Sunday, March 4, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
From Reality to Ritual and Back Again
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
February 26, 2012 Lent 1
When you adopt a child, there are certain moments of bonding that stand out in your mind. It isn't the filling out of forms and all the legal mess of adoption.... It is the moments of mutual understanding and connection.
I remember that 2 a.m. feeding when I held her in my lap in the moonlight and she took her sweet time finishing the bottle she had so urgently demanded as if she had to eat at that moment or face a sudden death. But she lingered over her formula as we looked at one another. And when she had finally finished, she reached up and touched my cheek, and in a moment of deep recognition, she said her first word, "Mum-mum." It was OK, I knew what she meant.
At the time of her birth I was very committed to eating a healthy diet. There was no red meat, no fried foods and no sweets in our house. But one day, when we were on our way to my family home in Kentucky, we stopped for breakfast in a little truck stop dinner, and in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to order the kind of breakfast I had grown up with.... Salt cured country ham, grits, biscuits and eggs.
I didn't expect her to like the hard, chewy salt cured ham which most people tell me has the taste of meat that has already spoiled, but from the first bite, she was an immediate convert.
She loved it and I was forced to exchange my breakfast for her bowl of oat meal as she discovered that my ethnic food was now also her ethnic food, doing more to seal the official adoption than anything that had happened at the court house.
We now keep a supply of country ham in our home. We don't eat it often but now and then, when you need to remember who you are, where you are from, what your roots are, we get some out of the freezer and fry it up, sometimes making those side dishes like "red eye gravy" which is nothing but ham fat with a little hot water added but ladled over grits, a biscuit and scrambled eggs can take you back to the old Ray farm in southern Kentucky where we are from.
Some literalists have challenged Valerie's penchant for an ethnic food that is not Asian but she patiently points out to them that she is from "South" Korea.... So she is a southerner at heart.
But truth be told, men and women, while our country ham meals are good for our souls, they are not all that good for our hearts. Realistically, no one should ever eat salt cured pork, but it is a part of our definition of who we are.
When salt cured ham found its way into the lives of my ancestors, there was no refrigeration, there was no freezer. We slaughtered hogs in the winter and cured the meat through the winter and though it grew a layer of mold on the outside, the salt preserved the meat on the inside for two or three years and so it was a part of what it took to survive during the pre-electricity years on the farm.
We don't need to salt cure meat to preserve it anymore but we do it sometimes as a kind of ritual of remembering. It has symbolic value that is greater than its nutritional hazard.
You know, most religious rituals have very practical beginnings. The kosher dietary restrictions of the Hebrew Bible made sense to the culture and time in which they were originated. The rules about agriculture and apparel served to preserve the Jewish people as an identifiable group in the mix of cultures in the ancient world and the ritual and dietary habits forged in a Palestinian wilderness helped to preserve their sense of belonging to that specific tribe of people.
For us, as progressive Christians, it is sometimes hard to tell when we need to preserve a tradition that has outlived its original purpose and when we need to uproot it because it has become unhealthy.
On this Sunday which, according to the liturgical calendar, is the first Sunday of Lent, the gospel lesson always repeats one of the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus. The season of Lent has functioned for many centuries as a time when people who were preparing to be baptized would spend time in personal reflection, penance and prayer to get them ready for the momentous moment when they are baptized.
We've never put any emphasis on baptism in our church. We have baptized an infant by sprinkling when asked to do so by the family and we've done an adult baptism by immersion when asked to do so, but we've never implied that anyone was either required to participate in this ritual or even encouraged to do so.
In the days before the Christian era, baptism had evolved as a kind of symbolic bath... it was a part of the rituals involved in converting to Judaism and certainly preferable to circumcision..... trust me on this one. John the Baptist appears to have been a part of the Essene movement which took baptism to the extreme of being a bath that Essenes may have observed as often as five times a day, believing that their personal cleanliness and spiritual purity, would hasten the coming of God's apocalypse.
Baptism was reinterpreted in the early church to be a ritual participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus.... a kind of sacramental re-birth. Unfortunately, it moved from being an affirming ritual into being invested with magical importance and if you didn't have that magical ritual your imaginary soul might be sent to an imaginary place of eternal torment.... Proving once again that organized religion can turn anything good into something absolutely neurotic and destructive. Let the people say, "Amen."
Many things that make perfectly good sense can become ritualized and institutionalized in a way that turns them into a meaningless religious burden and that is the sort of thing that we've been trying hard to get rid of in the emerging church. Some things we hold onto just because they are reflections of a tradition we love, the tradition through which we came to inherit a spiritual life. Most of those things are reinterpreted, to be sure, but we do not despise our own roots.
Baptism, Lent, the whole notion of penitence is suspect among progressives. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we were not the only progressive church in America that still has a prayer of confession in our liturgy every week.
I'm pretty sure that we're the only Progressive church in America that has a Gregorian psalm chant at the beginning of each worship service and we're one of the few that makes communion a weekly observance. But we are trying to affirm our roots when we can do so meaningfully, and simultaneously refusing to pass on that which is simply superstitious, neurotic or magical.
So, when it comes to something like baptism, you are not going to catch me mounting an argument either way. If the symbol is meaningful to you then I am all for it but if it is not, then I'm not going to expend any breath or energy defending it.
However, what it represents is, in my opinion, the real meat of the issue. The presumption that there is something in us that needs to be cleaned up... the suggestion that we need to die to an old way of living in order to be resurrected to a new way of living.... I'm not willing to give that up.
It seems evident to me that we all come into the world screaming and we're not screaming about unemployment, racism, environmental pollution or an unfair distribution of wealth. We come into the world screaming when we are unhappy. We naturally scream when we are hungry, tired, bored or wet. The problem is that a lot of what passes for human debate about politics is just not that different from the screams coming from the nursery at 2 a.m. The sound of a baby wanting a bottle and a rich person wanting a tax cut are made of the same primordial stuff.
To embrace a spiritual life is, in many ways, to do what the Buddha called "giving up the illusion of our separation from one another."
The spiritual life is unnatural in that it asks you to stop thinking about your own comfort, when you are hungry, bored, tired or wet and it asks you to grow in compassion, being able to feel the kind of wet a homeless person feels when it rains and their tent can't keep the water out of their bedding.
On Thursdays and Fridays when we take food to the homeless at Bill's Place, most of the time we have sandwiches wrapped up for them to take away with them for later. In our minds, the "take away" sandwiches are for their supper, or, even better, for them to give to someone they encounter who is hungry. But I'm going to estimate that 9 out of 10 of those sandwiches are eaten while they can still see our tail lights going down Commercial Street because, for the genuinely poor, there is no tonight.... There is not later.... They live in the moment.... A moment when they have no idea whether or not they will have a "later" and so we feed them a big hot meal and we give them a sandwich for later and they eat it as soon as they can get it down because their world is that uncertain. That's the kind of hunger that we who are well fed should scream about!
Because I am baptized, I no longer want to waste my breath screaming about how I want to be in a bigger house or drive a newer car or wear nicer clothes..... I want to scream about children living in cars.... I want to scream about the unemployed and the uninsured being denied the basic necessities of life.
I want to scream about Payday Loan shops making a profit off of the desperation of the poor. I want to scream about men in state legislatures wanting to stick electronic devices into the bodies of women who have come asking for an abortion just to humiliate them and hurt them some more.
I want to scream about using our military might to keep gasoline cheap while we sit back and watch tens of thousands die in a tortured Syrian genocide. I don't know that I need to baptize everyone in the world, but I know that I live in a world that is full of sin and darkness and the concept of repentance is not an antique ready for the trash heap.
During the dark days of apartheid in South Africa, Alan Boesak said to white church goers, "On judgment day you will stand before the Lord and he will ask you, 'Where are your scars?' And we will answer, 'We have none.' And he will ask us, 'Did you find nothing worth fighting for?'"
Men and women, if you are not shouting about the evil in our age, then you must not be paying attention because we have a lot that is worth fighting for.
Roger Ray, pastor
February 26, 2012 Lent 1
Mark1:9-15
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." 12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
14Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
When you adopt a child, there are certain moments of bonding that stand out in your mind. It isn't the filling out of forms and all the legal mess of adoption.... It is the moments of mutual understanding and connection.
I remember that 2 a.m. feeding when I held her in my lap in the moonlight and she took her sweet time finishing the bottle she had so urgently demanded as if she had to eat at that moment or face a sudden death. But she lingered over her formula as we looked at one another. And when she had finally finished, she reached up and touched my cheek, and in a moment of deep recognition, she said her first word, "Mum-mum." It was OK, I knew what she meant.
At the time of her birth I was very committed to eating a healthy diet. There was no red meat, no fried foods and no sweets in our house. But one day, when we were on our way to my family home in Kentucky, we stopped for breakfast in a little truck stop dinner, and in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to order the kind of breakfast I had grown up with.... Salt cured country ham, grits, biscuits and eggs.
I didn't expect her to like the hard, chewy salt cured ham which most people tell me has the taste of meat that has already spoiled, but from the first bite, she was an immediate convert.
She loved it and I was forced to exchange my breakfast for her bowl of oat meal as she discovered that my ethnic food was now also her ethnic food, doing more to seal the official adoption than anything that had happened at the court house.
We now keep a supply of country ham in our home. We don't eat it often but now and then, when you need to remember who you are, where you are from, what your roots are, we get some out of the freezer and fry it up, sometimes making those side dishes like "red eye gravy" which is nothing but ham fat with a little hot water added but ladled over grits, a biscuit and scrambled eggs can take you back to the old Ray farm in southern Kentucky where we are from.
Some literalists have challenged Valerie's penchant for an ethnic food that is not Asian but she patiently points out to them that she is from "South" Korea.... So she is a southerner at heart.
But truth be told, men and women, while our country ham meals are good for our souls, they are not all that good for our hearts. Realistically, no one should ever eat salt cured pork, but it is a part of our definition of who we are.
When salt cured ham found its way into the lives of my ancestors, there was no refrigeration, there was no freezer. We slaughtered hogs in the winter and cured the meat through the winter and though it grew a layer of mold on the outside, the salt preserved the meat on the inside for two or three years and so it was a part of what it took to survive during the pre-electricity years on the farm.
We don't need to salt cure meat to preserve it anymore but we do it sometimes as a kind of ritual of remembering. It has symbolic value that is greater than its nutritional hazard.
You know, most religious rituals have very practical beginnings. The kosher dietary restrictions of the Hebrew Bible made sense to the culture and time in which they were originated. The rules about agriculture and apparel served to preserve the Jewish people as an identifiable group in the mix of cultures in the ancient world and the ritual and dietary habits forged in a Palestinian wilderness helped to preserve their sense of belonging to that specific tribe of people.
For us, as progressive Christians, it is sometimes hard to tell when we need to preserve a tradition that has outlived its original purpose and when we need to uproot it because it has become unhealthy.
On this Sunday which, according to the liturgical calendar, is the first Sunday of Lent, the gospel lesson always repeats one of the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus. The season of Lent has functioned for many centuries as a time when people who were preparing to be baptized would spend time in personal reflection, penance and prayer to get them ready for the momentous moment when they are baptized.
We've never put any emphasis on baptism in our church. We have baptized an infant by sprinkling when asked to do so by the family and we've done an adult baptism by immersion when asked to do so, but we've never implied that anyone was either required to participate in this ritual or even encouraged to do so.
In the days before the Christian era, baptism had evolved as a kind of symbolic bath... it was a part of the rituals involved in converting to Judaism and certainly preferable to circumcision..... trust me on this one. John the Baptist appears to have been a part of the Essene movement which took baptism to the extreme of being a bath that Essenes may have observed as often as five times a day, believing that their personal cleanliness and spiritual purity, would hasten the coming of God's apocalypse.
Baptism was reinterpreted in the early church to be a ritual participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus.... a kind of sacramental re-birth. Unfortunately, it moved from being an affirming ritual into being invested with magical importance and if you didn't have that magical ritual your imaginary soul might be sent to an imaginary place of eternal torment.... Proving once again that organized religion can turn anything good into something absolutely neurotic and destructive. Let the people say, "Amen."
Many things that make perfectly good sense can become ritualized and institutionalized in a way that turns them into a meaningless religious burden and that is the sort of thing that we've been trying hard to get rid of in the emerging church. Some things we hold onto just because they are reflections of a tradition we love, the tradition through which we came to inherit a spiritual life. Most of those things are reinterpreted, to be sure, but we do not despise our own roots.
Baptism, Lent, the whole notion of penitence is suspect among progressives. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we were not the only progressive church in America that still has a prayer of confession in our liturgy every week.
I'm pretty sure that we're the only Progressive church in America that has a Gregorian psalm chant at the beginning of each worship service and we're one of the few that makes communion a weekly observance. But we are trying to affirm our roots when we can do so meaningfully, and simultaneously refusing to pass on that which is simply superstitious, neurotic or magical.
So, when it comes to something like baptism, you are not going to catch me mounting an argument either way. If the symbol is meaningful to you then I am all for it but if it is not, then I'm not going to expend any breath or energy defending it.
However, what it represents is, in my opinion, the real meat of the issue. The presumption that there is something in us that needs to be cleaned up... the suggestion that we need to die to an old way of living in order to be resurrected to a new way of living.... I'm not willing to give that up.
It seems evident to me that we all come into the world screaming and we're not screaming about unemployment, racism, environmental pollution or an unfair distribution of wealth. We come into the world screaming when we are unhappy. We naturally scream when we are hungry, tired, bored or wet. The problem is that a lot of what passes for human debate about politics is just not that different from the screams coming from the nursery at 2 a.m. The sound of a baby wanting a bottle and a rich person wanting a tax cut are made of the same primordial stuff.
To embrace a spiritual life is, in many ways, to do what the Buddha called "giving up the illusion of our separation from one another."
The spiritual life is unnatural in that it asks you to stop thinking about your own comfort, when you are hungry, bored, tired or wet and it asks you to grow in compassion, being able to feel the kind of wet a homeless person feels when it rains and their tent can't keep the water out of their bedding.
On Thursdays and Fridays when we take food to the homeless at Bill's Place, most of the time we have sandwiches wrapped up for them to take away with them for later. In our minds, the "take away" sandwiches are for their supper, or, even better, for them to give to someone they encounter who is hungry. But I'm going to estimate that 9 out of 10 of those sandwiches are eaten while they can still see our tail lights going down Commercial Street because, for the genuinely poor, there is no tonight.... There is not later.... They live in the moment.... A moment when they have no idea whether or not they will have a "later" and so we feed them a big hot meal and we give them a sandwich for later and they eat it as soon as they can get it down because their world is that uncertain. That's the kind of hunger that we who are well fed should scream about!
Because I am baptized, I no longer want to waste my breath screaming about how I want to be in a bigger house or drive a newer car or wear nicer clothes..... I want to scream about children living in cars.... I want to scream about the unemployed and the uninsured being denied the basic necessities of life.
I want to scream about Payday Loan shops making a profit off of the desperation of the poor. I want to scream about men in state legislatures wanting to stick electronic devices into the bodies of women who have come asking for an abortion just to humiliate them and hurt them some more.
I want to scream about using our military might to keep gasoline cheap while we sit back and watch tens of thousands die in a tortured Syrian genocide. I don't know that I need to baptize everyone in the world, but I know that I live in a world that is full of sin and darkness and the concept of repentance is not an antique ready for the trash heap.
During the dark days of apartheid in South Africa, Alan Boesak said to white church goers, "On judgment day you will stand before the Lord and he will ask you, 'Where are your scars?' And we will answer, 'We have none.' And he will ask us, 'Did you find nothing worth fighting for?'"
Men and women, if you are not shouting about the evil in our age, then you must not be paying attention because we have a lot that is worth fighting for.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
A Priesthood Frat Party
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
February 19, 2012
I did not know the story line of Les Miserable when I first went to see it in a theater in Louisville. When the main character, Jean Valjean, was taken into the home of a Catholic Bishop, Myriel, I felt myself tense up. When, in the play, Jean Valjean steals the bishop's silverware and is almost immediately caught by police and brought back to the Bishop's home, I felt a knot in my stomach. I was prepared for the worst. I expected Bishop Myriel to demand that Jean Valjean be returned to prison or perhaps executed because every time a minister, priest or religious official shows up in a TV show, a movie or a play, they are portrayed in one of two ways: Either they are complete idiots or, worse, they are morally bankrupt frauds.
I was the most surprised patron in the theater when the Bishop quickly insists to the police that the silverware had been a gift and he scolds Jean Valjean for forgetting the two silver candelabras, which were the most valuable part of the gift. There was no punch line, no joke, no manipulation. In fact, the Bishop insisted that Valjean keep the candelabras and use the proceeds to turn himself into an honest man.
People often seem to be thrilled to have the opportunity to think ill of the clergy. And, I can tell you that with 32 years of experience as a pastor, you can never be right enough to satisfy everyone.... Something about you will appear to by hypocritical to someone who is determined to either point out the speck in your eye or put one there if they can.
So, let me be quick to acknowledge, with everything that I am about to say, that I recognize that it is not accident that I'm standing up here behind the pulpit. I am a pastor. I think that I am pretty different from most pastors but, for whatever I am going to say, that band of priests and preachers, of pastors and religion professors..... I am one them and I share in their faults.
Which puts me in a rather uncomfortable spot when we turn to this passage from Isaiah that is printed in your bulletin today. This passage does not show up in the common lectionary. Unless you have a minister who is willing to go off the rails a bit, this text is never read in a Sunday morning worship service in a Catholic Church, or a Presbyterian, Methodist, Disciple, UCC, Lutheran, Episcopal or Orthodox church.... And, since it doesn't show up in the preaching cycle, my suspicion is that most pastors will have never read it, and it is just as well, I suppose, became it would make them madder than.... Well, we're talking about ministers so I guess we can say, "Madder than hell."
But, the prophet Isaiah is clearly in no mood to try to play nice and just try to get along with all of the religious leaders.... You know, how you often want me to be when I go to clergy meetings.... We want everyone to be sweet and even when we disagree we respect one another's right to be.... A jerk.... Isaiah starts off by telling them that they are just a bunch of drunks, verse 7:
And then Isaiah leaves the drunken fraternity party and turns to another image, he says, in verse 9 and following:
Do you baptize by immersion or by sprinkling? Do you take communion every week or just once a quarter? Does your pastor wear a clerical collar or a t-shirt? Do you believe that you have to invite Jesus into your heart to be saved or do you believe that you have to speak in tongues too? Do you confess the Apostle's Creed or is it just believing that Jesus died for your sins?
Is it necessary to believe in the trinity, incarnation, sacraments and clergy?
Isaiah would look at the church of our day, at the gathering of priests and pastors, .....oh, can't you see the scene? Can't you hear him saying, "Your religion is childish, insulting, it reeks like vomit.... You have taken the world changing message of peace and justice.... Of radical compassion, of fighting against the violence of poverty, prejudice and racism and you have turned it into baby prattle.... Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line.....And so the prophet says to us just as he said to the priests in the Jerusalem temple 2500 years ago:
And, if we could ask Isaiah about that, he would probably say, "Good!" It may be that the institutional church, particularly the main stream denominational churches will have to die in order for real faith to be reborn.
I say that with some fear and trepidation as we are having all of these meetings to talk about expanding, about trying to grow and add classrooms because, even though we have had a very successful start, we should be aware that all churches in America today are being built over an open grave and it would take very little to fall into the tomb..... if we abandon the message of liberation and compassion and just go all religious.... Teaching precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, then we too will deserve to be buried and I would gladly sing at the funeral.
We either have the courage and faith to keep kicking at the darkness or we should turn off the lights. You have heard me say it before and you will likely hear me quote Leon Bloy again, "Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."
We need to quit trying to get people to be believers and we all need to start being followers.... Disciples of that famous liberator whom we sometimes call Buddha, or Confucius or Moses but whom we mostly call Jesus.
Roger Ray, pastor
February 19, 2012
Isaiah 28:1-3, 7-13
I did not know the story line of Les Miserable when I first went to see it in a theater in Louisville. When the main character, Jean Valjean, was taken into the home of a Catholic Bishop, Myriel, I felt myself tense up. When, in the play, Jean Valjean steals the bishop's silverware and is almost immediately caught by police and brought back to the Bishop's home, I felt a knot in my stomach. I was prepared for the worst. I expected Bishop Myriel to demand that Jean Valjean be returned to prison or perhaps executed because every time a minister, priest or religious official shows up in a TV show, a movie or a play, they are portrayed in one of two ways: Either they are complete idiots or, worse, they are morally bankrupt frauds.
I was the most surprised patron in the theater when the Bishop quickly insists to the police that the silverware had been a gift and he scolds Jean Valjean for forgetting the two silver candelabras, which were the most valuable part of the gift. There was no punch line, no joke, no manipulation. In fact, the Bishop insisted that Valjean keep the candelabras and use the proceeds to turn himself into an honest man.
People often seem to be thrilled to have the opportunity to think ill of the clergy. And, I can tell you that with 32 years of experience as a pastor, you can never be right enough to satisfy everyone.... Something about you will appear to by hypocritical to someone who is determined to either point out the speck in your eye or put one there if they can.
So, let me be quick to acknowledge, with everything that I am about to say, that I recognize that it is not accident that I'm standing up here behind the pulpit. I am a pastor. I think that I am pretty different from most pastors but, for whatever I am going to say, that band of priests and preachers, of pastors and religion professors..... I am one them and I share in their faults.
Which puts me in a rather uncomfortable spot when we turn to this passage from Isaiah that is printed in your bulletin today. This passage does not show up in the common lectionary. Unless you have a minister who is willing to go off the rails a bit, this text is never read in a Sunday morning worship service in a Catholic Church, or a Presbyterian, Methodist, Disciple, UCC, Lutheran, Episcopal or Orthodox church.... And, since it doesn't show up in the preaching cycle, my suspicion is that most pastors will have never read it, and it is just as well, I suppose, became it would make them madder than.... Well, we're talking about ministers so I guess we can say, "Madder than hell."
But, the prophet Isaiah is clearly in no mood to try to play nice and just try to get along with all of the religious leaders.... You know, how you often want me to be when I go to clergy meetings.... We want everyone to be sweet and even when we disagree we respect one another's right to be.... A jerk.... Isaiah starts off by telling them that they are just a bunch of drunks, verse 7:
7These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment. 8All tables are covered with filthy vomit; no place is clean.Of course, he's not being literal. It isn't that they are just drinking all of the time, it is that they are acting stupid, stupid as if their brains were pickled.... Their sermons, their teaching, their guidance, Isaiah says, is like vomit.
And then Isaiah leaves the drunken fraternity party and turns to another image, he says, in verse 9 and following:
9"Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from milk, those taken from the breast? 10For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little."Isaiah is, on the surface of it, chiding them for having reduced religious life to a bunch of rules, beliefs, rituals that are useless and childish. But Hebrew scholars say that there is a bit more to his use of language. Where he says that their religion is just "precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little" in Hebrew, that sounds like a baby's prattle.... "cov la cov, cov la cov, sav la sav, sav la sav, sier shom, sier shom."
Do you baptize by immersion or by sprinkling? Do you take communion every week or just once a quarter? Does your pastor wear a clerical collar or a t-shirt? Do you believe that you have to invite Jesus into your heart to be saved or do you believe that you have to speak in tongues too? Do you confess the Apostle's Creed or is it just believing that Jesus died for your sins?
Is it necessary to believe in the trinity, incarnation, sacraments and clergy?
Isaiah would look at the church of our day, at the gathering of priests and pastors, .....oh, can't you see the scene? Can't you hear him saying, "Your religion is childish, insulting, it reeks like vomit.... You have taken the world changing message of peace and justice.... Of radical compassion, of fighting against the violence of poverty, prejudice and racism and you have turned it into baby prattle.... Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line.....And so the prophet says to us just as he said to the priests in the Jerusalem temple 2500 years ago:
11Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12to whom he has said, "This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose"; yet they would not hear.This is what you were told.... Give relief to the weary... and we have turned it into a religion of beliefs. And so the prophet concludes, about them and about us:
13Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them, "Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little;" in order that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.In an article published in the Huffington Post this week, Diana Butler Bass summarized her new book that is entitled, "The End of Church." She notes that a mere generation ago, half of all Americans were in church on a Sunday morning. Now that number is down by half. One out of ten Americans now describe themselves as being a "former Catholic" and even as mega churches arise within the conservative wing of religion, their total numbers are plummeting. The majority of churches in America have fewer than 40 people in their Sunday morning service each week.
And, if we could ask Isaiah about that, he would probably say, "Good!" It may be that the institutional church, particularly the main stream denominational churches will have to die in order for real faith to be reborn.
I say that with some fear and trepidation as we are having all of these meetings to talk about expanding, about trying to grow and add classrooms because, even though we have had a very successful start, we should be aware that all churches in America today are being built over an open grave and it would take very little to fall into the tomb..... if we abandon the message of liberation and compassion and just go all religious.... Teaching precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, then we too will deserve to be buried and I would gladly sing at the funeral.
We either have the courage and faith to keep kicking at the darkness or we should turn off the lights. You have heard me say it before and you will likely hear me quote Leon Bloy again, "Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."
We need to quit trying to get people to be believers and we all need to start being followers.... Disciples of that famous liberator whom we sometimes call Buddha, or Confucius or Moses but whom we mostly call Jesus.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Never Ending Battle with Addiction, Appetite and Id
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 12, 2012 Epiphany 6
Every holiday season you hear someone sweating the challenge of "what do you get for someone who already has everything?" It always sends a bit of a shudder down my spine for what that question says about our society..... why on earth would anyone feel the slightest motivation to give a gift to someone who is already bury in material things?
I can tell you from experience; it is much harder to know what to give to someone who has almost nothing at all. For many years of my life I was a friend to the Trappist community at the Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky. Brother Luke was a particularly close friend who was so important to me that I felt that I always had to give him something on special occasions. Luke keeps two changes of clothing, a few photographs, a few books and almost nothing else. He is allowed, by the order, to have a few personal possessions and sometimes he would indulge himself in some sort of personal stereo.... That he liked to call a "walk monk" or a camera but after enjoying that personal item for a while he would always give it to someone else because he didn't want to be distracted from his primary job which is to pray and to serve his faith community.
Perennially skinny, Luke stays pretty cold from September to May so one Christmas I bought him a couple of pairs of really heavy thermal sox because Trappist monks are the only people in America who should be allowed to wear sox with sandals. I remember the day he opened the package and the look on his face was suddenly a look of crisis. I had hit a homerun, of sorts. The thick wool sox were exactly what he would love to wear but, as he explained later, he already had two pairs of socks and so he felt that it would be best to give them to someone else.
In movies and in a lot of literature, monastic communities are often portrayed as being filled with sick masochists who like to beat themselves with whips and impose painful penance on themselves and others. This is a gross misrepresentation of monastic discipline on the scale of pointing to Timothy McVeigh as an example of MidWestern Christianity.
In our epistle lesson today, Paul uses the terribly unfortunate choice of words to express this sense of personal discipline by saying: I beat my body to become its master. Sadly, history is full of examples of people who took that sentence way too literally. But what he was saying was that he disciplined himself to keep from being run over by his appetites.
One of the desert fathers from the ancient Alexandrian tradition explained his practice this way: He said, "If you never take your fill of bread, you do not long for meat and if you never take your fill of water, you do not lust for wine."
The life of a monk, either in ancient Alexandria or in modern day Kentucky, will seem to be absurdly severe to most of us.... Not only beyond our reach but beyond anything we would even desire. But the merit of their example can only be understood when you look at the opposite extreme.
The news is full of disgusting examples of outrageous bonuses paid to investment bankers and greedy insider trading on the part of corporate bosses and elected officials. It is easy to point to the excesses of the fabulously rich and you all know that I have written and said a great deal about economic injustice in the division of our nation into a privileged class and a permanently poor class.
But, seriously, we don't need to devote all of our attention to the 1% whose personal habits are not under our control. Every person in this room and within the sound of my voice has a dark, greedy, pleasure seeking and pain avoiding part of your character that Freud called the "id." It is a part of us, whether we are a greedy Wall Street banker, a third world dictator or a pope or a prophet. What seems to me to be the greater spiritual issue is how each and every one of us addresses our own id, our appetites.
Seeing Brother Luke stand and sweat about a decision about whether it would be morally wrong for him to own 4 pairs of socks or not, makes me have to wonder about personal choices of my own..... should I cook at home or eat out again? Should I buy a used car or get a new one? Should I join a gym or just discipline myself to walk more and exercise at home?
As our economy has languished in a nearly imperceptible recovery, a lot of Americans have had to tighten the belt and have learned that living on their credit cards in the assumption that they will have more money next year than they have this year is not at all necessarily true. Many young people get themselves into huge difficulty by not being able to say "no" to their appetites at all.... Buying impulsively, scratching every itch, trying to satisfy every desire, until they become imprisoned by debt.
Debt, as one commentator put it recently, is the new slavery. As we were shocked by the news of Whitney Huston's death yesterday, though I do not want to jump to conclusions, we are all aware of how her drug addictions had ruined her beautiful and talented life and probably cut her life on this earth in half. Addiction is the saddest and most wasteful example of how our appetites can turn on us and consume us.
As most of you know I've been working for the past several months to lose some weight and it is a fascinating topic about which everyone on earth has advice to give.....most of unsolicited and a great deal of it entirely wrong.
But we want to believe that there is an easy way to be slender and healthy.... Just take these pills, sprinkle this on your food.... Television is full of ads for some exercise equipment that will get you into a super model's physic in just twenty minutes three times a week.
It is all lies. There is nothing you can do for 20 minutes three times a week and end up with the kind of cut body they show on those ads unless you are getting lipo suction for 20 minutes, three times a week. And there is nothing you can take that will kill your appetite and leave you feeling energized except for certain controlled substances which come with lengthy prison sentences and lots of the obvious down sides of addiction.
Here is the one and only honest secret to losing weight and it is very simple.... It is the ability to be hungry and to choose to not eat. Sure, it helps to avoid fried food, sugars and fats.... Exercise is very helpful.... Some foods are better than others but it comes right down to being able to say "no" to your appetite....
To be hungry and to choose not to eat. Look, just eating salads will not do it..... I don't want to be the first one to point this out to you but fat people eat salads.... I personally think that salads are delicious but let me just remind you that all that cows, hippopotami and elephants eat are green leafy vegetables. The fattest animals on earth eat nothing but salad with no dressing.
But we live in the capital of all-you-can eat buffets.....men and women, no one should ever eat all they can eat! But the buffet becomes a symbol for our bloated society that can never tell when they have had enough. We stand over buffets of steaming fried foods like Gollum caressing the magic ring in the Lord of the Rings, "precious, my precious, it's ours it is and we wants it."
We have made fun of prudish, puritanical religion that tries to make you feel guilty about ever indulging in anything and I do despise that absurd, human hating, neurotic guilt that makes you feel bad about every aspect of being human but I'm here to tell you that anything you cannot say "no" to is, in fact, your slave master.
There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with moderate alcohol consumption.... In fact, there can be a great deal said in favor of moderate alcohol consumption, especially when someone else is buying. The problem is that so many people cannot drink just moderately and addiction then becomes their prison warden.
Beer and liquor commercials always associate drinking with happy, sexy people but let me let you in on some mathematical facts, and this is from a recent policy paper published by the AMA: it is estimated that 3 out of every 5 drinks purchased in bars and restaurants are purchased by alcoholics.
If the beer and distilled spirits industries were making their money off of moderate drinkers almost all of them would go out of business. Addicts drive the market.... Advertising just masks the addiction. One of every ten cars on the road is being driven by someone who is intoxicated.
Even cigarette smoking wouldn't be a bad thing if people could limit themselves to one a week but the sorry fact is that no one does.... It is a product which, when used as directed, kills the consumer. The inability to say no to our appetites for drugs, alcohol, sex, tobacco, wealth, power.... This is what drove religious people to the extremism of using fear and guilt to drive the monster of appetite back into the cave though guilt and fear become their own toxins in short order.
What we need to control appetites whose aim is to enslave us is not a sick religion to counter a sick addiction. What we need is a healthy spirituality that empowers us, teaches us the discipline of being able to say "no" to our appetites. Not to beat ourselves into submission but to be willing to endure the pain of wanting something that we do not buy in order to be able to give to someone else..... to be able to resist eating everything we can hold, so that we can share our bread with the less fortunate.
While I am certainly not afraid to be critical of Paul, in this case, I believe that he has gotten a bad rap. I think what he is telling us is, in fact, very similar to the four noble truths of Buddhism. The four foundational truths that the Buddha taught to his followers are:
1) Life is full of suffering.
2) Our suffering comes from our attachment to and our desire for things
3) The solution to suffering is to empty ourselves of desire or appetite
4) The path to a life free of suffering is the gradual growth of a life of spiritual character.
In that, I believe that American Christians have a lot to learn from Buddhism. The pathway to a good life is the path of letting go of being controlled by, enslaved to, our appetites.
Our religion is not based on superstition, mythology or lies, nor is it based on guilt, fear or neurotic self loathing. The best short hand explanation I know of is to say simply, "Love is our religion."
Love of others calls us to lead lives of self sacrifice so that others may have enough to eat, a safe place in which to take shelter and a hope for the future. Love of self calls us to a life of devotion to the truth and an absolute refusal to be enslaved to debt, be it to Pay Day Loan shops or credit cards.... We will not surrender our freedom to addiction, gluttony or greed nor will we stand idly by while our sisters and brothers are tricked or forced into bondage.
Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 12, 2012 Epiphany 6
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.
Every holiday season you hear someone sweating the challenge of "what do you get for someone who already has everything?" It always sends a bit of a shudder down my spine for what that question says about our society..... why on earth would anyone feel the slightest motivation to give a gift to someone who is already bury in material things?
I can tell you from experience; it is much harder to know what to give to someone who has almost nothing at all. For many years of my life I was a friend to the Trappist community at the Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky. Brother Luke was a particularly close friend who was so important to me that I felt that I always had to give him something on special occasions. Luke keeps two changes of clothing, a few photographs, a few books and almost nothing else. He is allowed, by the order, to have a few personal possessions and sometimes he would indulge himself in some sort of personal stereo.... That he liked to call a "walk monk" or a camera but after enjoying that personal item for a while he would always give it to someone else because he didn't want to be distracted from his primary job which is to pray and to serve his faith community.
Perennially skinny, Luke stays pretty cold from September to May so one Christmas I bought him a couple of pairs of really heavy thermal sox because Trappist monks are the only people in America who should be allowed to wear sox with sandals. I remember the day he opened the package and the look on his face was suddenly a look of crisis. I had hit a homerun, of sorts. The thick wool sox were exactly what he would love to wear but, as he explained later, he already had two pairs of socks and so he felt that it would be best to give them to someone else.
In movies and in a lot of literature, monastic communities are often portrayed as being filled with sick masochists who like to beat themselves with whips and impose painful penance on themselves and others. This is a gross misrepresentation of monastic discipline on the scale of pointing to Timothy McVeigh as an example of MidWestern Christianity.
In our epistle lesson today, Paul uses the terribly unfortunate choice of words to express this sense of personal discipline by saying: I beat my body to become its master. Sadly, history is full of examples of people who took that sentence way too literally. But what he was saying was that he disciplined himself to keep from being run over by his appetites.
One of the desert fathers from the ancient Alexandrian tradition explained his practice this way: He said, "If you never take your fill of bread, you do not long for meat and if you never take your fill of water, you do not lust for wine."
The life of a monk, either in ancient Alexandria or in modern day Kentucky, will seem to be absurdly severe to most of us.... Not only beyond our reach but beyond anything we would even desire. But the merit of their example can only be understood when you look at the opposite extreme.
The news is full of disgusting examples of outrageous bonuses paid to investment bankers and greedy insider trading on the part of corporate bosses and elected officials. It is easy to point to the excesses of the fabulously rich and you all know that I have written and said a great deal about economic injustice in the division of our nation into a privileged class and a permanently poor class.
But, seriously, we don't need to devote all of our attention to the 1% whose personal habits are not under our control. Every person in this room and within the sound of my voice has a dark, greedy, pleasure seeking and pain avoiding part of your character that Freud called the "id." It is a part of us, whether we are a greedy Wall Street banker, a third world dictator or a pope or a prophet. What seems to me to be the greater spiritual issue is how each and every one of us addresses our own id, our appetites.
Seeing Brother Luke stand and sweat about a decision about whether it would be morally wrong for him to own 4 pairs of socks or not, makes me have to wonder about personal choices of my own..... should I cook at home or eat out again? Should I buy a used car or get a new one? Should I join a gym or just discipline myself to walk more and exercise at home?
As our economy has languished in a nearly imperceptible recovery, a lot of Americans have had to tighten the belt and have learned that living on their credit cards in the assumption that they will have more money next year than they have this year is not at all necessarily true. Many young people get themselves into huge difficulty by not being able to say "no" to their appetites at all.... Buying impulsively, scratching every itch, trying to satisfy every desire, until they become imprisoned by debt.
Debt, as one commentator put it recently, is the new slavery. As we were shocked by the news of Whitney Huston's death yesterday, though I do not want to jump to conclusions, we are all aware of how her drug addictions had ruined her beautiful and talented life and probably cut her life on this earth in half. Addiction is the saddest and most wasteful example of how our appetites can turn on us and consume us.
As most of you know I've been working for the past several months to lose some weight and it is a fascinating topic about which everyone on earth has advice to give.....most of unsolicited and a great deal of it entirely wrong.
But we want to believe that there is an easy way to be slender and healthy.... Just take these pills, sprinkle this on your food.... Television is full of ads for some exercise equipment that will get you into a super model's physic in just twenty minutes three times a week.
It is all lies. There is nothing you can do for 20 minutes three times a week and end up with the kind of cut body they show on those ads unless you are getting lipo suction for 20 minutes, three times a week. And there is nothing you can take that will kill your appetite and leave you feeling energized except for certain controlled substances which come with lengthy prison sentences and lots of the obvious down sides of addiction.
Here is the one and only honest secret to losing weight and it is very simple.... It is the ability to be hungry and to choose to not eat. Sure, it helps to avoid fried food, sugars and fats.... Exercise is very helpful.... Some foods are better than others but it comes right down to being able to say "no" to your appetite....
To be hungry and to choose not to eat. Look, just eating salads will not do it..... I don't want to be the first one to point this out to you but fat people eat salads.... I personally think that salads are delicious but let me just remind you that all that cows, hippopotami and elephants eat are green leafy vegetables. The fattest animals on earth eat nothing but salad with no dressing.
But we live in the capital of all-you-can eat buffets.....men and women, no one should ever eat all they can eat! But the buffet becomes a symbol for our bloated society that can never tell when they have had enough. We stand over buffets of steaming fried foods like Gollum caressing the magic ring in the Lord of the Rings, "precious, my precious, it's ours it is and we wants it."
We have made fun of prudish, puritanical religion that tries to make you feel guilty about ever indulging in anything and I do despise that absurd, human hating, neurotic guilt that makes you feel bad about every aspect of being human but I'm here to tell you that anything you cannot say "no" to is, in fact, your slave master.
There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with moderate alcohol consumption.... In fact, there can be a great deal said in favor of moderate alcohol consumption, especially when someone else is buying. The problem is that so many people cannot drink just moderately and addiction then becomes their prison warden.
Beer and liquor commercials always associate drinking with happy, sexy people but let me let you in on some mathematical facts, and this is from a recent policy paper published by the AMA: it is estimated that 3 out of every 5 drinks purchased in bars and restaurants are purchased by alcoholics.
If the beer and distilled spirits industries were making their money off of moderate drinkers almost all of them would go out of business. Addicts drive the market.... Advertising just masks the addiction. One of every ten cars on the road is being driven by someone who is intoxicated.
Even cigarette smoking wouldn't be a bad thing if people could limit themselves to one a week but the sorry fact is that no one does.... It is a product which, when used as directed, kills the consumer. The inability to say no to our appetites for drugs, alcohol, sex, tobacco, wealth, power.... This is what drove religious people to the extremism of using fear and guilt to drive the monster of appetite back into the cave though guilt and fear become their own toxins in short order.
What we need to control appetites whose aim is to enslave us is not a sick religion to counter a sick addiction. What we need is a healthy spirituality that empowers us, teaches us the discipline of being able to say "no" to our appetites. Not to beat ourselves into submission but to be willing to endure the pain of wanting something that we do not buy in order to be able to give to someone else..... to be able to resist eating everything we can hold, so that we can share our bread with the less fortunate.
While I am certainly not afraid to be critical of Paul, in this case, I believe that he has gotten a bad rap. I think what he is telling us is, in fact, very similar to the four noble truths of Buddhism. The four foundational truths that the Buddha taught to his followers are:
1) Life is full of suffering.
2) Our suffering comes from our attachment to and our desire for things
3) The solution to suffering is to empty ourselves of desire or appetite
4) The path to a life free of suffering is the gradual growth of a life of spiritual character.
In that, I believe that American Christians have a lot to learn from Buddhism. The pathway to a good life is the path of letting go of being controlled by, enslaved to, our appetites.
Our religion is not based on superstition, mythology or lies, nor is it based on guilt, fear or neurotic self loathing. The best short hand explanation I know of is to say simply, "Love is our religion."
Love of others calls us to lead lives of self sacrifice so that others may have enough to eat, a safe place in which to take shelter and a hope for the future. Love of self calls us to a life of devotion to the truth and an absolute refusal to be enslaved to debt, be it to Pay Day Loan shops or credit cards.... We will not surrender our freedom to addiction, gluttony or greed nor will we stand idly by while our sisters and brothers are tricked or forced into bondage.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Healing Miracles and What they Mean to Us
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
February 4, 2012 Epiphany 5
I visited a young couple in the waiting area right outside of the neo-natal intensive care unit at Cox Hospital several years ago. They were both ordained ministers, both were Harvard educated people who professed a very progressive and academic faith but they were in a crisis. The woman had given birth to their first child and there had been complications. They had spent nearly a month in that waiting room, seeing their infant son only for a few minutes a day.
As the days had past, any hope of the child's survival slowly evaporated and they young parents were left to wait for that inevitable event that is, in anyone's eyes, the saddest thing anyone on earth ever has to endure. I offered to pray with them, as I always do in such circumstances, and Micki began to weep softly.
You know, we are the kind of people who have set aside magical views of prayer. We do not believe that the Creator of the Universe sits enthroned in the heavens waiting for our supplications like a great Santa Clause in the clouds. We pray but we believe that prayer changes the one who prays and not the one to whom we address our prayers.
But Micki said, "You know, I thought I was so far past praying for miracles but I find in these days, that I cannot help myself." And so, that's what we did.... We prayed for a miracle because that was what was really in our hearts, even though we know that the universe really doesn't work that way.
That's not to say that miracles don't happen, nor would I limit the Almighty's ability to get into history and mix it up a bit with us but I do not believe that God needs either information or guidance from us. Their baby did die. The couple grieved for a couple of years before they decided to try again and they now have two very healthy children, though, of course, a dozen children would not replace the one that they lost..... surely we can all understand that nothing ever does.
So religious people often talk about miracles, hope for miracles, we pray for miracles and we defend the miracles recorded in our holy scriptures. And most of us have experienced what we call miracles..... a cancer that seemed lethal goes away for no medically explainable reason. Someone survives an accident that seemed too impossible to believe. I've seen my life flashing before my eyes in a couple of out of control automobile skids on ice that ended with the car right side up and even pointed in the right direction without a collision.
And so, sometimes, in spite of our relatively good grades in math, our experience in analysis and logic, we'll buy a lottery ticket and then spend a few moments putting our rational faith on the shelf while we dust off our superstitious faith and begin to pray like Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof,
"Oh, dear Lord! You made many, many poor people. I realize, of course it's no shame to be poor. But it's no great honor either.. So what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune.......Lord, who made the lion and the lamb, You decreed I should be what I am Would it spoil some vast eternal plan If I were a wealthy man?
But for the most part, those of us within progressive faith traditions just get a little nervous when the scripture reading recounts a healing miracle.... Maybe even a little embarrassed. The biblical critics of the early 20th century recounted healing miracles from other religions of the time. Most famously, we know of a contemporary of Jesus who was a traveling Neo-Pythagorian philosopher and teacher in Cappadocia known as Apollonius of Tyana, about whom there are healing accounts that are eerily nearly identical to gospel accounts about Jesus.
It was argued that gospel writers had to recount such healing events to give Jesus credibility in the ancient world. And, to an extent, that is probably true, as are a number of other honorific accolades in scripture intended to encourage faith in Jesus. But I think we would be mistaken to consign every miracle account to the category of literary embellishment.
There were healers in the ancient world and, believe it or not, I think there is reason to accept that they did successfully heal some people. The lines between our mind, our bodies and our spirits which we so often assume to be rather firm boundaries are, in my experience, rather porous.
When I was a young college student I had a particularly bad time with very painful plantar warts on the bottoms of my feet. I was attending Western Kentucky University which is built on a steep hill that required a great deal of walking and so I was regularly going to the doctor to have these painful viral warts cut off, or burned off with electricity or acid.
No matter what the doctor tried, the bad warts always returned and he eventually said to me, "Roger, if you are ever going to be free of these things you are going to have to believe that they won't come back." To which my father replied, "You tell the doctor to keep sending me a bill until he believes that it has been paid."
But, like it or not, there does seem to be a connection between mental health and physical health and there is a world of research to indicate that a healthy spirituality can contribute to both mental and physical health. In that sense, I, along with Marcus Borg and many other modern scholars, are unafraid to say that the historical Jesus was a preacher, a teacher and that he was also an exorcist and a healer.
But I want to go a bit farther with the topic because it seems clear to me that the gospels do not simply give us miracle accounts to bolster Jesus' credentials or to preserve a record of a few wonderful events. The New Testament tends to use the Greek words for "miracle," and "sign," and "wonder," fairly interchangeably. The miracles recorded in the gospels were not simply good news to frightened or grieving people nor were they just religious credentials for an important prophet.
The primary preaching theme of Jesus had to do with the Kingdom, the reign of God.... Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In that sense, I believe, and if I believe it, wouldn't it be polite of you to at least try to entertain the idea, that the miracles were signs of the Kingdom.
The gospels don't try to tell us that Jesus healed every sick person in Palestine.... He didn't cast out all of the demons, he certainly didn't raise everyone who died.... But the accounts recorded in the gospels are like sermons, they are like parables, they serve to give evidence, to teach what the Kingdom is to be like.
The real meaning of the word "salvation" in the New Testament, has nothing to do with going to heaven when you die.... I don't want to disappoint anyone but that is a meaning we brought to the word much later. The word means, "to be made whole." So when Jesus heals a blind man, he says, "Go, your faith has saved you," just like he says to the woman of ill repute who has been crying on his feet, "Go, your faith has saved you."
The woman's bad reputation cut her off from community and meaningful living. A blind man cannot work and support a family, cutting him off from community and meaningful living. In the Kingdom, people don't get tossed to the curb.... People aren't left out. The sick are not told to go get a job and insurance and try to come back before the cancer kills you..... as if a sick person can get a job or insurance.
I wish I could reach into every Sunday School class and Bible study and put a stop to the perpetuation of this notion that the miracles are tests of faith... you either have to make yourself believe in the impossible or your faith isn't strong enough.... Not believing in miracle accounts doesn't mean that you have weak faith, it means you have a strong orientation to reality, which is a good think in almost every case unless you are running for public office.... For that you need to be able to believe in myths and lies but for church, we're good with a commitment to reality around here.
Folks, hear me out on this, the miracles are not magical accounts to tell you what Jesus could do.... They are signs pointing the way towards what you can do.
You help the Kingdom to come. You are God's hands and feet.... You make it happen. As Alexander Campbell said, to get down on your knees and pray for something that you are not willing to then stand up and work and sacrifice to make happen is just a disappointment to yourself and an insult to God.
We will not save every sick baby, but if we try, if we work for it, if we demand it from our nation, if we are willing to sacrifice for it, we can heal most of them. We can't spit in the dirt and rub mud on someone's eyes to heal blindness but I will tell you this: I will be going to Nicaragua next month where lots of children are blinded due to malnutrition.... I will see children who are being carried or lead around by the hand because no one in their village has $600 to pay for the cataract surgery necessary to restore that child to community.... To save them... to make it possible for them to learn to read and write, to play with their friends, to marry and to have children of their own. I've not only seen it happen, I've paid for it to happen. And you can too.... It just depends on whether or not you are willing to meaningfully believe in miracles or if you just want to talk about magic. It's your choice..... but I tell you this, the Kingdom is not coming down from heaven, it is among you.
Roger Ray, pastor
February 4, 2012 Epiphany 5
Mark 1:29-39
29As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. 30Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. 31He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
32That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 35In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." 38He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." 39And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.
I visited a young couple in the waiting area right outside of the neo-natal intensive care unit at Cox Hospital several years ago. They were both ordained ministers, both were Harvard educated people who professed a very progressive and academic faith but they were in a crisis. The woman had given birth to their first child and there had been complications. They had spent nearly a month in that waiting room, seeing their infant son only for a few minutes a day.
As the days had past, any hope of the child's survival slowly evaporated and they young parents were left to wait for that inevitable event that is, in anyone's eyes, the saddest thing anyone on earth ever has to endure. I offered to pray with them, as I always do in such circumstances, and Micki began to weep softly.
You know, we are the kind of people who have set aside magical views of prayer. We do not believe that the Creator of the Universe sits enthroned in the heavens waiting for our supplications like a great Santa Clause in the clouds. We pray but we believe that prayer changes the one who prays and not the one to whom we address our prayers.
But Micki said, "You know, I thought I was so far past praying for miracles but I find in these days, that I cannot help myself." And so, that's what we did.... We prayed for a miracle because that was what was really in our hearts, even though we know that the universe really doesn't work that way.
That's not to say that miracles don't happen, nor would I limit the Almighty's ability to get into history and mix it up a bit with us but I do not believe that God needs either information or guidance from us. Their baby did die. The couple grieved for a couple of years before they decided to try again and they now have two very healthy children, though, of course, a dozen children would not replace the one that they lost..... surely we can all understand that nothing ever does.
So religious people often talk about miracles, hope for miracles, we pray for miracles and we defend the miracles recorded in our holy scriptures. And most of us have experienced what we call miracles..... a cancer that seemed lethal goes away for no medically explainable reason. Someone survives an accident that seemed too impossible to believe. I've seen my life flashing before my eyes in a couple of out of control automobile skids on ice that ended with the car right side up and even pointed in the right direction without a collision.
And so, sometimes, in spite of our relatively good grades in math, our experience in analysis and logic, we'll buy a lottery ticket and then spend a few moments putting our rational faith on the shelf while we dust off our superstitious faith and begin to pray like Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof,
"Oh, dear Lord! You made many, many poor people. I realize, of course it's no shame to be poor. But it's no great honor either.. So what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune.......Lord, who made the lion and the lamb, You decreed I should be what I am Would it spoil some vast eternal plan If I were a wealthy man?
But for the most part, those of us within progressive faith traditions just get a little nervous when the scripture reading recounts a healing miracle.... Maybe even a little embarrassed. The biblical critics of the early 20th century recounted healing miracles from other religions of the time. Most famously, we know of a contemporary of Jesus who was a traveling Neo-Pythagorian philosopher and teacher in Cappadocia known as Apollonius of Tyana, about whom there are healing accounts that are eerily nearly identical to gospel accounts about Jesus.
It was argued that gospel writers had to recount such healing events to give Jesus credibility in the ancient world. And, to an extent, that is probably true, as are a number of other honorific accolades in scripture intended to encourage faith in Jesus. But I think we would be mistaken to consign every miracle account to the category of literary embellishment.
There were healers in the ancient world and, believe it or not, I think there is reason to accept that they did successfully heal some people. The lines between our mind, our bodies and our spirits which we so often assume to be rather firm boundaries are, in my experience, rather porous.
When I was a young college student I had a particularly bad time with very painful plantar warts on the bottoms of my feet. I was attending Western Kentucky University which is built on a steep hill that required a great deal of walking and so I was regularly going to the doctor to have these painful viral warts cut off, or burned off with electricity or acid.
No matter what the doctor tried, the bad warts always returned and he eventually said to me, "Roger, if you are ever going to be free of these things you are going to have to believe that they won't come back." To which my father replied, "You tell the doctor to keep sending me a bill until he believes that it has been paid."
But, like it or not, there does seem to be a connection between mental health and physical health and there is a world of research to indicate that a healthy spirituality can contribute to both mental and physical health. In that sense, I, along with Marcus Borg and many other modern scholars, are unafraid to say that the historical Jesus was a preacher, a teacher and that he was also an exorcist and a healer.
But I want to go a bit farther with the topic because it seems clear to me that the gospels do not simply give us miracle accounts to bolster Jesus' credentials or to preserve a record of a few wonderful events. The New Testament tends to use the Greek words for "miracle," and "sign," and "wonder," fairly interchangeably. The miracles recorded in the gospels were not simply good news to frightened or grieving people nor were they just religious credentials for an important prophet.
The primary preaching theme of Jesus had to do with the Kingdom, the reign of God.... Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In that sense, I believe, and if I believe it, wouldn't it be polite of you to at least try to entertain the idea, that the miracles were signs of the Kingdom.
The gospels don't try to tell us that Jesus healed every sick person in Palestine.... He didn't cast out all of the demons, he certainly didn't raise everyone who died.... But the accounts recorded in the gospels are like sermons, they are like parables, they serve to give evidence, to teach what the Kingdom is to be like.
The real meaning of the word "salvation" in the New Testament, has nothing to do with going to heaven when you die.... I don't want to disappoint anyone but that is a meaning we brought to the word much later. The word means, "to be made whole." So when Jesus heals a blind man, he says, "Go, your faith has saved you," just like he says to the woman of ill repute who has been crying on his feet, "Go, your faith has saved you."
The woman's bad reputation cut her off from community and meaningful living. A blind man cannot work and support a family, cutting him off from community and meaningful living. In the Kingdom, people don't get tossed to the curb.... People aren't left out. The sick are not told to go get a job and insurance and try to come back before the cancer kills you..... as if a sick person can get a job or insurance.
I wish I could reach into every Sunday School class and Bible study and put a stop to the perpetuation of this notion that the miracles are tests of faith... you either have to make yourself believe in the impossible or your faith isn't strong enough.... Not believing in miracle accounts doesn't mean that you have weak faith, it means you have a strong orientation to reality, which is a good think in almost every case unless you are running for public office.... For that you need to be able to believe in myths and lies but for church, we're good with a commitment to reality around here.
Folks, hear me out on this, the miracles are not magical accounts to tell you what Jesus could do.... They are signs pointing the way towards what you can do.
You help the Kingdom to come. You are God's hands and feet.... You make it happen. As Alexander Campbell said, to get down on your knees and pray for something that you are not willing to then stand up and work and sacrifice to make happen is just a disappointment to yourself and an insult to God.
We will not save every sick baby, but if we try, if we work for it, if we demand it from our nation, if we are willing to sacrifice for it, we can heal most of them. We can't spit in the dirt and rub mud on someone's eyes to heal blindness but I will tell you this: I will be going to Nicaragua next month where lots of children are blinded due to malnutrition.... I will see children who are being carried or lead around by the hand because no one in their village has $600 to pay for the cataract surgery necessary to restore that child to community.... To save them... to make it possible for them to learn to read and write, to play with their friends, to marry and to have children of their own. I've not only seen it happen, I've paid for it to happen. And you can too.... It just depends on whether or not you are willing to meaningfully believe in miracles or if you just want to talk about magic. It's your choice..... but I tell you this, the Kingdom is not coming down from heaven, it is among you.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Toxic Religion
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
January 29, 2012 Epiphany 4
A woman limped into my church office one day when I was a graduate student serving a little county seat congregation in southern Kentucky. She had been to see me a few times but this time she looked much worse than ever before. She had survived a brutal beating. She had a broken nose and broken ribs, she limped from having been repeatedly kicked. She was a nurse in the local hospital and had told them too many times in the past that she had fallen down the stairs and so this time she feared going in for treatment because if the emergency room doctor called the police she might lose her job and if she lost her job, she was sure her husband would kill her.
I begged her to let me call an attorney, to take out a restraining order, to file for divorce. She shook her head and wept.... She couldn't. You see, she was a Catholic.... She had been a nun and she left her convent twenty years ago to marry the man who was now her abuser. She had been to see her priest before she came to see me.
He had told her that this was happening because she had broken her vow and that now these beatings were her cross to bear. I knew Father Tom. I knew him to be a kind and sincere man. But I could also hear him saying those words..... a vow to God is a vow that is not broken without severe consequences.
I can name Catholic priests, monks, professors and authors all day long who are wonderful, insightful, spiritual people.... I'm not trying to tar the Catholic Church with a single brush but neither am I willing to white wash the offenses because of the good on the other side of the scales. If you can't tell the truth in church, then where can you?
Earlier this month, Aaron Anson wrote an article for the Huffington Post about his struggles with coming out to his family. He says, "My cousin was a teenager when my family first learned he was gay, and you would have thought an airplane had crashed in our backyard. The malicious, bigoted religious rhetoric that ensued stunk to the heavens. I'm certain it contributed to my remaining closeted for the next 20 years. When I finally did come out, you would have believed Jesus himself had shown up in the backyard that time. Their rhetoric was condescending, venomous, and loaded with ill intent."
He writes about the "It gets better" initiative which is now more than two years old, in which celebrities and other adults post articles and videos to reassure young people who are being bullied and harassed to help prevent the epidemic of teen gay suicide. Of course, there are also examples of people who have posted reassuring videos who later decided that it didn't get better and they have also taken their own lives.
Anson is making the point that a lot of the anti-bullying effort is aimed at public schools and colleges where peer abuse makes young gays feel that they will never ever be accepted but the fact is that the most vicious, the most damaging bullying doesn't come from school or peers..... it comes from church and family.
It's hard to accurately talk about numbers because I believe that many teen suicides are not reported as suicides and the ones that are, are often reported in a way to allow the family to pretend that they have no idea why their son or daughter took their own life because they would not be willing to admit to the abuse they had dished out themselves and to the derision to which they had subjected them in Sunday School and church. Because, it shouldn't matter to us if it was 1 suicide or 1,000 suicides and, frankly, of the 4 to 5 thousand people who take their own life in America every year, no one knows how many of them are the direct result of sick religion but I suspect that most of us would guess that more than half bear the marks of religious persecution.
In the biblical text we read this morning, Paul is imploring the members of the church in Corinth to get along with one another even though they will not all agree on everything. Now, you have to understand that getting a letter from Paul telling you to be more understanding of one another's differences of opinion would be a little like getting a phone call from Charlie Sheen asking you to reign your behavior in a little bit.
There is a tension here that I simply must beg you to take very seriously. On the one hand it is incumbent upon those of us who insist upon being open minded, unjudging, compassionate and accepting.
It is not too strong a statement to say that the survival of the world is dependent upon people being willing to let other nations, other peoples, and sometimes our immediate neighbors to have different religious, political, economic and family values and beliefs.
However, you cannot say that religious beliefs that tell battered women to remain in a marriage where they know they will be abused.... You cannot defend someone's right to believe differently if they are using their beliefs to drive teenagers, and sometimes the teenagers under their own roof, to commit suicide. You cannot say that the religions that have defended slavery, child labor, sexual and gender oppression are mere matters of opinion.
If you need to believe that the Noah's ark story is literal history.... If you insist that Moses really did divide the Red Sea.... If you insist that a snake talked to Eve and a donkey talked to Balaam, and a fish swallowed Jonah.... As much as that kind of talk offends the religion professor in me, we have to say, "Go ahead."
But when you quote the gospels to say, "the poor will always be with you" to justify not trying to fight poverty, or if you quote Paul saying that women should be subject to men and should keep quiet in public, or if you insist that the Levitical injunction to stone gay men is something you must do..... then I have to call "foul."
It is far too simplistic, far too dangerous, there have been way too many deaths, and too many destroyed lives to say that we have to respect and honor whatever someone decides to call their religious values.
There is sick religion and there is healthy religion and we must not be afraid to make that distinction and depending upon the severity of the illness, we may need to make that distinction very forcefully. I do not know if the woman that I told about a few minutes ago managed to get out of that family alive but I know that I didn't do her any favors by respect her priest's pious Catholic views..... I shouldn't have just tried to talk her into believing differently.... I should have walked the two blocks down the hill in Russellville, KY and gone into the manse at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and said to my colleague and friend, "Father Tom, we have to talk."
If we are too timid to confront religion that has a body count of victims then, my friends, we are too timid. Progressive Christians, of all people, cannot justify any compulsion to stand idly by and pretend that abuse is not happening in the name of being polite.
As Karen Armstrong says in her autobiography, "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."
I asked Paul to come sing Ziggy Marley's song, "Love is my religion," today.... My apologies to our YouTube viewers.... We can't legally include the song in our recording but you can look it up yourselves.
His simple lyrics declare that after searching for meaning in the religions and Bibles of the world, he had reached this one conclusion: Love is my religion.
He says, "I don't condemn and I don't convert cause no one is gonna lose their soul."
Madeleine Albright wrote a book a few years ago entitled "The Mighty and the Almighty," in which she carefully talks about the ways in which Jews, Christians and Muslims have allowed their religious differences to repeatedly draw the world into violence and war but she emphasizes that these same religions also contain within them the cure for war and violence. Faith can heal the world, faith can be the basis for compassion and peace. Albright says that we must encourage the angelic tendencies in each nation, in each religion, to reinforce that which is healthy even when we cannot always do surgery to simply remove that which is malignant.
When the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about letting one another disagree on matters of personal preference, he spoke from the background of someone who came from a toxic faith.... Paul had been a man who had been willing to use the law to imprison and use his religion to justify murder of people who had, in his opinion, perverted his religion.
Most of us here would not be happy to hear that someone had followed us around with a video camera 25 and 30 years ago and were ready to play clips such as what we see in political attack ads these days. We are not unfamiliar with toxic faith, poisoned family values, and nationalism driven by misinformation, racism and fear. We have simply decided that we want to be better than that....
We don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past... we want to emerge into something better.
I think that Millard Fuller had the right idea when he tried to get Catholic and Protestant, Fundamentalist and Main Stream churches to come together to build Habitat for Humanity houses. Fuller called it, "the theology of the hammer." You don't have to agree on doctrine, sacraments or what happens to you when you die; you just pick up a hammer and help build a house for a homeless poor family.
We should try whenever it is possible, to find common ground with all other religions and every flavor of Christian. We should work with them to fight poverty, support civil rights, promote justice and defend the weak, but we should never be afraid to speak clearly about our belief that liberation theology is the obvious conclusion for anyone whose religion is love.
I believe that we should be more gracious towards our critics and those on the opposite end of the theological spectrum than they are towards us, but as I have said before, peace in the absence of justice is just surrender and people of faith should never consider surrender an option.
I have been told that the French Foreign Legion had a motto that went something like, "If I falter, push me. If I stumble, help me up. If I retreat, shoot me." That may be a little strong for church folk but really, what possible excuse do we ever have to turn our backs on the victims of abuse no matter what religious excuses may be used. May God do this and more also if we ever fail to be heroic in the face of injustice.
Roger Ray, pastor
January 29, 2012 Epiphany 4
I Corinthians 8:1-9
Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that "all of us possess knowledge." Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; 3but anyone who loves God is known by him.
4Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that "no idol in the world really exists," and that "there is no God but one." 5Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth--as in fact there are many gods and many lords-- 6yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
7It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. 8"Food will not bring us close to God." We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. 9But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.
A woman limped into my church office one day when I was a graduate student serving a little county seat congregation in southern Kentucky. She had been to see me a few times but this time she looked much worse than ever before. She had survived a brutal beating. She had a broken nose and broken ribs, she limped from having been repeatedly kicked. She was a nurse in the local hospital and had told them too many times in the past that she had fallen down the stairs and so this time she feared going in for treatment because if the emergency room doctor called the police she might lose her job and if she lost her job, she was sure her husband would kill her.
I begged her to let me call an attorney, to take out a restraining order, to file for divorce. She shook her head and wept.... She couldn't. You see, she was a Catholic.... She had been a nun and she left her convent twenty years ago to marry the man who was now her abuser. She had been to see her priest before she came to see me.
He had told her that this was happening because she had broken her vow and that now these beatings were her cross to bear. I knew Father Tom. I knew him to be a kind and sincere man. But I could also hear him saying those words..... a vow to God is a vow that is not broken without severe consequences.
I can name Catholic priests, monks, professors and authors all day long who are wonderful, insightful, spiritual people.... I'm not trying to tar the Catholic Church with a single brush but neither am I willing to white wash the offenses because of the good on the other side of the scales. If you can't tell the truth in church, then where can you?
Earlier this month, Aaron Anson wrote an article for the Huffington Post about his struggles with coming out to his family. He says, "My cousin was a teenager when my family first learned he was gay, and you would have thought an airplane had crashed in our backyard. The malicious, bigoted religious rhetoric that ensued stunk to the heavens. I'm certain it contributed to my remaining closeted for the next 20 years. When I finally did come out, you would have believed Jesus himself had shown up in the backyard that time. Their rhetoric was condescending, venomous, and loaded with ill intent."
He writes about the "It gets better" initiative which is now more than two years old, in which celebrities and other adults post articles and videos to reassure young people who are being bullied and harassed to help prevent the epidemic of teen gay suicide. Of course, there are also examples of people who have posted reassuring videos who later decided that it didn't get better and they have also taken their own lives.
Anson is making the point that a lot of the anti-bullying effort is aimed at public schools and colleges where peer abuse makes young gays feel that they will never ever be accepted but the fact is that the most vicious, the most damaging bullying doesn't come from school or peers..... it comes from church and family.
It's hard to accurately talk about numbers because I believe that many teen suicides are not reported as suicides and the ones that are, are often reported in a way to allow the family to pretend that they have no idea why their son or daughter took their own life because they would not be willing to admit to the abuse they had dished out themselves and to the derision to which they had subjected them in Sunday School and church. Because, it shouldn't matter to us if it was 1 suicide or 1,000 suicides and, frankly, of the 4 to 5 thousand people who take their own life in America every year, no one knows how many of them are the direct result of sick religion but I suspect that most of us would guess that more than half bear the marks of religious persecution.
In the biblical text we read this morning, Paul is imploring the members of the church in Corinth to get along with one another even though they will not all agree on everything. Now, you have to understand that getting a letter from Paul telling you to be more understanding of one another's differences of opinion would be a little like getting a phone call from Charlie Sheen asking you to reign your behavior in a little bit.
There is a tension here that I simply must beg you to take very seriously. On the one hand it is incumbent upon those of us who insist upon being open minded, unjudging, compassionate and accepting.
It is not too strong a statement to say that the survival of the world is dependent upon people being willing to let other nations, other peoples, and sometimes our immediate neighbors to have different religious, political, economic and family values and beliefs.
However, you cannot say that religious beliefs that tell battered women to remain in a marriage where they know they will be abused.... You cannot defend someone's right to believe differently if they are using their beliefs to drive teenagers, and sometimes the teenagers under their own roof, to commit suicide. You cannot say that the religions that have defended slavery, child labor, sexual and gender oppression are mere matters of opinion.
If you need to believe that the Noah's ark story is literal history.... If you insist that Moses really did divide the Red Sea.... If you insist that a snake talked to Eve and a donkey talked to Balaam, and a fish swallowed Jonah.... As much as that kind of talk offends the religion professor in me, we have to say, "Go ahead."
But when you quote the gospels to say, "the poor will always be with you" to justify not trying to fight poverty, or if you quote Paul saying that women should be subject to men and should keep quiet in public, or if you insist that the Levitical injunction to stone gay men is something you must do..... then I have to call "foul."
It is far too simplistic, far too dangerous, there have been way too many deaths, and too many destroyed lives to say that we have to respect and honor whatever someone decides to call their religious values.
There is sick religion and there is healthy religion and we must not be afraid to make that distinction and depending upon the severity of the illness, we may need to make that distinction very forcefully. I do not know if the woman that I told about a few minutes ago managed to get out of that family alive but I know that I didn't do her any favors by respect her priest's pious Catholic views..... I shouldn't have just tried to talk her into believing differently.... I should have walked the two blocks down the hill in Russellville, KY and gone into the manse at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and said to my colleague and friend, "Father Tom, we have to talk."
If we are too timid to confront religion that has a body count of victims then, my friends, we are too timid. Progressive Christians, of all people, cannot justify any compulsion to stand idly by and pretend that abuse is not happening in the name of being polite.
As Karen Armstrong says in her autobiography, "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."
I asked Paul to come sing Ziggy Marley's song, "Love is my religion," today.... My apologies to our YouTube viewers.... We can't legally include the song in our recording but you can look it up yourselves.
His simple lyrics declare that after searching for meaning in the religions and Bibles of the world, he had reached this one conclusion: Love is my religion.
He says, "I don't condemn and I don't convert cause no one is gonna lose their soul."
Madeleine Albright wrote a book a few years ago entitled "The Mighty and the Almighty," in which she carefully talks about the ways in which Jews, Christians and Muslims have allowed their religious differences to repeatedly draw the world into violence and war but she emphasizes that these same religions also contain within them the cure for war and violence. Faith can heal the world, faith can be the basis for compassion and peace. Albright says that we must encourage the angelic tendencies in each nation, in each religion, to reinforce that which is healthy even when we cannot always do surgery to simply remove that which is malignant.
When the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about letting one another disagree on matters of personal preference, he spoke from the background of someone who came from a toxic faith.... Paul had been a man who had been willing to use the law to imprison and use his religion to justify murder of people who had, in his opinion, perverted his religion.
Most of us here would not be happy to hear that someone had followed us around with a video camera 25 and 30 years ago and were ready to play clips such as what we see in political attack ads these days. We are not unfamiliar with toxic faith, poisoned family values, and nationalism driven by misinformation, racism and fear. We have simply decided that we want to be better than that....
We don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past... we want to emerge into something better.
I think that Millard Fuller had the right idea when he tried to get Catholic and Protestant, Fundamentalist and Main Stream churches to come together to build Habitat for Humanity houses. Fuller called it, "the theology of the hammer." You don't have to agree on doctrine, sacraments or what happens to you when you die; you just pick up a hammer and help build a house for a homeless poor family.
We should try whenever it is possible, to find common ground with all other religions and every flavor of Christian. We should work with them to fight poverty, support civil rights, promote justice and defend the weak, but we should never be afraid to speak clearly about our belief that liberation theology is the obvious conclusion for anyone whose religion is love.
I believe that we should be more gracious towards our critics and those on the opposite end of the theological spectrum than they are towards us, but as I have said before, peace in the absence of justice is just surrender and people of faith should never consider surrender an option.
I have been told that the French Foreign Legion had a motto that went something like, "If I falter, push me. If I stumble, help me up. If I retreat, shoot me." That may be a little strong for church folk but really, what possible excuse do we ever have to turn our backs on the victims of abuse no matter what religious excuses may be used. May God do this and more also if we ever fail to be heroic in the face of injustice.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Do You Do Well to Be Angry? (or, I'm Already Against the Next War)
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
January 22, 2012 Epiphany 3
The story of Jonah is an Old Testament parable and it is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful and most misunderstood books in the Bible. It is not intended to describe a historical event. This short work doesn't tell us about a real person or a real city and, much to many folks disappointment, not even a real whale. It struggles to tell us something about God and our anger. And like any well crafted parable, it is full of irony, humor and dramatic action.
The story is set up this way: a Jewish man is called by God to go and preach in the capital city of Assyria. It is set in a time when Assyria has destroyed Israel and pretty well messed up Judah and all of their neighbors. Assyria was practicing that ancient form of warfare which built their national wealth by stealing everything of value from all of their neighbors and enslaving their population. Assyria had never done anything good for any Jew and had done every outlandish, criminal, reprehensibly violent thing they could do to destroy the Jewish people.
So, this is a very tense set up. God tells Jonah to go and preach to the people he hated the most. Now, Biblical scholars agree that this story is not nearly old enough to have been written in those days of Assyrian rule. It was written much later, two or three hundred years later.
It was written in a time when the tiny little remnant of Jews were trying to rebuilt a scrap of a nation on the ruins left behind after nearly a century of slavery in Babylon. In those days of reconstruction there was just an awful lot of anger.... they had been bullied, robbed, burned out, sold into slavery and then finally dumped totally vulnerable in a nearly barren land in a city with no walls and very little to eat.
The person who sat down to write Jonah lived among a rag tag bunch of survivors who kept themselves alive by feeding on how much they hated Babylonians, Egyptians, Syrians and just about anyone who didn't look and sound Jewish. And when people are so certain that their hatred is justified, when they know for a fact that their blood thirsty prayers are heard by God it is very very difficult to offer an alternative position.
Sometimes, when people are that mad, using a little slap stick humor is the only way to break the ice. So the story starts with Jonah going the opposite direction from where God wants him to go. And God causes a great storm to strike the ship at sea. And even pagan gentiles are getting religion trying to beg God to help them.
They finally throw Jonah overboard into the raging sea and the sea calms down and a giant fish swallows Jonah and swims for three days to deliver him to the shores of Nineveh. See, everyone in this story is totally obedient to God.... the weather, the sea, the fish, and even pagan sailors but one person is defiant of God's will..... the preacher!
Cause, see, he has got a serious mad on. It is not just that he thought Judaism was that much better than the religion of Assyria or that Judah was just all that much better than any other nation.... it was that he had seen the wreckage, the slaughter.... he knew people who had been killed, enslaved, raped and robbed. His anger was a righteous anger that doesn't really believe that anyone who disagrees with him can be anything but stupid or evil and probably some of both.
Jonah walks into the middle of this huge monstrous city and delivers a short and pretty sad attempt at a sermon. He preached a sermon predicting the immanent destruction of the city. And against all credible odds, the entire city repents. The story teller wants us to believe that everyone from the King to the cattle in the field repented! Best revival in the history of the world!
But, of course, that is part of the irony. Jonah didn't want them to turn from their evil. He wanted God to destroy them. Isn't that God's business? Destroying evil people? Doesn't God see the injustice? Doesn't God become outraged by the mass destruction? Doesn't God want us to wipe out Nineveh and every city like it?
Jonah goes up on a ridge over looking the city to watch and see if they'll mess up.... maybe God will go ahead and bomb the city anyway. You know, it gets hot when you don't have anything but your anger to keep you company. Jonah is just sitting up there, waiting, watching, hoping they'll mess up.
In Alcoholics Anonymous they say that anger is the dubious luxury of ordinary people. It is a luxury because it is an emotion that some people can revel in but recovering alcoholics know that it is a luxury they can't afford.
If they get angry then it won't be long before they also get drunk. But it is a dubious luxury because even people who don't get drunk don't seem to get much good out of it. Anger doesn't seem to make people very smart. It doesn't make them spiritual.
It doesn't make them compassionate or loving and a whole lot of the time it makes them do something really destructive, usually self destructive. The wisdom of A.A. is that when I am angry it usually means that there is something wrong with me. The Big Book of A.A. calls anger poison and it may well be.
But let me return to the Biblical story. Jonah is sitting on the ridge watching the city and a vine grows up over the little shack where he is sitting and the vine is the only decent thing that has happened to Jonah.... at least the vine offers some shade from the hot sun. However, just as the weather, the sea, the fish and the pagans are all obedient to God, now even a worm is sent to do God's will..... a worm eats through the vine and it dies and that, for Jonah, is the last straw.
He rants at God:
You know the routine...... angry at illegal immigrants so that when you see signs in Spanish at the hardware store you are afraid that you are losing your country. Angry at Muslims who raise terrorists and who have no remorse for their heinous deeds. Angry at auto workers for demanding salaries that bankrupt American businesses. Angry at bankers who helped to wreck the economy. Angry at gay people for wanting the same rights as straight people.
It is not that Jonah and his people did not have a reason to be angry, it was that he had a better reason to get over being angry. The message of Jonah to the people who first read it was that their captivity in Babylon was over and it was time for them to stop hating and to accept the interracial marriages among them, the mixed blood Jews, the Jews who spoke other languages or who had family members who were of another religion.
But the stakes are much higher today than they were for the first people who read the book of Jonah. War in the 21st century is a lot more serious than it was 2500 years ago. Our nation has been at war for the past decade and we appear to teetering towards starting a new and probably much more bloody conflict than the last two wars we've been in. I want to ask you to look at a couple of maps.
This is a map of Iran. The ten American flags around Iran show where we have American military installations. This second map is a map of the United States which shows all of the Iranian military installations surrounding us..... you may notice that there aren't any.
Let's look at that again; here are the American military installations around Iran. And here are the Iranian military installations around the USA. One of these nations is accusing the other nation of having aggressive military objectives and is seriously talking about a pre-emptive invasion to stop them from their insane rouge military objectives. Now, I'm no expert on these things but if you looked at this map from Iran's perspective, would you feel inspired to beef up your arsenal?
We are being asked to be very frightened by the prospect of Iran developing a nuclear weapon because they might use it against Israel. Again, I'm no expert but Israel has an estimated 100 nuclear weapons and I suspect that what would keep Iran from bombing Israel is the same thing that kept us from bombing Russia and Russia from bombing us during the Cold War. I wish that we could rid the world of all nuclear weapons but if Iran's desire to have a nuclear weapon makes them crazy and unreliable then what does having 6000 nuclear weapons say about us?
God asks Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry?"..... And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left...?
God asks Jonah to look at the inhabitants of the city he wants to have destroyed. I think that is an excellent idea and I would like for us to take just a couple of minutes to look at some of the people who live in Iran:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98j0I7e5OHE
In years past we have invaded Mexico and Canada. We have gone to war with England, France, Germany and Japan, all of which are now close allies and trading partners..... OK, not France really but still..... think of the wine and cheese. It is possible for old enemies to become allies.
It is possible to find a way around the anger to something much more healthy..... not out of fear but out of courage....Not in ignorant naiveté but in powerful faith.
The question the Bible poses to us is to wonder if we do well to be angry. Jonah asks us to remember how compassionate that God is and it asks us to see how silly we look when we cannot see that our blood lust is not echoed by God.
If I could wish one thing for my nation today it is this, I wish my people would stop being afraid.
Roger Ray, pastor
January 22, 2012 Epiphany 3
Jonah 3
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2"Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." 3So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across. 4Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
5And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. 10When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
The story of Jonah is an Old Testament parable and it is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful and most misunderstood books in the Bible. It is not intended to describe a historical event. This short work doesn't tell us about a real person or a real city and, much to many folks disappointment, not even a real whale. It struggles to tell us something about God and our anger. And like any well crafted parable, it is full of irony, humor and dramatic action.
The story is set up this way: a Jewish man is called by God to go and preach in the capital city of Assyria. It is set in a time when Assyria has destroyed Israel and pretty well messed up Judah and all of their neighbors. Assyria was practicing that ancient form of warfare which built their national wealth by stealing everything of value from all of their neighbors and enslaving their population. Assyria had never done anything good for any Jew and had done every outlandish, criminal, reprehensibly violent thing they could do to destroy the Jewish people.
So, this is a very tense set up. God tells Jonah to go and preach to the people he hated the most. Now, Biblical scholars agree that this story is not nearly old enough to have been written in those days of Assyrian rule. It was written much later, two or three hundred years later.
It was written in a time when the tiny little remnant of Jews were trying to rebuilt a scrap of a nation on the ruins left behind after nearly a century of slavery in Babylon. In those days of reconstruction there was just an awful lot of anger.... they had been bullied, robbed, burned out, sold into slavery and then finally dumped totally vulnerable in a nearly barren land in a city with no walls and very little to eat.
The person who sat down to write Jonah lived among a rag tag bunch of survivors who kept themselves alive by feeding on how much they hated Babylonians, Egyptians, Syrians and just about anyone who didn't look and sound Jewish. And when people are so certain that their hatred is justified, when they know for a fact that their blood thirsty prayers are heard by God it is very very difficult to offer an alternative position.
Sometimes, when people are that mad, using a little slap stick humor is the only way to break the ice. So the story starts with Jonah going the opposite direction from where God wants him to go. And God causes a great storm to strike the ship at sea. And even pagan gentiles are getting religion trying to beg God to help them.
They finally throw Jonah overboard into the raging sea and the sea calms down and a giant fish swallows Jonah and swims for three days to deliver him to the shores of Nineveh. See, everyone in this story is totally obedient to God.... the weather, the sea, the fish, and even pagan sailors but one person is defiant of God's will..... the preacher!
Cause, see, he has got a serious mad on. It is not just that he thought Judaism was that much better than the religion of Assyria or that Judah was just all that much better than any other nation.... it was that he had seen the wreckage, the slaughter.... he knew people who had been killed, enslaved, raped and robbed. His anger was a righteous anger that doesn't really believe that anyone who disagrees with him can be anything but stupid or evil and probably some of both.
Jonah walks into the middle of this huge monstrous city and delivers a short and pretty sad attempt at a sermon. He preached a sermon predicting the immanent destruction of the city. And against all credible odds, the entire city repents. The story teller wants us to believe that everyone from the King to the cattle in the field repented! Best revival in the history of the world!
But, of course, that is part of the irony. Jonah didn't want them to turn from their evil. He wanted God to destroy them. Isn't that God's business? Destroying evil people? Doesn't God see the injustice? Doesn't God become outraged by the mass destruction? Doesn't God want us to wipe out Nineveh and every city like it?
Jonah goes up on a ridge over looking the city to watch and see if they'll mess up.... maybe God will go ahead and bomb the city anyway. You know, it gets hot when you don't have anything but your anger to keep you company. Jonah is just sitting up there, waiting, watching, hoping they'll mess up.
In Alcoholics Anonymous they say that anger is the dubious luxury of ordinary people. It is a luxury because it is an emotion that some people can revel in but recovering alcoholics know that it is a luxury they can't afford.
If they get angry then it won't be long before they also get drunk. But it is a dubious luxury because even people who don't get drunk don't seem to get much good out of it. Anger doesn't seem to make people very smart. It doesn't make them spiritual.
It doesn't make them compassionate or loving and a whole lot of the time it makes them do something really destructive, usually self destructive. The wisdom of A.A. is that when I am angry it usually means that there is something wrong with me. The Big Book of A.A. calls anger poison and it may well be.
But let me return to the Biblical story. Jonah is sitting on the ridge watching the city and a vine grows up over the little shack where he is sitting and the vine is the only decent thing that has happened to Jonah.... at least the vine offers some shade from the hot sun. However, just as the weather, the sea, the fish and the pagans are all obedient to God, now even a worm is sent to do God's will..... a worm eats through the vine and it dies and that, for Jonah, is the last straw.
He rants at God:
He said, "It is better for me to die than to live."
But God said to Jonah, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?"
And he said, "Yes, angry enough to die."
Then the LORD said, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left...?
When God asks Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry?" Jonah doesn't even understand the question..... because, you see, anger can be its own logic. Why wouldn't he be angry? Angry at the Assyrians for their violent sins. Angry at God for not destroying them. Angry at the vine for dying and making him so uncomfortable..... angry enough to die.
You know the routine...... angry at illegal immigrants so that when you see signs in Spanish at the hardware store you are afraid that you are losing your country. Angry at Muslims who raise terrorists and who have no remorse for their heinous deeds. Angry at auto workers for demanding salaries that bankrupt American businesses. Angry at bankers who helped to wreck the economy. Angry at gay people for wanting the same rights as straight people.
It is not that Jonah and his people did not have a reason to be angry, it was that he had a better reason to get over being angry. The message of Jonah to the people who first read it was that their captivity in Babylon was over and it was time for them to stop hating and to accept the interracial marriages among them, the mixed blood Jews, the Jews who spoke other languages or who had family members who were of another religion.
But the stakes are much higher today than they were for the first people who read the book of Jonah. War in the 21st century is a lot more serious than it was 2500 years ago. Our nation has been at war for the past decade and we appear to teetering towards starting a new and probably much more bloody conflict than the last two wars we've been in. I want to ask you to look at a couple of maps.
This is a map of Iran. The ten American flags around Iran show where we have American military installations. This second map is a map of the United States which shows all of the Iranian military installations surrounding us..... you may notice that there aren't any.
Let's look at that again; here are the American military installations around Iran. And here are the Iranian military installations around the USA. One of these nations is accusing the other nation of having aggressive military objectives and is seriously talking about a pre-emptive invasion to stop them from their insane rouge military objectives. Now, I'm no expert on these things but if you looked at this map from Iran's perspective, would you feel inspired to beef up your arsenal?
We are being asked to be very frightened by the prospect of Iran developing a nuclear weapon because they might use it against Israel. Again, I'm no expert but Israel has an estimated 100 nuclear weapons and I suspect that what would keep Iran from bombing Israel is the same thing that kept us from bombing Russia and Russia from bombing us during the Cold War. I wish that we could rid the world of all nuclear weapons but if Iran's desire to have a nuclear weapon makes them crazy and unreliable then what does having 6000 nuclear weapons say about us?
God asks Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry?"..... And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left...?
God asks Jonah to look at the inhabitants of the city he wants to have destroyed. I think that is an excellent idea and I would like for us to take just a couple of minutes to look at some of the people who live in Iran:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98j0I7e5OHE
In years past we have invaded Mexico and Canada. We have gone to war with England, France, Germany and Japan, all of which are now close allies and trading partners..... OK, not France really but still..... think of the wine and cheese. It is possible for old enemies to become allies.
It is possible to find a way around the anger to something much more healthy..... not out of fear but out of courage....Not in ignorant naiveté but in powerful faith.
The question the Bible poses to us is to wonder if we do well to be angry. Jonah asks us to remember how compassionate that God is and it asks us to see how silly we look when we cannot see that our blood lust is not echoed by God.
If I could wish one thing for my nation today it is this, I wish my people would stop being afraid.
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