A Wandering Slave Owning Mercenary Was My Father

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
February 17, 2013      Lent 1

Deuteronomy 26:5-9
5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us,
7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders;
9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

It has been quite a week for me, traveling in rural Nicaragua since we were last together.  I met a lot of interesting people and was a part of some fabulous experiences but I must tell you that while there, I met Jesus, and he's gay.... and only about 4'10"..... and in Nicaragua they pronounce it "Jesus." Jesus was one of our translators who traveled with our team and, I'm happy to say, is one of our newest web based church members along with another of our translators, Jiros.  Hola mi amigos!  Proxima ano!

In Nicaragua churches basically come in two flavors: Catholic and Pentecostal Evangelical.  Jesus and Jarios were both pleased to find out that there is a church where gay people are welcomed and where you can believe in the moral teachings of Jesus without all of the guilt, fear of hell and manipulation of lust for heaven.

What amazed me the most was when Jarios asked me if I had ever read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."   Jarios to speak English from a friend he hung out with at the park at night just because he wanted to learn to improve himself and from those conversations in the park, he moved onto reading pretty challenging books, not just Zinn but even John Perkins', "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man."
Our conversations grew  to include other translators and some of our Rainbow Network doctors, all of whom had a much deeper awareness of their own history and the ways in which Nicaragua has been little more than an enslaved
agricultural plantation for American interests for most of the past century and a half.

They are not either angry or vengeful.... it is what happened and they knew that we were there trying to do good things.  I am also factual about it but I am not there out of a sense of guilt or obligation, but I am factual about it..... I was on the power side of the North America verses Central America competition.  I'm not trying to do penance or even the playing field, I'm just trying to do what is compassionate and reasonable in light of our history and their need.

Similarly, though I have invested relatively little time in personal genealogical studies, I am aware that my patriarchal family operated a large slave plantation in southern Kentucky for four generations.  Their wealth was invested in land and the evil practice of slavery, or as Stephen Colbert calls it, "our unpaid African internship program."

And even though my family was locked into agricultural poverty for another three or four generations, we were destined to emerge, as a clan of white people born in North America.  Again, it is foolish to feel either advantaged or guilty based on gender, race, nationality or any other condition of birth, but it is a fact that the greatest indicator of economic success in the world is still to be born white and male in North America.  Those are the facts.... some people celebrate those facts and they feel tremendous fear as the descendants of white Europeans are becoming a minority in the United States and some of us acknowledge these facts and choose to work to create a more just world.

Reciting our history helps us to understand who we are.  Our scripture text this morning is very familiar to you if you have ever been close enough to a Jewish family to be around for Passover in which reciting the history of the Jews is a formal annual exercise.

In the late Bronze Age, as the cultures of ancient Syria and Assyria in collapse, nomadic Semitic tribes, Arameans, settled close enough to Egypt to be drawn into their expanding empire and enslaved.  There, we are told by the Biblical accounts of Deuteronomy, God found the Hebrew slaves and turned them into a people who would inhabit Palestine.

Every spring, when Jews come to celebrate Passover, their central holiday, they began by defining themselves by reciting their history..... in Jewish homes, the world over, in a few weeks, the youngest person present will ask the formulaic question about what all of these rituals mean and the head of the household will respond in the way that Passover celebrations have begun for centuries:  A wandering Aramean was my father.....

I could say, "an immigrant Brit who became a slave owning farmer was my father."  Most of you who woke up this morning as citizens of the United States could say something similar because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "We may have arrived on different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now."

Though many of us have had to face ridiculous and unjust discrimination and have been challenged with barriers to education, health care or employment in our lifetimes, still, we must acknowledge that we live in a nation envied by our southern neighbors for both our national wealth and the opportunities afforded to us.  And we, who are the inheritors of a nation made wealthy by hard work, sacrifice, courage, ingenuity, and by killing off 90 million Indians as we took their land, through forced labor of both African slaves and children in the 19th century, and exploited women and illegal aliens in the 20th century, now have the opportunity to help to create a more just, sane and spiritually honest world.

The Canadian artist, Bruce Cockburn, was inspired by the theology of one of my Harvard professors, Harvey Cox, as I certainly have been.  In search of a more engaged spirituality, Cockburn traveled in Guatemala and in Nicaragua the time of the Disappeared and during the Contra War. His anger at the injustices he witnessed and his determination to see the world changed became the poetry of his Stealing Fire album, now almost 30 years old and still one of the most influential collections of music in my life and, evidently a huge inspiration for the music of U2.

We asked David to sing a song from that album today, "Lovers in a dangerous time," that contains the line that I have so often used to define our ministry, asserting that we will keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. We will not deny our history.  We will not hide behind religious mumbo jumbo.  Genuine spirituality is in need of the whole truth but we are not destined to repeat our past or to be tied down to the abuses of our ancestors.  We have chosen to do a new thing, a good thing, a loving and compassionate thing..... we have chosen to keep kicking at the darkness of slavery, exploitation, oppression and abuse until it bleeds the light of liberation, justice, mercy and freedom. We are, as the Nicaraguan hero, Augusto Sandio, who fought against the US occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930's said, "viven en la luche por la paz."  We live in the struggle for peace and you will have to forgive me for believing that this time, we are winning.

Ending the Conspiracy of Silence

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Transfiguration Sunday

 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
12Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, 13not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. 14But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. 15Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; 16but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. 17Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
4Therefore, since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God's word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.

Magicians do not actually practice magic because, of course, there is no such thing.  What they actually practice is more accurately called the "art of illusion."  Magicians have long used scantily clad young women, puffs of smoke and flame in order to draw the audience's attention away from where the real sleight of hand, the real action they need for you to not see is taking place.

I've recently read the suggestion that we watch or read the news in the same way.  It may be helpful if you ask yourself, when the news is full or reports about a famous General's sexual escapades or a movie star's drug problems, what is the story they are wanting us to not know about while they are distracting us with this fluff?

Though I am often critical of our Springfield paper, as a contributing writer, I'm enough of an insider to know that the decline in newspaper advertisers and subscribers has resulted in the layoff of so many writers that any real investigative reporting is nearly a thing of the past.  There are just not enough journalists to do much more that grab news service stories and reprint them.
On the TV side of the equation, we've seen a rather more intentional dumbing down, as resources have shifted, year after year, away from investigative reporting in favor of huge contracts given to celebrity news readers......most of whom have about the substance as "Bambi, my lovely assistant" or a sudden puff of smoke.

Monsanto doesn't want us to know what they put in our food or that the government officials who regulate food safety used to work for them and will work for them again one day.  Boeing, GE, Morton Thiokol, General Dynamics and Haliburton do not want you to know what their profit margin is in military manufacturing.  In the conversation about sequestration, you hear lots about how the economy couldn't stand to cut the military budget because it would cost too many American jobs..... total bologna, of course.  For every million dollars we spend on the military we only create 11 jobs but for ever million cut from education, we lose 26 teachers.

I know the pulpit is not a great place to get into statistics and accounting but folks, what I'm trying to say here is that important things are going on while we are being asked to stare at smoke and mirrors.  A prophetic church is in need of the whole truth, but the media mostly feeds us gossip.  They call it the "liberal media" but something as important as global climate change is almost never mentioned and, those who analyze media content have reported that in almost every case that it was brought up last year, it was brought up by conservative politicians who were making fun of it.

Part of the false equivalency of the media is the sense that if one person says something about the dangers of climate change, they have to balance that with someone who undermines or denies climate change, as if it were a 50-50 proposition.  The truth is that 98% of qualified scientists agree on human caused climate change as a fact but 90% of what you hear in the media is the opposite.

In our scripture lesson today, Paul metaphorically refers to the Exodus account of Moses covering his face with a veil after he had been with the Lord......, In Exodus it said that Moses' face shown in a disturbing way so he covered it for the sake of the people.

My high school science teacher in Kentucky speculated that God must be radioactive since being with God made Moses' face shine.  Which leads me to two conclusions..... public school teachers not only shouldn't lead prayer in school but they should talk about religion at all..... and, my science teacher needed to not talk much about science since she clearly didn't understand.... while radiation does make some chemicals glow, no matter how many science fiction shows say it does, radition doesn't work on people that way.... radiation makes people dead.

The glowing face of Moses in Exodus is a metaphor and Paul uses the reference in a different kind of metaphor.  Paul talks about the veil as something that is cast over your minds to keep you from seeing the truth.  And though I do not always find it very easy to agree with Paul theologically, I certainly agree with him in his insistence that honest spirituality demands that we take off the veil and see reality.

An old classmate of mine from Vanderbilt, Dr. Paul Jones, has recently published a book entitled, "The Church's Seven Deadly Secrets."  I loved the title but I have to admit that I am not crazy about the content of the book.  I had hoped that Paul was going to do something really bold with this title but it is mostly very safe Sunday School chatter.

For example, chapter three is entitle:  The Bible is not the word of God, Jesus is.  He is correct, of course, to call out the modern fundamentalist assertion that the written text of the Bible is actually the word of God but he dismisses one unprovable truth claim for another, insisting that Jesus is the incarnate word of God.  If he had said that out loud while he was sitting next to me Jack Forstman's theology class everyone would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of it.... in fact there is some relief in the fact that Dr. Forstman passed away about six months before this book went to press.

You don't replace one magical claim with another magical claim.  We take the teachings of Jesus very seriously but the naked truth of those teachings doesn't need to be hidden behind a theological veil of smoke and mirriors.

When I think of the deadly lies of the church, I think of the ways in which the church has tried to get people to think about heaven and hell, rather than the economic realities of the present.  Jesus told people to sell all they owned and give it to the poor.  Jesus said that the rich have no more chance of entering God's kingdom than a camel has of walking through the eye of a needle.

The church says that Jesus is God's incarnate son but that God can't have any more sons or daughters..... it is just the two of them..... except for when it is not just the two of them, when it is God but not God or Jesus, then it is Spirit and when you consider that you have a trinity of gods that you must still believe is only one god so to be acceptable you have to believe that one plus one plus one equals one or you are really a very bad person and not Christian at all. Don't try this in math class boys and girls, it only works in Sunday School but if you don't make work in Sunday School then God will hate you.

See, Dr. Jones, that's the deadly lie of the church..... that's the illusionist's distraction.  Jesus said to love your enemies.  Jesus said to forgive the person who has hurt you seventy times seven times.  Jesus said to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, welcome the alien among you and sacrifice for justice, liberation and healing.

The church has told us to be baptized, take communion, recite the creeds, repent of our sins and avoid all physical pleasure, primarily by singing really boring hymns and being quiet during tedious sermons...... of which, if I must point it out, this is not one.  And honestly, I don't despise religious ritual or doctrine and I wouldn't mention it at all if we were generally pretty good about the loving your enemy and forgiving your brother and caring for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and the alien but we all know that the church of our experience was a lot better at rituals than they were at reality.

Our spirituality should give us insight and courage to deal with was is, not become an elaborate hoax that makes us focus on the illusion while reality passes us by.

Many of you are old enough to remember the Berrigan brothers, Fathers Daniel and Phillip.  During the 1960's they were both on the FBI's 10 most wanted list and eventually spent more than 3 years in prison.  For serving communion?  For baptizing?  For telling people how to go to heaven?  No, but the crime for which they went to prison wasn't bank robbery or murder either.

After visiting Vietnam and seeing the carnage there, they made a kind of homemade Napalm and used it to burn up draft records in a Maryland draft office.... burning paper rather than children.
Father Daniel wrote:  "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise....We say killing is a disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. For the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate (us) from public risk, when the poor can die without defense."

Father Philip was more poetic.  He said:

"The poor tell us who we are,

the prophets tell us who we could be, 

So we hide the poor and kill the prophets."

So when you hear me saying things like "I want to get magic out of the church."  What I mean is that though the church has a history of hiding the poor and killing the prophets, my modest proposal is that we focus on finding and serving the poor until we have served so much that we find that we have become prophets.

The Unacceptable Word of the Lord

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 3, 2013    Epiphany 5

Luke 4:21-30
21Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.' 22All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?' 23He said to them, 'Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, "Doctor, cure yourself!" And you will say, "Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum." ' 24And he said, 'Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's home town. 25But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27There were also many lepers* in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.' 28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Howard Zinn died three years ago this week.  When he died at the age of 87, the press reported his death, describing him as a "leftist historian."  I find it strange that he was labeled that way.  There may be left and right perspectives but there are not left and right truths.  Howard Zinn told us the truth about historical events which we very often did not previously know.

Things which it seems more politic not to mention..... like the fact that churches all over the nation found the miraculous story of Helen Keller to be nearly addictive until the blind and deaf young woman learned how to read Braille and when she had discovered how much violence, oppression and poverty there is in the world, Helen Keller became an outspoken advocate for a socialist reform movement in America..... that's when American churches began to say, "Well, you really can't pay much attention to a bind and deaf woman now can you?"

That's not a leftist fact.  That's a fact.  You can like Helen Keller or you cannot like Helen Keller but the fact is that once Helen Keller learned to read and write, she became an outspoken socialist..... it is a truth you have to deal with.

Zinn's recounting of history states certain uncomfortable facts, such as his almost throw away mention of Dr Charles Drew who developed the Red Cross' blood bank system,... Drew suggested that it was not medically necessary to separate the blood donations of white people and black people.  Drew was then fired by the Red Cross, not because he actually mixed Negro and Caucasian blood but just because he suggested that it could be done.

Drew, for whom Drew Medical School is named, happened to be black himself, which made his suggestion that the blood of blacks and the blood of whites were the same all the harder for the white majority to take but it was true.  But there are not black people truths and white people truths..... there's just the truth.

Zinn made a profession out of telling the unvarnished truth, and as a result, he was denied tenure and fired and marginalized and labeled and largely ignored in academic circles.  John quotes Jesus as saying that you will know the truth and the truth will set you free but popular wisdom says that before the truth will set you free that it will make you very very angry.

We have a rather "on again, off again" relationship with the truth.... both as Christians and as Americans.  There are things church people don't want to own up to.... and there are lots of things Americans don't want to own.  There are things we would rather not know, or at least, we would rather not have said in public.

Many of us have objected to the fact that there were never casualty records kept of either Iraqi or Afghani deaths in wars in the Middle East.  We count the deaths of American soldiers but reliable information about contract labor or enemy or civilian casualties has been difficult to find.

We have an unconscious belief that if we do not know the facts that the facts are not real..... it isn't really true until we acknowledge that it is true.

I was reading an article in the Christian Century years ago during the first Gulf War and I came upon a quote which was so bazaar that I copied it into a notebook and have held onto it through the years.  The columnist wrote: Defending U.S. military censor's refusal to release video footage showing Iraqi soldiers being cut in half by cannon fire from helicopters, a Pentagon senior official said, "If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war."

......If we let people see that kind of thing....... There would never again be any war...... you see, there are truths, which if you utter them, you can lose your job, lose your credibility, lose you tenure..... you can make people very angry.

In the current gun control debate, you can be cast as a liberal for just stating numerical facts..... a 100,000 Americans get shot every year.  30,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds every year.  That's not liberal.... that's not conservative.... that's math but you can get labeled as a liberal for just reciting those numbers because the people who don't want to deal with that fact don't want you to say those facts.

Luke tells us a very brief, encapsulated version of a time that Jesus went back to his home town to preach after he had become something of a superstar in the Galilee.  The scene moves very quickly from everyone being so impressed with him that they were breathlessly praising him to this scene we see today where they entire congregation of the synagogue is pushing him towards a cliff with the intent of murdering their cousin, their former neighbor and friend.
What set them off?  Well, he had been talking to them about liberation, about healing, about preaching good news to the poor.

Still, in a way, it was sort of a "chicken in every pot" kind of a political speech until he began to clarify himself and say, actually, the chicken won't be in your pot, it will be in the pot of your neighbor..... your neighbor who is not a member of this congregation, who is of another religion, a different race and who speaks a different language.

Preachers have, for centuries, secured their salaries and their pensions by telling straight people that gays are bad, by telling married people that divorced people are bad, and telling Christians that Moslems and Jews are bad, and telling Americans that the Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Russians and the Iraqis are bad.

Religion often takes on a corporate view of the truth, like Wal-Mart did when Sheryl Crow released her self title CD several years ago which featured her song, "Love is a Good Thing."  One of the lyrics in the song says, "Watch out sister, watch out brother, watch our children as they kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores."

Wal-Mart executives met down in Bentonville to discuss the fact that Sheryl Crow was calling them out on the fact that they do, in fact, sell guns right next to the toy department in over 2000 stores nationwide.  And faced with that fact they had to make a decision to do something about it, and this is what they decided:  They voted to ban all sales of Sheryl Crow's cd in their stores.  Keep selling the guns, but don't sell Sheryl Crow's cd because it is dangerous..... to sales of guns.
The Danish philosophy, Soren Kierkegaard, was very critical of the irrelevance of the church of his day.  He once quipped:  .. for our generation does not stop with faith, does not stop; with the miracle of faith, turning water into wine - it goes further and turns wine into water.  Isn't that what church has felt like to so many of us so often?  By treating us like we were children..... by filling our heads with stories of magic and superstition and by masking the real truth of our existence.... they had taken the potent wine of the message of Jesus and turned it into filtered water.

As we are gathered here in our church this morning, for the first time in our history, our elementary aged children are in a class of their own in our newly opened Annex.  There was a time in our history that we thought we might be just something of a boutique church..... a church for people who had become disenfranchised with mainstream theology.... a church for people who hungered for intellectual honesty and an academic approach to religion.

We are not a part of a denomination.  There are not many other churches like ours anywhere that we know of but we have sought one another out because we know that we just don't fit in with the rest of the religious world that prefers not knowing the facts, that would rather wallow in superstition, lies and half truths than to actually do the hard work of changing the world.

Some time back we realized that it was not enough for us to just find some friends who also don't fit in.  We realized that it was important to make sure that our children don't fit in either.
In part, we want to protect our children from being exposed to the dishonest mythology of either magical Christianity or American exceptionalism but the bigger issue, at least for me, is that the next generation will need its own prophets.

Howard Zinn is dead.  Marcus Borg, John Spong, John Dominic Crossan and Karen Armstrong are reaching retirement age.  Roger Ray and David Trobisch are not far behind.   It is our task to teach our children to love the truth as much as we do not to perpetuate our church because we have no reason to believe that our children will stay in Springfield.

We want to prepare them, not to be members of this church but to be the church of the next generation.... to be the Howard Zinn's and John Spong's of the 21st century.  Honestly, I wish that I was 36 years old and not 56 years old..... I wish that I could believe that I had another forty years to preach to nurture the progressive Christian movement, but a hundred yards to east of us, there is a room full of young prophets if only we will do our part to make sure that they can tell the truth from a lie and magic from reality.  Let's make sure that we don't fail them.

Between now and the time that I have to retire, I'm going to try to live my life in a way that gives them something to live up to and to surpass if they can.

Love is a Verb

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
January 27, 2013     Epiphany 4

1 Corinthians 13:1-13                  
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

In the wee hours before dawn, while most of you are still sleeping, the doorbell rings at my home and I pull on heavy gloves, a mask and hooded coat, and head out into the darkness to walk with Russ Venable while the wind chill factor is still in single digits.  We walk four miles through the darkness at a fairly rapid pace.

Russ and I have talked about losing weight and exercising for several months.  Most of those talks took place in the back yard over adult grain beverages and hand rolled Nicaraguan cigars.  I cannot remember exactly what moved us from months of talking about it to actually meeting at an unholy hour before we go to work but I can tell you with existential certainty that there a lot of difference between talking about exercising and actually exercising.  And most of the difference can be found in the exercising part.

I wish that exercise and dieting could be more like sitting in the back yard, eating and drinking on a warm summer evening but the truth is that it is hard work.  Some people enjoy it more than others.  Almost every enjoys it more than I do evidently.  But we both know that we need to do it and so we are challenging one another to do it and we are committing to do it together and the $100 wager on who loses the most weight by May 1 is really just a friendly side bet and I'm willing to split the proceeds with anyone who can get Russ to eat a fist full of donut holes before he comes into the sanctuary each week between now and the first of May.

I wish it were easier.  I wish that lettuce and carrots tasted like steak and baked potatoes.  I wish that cross country bike rides were all down hill and that weight lifting felt more like getting a full body massage.  And I wouldn't mind winning the lottery or having Halley Berry return my phone calls either.

But we all know that the fact of life is that exercise and following a healthy diet are what it takes to be the right size.  And that money actually comes from hard work and sacrifice and yet when it comes to love we still seem to believe that it should be something like winning the lottery.

We talk about "falling" in love or "finding" love as if it were like tripping on the curb or spotting a penny on the sidewalk.

In Eugene O'Neill's play, "The Great God Brown" The character, Dion, articulates the cynicism that many of us feel so existentially when he says: Love is a word, a shameless ragged ghost of a word, begging at all doors for life at any price!
Love is supposed to be so important to us.... It is the subject of movies, music, poetry and art and yet the most powerful statements about love in those mediums almost always seem to be about broken hearts, disappointments, infidelity and abandonment.

My contention is that being in love is not an adjective describing a condition or a feeling but that it is necessarily a verb describing action and, in all seriousness, action that involves sacrifice and concentrated effort.

It feels good to be in good shape, to be strong, to like what you see in the mirror, to wear the size clothes that you think look good on you but that good feeling doesn't just fall out of the sky.  It takes work.  For me, it takes deliberative, painstaking choices about what to eat and what not to eat.  It takes getting up in the dark and cold and walking, walking, walking, day after day, week after week, month after month.

If talking about it, wishing for it, defining goals and processes over beer and cigars would get you there, Russ and I would look like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon..... I'm the Ben Affleck one because I'm taller.

Our scripture lesson today, Paul's "Ode to love" from I Corinthians 13, is most commonly heard in weddings which is one of the most ironic moments in biblical interpretation when anyone brings up the Apostle Paul in reference to any romantic setting.

But in weddings I like to invite couples to substitute their own names where the passage says "love" and read it aloud and see how it sounds to them.  How does it read if you say, "Michael is patient; Michael is kind; Juli is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  Jim does not insist on having his own way.  Ann is not irritable or resentful......

So you want to keep that in mind if you ever want me to read that passage in your wedding.  None of us read our own names in that list of adjectives and get to stand up straight by the end of the reading.  It has become a bit trite in its over use but that famous quote from Gandhi that says, "You must be the change you want to see in the world," applies no where more than in this topic.

It should be clear that Paul was not writing this, or copying it..... a lot of us assume that Paul is borrowing this text from another source because, frankly, it is a bit lofty sounding for Paul.... A bit out of character for him.... And yet he clearly is not talking about marriage or just family relationships.  He is talking about love in the global sense, as a dimension of character and spirituality.

A lot of young people wear images of Che Guevara on their shirts because of his reputation as a defiant, even a militant socialist revolutionary but I actually keep a quote from Che hanging in my office that says:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

We're more used to thinking of Che as an armed revolutionary but whether you are talking about Che, or King, or Dorothy Day or any one of us who have sought out this church because we want to be prophetic, we want to be a part of the people who defiantly carry signs in protest in front of city hall and the Bank of America.... I have my Guy Faulks mask, hat and cape at the ready for the next Occupy demonstration but, men and women, anger is not enough.... Sure, we have things to be angry about.... But anger is not enough.

We rage against the injustice that keeps hundreds of people living on the streets at the edge of death from hunger and exposure but we can't just go back down to Commercial Street with hundreds of meals to share because we're angry.  You know that the real goal here is not just to feed people but to be able to love them..... the ones who complain about the food.... "did you put onions in that?"  The ones who want special consideration, "When are we gonna get fried chicken again?" Or even the ones who ask for a different color of gloves when the wind chill factor is in single digits.

It usually falls to me to say the prayer before we serve the meal each day and I tend to be a bit repetitious, not so much for them as for me.... "Lord help us to be patient with everyone we encounter today, especially for the one who deserves it the least and needs it the most."  Because, it's not about the food..... it is about the love.

I'm back in full swing in professor mode this week so I am going to leave you with an assignment, just be sure that you don't quote me out of context.  What I want for you to do this week, and I want you to sincerely work on it, sacrifice for it, devote yourself to doing it..... I want for you to be better lovers.

A Job Description for a Messiah

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Jan. 20, 2013     Epiphany 3

Luke 4:14-21    
14 Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. 15He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.'
20And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'

A good story teller does not tell you everything that happened, and sometimes what they tell you didn't even happen at all but what they do tell you captures the essence of what actually took place.  The gospel writers are not attempting to give us an exact account of the life of Jesus.  They are trying to tell us stories in a way that help us to understand Jesus, to feel like we know him, like we can get inside of his skin and his head.

In this account we've just read, Luke is telling us about a time when Jesus went to a synagogue, read scripture and spoke.  Is this exactly the way it happened?  No, of course not.  The entire service of reading and preaching, if it happened this way, would have taken less than two minutes and that is not like any church service that any of us have ever attended!

When they went to synagogue it was pretty much for the day.  The scripture readings were long, going on, sometimes, for hours.  The preaching might be even longer, involving more than one preacher.
So Luke tells us about a service at the synagogue in Nazareth and he draws it down to just two verses of scripture and a single sentence.  That's not how it actually happened but Luke distills this story down, like a good story teller, in order to let the full weight of a day in church rest on just this very concise image.

Jesus has returned to his home town.  He is surrounded by the people he grew up with, cousins, siblings, his mother, and neighbors; everyone who thinks that they know everything there is to know about Jesus.  And Jesus tells them who he is.

Now, if you were attending a public meeting..... let's say it is an inter-faith study class with Jews, Moslems, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus all in attendance, and if the leader of that discussion group turned to you and said, "To get us all started, why don't you stand up and tell us exactly who Jesus is"....... Would you feel comfortable doing that?

If you had to boil it all down to its most essential parts, who is Jesus?
You ought to be able to answer that.  We're Christians here..... we ought to know who Jesus is.  And Luke doesn't want us to be stymied by this question either.  And so he tells us.  Jesus looks at his old school chums, his family and extended family, and he uses the this brief passage from the prophet Isaiah to define what he is all about:

'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.'
20And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.

Who was Jesus?  He was a religious prophet who specifically reached out to the poor.  He understood himself to be a liberator of the oppressed.   Now, you take that back to first century Nazareth where they had been living under the heavy hand of Rome's military occupation and you realize that the only kind of leader anyone was looking for was the kind of leader who could lead them to liberty.... But they were clearly expecting that to be a military victory.

You will hear me quote my Harvard professor, Jim Wallis, very often because he frequently cited this fundamental truth:  If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

If you put all of your resources, all of your scientists, all of your manufacturing, all of your personnel, into building, equipping and arming an army then when you encounter a problem...... if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.  Jesus' contemporaries wanted to be liberated alright but they were not looking to sacrifice one of their own on a Roman cross to accomplish that.  They wanted to be liberated by killing all of the Romans.

People in the first century and people in the 21st century try to project onto Jesus what they know good and darned well what he is supposed to be.  His cousins wanted him to use his power and popularity to run out the Romans and give them back their country.  The modern church wants him to hang on a cross and bleed so that they can feel that their sins are forgiven and they can go to heaven when they die.

Neither one has the slightest idea what Jesus meant by reading this passage from Isaiah and using it to define his ministry, his purpose, his essence.  The early church laid a number of very metaphorical and spiritual sounding interpretations over the story of Jesus and every century since has tried to use the Jesus story to their benefit whether it is an emperor trying to raise an army, a government trying to raise taxes, a feudal lord trying to make peasants work harder, or some self involved American praying for a close parking place at the mall.

We've tried to make Jesus a military leader, a magical good-luck charm, divine fire insurance and the inspiration for a lot of really bad music and even worse art but who did he say that he was?  Luke tries to make it easy for us.

Jesus is a liberator with a special passion for the poor.  And if that is true, why don't all of the churches that bear his name look more like him?

As the early church heaped praise and religious language onto Jesus, they did so in adoration and respect but in many ways the end result was totally covering up the prophet whose message is so vital.  Putting Jesus up on a pedestal is, in effect, turning him into a god and taking away everything he said and stood for.

How close are we to the Jesus who described himself as one who came to bring good news to the poor and liberation to the oppressed?  Most of us were raised in religious traditions in which we essentially put Jesus on a space ship and sent him way up to a golden throne far beyond the stars.

And from this great distance we were suppose to endure boring religious services and pay lip service to magical beliefs for which there was never any proof and from which any comfort we derived was as illusory as ghosts we used to talk about in the dark when we were children.

Rediscovering the voice of Jesus in his teachings about liberation and taking good news to the poor, we have found ourselves renewing our faith..... as the aroma of a hearty beef and vegetable soup travels from June's kitchen, and Elsie's, and Mary's...  where they lovingly fills huge pots with stew or ham, to the dirty little building where the homeless come inside to warm up on Commercial Street and one of you ladles out steaming bowls of grace.

Men and women who have often found themselves estranged from everyone who is their blood kin, by reason of violence or addiction or crime, now are greeted by the smiling beautiful face of Mary Kapustka or Ruth Miller as she hands them a chocolate dessert she made just for them the night before, showing acceptance these people may not have felt from their brothers and sisters, mothers or fathers for years.

At Crosslines on Tuesday our crew handed food to nearly a hundred families.....so many that they were running out of food long before we were running out of time.  We are not always good at following the rules..... we give out more food than we are supposed because, well because we had come to bring good news to the poor.... The year of the Lord's good favor.

There is resurrection in that.... There is baptism.... There is communion.... Confirmation... reconciliation, even incarnation in that...maybe even salvation... Without all of the Sunday school theology.

I remember our very first worship service 4 and a half years ago at the funeral home.  There were forty or fifty of us there and I looked around the room and saw so many people I have known.... Ruth and Mel were there.... A couple who had four children and then started adopting children no one else wanted.... A little black boy, an Indian, an Asian family..... long before the Civil Rights movement had even started, before Martin Luther King, Jr. had even started preaching.... Mel and Ruth were risking their careers and their very lives to live liberation, the end of racism, the beginning of the year of the Lord's favor.

There was my old friend Jim Price, who has left the comfort of his Iowa college to go down to Nicaragua to use his own presence in tiny Sandinista villages to stop the American bombing of the peasants in Matagalpa.  Jim went to Guatemala to be an escort to journalists who were in very real danger of assassination among the "disappeared" while that government was seeking to kill off hundreds of thousands of the Indians of Guatemala.

We had the support of my old friend Nelson Parnell, who had, with his wife Betty, worked for decent, safe housing for the poor, for social justice and civil rights for immigrants and the gay community.

In our short time together I've seen people showing such humility in service, .... Going to the home of a new friend who is recovering from surgery, not only with hot food but with a laundry basket to help them wash their clothes.
I've seen people invite total strangers into their home to share a meal and sometimes to move into the guest room for more than a year!  I've seen such trust develop that they share with one another their life challenges.... Illnesses and addictions.  What's more, I've seen people get sober, grow past their brokenness and have their lives restored and literally resurrected within the loving community of faith.  There is salvation in that, isn't there?  There is resurrection in that.

You can see Dr. David Adams at Crosslines anytime we are there..... but I have also seen David sitting in a café in Matagalpa with survivors of the Contra War in Nicaragua, talking loving with them about his hopes for their country..... and I've seen him stumble out of his huge garden looking like a poor tenet farmer himself, where he works full-time for months out of the year growing food for the hungry of our city.  Can you feel the spirituality in that?

I could go on but I won't right now..... a good story teller doesn't tell everything... he just distills it down to the essence of the story.

Why did we start this church?  Who are we?  What is our reason for being here?

.....to bring good news to the poor.
....to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.'

For the Common Good

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Jan. 13, 2013    Epiphany 2

I Corinthians 12:1-11                  
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. 2You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. 3Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says "Let Jesus be cursed!" and no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit. 4Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

This week the famous French film star and producer,  Gérard Depardieu, officially gave up his French citizenship and went to Russia to accept a new passport directly from the hands of Vladimir Putin.  Depardieu still lives in Belgium but his paper defection is in an attempt to avoid the top French income tax rate of 75%.  He likes France.  France has given him opportunities, a career and fabulous personal wealth but he doesn't want to turn the majority of his income over to pay the bills for running France.  His move is certainly being applauded by many tax revolutionaries but I wonder how much wealth he would have had if he had made the move to Russia forty years ago?

It goes to one of the campaign issues of last fall when President Obama was quoted as having told business owners "You didn't build that."  Many people took to the media to shout, "I did too build that," though they failed to mention that in the process of building that they had taken millions of dollars in loans from the federal government, and depended upon hiring a work force educated at public expense, and that their product is moved on roads paid for at public expense and they are protected by police and firemen who are paid for at public expense..... but they built their business all by themselves with no help from anyone.

Rather more quietly, without much media coverage, the author of the Harry Potter book and movie franchise, J. K. Rowling, has remained in Great Britain.  She was a single mother on welfare who wrote her first book sitting in a coffee shop while her children were in school because the coffee shop would give her free refills all day.

Rowling said, "When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism."

There is a line in our pericope from I Corinthians chapter 12 that is almost a throwaway line in our culture because it is almost impossible to hear what you do not understand.  When someone talks about something you know nothing about, that is not a part of your life experience, your mind tends to gloss over it.... you don't hear it, you don't remember it, you don't think about it...... and trust me, I'm not just talking about my university students.

Paul is talking to people in the church about their various talents, what he calls, "gifts of the Spirit," and he says to them, it is in verse 7.... may I ask you to look on the text in your bulletin and focus on what he is saying:

7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

The reason that this is such a throwaway sentence for us is that we have a much more visceral, real and felt identification with Gérard Depardieu than we do with J. K. Rowling.  We understand the desire to keep what is ours for ourselves and for our children and to resent anyone around us who appears to get something for nothing.

And I can be as irritated by lazy people who have an entitlement disorder as anyone but, do you remember last fall when Mitt Romney talked about how much it damages children to have only one parent and you realize that both Obama and Bill Clinton were raised by single mothers, who were dependant upon welfare benefits.  That our president was one of those people fed by food stamps..... just like J. K Rowling was on welfare on her way to being in a position to pay millions of Euros in taxes back into the system?

The challenge for modern Americans, the challenge for the modern church, is to not always see everything from a perspective of self interest.  Sure, indulge yourselves.  Eat from the vineyard you planted.  Enjoy the fruits of your labor, but remember that you don't live alone and someone sacrificed to give you a chance in life and there is always another generation coming along behind you.

Paul is reminding the church to think about their community.  It is great if you have a high IQ, or if you are a natural in the business community, or you have great talent in art, music, science or carpentry but Paul wants to tell you that you were not given that talent to make you either rich or comfortable but rather you were given that talent so that you could be a blessing, a resource, a support for your family, your community, your nation.

We've been so trained to always be afraid.... to be afraid that we won't make end's meet, that we won't survive the next economic downturn, that we might become unemployed and unable to support ourselves and as real as those fears can be, if we allow those fears to make us forget about the community around us then I guarantee you that those fears will be realized.

The only thing that makes it possible for us to live a decent life is if we make sure that everyone else gets to live a decent life.

Honestly, it is so disappointing to me when I hear people who are in such rebellion against taxes that they literally would rather have 90% of 4" pie than half of a 12" pie because they can't be satisfied with what they have if they think that anyone else is getting something.

We don't want to fund public health, public education, state universities, food stamp programs or public housing but because we don't see that poverty among a large portion of the population is literally, not just figuratively, but literally like trying to feed your right arm and left leg while starving the other two to save money.

Poverty drives both crime and addiction and then crime and addiction drives up the crime and prison population, taking people out of productive taxpaying careers and putting them on the most expensive form of public assistance there is, incarceration.

There are people in Great Britain right now who would like to cut the assistance given to people like J. K. Rowling a few years ago, and here we have huge disdain for the welfare moms like the ones who raised Bill Clinton and Barack Obama but whether you like either their literature or their politics, they have turned out to have been a good investment.

I'm not saying anything too complicated here.  I'm just saying don't starve your left leg so that your right leg can be stronger and more healthy.  As long as there is a hungry child in this city who goes without proper nutrition, as long as there is a senior citizen who is being denied the health care they need because we, as a society, are willing to cast off our weakest members then we are poisoning our own bodies.

This is not a complicated spiritual idea but it is a hard one to let sink in.  So, you can trust me to bring it up again.  We are born selfish little pigs, but through worship, study, service and by practice of faith, we give birth to a new character defined by radical compassion.  None of us are entirely there yet but the good news is that we have another week in which we can work on getting better at it.

A Prayer for Good Government

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Epiphany 1

Psalm 72:1-7, 12-14            
¹Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king's son.
²May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.
³May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness.
⁴May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.
⁵May he live while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.
⁶May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.
⁷In his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.
¹²For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.
¹³He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.
¹⁴From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.

Everyone knows that the most fundamental rule for any social gathering is to avoid talking about either religion or politics.  As a pastor, religion professor and a journalist who writes political essays, I'm about as dangerous to a pleasant social gathering as a tsunami at a beach vacation.  I don't watch sports and I am often uncertain as to which professional sport is in season but when I am at a loss for words, I often just throw out a, "How about those Bears?" and hope that it hit it lucky.

But the truth of the matter is, at least for me, that there is no way to avoid, not only religion or politics, but more accurately, I always have to have the two together.  Though there are certainly those who cry out against any mixture of religion and politics, it is a rather absurd complaint.  Almost everything in scripture and serious religious practice has a political implication.

I find that people only cry foul when you are saying something with which they don't personally agree.
 No one says that the Catholic Church is meddling in politics when they are publicly opposing abortion, or that the Quakers are political when they are opposed to war or the Baptists are against almost anything that is especially fun to do.

Anyone who reads the prophets and the gospels should not be surprised when we in the progressive movement advocate for peace, protecting the environment and the equal rights of all races, genders and sexual orientations.  In fact, specifically because we take the prophets and the gospels seriously, we have fought to lower the interest rates charged by predatory lenders, to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, for poverty related services and access to health care and addiction treatment.  That may seem political to people who only want us to pray, baptize and serve communion but those people don't get to tell us what it means to be spiritual people.

There is a common misconception that the involvement of the faith community in politics is something new, a perversion of pure religion.  That is, what we call in technical theological language, pure hogwash.  Look at this reading we have this morning from Psalm 72.  This is an example of what we call an "enthronement psalm," but if you look at it, it is little more that a public prayer for a just and ethical government.

Verse 4 that asks that the ruler of their nation "defend the cause of the poor ...., give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor," that's exactly what we are all about..... and that's 3000 years old!

Jesus and the ancient prophets were not imprisoned and killed because they were extolling people to pray more often, make sacrifices and memorize scripture.
They were imprisoned and killed for exactly the same reasons that Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Berrigan brothers, Archbishop Romero and Dorothy Day were imprisoned or killed or both.  They criticized the government.  They opposed military service.  They were a threat to the economic system that involved the rich taking advantage of the poor.

Jesus wasn't killed for making claims to be the messiah or for matters of religious doctrine.... they killed him because he was a threat to the established order of government, of banking, of business and the institutional religion that supported government, banking and business.

This is the point where we often find ourselves parting company with the more traditional churches that insist upon a fairly literal reading of the gospels.  Reading the gospels in their historical setting helps us to see that the titles the early church heaped up on the executed Jesus were the exact same titles that were traditionally reserved for the Caesar, the emperor of the empire.

The statues, banners, even their coins referenced the Caesar as either god incarnate or the son of God.  They called their emperors "lord" and even "savior."  You were told in Sunday School when you were a child that "Christ" was not Jesus' last name.... "Christ" means "king" and yet our Sunday School teachers rarely put 2 and 2 together to let us know what that meant.

Imagine what it would mean if we put on our sign out front, not "Dr. Roger Ray, pastor" but rather, "Roger Ray, the President of the United States."  That has a rather more ominous ring to it doesn't it?

The cry of the early church, "Jesus is Lord!" was a defiant proclamation that the Caesar was not the lord.  To call Jesus "the Christ" meant that Caesar was not the king.  I doubt seriously that during his lifetime anyone called Jesus "Christ" or "Lord" or "Savior" and certainly no one called him "son of God," but right after the government had him executed the people who were still gathered around his message saw the stark contrast between the message of Jesus and the domination of Rome and by the time Paul started writing letters to churches fifteen years after the first Easter, it was already common anti-empire language within the church to say that Jesus was God's son, the savior, the Christ and our Lord.

With good reason there are many among progressive religious folks who don't like using any of those titles because they are so closely associated with the domination of empire and, when you think about it, they are mostly pretty strongly male dominant as well.  I find myself avoiding these titles most of the time because I don't want to be misunderstood but when I do use a word like "lord" in reference to God or to Jesus, I want you to understand that I am saying that the message of Jesus is what I prize, not any king, emperor, president or employer.  When we say that Jesus is lord what we are saying is that the economic and political powers of this world do not own us.... they are not our lords because we have a given our allegiance to the message of Jesus of Nazareth.

The anti-empire implications of those titles were not lost on Paul.  He was a citizen of Rome and was willing to exploit his citizenship in the Empire for his missionary purposes but there is no credible way that he could have been unaware that the language he used was revolutionary.

Still, Paul started a process of shifting attention away from the cry for mercy for the oppressed, relief for the poor, justice for the downtrodden and towards a hope that was more invested in a kingdom that was to come in heaven than the kingdom where we have a street address, businesses, schools, slums and leper colonies.

There is no shortage of books that detail the differences between the religion of Paul and the teachings of Jesus.  I believe that there was a world of difference between the two but that wades into a lot of historical speculation because even our canonical gospels were written long after Paul's letters were commonly read and Paul had more influence on the final shape of those gospels than, frankly, he really should have.

That's a value judgment on my part though I don't say that to drive an unnecessary wedge between progressive Christians and traditional Christians.  The final redaction of New Testament materials and the selection process of what to leave in and what to take out was influenced by the agenda of the empire.

I am convinced that the Jesus movement was distinctly anti-empire, was fully invested in advocacy for the poor and was a message of radical compassion.  Paul expressed those values within a more theologically contrived structure that unfortunately played into the hands of the interests of Constantine and his successors.  The faith that started by being a thorn in the side of the empire was transformed into being the tip of the spear of the empire's exploitation of the poor.  Frankly, I believe that every reform movement in the history of Christianity has to one degree or another, been an attempt to take Jesus back from the empire and give him back his message of radical compassion, liberation and hope.

For me, turning Jesus into a god and worshipping him takes away most of the relevance and power of his message.  Thankfully, there are those who have a very high christology who are joining us in our prayers that the government will defend the weak, heal the sick, feed the hungry, provide for, as the psalmist says, "prosperity for the people and defense from violence and oppression."

We have sometimes been known to be dismissive of traditional religious people because they are too emphatic about Jesus being the lord of heaven and they have been dismissive of us because we are so emphatic about the message of Jesus being the lord of the earth.  The gospels insist that God is lord of both heaven and earth so, perhaps, in this case, we both get to be right.

I don't know much about heaven but I've gotten a pretty good taste of the earth.  I've seen children making rugs in wretched circumstances in Egypt.  I've seen old people worked so hard in Ecuador that their skeletons are bent and their bare feet look like the feet of an elephant.  I've been in many villages in Nicaragua where some children are blind from malnutrition and where many have died.

I know people who live in their cars in Springfield.  We regularly feed children who live below the radar of child protective services and school truant officers.  And so, I think it is only right that we take up the prayers of our ancestors in the faith so that we also pray that our government will judge the poor with justice and work for prosperity among the people.  That our government will defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the needy and crush the oppressors..... and if they don't, they will have reason to imprison and kill a few more prophets because we intend to do more than pray.