Sleeping in Church

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
January 15, 2012     Epiphany 2

1 Samuel 3:1-11    
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. 2At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; 3the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. 4Then the Lord called, "Samuel! Samuel!" and he said, "Here I am!" 5and ran to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call; lie down again." So he went and lay down. 6The Lord called again, "Samuel!" Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call, my son; lie down again." 7Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. 8The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. 9Therefore Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place. 10Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
11Then the Lord said to Samuel, "See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.

As the career of the probably insane comic, Andy Kaufman, began to take off in the 1970's, Kaufman he made the decision to return on a part time basis to the first job he ever had, as a busboy in a diner.  Appearing on Saturday Night Live, in Playboy Clubs and finally in a lead role on Taxi, he became aware that wealth and fame could separate him from everyday people and it was his understanding every day people that had made him a successful comedian.

When I first learned that about Kaufman, I was initially impressed but almost immediately thereafter, I was convicted.  It was such an obvious thing.... To stay in touch with your roots, don't let your goals of success rob you of being who you are, literally to lose your soul.

There has been a poster floating around the liberal websites this week that says, "Each week, millions and millions of upper middle class American citizens put on expensive dress clothes, and load themselves into SUV's and drive past homeless shelters, orphanages, prisons, missions, and halfway houses on their way to very expensive and nice church, where somebody tells them how to be more like Jesus."

Let the congregation say, "OUCH."  I'm sure that some of you get tired of hearing about our involvement at Bill's Place and at Crosslines.  In 2004 I chaired an effort to build 200 little cinder block houses in rural Nicaragua in a blitz build.  I had to raise nearly a half a million dollars and make a lot of trips to Nicaragua but we got it done.  The next year, when I was trying to organize a new team to go down and help build more houses, a church member complained, "That's what we did last year, let's do something different this year."

The challenge made me angry but in a way I understand it.  For most of the world, religion is a form of entertainment.... It should be kind of exciting, thrilling, and doing the same thing over and over.... Well, that lacks Hollywood imagination.

And so, some of us go to Bill's Place every week.  For the past few months, we've been going twice a week.  That's my Andy Kaufman, busboy, staying rooted exercise.  Some of the guys we share food, sleeping bags, hats and coats with are just unemployed and down on their economic luck.  But many others are haunted with addictions, mental illnesses, TB,HIV, hepatitis.... Some have cancer, most are either on parole or there are warrants out for them somewhere.

For me, to be a real pastor, I feel that I need to stay in close contact with the people who are in the greatest need, who are the most broken, the most vulnerable and, quite frankly, the most abandoned by mainstream religion.

Back when Bruce Willis still had hair he made a movie with the child actor, Haley Osment, that made my hair start falling out.  In the frightening mystery movie, The Sixth Sense, little Cole shares with the psychiatrist his horrifying secret, "I see dead people, walking around everywhere, they only see what they want to see, they don't even know that they are dead."

Someone took that iconic picture of the frightened child hiding under his covers and added the caption, "I see churches, they are big buildings everywhere, they only see what they want to see, they don't even know that they are dead."

That seems rather harsh but I know where the sentiment comes from.  But rather than saying that they are dead, I think that it might be more fair to say that they are sleeping.  That's how the faith community is portrayed in this reading we had this morning from I Samuel.  The literal story is that the boy Samuel was sleeping in the temple and the Lord kept calling to him and he keeps thinking that the old priest, Eli, is calling for him.  It took God several times to get Samuel to sit still and actually listen.

That part of the story would be meaningless except for what it symbolizes.  The writer of the narrative sets it up the account by saying:  The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. How's that for an introduction?  How would that do as a way of describing the modern church?.... the word of the Lord is rare these days, no one seems to have any vision.

Sleeping is used frequently in scripture, both in the Old Testament and in the gospels, as a metaphor for just not being aware.... Of not getting it.
The disciples slept in the Garden of Gethsemani while Jesus was in such stress that he was sweating blood. Both Pauline and deuteron-Pauline epistles enjoin the church to "wake up" and realize what is going on.

My continued hammering of issues of biblical criticism and of the historical Jesus goes to this issue of how the church took the powerful, life changing, socially challenging message of Jesus and put it into a prison of doctrines and dogmas, rituals and creeds that go so far that the very voice of Jesus is drowned out entirely.

Look at the creeds themselves..... I believe in God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate...... the creed is telling you what Christians are supposed to believe but all they want to tell you about Jesus is that he was born of a virgin, killed by a Roman governor and then raised from the dead..... not a word about what he said.... Not a word of his teachings, what he stood for, what he wanted us to be and to do.......  Indeed, the word of the Lord is rare in these days, visions are not wide spread.

The church has used belief in order to cover their ears and fail to hear how Jesus has told us to love the least of these, to serve them, even to forgive and to love our enemies.  Those of you who have suffered through reading that book I wrote several years ago, may remember my section on fideism.... Fideism is the belief that  we are saved by believing the right things.... Rejecting reason and just believing.  The Catholic Church officially condemned fideism as a heresy but you have to admit that both Protestants and Catholics practice it with abandon..... believe the right things and your soul (which no one has ever seen or knows exists) will go to heaven (which no one has ever seen or knows exists) rather than going to hell (which also no one has ever seen or knows exists).

Which is so much easier than actually doing what Jesus distinctly said which was to give to the poor, forgive the people who have hurt you and love your enemies.  So the church focuses on getting everyone to believe the right things and that process is to terminally boring that everyone goes to sleep.

Harriet Tubman, and amazing black woman who was such a successful abolitionist, famously said, "I freed a thousand slaves.  I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew that they were slaves."

In the conclusion of this little periscope from I Samuel, when God finally has Samuel's attention, he warns him, "I'm about to do something that is going to many anyone's ears who hears it, tingle.... Burn..... you are going to want to cover your ears."

For centuries the church has depended on being able to tell people, "Come to here and we'll make sure you go to heaven, but stay away from here and you will spend eternity in hell."  And people, in droves, are staying away because that old saw just isn't going to work any longer.  The main stream denominations are dying.  Most churches in America have fewer than 40 people in attendance each week.  Gigantic structures stand on street corners throughout the east coast, in Europe, and they are virtually empty.

Mega churches here in the Midwest are using as many as 8 drum sets on their stages to keep people awake... they can put a Starbucks in the lobby and add multiple gymnasiums, but the message won't continue to seduce a population that is able to look at it and recognize a snake oil sham when they see it.

Jesus is the teacher of radical compassion.  He is the one who told us that love, forgiveness, mercy, self sacrifice, service of others, working for peace and fighting poverty..... that is our religious heritage and the only church that will survive, the only one that deserves to survive, is the church that wakes up to that message.

Time to Talk about Trinity, Monotheism and Panentheism

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
January 8, 2012    Epiphany 1   



Genesis 1:1-5

When the German Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, was getting into very hot water with the Vatican, his friend and my Old Testament professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. Doug Knight, invited him to come to Nashville for a series of lectures where he was greeted by both Vanderbilt's student body and the American press as a hero.

It was a fabulous opportunity for me, as a young student, to sit in a room and listen to talks that were, frankly, not only obscured by a thick German accent but were a bit past my academic reach as a new seminary student.

But what I remember, even across the span of more than 30 years now, is the passionate way in which Kung was imploring us to break out of our old ways of thinking about God and to emerge into a new and more vital kind of faith.  He talked about the genesis of religion being a belief in what he called "a God of the gaps."  That is, whatever we didn't understand, we said it was God... or gods.

In the primitive world, everything was thought to be spiritual... the weather, the growing season, a successful hunt or a drought.  Before modern medicines, demonic or divine attribution was given to every illness and every turn of fate.  Even the realizations of such things as the fact that the world is not flat and that the earth is not the center of the universe, flew in the face of early religious assumptions.

But in the scientific age, in the era of growing understandings of botany, medicine, astronomy, there was always still the edge of knowledge and it has been our habit to walk up to that edge of what we could not explain and call that edge of darkness, the mystery of God.  There was a time when we did not know how the moon stayed up their circling the earth or why the earth never just fell into the sun and we said that God held the stars and planets in their orbits.

When your faith is in a "god of the gaps" then every time there is a scientific explanation for why things are the way they are, then we need God a little bit less and the whole business of faith looks a little more primitive, a little more embarrassing.  When famous atheists make a summary dismissal of religion, inevitably, what they are dismissing is the religion that is based on this idea of "the god of the gaps" in our knowledge and, since we see ourselves as being terribly clever and enlightened, then we have no need for that god any longer.... We just need to do more research so that we can answer any unresolved questions for ourselves.

Rarely a day goes by that I don't get a message from one of our YouTube or iTunes listeners who tell me that they have considered themselves to be an atheist but they have found some appreciation for the spirituality of our emerging church community.  And I generally tell them, "The god you don't believe in is the god we don't believe in either."

The god-of-the-gaps, that creation of superstition and magic, that combination of pre-science simplicity, is not what draws us here.
We're not trying to get in touch with the god who helps us to find a parking place at the mall or make it rain on our vegetable garden.  And yet, people are terribly afraid to give up on the institutional religious packaging that first introduced us to the god-of-the-gaps.

And I want to be quick to say that I am in no way dismissing our traditional faith heritage as being either worthless or bad.  It is impossible to speak accurately about that which is beyond human comprehension and certainly far beyond human language and so we try to "eff" the ineffable.

When you were in middle school, your science teacher began to teach you about the building blocks of the universe.  You were shown a model of an atom.  There are 118 known elements, the most simple being the hydrogen atom with one proton and one electron.  The periodic table takes you through various levels of complexity of combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons with electrons orbiting the atom's core in varying levels of electron shells.

You work with those models, those drawings, for so long that you can come to assume that an atom actually looks like little different colored balls with rapidly spinning bright electrons circling around them.... Which is, of course, totally absurd.  No one can see an atom and if you could see it you would not recognize what you were seeing from the model.  The model just helps you to think about atoms, elements, and the construction of the universe.  As such, the models are immensely helpful.  The models are not the absolute truth but they help us to start understanding certain truths.

The problem would be if scientists started to behave like fundamentalists who insist that everyone believe in the literal interpretation of the model of the atom and anyone who deviated from that belief was not a scientist but a dangerous heretic.  You see where I'm going with this.

Your middle school science teacher was not a liar or an idiot.  You were being introduced to concepts that were impossible to grasp and so you were being brought into the conversation through models and images to help you to understand.... It's just that your introduction should not be considered to be the sum total of what can be known.

All of the world's religions have tried, through the centuries, to find a way to put into words what we have experienced of God.  Sometimes their efforts are brilliant and helpful and, honestly, sometimes they get it wrong.  Sometimes they create a model that is helpful to them to solve a problem in their understanding at that time, within that culture but the model doesn't translate well through the centuries and across the continents.

For cultures in which animal sacrifice to appease angry gods and demons was a fresh memory, the notion that Jesus had to die in substitution for our sins made a certain amount of sense.  But shortly after that notion of atonement was articulated, animal sacrifice began to make less and less sense and then the only way they could force someone to believe in the atonement was to tell them that they were going to burn in hell forever if they didn't believe it.

First God demands the blood of his own son for something he didn't do and he'll do even worse to you if you don't act like you appreciate that bloody gesture.... I think God needed a better publicist.

What people had experienced was that the words, the teachings, the example of Jesus had brought them closer to God.  Then they tried to answer the difficult question, "Why did he have to die?" and from that point on they started to make less and less sense.  The atonement led to the development of the model of the Trinity which, in philosophical terms, solved a problem among third and fourth century thinkers but doesn't really stand up to analysis..... so, we go back to the first technique..... you will burn in hell if you don't act like you believe this.

The atom is too complex to be entirely explained in a middle school drawing.  God is too big for any creed, dogma or religion to fully or accurately explain.  That is why there are so many isms.... Monotheism, polytheism, humanism, pantheism, panentheism.... But it comes down to asking, "Which song is right?"  You can love music.  Your life can be changed by music.  You can even have a favorite song.... But you would have to be crazy to say that your favorite song is the only song that anyone should ever sing.... And yet, in the world of religion, we are often just that crazy.

In an interview about one of her biographies, Karen Armstrong tells the story of when she was a young nun being educated in theology.  She was asked to write a paper on the incarnation.
The mother superior of the convent congratulated her on a well written paper and assured her that she would do well in the order.  But Armstrong couldn't leave it alone, she replied:  But, honestly, none of it is true is it, Mother Superior?  And the older nun leaned down and whispered, "No, of course it isn't, but don't tell the others."

The problem, of course, is in trying to nail down a definition of God in the first place.  I am deeply indebted to the work of Marcus Borg who has given a lot of us permission to be enthusiastic people of faith without having to feel tied to dogma.

In one of his most beautiful lectures, delivered at the Chautauqua Institute a few years ago, he was talking about the Apostolic Creed.  The first line of the creed in Latin says: Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem which we translate as saying "I believe in God, the Father, almighty."  But obviously, we get the word "creed" from the first word in the Latin version of the creed "credo."  Borg says that we moderns, who tend to see "I believe" in a very fact literal way, should try to hear it in the more fluid and poetic sense of the ancients.  He asks us to translate it, not as "I believe" but as "I belove."  That is, "I love the tradition that is expressed in Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

I love the Christian tradition of incarnation, atonement, resurrection, sacraments and scripture because that is the heritage through which I was introduce to God. I don't have to pour concrete about those early models and doctrines and say that I have to understand my relationship with God in just that way throughout all time.... Frankly, that would be silly.... But it would be just as silly to let ourselves despise our own roots.
You do not have to despise your middle school science teacher to begin to study sub atomic particles because you would never grasp quarks, bosons and mesons without first drawing models of protons, neutrons and electrons.

What is inescapable is that we have an experience of the divine "other" that even though we cannot fully or accurately describe the divine, we know that we would be nuts to not try.  The universe is not God.... Though we experience God in every part of the universe.  By faith, we reason that God is something more than the sum total of all of the universe's parts because if we experience God as having a kind of moral force.... That is that we experience the good in peace over war, in love over hate, in kindness over violence, in generosity over greed.

And we know, if only because we experience it, that we can live in a way that draws us into closer communion with God or we can live in a way that alienates us from God.  And, after many centuries and a number of very embarrassing religious wars, inquisitions and excommunications, that we need to stop trying to regulate how anyone tries to express what and who God is or isn't.

We can love the tradition that brought us here but we can also let go of all claims of being in possession of the absolute truth.  If love is our religion, then no one has to ever go to hell again. No one ever has to be afraid of God or demons.  No one can tell you what you have to believe.

But we know that together, we can change the world if we let our faith grow in love, kindness, mercy, forgiveness and compassion.  So love is my religion and I'll try to get you some more details when we have more time.

End of Times or Endless Times?

New Year's Day at Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Jan. 1, 2012

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13          
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 7a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. 9What gain have the workers from their toil? 10I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.
11He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.

The 170,000 lbs. NASA satellite, dubbed "Skylab" was put into orbit in 1973.  The very heavy object had no way of keeping itself in orbit but the plan was that the soon to be launched Space Shuttle fleet would occasionally boost it back up into a solid orbit.  However, as government plans often seem to go, the Space Shuttles were seriously behind schedule and, in 1979, a couple of years before the first shuttle launch, Skylab came tumbling down through the sky, giving Chicken Little's long derided warning some new found merit.

Of course, even a 2000 pound satellite, falling through the atmosphere of a very large planet, has almost no chance of actually hitting anyone or anyone's house.  It is possible but then it is also possible that Jennifer Anniston will finally get over Brad Pitt and decide that she has a real fondness for a certain Midwestern cleric but I'm not keeping my Friday nights open waiting for her phone call.

I was living in Memphis, TN when Skylab's orbit began to deteriorate and suddenly there were signs all over town from a local insurance agency that was selling Skylab insurance.

You may be aware that Memphis is not generally thought of as being the MENSA Club capitol of the world but I was astonished that anyone could possibly be dumb enough to actually purchase insurance against the infinitesimally small chance that they or their property would be injured by the falling debris.  It occurred to me at the time that perhaps the insurance salesmen might be persuaded to turn over their list of clients to a mandatory sterilization program to make sure that those insured individuals would never reproduce.

It took 40 years but the idiocy of Skylab insurance was finally trumped right here in our fair city in the lead up to New Years day in the year 2000.  The over trumpeted computer glitch dubbed "Y2K" had some of our locals preparing for the apocalypse.  One local pastor actually ran paid ads in the paper encouraging people to come to his church where the Lord would save them from the coming dangers of Y2K.  There was even a small commune developed in Seymor where several people built self sustaining homesteads where they could draw water from a well, heat with wood and generate electricity with a windmill while protecting themselves from the coming hoards of zombies set loose by computers that were not capable of moving from the 1900's into the year 2000.

Kinda makes ya proud, don't it? Yeah, I know.

But now we greet 2012, the year when the Mayan's ran out of room on their stone calendar. In any event, it was excessively optimistic so far as the Mayans are concerned since the sand ran out of their hour glass long before the Spanish came and started killing off their chief rivals and successors in Mesoamerica.

Of course, the Mayan calendar issue is of even less consequence than Skylab, which did fall to earth on Australia, in the outback where no one and nothing was hurt but at least that was something.  Still, you can bet that there will be any number of religious folks in this coming year who will thrill themselves with a certain amount of apocalyptic hysteria for more or less the same reasons that Jr High aged girls love to read about Vampires..... none of it is real but it's kinda fun to talk about..... that is, until your intellect grows past early adolescence and then it is just kind of embarrassing.

Look, we religious people have got to stop letting ourselves get drawn into that kind of silly stuff.  We absolutely must separate ourselves from thrill seeking speculation so that we can focus on what is actually true right now.  The turning of a new year is more importantly a time for us to think about where we are and what we can do to make things better.... This can be true individually.... It is a good time to decide to stop smoking, start exercising, lose weight, deal with addictive behaviors, stop cheating on your spouse.... Oh, wait, maybe I should just stop there....

Seriously, as we come to a new year, this is a time when we can spend a moment in honest reflection about our lives.  One of my favorite all-time quotes is Henry David Thoreau's statement that:  "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."  
We don't have to be victims.  We may have any number of reasons for being the way that we are but the only cause is our own choice.  A certain amount of suffering is unavoidable in life but misery is not a necessity, it is a choice.  One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, William James, said that "The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can change his life by changing his attitude of mind."

And I do not say that to diminish anyone's history of pain or victimization.  Horrible things happen, many of which are totally beyond our control, but as Viktor Frankel said, "suffering is like a gas, it expands to fill the space allowed to it."  We can choose to be different people.  We can improve both our joy and our character by consciously working to change the way we think and act.

But we can do that nationally and globally as well.  Especially in an election year when we are being asked to get all exercised about issues over which we have no control while ignoring the things that actually are in our hands.

In philosophy we have a concept called "Occam's Razor."    Many people summarize the theory saying that it means that the simplest explanation is usually the best.  That doesn't quite capture the concept completely.  What Ockham really said is that among competing hypotheses, the one that requires the fewest new assumptions is the one most likely to be true.  And Ockham was a 14th century monk, but he was saying even then, we really need to talk about what we know and not go making silly superstitious claims about things we do not know and cannot prove.

When it comes to religion, there is an Occam's Razor that I would like to propose to you and to articulate it, I want to borrow the words of Karen Armstrong in her autobiographical book, "The Spiral Staircase:  My Climb Out of Darkness."  I think that it is safe to say that Armstrong is one of the world's very top religious academics.  She was, at one time, a nun but details in her book her climb out of the darkness of her previous religious life into the liberation of her current spiritual perspective.  And here is the Occum's Razor that tells us how to tell sick religion from healthy religion, she says:
"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

If we, as a faith community, want to face 2012 with complete honesty, embracing an understanding of our faith that leads us to be more kind, more empathetic, more impelled to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, then we need to not be afraid of looking at the facts of the world in which we are going to live out this healthy faith.

We Americans often cannot resist telling ourselves and the rest of the world that we are number one.  There can be no denying that we are the greatest military power in the world..... we ought to be, we spend more on our military than the rest of the world added together.  And, collectively, we are the richest nation in the world.

But when you say that we are number one, that claim deserves to put to a certain objective test, especially if you are an honest person of faith.
What really makes a nation number one?  Is it wealth?  Is it military might?  A German foundation looked at the 31 nations that work together for economic growth and expansion and ranked them on what we might call national character.  They listed a number of social justice concerns including income disparity, access to health care and education, jobs, individual freedoms and justice.

Look at in this way, the USA is not number one.... Nor are we number five, or number 10 or even number twenty.  In fact, we were fifth from the bottom, scoring only slightly better than Mexico, Chile, Greece and Turkey.  "We're number 27" just doesn't have the same ring to it does it?

Only Canada made the top ten from the Americas.  We were way behind such places as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.... Which is a strange list of countries for us to have to look up to in terms of social justice in matters of poverty, health care, personal liberty and fair treatment in the judicial system.

One of the conversations that comes up fairly often in rooms where I happen to be is this matter of keeping partisan politics out of religion. And here is what provokes someone to bring that topic up..... it comes up when I say something that makes them uncomfortable.  No one ever thinks that I'm being political when I say something they agree with, they just complain when they want me to be quiet.

I want to lodge the opposite complaint.  I wish that all religious people would stop talking about stuff that no one can know anything about, what Ockham called the "unknown assumptions" that dominate most religious messages.
We need to talk about what is real.... We need to apply the religion that inspires compassion, loving-kindness, and empathy to the known world. Not in a partisan political way.... Everyone has a right to their own opinions it's just that no one has a right to their own facts.

The fact is that nearly half of America is living in poverty and the over whelming majority of our children live in poverty.  Lack of access to education, health care, housing, jobs and equal treatment under the law.... Those are religious issues and if you don't believe me I can only invite you to try reading the gospels and the prophets.

We have claimed that the church serves as the conscience of our nation but many nations with empty churches have put us to shame in matters of great religious importance.  But I don't want to stand up here and scream like Chicken Little about how the sky is falling.  The good news is that we can change as individuals by making the conscious decision to change and we can change as a nation if ever the church will choose to stop acting like we are unconscious.

Christmas Stories

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
Christmas Eve 2011



Helena, the sainted mother of Emperor Constantine, used the influence and wealth of her son to build churches in the Holy Land.  Three centuries after the events described in the gospels, she went to Jerusalem to build a church where Jesus was buried and to Bethlehem to build a church where Jesus was born.

I have been to both a few times but then, I have also been to Jericho where a guide showed me the actual Sycamore tree that Zacchaeus climb up into so that he could see over the taller people when Jesus came to town.

Now, Helena was no archaeologist determined to preserve history.  She was a devout worshipper so when she asked people in Bethlehem where Jesus had been born, the locals showed her a shepherd's cave.  She, of course, did not enshrine the cave, she had the entire hill excavated and a replacement cave made in the lower floor of the great cathedral of the Nativity out of precious marble.

Visitors to the Church of the Nativity are often treated to a plaintive tour guide who says that the manger in which Jesus was born is not on display there, not because such a crude wooden item would have turned to dust and ash thousands of years ago but, because it was stolen by the Catholic Church and is housed in the Vatican..... the absurdity of that claim never seems to trouble Israeli tour guides nor the curators of the Vatican's treasures who have no intentions to relinquishing the manger that has no more to do with Jesus than I have to do with managing the caviar trade in Russia.  Sometimes it is hard to embarrass religious people.
One of the most difficult issues in teaching Bible in my college classes is the fact that moderns tend to be so fact literal.  You read the parables where Jesus says that the Kingdom is like a man who had two sons and then another parable says that the Kingdom is like a woman who lost a coin and modern people get mad and say, "Well which is it?  Is it like a man with two sons or a woman who lost a coin because it can't be both!"

I sit in the back of the sanctuary and watch Dr. Trobisch patiently teaching us about the gospels, understanding them as stories written to help us understand great truths, metaphors used to open the mind to see reality in new ways, and, inevitably, at the end of the class, someone will raise their hand and ask, "But how do we know that this really happened?"

I complimented David once on his uncommon patience and in the midst of the conversation someone came up to him to demand an explanation for why God would be so cruel as to kill all of the animals on earth in the world wide flood of Noah when it was the people who had been sinful.  I responded, "Don't you understand that it is a sermon and not a bit of history, there has never been a world- wide flood."  And David interjected, "Well, in a way, it happens every time the story is read."

That is the power of story telling.... It becomes real in the moment it is shared in a community in order to bring about something that is real within us.

When St Helena went to Bethlehem, she was looking for the stable mentioned in Luke's gospel.  But that was just a choice she made.  In Matthew, Jesus was born in a house.
The two gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus have almost nothing in common other than the gender of the child.  In Matthew, the holy family lives in Bethlehem but flees to avoid the slaughter of the innocents and ends up settling in Nazareth.  In Luke, the family lives in Nazareth but are compelled in the most unlikely manner to visit Bethlehem for a Roman census and then return to their home after the birth.

Neither account is historically true.  Jesus was, in all likelihood,  born in and grew up in Nazareth.  Neither Mark nor John are interested in the geography or circumstances of Jesus' birth.  Matthew and Luke both have reasons of Jewish heritage to say that he was born in Bethlehem but Matthew and Luke don't compare notes.

The shepherds, angels, stable and the magnificat are only in Luke.  The magi, star, and flight to Egypt are only in Matthew.  The one thing that both have in common is that neither is the slightest bit interested in the historical facts because they are too busy trying to tell us an important story.... And we're still wondering why the Vatican refuses to give that old wooden manger back to the church in Bethlehem where it belongs.

The best way to kill a good story is to try to take it too literally.  One of the great rallying cries of the Progressive Christian movement is that we take the Bible seriously but not literally.  The question we should be asking is, if Luke and Matthew had no facts about the historical circumstances of the birth of Jesus, then why did they write these accounts?  Why?  What do they mean?  What is the message.... Those are the questions every story teller is actually trying to answer.

Matthew is at pains to tell the Jesus story in a way that proves to us that he is the true Jewish messiah.  He begins his account with a long genealogy tracing Jesus through the family of Joseph back to Abraham and then he tells us that Joseph wasn't really his father... like I said, Matthew doesn't want to be disturbed with any logical facts, he is telling us a story.

Like Matthew, his story is full of powerful irony.  Though Matthew will quote Old Testament texts repeatedly through the next 25 chapters of his book to prove that Jesus was the messiah, he completely leaves the Jews out of his birth narrative.  No one in the temple was aware of the birth of Jesus, but some foreign astrologers knew about it and they traveled across the wilderness to come bring presents.  Astrologers were anathema to Jews.  Practicing astrology is punishable by death, according to Deuteronomy 17 and yet, Matthew, the most Jewish of New Testament writers, is willing to slap traditional Judaism in the face and insist that gentiles knew about Jesus and his own people didn't.

There is a real message of humility in this.  As Michael Franti sings, "God is too big for just one religion."  Matthew tells us a story of a messiah who comes into the world, embraced by those who seek him but endangered by the both the institutions of religion and government.  The priests are indifferent and Herod tries to kill him, so that Jesus is aided by members of another religion and then is forced to flee as a political refugee.  If you let Matthew tell the story his own way, you see how we Christians are always uneasy around institutional religion, the halls of political power, and we can always look for Jesus among the refugees and the illegal immigrants.

Luke tells his Christmas story with entirely different details but hauntingly similar themes.  For Luke, Jesus is born into poverty and suffers both indignity and rejection by government and religion.

They are forced from their home by an oppressive occupying government and then in Bethlehem, they are not even shown the dignity to be allowed to give birth in doors.  We have all heard all of our lives that there was "no room" in the inn for them but I am inclined to think that Luke had something even more pointed in mind.

Ancient inns did not rent "rooms."  They were not like a Days Inn, after all.  Inns were just big houses largely comprised of a lower floor and an upper room.  Customers just paid to come in and they found a place on the floor among the other guests.  At what point does an inn keeper in the ancient world tell a paying customer, "I don't want any more money"?

It is possible that Luke is suggesting to us that for religious reasons, it was not simply that there was not room inside, it is that there was no room among all those people for Mary and Jesus.  Again, in Jewish tradition, everyone who is in a house when a woman gives birth is defiled and must make an offering.  Perhaps Luke is telling us that Jesus was rejected by formal religion even before he was born..... something that all of us who have been rejected by either family or faith because we were somehow "unclean" in their judgment should be able to appreciate.

Where do we find Jesus in Luke's story?  Out in the barn, among all of the stuff that you know is found in a barn.  And to whom is the divine birth announcement given?  Not to priests or kings but only to shepherds in the field.
We modern Americans tend to romanticize shepherds but don't kid yourselves....being a shepherd was the real night cashier job at Walmart in those days.  Sheep are smelly and stupid and they have to be watched all of the time.  Shepherds didn't get to observe Sabbath and they were always unclean literally or religiously.

That angels appeared to shepherds who were led to a barn where Jesus was born is a statement that you will find Jesus in homeless shelter for runaway teens where some unwed teen-ager just had a baby.  If you let Luke tells his story his way, you can appreciate why Jim Wallis says that no one goes to heaven without three references from homeless people.

The Jesus story is real, and every time we tell it, we bring good news to the poor, we bring hope to those in despair, we shine a light in dark places, promising justice to the oppressed, the refugee, the homeless and the unemployed.  The story of Christmas is not the first corner stone of a new organized religion.  It is a story that begins our story, our story of standing up to governments and churches, of siding with the poor and the oppressed.... Of kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.  Merry Christmas my friends.

How Mary Interprets Her Son's Birth

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
Dec. 18, 2011    Advent 4

Luke 1:46b-55                                      
46And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord, 47and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 49for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 50His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 54He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, 55according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

Sean, Barry and I get together every couple of weeks to look over the outlines of my future sermons.  I usually have a few song suggestions for them to ignore and then they tell me what we're going to do each week.  I've been a pastor for 33 years now, I know not to try to negotiate with either musicians or terrorists.... But I repeat myself.  Seriously, they are both brilliant musicians and some of my suggestions actually do get a little airtime during our services.

But I have to tell you that the Christmas season is a hard time for us.  I regularly remind them that every hymn doesn't have to match the theme of the sermon for the day and sometimes, those of us who grew up in traditional churches just like to sing hymns that we love for nostalgic reasons more than for their theology.

But when it comes to Christmas carols, we sit and read through the lyrics and generally find unanimous consensus that we just can't do it again.  The ones we know the best tend to take the birth narratives very literally on the one hand and they all seem to focus on some kind of incarnational theology that we just can't swallow.

I'm so glad to have Jia Ling here to sing portions of the text Valerie read for us from Luke.  Jia Ling, of course, sang from the Bach version and, pretty much, once Bach has treated a topic all mere mortals keep their hands off of ever trying to do it a different way.

The early church infused the Jesus story with the elements of Greek mystery religions, and insisting that, like the Roman Emperors about whom it was said that they were sired by the gods and that their mothers were virgins, that Jesus was every bit as magical and important if not more so than any Roman myth.  But before the incarnational Christmas carols got a toe hold in the church, they wrote this very first Christmas song and set it on the lips of Mary.

I'll say more about the whole message of the two competing and contradictory birth narratives in the New Testament from Matthew and Luke next week, but this week I want to let the mother of Jesus have a moment at the microphone.

Now, this is not a literal story.  Mary didn't just break out into improvisational song and someone remembered the words 80 years later and wrote it down in Luke's account of the birth.  No, but this is a song written by the church that remembered Mary and set down a theological interpretation of the meaning of Jesus' birth.

Long before there was a "little town of Bethlehem," or "Silent Night," or "Angels we have heard on high," Mary sings a Christmas carol and, if you read it, you see that it is a song of revolution.  It is a song of reversals of power.

When Mary first speaks about this child she will give to the world, she says that he will cause, well, it is there in verses 51 and 52, that he will scatter the proud in the imaginations of their hearts... he with throw the powerful down off their thrones and he will lift up the down trodden.... He will give food to the hungry and send the rich away with nothing.

If Mary actually said that you may see why the early church didn't let women preach!  The Catholic Church put up statues of Mary and praised her for her virginity..... which suggests some really twisted psycho-sexual stuff to me but you can't make me talk about that today.... Unless you buy me lunch.... Cause, honestly, I kinda want to talk about it, just not right now.

This is prophetic preaching.  It is threatening to the people who are in power.  There is nothing about this that should have been perverted into "Joy to the world," because it really talks about a house cleaning!

Some of you know that I will be going back to Nicaragua for a few days next month to visit some of the jungle villages where I have worked in past years among the rural poor.  These are the villages that were the most sorely oppressed during the Somoza years.

Prior to the 20th century Nicaragua was one of the most prosperous nations in Central America, but at the turn of the century our country installed a puppet dictator, Anastasia Somoza.  And a member of his family ruled the nation for the next 50 years, enslaving the rural peasants to work on coffee plantations and banana farms.  He was violent and greedy.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is reported to have said, "Somoza is a real son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch."

And that he was.  But during those years of violent oppression, even the illiterate poor carried with them a copy of the song of Mary..... Ha esparcido a los soberbios en el pensamiento de sus corazones....he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.....Ha quitado a los poderosos de sus tronos....
He has thrown the powerful down off their thrones.

The jungles of Nicaragua is one of the places where liberation theology was born before it was mentioned in American pulpits.  They were poor but they were not stupid.... They understood Mary's Christmas Carol.... They knew what the birth of Jesus really was about.

The practice of carrying it as a sign of hope for the end of Somoza's rule was so common that the dictator required that people in that region carry with them at all times, paper proof that they had voted for Somoza.... The soldiers called it their "magnificat."  The pope tried to crush the liberation theology movement, fearing that it would lead to socialism.... Which, for some reason, the pope found to be more distasteful than a cruel dictatorship.....this might be a long lunch.

The powerful, both in Rome and in Managua, wanted to shut Mary up.  A lot of priests who caught a vision of liberation theology were killed throughout Central America.  The most famous priest and poet of Nicaragua was Ernesto Cardenal.  He managed to escape when a coup against Somoza failed in the 1950's.  Ironically, Cardenal, was living very near my family home when I was born in Kentucky.  He was a student of the famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, at Gethsemane.

But he returned to Nicaragua and rejoined the revolution, creating a community of liberation theology on the island of Solentiname.  He is still alive though he has distanced himself from Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega, but then so has just about everyone else.  He was elected to be a revolutionary but he is just another greedy Central American head of state.

But, you know, my friends, Mary was not the head of a political party.  She didn't want to see one dirty ruler cast down off the throne to be replaced with different flavor of politician.  What she was after was justice and that is what the early church said that Jesus was all about when they composed this first hymn.

So once I get to leave the airport in Managua, and Ortega's government is in the rear view mirror of the jeep and I get back under the shade of banana plants where the coffee bushes grow we will sing Mary's song again, we will remember the real Jesus and we will hope for the day when the hungry are filled and the downtrodden are raised up..... look can't you see that's what Mary's boy always wanted?

The Liberation Theology of Jesus

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
December 11, 2011

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11                
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; 2to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; 3to provide for those who mourn in Zion-- to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.
4They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. 8For I the Lord love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. 9Their descendants shall be known among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom the Lord has blessed.
10I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. 11For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

There are speeches, plays, songs and poems that are so much a part of our culture and our growing up that we only have to say the first three or four words before we all immediately begin to see the setting, the characters or to hear the tune:  Four score and seven years ago..... To be or not to be..... Amazing Grace..... Mine eyes of seen the glory.... Life can be a challenge,...... life can seem impossible, .......it's never easy when there is so much on the line.... You know, from the Pokemon movie, the song Herman Cain quoted in his farewell speech.... Don't we all know the lyrics from the Pokemon movie?  Ok, maybe not.

You get my point.  Every culture in every age has had its most familiar stories, hymns and poems that everyone knows.  You don't have to sing all of the verses of Amazing Grace for anyone who has gone to church over the past 50 years to immediately remember the whole song.

When the gospel writers were telling the story of Jesus, there were points at which they would use just a first line of a familiar quote from the Hebrew Bible in order to suggest the whole passage.  All four gospels talk about Jesus going to his home town and not being accepted by his home congregation but Luke tells us that when he went to his synagogue he was handed  the scroll of Isaiah and Luke tells us that Jesus read the first two verses of Isaiah 61, a very popular piece of prophetic preaching.  The two verses are used in Luke's account by Jesus to tell his family, his cousins, the people he grew up with, just who he had become and what he was going to do.

They had heard that he was a miracle worker and they may have come for a magic show, but what he told them he was going to do was what Isaiah talked about in this passage of scripture.  In those turbulent times, when Israel was a very unpopular vassal state in Rome's empire, there were several Hebrew Bible and later religious works that had become very popular in the frightened and oppressed population of the Jews.

In fact, almost all of the much talked about Dead Sea Scrolls were copies of books written about certain religious prognostications about how they were going to get out of their current mess.  Their expectations, their predictions, their hopes were not at all singular in nature.  There were lots of differing opinions ranging all of the way from the highly unlikely all of the way to the totally insane.

But, if we can take Luke at his word, Jesus chose from among all of those different images of Israel's future and he picked this passage from Isaiah to define himself and how he thought God would go about setting things in the world right.

I'm fond of this book by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer that is provocatively titled "Jesus against Christianity."  As you might guess, his premise is that the Jesus of history would not have approved of the religion that now bears his name.

What Pallmeyer says that really attracted me to his book is that Jesus looked at all of the many different and contradictory images of God both in the Hebrew Bible and in the hundreds of rival books floating around at the time and Jesus chose just one image, one expression of the character of God, one vision of what it meant for him to be the man who represented God to his people and that image was of the prophetic liberator.

We all been treated to the patently absurd summary of the Bible that people who have never read it like to quote, saying that there is a harsh punitive God in the Old Testament and a loving and nurturing God in the New Testament.  That's just not true.  There is loving and nurturing stuff in both testaments and there is no shortage of rather cruel and judgmental stuff in both testaments.

But what Jesus chose to believe in, what he chose to try to be, was this agent of good news, this liberator of the oppressed.  A few weeks ago I talked with you about the canon within the canon and I told you that for me, I take that judgment scene in Matthew 25 as my core understanding of the message of Jesus and I interpret the rest of the gospels out from that point.  I don't take every gospel story as being of equal value and where a text wanders too far from the value of radical compassion expressed in this text then it won't get much attention from me.

Jesus was a Jew.  And he was only one of very many religious leaders in that very troubled time period but there is a reason why his name is remembered and others are not.

The majority voice of the people was expecting something cataclysmic to happen.  They were looking for a religious leader who would destroy the Roman occupation, punish the bad guys and put Jews in charge of the world.  That was the mainstream message.  The message of Jesus is remembered because it was not the mainstream message.  His was the alternative message.  He picked a canon within the Jewish canon of books and scriptures that was articulated by the prophet Isaiah.

Paul, who never met Jesus and never heard him teach, had a lot to say about Jesus.  The early church, created a religion around the name of Jesus that was, to be honest, a blending of Jewish scriptures with a bit of the teaching of Jesus and a very large portion of the mystery religions that flourished in the Empire at that time.  But that is what the early church said about Jesus, but what did Jesus say about himself?  How did he define himself?  What was his canon within the canon?  What kind of religious figure did he see himself as being?

And if we are going to let the man speak for himself for just a minute, we have to let go of all the stuff we have been told..... all of the gold plated, heaven and hell, super-theistic stuff we have been told and stop for a moment and hear what Jesus had to say, using the words of Isaiah, about himself:

Please look at the Hebrew Bible lesson printed in your bulletin.... Look at Isaiah 61, verse 1:  He says that he is called by God to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to liberate captives and release prisoners.
Now a real religious person would tell you that Jesus came to liberate you from bondage to sin, and to heal your sinful heart, and to release you from the captivity of hell where you are held prisoner by the devil.  You have been told that.... I've been told that.... The church told us that.... In some ways, Paul told us that.... But look at the text.  Jesus didn't say that.  Jesus didn't mean that.  I think, and call me a rebel on this one, but I think he meant what he said.

There is no army of angels coming down from heaven in this text.  There is no apocalyptical battle against a beast.  There is no heaven or hell.... In fact, there is no divine intervention.  Because bringing good news to the oppressed involves you and be working to end oppression.  We are the ones who work to bind up the people who are in pain.  We work to liberate captives and release prisoners.

In very 4 he says that he is going to lead us into rebuilding ancient ruins, to pull blighted neighborhoods out of their devastation.  And why is this what Jesus wants to do?  Look at verse 8, because God loves justice, and hates the way the people have been robbed and mistreated.  Don't let a religious sounding phrase like "I will faithfully give them their recompense" slip past you because it sounds like Sunday School talk.  What is recompense?  It means getting paid fairly... it means paying people what they are owed.

Jesus was talking about a heavenly kingdom that would descend out of the clouds and make everything right..... even though that is exactly what a lot of the people around him were saying.  The vision of Isaiah, the vision that Jesus chose to use to define himself, was the building of a nation defined by justice and mercy and that is a domain that is created by one act of compassion after another, one just, fair, decent decision after another.
It doesn't descend from the clouds, it comes out of your hands.... It comes out of your heart, your decisions, your labor.

Remember we talked a few weeks ago about how the Hebrew words for "justice" and "righteousness" mean the same thing.  When the prophet says that God will clothe him in a robe of righteousness, you can see that as a nation enfolded in justice.

And so that prayer we have said so many times in church, the one that says, "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."  That part about doing God's will on earth is just this... because God loves justice and hates the robbery of the people and God's will is that you and I get busy bringing good news to the oppressed, liberation to the captives, comfort to the broken hearted and release to the prisoners and that, is what it means to be a Christian.

Now I know that's not they way we were taught.  I'm just saying that this is what Jesus said about himself..... if you think you know better, I can only encourage you to take it up with him.  But in the choice between the religion I inherited and the message of Jesus, then I'm gonna go with Jesus on this one.

Living the Good Life to Become the Good Person

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
Springfield, MO
Dec. 4, 2011

"Living the Good Life to Become the Good Person"   A sermon based on sayings of Confucius



When people ask you, "Why do you go to church?" I would love to be a fly on the wall to hear your answers.  Unlike Fundamentalists or Catholics or most Evangelicals, we do not believe that there is an angry or punitive God who is so ego deficit that the divine self sits enthroned in the clouds, hungry for our adoration and praise, pillorying heaven with prayers and sacrifices.  I doubt that many of you have any concern about either being cast into the fires of hell or designing a heavenly mansion.  So why are you here?

I suspect that most of us have found that we can be improved.  That is, we can be better people, have deeper character and we can live more compassionately and meaningfully if we participate in a spiritual community, expose ourselves to moral deliberation, education and direction, and if we work collectively towards those things which we believe make the world a better place and make us better people.

And if you said that in the middle of an Evangelical conference you might well be told that you are not really Christian, or maybe that you are not even religious.... You might be called a Humanist because your spiritual concern is not with satisfying a supernatural deity but in reshaping yourself to reflect the values you believe to be holy, pure, good and commendable.

Of course, the greater likelihood is that none of you would participate in that conversation in the first place because we have learned not to care very much about how other people criticize us or try to categorize us.

But if we did, we might find ourselves in the middle of the same debate western religious people have had about Confucianism for the past millennium. Most scholars tend to say that Confucianism is not a religion because they do not have a theistic world view, even though they do have temples, rituals, a written text, sacrifices and a certain worship of the spirits of Confucius and other great teachers.
And, I suppose that you can say that they have hymns since our closing hymn today is comprised of sayings of Confucius.

Jesuits who first went to Japan declared that Confucianism is a philosophy and not a religion which gave them permission to not go on a crazy rampage burning books and tearing down temples like they did in other places.  Confucianism as a system of ethics was deemed to be compatible with Catholicism as it has been seen as a supportive partner by many Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.

But when it comes to typical religious themes, Confucius neither denied nor confirmed religious speculation.  In eastern thought, worship of or veneration of the spirits of deceased relatives is the most common expression of spirituality but when Chi-lu asked him exactly what is due to the ghosts of the dead. The master replied, "We fail in our duty to the living; can we do our duty to the dead?"

I know that it frustrates some of my more traditional religious friends but it doesn't make much sense to me to talk about what cannot be known.  If there is life beyond our mortal bodies we surely don't have any information to go on to build a belief system around it.  When Confucius was asked directly about death, he said        "We know not life, how can we know death?"

That is not to say that we know that there is nothing, just that we do not know.
Confucius taught that we should focus on being a person of character in the here and now without obsessing about a life we do not and cannot know anything about.  I am always reminded of Sören Kierkegaard's comment that there are things that are true when they are whispered that become false when they are shouted.  Humility and reality dictate that all sincere people of faith spend their time and energy doing a better job embodying our philosophy and practicing our faith where we are today and leave what cannot be known in the hands of God.... Or, the universe, as Confucius might say it.

I really cannot emphasize this enough.  The general impression people seem to have that religion exists to guarantee their adherents a cushy place in eternity is absolutely misleading and, in the end, really very foolish.  Religion is not about life after death..... it is about meaningful living right now and into tomorrow..... that time line may go on for eternity but the truth is we don't know that we'll live until the next sale at Joseph A. Banks.

If you believe that repeating certain creeds or reciting certain magical incantations will send you to heaven then I've got some e-mails from a Nigerian Princess with a lot of money to send to America that's really going to excit you!

I was talking with a recent visitor to our church right after our team had served lunch to the homeless people we care for at Bill's Place on Thursday.  As we talked about how our church tries to practice our faith, I said, "I just handed out 70 turkey sandwiches to homeless people.... Do you think they would have preferred that we just gather and pray for them?"  Of course, the guys I know want the sandwich but for me, and I suspect for many of you, handing out the sandwich is a form of prayer.  As the African proverb goes, "when you pray, move your feet."
In that I think we share a spirituality with Confucian thought that teaches a kind of inward virtue that expresses itself in social virtue and civic virtue.  If you read Confucius, you will be surprised by how often he speaks of being a gentleman but what he means by that is to become a person of character, embodying honesty, civility and avoiding hypocrisy.

He said:  "I hate those who mistake spying for wisdom. I hate those who take want of deference for courage. I hate evil speaking, cloaked as honesty."  He expected people to live in such a way that they treated one another with sincere respect.

Asian culture emphasizes courtesy but Confucius wanted it to be more than just polite deference.  He wanted it to be real.  He said:  "A man of worth can always talk, but talkers are not always men of worth."

Like Jesus, Confucius eschewed personal wealth and made fun of people who pretended to be scholars or political leaders just to make money.  He said, "Living on coarse rice and water, with bent arm for pillow, mirth may be ours; but ill-gotten wealth and honors are to me a wandering cloud."  Which is to say, that if you learn how to live comfortably in poverty you don't have to sell your soul to bet a better living.

If I may be allowed to skip around the continents for a moment to quote a
Greek philosopher who was a contemporary of Confucius, Diogenes was visited
by another teacher, Aristippus as Diogenes was making a dinner of lentils. He
said, "If you could but learn to flatter the king, you would not have to live on
lentils."

Diogenes said, "And if you could learn to live on lentils, you would not have to
flatter the king."

Confucius was concerned with sincerity of motive.  He once said that "I have
met no one who loves the good as much as they love women."  .... Which is a
tad personal I suppose but we know what he means.  A great deal of the
hypocrisy in religion that has been disappointing to us is wrapped up in the
pretense of piety without the more substantial foundation of actually wanting to
do the right thing.

There are those who insist that Confucianism is not a religion because he does
not give lessons on eternal life, heaven and hell, and a supernatural theism but I
think that we are more likely to keep company with the likes of Confucius and
Buddha when it comes to those issues and as best I can tell, so would Jesus.

I believe that the challenge for the emerging church of the future is to be willing to boldly separate ourselves from the religious habits and practices that turn God into a divine Santa Claus in the clouds and reduce the teachings of Jesus to a kind of super spiritual ranting that is all about an unseen other world, ignoring the very real issues of our present existence.

We are not a flat-earth society engaging in magical rituals.  We move our feet when we pray.  Our most vital sacraments involve working to end poverty, to restore the earth and to create peace among nations, among families and within ourselves.

Confucius was concerned about individual character, meaningful civilization and the alleviation of suffering.... so was Buddha and so was Jesus.... And shouldn't that be what we are about as well.  And so, we keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.