Investing in Community

Community Christian Church    
Roger Ray, pastor  
May 15, 2011    Easter 4

Acts 2:42-47
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common;
45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

By being here today you have clearly chosen not to attend the "Get Prepared" conference which is going on this weekend at the expo center downtown.  Playing on public paranoia, combined with the political organization of our local Tea Party members, the conference organizers promise to teach people how to grow and preserve their own food.  How to convert all of their assets into gold and silver so that they can survive the melt down of society which is sure to come, either by global warming, terrorist activity or the simple fact that we have elected a black, Muslim,  socialist to be our president.

If he were alive today, we could take Charles Darwin down to the Expo center and prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that human kind did not evolve from apes because, clearly, apes are much too smart to attend a conference of this sort.  But this shameless celebration of crippling paranoia is a reminder of when this kind of insanity was more broadly expressed in our society with our Civil Defense system.

My former church actually had those stickers in the windows from the 1950's declaring the church's boiler room to be a shelter for the neighborhood in the event of a nuclear disaster.

My generation grew up watching the civil defense films that taught us how to survive in a basement for two or three years while the radiation from a nuclear war dissipated.  I still remember the day in jr. high school when my friend, Pryor Johnson, just fainted and fell off the gym bench when they were showing us the film about how to deliver a baby while living underground.  

Other films dealt with how to ration food and water, how to seal and contain human waste in drums and how to set broken bones and stitch up gaping wounds.  The absurdity of the whole proposition of sending Americans underground to huddle together in basements that would no more protect you from nuclear fallout than the plastic sheets and duct tape suggested by the Bush administration would protect us from airborne anthrax never seemed to occur to the teachers who made us endure these ridiculous anxiety producing films.

Our church doesn't have a basement but, for the moment, let's pretend that it did and that our imaginary basement were supplied with sufficient water, dried foods, candles and potties so that we could all survive down there, far away from the purple rain or whatever it was which scared us into hiding.

Thankfully we are well supplied with doctors and nurses cause, "I don't know nothing bout birthin no babies, Ms. Scarlet."  I'll bless them but until that day, I'm not much help.  But, as much as I love every last one of you..... even when you are texting me at 11 p.m. or calling me at 6 a.m. to tell me something which could have perfectly well waited until office hours..... I love ya, but 24 hours together in a confined space..... 2 days, a week, a month.... Without scope or right guard???

What they never discussed in the civil defense films was how we are to keep from killing one another.  Just imagine if we barred the doors down at the expo center this morning and locked all of those paranoid survivalists in together over night.... How long would it be before all of those "concealed weapons" began to come out of their secret holsters?  I can't prove it but I would suppose that the shoot out at the OK Hammons Corral would take place before the donuts arrived the next morning.

In all seriousness, building community is phenomenally difficult even among the most sane and the most decent sort of folks.  It is a peculiar irony to me that solitary confinement is the most severe of punishment.  Criminals tremendously prefer the company of other criminals over being isolated but then we do even worse when we cannot have isolation at all.

We crave human contact so much that we have gone to great lengths to create a postal system, telegraph and telephone, e-mail and texting and now we finally have the two-way video conversations on our cell phones and lap tops which used to be only on Dick Tracy's wrist in the comics.  But with each step of technology that connects us to other human beings more easily, we become a little less connected in fact.

As our population grows, fewer people join civic clubs.  Sociologists have commented on the fact that more and more people go bowling but there are fewer and fewer bowling leagues.  And even though, here in the Midwest, we have this phenomenon of mega-churches, fewer and fewer people go to church and the mega-church allows you to remain perpetually lost in the crowd for years, sitting in pews surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people without ever meeting any of them.

I'm the pastor of a church that I helped to named "Community" because it is my goal to create community among us but I don't know my neighbor's name.  I have never met the two men who mow my yard.  I have no idea who delivers the mail or collects the garbage.  I have hundreds of friends on the Book of Faces, many of whom I have never met.

We like to look at people.  We like to be around people.  But when we are forced into close proximity with one another we have real difficulty in getting along.  We often find most noticeable about one another the things that irritate us rather than the things that attract us to one another.

In rural Nicaragua there is a saying for this, when you catch two people gossiping with one another, the question roughly translates, "Are you eating your neighbors at the fence?"

The one real exception to this is when there has been a life altering crisis, either a good one or a bad one.  The immediate reaction to the news of the 9-11 attacks a decade ago was seen as lines formed at gas stations and grocery store shelves where emptied...... the latent paranoid mentality that makes some people go to a survivalist conference came out in a huge portion of the society, even in an isolated place like Springfield which just isn't going to rank very high on a terrorist priority list.... But within hours partisan divisions began to evaporate.

Public servants, whom we rarely thought about, firemen, became national heroes.  People who normally couldn't care less if the east coast just boarded ships and went back to Europe were willing to immediately send the shirt off their backs to strangers in New York City.   Even I stopped publicly criticizing George W. Bush.... For several days.

And that is the problem.  A crisis can create community for a few moments.  When there is a common enemy, even people who naturally dislike one another can become allies.  It just doesn't last long.  The day Osama bin Laden was killed, the right wing could hardly find anything to talk about.  Newt Gingrich was so momentarily confused that he even reportedly made a pass at his current wife!..... I kid Newt!

Finding Osama after a decade long hunt for the world's most wanted man did not lead to a sustained sense of community.  The bad news for the 24 hour media is that you can only kill a terrorist once.  If he had been captured and put on trial it would have given them months of stuff to talk about but once the news was broken that Osama was dead, the best they had to talk about was whether or not President Obama would release gruesome photographs of the body.  I hope that the Tea Party doesn't keep up the drum beat to see the pictures as long as they kept up the demand to see the president's birth certificate.... There's only so much I can take before I am in danger of becoming cynical about their sincerity.

Our scripture lesson from Acts today describes a profound coalescing into community resulting from a different kind of crisis.  Luke gives us the only account of the events following the first Easter.  And Luke wasn't there so we are getting a potentially heavily polished apple but the basic story is believable to me.
The early church community had witnessed the brutal death of their leader whom they had hoped would become their king after he had led a successful revolt, running the Romans out of Israel.  Jesus was dead.  The Romans were still there.  Everything was the same, only worse, except for the fact that they had realized that in some very profound way, Jesus wasn't dead and the movement wasn't over.

I would not pretend to know exactly what that early community had experienced, not in such specificity as to try to put it into concrete terms, but they had experienced Jesus as Christ beyond the tomb.

After 9-11, I developed the bad habit of sleeping with CNN on all night.... To the point that when I am traveling I can hardly go to sleep in a silent room.  More importantly, I found that every sermon I had written prior to 9-11 seemed to look silly to my own eyes when I would open a file to look at how I had treated certain Biblical texts in the past.  The world had become instantaneously smaller and more dangerous and things that had once seemed important to me became venial.

 In the early weeks of the church, as Luke described it, the people's world had changed in such a way that the value of things changed.  What became important to them was their connection to one another.  Valuable possessions that they had once hoarded to insure their own security became unimportant and people willingly sold what they had so that they could share with their brothers and sisters with whom they were now knit together in an intense community experience.

I don't know how long it lasted but it lasted at least long enough to give them a name.  Church, in Greek, "ecclesia," means "called out group."
They came to be called a church because they did become a community that looked out for one another, shared with one another, loved one another.
I have often observed that Jesus preached about the coming Kingdom of God but rather than the Kingdom of God, he got the church and one is forced to wonder how he feels about that deal?

Heaven didn't come through a divine invasion of the world of space and time.  Evidently, heaven only comes when we find people to be of greater value than things.  When we can, with or without a crisis, create a community out of people who could just as easily eat one another at the fence but who choose instead to learn to accept, work with, share ideas with and eventually love one another.

There were several attempts at creating utopian societies in the early settlement of the British colonies.  The Spanish had come here a century before looking for gold and silver they could steal from Indians.  The French came looking for furs and tobacco.  But my people, the British, came trying to get away from other British people.  That's an over simplification but it gives me some satisfaction to sum it up that way.

When King Charles had had about enough of Puritan religious snobbery, Puritans began to immigrate to what became the Boston area of Massachusetts.  Most famous among the colonizers was Jonathan Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan who hoped that if only they could get away from the Catholics and the Anglicans, that some real Christian people could come here and establish a sort of heaven on earth.  He told them: We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ......community.... as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace,
None of the utopian experiments were especially successful and some, evidently, resorted to eating their neighbors at the fence in an alarmingly literal manner.

Our church, our community, our ecclesial called out group came into existence in a sort of a crisis.  My personal crisis came as I realized that when I was no longer either a pastor or a Disciple that I couldn't find a church that I could stand to go to.  I gave it some tries and ended up reading my e-mail and sending text messages and praying for it all to end.  I honestly wish that I had found some place that didn't strike me as being totally irrelevant.

Many of you have reported similar experiences.  Some of you were excluded from your mother church because of your sexual orientation.  Others couldn't be comfortable in a church where your son or daughter, or your friend would have been rejected because of who they love.

Others had more complex ideological reasons for being among the church alumni association.  You got to a point where you just couldn't buy into the superstitious stuff anymore.... You just weren't going to be manipulated by guilt and fear anymore.... Or, as I remember very distinctly my friend Mel Miller telling me, he just got to where he couldn't go to a church where there was no mention of the fact that our nation was engaged in a deadly and questionable war and that we lived in a city surrounded by serious poverty and addiction.

We became refugees through doctrinal torture and religious boredom.  But creating community is not automatic for us.  Victims have a nasty habit of becoming victimizers.  We too can eat our neighbors at the fence.

If we are to become a community in a lasting sense then we have to decide that what brought us together is more important than any of the annoying things that might tear us apart.  We are not a community because everyone agrees with everything I say in a sermon or everything I publish in the NewsLeader.  Some of you wish you could hear some more traditional theology.  Some of you wish I would be less controversial.  And some of you are probably wishing that I would tell some more jokes about Newt Gingrich.... Shame on you!

We're coming up on our third anniversary.  The crisis of isolation that first caused us to meet together in funeral home chapel is becoming a distant memory.  You can forget that we have not formed a new church out here simply out of choice but more because we had no other choice.  Most of us would have gone to another church if there had been one to go to that did not insult our character, our intellect or our conscience.

One of the early symbols of the church was a line drawing of a boat.  Some historians speculate that the church used the boat image as a way to disguise the cross.... You could mark your home with a cross on the door, letting Christians know where they could come worship by simply drawing a boat at the bottom of the cross, making the cross look like the mast of a ship.

I'm not so sure that was it.  I think that it is just as possible that the early Christian communities saw themselves as being in a boat with one another.....like a life boat in which everyone's survival depended upon being able to cooperate and share with one another.... Like being trapped in a church basement together with nothing but communion bread and grape juice to live on for a couple of years.

Our mission statement says that we have formed this church because we want to work together for social justice and boy do we have our work cut out for us.

Do you know that the military budget in the United States has doubled since 9-11 and that's not even counting the costs of three Middle Eastern conflicts?  Military spending is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  Why are there no decent jobs?  Why do so many families live in danger of eviction, hunger and illness?  Because all of our resources are going to a military machine.  We have a mission to witness for peace, for economic justice, for an end to oppression, liberation of the unjustly incarcerated and an end of violence.

But we won't have a voice for long unless we love one another.  The Peace Network of the Ozarks sprang up in the midst of the crisis of the war against Iraq but it soon fell apart and the war goes on.  The interfaith aids network came together in Springfield in the presence of violence and oppression against gays and lesbians but the interfaith groups couldn't get along with one another and that coalition went away and the prejudice remains.

For us to make a difference, for our community to really matter, we have to fulfill that vision part of our mission statement that says that we want to be a healthy community.  This means that we decide to be tolerant, even when we feel irritated.  It means that we will decide to be agreeable, even when we don't always agree.  It means that even when a person seems to be just too full of themselves to be contained in a small sanctuary, that we choose not to burst that bubble.

We strive to be a prophetic voice of social justice for this community and to have the credibility to do that, the first gift we must give to Springfield is the example of a healthy spiritual community.

In spite of our political, doctrinal and personal disagreements.... What we agree on is that we love one another, respect one another and we are resolved to take care of one another both in crisis and in calm times.   By learning to show forgiveness and tolerance to the people we do know, we will become capable of showing forgiveness and tolerance to the people of other nations and religions whom we do not know.  An old commandment I give to you, that you love one another.

Feminism is the Radical Idea that Women Are Human

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
May 8, 2011

Proverbs 6:20-22 
20
My child, keep your father's commandment, and do not forsake your mother's teaching. 
21 Bind them upon your heart always;
   tie them around your neck. 
22 When you walk, they will lead you;
   when you lie down, they will watch over you;
and when you awake, they will talk with you.

A part of most weekday mornings for me is a few minutes of watching Morning Joe, a news commentary program co-hosted by former Republican congressman, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.  They are two intelligent people who have different perspectives on the news and they often interview some of the most influential people in the world.

The people on the set are, of course, all multi-millionaires and they regularly shamelessly hawk their own books.  Mika produced her first auto-biography last year and, this past week, has already released another auto-biographical book.... It seems to me that the talking heads on TV news often have a terribly inflated view of their own importance but this second book may have at least a footnote of real value because it is, after all, about knowing your own worth.

Joe and Mika sit side by side every Monday through Friday morning with Mika doing most of the heavy lifting of the more complicated conversations about the news but she discovered that MSNBC was paying Joe Scarborough seventeen times as much as they were paying her.  Not twice as much.  Not ten times as much..... seventeen times as much.

I may not have the proper level of concern about Mika's plight since I generally believe that the people who sit in front of TV cameras are all over paid but her situation symbolizes the sorry state of affairs which still exists in the inequity between women and men in the workplace.

Huge strides have been made. A lot of barriers have been dropped and in any particular case you may be able to find a plausible reason why a certain female candidate did not get more votes than their male rival, or why a university hired four male deans in a row even though there were qualified women applying for each position but still, let me ask you to pull back the lens and look at the world.

Right now, in the 21st century, men own 99% of the privately owned property in the world.  Women perform 66%, two thirds, of the world's work.  Women produce 50% of the world's food but they are paid 10% of the world's income and own 1% of the property now tell me how that can be fair in 2011?

I want to share a little video clip with you from a recent Oprah program about an African woman named Tererai:

http://www.oprah.com/world/Tererai-Trent-Returns-to-Zimbabwe-to-Share-Her-Story-Video

Tererai's story is told more completely in the book which had caught Oprah's attention.  The title is "Half the Sky," saying that though women own only 1% of the property in the world, they still own half of the sky.

The book tells the story of women who have risen from both poverty and obscurity in Africa to become fully actualized human beings.

I don't want to take anything away from Tererai who really is a phenomenal human being but this video clip ends with Tererai saying, "I did it.  I did it."  And when she has been allowed to more fully tell her story, she gives a lot of credit to other people in her life.

Yes, she was largely self taught in her early life.  Her father not only wouldn't let her go to school and he married her off to a horrible man when she was only 11 years old.  She bore three children to that man while still herding cattle in her African village but taking correspondence classes.

On Oprah, you hear that her husband beat her because she was trying to learn and gain an education but when Heifer Project gave her a scholarship to come to the United States, he was more than willing to come with her.  They lived in a raggedy trailer in Stillwater, OK while Tererai went to Oklahoma State University.

A local church helped the family with food.  Her husband did not work but often sent what little money she had back to his family in Africa to present himself as being successful.  But, again, what you don't see on TV or in the book, is that her husband was HIV positive and very lazy.  Even in the US, he regularly beat Tererai and deeply resented her success.

She approached my friend, Dr. Jeanmarie Verchot, and asked her for a job washing dishes in her research lab.

Jeanmarie soon discovered that Tererai actually had a keen grasp of lab procedures and she took her under her wing and gave her an ever expanding role in the lab.  Tererai "did it" but it was Jeanmarie who helped her to believe that she could report her husband to the police, even though her African upbringing had taught her never to stand up to a man.

Eventually, because of his violence and Jeanmarie's persistence, her husband was deported and he returned to Africa where he did not long survive without Tererai's support.  Tererai was carrying a load of 21 hours, caring for 3 children and working in the university laboratory.  Her advisor did not want to consider all of the correspondence work she had done in Africa and tried to make her stay in school at OSU for an extra year but Jeanmarie went to the dean and did a degree audit, proving that she had more than enough credits to graduate.  Again, Tererai would never have stood up to a man in authority; she needed another woman in her life to help her to find her path to becoming the person she longed to be.

Jeanmarie helped to get her into a masters program, and then on to earn her PhD in agriculture and she is now the assistant director of Heifer Project international.  I can only tell you about Jeanmarie's role in Tererai's success because Jeanmarie is not here today.  She went back to Oklahoma yesterday to spend Mother's Day with her son.

But the fact that she has refused my requests to tell Tererai's story here in one of our classes or to allow me to tell you this story in her presence forms a large part of what I want to say on this Mother's Day.

I don't do Mother's Day sermons for a whole host of reasons not the least of which is that the traditional greeting card holiday fundamentally diminishes the value of women as whole human beings and exaggerates the singular fact that women bear children.  A great deal of what is extolled in Mother's Day greeting cards is the selflessness of women, and while compassion and generosity are values we certainly hold dear around here, we do not value self-subjugation.

One of the points Mika Brzezinski makes is that while men are self-promoting, women often tend to be self-deprecating.  Women are constantly saying, "I'm sorry," when men are pointing out what they have accomplished.  Men argue their value to their corporation or their university and women are constantly apologizing.  I don't get invited out to the "girls night" conversations but as they have been reported by many professional women, they often use their confidential friendship time to tell their friends where and how they are failing, what they are afraid of and how unhappy they are with their bodies, their home life or their jobs.

Women do 60% of the work and get 10% of the pay in the world because they spend way too much time waiting for men to play fair.  Look at Tererai's story:
She was encouraged to dream and work hard for success by her mother.  It was a female Heifer Project director who got her a scholarship to come to OSU and start a real education.  It was a female professor and employer who helped to liberate her from abuse and stood up for her in a male dominated university culture to get her first degree.

I'm not trying to say all men are bad, but you can't avoid that fact that Tererai's father held her back, her husband beat her and held her back, her male advisor tried to keep her from graduating..... if it were not for the women in her life who championed her, mentored her, empowered her, Tererai wouldn't be sitting on Oprah's couch saying, "I did it, I did it."

The director of the bar association here in Springfield, Crista Hogan, is a friend of mine who has had to deal with some really crazy hard challenges in life not the least of which has been the suicide of her first husband and the death of her second husband to cancer.  She now finds herself having to manage her own children and her second husband's children as well as a bunch of lawyers who act like babies and a good deal of rental property.  When I told her what I wanted to talk about today she wrote this to me:
"All women are mothers.... I always had my mother, and several assorted mothers of my chosing. And I serve that role for dozens of young people. And my kids have me, and they all have mother substitutes. So I don't think fertility is terribly relevant.

... but if someone could give me a message it would be something along the lines of "forgive yourself ..... You love you children, they love you. The mistakes are inevitable, so forget your shortcomings and move on."

I can tell you that I always thought Mothers' Day was bogus, and I had a personal opinion that it was designed to celebrate conventional mothers and not the ones that function like me.

I applaud the stay at home moms who cooked and cleaned and froze their buns off watching their kids play soccer or football, and helped with homework and clipped coupons' and sewed Halloween costumes.


But I also applaud the mothers who get up and go to work to show both their sons and their daughters that half of the sky belongs to women and that the sky is the limit for where their dreams can take them.

And I applaud women who stop apologizing and focusing on what they can't do and what they are afraid of and who start telling one another how powerful, how intelligent, how creative and capable they are.

And tell one another that you are beautiful.  It makes me crazy to know that more women die in this country from anorexia than from breast cancer because women are so insecure about their appearance that they are starving themselves to death.  It makes me crazy that we spend more on breast implants than we spend on Alzheimer's research.  Stop it.  You are beautiful.  You don't need to look younger, or thinner.... You don't need to surgically altar your face or your figure unless you want to do it for you and you alone.  It is your body and should stop worrying about what men think or what men like.

Ladies, before you go home today, you tell one of your daughters, or one of the women for whom you are a mother or a sister.... "you look beautiful."  And try to find a way to say to another woman, "You sure are smart.... You are so talented.... You are amazing."

I'm not encouraging gender competition.  I'm not saying that this is a battle between men and women but I am saying that if women ever want to own more than 1% of the property in the world, they shouldn't wait for a man to hold open the door to prosperity.

Commissioned to Forgive the World

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
May 1, 2011     Easter 2

Commissioned to Forgive the World from Community Christian Church on Vimeo.

John 20:19-23
19
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.
23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

My cousin, Temple Dickinson, wore a full thick beard when we were in Middle School but he was clean-shaven in High School.  The reason for this grooming change was that the student dress code in my little Kentucky High School, forbid facial hair.  But the Middle School had no such restriction because, prior to my cousin's early maturity, it had never been an issue.

Any dress code or operations manual is basically written to correct past mistakes.  If your office dress code forbids men from wearing fireman's overalls and coats and hats to work, then you can bet someone had tried it.  You can read your office manual as something of a hit parade of past colorful employees.

You can do something like that with the gospels.  They were not written during the life time of Jesus and so, they were written to accomplish certain goals of later generations..... it is not much of a stretch to realize that they were written, at least in part, to correct some past mistakes.

Mark was written first, then Matthew and Luke.  Then, a full generation later, John finished his gospel that, in many ways, responded to problems which were being experienced in the church near the end of the first century.

I've shortened our lectionary reading for today to just five verses out of this late chapter in John.

It records an encounter with the resurrected Jesus, something which is almost certainly, a creation of the gospel writer and not reflective of any actual encounter.

Now, that may not sound good to you but I can tell you that the church did and does this kind of thing even now.  You have at least heard of the fifteenth century spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a' Kempis.  Thomas writes this manual for monastics as if it were Jesus speaking in the first person.

You might think that you would not stand for such a forgery, but it was offered sincerely as what Thomas believed Jesus would say to the people of his day and it was read by hundreds of thousands of people with that kind of authority.

Several years ago, when I was living in Louisville, a young pastor went to serve a dying congregation with a large building in an impoverished Louisville neighborhood, and he wrote his weekly newsletter column over the name of Jesus.  Signing most of them, "with tears, Jesus."  Now, they did fire him after a few months and, I'll admit, I was somewhat relieved by that decision, but you have to admire his modern temerity.....well, maybe you do, I certainly didn't admire it..... but in the late first century, for John to write an ending to his gospel that was John putting words in Jesus' mouth to speak to the church of his time was entirely acceptable.

 Divorced from reading this as a historical encounter with the risen Jesus but more like a vision of Jesus coming back to give the young church marching orders.... What is it that John believes is so important for the church to hear?

In these five short verses, the post-Easter, resurrected Christ is telling the apostles that they are commissioned to forgive sins.

Do you remember that story in the fifth chapter of Luke where Jesus heals the paralyzed man? At first he says to the man, "Your sins are forgiven," and some of the religious folk standing around complain about that saying, "who can forgive sins but God?"  And so Jesus shows him that he has the authority to forgive sins by telling the man to pick up his bed and walk, which he, miraculously, does.

So Jesus has the authority to forgive sins and long after Jesus was dead, John wants the surviving church to know that this authority has passed to them.  In fact, the apostles have a fairly short job description in the gospels and high up on the list of what they are suppose to do is to forgive people.

Of course, the Catholic church, which likes to formalize things, takes these verses to justify a formal sacrament of the church.... The sacrament of confession or what is called in modern times, the sacrament of reconciliation.  If you read about the practice of the sacrament of reconciliation, it seems like a wonderful idea.  If you actually go to a Catholic church and look into the confessional booth, you will probably see about a half inch of dust collected on the seat.  Great idea.... Nobody does it.... Which is just one of the problems with organized religion.

 There is a parable which says that a Christian and the Devil were walking one day and the Christian discovered a great truth.  Showing the truth to the Devil, Satan said, "here, let me organize that for you."  Because, when it comes to spiritual truths, nothing is as effective in killing it as being institutionalized.

If, for example, the risen Christ had come to you and said, "I have given you the power to cure cancer, just touch any patient and they will be instantly healed," what would you do?  Would you make them fill out forms and wait six months?  Would they have to pay premiums for years before you touched them?

Would you tell them that you only touch people who were paying premiums before they got cancer because you refuse to touch people with pre-existing conditions?

Seriously, if you had been given the ability to cure terminally ill patients with the touch of your finger, wouldn't you be running through the cancer wards touching as many people as you could?  If you carried in your hand the cure for cancer, wouldn't you use it, share it, spread it around as far and fast as you could?

Well, of course, we don't have that power.... Or at least most of us don't.  But the cure which was given to us was the ability to forgive people and for a whole lot of folks, that's more valuable than being cured of cancer.  And a lot more people suffer from guilt than suffer from cancer.

Now, you might say, back to the cancer thing..... I'm not going to cure people who smoke.... They really deserve what they get.  And maybe you will say, "I'm not going to cure obese people.... They kept eating all of that fast food when they knew what would happen to them."

And you can keep going, eliminating the undeserving.  Of course, we've seen how that works.  Do you remember the welfare reform discussions of the 80's in which President Regan wanted to help only the "deserving poor"?  Except, when you really squeezed him on the point, everyone who was poor was really to blame for their own circumstances..... anyone ought to be about to get a camera and a couple of monkey's and make a few million dollars on bad movies shouldn't they?

And all of us remember the years when AIDS was first spreading across the country and discussions about assistance for those who are HIV positive often circled about the "innocent" victims.... Which meant people who got the virus through a blood transfusion or an accidental transfer of blood.... But not those nasty people who got it through having sex..... because, somehow, people who got sick because they did something which is about as universal to human experience as breathing are not actually innocent!  Hypocrisy is still America's favorite pastime.

What John believed was so important to tell the church, and, I think it is safe to say that he didn't simply have in mind a small community in Ephesus near the turn of the second century.... This is a message for them and, more importantly, for us.  It is not the apostles we need to worry about, it is the people who carry on the apostles' tradition.  YOU are commissioned to forgive sins.

It doesn't take a priest.  It doesn't take a special ceremony or carved walnut box.  You just need to get busy.

I like the way it is expressed in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

 Those of you who have never been to an AA meeting will have heard about the 12 steps and you may imagine that they say things like:  Don't drink.... Don't go to bars.... Don't go in a liquor store.... Don't hang out with drunks.... Drugs are bad, m-kay?..... or...Don't listen to Rush Limbaugh (sorry, I was thinking existentially.... Rush Limbaugh makes me want to drink).

Actually, the word "alcohol" only appears in the first of the 12 steps and the word "alcoholic" is only in the last step.  The rest of it is about spiritual growth and, the majority of the steps, seven of them, are about confession and forgiveness.

AA assumes that addiction is a spiritual problem.  You may not agree with that but AA has the best track record of success in helping alcoholics to regain sobriety of any program in the world so, disagree to your heart's content, I suppose.....


And, what is really neat about it is that there are no professionals involved... no fees, no one is in charge.... It's free and it works and it mostly focuses on forgiveness and we, church folk, really ought to be down with that.

4.     Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.     Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.     Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.     Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.     Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.     Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would      injure them or others.
10.   Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

The one we Protestants get hung up on and the one the Catholics have made overly institutionalized is this concept in the fifth step. Most folks would still ultimately say that it is God who forgives sins but people in AA recognized that just telling God doesn't make it real enough for most of us. God is a bit of a silent partner in our lives and so you can confess things to God that you can still never really take responsibility for.

I have a friend who confessed to me once that he was having inappropriate feelings for a woman in his work place.  Their jobs were such that they spent a good deal of time in private conversation with one another and she was single and had told him that she had a strong physical attraction to him.

He confessed to me that he had similar feelings and that he was really frightened by that.  I asked him, "What are you going to do about it?"  And he replied, "I've already taken care of it.  I told you and now that I have told you, I know that I have to take charge of this and make certain that I am faithful to my wife."

Gossip is the scourge of the human condition and whenever you confide in someone you take a great risk, but to not be honest and tell another human being about your faults ultimately means that you are never going to take responsibility for them.

But when someone has the courage to confess something to you, you need to remember the authority that has been given to you.  You might not want to express it in the first person.... You know, you might not want to say:  I forgive you.... Remember, you are not Donald Trump.... You have to keep your ego in a certain amount of check.

I include an assurance of pardon in every worship service because I believe that it is just that important.... It's like being able to cure a social cancer.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux said, "You learn to love by loving."  Which is like the modern proverb that says, "you learn to sing by singing, you learn to ride a bicycle by riding a bicycle."  You learn to forgive by forgiving.  You don't learn about it by listening to sermons or formal assurances of pardon.

You learn by forgiving the neighbor whose dog barks at night and you move on to forgiving the person who doesn't do their share of the work at the office.  You build up muscles to be able to forgive your ex-spouse for..... everything... and you to forgive your parents for not being better parents and maybe you become able to forgive yourself for letting the dog bark outside at night, and for not doing your share of the work, and for not having been a better spouse and maybe even for not being a better parent.

We have the ability to bring a lot of healing to the world.... We can learn to forgive poor Mexicans for coming across the border to harvest our fruits and vegetables and them prepare them for us in local restaurants and change our sheets in our hotel rooms.  We can learn to forgive Muslims for being kind of stuck in the 17th century and we can learn to forgive the hoodlums who insist upon showing our local Muslims how sophisticated we are by painting graffiti on walls of their house of prayer and burning their holy scriptures on their front lawn.

I am convinced that we can never heal the world through judgment and revenge.... We've tried it, it doesn't work.  I'm just suggesting that we try forgiveness.... I've seen that work but mostly I've seen it go untried.

You are commissioned to go forth and forgive.... By me... by John... and, probably, by Jesus.  You are welcome to stay here until the end of the service, but once you hear Barry start playing the postlude, get out of here and start forgiving.

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.