Stating the Obvious

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Oct. 14, 2012    Proper  23

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15                      
6 Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire,
   and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it.
7 Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground!
10 They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth.
11 Therefore, because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain,
you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.
12 For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins--
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate.
13 Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time.
14 Seek good and not evil, that you may live;
and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said.
15 Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate;
it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

I was living in Louisville, KY when we first adopted our infant daughter from Korea.  I was, of course, married at that time..... as hard as that may be to believe for some of you who know me best.  We had to endure a number of rather peculiar questions about our decision, some of which were insanely personal and others were just, well, really stupid.  I will not reveal which family member asked us if we planned to tell our very Asian daughter that she was adopted.  The strangest inquiries came from total strangers in public places.

One day, when Valerie was more than a year old and had come into her beautiful long black Korean hair, her mother and I were grocery shopping with Valerie riding along in the cart.  A woman came up beside us and said, "What a beautiful child, did you adopt her?"

Being a bit weary with these impromptu invasions of privacy, without answering the woman, I turned to my wife and said, "See, no one thinks she looks like me, isn't there something you want to tell me?"  My former wife did not universally enjoy my sense of humor but when that woman grabbed her purse and abandoned her shopping cart to sprint for the front door, even she was able to enjoy my extemporaneous "why don't you mind your own business" lesson that day.

There are things that are so obvious that they shouldn't have to be said and yet, we end up saying them and even then, the obvious does not always win.  I'm reading a new book that I recommend to you very highly.  It is written by an Episcopal priest who was previously unknown to me.  His name is Harry Cook and the book is entitled, "Long Live Salvation by Works". I was first drawn to this book by a single quote from it that a friend emailed to me.  Cook says, "It is an axiom of human behavior that you cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place. However, a person who did reason himself into a position might be reasoned out of it and into another more reasonable position."

That single sentence sums up a lot of what I have found difficult in my life as a religious person.  There is so much about religion that we do not arrive at by reason.  We are told to believe certain things, and we are told to believe them emphatically and never to let them go.

You would not, through observation of the world or through any personal experience, come to believe in the divinity of Jesus, or the sanctity of sacraments.  You would not reason your way into believing in incarnation, heaven and hell or substitutionary death.
And so, when we try to apply reason to the practice of our spirituality, we find ourselves constantly at odds with those who refuse to allow reason to be a part of their thinking.

Religious people are so often like the Queen in "Through the Looking Glass" who, when Alice objected:  "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Lewis Carol, of course, was not simply writing humor for children.  Once you can get a person practiced to believe impossible things then you can get them to believe almost anything.  And, I'm afraid, a lot of our early religious training works to anesthetize our ability to think critically.

Sometimes we miss a lot of what even the Bible says because we have been trained to look at it as if it were a book full of magical spells.... it becomes so holy in our minds that it becomes incomprehensible.  We tend to think of the word "prophet" to mean someone who has divine insight into the future, like a saintly Nostradamus.  That is not true at all.  The prophets rarely foretold the future.  They almost always talk about the present.  The meaning of the word "prophesy" is no different that the meaning of our word "to preach."

The prophets were said to speak in a way that made the people's ears to tingle, to make them want to cover their ears.  They were not foretelling distant future events, the coming of a later messiah nor the end of time.

They mostly talked about the present time with such naked honesty that it made people put them into prison or kill them rather than to deal with what they were saying.  We say that the role of the prophetic church is to speak the truth to power but power rarely wants to hear it.

It was the prophetic church that stood up to the abuses of our colonizers.  It was the prophetic church that challenged the practices of child labor in the early textile industry.... that challenged the institution of slavery.... the relegation of women to second class status.... the labor abuses of immigrants and defenseless workers.

Institutional religion has a whole long laundry list of social justice issues in which they were on the wrong side of ethics.... but that's not because they were accustomed to speaking truth, it is because they were well practiced in believing six impossible things before breakfast.

The emerging church of the 21st century must stop asking people to believe what cannot be known and that which is inherently unreasonable.  Faith is compatible with hope but not with ignorance.  The prophets were not magical diviners who had angels whispering in their ears, they were people who were able to speak the truth to power.

Consider this text before us today from the 5th chapter of Amos.  Sure, he is pronouncing divine judgment on the people but look at why:
in verse 11 he says very clearly that their nation is going to fall apart "because you trample on the poor."  He says in verse 12 that they take bribes and push the needy away from the gate.  Can the modern church hear the voice of its own prophets?

Let me give you an example that we have never talked about before..... a clean slate issue.
Let's just look at some facts about voter fraud and voter suppression.  There have been lobbyists working across the nation to change voter laws to require that every voter present a photo ID.  It is estimated that over 20 million voters do not have a photo ID which is normally associated with owning a car.  Of that 20 million people who do not have a driver's license, almost all of them, statistically speaking, are poor and many are minorities.

By both instituting photo ID's and restricting pre election day voting, lobbyists are potentially removing more than 20 million votes in the name of protecting our elections from voter fraud.  How many cases of voter fraud do we typically have in a year in the USA?  Between 5 and 20.  So, when politicians are willing to keep 20 million poor and minority voters from voting to avoid 5 to 20 cases of voter fraud, can you possibly make yourself believe that the motivation is to avoid voter fraud?

You see, we are interested in calling out the public to embrace the truth.  This week, billboards began appearing in minority neighborhoods in Cleveland, OH that read, "Voter Fraud is punishable by a 3.5 year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine."  These billboards are only appearing where there are immigrants and poor blacks who are generally expected to vote democratic in this very important swing state.

You can understand that there are people who are inspired to try and get Obama out of the White House, but once they decide that they can trample on the poor to accomplish that goal then they should not expect persons of conscience to act like we are willing to believe that they are not enemies of democracy and justice.

Now, Plato, in The Republic, advocated that philosophers should be kings.  In our age, we could say, for example, that only people who have an IQ over 140 should be allowed to vote.  So if only geniuses could run the government, we would have a very efficient and dependable government.

But one of the interloculars in Plato's Republic, once Socrates had described this wonderful state run by philosopher kings, asked, "But who would want to live there?"  An America run only by and for the rich or an America run only by and for the elite would not be an America we would long want to live in.

As sloppy and inefficient as it is, the beauty of our nation is found in striving for equality among all people..... we are nowhere near there..... as religious people we can say that being rich is not a blessing and being poor is not a curse but when you have lived on both sides of that fence you can say with the pigs in Animal Farm that some of us are just more equal than others.

Traditional religious people want us to show kindness to the poor, the hungry, the sick, as sort of the icing on top of our self congratulatory religious beliefs that we are heaven bound travelers on a sacred highway.  The prophets asked us to be more devoted to the absolute truth than to any dogma or religious ritual.

In our very complicated world in which politicians play dice with deciding which sick people get health care, which people will live in mansions and which live under bridges, and who gets to vote and who doesn't..... then we should be considered to be dangerous people who will always take the side of the truth rather than the powerful and that devotion to compassion and reason is now our sacred scripture and our holy quest.

Curse God and Die

Community Christian Church
Dr. David Trobisch
October 7, 2012

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
1:1 There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.
2:1 One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD.
2:2 The LORD said to Satan, "Where have you come from?"
Satan answered the LORD, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it."
2:3 The LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason."
2:4 Then Satan answered the LORD, "Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. 2:5 But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face."
2:6 The LORD said to Satan, "Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life."
2:7 So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. 2:8 Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.
2:9 Then his wife said to him, "Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die."
2:10 But he said to her, "You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

The name of my grandfather was Ralph Hult. His family had emigrated from Sweden to Nebraska in the 18 hundreds.

As a young man he felt the call to ministry. He received a full scholarship to study at Augustana College in Rock Island.

At the age of thirty, he and my grandmother Gertrude served as missionaries in Africa. They first were in Nigeria, where Ralph Hult traveled inland and later also served in Nigeria, all in all for six years. During this time my uncles Paul and John and my mother Ingrid were born. And Ralph Hult had another daughter, Ruth, who died shortly after she was born, and who is buried in Tanzania, on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Ralph Hult also traveled inland and became one of the first white men to travel through Central Africa.
In the area of what is today Chad, Ralph Hult had a spiritual experience. God wanted him to serve as a missionary to a specific tribe.

But when Ralph Hult returned to the United States on furlough, he was not able to persuade his mission board to send him back. In fact, the mission board had just decided that they would not continue the Sudan Mission into French speaking Africa, which Ralph Hult had pioneered.
Fifteen years later, in the dawn of World War Two, the German Lutheran missionaries in British East Africa either interned or deported because of the war. And the German Lutherans asked the American Lutherans to take over the mission fields that were left leaderless.

So the Mission Board in Minneapolis remembered that rogue pastor in Missouri, swallowed their pride, and sent him a letter. They inquired in cautious tones whether Ralph Hult, now fifty-two years old and the father of ten, would consider returning to Tanzania for the duration of the emergency. If he would help to organize the transition, they would in return send him to the tribe that he felt called to minister to.

It took the mission board 15 long years before they decided to send him to Africa again. And when they did, the year was 1940, the world was in turmoil, and the United States were just about to enter World War Two. Ralph Hult The boat, which was supposed to bring him to Tanzania, was the "Zamzam", an 8,000-ton ship, which had served as a British troopship during World War I. More than one hundred missionaries,  some with wives and children,  representing 20 different denominations, were on the Zamzam  when it started out from New York in the spring of 1941.

Among the travelers was a group of young ambulance drivers  who tried to escape the draft. And on the first evening, as the ship glided down the Hudson River past the Statue of Liberty, 120 missionaries sang the hymn "Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me" while the ambulance drivers tried to drown them out with an impudent song of their own. If the missionaries are to believed, those young men were drunk most of the time.

But the real conflict, it seemed, was between the missionaries themselves.

There were Lutherans, Methodists, Adventists, Catholics, and Pentecostals on board. Knowing how stubborn my grandfather could be in matters of faith  I do not find it hard to imagine  that there may just have been a thing or two  he wished to clarify with his fellow theologians.

The Egyptian crew mostly consisted of Muslims.

So what do we have: a ship,  full of Christian missionaries,  constantly rubbing soldiers  steered by Muslims.

At some point during the voyage from Brazil to Capetown, the captain received orders to sail under blackout. British intelligence sent coded radio instructions charting a safe course.
And when everyone retired the evening of April 16th 1941 it felt like any other night on board the ship. They were counting off the days until the Cape would come in sight, and they would disembark and set foot on African soil for the first time.

Little did the passengers know that for days they had been secretly followed by a German raider.

My grandfather was awakened at dawn by what he thought at first was the crash of a large wave against the ship. The second "wave" however, made him realize that the ship was being shelled. He immediately got dressed and went on deck. The passengers seemed to be calm but the crew panicked. Nevertheless Ralph Hult was able to reach his assigned lifeboat. As soon as the boat had been lowered, however, they discovered that shrapnel of the shells had torn a hole in it. The boat tipped over, throwing all into the shark infested sea.

And when after a while  the Egyptian seamen had managed to crawl up on the overturned boat were lifting up their arms to call on Allah, spirited Ralph Hult pleaded with them to lower their arms and pull at least the floating children out of the water.

The German raider sent out rescue boats. And in what my grandfather later would describe as "a business-like manner" brought passengers, baggage and other material from the Zamzam to the raider. Eight hours after the Zamzam had been shelled the ship sunk.

Miraculously, all passengers survived. Only two men had received severe injuries.

Of course: two ambulance drivers!

The Germans realized their mistake  but they tried to hide the sinking. This incident could have triggered the US participation in World War 2 if it had been publicized.
There were 330 ship wrecked passengers from the Zamzam who had to be put up on the German ship: 35 children, 76 women -- 5 of the women were pregnant. But the German ship had accommodations for only 35 passengers. Three women were sharing two mattresses on the decks of public rooms. In the forward hatch 108 men were sleeping head to foot and shoulder to shoulder  on rough wooden planks  in a total space of 50 feet by 50 feet.

Ralph Hult was  as I told you  a good Lutheran. And so were the soldiers in Hitler's navy. Every Sunday there would be a Lutheran worship service on deck. And the German chaplain would preach. And the soldiers would sing hymns. And my grand father would know those hymns.
The toughest message these missionaries had to learn during their voyage was that the enemy  Hitler's army  shared the same Lutheran faith in a loving and caring God.

The German captain received instructions from Berlin to bring the passengers to a port in occupied France. To get there, however, the ship had to run through the British sea-blockade. All the passengers were forced under deck where they waited in complete darkness. Terrified. Afraid to be sunk again, but this time from their friends and allies. At any given moment ship could collide with a British mine or a torpedo could penetrate the iron hull of the ship.

The voyage from where the Zamzam sunk to the port France, where the passengers disembarked, lasted five weeks. By that time the mission boards had informed the families that the ship and every soul on it was lost. Memorial services were organized. My mother was 14 years old, when the principal of her school took her out of the class room and told her: "Ingrid, your father is dead."

One of the last three American passengers on the Zamzam to return to the US was Ralph Hult. After waiting for 15 years for his mission board to send him  after being so close to the continent God called him to serve  after surviving a shipwreck and barely avoiding a second one Ralph Hult was standing again at the peer in New York, where he had left.

Ralph Hult finally did make it to Tanzania. On board a monition ship. He helped take over the mission stations from the Germans. But on a trip to Dar es Salaam he died of heart failure in a hospital. He had checked himself in, but no one knew who he was and who to notify. Following the Islamic custom he was buried before sunset the same day. No friends, no colleagues, no family attended the ceremony.
Ralph Hult never made it to the tribe that God had called him to serve.

We tend to tell stories of God's promises  to show how God is reliable, how God carries us through. But the Bible has other stories as well. Like the story of Job.
God and Satan have a bet. For no good reason, God admits in the story, He turned against Job and destroyed him.
And Job's family? How supportive are they? His wife looks at him  sitting among the ashes, scratching his sores with a potsherd, and all the consolation she has to offer is: "Curse God and die!"

Being a Christian is about sharing a boat with people you do not necessarily like. The conflict is in the boat. Like in the Zamzam.
This is why we use the language of family when we talk about our faith community: we are brothers and sisters. We cannot choose our brother or our sister. Even if we don't like them, they will not go away.
I do not know if you ever were on a boat  figuratively speaking  shelled and sunk by your sisters and brothers in faith. Chances are, you know what I am talking about.

But the true conflict is not in the boat. The real problem is with God. Why is God so unreliable? Why doesn't God do what we ask God to do? Why do things happen to us  that make no sense?
Why do things happen to us  that make no sense?
Why does God do what God does?  I have no good answer for you. But I can tell you that on other days the very same events look differently. In all the disappointments, tragedies, horrors and pain  we can see the light. We can look at the exact same events in our past and see them as blessings. We can even say "Thank you" for what happened.
I cannot tell you why this is, but I can tell you that it is true. We call it hope. And faith.
My grandfather, Ralph Hult, was not an unhappy man.
Blessed is who feels a call from God - and responds to it. Life is a voyage. But it is not so much about arriving as it is about travelling.
God bless you all on your voyage!
AMEN

The Persian Horse

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor  
Sept. 30, 2012    Proper 21

Mark 9:41-50
41For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
42"If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. 43If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. 47And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
49"For everyone will be salted with fire. 50Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

Cursing is a peculiar art, and it is, in my opinion, a sadly failing art in our culture.  Our curses are few and very crude.  Four centuries ago, Shakespeare peppered his plays with almost throwaway insults that were wonderful:

"Sir, my desire is that we become much better strangers."
"I could endure anything before but a cat, and now he's a cat to me." Or, "Let's meet as little as we can."

We would not generally tell someone that they are fat but in a more subtle time, the English might say, "By truth, your girth doth make a mill stone seem a feather."

We have no more imagination than to simply say that someone is just ugly but the English might say, "Thy vile canker-blossom'd countenance curdles milk and sours beer."

I'm not encouraging you to be rude, I'm just saying that when you are rude, you could try to use a little more creative flair.

Cursing in our era tends to be one of only two things.  You might hear someone telling someone to go to place of eternal torment.... Which, clearly, expresses some sincere anger.... But the other common curse wishes a sexual encounter on another person, which, as curses go, doesn't really make much sense.  Our curses are either wishing someone eternal torment or brief ecstasy.  Which makes no more sense than angrily saying, "I hope your daughter gets into Harvard."  Or "I hope you get a substantial promotion."

That one I can't make sense out of but the former seems to come from a much deeper necessity.  A necessity because the world is unfair, it is especially unfair to people who live in militarily occupied nations.... It is unfair to slaves who are bought and sold.... It is unfair to the poor who are defined by cast, class or race to be perpetually poor, generation after generation.

Something innate in our souls calls out for justice.  In the most ancient strata of human religious thinking, the gods and demons meted out reward and punishment instantaneously.  Earthquakes, floods, droughts and plagues were signs of god's wrath and bumper crops, healthy births and victory on the battlefield were signs of god's favor.

That system proved to be unsatisfactory.  Sacrificing animals really doesn't make it rain or make crops grow.  Carrying religious idols and emblems into battle will not really insure victory over bad military odds.

Our ancestors could not accept that God was either indifferent or unjust but if you just look at the events of current times or even of history, a plausible case could be made for accusing God of being indifferent, unjust or just plain old ineffective.  Various religious solutions for this dilemma have been offered.... Reincarnation continues to be an inviting idea to many.... If life sucks this time around, you have an infinite number of opportunities for life to suck even more.

It was the ancient Persians who first put into words the solution that seems to have mostly stuck, at least for modern Christians, Muslims and some Jews.

Our ancestors long held fairly nebulous hopes that there was some life beyond this life.  Ancient Jews had almost nothing to say about it beyond the shadowy house of Sheol, and ancient Egyptians held only to a hope that the demigod pharaohs had a future.

The Persians, as envisioned by Zoroaster, believed that everyone marched from death into eternity and there had to cross a bridge into the eternal world from which all souls come.  The bridge, however, crosses over a deep pit of fire and if you have lived a good life, the bridge is wide and easy but if you have not lived well, the bridge turns and is as narrow as the blade of a knife, so that the unjust fall into the eternal flame.

Hebrew slaves were exposed to this very convenient religious belief while they were in captivity in Babylon and worked this view of eternity into their post exilic Judaism which gave birth to Christianity and Islam.  I say that it is a convenient religious creation because it allows us to believe that God is just, that the world, though it looks unfair, will be ultimately set right.


On the one hand, that hope becomes a way of tolerating the gross injustices of life.  But on the down side, it becomes a tool for keeping people in oppression.  African slaves introduced to Christianity in North America were told that if they were obedient and worked hard, enduring their misery in this life, would have untold riches and joy in the world to come.

Even St Paul lends his voice to the conviction that this life is so temporary, compared to eternity, that we should suffer in silence, setting our hope on the unseen, unknown, unprovable world of reward for which there is not a scrap of supporting evidence.....the ultimate pig in a poke, the pie in the sky in the by and by promise for which no one can file a complaint of false advertising.

The threat of hell is then used not only to keep the poor and the enslaved in compliant service, but it is also used to keep women in abusive relationships, to tell young men and women that the urges stirring within them can not only lead to incurable diseases and unwanted pregnancy but also to eternity in a place where the flame is unceasing and the worm never dies where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth...... which never seemed to eradicate sexual conduct but it sure invested it with a lot of conflict, guilt and despair.

In very recent years, several evangelical authors have found the courage to take a look at this issue and begin to say things like, "love wins," rejecting the notion that a loving God will burn you up in eternity for doing things that a million years of evolution insists that you will do.


When I was attending the Wild Goose Festival this summer, the film "Hellbound" was being hawked by its producers and the largely evangelical preachers who spoke at that event were nearly doing cartwheels in joy as the movie traces the hell myth back to Zoroastrianism and its influences on evolving Judaism and the birth of Christianity and Islam.  Something they would have known a long time ago if they had bothered to go to school..... but it only seems to infuriate them when I point that out and they generally have to fall back on one of the two insults they know, one of which makes no sense and the other had just be debunked...... it's awkward.

In this we stand at the open mouth of a dark cave with our pre-civilization ancestors.  We do not know what, if anything happens when we die.  We seem to have an innate hope and we have an abundance of ideas, experiences, accounts of angelic sightings, ghosts, bright lights and voices all of which add up to absolutely no proof of anything and no certain conclusions other than that we hope.

Like so many aspects of religions which begin as revolutionary movements of the poor expressing defiance against the powerful, hell is a piece of a formula in search for ultimate justice.... That there are people who are so evil, circumstances so unjust, that surely God can't let it go without some settling of accounts, some justice on the other side of what we can see and know.  But then, as all surviving religions eventually become state religions, the threat of hell is used against the weak and oppressed to keep them in compliance and to control their lives.

What the emerging church must realize is that the spiritual life either has value in and of itself or it has no certain value at all.

When I was a young preacher in Louisville, KY, I taught a Wednesday evening Bible Study in the church's fellowship hall on Taylorsville Road and I had about thirty or forty people in that class.  The next major road to the west was Bardstown Road where there was a very large bar that, on Wednesday nights, held a "naughty nighty competition."  So I regularly thanked those in attendance at the Bible Study for choosing to read the gospels with me rather than going to the naughty nighty competition at the Toy Tiger.

But as I looked at some of the young college students in the class, I thought I could detect a certain discomfort with the choice they had made.  And here is the issue, if you are in Bible study when you would rather be at the Toy Tiger because you are afraid of going to hell then, you have been tricked.

Like all of you, I have hope for life in the future and I can even add to that a bit of faith in a loving and kind God so that whatever the great unknown may be, I am willing to trust God with that.

An engaged spirituality, a religion embedded in the real world, opens its eyes to look at what is through a lens of faith.  Our innate feeling that the world is unjust and that somehow the will of God still favors justice is not wrong, we just anesthetize it with talk about heaven and hell.

Your passion for justice, your desire to ameliorate suffering, to share the resources of the world with those in need..... that is holy and anything that keeps you from working to make that happen, anything that tells you to disengage and leave it in the hands of an unknown hereafter, that, I submit, is the opposite of spirituality..... in fact, when you think about it, it's really not religion, it is just old fashioned stupid.

Some people sitting at their desk watching this sermon on YouTube will protest, but Jesus warned us carefully avoid the unquenchable fire of hell, it is right there in the 9th chapter of Mark.  I can tell you that the preponderance of New Testament scholars from the members of the Jesus Seminar to any Ivy League school you want to name would tell you that though the early church wrote such texts into the gospels that the historical Jesus would not have said that.

I'm here to tell you that even if he did, you need to have the courage to say that even he could be wrong about some things.  Jesus was, at least in part, a product of that same culture that inherited as fact that part of their Persian history that put justice off into the afterlife.  Jesus is a part of that flat earth culture that believed that it rained when God opened doors in the firmament to let the waters above fall on the earth beneath, and that the sun was literally reborn each morning as God drew it across the sky.

What we, as spiritual people in the 21st century must do is to examine the heart of the faith we have inherited, to preach good news to the poor, liberation to the captives, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless and to pay fair wages to laborers.

That's in the prophets, that's in the gospels, that's the preaching of the apostles and testimony of the saints.

You will not often hear me quoting that 18th century Irish American revivalist, Alexander Campbell, but he said this one thing that I love..... that if Christians will get down on the knees and pray for anything for which they will not then stand up and work for, sacrifice for, to make it happen then they are only insulting God and disappointing themselves.

We know enough about hell in the here and now without wasting time on speculation about the afterlife.  Hell is when middle class legislators make it illegal for poor women to manage their own bodies when those legislators can afford to send their kids to Canada or Europe for any medical procedure they make illegal here.  Hell is living in a nation with enough empty foreclosed upon houses to house every homeless person in the country but no one seems to be willing to do the math necessary to correct that absurdity.

Hell is fighting the bloodiest domestic war in history to end slavery in this nation and then blithely accepting slavery produced goods and food because they come from a nation far enough away that we don't see it.  Hell is telling people that they have to get off of welfare and go to work and then we devise a transportation system where you have to buy a car, insurance, gas, pay taxes and fees to get to work.... Which is virtually impossible and at least here in Springfield, we design our bus system routes to keep the number of riders low because it costs too much to subsidize the buses.

 Hell is sending the poor of this nation to kill the poor of another nation to keep the transfer of wealth into the hands of the few sailing on a sea of the blood of the unsuspecting, compliant, obedient poor.  What does your religion have to say to that?
 If you demand that the message of Jesus remain imprisoned in a religion that does not speak to the hell we know in favor of one that doesn't exist then, well, I have a couple of cryptic curses for you, and you can take your choice of which one you like the best, I just insist that you stay out of our way because we are going to try to change the world so that the will of God is done on earth where we can see it.

How Our Cravings Make Us Crazy

September 23, 2012    Proper 20
Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor

James 3:13 - 4:2                        
13Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. 14But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. 15Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. 16For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. 17But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. 18And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.
4Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? 2You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.

On Friday morning television crews were out filming images of people sleeping on the streets in sleeping bags.  Some were in small clusters around camp stoves and tents.  But these were not homeless people.  We don't allow homeless people to sleep on the sidewalks.... Even when they are hiding from plain view, our local police force will arrest or evict them, confiscate their belongings and discard them and even take their pets to the animal shelter where they will likely be put down.

No, the people sleeping on the sidewalks this week were in line to buy the new iPhone 5..... a product with differences so subtle from the last version of the iPhone that most of us would be at pains to meaningfully say what they are.  Still, the irony present in the fact that you cannot sleep on the streets if you have no home and nowhere else to go but you can sleep on the streets if you do own a home but you intend to buy something and if that doesn't tell you something of the degree to which capitalism has become America's real religion then, my friends, you are not paying attention.

I don't say that to be hyper-critical of techno-nerds.  I actually have an iPhone 4 myself which I purchased when they added the Siri communication feature, only to discover that I can't communicate with Siri any better than I have been able to communicate with any of the women I've dated over the past two decades.

And I would even say that I need to put some distance between myself and a lot of my very liberal, tree hugging, anti-consumerism friends.  If we all just stop buying things and learn to live very simply on much less then the economy grinds to a halt and the poor suffer even more.  A lot of the hardship we are experiencing across the country right now is a direct result in the slowdown of the economy that has cut production and retail jobs, cut state sales tax income, forcing reductions in school and road budgets and layoffs among police and fire fighters.

Excessive greed and consumerism is part of what caused this economic melt down but the other end of the spectrum has its own monsters.  No matter what else you might want to say about the "dot.com bubble" of the 1990's, the hyper stimulated market was directly responsible for an increase in employment and income and under those circumstances a lot of wonderful things happen that should make both liberals and conservatives happy..... the crime rate went down.... Violent crime by more than 50%.... even the abortion rate went down by 50% because women who feel that they can raise a child are much more likely not to terminate a pregnancy.

Unemployment went down, the numbers of teen pregnancies, single parent births went down and giving to global charities reached all time highs.


A liberal progressive who really wants to see an alleviation of suffering and a raising of the standard of living of the poor needs to take a sober look at the reality of what a bull market can do if all of the profits are not being skimmed off into the pockets of the now infamous 1%.

But, of course, the answer to the poverty issues that plague us today is not nearly so simple as telling people to go buy more, consume more, own more.  The sobering reality is that if we want to give more people a living wage and a decent standard of living then we are going to have consume less but pay a lot more for it..... and that does not translate well to the marketplace.  You will never see a grocery store chain called "Pay More Get Less."

Although, truth be told, that is what our local Farmers' Markets really are.  Buying produce at one of our local Farmers' Markets is good for the environment; it is good for your health, it's good for the local economy but you are going to pay an awful lot for apples and onions.

You can take comfort in knowing that one of our favorite local musicians, Dallas Jones, who also is an farmer, will not have his infant children out in the field digging up potatoes or cracking open pecans by candle light in the basement at night. If you buy local produce you will have to pay American wages to people who work under acceptable first world conditions and then you find out why food at Walmart is so much cheaper.

If you buy food at Chick-fil-A you know that you are getting a little hate and prejudice with your fried chicken.
If you buy produce at Sams and Walmart, which most of us do, then you can know that someone is being abused on the other side of that transaction.  If you are a person of conscience, then certainly you want to work to alleviate suffering and to make the market place more fair, more just, and, if you are a heard hearted greedy capitalist, you at least want to make profits the right size to make market growth sustainable.... During the dot.com bubble, no one was calling President Clinton a communist, were they?

In our scripture lesson from James today, James is making the eternally true observation that greed leads to conflict, even to murder.  No matter what the spin put on international warfare, it is almost never about religion, humanitarian aid, liberation or spreading democracy.... There are times when it is but when you hear hoof beats you think "horses" and not "zebras."  Most wars are about economics, about the market, about profit and power.

James says that the warfare is within us.... We want something and we do not have it and so we will murder to get it.... If not literally, then essentially.  Most of us would be ashamed to wear the shoes on our feet if we saw the conditions in which they were made.  We live with a clear conscience because of what we do not see, what we do not know, but when we refuse to see or become informed, then, in fact, we already know that we will wear the shoes either way.  And that is the point at which spirituality enters the marketplace of both ideas and shoe shopping.

At the heart of Buddhist teaching is what is called the Four Nobel Truths.  It is always dangerous to try to sum up any religious teaching too simply but if you will give me permission to give you a short hand version of the four truths:

The first is that life is full of suffering, dissatisfaction and dis-ease.
The second is that our suffering, dissatisfaction and lack of contentment comes from our unrealized desires.
The third is that the end of this discomfort comes from letting go of all desire.
The fourth point has to do with following what is called the "eight fold path" which consists of consists of: Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

Really explaining that 4th point would require that you take my course in eastern religious thought..... the tuition for that course at Drury University is $2,400, which gets us back to the whole point about greed, consumerism and camping out in front of the Apple store to get a version of Siri that actually understands me.

The first three points are a bit easier.  When your friend tells you that they are going to Hawaii for two weeks, is your first thought that you are really happy for your friend that they are going to get to have such a nice vacation or is your first thought jealousy?  You see, letting go of desire, being able to have a balanced approach to life goes to the heart of the problem between the first world and the third world.

Would I be willing to get by on three pairs of shoes rather than fifteen pairs of shoes if the people who make my shoes got to eat every day and live in a house that has a floor?  If you cannot answer "yes" to that question then you need to keep coming to church every week until you can.

Finding the right balance to our consumerism that gives others a chance to have a decent life is a spiritual issue.  When we can get our appetites under control then a lot of life factors start to change..... marriages will last longer, children will be better cared for, there will be fewer wars, fewer people who need to sleep on the streets and more people interested in signing up for my college classes..... and that, as Martha Stewart says, would be a good thing.

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.