Teaching and Learning, Learning and Teaching

September 16, 2012    Proper 19
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

 

Isaiah 50:4-9a        
4The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens-- wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. 5The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward. 6I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. 7The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; 8he who vindicates me is near. Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who are my adversaries? Let them confront me. 9It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty? All of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.

In 2004 Missouri earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first state in the union to pass an amendment to our state constitution, banning same sex marriage.  I grew up in Kentucky where, even when I was growing up, our state constitution banned automobiles.  Needless to say, that conservative move by the voters in Kentucky didn't keep cars off the streets any more than Missouri's absurd amendment will stop gay people from falling in love with one another.

When the amendment was put on the ballot, I organized a press conference and invited pastors in the area to join me in making a united statement in opposition to this prejudiced and backward amendment.  And I did have several who joined me for the press conference but I was disappointed that they were all retired pastors.  I was the only pastor at the press conference who was still drawing a salary from a church though I did receive phone calls from a few other parish pastors who said that they would really love to join me but that... as one said, "I have young children at home and I have to keep my job to keep a roof over their heads."

And I don't want to be too diminishing to that response.  I was fired not long after that and I had a kid going into college and a mortgage and a lot of years to work before retirement.  I have felt the fear of economic desperation.
I know what it is like to be over 50 and unemployed and let me tell you, when one big church fires you, there are not a dozen others that come rushing to offer you a job.  Being fired by people whom you have loved and literally grown up with for two decades is traumatic but, and it took me a long time to get to the point of being able to say this, but it may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.

They say that the best way to defend a lion is to open the cage door.  I had no way of appreciating how small my prison had become until I had been set free.

Our beautiful and poetic reading from Isaiah this morning moves quickly from one image to another.  At first, the prophet is just reveling in the belief that he had been called to be a preacher who is, first and foremost, a teacher:
The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens-- wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.

But then, without explanation, he turns immediately to a violent image, saying:

I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.

On the one hand, the prophet is ebullient about being in a role of teaching prophetic truth but he is aware that people will also pull out his beard and spit in his face for doing it.  And here is what I really want to draw to your attention about his text.  This is not first Isaiah, the writer of the first 39 chapters of Isaiah was predicting the destruction of their nation by a foreign army.
You can easily understand why people would want to fire, abuse or kill a prophet who is predicting doom for his own nation.  We're used to seeing Old Testament prophets being imprisoned or abused for saying things no one wants to hear.

But Second Isaiah, the beautiful poetry from the middle of the book of Isaiah comes from a different preacher in an entirely different generation.  He isn't warning an established nation that they are about to be conquered and carried away into slavery.   He is talking to a ghetto full of slaves who have been in slavery for as long as almost anyone alive could remember.

He is telling them that their cage is open!  They can leave the familiar surroundings of slavery in Persia and return to their own land, rebuild their own nation, observe their own religion and culture and, apparently, a lot of the slaves in ghetto responded by spitting in his face and abusing him.

The famous abolitionist, Harriet Tubman, escaped from slavery but then returned to the south many times to help free others.  She said, late in her life, "I freed thousands of slaves but I could have freed thousands more if only they had realized that they were slaves."

From the days of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and the Greek gods of Olympus, governments have used religion to help keep society stable..... as such most houses of worship have been the defenders of the status quo.  Ironically, the prophetic tradition has always stood up to challenge the status quo but the institutional priest and preacher tells people that we have always supported war against whoever we need to kill this year.... We've always hated gays.... We've always bowed to the power of the employer or slave owner..... and you must always believe in the same magic!

Keeping people believing in the same anti-intellectual, anti-logical, anti-critical thinking religion is a part of keeping them from questioning authority and the social order. Once you can make someone believe something that is totally absurd then you can get them to do almost anything, from strapping on a suicide bomber vest to telling your own son or daughter to get out of the house because they are gay...... nothing a sane person would do who didn't have their head filled with non-sense.

Once you question ancient religious assertions that tell you that you are so sinful that God had to kill himself..... that even though life is unfair, unjust and cruel in this world that God made, there is another world that God also made that is either infinitely more cruel or incomprehensibly cushy..... of course, God could have started you out in the cushy world but a little suffering for a few decades here will make you appreciate it all the more...... there are some other things about preachers inside of fish and walking on the water but basically, just don't think and don't question the guy in the big dress.

I was in graduate school more than 30 years ago and even then some of my biblical professors would occasionally introduce a lecture by saying, "Now you can't say this in your church......" assuming that if we took good scholarship into the parish that the stupid people there would revolt and fire us.

And that is why, most churches today hold onto a seventeenth century way of talking inside their churches while people have to leave and try to live in the 21st century.... And so, is it any surprise that there are people who insist that global warming is not real because they don't believe in it.  They can say that the United States has the best health care in the world because they refuse to accept the actual research that places us somewhere around 35th in the world.  Even C. S. Lewis, one of the darlings of the evangelical church, said that a mad man cannot put out the light of the sun by writing the word "darkness" on his cell wall.... And yet traditional religion expects to do basically that..... assuming that you can recite a creed and make it true because you and a lot of other people say it in unison.  Give me someone who believes that the doctrine of the Trinity accurately describes the nature of the one true God and, trust me, you are looking at a person who can be made to believe that you can cut taxes and balance the federal budget at the same time.... No really, some people will believe anything!

Those of you who are on my email list have seen many of the letters from viewers we have from around the world who often write saying that they have never heard anything like what I tell them about the Bible or about a way of being Christian that is free of superstition and magic..... that you can still be devoted to the ethical teachings of Jesus without believing in blood sacrifice or the threat of a burning hell..... or the alternative with the streets of gold and dozens of virgins..... and what is so special about that if they all insist upon remaining virgins for all of eternity anyway?

But here is the newsflash for you..... there is nothing that I have said that is original to me.... I'm not an original scholar in any way.... The only thing different about me is that I am no longer afraid..... if there is anything about me that is different from a garden variety preacher it is that I have failed to pay attention to my professors when they said to us, "You can't say this in church."

John Shelby Spong says that the fastest grown church in America is the Church Alumni Association because people are just not going to go on being willing to assassinate their brains and believe stuff that is clearly not true that leads to all kinds of oppression, violence and discrimination.

And so, I believe, the only church that will survive, the only one that should survive, is the one that joins Isaiah in courageously telling the truth, even if it makes people mad.... Even if they would prefer to remain in mental slavery, even if they prefer the cage to freedom.

We have already freed thousands from the grip of irrational fear, guilt and superstition and there are thousands more to free whenever they are willing to stop being enslaved to ignorance and fear.

To those who are willing to unplug from the matrix of illusion and lies, welcome to reality.  It isn't all that pretty but I can tell you this, if you still want to go to heaven you are going to have to roll up your sleeves and join us in the trenches because the only heaven we are sure of is the one we work together to build in this world by fighting against poverty, discrimination, war and injustice.

The Just Use of Power

Sept. 9, 2012    Proper 18
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

James 2:1-10, 14-17
My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? ²For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, ³and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, "Have a seat here, please," while to the one who is poor you say, "Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet," ⁴have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? ⁵Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? ⁶But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? ⁷Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
⁸You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." ⁹But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. ¹⁰For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.
¹⁴What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? ¹⁵If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, ¹⁶and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? ¹⁷

So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.           
There is a small Trappist monastery in the vast pine forest around Monk's Corner about seventy miles outside of Charleston, SC.  I visited my friend, the former guest master at Gethsemane Monastery, Brother Luke, when he was assigned to lead music there for a couple of years.  Luke walked me out to the edge of the monastery to show me their egg producing business that the brothers operated to support themselves.

More than ten thousand hens occupied the rows and rows of cages where, what the brothers called their "lay sisters" worked tirelessly to support the monastery.  Every few months, the hens had to be replaced.  A large truck from Campbell's Soup would roll up, the cages were opened and then monks chased scrambling chickens all over their acreage in what they called a "chicken party."  But, as Luke observed, it really wasn't much of a party for the chickens who would soon become part of a can of chicken noodle soup.

The image reminded me of an old 80's song that made fun of elections.  It says:
"I was born down south on a chicken farm near Nashville, Tennessee
There wasn't nobody there except a sky full of air and 17 million chickens and me
And then one day I said to myself, I think I'll take a little of that LSD
Well, it blew my mind and I got real kind and I set my chickens free.
And there was chickens in the pasture, chickens in the barn
There was chickens driving Cadillac's to Washington, DC
when I set my chickens free.

In this presidential election year, we have two "parties," each going by different names, vying to gain control of the American government.  Each party tries to make their convention look as festive as possible but I assure you, just like the chicken parties at Mepkin Abby, there are victims.

Because of my stridently liberal newspaper opinion column, most Republicans in Springfield assume that I am a Democrat. What they might be surprised to know is that the only correspondence I have received from the Greene Co. Democrats' office for the past several years has been quite hostile.  Even though I am the only published member of clergy in local media, you will notice that I am never asked to speak at any of the big Democratic gatherings in our area because they think that I have been way too critical of elected Democrats. They either want me to be a devout, unquestioning Democrat or they don't want me at all.

Religious professionals are not supposed to promote one party or another nor champion one candidate over another and though I am not often known for bowing to such rules, that one comes easily for me.  I see victims in both parties and it is easier for me to say, "A pox on both your camps" than it is for me to applaud one over the other.

My spirituality informs my politics and I hope that yours does too but my spirituality doesn't fit neatly into either camp.  As a spiritual person, the guiding principle that I bring to governance is a preference for policies that provide the greatest good to the largest number of people.  It is not simple utilitarianism but rather radical compassion that dictates the spiritual desire to see the greatest good provided to the largest number of people, I favor a more equitable distribution of wealth rather than stacking the deck so that a minority holds the majority of the resources.

Because my spirituality directs me to pursue the greatest good for the largest number of people, I oppose the exploitation of the poor, the oppression of minorities, unjust war, unequal justice in the court system, and the despoiling of the environment.

Granted, then, at least based on rhetoric, I'm much more often likely to favor a Democrat over a Republican but we should all resist the temptation to baptize either party.

Charles Toy, the founder of the website called The Christian Left, summed up his opposition to the Mitt Romney candidacy this way:
Mitt Romney's Platform: Deny gay people the right to marry; Deny women the right to make decisions about their own body; Deny health care to millions of Americans; Restart The Cold War; Return to Bush era torture policies; Instate austerity; Privatize Medicare and Social Security; Make it harder for kids to get a college education; Destroy unions; Roll back regulations on Wall Street; Start more wars in The Middle East; Raise taxes on the poor and middle class and cut taxes for the rich; Double down on the failed "War on Drugs." Any questions?
And I recognize that Charles can back each of those claims up, if not with direct recent quotes from Mitt Romney, at least from the lips of other nationally prominent Republicans. And I don't want to play a "yes/but" game or engage in false equivalencies because all of the issues Charles named are very real and very serious.

But it does have to be said that President Obama doubled down on the war in Afghanistan and I have yet to hear him or anyone in his administration reasonably defend the claim that we have any militarily achievable goal in that nation that in any way justifies the loss of life and expenditure of resources in that war.  I know some of you disagree but this practice of political assassination by predator drones is, to me, an outrage.  We use these sci-fi flying robots to kill people that a generation ago would have been called political assassinations rather than military targets.  And though they are deadly and astonishingly accurate, they do not kill with a single bullet.

The collateral casualty numbers of victims who just happened to be in the kill zone at the time of the strike got to be so large that the Obama administration redefined collateral civilian deaths as being military targets if the deceased were of fighting age..... which, in the countries where we are using predators, is just about anyone between childhood and infirm old age...... which means most of you here could easily be defined as a potential terrorist threat if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Many people have accepted, even the targeting of American citizens who have not been tried or even indicted for a crime, because you trust the judgment of President Obama but a precedent has been set and surely even those of you who trust President Obama with this authority to kill alleged enemies of the state at will, can  think of a recent president whom you would not like to have given that authority and can't you realize that now some future president with whom you have no confidence will be carrying out these exact same sort of strikes?

We still have Gitmo.  We still use secret foreign prisons where prisoners are certainly tortured.  We still have an obscene judicial system in which the wealthy almost always get their way....

And let me digress here for just a moment to tell you, especially all of you who worked so hard gathering signatures to put both an initiative to raise the minimum wage in Missouri and another to cap the interest rates charged to the poor by payday loan businesses on the ballot this fall that you will not get a chance to vote on those issues.  Even though we had far more than enough signatures to get these measures on the ballot this fall, the attorneys representing the Chamber of Commerce joined forces with the attorneys representing the PayDay Loan sharks and they continued making legal challenges to signatures on petitions until our side just ran out of money.

As Howard Zinn said, our judicial system is not set up to determine who is right and who is wrong, it only determines who can pay their attorney the longest.  The just cause of the poor in this state has once again been defeated by the profit motive of the wealthy, echoing our reading from James this morning that would not receive a friendly hearing in many churches but is a first century statement of fact that is just as true in the 21st century, verse 6 of chapter 2 says, "Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?"

Politicians are under constraint to be politically correct..... prophets are under constraint to be correct.... To tell the truth and to let the chips fall where they will.
James writes about an applied spirituality that is nakedly honest and it is nearly entirely dismissive of almost everything we know of that passes for Christianity.  He says plainly that faith without good works is dead.... It is a farce, it is a pretend faith.  If you are not actively working to provide the greatest good to the largest number of people then you really have no business calling yourself a Christian.  Faith is a way of life, not a way of believing.

Few people in America were more moved by the election of Barak Obama in 2008 than I was.  He was not my first choice or my second choice because I did not believe he had the experience to be an effective president.

But the mere fact that a black man who once ate from a table financed by food stamps could rise to become a Harvard educated lawyer and then win election to the office of the president was nothing short of miraculous.  I do not want to diminish the significance of that historic event but I also will not ignore the fact that he has reappointed many of the same monetary leaders who brought our nation to bankruptcy in 2007, and put the owners of the Frankenfood industry in charge of our food supply.

Earlier this summer I attended the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina and I was pleased to hear Frank Schaeffer, the son of the famous evangelical preacher and author, Francis Schaeffer, speak.  Frank Schaeffer was, at one time, following in his father's footsteps, preaching, writing, producing films that were consumed by the right wing religious conservatives until he had a kind of epiphany and he was able to walk away from that world of wealth and hypocrisy.

I was glad to hear someone who could, first hand, speak to the falsehood, the manipulation of and the exploitation of the gullible for money and political power and I was glad to hear that he found the character to walk away from it all.  But Frank chided the liberals in his audience who were being critical of President Obama.  He didn't say it the way Chris Rock recently boiled it down but it was something the same as when Chris said that voting for someone other than Obama because Obama didn't do everything he said he would do would be like saying, "because Obama couldn't cure cancer, next time, I'm going to vote for cancer."

But as I heard Frank Schaeffer speak during that week of the festival, he told us about how he had gotten disgusted with religion and had quit believing anything or going to church at all but when he had grandchildren, he began to reconsider and to seek out some way to have a spiritual life that did not involved the evangelical faith he despised.  He told us that he now attends an Orthodox church because he loves the liturgy and the sacraments and the whole non-rational, other worldly feel of the services.  But when he was asked about the Orthodox Church's refusal to allow women in leadership and their official condemnation of homosexuality he literally shrugged his shoulders and said, "You have to make some compromises."

I suppose that it is easy enough to make that compromise if you are not female, or not gay but what gives Frank Schaeffer or anyone else permission to give away anyone else's integrity as a whole human being?  How do you make that compromise, especially in the name of going to church?

At the ballot box, I will fight to have the right to vote my conscience and I may have to accept that there are times that the best I can do is to vote for the lesser of two evils but I will not pretend to have shifted my spiritual loyalty to a political party and I will not give loyalty to a church that intentionally discriminates against their own people for reasons of race, gender or sexual orientation..... and while I hate to be prescriptive but, common on people..... if you are a woman, don't go to any church that tells you that you are not allowed by their beliefs to have any role a man can have.  And if you are gay and you are attending a church that will cash your checks you drop in the offering plate but won't let you speak from the pulpit or be photographed in your church directory with your partner then just stop it!

Don't buy bullets for your own assassin.  Don't support the people who oppress you.  Demand the greatest good for the most people and you can't get there by oppressing half the population for being female and a tenth of the population for being gay.

I am not trying to speak for you, but assuming that at least my own understanding of a spiritual person's participation in politics is to seek the greatest good for the largest number of people, there is still room for a lot of debate.  There is an argument to be made that ill-conceived public assistance can rob a person of motivation to work and be self supporting.  Spiritual people do not eschew the value of personal responsibility with some well intended but ultimately destructive demand that we just give everyone food, shelter and medical care without any prompting to work for those things.

Affordable electrical power is a priority for the poor, but burning coal is still the cheapest way to generate electricity.... Is it the greatest good for the largest number of people if we gain a temporary benefit at the cost of long term destruction of the environment?
Some people argue that we need to pass right to work laws so that there will be more jobs in our state but is the creation of jobs that pay less than what it costs to live a good idea in the long run?  A present benefit in exchange for creating an abusive permanent economy doesn't sound like the greatest good for the most people to me.

As Elizabeth Warren noted in her recent speech in North Carolina, "If you feel like the system is stacked against you, that's because the system is stacked against you."  What we need to do is to change the system.

Setting the chickens free seems like liberation in the moment, but if they are going to be in a can of soup by Wednesday, then we're not really talking about liberation, are we?  I will not vote for a system that opens your cage with one hand and puts you in a soup can with the other.

The portrait of Dorothy Day that hangs in our conference room has a caption that quotes the founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."  My modest suggestion to you is, that you not act or vote like you accept this filthy rotten system anymore.

Just Treatment of Workers

Sept. 2, 2012   Labor Day Weekend
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

Isaiah 65:17-25                        
17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. 
18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. 
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress. 
20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
   and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. 
21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 
22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
   and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. 
23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; 
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord--
 and their descendants as well. 
24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. 
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
   but the serpent--its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

I was pretty sure that it was a waste of time but at the instance of a member of my team, we all took an evening off from our work among the poor in rural Nicaragua to attend a Rotary Club dinner in Managua.  My friend loved his own Rotary Club members in Springfield so much that he was just certain that if this Nicaraguan club only knew what we were doing in the impoverished villages in the jungle that they would want to help.

I watched as he desperately spoke to an indifferent gathering of Nicaraguan first families about how his club in America wanted to work with their club in Managua to raise aid for the poor of their country.  You couldn't have cut through their indifference with a chainsaw..... though the thought of trying did occur to me.

The business women and men of Managua do not want to think of their country as being poor.  Many of them have never strayed into the countryside of their own nation.  The coffee they drink in the morning, the fruit and vegetables on their dinner table is being produced in virtual slave conditions not more than a two hour drive up the Pan American highway from Managua but they will never see it and they don't want to hear about it.  They do most of their shopping in Miami, they live in gated communities and the army keeps the Sandinista peasants from ever protesting in the city streets of Managua.

I have seen, on several trips, huge encampments of poor Sandinistas just thirty or forty miles north of Managua.  They leave the mountains of Matagalpa and form encampments and every few days they walk a few miles closer to the capital city, threatening invasion.  This political posturing happens in other areas as well.  I have seen Indians in Ecuador using the same mobile campsite method, moving down out of Otavalo towards Quito.

I was reminded of these threatening encampments last fall when the Occupy Movement was gaining attention.  CNN's beautiful business correspondent, Erin Burnett, launched her new show during a time when she had to walk past the protestors on her way to the studio and she express sincere confusion about the whole thing, saying, "What do these people want?"

And even when the issues of income disparity and the use of public money to repay the virtual gambling debts of Wall Street bankers were explained to her, she looked right into the camera and incredulously said that the whole problem is that the protesters don't understand how the economy works.
Of course, Burnett grew up in an affluent family and was engaged to a leading executive at Citigroup..... a recipient of huge bonuses which, I'm sure they believe that they have earned. When the classes grow so far apart that one cannot even see the other one anymore then the low wages and low standard of living of the poor actually makes sense to the rich.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski sat on the set of their popular morning news show talking both about Mika's publication of an entire book about her salary negotiations while sympathizing with Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker's complaints about teacher salaries.  Scarborough and Brzezinski have kept their actual salaries largely secret but we know that the hosts of less popular shows make more than ten million dollars a year, including Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Meredith Vieira and even Bill O'Reilly.

Brzezinski speaks boldly about the gender gap that separated her salary from the men at the table on Morning Joe but she was still willing to believe that police, firemen and schoolteachers were just going to have to be more realistic about their salary expectations.  It is painful to me that so many people are willing to blame middle class laborers for the world's economic challenges while still literally feeling sorry for themselves in the midst of obscene wealth.

Mika Brzezinski threatened to quit because the cost of child care, make up and wardrobe left her with too little of what must have been more than a million dollars a year of salary.


Bill O'Reilly threatened to just retire if Obama allows the tax cut on the super wealthy to sunset because if he has to pay any more in taxes, the more than $8 million dollars a year that he keeps after taxes just wouldn't make it worth it to keep working.  And the fact that Bill O'Reilly might actually shut up if his taxes go up is one of the single best arguments for a tax increase I have ever heard.

The premise underlying Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is that all that had to happen for Scrooge to change his cold heart was to actually see the lives of the poor, the sick, the homeless and hungry.  And I want to believe that most people, if they will leave the Rotary Dinner, push back from the makeup counter and actually go and see how a school teacher has to spend their own meager salary to buy supplies for their classroom and to realize that the person who runs into a burning building when everyone else is running out is not either lazy or greedy but is willing to risk their life, spend half a week isolated away from their family for years and years but that they expect to retire with some dignity and have medical care in compensation for their sacrifice.

It doesn't work for everyone.  There are people who just have a cold hard place where their heart is supposed to be but I think most people want to be decent folks.  But there is a separation between the rich and the poor in our culture.  Old neighborhoods had big houses and small houses but, since the automobile has become ubiquitous, we build houses together within a certain price range.  Air conditioning has taken away front porches and cable TV pushes everyone back to the back of the house into a family room.


Many neighborhoods don't even have sidewalks.  We don't see one another, we don't interact and so is it any wonder that we don't understand, don't sympathize, and don't care?  The people who actually own most businesses live nowhere near them.... Or they don't know they own it...... I have no idea what my pension funds are invested in and in most offices, virtually anonymous ownership means that owners never have to know that some of their employees are lined up at Crosslines for an extra bag of groceries to get them through the month.

They don't know which employee comes to work, ignoring the chest pains because they can't afford to see a doctor or miss work even if they need life saving treatment.

In our very familiar scripture lesson today, the prophet is speaking to a people who are leaving slavery behind to go and build a new nation and he says: 21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 
22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.

The media derision of the Occupy Wall Street movement was that it was lazy bums who wanted a handout.  They failed to recognize that what they were asking for was an opportunity to work for a living wage.

The American dream was articulated in a Revolutionary War era saying attributed variously to Washington, Jefferson and Adams that said, "I am a soldier so that my son can be a farmer, so that his son can be a merchant, so that his son can be a poet."

There was, among us, a dream that if you worked hard and tried, that we could change our station in life and that our children could have a better life.  But if people who are bankers who move money around from instrument to instrument without ever actually producing anything, and people who are talking heads on TV can make millions of dollars while we insist that the people who pave our roads, grow our food, deliver our mail and teach our children cannot retire, or have access to housing, medical care or education for their children then the American dream is a farce.

How can the richest country in the world even consider creating an economy in which people can work full time and not have a place to live, food, medical care, transportation and a hope of retirement?  How could we even be callous enough to discuss it?  Especially in a country that is full of churches.

 No one should be ashamed to ask for a living wage in exchange for their lifetime of service and our nation should be ashamed that they have to ask.  I have no problem with people being economically successful but their success cannot mean that the children of public servants can't go to a state university so that the children of the rich can go to exclusive private colleges.  I think people who are clever and talented, inventive and frugal, deserve a bigger piece of the pie but they don't get the whole pie.

And the church that thinks that the "good news" is that the poor get some pie in the sky when they die need to dust off their Bibles are realize that the good news to the poor means that they not only build houses for the rich to live in, they get to build a house and live in it themselves.
They don't just move from one migrant vineyard after another so that the wealthy can have wine on their tables but they get to share in the wine and the roses.

If we have to keep a third of this nation in poverty so that the 1% can live in a way where they never have to see the poor then capitalism and democracy have failed the moral smell test.

Most of the world's great religions began with a leader who became radicalized by the suffering of the poor.  Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed were all advocates for the poor and each as seen the reform movements they started become the state religion and then the means of the government keeping the poor in submission and in poverty.

None of the world's great religions were royal religions.... They were movements for justice for the poor and that, I insist, is what they should be again.

Several years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich accepted the journalistic challenge of going around the country taking various entry level jobs and trying to survive on the salary.  Her book, "Nickle and Dimed" should be a must read for every pastor and church goer in our nation.

While working as a cook in a retirement home in Maine, Ehrenreich has a Saturday evening off and decides to go to a revival being held near her one room apartment.  Her observations of the poor who attend such services were prophetic.


She writes, "The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful "amens." It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage.  But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say.  Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again to that he can never get a word out of his mouth......  I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher's metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole."

Men and women, I say that it is time to stop crucifying Jesus.  It is time to cut him loose from the tent pole.  It is time for us to turn the good news for the poor loose in our nation and to stand with laborers and public servants, cooks and janitors, the people wipe the chins and the butts of our nursing home patients, the people wipe the noses of our children and spend long hours with them every day.  It is time for us to bring the good news of a living wage to the check out clerk at Walmart and the Taxi driver at the airport.

Do not dream of justice in the next world if you do not have the courage to demand it in this world.  There is not enough of heaven to make up for treating the poor to a serving of hell on earth.  We must not be silent. We must not stand idly by.

Two Ways of Seeing the World

August 26, 2012
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor


I'm going to have lunch with a couple of pastors on Tuesday.  That wouldn't be an unusual thing for most ministers, of course, but it is quite uncommon for me because, other than the retired pastors who are members of our church, I generally don't like pastors and they universally return the sentiment.  They are not bad people, I just typically don't do well in large gatherings of them.

Charles Wesley once observed during a church conference that pastors as like manure, spread around on the fields, they can do a lot of good, but piled up in one place they are just a pile of..... I think what he said was that piled in one place they raise quite a stench.... But we know what he meant.

What is unusual about this lunch that we are going to have this week is that it was my idea; in fact, it is something I've been trying to get to happen for several months.  I believe that the progressives of our community really should be in conversation with one another so I have prevailed upon our local Unitarian pastor and our local Unity pastor to break bread in the hopes that we can form a more mutually supportive relationship.

In my previous incarnation as a denominational pastor, I used to have to spend a lot of time in sort of contrived meetings with other pastors that can only be described as a waste of time.
Charles Dickens once found himself stuck in a long gathering of clergy back in the 19th century when séances were very popular.  As the meeting drug on and on, Dickens interrupted with the suggestion that they all stand in a circle, join hands, and see if they could contact the living.

Religion, on the face of it, should be a uniting force that brings people together in loving community.  However, what we more often see is the exact opposite.  Religion seems to be much more likely to divide people so that we get this well known proverb that tells us not to discuss either religion or politics in polite society because either could turn a wonderful dinner party into a bar room brawl if not an intercontinental war.

This has been an especially volatile week as Congressman Todd Akin has been trying to explain to Missouri voters the differences between legitimate rape and illegitimate rape, or "she had it coming rape."  The national weather bureau has named the hurricane threatening to disrupt the Republican National Convention this week, Hurricane Isaac, but I'm afraid that storm is only secondary to Hurricane Akin's destructive hot air.  But that is such low hanging fruit that I refuse to talk about it today.  Let's just register our disgust and move on.

One of the things that makes it difficult for progressives and traditional religious people to be in conversation is that our use of scripture is quite different.  We cherish the Bible and we read it aloud in our services, discuss it in our classes and both David and I teach college level classes in Bible but we do not understand the bible to be a document written by God.  It is a collection of the spiritual writing of ancient faith communities that were, in fact, not just in conversation with one another but often engaging in open debate with one another.

Traditionalists will try to act like they revere the Bible as the owners manual for a human soul but of course, if you want to believe that the Bible is God's word on how we are to live you either have to avoid reading it or allow yourself to be exposed to a God who has more conflicting personalities than Sybil.

Dr. Adams and I recently attended a meeting of all of the churches involved in the community's shared food pantry at Crosslines.  We were informed that the Kitchen, which operates the other large food pantry in town, was no longer going to be giving out groceries so that they could focus on their homeless services.  Which means that our volume of clients at Crosslines may double in the next month.

Now, there are about 300 member churches in the Council of Churches and they try to get a church to cover one day a month at Crosslines but they can't get enough churches to do it so we cover two days a month..... and we are not a member of the Council of Churches because, evidently, we don't believe in Jesus enough for them to consider us to be a Christian organization.  However, even though we are not as big as some of the Sunday School classes in the churches that can't find enough volunteers to cover one day at Crosslines, we cover two.  And so, at the prospect of doubling the number of hungry people we serve, I raised my hand and asked a number of detailed questions about schedules, food supplies and the need to increase the number of volunteers.

You would have had to have been there to believe the patronizing answer from a member of their board who told me that I just had to believe what the Bible says and have faith that the Lord will provide.  But, since their three hundred member churches can't cover the 22 days a month that Crosslines is open and they need us to cover two days.... Just as at Bill's Place, we need only five of the more than 400 churches in town to take a day a week to feed the unsheltered homeless and we have to take two days a week because they can't find five churches that will do it......  I accept that they believe that the Lord will provide, it's just that based on our experience over the past few years, I'm starting to worry that they think that we are the Lord.

Which brings us down to the real dividing point between progressives and traditionalists.  Traditional Christians are very concerned with orthodoxy, believing the right things.  Progressives are very concerned with orthopraxy, or doing the right things.  I am not disinterested in matters of belief.  In fact, I spend a great deal of time in study for both writing and teaching every week but my beliefs are informed by a commitment to orthopraxy.  And I would not suggest that traditionalists are not concerned with orthopraxy, it is just that they place so much emphasis on beliefs that they excuse themselves from the kind of commitment to social justice that our current circumstances demand.

It has taken me a while to get to it, but we actually do have a biblical text today, in fact, we have two.  For the most part, the gospels of Matthew and Luke copy the older and shorter gospel of Mark and just add to it from their various sources...... except for where they feel the need to correct Mark.

The older gospel, Mark, reports that when the disciples were unhappy about people using the name of Jesus who were not a part of their narrowly defined group that Jesus told them to lighten up..... he said that if these other people were not specifically arrayed against them that they should consider them to be a part of their own community...... telling them to expand their tent to cover those who might not be exactly the same as they were.

A generation later, when the critics of the early church might have become rather more contentious, Matthew edits Mark to say the exact opposite.  Where Mark portrayed Jesus as being very generously inclusive, Matthew insists that Jesus was very exclusive, saying that if others were not precisely with them, that they should be seen as being against them..... literally, that they are enemies.

Both passages are in the Bible.  Both are gospel texts and both are attributed to Jesus..... but both of them cannot be true, or right, or, to put it in the language we used earlier, both cannot be orthodox.

Traditionalists will insist that the Bible is the reliable word of God and so, they have to read these two passages and pretend that they do not say the exact opposite things or, and this is more likely, they don't read either passage and remain blissfully unaware of the conflict.

We read them and we recognize that these are two different voices trying to claim that their perspective is the perspective of Jesus.  Matthew insists that Jesus stands for something very specific, very concrete, and he will not put up with relativism... and I can resonate with that perspective.  I find most of religious language to be dripping in superstition and magic and I want to separate myself from it as far as possible.

But this other voice wants to portray Jesus as being less concerned about orthodoxy, they want us to see Jesus as being more inclusive, less judging, less harsh.  Mark's Jesus wants us to have lunch with Barney Frank and Todd Akin, at the same time.

I'm more comfortable with the exclusiveness of Matthew's Jesus because I am tired of putting up with religious people who seem to me to be simultaneously morally irrelevant and intellectually dim but I fear that way lies monsters.  Though it is not my preference, in my heart, I believe that Mark's Jesus comes closer to what is right.

So often when people visit with us here, they tell me that they are looking for a church where they feel comfortable.  And on the one hand I can appreciate that..... I don't think that women should have to tolerate misogynistic religion..... I don't think that gay people should have to tolerate homophobic religion.... And I don't think that people who take the Bible seriously should have to tolerate a lot of silly magic and superstition.... But.... If you think that you should be comfortable in church then I don't think that you understand what church is for.

When reading the Bible and given a choice between a Jesus who makes us uncomfortable and a Jesus who confirms our prejudices, in almost every case, we should pay more attention to the Jesus who makes us uncomfortable.

I remember hearing Scott Peck say once that the only reason to get married is for the tension..... which may say a lot about his marriage.... But what he meant, of course, is that we should not look for a life partner who coddles us but rather we should look for a life partner who challenges us.

I'm saying, you should look for a church that challenges you.... That not only makes you think but that makes you want to be a better person..... not to tell you what to believe but to goad you into action.  We do not seek the Jesus who makes us feel comfortable but rather the one with whom we feel some tension.... Some moral challenge.... Who pushes us not simply to surround ourselves with those who agree with us but to open our minds and hearts to include those who, even though they may be wrong, force us to stretch our minds, clarify our beliefs and exercise our ability to love those who sometimes are not easy to love.

We may say that are followers of Jesus but I have to warn you that there is more than one Jesus in the gospels and you will have to choose which one you want to take seriously..... it would really rather not, but I believe that I need to try to choose to follow the one who asks me to include more people at the lunch table rather than the one who gives me permission to just sit down with those who are the most like me.  I'm not trying to tell you who which one you need to choose but I am telling you that you need to make a conscious choice, because, if you don't make a choice, you will always defer to the path of least resistance and I don't think you are likely to find Jesus on that path.  That's just my opinion, I could be wrong......but we all know that I'm not.

God had a Wife

August 19, 2012
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Dr. David Trobisch

Proverbs 9:1-6
1 Wisdom has built her house,
She has hewn her seven pillars.
2 She has slaughtered her animals,
She has mixed her wine,
She has also set her table.
3 She has sent out her servant girls,
She calls from the highest places in the town, 4 "You that are simple, turn in here!"
To those without sense she says, 5 "Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. 6 Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."

Did you know that according to some Biblical writings in the beginning when the world was created God had a wife? She was there from the very first moment, even before light, earth, heaven and time existed.

The name of this woman was Chokmah in Hebrew, or Sophia in Greek, or as we call her in English: Wisdom.

I am not saying this to annoy Bible loving Christians, I am simply repeating what anyone can read, let me quote:

8:27 When God established the heavens,
I, Wisdom, was there,
When he drew a circle on the face of the deep, 28
When he made firm the skies above,
When he established the fountains of the deep, 29
When he assigned to the sea its limit, (...)
When he marked out the foundations of the earth, 30
I was beside him,
Like a master worker;
Proverbs, chapter 8, verses 27-30.

When the world was created, Sophia, Wisdom, was there. God had a companion in creation, a woman who stood at his side "like a master worker" (Proverbs 8:30).

The Bible doesn't always say what we expect. Does it?

For 12 years I taught at a small seminary in Maine. I am not an ordained minister, but I never turned down an invitation to preach. My first invitation came from a small community church in Smithfield, close to Waterville.

After the service a lawyer shook my hand and said, "This was good. You gave us food for thought." And then he added, "And I am so glad that you don't come every Sunday!"

I am a Bible scholar. I do not baptize children, I do not marry couples, I do not have to visit people in the hospital, and do not do funerals. I do not tell people what to believe or who to vote for. And I am skeptical of those who do. I am skeptical of those who know so much about God that they always seem to know what is right and what is wrong.

My role is different. I confuse people. My trade - Bible scholarship - is not faith based. When I go to conferences, I don't know if my fellow scholars are Catholic or Mormons or Jews or Muslims or atheists. Like Sophia-Wisdom I and tens of thousands of other Bible scholars in America and all over the world, we minister to the public. We serve not only those who sit in the pews, we serve everyone.
And believe me, there are people out there who are tired of being treated as if they were stupid. They feel that organized religion has all too often insulted their intelligence. They are told to believe what they do not understand and to do what they are told. But they want to understand! They want to do what they think is right!

Believe me, there are people who have seen that God does the good and the bad. And they ask: Why? What is the point? They are not afraid to ask the hard questions.

These people run our hospitals, they work in our courtrooms, they engineer our bridges, airplanes, and cars. We trust them with our lives every single day. They want to know more: About the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and they will even sit down with a scholar for two and a half hours on their evening off and read Josephus.

They have heard the call of Sophia--Wisdom who is shouting from the high places in the city: Grow up! Use your intelligence! There is life before death! Follow your own insight!

I often wish I had a little camera with me and I could show you what I see when I go and do my lectures, seminars or workshops. Often participants react surprised, when they hear me talk about what is common knowledge in Bible scholarship. But rarely are they shocked, and almost never do they turn away. Their interest is sparked, eyes light up, they want to know more, when they hear, for example, that in some books of the Bible God has a female consort at his side.

They understand the difference between history and stories. Remember - these people run our hospitals, work in our courtrooms, and engineer our cars. They deal with complicated matters every day.

They understand that story tellers take liberties, that stories in and outside of the Bible work with humor, imagination and irony. They understand that the experience of God differs from faith community to faith community; that the experience of God differs from individual to individual. They realize that God says different things to different people.

I also know that many of us experience God as a tiny voice that commands us to do certain things and not to do others. Like a GPS device this voice always seems to know where we are, where we are supposed to go, and what the fastest way is to get there.

And when we veer off the narrow path, we will hear the voice loud and clear: Recalculating. Recalculating. Make a U-turn!

Like in the story of Adam and Eve in Paradise. God said: Don't eat from this tree - or you will be punished.

Do you remember the name of the tree? It was called the tree of wisdom, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

So, when the woman saw that the tree would make her wise (Genesis 3:6), she took from its fruit and ate and also gave some to her husband.

But didn't we hear in today's scripture reading wisdom shouting out: "Come, eat of the bread I made, drink of the wine I mixed, and lay aside your immaturity"?

Grow up! There is life before death! Trust your own judgment!

Follow the path of your own insight!

How could both be correct? How could it be right to blindly follow God's rules and commands and at the same time could it be right to trust your own intelligence?

How can both go together?

I don't know. Remember: I am a scholar. My role is to confuse. And I am not going to lie to you about the Bible.

But I suspect that both positions to follow God's commands and to follow your own insight I suspect that both positions are true.

I will end with a Midrash,  the old Jewish practice to comment on a problem in the Biblical text with the help of a story.

A Story, A Story!
(Response:) Let it come, let it go!
...
End of the story. Amen.

Yeah, Right, Get Over Yourself

August 12, 2012
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

1 Kings 19:4-8                        
⁴But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors." ⁵Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, "Get up and eat." ⁶He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. ⁷The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, "Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you." ⁸He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.

Over the past year our church has gone from being a small progressive outpost in an otherwise pretty ferociously conservative city to being, in a way, two congregations.  We have our seated congregation here in Springfield who have purchased and maintained this building and who have created a very respectable outreach to the poor of this community while offering great adult religious education and progressive witness in the Ozarks.  And we have a far flung congregation who join us via our YouTube and iTunes channels, usually amounting to more than two thousand downloads per week.

I spend a significant amount of my work week answering correspondence from our web based church and feeding thoughts and rants to our page on Face Book that is called, "The Emerging Church."  As this congregation has evolved there have been two things that I've noticed that have been very surprising.  The first is that our video's outnumber our podcasts in popularity by nearly ten to one.  I don't know why anyone would sit at their computer and look at a corpulent cleric week after week when they could just download the audio to their phone and listen to the message.
They live all over the world, in Asia, Africa, South America, Europe and Austrailia but demographically I have noticed that the two largest identifiable groups of people we have viewing are pastors and atheists.

That may sound odd at first but honestly I understand it.  Being a progressive thinking pastor in a denominational church can be like being mentally enslaved.  Many have written to me saying that our congregation gives them hope and I hope with them that the mainstream church can be transformed before it dies in irrelevance entirely.

But the atheists group is interesting to me in a different way.  They often feel obligated to self identify as an atheist before saying anything complimentary.
Just this week, I heard from dozens of self described atheists, you can read many of them posted in the comments section on our YouTube channel.
They are often very flattering of me and of us, though most are tinged with a sense of hopeless isolation.  It is as if they are saying to me, "You and I get it but no one else does."

If I am right about what I see here, the isolation they feel, the sense that they have a rational world view and they are surrounded by people imprisoned in misinformation, superstition, magical thinking and fear based politics.... Then, in fact, the atheist group and the group of pastors are probably here for about the same reason.

You feel as if you are very nearly or entirely alone.  You have your eyes opened to the real justice issues of life, you see the ravages of poverty, the discrimination against racial minorities, gay people and the desperation of the sick who cannot afford health care..... and then you see the news..... just at the suggestion of a radio talk show host that invites people to stand up for bigoted prejudice and millions of people across the nation line up at Chick-fil-A to cast their vote.

The budget cuts recommended by Paul Ryan would turn Medicare into a voucher system telling sick elderly people to go try to buy private insurance......when it is obvious that handing the elderly sick a cyanide pill makes as much sense as giving them an insurance voucher.  The budget plan is so cruel to the poor and so favorable to corporations that a bunch of nuns came out of their convents and started a nation wide tour on a bus to talk to voters and candidates about morality.....

And, of course, the Vatican told them to stop it and go back to their convents and talk about why women shouldn't use birth control or get abortions.
And nearly every pastor knows what that feels like..... anything that smacks of the radical claims of the gospel.... Anything that inspired you to go to seminary in the first place, when you try to talk about those things you are told by your bishops and your presbyters and board members not to talk about politics.... Not to offend those whose personal beliefs might be pro war, pro business, or pro slavery....just don't say anything that matters or you might get fired.

In our scripture text from I Kings, Elijah has run away.... He left the ministry.... He left the church.... He is hiding from everyone and lies down and says to God, why not just go ahead and kill me now.... Nothing makes any sense anymore.

If you looked under the bushes in that part of the wilderness, you are likely to find embittered pastors and cynical atheists under every bush.  The most recent issue of Newsweek has an article in it entitled, "America the anxious."  There are no jobs for the unemployed.  The national debt threatens our future.  Education is becoming too expensive for the middle class to consider.  Wages are stagnant and health care costs are rapidly rising.  People who had planned to retire can't afford to.....shoot, even though some people are still screaming about illegal immigration, the fact is that there are more immigrants leaving the United States than are coming here because there is no work here either.

So Elijah does what Mitt Romney suggested.... He "self deported."  John Shelby Spong says that the fastest growing religious community in the United States is the church alumni society..... people are self deporting from church too.  Churches either insult your intelligence or insult your morals.

When people who watch my sermons regularly tell me that they are atheists, I have to believe that what they are saying is that they no longer believe in the moralizing, guilt producing, threatening, supernatural deity who is the imaginary friend of Fundamentalists.  Of course, we don't believe in that god either.  I'm just not willing to believe that once you reject the "heaven or hell" gamble or the anthropomorphic super Santa in the clouds that I am then willing to run into the wilderness and die.

A couple of people write to me every week to say, "If you had been my pastor years ago, I would not have left the church."  Which, I know, they mean as a compliment but, darn it, if you aren't writing from the cancer ward why are you talking about yourself in the past tense?  There is nothing special about me.... I'm not doing anything you couldn't do.

The desert is littered with prophets hiding under bushes, filled with self pity because your Sunday School teacher told you a bunch of myths that turned out to be lies, or your parents used guilt, shame and fear to keep you from having sex and using drugs and now you want your church offering money back.  The wilderness is full of preachers who have given up.... They wouldn't say that they have given up.... They sit under their scrub bush and think very sophisticated and well informed liberal thoughts and as long as the universe is just between their ears, they are just fine.... Smug, self righteous.... And pretty much worthless.

In this very metaphorical text..... let go of reading the tales of the prophets in the Old Testament as history... they are not historical... they are sermons.... Listen to the story as a sermon and try to see what the point of the sermon is.

The prophet has run into the wilderness to die and an angel appears to him and tells him to get over himself and go back to town and get to work..... you have to be able to hear through the religious language, .... He had gone out there to die of hunger and thirst and the angel brought him water and food and said, "Eat your fried chicken and drink your sweet tea because you have a lot of work ahead of you and you are going to need your strength."

I understand that saying you are an atheist is a way of protecting yourself from the disappointments that have marked your family and your religious history and I'm not asking you to believe in what you cannot see and what no one can know..... I'm asking you to open your eyes..... look at the sky, the sea, the land.... Look at the trees, the rivers, the people, the children, the elderly.  Can't you see the disabled and the sick?  Can't you see the emptiness in the eyes of teenagers who have lost hope, who cannot get an education and cannot earn a living wage.  Can't you see the elderly greeting at Walmart, carrying out groceries at Harter House, sweeping the floors in hotels because they can't retire and they can't give in to their aching feet, sore back and chest pains because as soon as they stop they will die.

You can't see God but unless you are blind you can see the suffering around you and I'm telling you that the separation you may feel from those people is just an illusion.  You are those people.  Call that spirit that connects you to our polluted earth and our impoverished humanity God and if you can't believe in that God then you have let your heart turn into a cold hard place and you are as good as dead.

Pastors.... As denominational budgets have diminished, they have had to lay off and consolidate jobs and most of the best and the brightest have been shoved out of the nest because when resources get scarce the mean and the dishonest will find a way to survive and those of good intent will likely become unemployed.  Your church structures will not save you but then you didn't enter the ministry to serve church bureaucracy did you?

Some of you need to get your head out of the clouds and a lot of you need to get your head out from between your legs.  We need your education, your experience, your ability to write, to speak, to inspire, to lead.... But if you have allowed cowardice to make your decisions for you then all of your talents are just being wasted.

On Tuesday there will be thirty or forty of us gathered in front of Senator Blunt's office to protest his desire to keep women and the elderly from getting health care and he won't pay a bit of attention to us and we won't accomplish anything other than a few dozen good hearted people will spend an hour together.  But if everyone would just come back out of the wilderness.....if hundreds of pastors came and they brought a few dozen church members with them.... If we had a crowd of thousands in front of his office then he would come out and want to have his photo taken with us.

In any number of efforts regarding war, poverty, pollution, discrimination, crime, racism, sexism, declining employment and compensation.... It is true, things are getting worse and when you are through with your pitty party and are ready to get back to work, we can change things.... And when you get back from the wilderness and are ready to take to the streets to make a difference you will find us there waiting for you because we're not afraid and we're not going to give up.

Creating a Faith Community

August 5, 2012    Proper 13
4th anniversary of Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO  
Roger Ray, pastor          

Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16              
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. 7But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift. 11The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 14We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.

I went a little "postal" Wednesday evening.  The whole Mike Huckabee  call for a "Chick Fil A Appreciation Day" had not shown up on my radar until some church members told me about driving past the fried chicken restaurant and saw cars lined up for blocks.  They were giving me a ride home from church that evening and I asked them to drive by our local Chick-Fil-A so that I could see if it was still going on.  Sure enough, at 9 p.m., there was still a line stretching down the road for blocks.

I was, of course, appalled but when I saw a huge campaign bus for one of our gubernatorial hopefuls here in Missouri turning off of Glenstone and taking their place in line..... well, that was just too much.  I jumped from the passenger seat of Mike and Carolyn's van and ran over to the bus and began shouting at the candidate..... "You are trying to get the hate vote?  Is that why you want to be governor?  You want to encourage people to murder gay people?  You want to export them from the USA?"

If you did not know it, the owners of Chick Fil A have donated more than $5 million to causes supporting the political decision in Uganda to execute anyone found to be gay and another group advocating for the expulsion of gay people from America.  This is hardly a free speech issue..... this is advocacy of genocide and ethnic cleansing..... a point perhaps lost on folks who were there because their right wing pastor told them to be there but certainly not lost on a political candidate for the office of governor.

Of course, Dan Cathy, the Chick-Fil-A's president says that he is not anti-gay but rather he is just, in his own words, "very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit."  Now, by that, he does not mean the Biblical view of the family in the majority of scripture.... He isn't advocating for polygamy, concubinage and having sex with slave girls as most of the Bible does but rather, he favors the more narrow implied definition in the New Testament.  Still, if he were being honest, surely we would see him trying to repeal no-fault divorce laws, or wanting to make infidelity a criminal offense, or restrict the cohabitation of unmarried persons of the opposite sex.  He has not spent a cent on those measures but has donated more than $5 million to violent anti-gay causes.... So, as in most cases when people say, "I'm not anti-gay, I'm just in favor of free speech," they're really anti-gay.

I was seething with anger but, angry outbursts are not very helpful in such situations.  I went home, dug my white alb that I reserve for baptism ceremonies out of the closet and put it on.

I then went, looking like an out of place monk, and stood in front of Chick-Fil-A until they were closed and all the cars were gone.  I didn't argue with anyone, I just smiled and passed out copies of a newspaper article detailing how the owners of the restaurant used profits to further their Neo-Nazi agenda..... but I did it in a nice way.... You would be proud of me.

I know all too well that such actions don't change anyone's mind but may I remind you of that old Civil War story about the old woman who came running off the porch of her cabin holding her broom over her head to join the army as they ran to the battle front. A young soldier said to her, "You better go home grandma, you can't do much out here with that broom."  And she replied, "Yes I can, I can show them whose side I'm on."

I know that I must have looked like a crazy man, out there all alone, but I felt that someone had to stand up for the gay people who were being so hideously maligned by this public display of homophobia.  I had to at least show them that there are Christians who don't join them in their violent hatred.

Let me ask you to take a look at the cover of your bulletin where we print the 8 points of progressive Christianity every week.  Number 3 says, "By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who seek community that is inclusive of ALL people, including but not limited to:  conventional Christians and questioning skeptics....Believers and agnostics, Women and men,...Those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
Those of all classes and abilities....
The 4th point illustrates what we mean by this too as it adds that we know that the way we behave towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe.

On this day when we are celebrating the 4th anniversary of our church's founding, I want to talk about community.  We were not named accidently, after all.  It is our intent to form, not simply a church, but an intentional community of faith.  Creating community, especially in the social environment of the 21st century, is very difficult.  We divide ourselves so eagerly along political, gender, economic class, race, language and age lines.

The famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, wrote a book about building community entitled, The Different Drum.  In it, Peck argues that one of the most crucial aspects of community is that it must be ferociously inclusive.  In fact, I have heard Peck say on several occasions, to build community, you have to be tolerant of everything except for intolerance.  That is, you must push yourself to be accepting, forgiving, inclusive of especially the people with whom you disagree, the people who are different from you, the people who may even offend your sensibilities.  But the one thing that a community must reject is intolerance.

In fact, after the first time that I heard Scott Peck say that in a lecture I went to my study and looked up every time that the gospels describe Jesus as being in heated conflict with someone.  The Jesus of the gospels is known to socialize with tax collectors and sinners.... Which in our parlance is traitors and prostitutes....
He visited with, had dinner with, and partied with the people we might be afraid to be seen with but the only people he got into a shouting match with.... Indeed, the only people he told to go to hell, were religious bigots who refused to accept the people who lived on the margins of society.  He said to the Pharisees (Matthew 23): 13 'But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. 15Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Passivity does not create community.  Being neutral in ethical matters doesn't create community, it just creates victims.  It takes courage to create community.  It takes a willingness to invest energy in understanding one another, forgiving one another, loving one another.

Mega-churches fill warehouses with thousands of members who do not ever have to engage one another in conversation.  House churches self select people who are carbon copies of themselves so that they never feel the discomfort of being around someone who voted differently in the last election or who has a disability, or a sexual orientation that might make them feel slightly uncomfortable.

Real inclusivity is much dirtier business.  In a real community you live in close enough proximity to know the people around you.  You know who is unemployed, who has cancer....
You know who is divorced and who is straight, gay or bi....
You break bread with people of different races and political parties.  You disagree about issues and beliefs but you never let those things make you reject that person, unless they predicate your friendship on your willingness to join them in rejecting, judging, executing or deporting someone else.

As Karen Armstrong so clearly states: "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."

We have rejected the part of our religious heritage that masked cruel, unkind or violent behavior by blaming it on God.  We have forsaken the church that asked us to sit quietly and dream of heaven while those around us suffered a hell on earth.  We are striving to give birth to a faith community that is safe, that is affirming, that is inclusive, healing and prophetic.

In fact, fours years into this journey together, as we sit here in this building surrounded by thousands of pairs of shoes that will begin their journey to the poor of Nicaragua tomorrow and as you make plans for how you will once again meet and feed the homeless here in Springfield this week, I say, that you have done it.

Most weeks you generously applaud my meager effort at preaching but today, we should turn the tables because it is you who deserve applause.... You have swum against the current of religious irrelevance, you have rejected the religions of prejudice, judgment and guilt, you have sent a message or forgiveness, acceptance and justice all around the globe.
I appreciate you.  I applaude you!  I love you!