Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Sept. 11, 2011 Proper 19
Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35
Twenty years ago this fall, the Disciples of Christ held their General Assembly in Tulsa, OK where they were slated to vote for Michael Kinnamon as their new General Minister. Michael had been asked in an interview a month or so before the vote if he was in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to be ordained to the ministry. His answer was "yes." And that was when the issue of homosexuality hit major denominations across the country.
And I will confess that when that happened, my life was changed and my education in sexual tolerance began. I knew of a couple of lesbians in high school. There were some openly gay people in my college theater group and several in seminary but none were my personal friends and though they seemed a bit odd to me, I never thought about the matter very much.
But when I heard people wanting to skewer Michael Kinnamon because he was open to gays and lesbians, I had to pay attention because I knew Michael and I thought he was about the most intelligent and spiritual person I had ever known. This was complicated by my having just moved to Springfield and I inherited an associate pastor who was gay but who was afraid to speak up on his own behalf.
And so, without every planning it or having a moment to prepare, I was thrown into a religious battle which has defined a lot of the past 20 years of my life. The issue of gay marriage and homosexuality in the Church has been a dividing topic in both religion and politics.
And as painful as the battle has been, ironically, I can say that if the people who wanted to condemn homosexuals had not been so loud, so cruel, so vicious, then the issue might never have received much public attention.
The plight of gays and lesbians in this nation has steadily improved, not in spite of the attacks they have suffered but, if I may say it just this way, their circumstances have improved because of the attacks. The cruelty and judgmental condemnation from the religious right has forced the rest of us to wake up, pay attention and learn a lot about this community of people who have been hiding in plain sight since the earth had cooled enough for life to take tentative steps on the soil.
I had managed to skate through 12 years of ministry without ever discussing the issue a single time, until in 1991, a firestorm of condemnation was falling on the gay community and there was going to be a casualty in the office next to mine if I tried to remain neutral.
We are often reminded that the Chinese charter for "crisis" is made from two different characters, the character for "danger" and the character for "opportunity." A crisis, by definition is dangerous. Bad things can happen in a crisis but a crisis is also a time when the fruit basket is turned over... when the established order is disturbed, we have the opportunity to rearrange our reality.
Gay people had been forced to live nearly invisible lives in most of the world for most of history but when they were attacked, reasonable people of good conscience were awakened and motivated to change the dialogue. The battle is not over and yet, the outcome is certain. State by state, legal barriers to same sex marriage will fall and congregation by congregation, religious prejudice will fade away.
Ten years after that crisis in church and politics, we were even more suddenly ushered into a new crisis by the terrorist attacks on September 11 in 2001. There had been previous incidents, the revolution in Iran and the hostage taking in 1979, but on September 10th of 2001, the largest terrorist act in American history had been a domestic militant Christian attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City.
How much did you know about Islam on 9-11? I had read some chapters in a world religion text book but if you had, on that day, asked me to tell you anything at all about Muslim faith; I would have stammered and guessed for a few seconds before shrugging my shoulders.
I will not bore you with stories of where I was when I first heard the news.... We all remember the day as clearly as if it were yesterday, I will only say that a long scheduled meeting at church was canceled because no one had the heart to go on with business as usual. I went home in a kind of fog, passing gas stations with long lines of cars waiting to fill up because so many people were having hysterical reactions, acting as if the Mongol hoard would be invading Springfield at any moment.
The only Muslim I knew in Springfield was a man who lived across the street. He worked in Jefferson City and I went and knocked on his door to offer my friendship and support in what I knew would be a dangerous time for him. He was not home. He was, in fact, holed up in his Jefferson City office, afraid to venture out and come home. And so I did the only thing that I could think of to do. I mowed his yard.
Because, men and women, you have to think about where you want to end up to know how to start a journey. I didn't know spit about Islam ten years ago but I knew that we were in a crisis and the danger was that Muslims would be portrayed as our enemies and a cataclysmic war was distinctly possible.
I knew that it would be wrong to blame all Muslims for those horrible attacks and I knew that going to war against terrorists was both illogical and virtually impossible.
More people died in that single terrorist attack than in any other in the history of the world. But the issue is not simply a body count. We don't know how many tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of our decade of war since 9-11. We do know that more of our soldiers have died in the prosecution of those wars than were killed by the initial terrorist attack. And, in terms of sheer volume of violence, more than 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug wars just south of our border since 9-11 and almost no mention is made in our media about the fact that we are both funding and arming that civil war. It is as if it were not happening.
As horrible as it was, the issue is not the death toll.... It is our total shock at the nature of the attack. It is that memory seared into our minds of seeing people jumping out of windows, falling to their deaths on the pavement below to avoid the more painful death of being burned alive. It is our awareness of the sacrifices made by fire fights and police officers who bravely rushed into the burning, crumbling chaos to save as many people as they could, aware that many of them would die in the process.
50,000 people worked and did business in the World Trade Towers on a daily basis. I assumed that the death toll would be in the tens of thousands if not, in fact, a hundred thousand. The organization and bravery of those public servants can be credited with a lot of the reason why the body count was not much much higher.
But our reaction to the event has not made much sense. A few months ago, my friend, Jeanmarie, and I took a trip to visit some of my friends in Kentucky. While there we spent a day at Mamouth Cave National Park near my hometown. We took a cave tour which starts out with all fifty or sixty tourists gathering in a cavern near the entrance to listen to a little safety speech delivered by the tour guide.
I shouldn't have, I know, it was childish and a little mean, but when the tour guide got to sentence where he said that more than ten thousand bats live in the cave, I made the sound of flapping wings...... the woman in front of me screamed... but then she turned and looked at me and could tell that I was the one who had frightened her and then she punched her husband.
She explained, "I know you did it but I don't know you and I had to hit someone." That's not really logical but it is very American. When we're scared, we feel like we have to punch someone. When that is done on a national level with armies and war planes, we reveal the very worst side of our character.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Any testimony linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda was obtained by repeatedly water boarding prisoners who said what their interrogators wanted to hear. On the strength of that obviously bad intelligence, we have wasted the lives of our soldiers and Iraqi citizens as well as trillions of much needed dollars hitting someone who didn't do it.
That has resulted in a decade of war which has not made us safer but has, in fact, made terrorism more likely and has left us on the threshold of what many are calling "a perpetual state of war."
The goal of a journey defines the path. If you want to end up in St Louis, you don't drive towards Tulsa. If you want to end up with peace and security then you must make steps that lead in that direction. The attack on 9-11 required a meaningful response. We obviously couldn't start out with a tea party to discuss our differences. But if the goal is peace, what do you do to move in that direction?
In many ways, similar to the crisis in the church of the previous decade, I took this crisis as an opportunity to learn and grow. I immediately put together a class in world religions, specifically to have a chance to study Islam with my parishioners so that we could all learn to tell the difference between those who were dangerous terrorists and the one and a half billion Muslims in the world.
We have been so shocked, so frightened, so sickened by what happened that anger and hatred are always close at hand, easy options for dealing with the pain of 9-11. And anger and fear will take hold of us unless we choose to go in another direction.
The Apostle Paul reminds the Roman church that we are not all going to agree on matters of faith but we must not allow ourselves to despise those who disagree with us. Paul is never very good at hiding his own prejudices, saying to them that they should "welcome those who are weak in faith," which you can bet is not how the people who disagree with Paul would describe themselves.
Muslims often think that we are morally lax and doctrinally messed up polytheists. We often think they are extremists locked into the middle ages. In fact, European Crusaders a thousand years ago often called the Muslims religious extremists which is pretty odd since they had walked all the way from England, France and Spain to fight them in the name of Christ! Religious hypocrisy is present on both sides of this equation!
Our gospel lesson lies at the heart of the religious solution to a world crisis in which religion has so far played the role of a villain rather than the heroic role we would like to choose for ourselves. Religion has taken a part in creating this rift and now religion needs to play a bigger role in healing it.
If what we really want as our goal is peace and security, the necessary path to that goal is the one Jesus talks about here.... The path of forgiveness. Even when there is a lot to be forgiven.... Even in light of memories so painful that we can barely stand them even ten years later, the right path is the path of forgiveness. And it is a long long journey.
I will share with you that there are five guys in this church who made a pact a couple of weeks ago to encourage one another in losing weight. The five of us added together make up nearly 3/4 of a ton and so we have a bet about who can be the biggest loser between now and Thanksgiving.
We are all taking this very seriously. I have started exercising every day. I have cut back my calorie count to less than half of what I normally eat. I have cut out breads, potatoes, rice, and all fried foods. I eat very little meat and a whole lot of raw vegetables.
And it is working, we're all losing weight. But the hard thing for me, after passing up donut holes and hot dogs, driving past burgers and saying no to fries, after walking three or four miles every single morning and yet, when I catch my profile in the mirror, I'm still fat. It make me feel a little bit like God hates me or something. Now, I mention this but don't misinterpret this self revelation as being permission to give me advice or to talk to me about dieting. This is an illustration, not a public invitation.
My issue is that I'm being so good! I'm denying myself so much but I'm still fat. Because real change takes time. You can't do the right thing for a week or two weeks and then everything is OK again. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
We grieve the loss of life from terrorism and from warfare. We grieve the prejudice born of misunderstood and distorted religion which has led to violence and death, poverty and want. We resolve to forgive today, knowing that we will have to forgive tomorrow too, and the day after and next month and next year because we are on a journey to peace and we will not rest until we get there.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Choosing Substance over Symbolism
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
August 14, 2011 Proper 15
As we prepared for our 3rd anniversary, I happened to hear Billy Joel's famous song, "We Didn't Start the Fire," in which the former history teacher flashes through hundreds of images of historical events between 1949 and 1989. It struck me that if we simply added a couple of verses we could bring the song forward from 1989, blending national events with Springfield events and ending up with the creation of our church.
It turns out that writing verses of songs is not all that easy, particularly with the rapid-fire rhythm and rather irregular rhyme scheme of that song. In the last days before our rehearsal, it fell to Paul Thomlinson and me to push the lyrics back and forth. If you were here, I hope you liked it, but you won't see it posted on line because I'm not entirely sure of the legality of what we did.
If you were here and able to keep up with the rather dizzy pace of the song, it ended with the names and pictures of the staff with Jesus Christ Superstar thrown into the mix for gravitas. I ended the list rhyming with my own last name, "Roger Ray, what else do I have to say?" Paul felt that the line needed two more beats, so he edited the conclusion to say, "Roger Ray, marries gays, what else do I have to say?"
I wasn't sure that I wanted my 20 year long career in ministry in Springfield summed up in just those two words but it fit the needs of the song and made for an interesting image to end our presentation so, there you have it, two plastic grooms standing side by side on top of a wedding cake.
It is historically accurate to say that I was the first mainstream pastor in town to perform same sex unions and, sadly, it is still true, 20 years later, that I am among the few who insist upon treating straight couples and gay couples with equal respect and dignity. But it is also true that I have spent a hundred times as much time and energy on methamphetamine and other drug and alcohol addiction and treatment research and funding. And much more time still on poverty issues, welfare to work training, housing and nutrition.
None of which either rhymes with "Roger Ray, what else do I have to say," nor does it draw as much public attention. As important as the civil rights and social justice aspects of liberation in the arena of sexual orientation is, you have to marvel at how much time and energy is given to the symbolic nature of it all.
I perform same sex weddings but there is no marriage license in the state of Missouri.
Now, let me hasten to add that other than the child custody issues of marriage, virtually ever other legal privilege of marriage can be conferred on a gay couple through other legal documents.... And everyone probably should be careful to do that.
But most of the rest of the debate is symbolic. The research I spearheaded into Meth use in Springfield resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of treatment funding and influenced research and treatment here and in Asia..... that's very real. The work we've done in poverty issues has resulted in feeding thousands of people and building new houses for thousands of others..... that is literally concrete and steel.
But whether Mitt Romney is for gay marriage or against gay marriage..... or both...... Can you imagine two women sitting together at their breakfast table in Massachusetts, and Martha reaches out and takes Mary's hand and says, "Honey, I love you and I cherish the 20 years that we have spent together and you know how much I love our children. But when we first got together, Gov. Romney favored our sort of family but now that he has changed his mind.... I just think it would be wrong for us to stay together."
Because, of course, any vote on matters of sexual orientation is going to be symbolic.... A matter of opinion... but the fact of a couple living together, loving one another, supporting one another through good times and bad times, that's has very little to do with either licenses, ceremonies, politicians or preachers. One is real, the other is symbolic, and we need to not confuse the two.
Still, the issue has been debated and fought over in political campaigns for years and years, even though sexual orientation is a matter of personal reality and has nothing to do with the symbolic opinions and votes of either churches or states.
Religion is especially subject to getting substance and symbolism confused. Marcus Borg has very convincingly portrayed the entire conflict within the New Testament as being a conflict between a religion of piety and a religion of compassion. We have to be very careful to fall into simplistic anti-Semitism when we talk about this because the Jewish faith, like the Christian faith, is complex and there are people who practice Judaism in one way and others who practice the same faith quite differently and the same can be said for Christians, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists.
Jesus was in conflict with Jews whose religious practice was primarily focused on personal piety. They worried about kosher regulations of what you ate, what you wore, how you pray and on what days you work and the days you don't. In this gospel passage today, Jesus plainly says that all of that stuff is just ridiculous.
The spiritual life has nothing to do with whether eat bacon or wear blended fabrics but it has everything to do with whether you actually show compassion, kindness, tolerance, love and respect for others. But religious people are famous for making huge deals of symbolic things..... are you baptized by sprinkling or immersion? At birth or when you are "of age?" Do you take communion every week or every quarter?
How do you take communion and what do you believe about the communion when you are taking it?
My earliest memory of a great religious debate in my own home came when I was just 10 years old and I found my mother crying in the kitchen.... Which was a very rare sight! When I asked her what was wrong she explained that my older brother was marrying "someone from another religion." This can be very upsetting to families..... the proximity of Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan and Jews and Muslims in Palestine have made for any number of painful family mergers. In Glasgow, KY, my mother's tears were for the fact that her Christian Church son was marrying a woman from the neighboring Methodist Church.
Such a colossal waste of energy and emotion over what is purely symbolic is something we really have get past if communities of faith are to regain any sense of relevance in the modern world. There are members of the Jesus seminar who have speculated that the historical Jesus may not have been especially religious. I find such statements to be interesting but historically unlikely.
Clearly, he was a person of faith but if what these scholars are suggesting is that he was dismissive of the symbolic, magical, superstitious and merely pious aspects of faith, well, then I think they have a lot of sympathetic friends in this room.
In times of great adversity, throughout recorded history, people in desperate circumstances tend to gravitate towards a religion that is primarily other worldly. It reflects a kind of incurable cynicism about prospects for a better world in this life and so everything becomes focused on getting a ticket for the train ride to a better life in heaven.
My frustration with the religion I have encountered in the mountains of Ecuador and the jungles of Nicaragua is that it is almost always focused on personal piety in order to appease a rather neurotic deity who could give you eternal life in heaven but probably won't unless you learn the secret passwords and secret handshakes. In that event, isn't it obvious that the American backed evangelical churches supporting these missionary efforts are keeping people from using their spiritual resources, time and energy in actually changing the only world and the only life that we know that we'll ever have. We need a faith which addresses the reality of the world in which we live and not the imaginary or hoped for world that no one knows anything about.
Bill Maher recently observed that if you see someone talking to their hairdryer as if it were God, we would lock them up in a mental hospital. Take away the hairdryer, and they're just praying. But in politics and the church of today, there are any number of people who swear that the hairdryer is talking back to them..... and that, I submit, is a serious problem.
I want nothing to do with the religion that asks people to focus only on some promises of worlds unknown and unseen that ignores the very real and substantive circumstances of life.
I want a piece of the faith that kept Nelson Mandela alive on that prison rock in South Africa for 28 years, doing manual labor in the unbearable heat of Robben Island, and emerging to become the first black president of South Africa. Twenty-eight years! Do you think he was talking to his hairdryer in that prison cell when he knew what lay ahead of him when the sun rose the next day and the day after that, and the year after that? I don't want the religion that promises me that God will help me to find a parking place at the mall and keep it from raining on my Labor Day picnic.
I want a share in the faith of Martin Luther King, Jr. who kept leading marches for civil rights and organized labor even after his house and been bombed and he had been repeatedly beaten and imprisoned. I want the kind of faith that makes you step out on the balcony to speak to the crowds when you know good and well that someday there would be an assassin out there with a gun waiting for you.
You would think that the choice between symbolism and substance wouldn't be that hard.... It should be obvious.... But wars and broken families still seem to be on the casualty list of superstitious religious values.
I often cringe when I hear people say that they are spiritual but not religious but at least at this level, I am prepared to say the same thing about myself and about our congregation. The mainstream church is all but gone in Europe. It holds onto existence by its fingernails in on the east and west coasts of America.
The denomination in which I grew up was quite strong in Springfield when I came here 20 years ago, sharing about 1600 among six congregations on Sunday mornings. Those same six churches are now less than half their former size and I expect their decline to pick up speed in the years ahead if they don't put down their hairdryers and get back to being engaged in reality.
The world needs more ethically engaged spiritual communities than it ever has before and the mainstream church keeps not showing up on the job. We must learn from their mistakes and make certain that we don't follow their lead, falling into symbolic gestures while ignoring the fact that the world is on fire.
We didn't start the fires of injustice, war, prejudice, poverty, sickness and hunger but we will fight it.
Roger Ray, pastor
August 14, 2011 Proper 15
Matthew 15:10-20
10Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, "Listen and understand: 11it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles." 12Then the disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?" 13He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit." 15But Peter said to him, "Explain this parable to us." 16Then he said, "Are you also still without understanding? 17Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? 18But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. 19For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. 20These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile."
As we prepared for our 3rd anniversary, I happened to hear Billy Joel's famous song, "We Didn't Start the Fire," in which the former history teacher flashes through hundreds of images of historical events between 1949 and 1989. It struck me that if we simply added a couple of verses we could bring the song forward from 1989, blending national events with Springfield events and ending up with the creation of our church.
It turns out that writing verses of songs is not all that easy, particularly with the rapid-fire rhythm and rather irregular rhyme scheme of that song. In the last days before our rehearsal, it fell to Paul Thomlinson and me to push the lyrics back and forth. If you were here, I hope you liked it, but you won't see it posted on line because I'm not entirely sure of the legality of what we did.
If you were here and able to keep up with the rather dizzy pace of the song, it ended with the names and pictures of the staff with Jesus Christ Superstar thrown into the mix for gravitas. I ended the list rhyming with my own last name, "Roger Ray, what else do I have to say?" Paul felt that the line needed two more beats, so he edited the conclusion to say, "Roger Ray, marries gays, what else do I have to say?"
I wasn't sure that I wanted my 20 year long career in ministry in Springfield summed up in just those two words but it fit the needs of the song and made for an interesting image to end our presentation so, there you have it, two plastic grooms standing side by side on top of a wedding cake.
It is historically accurate to say that I was the first mainstream pastor in town to perform same sex unions and, sadly, it is still true, 20 years later, that I am among the few who insist upon treating straight couples and gay couples with equal respect and dignity. But it is also true that I have spent a hundred times as much time and energy on methamphetamine and other drug and alcohol addiction and treatment research and funding. And much more time still on poverty issues, welfare to work training, housing and nutrition.
None of which either rhymes with "Roger Ray, what else do I have to say," nor does it draw as much public attention. As important as the civil rights and social justice aspects of liberation in the arena of sexual orientation is, you have to marvel at how much time and energy is given to the symbolic nature of it all.
I perform same sex weddings but there is no marriage license in the state of Missouri.
Now, let me hasten to add that other than the child custody issues of marriage, virtually ever other legal privilege of marriage can be conferred on a gay couple through other legal documents.... And everyone probably should be careful to do that.
But most of the rest of the debate is symbolic. The research I spearheaded into Meth use in Springfield resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of treatment funding and influenced research and treatment here and in Asia..... that's very real. The work we've done in poverty issues has resulted in feeding thousands of people and building new houses for thousands of others..... that is literally concrete and steel.
But whether Mitt Romney is for gay marriage or against gay marriage..... or both...... Can you imagine two women sitting together at their breakfast table in Massachusetts, and Martha reaches out and takes Mary's hand and says, "Honey, I love you and I cherish the 20 years that we have spent together and you know how much I love our children. But when we first got together, Gov. Romney favored our sort of family but now that he has changed his mind.... I just think it would be wrong for us to stay together."
Because, of course, any vote on matters of sexual orientation is going to be symbolic.... A matter of opinion... but the fact of a couple living together, loving one another, supporting one another through good times and bad times, that's has very little to do with either licenses, ceremonies, politicians or preachers. One is real, the other is symbolic, and we need to not confuse the two.
Still, the issue has been debated and fought over in political campaigns for years and years, even though sexual orientation is a matter of personal reality and has nothing to do with the symbolic opinions and votes of either churches or states.
Religion is especially subject to getting substance and symbolism confused. Marcus Borg has very convincingly portrayed the entire conflict within the New Testament as being a conflict between a religion of piety and a religion of compassion. We have to be very careful to fall into simplistic anti-Semitism when we talk about this because the Jewish faith, like the Christian faith, is complex and there are people who practice Judaism in one way and others who practice the same faith quite differently and the same can be said for Christians, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists.
Jesus was in conflict with Jews whose religious practice was primarily focused on personal piety. They worried about kosher regulations of what you ate, what you wore, how you pray and on what days you work and the days you don't. In this gospel passage today, Jesus plainly says that all of that stuff is just ridiculous.
The spiritual life has nothing to do with whether eat bacon or wear blended fabrics but it has everything to do with whether you actually show compassion, kindness, tolerance, love and respect for others. But religious people are famous for making huge deals of symbolic things..... are you baptized by sprinkling or immersion? At birth or when you are "of age?" Do you take communion every week or every quarter?
How do you take communion and what do you believe about the communion when you are taking it?
My earliest memory of a great religious debate in my own home came when I was just 10 years old and I found my mother crying in the kitchen.... Which was a very rare sight! When I asked her what was wrong she explained that my older brother was marrying "someone from another religion." This can be very upsetting to families..... the proximity of Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan and Jews and Muslims in Palestine have made for any number of painful family mergers. In Glasgow, KY, my mother's tears were for the fact that her Christian Church son was marrying a woman from the neighboring Methodist Church.
Such a colossal waste of energy and emotion over what is purely symbolic is something we really have get past if communities of faith are to regain any sense of relevance in the modern world. There are members of the Jesus seminar who have speculated that the historical Jesus may not have been especially religious. I find such statements to be interesting but historically unlikely.
Clearly, he was a person of faith but if what these scholars are suggesting is that he was dismissive of the symbolic, magical, superstitious and merely pious aspects of faith, well, then I think they have a lot of sympathetic friends in this room.
In times of great adversity, throughout recorded history, people in desperate circumstances tend to gravitate towards a religion that is primarily other worldly. It reflects a kind of incurable cynicism about prospects for a better world in this life and so everything becomes focused on getting a ticket for the train ride to a better life in heaven.
My frustration with the religion I have encountered in the mountains of Ecuador and the jungles of Nicaragua is that it is almost always focused on personal piety in order to appease a rather neurotic deity who could give you eternal life in heaven but probably won't unless you learn the secret passwords and secret handshakes. In that event, isn't it obvious that the American backed evangelical churches supporting these missionary efforts are keeping people from using their spiritual resources, time and energy in actually changing the only world and the only life that we know that we'll ever have. We need a faith which addresses the reality of the world in which we live and not the imaginary or hoped for world that no one knows anything about.
Bill Maher recently observed that if you see someone talking to their hairdryer as if it were God, we would lock them up in a mental hospital. Take away the hairdryer, and they're just praying. But in politics and the church of today, there are any number of people who swear that the hairdryer is talking back to them..... and that, I submit, is a serious problem.
I want nothing to do with the religion that asks people to focus only on some promises of worlds unknown and unseen that ignores the very real and substantive circumstances of life.
I want a piece of the faith that kept Nelson Mandela alive on that prison rock in South Africa for 28 years, doing manual labor in the unbearable heat of Robben Island, and emerging to become the first black president of South Africa. Twenty-eight years! Do you think he was talking to his hairdryer in that prison cell when he knew what lay ahead of him when the sun rose the next day and the day after that, and the year after that? I don't want the religion that promises me that God will help me to find a parking place at the mall and keep it from raining on my Labor Day picnic.
I want a share in the faith of Martin Luther King, Jr. who kept leading marches for civil rights and organized labor even after his house and been bombed and he had been repeatedly beaten and imprisoned. I want the kind of faith that makes you step out on the balcony to speak to the crowds when you know good and well that someday there would be an assassin out there with a gun waiting for you.
You would think that the choice between symbolism and substance wouldn't be that hard.... It should be obvious.... But wars and broken families still seem to be on the casualty list of superstitious religious values.
I often cringe when I hear people say that they are spiritual but not religious but at least at this level, I am prepared to say the same thing about myself and about our congregation. The mainstream church is all but gone in Europe. It holds onto existence by its fingernails in on the east and west coasts of America.
The denomination in which I grew up was quite strong in Springfield when I came here 20 years ago, sharing about 1600 among six congregations on Sunday mornings. Those same six churches are now less than half their former size and I expect their decline to pick up speed in the years ahead if they don't put down their hairdryers and get back to being engaged in reality.
The world needs more ethically engaged spiritual communities than it ever has before and the mainstream church keeps not showing up on the job. We must learn from their mistakes and make certain that we don't follow their lead, falling into symbolic gestures while ignoring the fact that the world is on fire.
We didn't start the fires of injustice, war, prejudice, poverty, sickness and hunger but we will fight it.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
July 31
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
July 31, 2011 Proper 13
I began making trips to Nicaragua in 2003 and over the next four years I made a total of eight trips to visit the most impoverished areas of the western hemisphere. I'm no stranger to poverty, having seen a great deal both in my professional and personal life but Central and South America is the only place I have ever visited where everyone in a village lived in a dirt floor shack made out of scrap material, jungle vegetation and mud.
People have often asked me why I went all of the way to Nicaragua to help the poor when there are so many poor people right here in Springfield. Of course, no one who has ever been in rural Nicaragua would ever ask that question. Poverty in America is rarely like poverty in the third world. On my first trip up onto the mountains of Matagalpa, the residents were suffering from the results of a protracted drought. Their usual food sources were unproductive and malnutrition was common and actual starvation was not uncommon.
My heart was broken by their plight and helping to provide assistance to those rural villages became my life's focus for the next several years. But you see different things as you make repeated trips to the same places. Immediately I saw the dirt floored shacks, the hungry children, the absence of older people in a place where the difficulties of life and the lack of medical sources cuts nearly everyone's life expectancy in half.
I saw the lack of opportunity, the scarcity of education and transportation and I saw the vulnerability in which everyone lived.... Vulnerable to violence, abuse and exploitation.
On almost every trip I took a team of church member volunteers who helped to build houses, worked with the medical teams and in education. But at the end of each day we would retreat to a hotel which was protected from Nicaragua by an armed guard and razor wire. While the people we came to serve finished up their daily ration of beans and rice before the sun set and darkness descended on their world, my traveling companions and I visited a restaurant where we sat at table cloth covered tables and ate very well.
We retired to the hotel bar or lobby and sat and talked. What I began to notice on each trip was that the talk quickly left Nicaragua and began to be more personal. A lot of the stories were not happy..... unhappy at work, marriage problems, difficulties with the kids, challenges with divorce settlements, inheritance issues and health problems.
The ironic contrast became more evident to me with each trip I made into the jungle. In the villages, where they have nothing, the people smiled, sang songs and the children often danced and were eager to read their poems to us or to tell us about their hopes for the future. Inside the razor wire, though we North American travelers had every essential creature comfort at our ready disposal, there was distinctly less joy than there was outside of the fence.
I have taken a lot of people on mission trips and some were able to really see the ravages of poverty but, at least it seems to me, most returned fairly unscathed by the adventure, returning to relative opulence punctuated by sheer human misery. Why are the rural poor of Nicaragua, people who have to carry their water up from an open creek.... People in live in shacks with no floor or closets, no electricity or plumbing and generally no doors, whose children often have no shoes and no toys and food is repetitive and frequently rare..... how do those people dare to be happier than we are?
Or as the prophet Isaiah words it, "Why do you spend your money on that which is not bread and your labor on that which does not satisfy?" Because, we are full.... We have even changed our architecture to have walk in closets and bigger garages. The rental storage unit industry has sprung up and spread. We have more clothes than we could wear out in a lifetime. We have every kind and color of shoe imaginable. We have every kitchen appliance ever known which gather dust while we go from restaurant to restaurant looking for a new dining experience..... but we are not satisfied.
In recent years, the modern phenomenon of hoarding has become so common that there is even a television show dedicated to it. When I first encountered hoarders the most common explanation was that they were people who grew up in the depression and they were so fearful of going without that they couldn't throw anything away.
Of course, my parents grew up abject poverty in the depression but they kept the most meticulous house you have ever seen and they refused to keep anything for which they did not have an almost immediate use. As the hoarding issue has passed to a post Great Depression generation, we have learned to see it as something else.
In the most severe cases, it is caused by and obsessive compulsive disorder but unlike a strict clinical mental health diagnosis, hoarding is often passed down from one generation to the next and, in a family, it has to become a shared value between spouses and children.
Old newspapers, canned foods long out of date and almost certainly deadly to anyone who might try to eat the contents, worn out car tires and thread bear clothing pile up until certain rooms of the house can no longer be lived in. Only a pathway to a chair in the living room remains between stacks of papers and magazines. They have to leap over boxes of half used cleaning supplies to get to the toilet which is surrounded by empty toilet paper rolls being saved for future unknown pre-school art projects.
Throwing something away causes great distress but saving everything causes great shame. It would not be hard to conclude that possessions make people sad and having nothing makes people happy but that is not substantially true. I would be very willing to fight anyone who said that the evidence of happiness among the poor should relieve us of any obligation to bring education, food and health care to them. Poverty is a form of violence and no decent person should ever allow themselves to be dismissive of that fact.
But what we can very accurately conclude is that possessions do not make people feel either happy or satisfied. I've heard it said that the people who believe that money can't buy happiness simply don't know where to shop. And, sure enough, there are things you can buy and do and eat which are quite enjoyable.
But if I ask you to remember the most remarkable meal you ever ate, if you pull that memory of your very favorite dining experience, isn't it true that the company you shared at that meal is crucial to it having been your most memorable meal?
I share my home with my 22 year old, very socially active, daughter which means, in essence, I live alone. I certainly take most of my meals alone and I always have my morning coffee alone. If there is a movie I want to see, I almost always go alone. I have often traveled alone in Europe and America.
It doesn't bother me to be alone but I can tell you this, the first time I went to England I was by myself and I went to the British Museum which is one of the world's finest historical collections of things stolen from every nation of the world. I have a natural interest in both history and archaeology so I was absolutely thrilled to be there.
But I can remember the moment that I first saw the Rosetta Stone as if it were yesterday. The experience of finally seeing this item which I had heard of all my life, which opened the door to translating the wealth of Egyptian hieroglyphs was amazing.
I was surrounded by a British school children, chirping about like a flock of starlings, but there was no one even approximately my height that I could turn to and say, "Would you look at that?" And though being in the British Museum is one of my absolute favorite things in the world, I recognize that no experience which is not shared with someone you care about has the same depth as when you experience it in connection to someone else.
I have sat in a beautiful Las Vegas theater and watched the breath taking performance of Circ de Soleil but, in terms of impact on my life, I remember more profoundly the first time a group of elementary school students in the poverty stricken village of San Ramon, Nicaragua came out and tried to perform a dance routine to a recording of a Britany Spears tune.
Which is to say, that to be satisfied.... That is, to have a life that is worth living, simply having, acquiring things, experiences, consumables, is just a part of the picture. Having social connections is also just a part of the picture. Having some spiritual depth, some expression of genuine connection through compassion and empathy.... That, I believe, is what makes the difference.
The belief that American consumerism is killing off our spirituality is not simply a liberal or a progressive soapbox. Even the famous evangelical preacher and close friend of George W. Bush, Tony Campolo, has recently written:
But Brueggemann goes on to say that the consumer culture we have become is inextricably connected to militarism because you can't consume the majority of the world's goods without a strong and aggressive military to force the world to serve at your table. Brueggemann calls it a sickness or a kind of madness.
He says: The central promise of the gospel is peace that is God's good gift (John 14:27). But it is clear upon any reflection that the ways of consumerism do not lead to peace, but only to anxiety. The ways of militarism do not lead to security, but only to destruction, violence, and dehumanization. And in the midst of this mad scramble toward death are Christians, the church, with this conviction that the crucified risen One matters even here, because this One, and only this One, is Lord and Savior.
Isaiah speaks poetically, asking people to consider the fact that they have sold out their lives for a standard of living which leaves their houses full but their lives empty.... They eat and eat but they are always hungry.
Jeremiah is rather less diplomatic. He says: "From the last to the greatest of them, every one is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, every one deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall..." says the Lord.
Jeremiah looks at the scandalous, unaware consumerism of his people and he says, very frankly, "they don't know how to blush." We have anesthetized our conscience to such a degree that we don't even know to be ashamed of ourselves.
One of the common psychiatric treatments for hoarding is to ask your patient to stop by a store on the way to their appointment and to buy a couple of the most recent editions of their favorite magazine. Then, in the midst of therapy, the therapist takes one of the magazines and begins tearing one page out at a time and tearing it up and throwing it away.
This will create a great deal of anxiety on the part of the patient but the therapist keeps reassuring them, "see, you can live without this.... You don't need this.... This isn't hurting you."
Of course, it does hurt because in the extreme, we get so attached to things that we think that we need them.... We think that we love them.... But that is only because we're kind of crazy. Eventually, the therapist will ask the patient to take the other magazine and begin to destroy it, telling themselves that they are ok.... They don't need this magazine, they can live without it, it doesn't hurt to destroy it.
I have known several people who have been treated for OCD, some successfully and many more unsuccessfully. If I were to be allowed to address a gathering of the American Psychiatric Association, I would have a theological suggestion to make. I would like to suggest that rather focusing on teaching people how to destroy and throw away that they might try to focus on learning to give away.
I never personally knew the millionaire recluse, Jeanette Musgrave, for whom the Musgrave Foundation is named, but I knew her accountant very well. Joe Clark was a good friend of mine and over the years he shared with me how, when Mrs. Musgrave had inherited millions of dollars from her brother, that long lost relatives, neighbors and strangers all tried to get her to give them some of it. She had always been a bit of a recluse and she had been very frugal.
But over the years Joe talked Mrs. Musgrave into reading a story in the paper about someone who had lost everything in a fire and he would say, "Wouldn't it be nice to help those folks out a little bit." Now and then, she would let down her guard and give someone twenty or thirty dollars. And when she did, Joe would bring it up again later and say, "Didn't it feel good to know that you were helping a stranger with a serious problem?"
And she acknowledged that it did feel good. And over time she began to charge her accountant to find other people who could be helped with some gifts of money and eventually she was persuaded to help the entire community by donating the money to build our art museum additions and in the end she put her entire estate into a trust fund which continues to make many important charitable causes happen in this city.
She never had children and she died with virtually no remaining relatives but she was lovingly and powerfully connected to an entire city through her ability to find meaning out of helping other people.
What Joe Clark did for Jeannette Musgrave is what I wish we could do for America..... to cure our madness.... To heal the sickness of consumerism and to stop the violence of militarism which keeps our shelves lined with cheap shoes, bananas and coffee. I want for us to teach America how to blush again.... How to remember that we are a nation built largely out of the victims of European classism and African slavery and Central American feudalism.
Our culture tells us to eat when we are not hungry and to buy products that separate us from other people. Our faith tells us to say "no" to our appetites, no to consumerism and yes to one another.
Roger Ray, pastor
July 31, 2011 Proper 13
Isaiah 55:1-5
55:1 Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3 Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.
I began making trips to Nicaragua in 2003 and over the next four years I made a total of eight trips to visit the most impoverished areas of the western hemisphere. I'm no stranger to poverty, having seen a great deal both in my professional and personal life but Central and South America is the only place I have ever visited where everyone in a village lived in a dirt floor shack made out of scrap material, jungle vegetation and mud.
People have often asked me why I went all of the way to Nicaragua to help the poor when there are so many poor people right here in Springfield. Of course, no one who has ever been in rural Nicaragua would ever ask that question. Poverty in America is rarely like poverty in the third world. On my first trip up onto the mountains of Matagalpa, the residents were suffering from the results of a protracted drought. Their usual food sources were unproductive and malnutrition was common and actual starvation was not uncommon.
My heart was broken by their plight and helping to provide assistance to those rural villages became my life's focus for the next several years. But you see different things as you make repeated trips to the same places. Immediately I saw the dirt floored shacks, the hungry children, the absence of older people in a place where the difficulties of life and the lack of medical sources cuts nearly everyone's life expectancy in half.
I saw the lack of opportunity, the scarcity of education and transportation and I saw the vulnerability in which everyone lived.... Vulnerable to violence, abuse and exploitation.
On almost every trip I took a team of church member volunteers who helped to build houses, worked with the medical teams and in education. But at the end of each day we would retreat to a hotel which was protected from Nicaragua by an armed guard and razor wire. While the people we came to serve finished up their daily ration of beans and rice before the sun set and darkness descended on their world, my traveling companions and I visited a restaurant where we sat at table cloth covered tables and ate very well.
We retired to the hotel bar or lobby and sat and talked. What I began to notice on each trip was that the talk quickly left Nicaragua and began to be more personal. A lot of the stories were not happy..... unhappy at work, marriage problems, difficulties with the kids, challenges with divorce settlements, inheritance issues and health problems.
The ironic contrast became more evident to me with each trip I made into the jungle. In the villages, where they have nothing, the people smiled, sang songs and the children often danced and were eager to read their poems to us or to tell us about their hopes for the future. Inside the razor wire, though we North American travelers had every essential creature comfort at our ready disposal, there was distinctly less joy than there was outside of the fence.
I have taken a lot of people on mission trips and some were able to really see the ravages of poverty but, at least it seems to me, most returned fairly unscathed by the adventure, returning to relative opulence punctuated by sheer human misery. Why are the rural poor of Nicaragua, people who have to carry their water up from an open creek.... People in live in shacks with no floor or closets, no electricity or plumbing and generally no doors, whose children often have no shoes and no toys and food is repetitive and frequently rare..... how do those people dare to be happier than we are?
Or as the prophet Isaiah words it, "Why do you spend your money on that which is not bread and your labor on that which does not satisfy?" Because, we are full.... We have even changed our architecture to have walk in closets and bigger garages. The rental storage unit industry has sprung up and spread. We have more clothes than we could wear out in a lifetime. We have every kind and color of shoe imaginable. We have every kitchen appliance ever known which gather dust while we go from restaurant to restaurant looking for a new dining experience..... but we are not satisfied.
In recent years, the modern phenomenon of hoarding has become so common that there is even a television show dedicated to it. When I first encountered hoarders the most common explanation was that they were people who grew up in the depression and they were so fearful of going without that they couldn't throw anything away.
Of course, my parents grew up abject poverty in the depression but they kept the most meticulous house you have ever seen and they refused to keep anything for which they did not have an almost immediate use. As the hoarding issue has passed to a post Great Depression generation, we have learned to see it as something else.
In the most severe cases, it is caused by and obsessive compulsive disorder but unlike a strict clinical mental health diagnosis, hoarding is often passed down from one generation to the next and, in a family, it has to become a shared value between spouses and children.
Old newspapers, canned foods long out of date and almost certainly deadly to anyone who might try to eat the contents, worn out car tires and thread bear clothing pile up until certain rooms of the house can no longer be lived in. Only a pathway to a chair in the living room remains between stacks of papers and magazines. They have to leap over boxes of half used cleaning supplies to get to the toilet which is surrounded by empty toilet paper rolls being saved for future unknown pre-school art projects.
Throwing something away causes great distress but saving everything causes great shame. It would not be hard to conclude that possessions make people sad and having nothing makes people happy but that is not substantially true. I would be very willing to fight anyone who said that the evidence of happiness among the poor should relieve us of any obligation to bring education, food and health care to them. Poverty is a form of violence and no decent person should ever allow themselves to be dismissive of that fact.
But what we can very accurately conclude is that possessions do not make people feel either happy or satisfied. I've heard it said that the people who believe that money can't buy happiness simply don't know where to shop. And, sure enough, there are things you can buy and do and eat which are quite enjoyable.
But if I ask you to remember the most remarkable meal you ever ate, if you pull that memory of your very favorite dining experience, isn't it true that the company you shared at that meal is crucial to it having been your most memorable meal?
I share my home with my 22 year old, very socially active, daughter which means, in essence, I live alone. I certainly take most of my meals alone and I always have my morning coffee alone. If there is a movie I want to see, I almost always go alone. I have often traveled alone in Europe and America.
It doesn't bother me to be alone but I can tell you this, the first time I went to England I was by myself and I went to the British Museum which is one of the world's finest historical collections of things stolen from every nation of the world. I have a natural interest in both history and archaeology so I was absolutely thrilled to be there.
But I can remember the moment that I first saw the Rosetta Stone as if it were yesterday. The experience of finally seeing this item which I had heard of all my life, which opened the door to translating the wealth of Egyptian hieroglyphs was amazing.
I was surrounded by a British school children, chirping about like a flock of starlings, but there was no one even approximately my height that I could turn to and say, "Would you look at that?" And though being in the British Museum is one of my absolute favorite things in the world, I recognize that no experience which is not shared with someone you care about has the same depth as when you experience it in connection to someone else.
I have sat in a beautiful Las Vegas theater and watched the breath taking performance of Circ de Soleil but, in terms of impact on my life, I remember more profoundly the first time a group of elementary school students in the poverty stricken village of San Ramon, Nicaragua came out and tried to perform a dance routine to a recording of a Britany Spears tune.
Which is to say, that to be satisfied.... That is, to have a life that is worth living, simply having, acquiring things, experiences, consumables, is just a part of the picture. Having social connections is also just a part of the picture. Having some spiritual depth, some expression of genuine connection through compassion and empathy.... That, I believe, is what makes the difference.
The belief that American consumerism is killing off our spirituality is not simply a liberal or a progressive soapbox. Even the famous evangelical preacher and close friend of George W. Bush, Tony Campolo, has recently written:
"We all know that we Americans spend more and more money to buy more and more things we don't need in order to impress more and more people we don't know. In short, we have turned away from the lifestyle prescribed by scripture, failed to be good stewards of God's creation, ignored the needs of the poor, and, in the words of scripture, 'spent our money on that which does not satisfy.' The time is at hand for repentance--not only for Wall Street tycoons and self-serving politicians--but for all of us."I trust that you remember the famous Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, whom I have often quoted in the past. He wades in on this topic from the perspective of the Exodus instruction to the Israelites about the manna from heaven that they were to only "gather enough for the day." They were not to hoard or try to take away their dependence upon God's mercy and grace for the next day or the next week. In the presence of scarcity of resources, there can be no hoarding. In a true community, there is no need for greed, theft or brutality of any kind because people share what there is to be shared.
But Brueggemann goes on to say that the consumer culture we have become is inextricably connected to militarism because you can't consume the majority of the world's goods without a strong and aggressive military to force the world to serve at your table. Brueggemann calls it a sickness or a kind of madness.
He says: The central promise of the gospel is peace that is God's good gift (John 14:27). But it is clear upon any reflection that the ways of consumerism do not lead to peace, but only to anxiety. The ways of militarism do not lead to security, but only to destruction, violence, and dehumanization. And in the midst of this mad scramble toward death are Christians, the church, with this conviction that the crucified risen One matters even here, because this One, and only this One, is Lord and Savior.
Isaiah speaks poetically, asking people to consider the fact that they have sold out their lives for a standard of living which leaves their houses full but their lives empty.... They eat and eat but they are always hungry.
Jeremiah is rather less diplomatic. He says: "From the last to the greatest of them, every one is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, every one deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall..." says the Lord.
Jeremiah looks at the scandalous, unaware consumerism of his people and he says, very frankly, "they don't know how to blush." We have anesthetized our conscience to such a degree that we don't even know to be ashamed of ourselves.
One of the common psychiatric treatments for hoarding is to ask your patient to stop by a store on the way to their appointment and to buy a couple of the most recent editions of their favorite magazine. Then, in the midst of therapy, the therapist takes one of the magazines and begins tearing one page out at a time and tearing it up and throwing it away.
This will create a great deal of anxiety on the part of the patient but the therapist keeps reassuring them, "see, you can live without this.... You don't need this.... This isn't hurting you."
Of course, it does hurt because in the extreme, we get so attached to things that we think that we need them.... We think that we love them.... But that is only because we're kind of crazy. Eventually, the therapist will ask the patient to take the other magazine and begin to destroy it, telling themselves that they are ok.... They don't need this magazine, they can live without it, it doesn't hurt to destroy it.
I have known several people who have been treated for OCD, some successfully and many more unsuccessfully. If I were to be allowed to address a gathering of the American Psychiatric Association, I would have a theological suggestion to make. I would like to suggest that rather focusing on teaching people how to destroy and throw away that they might try to focus on learning to give away.
I never personally knew the millionaire recluse, Jeanette Musgrave, for whom the Musgrave Foundation is named, but I knew her accountant very well. Joe Clark was a good friend of mine and over the years he shared with me how, when Mrs. Musgrave had inherited millions of dollars from her brother, that long lost relatives, neighbors and strangers all tried to get her to give them some of it. She had always been a bit of a recluse and she had been very frugal.
But over the years Joe talked Mrs. Musgrave into reading a story in the paper about someone who had lost everything in a fire and he would say, "Wouldn't it be nice to help those folks out a little bit." Now and then, she would let down her guard and give someone twenty or thirty dollars. And when she did, Joe would bring it up again later and say, "Didn't it feel good to know that you were helping a stranger with a serious problem?"
And she acknowledged that it did feel good. And over time she began to charge her accountant to find other people who could be helped with some gifts of money and eventually she was persuaded to help the entire community by donating the money to build our art museum additions and in the end she put her entire estate into a trust fund which continues to make many important charitable causes happen in this city.
She never had children and she died with virtually no remaining relatives but she was lovingly and powerfully connected to an entire city through her ability to find meaning out of helping other people.
What Joe Clark did for Jeannette Musgrave is what I wish we could do for America..... to cure our madness.... To heal the sickness of consumerism and to stop the violence of militarism which keeps our shelves lined with cheap shoes, bananas and coffee. I want for us to teach America how to blush again.... How to remember that we are a nation built largely out of the victims of European classism and African slavery and Central American feudalism.
Our culture tells us to eat when we are not hungry and to buy products that separate us from other people. Our faith tells us to say "no" to our appetites, no to consumerism and yes to one another.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Concerning the Holy Land and American Exceptionalism
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
July 17, 2011 Proper 11
We ended the week visiting two of my best family friends in Louisville, KY. From time to time, Jeanmarie would say, "You really miss it here don't you?" And, as much as I love being the pastor here, I have to admit that there is something about the hills, rivers and forests of Kentucky that have an almost magical pull on me. And I recognize that it really is a land thing. As much as the rather anti-intellectual and conservative religious climate of Springfield is irritating, I know it is even worse in Kentucky.
Kentucky is now the state where Mitch McConnell is the sane senator! Only Rand Paul can make that guy look like he has an oar in the water. I'm embarrassed for my home state but, I have to tell you, I love it there, I can't help it, and God knows, I've tried!
It is almost inescapable that all of us have a certain sense that our homeland is, in once sense or another, a holy land. Anyone who has been in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day can attest to the fact that immigrants in America carry on about St. Patrick's Day ten times more than anyone in Ireland does. I have romantic feelings about my home. I ate country ham every day that I was on vacation. I ate pinto beans, grits, a hot brown and fried corn bread..... my ethnic foods. If you get to go over to Andrea Zamora's house on a holiday, she will serve you a piece of a tres leches cake which is just as uninviting to me as country ham and grits is to anyone who cares about their heart health. If you eat breakfast over at the Hartenstein's you'll be offered a half of a broiled tomato in Scottish style with your bacon and eggs...... we relish these reminders of our home.
It is helpful to remember that most of the Hebrew Bible was not written in Israel or Judah. Homesick Jews who were slaves in Babylon wrote most of it. They were not in their Holy Land, they were remembering their Holy Land. The story we just read from Genesis about Jacob's dream of ladders going up to heaven is not simply metaphorical in the minds of ancient Jews. They believed that God's throne was straight up over Mt. Moriah. The Arc of the Covenant was made like a giant throne and it sat in the Temple in the Holy of Holies, directly under where God's true throne was in heaven.
Jacob's vision was recorded in Genesis as a declaration that while other nations might be bigger, or stronger or more wealthy, that their land was God's land. That conviction, though it seems silly to claim today, is still at the root of what we call Zionism. It isn't rational, but when is extremist nationalism ever rational?
I love my homeland. I know that June still loves Scottland and Andrea loves Mexico and for reasons which defy logic, Jim Payne still loves Alabama. It is natural to love your homeland. It is noble to be patriotic about one's country. To sacrifice for, work for and maybe even die to protect the welfare of your country. But there is a continuum which may begin with warm feelings about country ham and biscuits that runs through patriotism and can keep going until it is nationalism or even a religious fervor to adamantly demand that your nation is not just God's country in your music and art but in your international politics. Most of the soldiers in the Nazi army just thought of themselves as being patriotic.
Sociologically, that was the early attraction to the Mormon religion in America. Joseph Smith claimed that the lost tribes of Judah had come to the Americas and that Jesus, when he had ascended from Jerusalem, came back down in the Americas. The magic golden plates Smith claimed to have found buried in the hills of the finger lake region of New York State were evidence that America was the new Holy Land.
God and country are inextricably wound together in Mormon theology and that is why every Mormon church has a boy scout troop as their virtual Sunday School program. Of course, every religion, if you look at from a skeptic's perspective can look pretty silly. Catholics and Jews, Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses believe some pretty incredible things but they all have the benefit of having their holy texts and heroes protected by the veil of hundreds of years of history.
Jesus might have been really bad at math and he might have gotten drunk at his senior prom but we would have no way of knowing anything about such details. Joseph Smith, however, is close enough to us in history that a lot of his personal embarrassments are well known to us. Most of which will likely find their way into the media in the coming year if Mitt Romney remains in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
It may not be fair, but it will be hard for anyone seeking public office not to lose a lot of credibility when associated with Joseph Smith's personal story but every nation has examples of similarly nationalistic characters who lost touch with reality.
Jewish scriptures are not very good at being self critical about their nationalistic views. But then neither was Spain or France or Great Brittan when they built their empires, nor Russia when it built the Soviet Union, as Germany certainly wasn't in the first half of the last century.
Americans are able to be self critical about how we treated the native American Indians..... at least those of us who live at some distance from remaining tribes are able to do so. We cringe at the religious glee of 17th century accounts such as the description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason's attack on a Pequot village.
American exceptionalism began to be entered into our national documents by the likes of Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
As Howard Zinn pointed out in an article published just before his death, "At the time (Root) was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos." As Molly Ivans has been famously quoted, "It's hard to convince someone that you are killing them for their own good."
At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, then the owner of Time Magazine and several other important publications, declared that this would be "the American Century," that victory in the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Most people these days try to mask their feelings a good deal better but in the days when Donald Trump was warming up for a run for the office of the President, he said that if he were elected he would take a trillion dollars worth of oil from Iraq to pay for what we "did for them" and that it would invade Libya and just take their oil. It's frightening in one way but in another it at least has the refreshing ring of honesty to just skip that stuff about weapons of mass destruction and nuclear ambitions.
Men and women, this is hard stuff for us and I know that some of you feel very differently but I beg you to let me speak as a pastor on a matter of the heart of our nation. I just drove nearly 2000 miles through Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. No where along the route of my long journey did I drive past a French Air force base, or a Saudi army base or even some innocent looking Canadian Mounties. Nor would we tolerate such a presence on our sacred soil.
But America presently has nearly half a million soldiers, sailors and pilots scattered over nearly a hundred nations from Bahrain to Brazil, from Japan to Qatar. Boys and girls, that's an empire.
We say, in our literature, that we are a religious community that is willing to question traditional beliefs. We say that we want to be open minded, to look at all sides and to have the courage to question our most cherished beliefs. But this is a hard one.
We want to believe that our nation's sins are all in the distant past. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers were blind to their ambitious nationalism but we get to wear the white hat and go forth to rescue, to liberate, to share democracy, capitalism, McDonalds and CocaCola...... but from the view of most of the world, it is not largess.... It is empire.
I am not so foolish as to think that we could be like Costa Rica and just dismiss our army and focus on education. We wouldn't survive for a week without some means of defense.
I don't live in a gated community and I regularly leave my doors unlocked. I shouldn't, I know, but I do. In large part because I don't own the things that thieves steal. I don't own guns, or jewelry, I don't have gold or silver or expensive art or electronics. Most of what is in my house is not dissimilar from what you might find in a yard sale.... Used clothing and unused exercise equipment.... So my house is sort of like Costa Rica.... No one is likely to attack me. But the United States as a whole is wealthy and resource rich and we have a lot of enemies.
We are now the modern equivalent of Ancient Egypt, or Babylon... We are the Roman Empire trying to keep a nervous Pax Americana at the tip of a spear. The question for people like us is, what do we do now that we are the king of the hill?
One horribly cold February day I was exploring the old Latin quarter of Paris. I sat alone in the unheated St. Supice cathedral listening to an organist practicing for a Bach concert until I could no longer feel my fingers or toes. I stumbled out into the snow to find a place where I could warm up in that part of Paris where either no one spoke English or no one cared to admit that they spoke English.
I ducked into a café and muttered in very bad French that I wanted a cup of coffee. It was a tiny, dimly lit café full of old French men. The barista curled his lip and pushed a tiny espresso my way and asked for 80 francs, which was about $18 dollars. I stepped back to see if it was a joke or if he was trying to just price gouge me enough for me to drink my coffee and leave with empty pockets.
While I was still trying to assess the situation, a very wrinkled up old man put one hand over mine and with the other he reached into his pocket and pulled out the money to pay the angry looking waiter. The old man patted me on the back and what I caught was, "Merci, Merci Americans."
He was among those rescued by the American liberation of France during WWII and he would not stand by and watch me be charged for a half a dozen cups of coffee when I had ordered only one.
Now, see, that's the kind of American I want to be..... I want to be the kind that old man thought I was.... A noble, selfless, courageous liberator. There is still an America like that but there is also an empire.
My fear is that mainstream religion can no longer tell the difference. My fear is that almost every church in this country is in service of the empire. And that is the church I hope we never become.
Roger Ray, pastor
July 17, 2011 Proper 11
Genesis 28:10-19a 10This past week I have been on vacation, a driving trip that I have called the Roger Ray Heritage tour. I had some long over due visits to make with family and friends so my friend, Jeanmarie, and I set out driving from Springfield to Memphis where I used to live, then down to Birmingham, AL to visit my brother and an old seminary friend. Afterwards we drove up through Nashville, TN where I went to grad school and then spent a couple of days in a National Park near my hometown, allowing me to see the home and church where I grew up and the veterans memorial recently placed on the site of my original church home in honor of my father.
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the LORD stood beside him and said, "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it!" 17 And he was afraid, and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 18 So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19a He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first.
We ended the week visiting two of my best family friends in Louisville, KY. From time to time, Jeanmarie would say, "You really miss it here don't you?" And, as much as I love being the pastor here, I have to admit that there is something about the hills, rivers and forests of Kentucky that have an almost magical pull on me. And I recognize that it really is a land thing. As much as the rather anti-intellectual and conservative religious climate of Springfield is irritating, I know it is even worse in Kentucky.
Kentucky is now the state where Mitch McConnell is the sane senator! Only Rand Paul can make that guy look like he has an oar in the water. I'm embarrassed for my home state but, I have to tell you, I love it there, I can't help it, and God knows, I've tried!
It is almost inescapable that all of us have a certain sense that our homeland is, in once sense or another, a holy land. Anyone who has been in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day can attest to the fact that immigrants in America carry on about St. Patrick's Day ten times more than anyone in Ireland does. I have romantic feelings about my home. I ate country ham every day that I was on vacation. I ate pinto beans, grits, a hot brown and fried corn bread..... my ethnic foods. If you get to go over to Andrea Zamora's house on a holiday, she will serve you a piece of a tres leches cake which is just as uninviting to me as country ham and grits is to anyone who cares about their heart health. If you eat breakfast over at the Hartenstein's you'll be offered a half of a broiled tomato in Scottish style with your bacon and eggs...... we relish these reminders of our home.
It is helpful to remember that most of the Hebrew Bible was not written in Israel or Judah. Homesick Jews who were slaves in Babylon wrote most of it. They were not in their Holy Land, they were remembering their Holy Land. The story we just read from Genesis about Jacob's dream of ladders going up to heaven is not simply metaphorical in the minds of ancient Jews. They believed that God's throne was straight up over Mt. Moriah. The Arc of the Covenant was made like a giant throne and it sat in the Temple in the Holy of Holies, directly under where God's true throne was in heaven.
Jacob's vision was recorded in Genesis as a declaration that while other nations might be bigger, or stronger or more wealthy, that their land was God's land. That conviction, though it seems silly to claim today, is still at the root of what we call Zionism. It isn't rational, but when is extremist nationalism ever rational?
I love my homeland. I know that June still loves Scottland and Andrea loves Mexico and for reasons which defy logic, Jim Payne still loves Alabama. It is natural to love your homeland. It is noble to be patriotic about one's country. To sacrifice for, work for and maybe even die to protect the welfare of your country. But there is a continuum which may begin with warm feelings about country ham and biscuits that runs through patriotism and can keep going until it is nationalism or even a religious fervor to adamantly demand that your nation is not just God's country in your music and art but in your international politics. Most of the soldiers in the Nazi army just thought of themselves as being patriotic.
Sociologically, that was the early attraction to the Mormon religion in America. Joseph Smith claimed that the lost tribes of Judah had come to the Americas and that Jesus, when he had ascended from Jerusalem, came back down in the Americas. The magic golden plates Smith claimed to have found buried in the hills of the finger lake region of New York State were evidence that America was the new Holy Land.
God and country are inextricably wound together in Mormon theology and that is why every Mormon church has a boy scout troop as their virtual Sunday School program. Of course, every religion, if you look at from a skeptic's perspective can look pretty silly. Catholics and Jews, Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses believe some pretty incredible things but they all have the benefit of having their holy texts and heroes protected by the veil of hundreds of years of history.
Jesus might have been really bad at math and he might have gotten drunk at his senior prom but we would have no way of knowing anything about such details. Joseph Smith, however, is close enough to us in history that a lot of his personal embarrassments are well known to us. Most of which will likely find their way into the media in the coming year if Mitt Romney remains in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
It may not be fair, but it will be hard for anyone seeking public office not to lose a lot of credibility when associated with Joseph Smith's personal story but every nation has examples of similarly nationalistic characters who lost touch with reality.
Jewish scriptures are not very good at being self critical about their nationalistic views. But then neither was Spain or France or Great Brittan when they built their empires, nor Russia when it built the Soviet Union, as Germany certainly wasn't in the first half of the last century.
Americans are able to be self critical about how we treated the native American Indians..... at least those of us who live at some distance from remaining tribes are able to do so. We cringe at the religious glee of 17th century accounts such as the description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason's attack on a Pequot village.
Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.But the closer we get to our own time, the harder it is for us to even allow ourselves to think of the possibility that we have confused nationalism with the more appropriate patriotic love of country.
American exceptionalism began to be entered into our national documents by the likes of Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
As Howard Zinn pointed out in an article published just before his death, "At the time (Root) was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos." As Molly Ivans has been famously quoted, "It's hard to convince someone that you are killing them for their own good."
At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, then the owner of Time Magazine and several other important publications, declared that this would be "the American Century," that victory in the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Most people these days try to mask their feelings a good deal better but in the days when Donald Trump was warming up for a run for the office of the President, he said that if he were elected he would take a trillion dollars worth of oil from Iraq to pay for what we "did for them" and that it would invade Libya and just take their oil. It's frightening in one way but in another it at least has the refreshing ring of honesty to just skip that stuff about weapons of mass destruction and nuclear ambitions.
Men and women, this is hard stuff for us and I know that some of you feel very differently but I beg you to let me speak as a pastor on a matter of the heart of our nation. I just drove nearly 2000 miles through Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. No where along the route of my long journey did I drive past a French Air force base, or a Saudi army base or even some innocent looking Canadian Mounties. Nor would we tolerate such a presence on our sacred soil.
But America presently has nearly half a million soldiers, sailors and pilots scattered over nearly a hundred nations from Bahrain to Brazil, from Japan to Qatar. Boys and girls, that's an empire.
We say, in our literature, that we are a religious community that is willing to question traditional beliefs. We say that we want to be open minded, to look at all sides and to have the courage to question our most cherished beliefs. But this is a hard one.
We want to believe that our nation's sins are all in the distant past. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers were blind to their ambitious nationalism but we get to wear the white hat and go forth to rescue, to liberate, to share democracy, capitalism, McDonalds and CocaCola...... but from the view of most of the world, it is not largess.... It is empire.
I am not so foolish as to think that we could be like Costa Rica and just dismiss our army and focus on education. We wouldn't survive for a week without some means of defense.
I don't live in a gated community and I regularly leave my doors unlocked. I shouldn't, I know, but I do. In large part because I don't own the things that thieves steal. I don't own guns, or jewelry, I don't have gold or silver or expensive art or electronics. Most of what is in my house is not dissimilar from what you might find in a yard sale.... Used clothing and unused exercise equipment.... So my house is sort of like Costa Rica.... No one is likely to attack me. But the United States as a whole is wealthy and resource rich and we have a lot of enemies.
We are now the modern equivalent of Ancient Egypt, or Babylon... We are the Roman Empire trying to keep a nervous Pax Americana at the tip of a spear. The question for people like us is, what do we do now that we are the king of the hill?
One horribly cold February day I was exploring the old Latin quarter of Paris. I sat alone in the unheated St. Supice cathedral listening to an organist practicing for a Bach concert until I could no longer feel my fingers or toes. I stumbled out into the snow to find a place where I could warm up in that part of Paris where either no one spoke English or no one cared to admit that they spoke English.
I ducked into a café and muttered in very bad French that I wanted a cup of coffee. It was a tiny, dimly lit café full of old French men. The barista curled his lip and pushed a tiny espresso my way and asked for 80 francs, which was about $18 dollars. I stepped back to see if it was a joke or if he was trying to just price gouge me enough for me to drink my coffee and leave with empty pockets.
While I was still trying to assess the situation, a very wrinkled up old man put one hand over mine and with the other he reached into his pocket and pulled out the money to pay the angry looking waiter. The old man patted me on the back and what I caught was, "Merci, Merci Americans."
He was among those rescued by the American liberation of France during WWII and he would not stand by and watch me be charged for a half a dozen cups of coffee when I had ordered only one.
Now, see, that's the kind of American I want to be..... I want to be the kind that old man thought I was.... A noble, selfless, courageous liberator. There is still an America like that but there is also an empire.
My fear is that mainstream religion can no longer tell the difference. My fear is that almost every church in this country is in service of the empire. And that is the church I hope we never become.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Jesus the Teacher
Community Christian Church
Dr. David Trobisch
July 10, 2011
Pray with me:
Open our eyes, so we can see,
Open our ears, so we can hear,
And open our hearts, so we can understand.
AMEN
ARRIVING IN BANGOR
It was a cold and wintry day when Vera and I first arrived in Maine. English is not my first language, and Vera had not lived outside of Germany before.
We visited the LL Bean store in Freeport. I insisted on buying a pair of their "duck boots," boots with rubber shoes and leather shafts. Vera thought they were ugly. I told her that owning a pair and wearing them for our first visit might demonstrate a willingness to live up to the climate and whatever else our new country of residence would throw at us.
It was a Saturday morning when we parked our car on the empty lot in front of the library of the old campus. As we approached the entrance of Maine Hall the doors opened wide, and the President walked toward us with outstretched arms. To my delight, the President wore "duck boots".
Our twelve years in Maine were the most satisfying years in my life as a teacher. I knew that Maine was where God wanted me to be, and Vera found a spiritual home there as well.
AUSTRIA
I was born in Africa. My parents were missionaries. When I turned six the family moved to Austria where we lived on a remote mountain with five other families, all farmers. When I turned ten, I was sent to boarding school, as it was impossible to get to a high school from where we lived and return the same day.
PORTLAND
In Bangor we bought a small house just across the street from the Seminary. The following years were turbulent for the School. In the wake of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the economy declined, the financial situation of families and churches became more and more strained, and the catastrophes of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina diverted the charitable donations of wealthy Mainers to other causes than to the Seminary. Students who were able to pay full tuition without borrowing became a rare commodity; full time students all but disappeared from our class rooms. Our salaries were frozen, faculty openings were not filled in a timely manner, and when my contract was up for renewal the President had to disclose that the financial situation of the institution was so desperate that the Board could only offer me a twelve month extension. The review committee had suggested tenure.
The Board understood that the future of the School depended on the strength of their Portland campus with its wealthier population and a stronger base for recruiting donors and financial supporters. To achieve this, at least one faculty member had to be moved from Bangor to Portland. I volunteered.
But real estate in Portland is three times as expensive as in Bangor. The salary I received was so pitiful that no bank would lend us the money to buy a house. So it was agreed that the Seminary would act as a lender.
But the Board of Trustees did not deliver a contract. After eight months of stalling, postponing, and finding excuses, all the while encouraging us to pack and set a date for the move and sell our house in Bangor, they gave us a contract, one hour before the closing. It missed a paragraph that regulated what would happen if the real estate market collapsed and the house could not be sold at the price it was bought. The President promised that the Board would pick up the difference.
We refused to sign the closing documents, and I called the Trustee who had been assigned by the Board to work with us. She gave me her word over the phone that the Board would keep the President's promise: The word of the President and the word of the Trustee, an investment banker, whose husband had written the contract, and who was fully aware of the promises made to us, was good enough for Vera and me. We trusted them and we signed.
ON THE BALCONY
Because many Austrian families live in remote areas, the only chance for their children to receive a higher education is by sending them to a boarding school when they are 10 years old. Each group of twenty boys was called a "family" in our school and was assigned to one "professor". Being both, teacher and supervisor, allowed professors to draw a larger salary. It meant, however, that we were at their mercy, day in and day out.
I vividly remember the first communal shower. Once a week we were lead as a group down into the basement of our building and ordered to strip. Along the ceiling, pipes were installed with showerheads lined up in a row. The professor would turn on the hot water for a few minutes then turn it off. And after we applied soap, he would run hot water again. The ritual always ended with the professor turning on the ice cold water without warning, sending us squealing through the room, running naked for our towels. Some professors got enormous pleasure out of tormenting us and some did little to hide their erections.
These scenes still haunt me. We boys referred to the communal shower as the "gas chamber". I was a very modest child when I entered boarding school. Even when seeing a doctor I did not want to take off my clothes, unless my mother was present.
I especially remember the philosophy teacher. His philosophy of dealing with 20 unruly boys was that if one of us did something wrong, all of us were to be punished. And his preferred way of punishment was to make us stand quietly in the common room for an hour while he insulted us. "One for all and all for one," was his motto. So one evening, when two of my class mates had started a pillow fight and the professor walked into their room, once again all 20 boys were lined up and made to stand in complete silence.
It is difficult to express the emotions a situation like this will create in the heart of a young man. My mother always insisted that, of her five children, I was the one with an exaggerated sense of justice. Even as a little boy, she would say, I could not control myself when I felt that injustice was done to others. This trait has not been helpful to me in my life. By speaking out for others, I have often harmed my own interests.
That particular evening, the philosophy professor made fun of my parents and ridiculed them in front of the group for being missionaries. I am not sure, whether I did it on purpose or whether the "wind blows where it chooses", but - I let one fly. It was a good fart. Long, noisy, and it smelled its part. My classmates laughed hilariously, and the professor's anger was aroused. He wanted to know who it was, but none of my peers gave me away: "All for one, and one for all". The professor had to question us individually, and when he asked me directly, I did not lie.
My punishment was severe. I was made to go outside, on the third floor balcony, in the middle of winter, and stand there barefoot, wearing nothing but pyjamas, at sub-zero temperatures.
Next morning I woke up with high fever and was taken to the sick bay with a severe case of bronchitis. My parents somehow found out and complained to the institution. The professor was severely reprimanded.
At that moment my life as a naïve little boy, who was born in Africa and grew up a happy child on an idyllic mountain in Austria, came to an abrupt end. I now had a mortal enemy, who had the power to control and hurt me every waking moment. And he did so as often as he could, in subtle but terrifying ways. And he very much enjoyed terrorizing me. I went to boarding school for eight long years.
FIRST TALK
Now, in 2007 my mother died, and it became clear that our days in Maine were coming to an end. My family needed me in Missouri. Following through on the suggestion of the outgoing president I contacted the new President and asked whether the School had an interest in buying our house. I proposed that the architects, bankers, lawyers, and realtors on the Board be involved and tour the house. But the new President immediately discouraged any Trustee to talk to us. It took him two months until he could find the time to sit down with me. When we met he said he did not have the necessary information about the house and promised to get back to me soon. When I did not hear from him and contacted him, he responded in an email that he copied to the Chairman of the Board that he had come to the meeting fully prepared. I had never been lied to by an executive officer of any institution quite so bluntly before. That was in August. In September of 2008 the housing market crashed.
The ensuing e-mail correspondence with the new President revealed a man who was more comfortable hacking out two-liners on his BlackBerry than meeting in person. This man had no practical experience in fundraising. He had seen academic institutions only from the perspective of a student. He did not seem to have published one line in a scholarly journal. He had not pastored a church for 15 years, and the membership of his last church had declined by almost a third during his tenure. There were red flags everywhere.
It became obvious to me that this man had no business leading a Seminary. At the time, it seems, that I was the only one who saw this.
Facing such incompetence, in our despair Vera and I petitioned the Board directly to allow us to continue to finance our house at bank interest rates for several more years until the market would rebound. We had made arrangements with a property management company, had identified potential renters, and the numbers seemed to work.
We were not allowed to be present when the Trustees met to discuss the matter. Two weeks after the board meeting the President sat me down and disclosed that the Board had turned down our petition and that he had no solution to propose. We should simply pay the loan back. He said this with a broad smile on his face and with a rather obvious satisfaction.
I remember sitting across the table from the little, bald man with those huge lips, who could never seem to wipe the smirk off his face. When he spoke, he sent torrents of spittle through the air. What struck me more, however, was the joy in his eyes as he watched me digest the information: Neither the previous President nor a lawyer, banker, or realtor serving on the Board would even talk to us. He had managed to cut us off from any meaningful conversation with the Board.
I had seen this look before, in boarding school. And suddenly it dawned on me that I was dealing with one of those people again, who gained pleasure from hurting others.
REFLECTION
Why am I telling you this? And what does it have to do with the parable of the sower?
Because that President and those Trustees are good people!
I know many of the Trustees very well. Some had been student of mine. For others I organized educational events. I preached in their churches. Together we stood at the graves of students, staff members, professors, and trustees. We spent long hours working together in committees, finding unusual solutions for our problems. We marched side by side, demonstrating for the rights of gay, lesbian and transgendered fellow citizens. We organized workshops for battered women. We attended funerals of our most beloved students, staff - one of our secretaries froze to death in front of her home one winter - or Trustees - one died together with her partner in a plane crash off the Canadian coast.
These Trustees are not only good people. They are the best the Church has to offer. No one serves on the Board of a desperately poor Seminary facing an uncertain future for prestige or because they have nothing else to do. They are mission driven. They want to do what it takes to provide educated clergy for the churches of Northern New England. Founded in 1815, this is the third oldest theological school in the USA only because of the resilient, creative, and resourceful nature of the Trustees who have served the institution for two centuries. I would be proud to serve on their Board.
And the President, even as he failed the institution and finally had to be relieved of his duties two weeks ago, was doing his best. Maybe he thought that "being tough" with that unruly German scholar was what an administrator is expected to do? I don't know. He was well aware of his lack of professional qualification, when he came. Taking the job he knew it would be a challenge and an act of faith. This person is a good man.
Roles are easily reversed. I could have been on that Board; I could have been the perpetrator, not the victim.
And where is God in all this?
God is in the conflict.
A conflict is when you have two parties, and both are right.
Our spiritual challenge is to not give up on one another, to not walk away, but to face each other.
CCCSGF
This congregation is diverse. From the first moment that I experienced you, I was impressed. Republicans and Democrats sitting in the same pews. In Springfield, Missouri? Grandparents with their sons and daughters and their grandchildren worshiping next to gay and lesbians, in Springfield, Missouri? Who would have thought? Catholics, Assemblies of God, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans (both Missouri and ELCA) participating together in the Christian rituals, while the leadership of their own denominations is not sure whether they should encourage this? In Springfield, Missouri?
You don't just talk, you live what others are preaching: There can be unity in diversity.
On the other hand, compared to some of the other groups meeting today here in this city, we are not a big crowd. Not everyone is comfortable reaching out and bridging gaps.
What if the other party in the conflict does not want to talk? What if they do not seek the dialogue?
This is what happened in my case: In the three years not one of my emails or letters to my Christian brothers and sisters on the Board has been answered. What do you do then?
THE SOWER
The Parable of the Sower has offered me deep consolation. It seems to me that no sower would intentionally waste seeds on pavement or on rocks or sow among weeds. The seed will always grow without our control - I am speaking as a teacher now - no perfect PowerPoint presentation, no perfect manuscript can guarantee that a seed comes to life.
The parable does not encourage us to grow, it encourages us to sow. I have always experienced growth as a miracle.
In an unresolved conflict, we are encouraged to continue to sow. Some seeds will fall on barren ground, others on rocky spots, others among the thorns, but others on good soil - and they will bear fruit.
END
When I walked out of the room after that final conversation with the President, I stumbled across my colleague of many years, the Ethics professor. And when he asked me, how the meeting had gone, I spontaneously answered: "I've just been raped."
I continued to walk down the hall. In the sitting area I met the new President's wife. She was delighted to see me. She had a question about the New Testament that she had not been able to research to her satisfaction.
((PAUSE))
It was at that moment that I had to decide, who I was. And I decided to be, who my students had taught me to be during the twelve years I proudly served them.
I listened to the President's wife as carefully as I could in this difficult situation, and I answered her question to the best of my knowledge.
End of the Sermon. // Amen.
((Blessing: Go with God! Go in peace! - And sow the seed!))
Dr. David Trobisch
July 10, 2011
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
13:1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. 13:2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 13:3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: "Listen! A sower went out to sow. 13:4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 13:5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 13:6 But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 13:7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 13:8 Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 13:9 Let anyone with ears listen!"
13:18 "Hear then the parable of the sower. 13:19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 13:20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 13:21 yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 13:22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 13:23 But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."
Pray with me:
Open our eyes, so we can see,
Open our ears, so we can hear,
And open our hearts, so we can understand.
AMEN
ARRIVING IN BANGOR
It was a cold and wintry day when Vera and I first arrived in Maine. English is not my first language, and Vera had not lived outside of Germany before.
We visited the LL Bean store in Freeport. I insisted on buying a pair of their "duck boots," boots with rubber shoes and leather shafts. Vera thought they were ugly. I told her that owning a pair and wearing them for our first visit might demonstrate a willingness to live up to the climate and whatever else our new country of residence would throw at us.
It was a Saturday morning when we parked our car on the empty lot in front of the library of the old campus. As we approached the entrance of Maine Hall the doors opened wide, and the President walked toward us with outstretched arms. To my delight, the President wore "duck boots".
Our twelve years in Maine were the most satisfying years in my life as a teacher. I knew that Maine was where God wanted me to be, and Vera found a spiritual home there as well.
AUSTRIA
I was born in Africa. My parents were missionaries. When I turned six the family moved to Austria where we lived on a remote mountain with five other families, all farmers. When I turned ten, I was sent to boarding school, as it was impossible to get to a high school from where we lived and return the same day.
PORTLAND
In Bangor we bought a small house just across the street from the Seminary. The following years were turbulent for the School. In the wake of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the economy declined, the financial situation of families and churches became more and more strained, and the catastrophes of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina diverted the charitable donations of wealthy Mainers to other causes than to the Seminary. Students who were able to pay full tuition without borrowing became a rare commodity; full time students all but disappeared from our class rooms. Our salaries were frozen, faculty openings were not filled in a timely manner, and when my contract was up for renewal the President had to disclose that the financial situation of the institution was so desperate that the Board could only offer me a twelve month extension. The review committee had suggested tenure.
The Board understood that the future of the School depended on the strength of their Portland campus with its wealthier population and a stronger base for recruiting donors and financial supporters. To achieve this, at least one faculty member had to be moved from Bangor to Portland. I volunteered.
But real estate in Portland is three times as expensive as in Bangor. The salary I received was so pitiful that no bank would lend us the money to buy a house. So it was agreed that the Seminary would act as a lender.
But the Board of Trustees did not deliver a contract. After eight months of stalling, postponing, and finding excuses, all the while encouraging us to pack and set a date for the move and sell our house in Bangor, they gave us a contract, one hour before the closing. It missed a paragraph that regulated what would happen if the real estate market collapsed and the house could not be sold at the price it was bought. The President promised that the Board would pick up the difference.
We refused to sign the closing documents, and I called the Trustee who had been assigned by the Board to work with us. She gave me her word over the phone that the Board would keep the President's promise: The word of the President and the word of the Trustee, an investment banker, whose husband had written the contract, and who was fully aware of the promises made to us, was good enough for Vera and me. We trusted them and we signed.
ON THE BALCONY
Because many Austrian families live in remote areas, the only chance for their children to receive a higher education is by sending them to a boarding school when they are 10 years old. Each group of twenty boys was called a "family" in our school and was assigned to one "professor". Being both, teacher and supervisor, allowed professors to draw a larger salary. It meant, however, that we were at their mercy, day in and day out.
I vividly remember the first communal shower. Once a week we were lead as a group down into the basement of our building and ordered to strip. Along the ceiling, pipes were installed with showerheads lined up in a row. The professor would turn on the hot water for a few minutes then turn it off. And after we applied soap, he would run hot water again. The ritual always ended with the professor turning on the ice cold water without warning, sending us squealing through the room, running naked for our towels. Some professors got enormous pleasure out of tormenting us and some did little to hide their erections.
These scenes still haunt me. We boys referred to the communal shower as the "gas chamber". I was a very modest child when I entered boarding school. Even when seeing a doctor I did not want to take off my clothes, unless my mother was present.
I especially remember the philosophy teacher. His philosophy of dealing with 20 unruly boys was that if one of us did something wrong, all of us were to be punished. And his preferred way of punishment was to make us stand quietly in the common room for an hour while he insulted us. "One for all and all for one," was his motto. So one evening, when two of my class mates had started a pillow fight and the professor walked into their room, once again all 20 boys were lined up and made to stand in complete silence.
It is difficult to express the emotions a situation like this will create in the heart of a young man. My mother always insisted that, of her five children, I was the one with an exaggerated sense of justice. Even as a little boy, she would say, I could not control myself when I felt that injustice was done to others. This trait has not been helpful to me in my life. By speaking out for others, I have often harmed my own interests.
That particular evening, the philosophy professor made fun of my parents and ridiculed them in front of the group for being missionaries. I am not sure, whether I did it on purpose or whether the "wind blows where it chooses", but - I let one fly. It was a good fart. Long, noisy, and it smelled its part. My classmates laughed hilariously, and the professor's anger was aroused. He wanted to know who it was, but none of my peers gave me away: "All for one, and one for all". The professor had to question us individually, and when he asked me directly, I did not lie.
My punishment was severe. I was made to go outside, on the third floor balcony, in the middle of winter, and stand there barefoot, wearing nothing but pyjamas, at sub-zero temperatures.
Next morning I woke up with high fever and was taken to the sick bay with a severe case of bronchitis. My parents somehow found out and complained to the institution. The professor was severely reprimanded.
At that moment my life as a naïve little boy, who was born in Africa and grew up a happy child on an idyllic mountain in Austria, came to an abrupt end. I now had a mortal enemy, who had the power to control and hurt me every waking moment. And he did so as often as he could, in subtle but terrifying ways. And he very much enjoyed terrorizing me. I went to boarding school for eight long years.
FIRST TALK
Now, in 2007 my mother died, and it became clear that our days in Maine were coming to an end. My family needed me in Missouri. Following through on the suggestion of the outgoing president I contacted the new President and asked whether the School had an interest in buying our house. I proposed that the architects, bankers, lawyers, and realtors on the Board be involved and tour the house. But the new President immediately discouraged any Trustee to talk to us. It took him two months until he could find the time to sit down with me. When we met he said he did not have the necessary information about the house and promised to get back to me soon. When I did not hear from him and contacted him, he responded in an email that he copied to the Chairman of the Board that he had come to the meeting fully prepared. I had never been lied to by an executive officer of any institution quite so bluntly before. That was in August. In September of 2008 the housing market crashed.
The ensuing e-mail correspondence with the new President revealed a man who was more comfortable hacking out two-liners on his BlackBerry than meeting in person. This man had no practical experience in fundraising. He had seen academic institutions only from the perspective of a student. He did not seem to have published one line in a scholarly journal. He had not pastored a church for 15 years, and the membership of his last church had declined by almost a third during his tenure. There were red flags everywhere.
It became obvious to me that this man had no business leading a Seminary. At the time, it seems, that I was the only one who saw this.
Facing such incompetence, in our despair Vera and I petitioned the Board directly to allow us to continue to finance our house at bank interest rates for several more years until the market would rebound. We had made arrangements with a property management company, had identified potential renters, and the numbers seemed to work.
We were not allowed to be present when the Trustees met to discuss the matter. Two weeks after the board meeting the President sat me down and disclosed that the Board had turned down our petition and that he had no solution to propose. We should simply pay the loan back. He said this with a broad smile on his face and with a rather obvious satisfaction.
I remember sitting across the table from the little, bald man with those huge lips, who could never seem to wipe the smirk off his face. When he spoke, he sent torrents of spittle through the air. What struck me more, however, was the joy in his eyes as he watched me digest the information: Neither the previous President nor a lawyer, banker, or realtor serving on the Board would even talk to us. He had managed to cut us off from any meaningful conversation with the Board.
I had seen this look before, in boarding school. And suddenly it dawned on me that I was dealing with one of those people again, who gained pleasure from hurting others.
REFLECTION
Why am I telling you this? And what does it have to do with the parable of the sower?
Because that President and those Trustees are good people!
I know many of the Trustees very well. Some had been student of mine. For others I organized educational events. I preached in their churches. Together we stood at the graves of students, staff members, professors, and trustees. We spent long hours working together in committees, finding unusual solutions for our problems. We marched side by side, demonstrating for the rights of gay, lesbian and transgendered fellow citizens. We organized workshops for battered women. We attended funerals of our most beloved students, staff - one of our secretaries froze to death in front of her home one winter - or Trustees - one died together with her partner in a plane crash off the Canadian coast.
These Trustees are not only good people. They are the best the Church has to offer. No one serves on the Board of a desperately poor Seminary facing an uncertain future for prestige or because they have nothing else to do. They are mission driven. They want to do what it takes to provide educated clergy for the churches of Northern New England. Founded in 1815, this is the third oldest theological school in the USA only because of the resilient, creative, and resourceful nature of the Trustees who have served the institution for two centuries. I would be proud to serve on their Board.
And the President, even as he failed the institution and finally had to be relieved of his duties two weeks ago, was doing his best. Maybe he thought that "being tough" with that unruly German scholar was what an administrator is expected to do? I don't know. He was well aware of his lack of professional qualification, when he came. Taking the job he knew it would be a challenge and an act of faith. This person is a good man.
Roles are easily reversed. I could have been on that Board; I could have been the perpetrator, not the victim.
And where is God in all this?
God is in the conflict.
A conflict is when you have two parties, and both are right.
Our spiritual challenge is to not give up on one another, to not walk away, but to face each other.
CCCSGF
This congregation is diverse. From the first moment that I experienced you, I was impressed. Republicans and Democrats sitting in the same pews. In Springfield, Missouri? Grandparents with their sons and daughters and their grandchildren worshiping next to gay and lesbians, in Springfield, Missouri? Who would have thought? Catholics, Assemblies of God, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans (both Missouri and ELCA) participating together in the Christian rituals, while the leadership of their own denominations is not sure whether they should encourage this? In Springfield, Missouri?
You don't just talk, you live what others are preaching: There can be unity in diversity.
On the other hand, compared to some of the other groups meeting today here in this city, we are not a big crowd. Not everyone is comfortable reaching out and bridging gaps.
What if the other party in the conflict does not want to talk? What if they do not seek the dialogue?
This is what happened in my case: In the three years not one of my emails or letters to my Christian brothers and sisters on the Board has been answered. What do you do then?
THE SOWER
The Parable of the Sower has offered me deep consolation. It seems to me that no sower would intentionally waste seeds on pavement or on rocks or sow among weeds. The seed will always grow without our control - I am speaking as a teacher now - no perfect PowerPoint presentation, no perfect manuscript can guarantee that a seed comes to life.
The parable does not encourage us to grow, it encourages us to sow. I have always experienced growth as a miracle.
In an unresolved conflict, we are encouraged to continue to sow. Some seeds will fall on barren ground, others on rocky spots, others among the thorns, but others on good soil - and they will bear fruit.
END
When I walked out of the room after that final conversation with the President, I stumbled across my colleague of many years, the Ethics professor. And when he asked me, how the meeting had gone, I spontaneously answered: "I've just been raped."
I continued to walk down the hall. In the sitting area I met the new President's wife. She was delighted to see me. She had a question about the New Testament that she had not been able to research to her satisfaction.
((PAUSE))
It was at that moment that I had to decide, who I was. And I decided to be, who my students had taught me to be during the twelve years I proudly served them.
I listened to the President's wife as carefully as I could in this difficult situation, and I answered her question to the best of my knowledge.
End of the Sermon. // Amen.
((Blessing: Go with God! Go in peace! - And sow the seed!))
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Beyond Religious Hypocrisy
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
July 3, 2011 Proper 9
If you ever decide that you would like to learn how to fly and airplane, you will discover that what it takes to actually operate a small aircraft is not much more complicated than driving a manual transmission car.... With the important difference of not being able to pull off to the side of the road when something goes wrong.
What I was surprised to discover is that the actual operation of the airplane was nothing compared to the skill needed to navigate. In fact, before GPS guidance systems became affordable, most of we private pilots preferred to fly with two pilots... one to hold onto the controls and the other to stare endlessly at the navigation chart.
The first time you look at a navigation chart, it looks like a very important but totally possible to comprehend pile of colors, lines and numbers, many of which are detailing obstacles that could kill you if you don't get them right. Some numbers tell you the height of certain towers and mountains, others let you know what the radio frequency of a particular airport's tower or navigation point and some let you know the hours of operation of military fighter jets over huge expanses of land nearly everywhere you thought you wanted to go. You have to love a sport with so many colorful and intricate ways in which to kill yourself!
I suspect that for many of you, when Dr. Trobisch and I ask you to open the Bible with us, that what you see there looks a lot like what a new pilot sees when looking at a nav chart. Even when rendered in modern English, it presumes knowledge of an ancient culture and religious beliefs which are as foreign to us as how a navy pilot lands a jet on the moving target of an aircraft carrier at sea.... The chances of actually getting it right seem to be miniscule.
Before you can grasp all of the numbers and lines, first you have to see the big picture.... You have to see the road, rivers, towns and the tower field in Fordland that has several towers that go up to 2000 feet from the ground. Once you can see those things at a glance, the rest of it all starts to fall into place.
I would argue that there are similar things you have to be able to see when you start looking at our Bible. Specifically, when you look at the gospels.... When you look at these stories about Jesus, what are they really trying to tell us?
I am indebted to Jesus Seminar scholar and author, Marcus Borg, for so clearly pointing out the roads, rivers and towns in the wide angle view of the Jesus narrative. Borg asks his readers, "What is the primary theme of the gospels?" And he asks, "What is the central conflict around which the story revolves?"
Here are the two central points I would ask anyone to have in mind when they start reading the gospels. Number one is that Jesus was the teacher of radical compassion. Number two is that Jesus, as the teacher of compassion, is in constant tension with the prevailing religion of piety.
I've always known that somehow, when my Sunday School teachers, when my mother looked at the pages of the Bible, what they saw was the gospel against smoking, drinking, dancing and cussing.....and when you get up to about 10 years old, they added, oh, and don't think about sex either.
It's like trying to be a recruiter for the Catholic priesthood..... OK, there is no salary, no retirement, no days off and no sex and no family..... are there any reasons why someone might not want this job?
The conflict between compassion and piety is nowhere expressed more succinctly than in this gospel passage before us today. Jesus, just a few months into his life as a preacher, has discovered that there is no way to satisfy pious religious critics. He compared them to whinny children. Because, John the Baptist had come and he really was a very observant religious person..... he didn't drink wine, he didn't eat meat, he wouldn't even wear clothing made of cotton or wool. He lived in the wilderness wearing animal skins and eating bugs and they said that he, well.... They said that he had a demon but what they meant was that John was a tad crazy... off his rocker.... A few bricks short of a load... not playing with a full deck.... His elevator didn't go to the top floor.... He was, in our parlance, a bag of fries short of a happy meal..... which is where you could easily wind up if you took my Sunday School teachers too seriously.
But Jesus wasn't that way. Jesus wasn't always serious. He liked to go to parties. He liked to hang out with people who had bad reputations. He drank wine, enough that some people called him a drunk. He liked to eat so much that some people called him a glutton.
And yes, in all seriousness, there is a moral implication to leading a life of faith. We don't want to hurt other people or ourselves. We want to be healthy and to promote health in others and in society.... But the way of piety just never seems to get it right.
When I was in seminary our field education teachers warned us never to socialize with church members. They warned us against being too friendly or too available because when you become too familiar, people will criticize the house you live in, the car you drive, the length of your hair and how you raise your kids.
And it is true enough, some people just can't resist piously judging everyone from their children to their pastor as being either demonic or drunk. I just never would go along with the business of acting like a distant priest because that would mean that I would only socialize with other pastors and, frankly, pastors are a pretty dull crowd to hang out with.
You can never be good enough, or drive the right car or raise your kids in a way that really satisfies the pious but, as W. C. Fields said, "It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to that matters."
Jesus offers his followers an alternative to the religion of piety. There was a park bench near my home when I lived in Memphis, TN. And it said, in large letters, "come to me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest." Obviously, the quote is from our gospel lesson today but what had made me remember that park bench now for 30 years is that when those words were written on a park bench, they were literally true, honest and sincere. But when you hear these words of Jesus being uttered in church.... Are they true?
Is the yoke of being a Christian light and easy? Is the burden of trying to live this life easy?
When you open the Bible to read from the gospels, ask yourself, "What is he really saying?" And when you see Jesus in conflict with others, ask yourself, "What are they really arguing about?" I think that when we experience the church as being full of guilt and fear, manipulation and judgment, rejection of joy and embracing somber piety then we are experiencing the religion that Jesus specifically rejected.
Radical compassion, at the very least, means that you stop passing judgment on other people. I can't resist buying bumper stickers by the dozen.... Sometimes I wish I could have one of those digital marquise running in the back window of my car because there are so many single sentence pithy things I want to say to the world, like, "I'm pretty sure that when Jesus said, 'love your enemies' he meant that we shouldn't kill them." There are parts of the Bible that really require a commentary and some parts ought to be allowed to stand alone.
Radical compassion is not necessarily easy because there are people that it is just easier to judge them than it is to love them. And I find that the world is populated with people who would be every so much happier if they would just let me change them a little bit......none of you, of course, but almost everyone who isn't here today.
The religion of Jesus is not the gospel of smoking, drinking, dancing and cussing we heard about when we were kids. The religion of piety which often wears his name, is a fraud.
If we are sincere followers of Jesus then we stand within a tradition of following the teacher of radical compassion and, from one guy sitting on the park bench to another, it shouldn't be that complicated and we really ought to enjoy the journey.
Søren Kierkegaard said, "It is so much easier to become a Christian when you aren't one than to become one when you assume you already are." I fear that millions of people have dismissed the Christian faith because they believe that it is the religion of piety that, in fact, Jesus explicitly rejected. The hard thing is to get someone who has already decided about institutional religion to open their minds again to the possibility that there is a better option.... One defined by justice and compassion rather than fear and guilt.
I often regret that we do not have more people here to hear Dr. Trobisch's lectures on scripture, but most people are pretty well convinced that they know what is in the Bible and they don't like it much. Probably, you don't know that much about what is in it and you are in for a pleasant surprise when we let the real Jesus stand up in its pages.
We have rejected the religion of piety, with all of its magic, superstition, anti-intellectualism and neurotic judgment. We have set that down in favor of being yoked with Jesus, who is gentle and humble in heart and who provides for us a respite from the insanity of the world and hope that we may be able to make it better.
Roger Ray, pastor
July 3, 2011 Proper 9
Matthew 11:16-19, 28-30
16"But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 17'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.' 18For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; 19the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."
28"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
If you ever decide that you would like to learn how to fly and airplane, you will discover that what it takes to actually operate a small aircraft is not much more complicated than driving a manual transmission car.... With the important difference of not being able to pull off to the side of the road when something goes wrong.
What I was surprised to discover is that the actual operation of the airplane was nothing compared to the skill needed to navigate. In fact, before GPS guidance systems became affordable, most of we private pilots preferred to fly with two pilots... one to hold onto the controls and the other to stare endlessly at the navigation chart.
The first time you look at a navigation chart, it looks like a very important but totally possible to comprehend pile of colors, lines and numbers, many of which are detailing obstacles that could kill you if you don't get them right. Some numbers tell you the height of certain towers and mountains, others let you know what the radio frequency of a particular airport's tower or navigation point and some let you know the hours of operation of military fighter jets over huge expanses of land nearly everywhere you thought you wanted to go. You have to love a sport with so many colorful and intricate ways in which to kill yourself!
I suspect that for many of you, when Dr. Trobisch and I ask you to open the Bible with us, that what you see there looks a lot like what a new pilot sees when looking at a nav chart. Even when rendered in modern English, it presumes knowledge of an ancient culture and religious beliefs which are as foreign to us as how a navy pilot lands a jet on the moving target of an aircraft carrier at sea.... The chances of actually getting it right seem to be miniscule.
Before you can grasp all of the numbers and lines, first you have to see the big picture.... You have to see the road, rivers, towns and the tower field in Fordland that has several towers that go up to 2000 feet from the ground. Once you can see those things at a glance, the rest of it all starts to fall into place.
I would argue that there are similar things you have to be able to see when you start looking at our Bible. Specifically, when you look at the gospels.... When you look at these stories about Jesus, what are they really trying to tell us?
I am indebted to Jesus Seminar scholar and author, Marcus Borg, for so clearly pointing out the roads, rivers and towns in the wide angle view of the Jesus narrative. Borg asks his readers, "What is the primary theme of the gospels?" And he asks, "What is the central conflict around which the story revolves?"
Here are the two central points I would ask anyone to have in mind when they start reading the gospels. Number one is that Jesus was the teacher of radical compassion. Number two is that Jesus, as the teacher of compassion, is in constant tension with the prevailing religion of piety.
I've always known that somehow, when my Sunday School teachers, when my mother looked at the pages of the Bible, what they saw was the gospel against smoking, drinking, dancing and cussing.....and when you get up to about 10 years old, they added, oh, and don't think about sex either.
It's like trying to be a recruiter for the Catholic priesthood..... OK, there is no salary, no retirement, no days off and no sex and no family..... are there any reasons why someone might not want this job?
The conflict between compassion and piety is nowhere expressed more succinctly than in this gospel passage before us today. Jesus, just a few months into his life as a preacher, has discovered that there is no way to satisfy pious religious critics. He compared them to whinny children. Because, John the Baptist had come and he really was a very observant religious person..... he didn't drink wine, he didn't eat meat, he wouldn't even wear clothing made of cotton or wool. He lived in the wilderness wearing animal skins and eating bugs and they said that he, well.... They said that he had a demon but what they meant was that John was a tad crazy... off his rocker.... A few bricks short of a load... not playing with a full deck.... His elevator didn't go to the top floor.... He was, in our parlance, a bag of fries short of a happy meal..... which is where you could easily wind up if you took my Sunday School teachers too seriously.
But Jesus wasn't that way. Jesus wasn't always serious. He liked to go to parties. He liked to hang out with people who had bad reputations. He drank wine, enough that some people called him a drunk. He liked to eat so much that some people called him a glutton.
And yes, in all seriousness, there is a moral implication to leading a life of faith. We don't want to hurt other people or ourselves. We want to be healthy and to promote health in others and in society.... But the way of piety just never seems to get it right.
When I was in seminary our field education teachers warned us never to socialize with church members. They warned us against being too friendly or too available because when you become too familiar, people will criticize the house you live in, the car you drive, the length of your hair and how you raise your kids.
And it is true enough, some people just can't resist piously judging everyone from their children to their pastor as being either demonic or drunk. I just never would go along with the business of acting like a distant priest because that would mean that I would only socialize with other pastors and, frankly, pastors are a pretty dull crowd to hang out with.
You can never be good enough, or drive the right car or raise your kids in a way that really satisfies the pious but, as W. C. Fields said, "It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to that matters."
Jesus offers his followers an alternative to the religion of piety. There was a park bench near my home when I lived in Memphis, TN. And it said, in large letters, "come to me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest." Obviously, the quote is from our gospel lesson today but what had made me remember that park bench now for 30 years is that when those words were written on a park bench, they were literally true, honest and sincere. But when you hear these words of Jesus being uttered in church.... Are they true?
Is the yoke of being a Christian light and easy? Is the burden of trying to live this life easy?
When you open the Bible to read from the gospels, ask yourself, "What is he really saying?" And when you see Jesus in conflict with others, ask yourself, "What are they really arguing about?" I think that when we experience the church as being full of guilt and fear, manipulation and judgment, rejection of joy and embracing somber piety then we are experiencing the religion that Jesus specifically rejected.
Radical compassion, at the very least, means that you stop passing judgment on other people. I can't resist buying bumper stickers by the dozen.... Sometimes I wish I could have one of those digital marquise running in the back window of my car because there are so many single sentence pithy things I want to say to the world, like, "I'm pretty sure that when Jesus said, 'love your enemies' he meant that we shouldn't kill them." There are parts of the Bible that really require a commentary and some parts ought to be allowed to stand alone.
Radical compassion is not necessarily easy because there are people that it is just easier to judge them than it is to love them. And I find that the world is populated with people who would be every so much happier if they would just let me change them a little bit......none of you, of course, but almost everyone who isn't here today.
The religion of Jesus is not the gospel of smoking, drinking, dancing and cussing we heard about when we were kids. The religion of piety which often wears his name, is a fraud.
If we are sincere followers of Jesus then we stand within a tradition of following the teacher of radical compassion and, from one guy sitting on the park bench to another, it shouldn't be that complicated and we really ought to enjoy the journey.
Søren Kierkegaard said, "It is so much easier to become a Christian when you aren't one than to become one when you assume you already are." I fear that millions of people have dismissed the Christian faith because they believe that it is the religion of piety that, in fact, Jesus explicitly rejected. The hard thing is to get someone who has already decided about institutional religion to open their minds again to the possibility that there is a better option.... One defined by justice and compassion rather than fear and guilt.
I often regret that we do not have more people here to hear Dr. Trobisch's lectures on scripture, but most people are pretty well convinced that they know what is in the Bible and they don't like it much. Probably, you don't know that much about what is in it and you are in for a pleasant surprise when we let the real Jesus stand up in its pages.
We have rejected the religion of piety, with all of its magic, superstition, anti-intellectualism and neurotic judgment. We have set that down in favor of being yoked with Jesus, who is gentle and humble in heart and who provides for us a respite from the insanity of the world and hope that we may be able to make it better.
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