  It is hugely important and the ravages of gender discrimination is a dragon which should have long since been relegated to ancient mythology but it yet breaths fire into the hearts and minds of women in the present day.

Where better to start than at the beginning, literally, Genesis?  The casual reader may step gingerly along the first eleven chapters of Genesis and not be able to tell that it is not a literary whole.  By that, I mean that the stories collected there are not only not written by the same hand but they in fact were not written in the same century or the same nation.  There are different hands, different cultures and different subsets of languages involved in the composition of these stories.

There are two different creation narratives in the first and second chapters of Genesis. The stories of the creation, the garden of Eden, the murder of Abel, the flood, and the tower of Babel were never intended to be ancient accounts of either science or history.  They are religious stories, parables of sorts, intended to both teach a moral lesson and to account for the way the world is, what cultural anthropologists call an "etiology."

The story of the tower of Babel explains why there are so many languages among the nations and the story of the Garden of Eden explains why women are afraid of snakes..... most of we men are afraid of snakes too but we didn't want to see that in print in the Bible.

Biblical scholarship is not a matter of personal opinion any more than any other field of serious study.  We don't have time to explore all of the reasons why we know that the Garden of Eden text is intended to be understood metaphorically but let's just remember that the narrative revolves around a magical tree which is inhabited by a talking snake.  Anyone who wants to interpret this text literally should first be able to produce a snake which can not only talk but one who is able to win an argument with a woman.  Nuff said.

What these Genesis narratives actually are is both wonderful and complex.  They are stories which define the society in which they were created and every word is packed with meaning, more so than in most poetry.

In the narrative, the first man is created by God out of the dust of the earth.  Dust, in Hebrew, is "adamah."  The man is named "Adam."  Which is a play on words.  Then we see this almost comic play in which God wants to give the man a fitting partner.  God returns to the dust of the earth and makes one animal after another.

It is like a dating service gone crazy.  God is trying to make the perfect companion for Adam and in order to be that, the companion must be an equal to him.  And, in the humor of the story, it is as if God just can't get it right.  Every creature, when presented to Adam, is not adequate to be his partner and so he names it.  In that ancient society, to give something or someone a name was a sign of ownership and more than that, a sign of domination.  When Adam named the animals it was a form of condescension, a statement that he was superior to them.  You cannot have a full partnership with someone you are superior to.

And so, it is then as if in desperation that God gives up on trying to make Adam's partner from the same muddy stuff Adam was made from.  God causes Adam to fall into a deep sleep.  And here the text is a bit rough.  There is no word in ancient Hebrew for rib.  The word used here is "side."  The presumption in later interpreters was that the text meant to say that God had surgically removed a rib from Adam and managed to make another person from that small part.

A better understanding of the text is to take it as it is written, God took one side of Adam, literally dividing the first human into two parts, one of which was a man, the other was a woman.  Even the word used in the Hebrew for the creation of the woman is subtly different.

In the creation of Adam the word used was the same as the word used for construction.  Adam was built of dirt and named for dirt.  The woman, we are told, was created, and the word used is the word normally referencing art.  The woman's creation was God's first work of art.

And you'll notice, especially since I am pointing it out to you, that the woman is not called Eve here.  She is not named until after the nasty incident with the snake.  Adam names Eve after the fall as a sign of their broken relationship.  In the perfect creation, the man and the woman were to have been equal, partners, two halves of the same whole.  In the fallen and sinful state of humanity, the two are no longer considered equals.

Now, if you'll recall, this whole matter of looking for a partner for Adam was because he was lonely and God saw that it was not good that he should be alone.  In the fall, when they are no longer equals, the woman must suffer from male domination but the man has not won anything here, in winning domination over the female, he has become isolated again.... he is also being punished, being made lonely forever.

There are wonderful things to take note of in the unfolding of the text.  The forbidden fruit in the garden is wisdom.  It was not the man who was tempted to become wise, it was the woman.  And the man does not engage in dialogue here.

It is the woman who is interpreting the word of God, literally playing the part of a rabbi in debate with the serpent.

The man doesn't say a word.  He just shows up with his knuckles dragging the ground, scratching himself and wondering what was for supper.  He eats of the fruit of wisdom only when the woman has first had her eyes opened.  There is so much exalting of women in this text that it is tempting to believe that its original author was female.

Either way, if you are willing to let the text be properly understood, it lifts up equality as the ideal, and inequality as the sign of sinful and fallen humanity.  Male domination was a fact of human existence for most of history but it was not the ideal.  It was the result of sin.

Standing up here in this big black dress demands honesty.  There is no way to publicly read the Bible every week and not admit that it contains hundreds of examples of religiously justified and legislated male dominance and totally unequal treatment of women.

In Genesis Abraham is stopped by God's own hand from sacrificing his son Isaac. And if the story ended there we could trumpet the ancient rejection of human sacrifice.

But the truth is that later, in the eleventh chapter of Judges, we encounter the story of Jephthah's pledge to God in which he ends up sacrificing his own daughter and the story is told in a way to lead you to believe that we are to admire his faithfulness and sacrifice.

The Levitical code includes condemnations against women for nothing more than their basic biological makeup.

Punishments are unequal and blessings are decidedly tilted towards men.  The Bible does not speak with one voice only.  There are messages of compassion, images of equality.  There are stories of victorious female leaders and commandments to disregard gender and race prejudice.  But the bad stuff is there too.

In the past decade we Westerners have allowed ourselves to take a pretty dim view of the Muslim religion and we have especially pointed out passages of the Koran which institutionalize the unequal treatment of women.  However, my friends, a literal reading of much of the Old Testament would be more harsh than a literal reading of the Koran.  Fundamentalist Christians are faced with either enforcing male dominance or trying to simply not read more misogynistic passages of scripture.


The way our church is structured I, of course, cannot speak for what everyone thinks, but I can tell you what I believe.  I can say, as a Biblical scholar who has lived every day with these texts, that there are things, especially in the Levitical code and the most ancient strata of the Old Testament, which simply do not apply to us.

All of scripture, all of religion, every sermon, every prayer is an attempt on the part of women and men to reach up to the mind of God.  Like learning to ride a bicycle, there are a lot more falls than progress in the early days and even a pro will occasionally fall.  Do a Google search on "Lance Armstrong falls" and you get quite a list.  The best cyclist in the world isn't above making mistakes.

What I believe with all my heart is that the direction of sincere spirituality is always in the direction of liberation, of discovery of greater and greater truths, and always in the alleviation of oppression, bondage and prejudice.  The church along with governments, banking systems, corporations and armies has been guilty of violence and oppression towards women.

What I can tell you that I believe without the slightest shade of doubt is that God has never been behind any of those abuses.  Any religion which seeks to discriminate against women for being women is blasphemous.

In the past generation we have tried to change the way we talk in order to help change the way we think.  We've tried to reinterpret male centered language to be more inclusive but the sins of the abuse of women go deeper than any symbolic change.

When I preach in Central and South America I never fail to remind my congregation that men must never hit or sexually attack their spouses or any other women.  I have failed to say that often enough in my own pulpit. We too passively walk through a society which turns women into objects of decoration and sexual desire and I find it too easy to simply accept that role without question or pain.... until it involves my daughter.... and that too is matter of male ego.

If women would just gain the self esteem to stop attending, contributing to and cooking and cleaning for churches which discriminate against them the face of Christianity would change tomorrow.  Even the current pope would be happy to start ordaining women as priests by the end of the month if they just stopped attending the Catholic church, running Catholic hospitals and teaching in Catholic schools.  Oppression continues as long as the oppressed will put up with it.  Haven't well all had about enough of it?

And from the perspective of the dirt party, every son of Adam will continue to be lonely until we fully accept the daughters of Eve as equals, partners, the other half of our very souls.  Believe what you will but I will tell you what I believe.  I believe that the religious liberation of women will be the spiritual healing of men.