Standing on the Railroad Tracks

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
March 3, 2013    Lent 3

Isaiah 55:1-9                            
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. 4See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. 5See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
6Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; 7let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 8For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. 9For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.    

Many of you will have heard the behaviorist illustration that says that if you drop a frog in hot water it will jump out immediately but if you put it into cold water and allow the temperature to slowly rise, the frog will complacently sit until it dies from the heat.  This is a great illustration about how we either react or fail to react to a crisis.  If a horrible situation arises all at once, we know to respond quickly and meaningfully but if it just creeps up on us slowly, with a very gradual evolution of our circumstances, we may just slumber into our own demise.

And, as it goes, the illustration is helpful when it comes to things like climate change.  The only reason we are still burning coal to generate electricity and burning gas to power private individual automobiles is because the poisoning of our environment is so slow, so gradual, that it is easy not to say, on any particular day, that things have gone too far and we must change our ways.

So, the slow boiled frog illustration is true when it comes to humans and environmental disaster.  It is not, let me stress this, not true about frogs. I don't know what kind of sick high school biology experiment started with putting live frogs on to boil but given the opportunity, a frog will escape lethal hot water.

Which, in a way, is kind of sad because even a frog will not sit quietly and allow its environment to become lethal but either the most arrogant or the most intelligent of earth's inhabitants will sit still while our own conduct kills off our species.

I love this text from Isaiah that David read for us this morning.  The prophet asks why people spend their resources on that which does not satisfy them.  Did joining the country club give you the close circle of friends you thought it would?  Did building a bigger house make you feel as important as you had hoped?  After stock piling guns and ammunition, do you actually feel safe?  It is like drinking diet coke because you are hungry.  Even if you could drink a thousand diet cokes, you would still be hungry because, even though it is sweet and bubbly, there is no food value in it.

 The prophet is, of course, not talking about food.  He is asking why people spend their time and resources on things that don't really satisfy them. That is a good question!

Jurnegan Moltmann wrote in his work, The Theology of Hope, that there is something called the "sacrament of the status quo."  The way that things are comes to be viewed as holy.  19th Century missionaries, who went from the United States to teach Christianity in Africa, New Zealand, and Indonesia, couldn't imagine the Christian faith apart from western commerce and American government.  Many succeeded in passing along the faith but they were, in many ways, better at spreading the markets of Coca Cola and American's addiction to cigarettes.  In many places in the world, the Christian missionary churches are a fading memory but Marlboro and McDonalds are still there.

 We don't have much mass transit in the USA because we have cars.  We make cars.  And because we make cars we build roads.  And even though our cars and roads are destroying the planet we cannot conceive of a world without all of these cars and roads and when the dinosaur juice that runs our cars starts to get scarce, rather than looking for alternative ways to get around, we will literally intimidate, control and even go to war to keep things just the way that they are, even if to do so we will destroy ourselves in the process!  That is the sacrament of the status quo.

 Because, the voice of the prophet, the voice of the poet, is rarely heard in our day.  Only in church, really, and that not in many churches and not that often there.  Almost every minute of every day we deal with the way that the world is and give only passing thoughts to how it might be.

And, eventually, you get to the point that you cannot even imagine the world as being any different from the way it now is.  In fact, when you hear the way the politicians talk about it, we have to do whatever we have to do to maintain this consumer - military based economy and society, even though we know how it is going to end.

Our generation is like a man standing on a set of railroad tracks watching a locomotive headed straight for him and he is so accustomed to standing on those tracks that he has no will left to get out of the way of the oncoming train.  Even slight changes in position seem to be too much trouble, to require too much effort, too much sacrifice to act to save his own life.

The prophet Isaiah asked the people of his day, "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?"

"Why do you just dig in and entrench yourself in a culture which is based on controlling the rest of the world through militarism so that you can consume more and more of their stuff?"  "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?"

It seems that all of the power in the world is either economic or military.  And you don't need for me to tell you that the church, in almost every century, in almost every place, has become little more than the court jester for the forces of the military and money.  The thing that has made this congregation so different is that we have very nearly entirely rid ourselves of bondage to the kind of prejudice and superstition which are generally the hallmarks of religious practice and to try to actually hear the challenging word of the prophets.

When it comes to the environment, the church absolutely must stop being the lap dog of the marketplace.  It is time for us to get up and do some barking around here.

The poet, the prophet, sings:
"Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."

If we will allow our imaginations to be infected by the poet's words then the world as we know it can come to an end, and the world as God imagined it can emerge.  We don't have to just stand on the railroad tracks and watch the world come to an end, we can help it to be reborn.
Recycling plastic and paper is a largely symbolic gesture but we should do it because the discipline of doing it helps us to think about how we can save the planet.  The fact that our church leased an electric car makes a statement, a largely symbolic statement but one that needs to be made.  We should all try to live closer to where we work, drive less and insist on mass transit investment but until then, we should burn as little fossil fuel as possible.

Going out and helping to pick up trash out of a local river is largely symbolic but you will not quickly come home from a day of nasty river recovery and then passively pollute a river ever again.  We can air condition our homes without Freon, we can grease our cooking pans without hydroflurocarbons and we can keep our underarms smelling fresh without deteriorating the ozone layer.

The first thing is that we have to stop standing on the railroad tracks while the train comes towards us.  Then we need to put a stop to these science experiments that involve boiling frogs.

Killing Jesus

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
February 24, 2013     Lent 2

Luke 13:31-35                        
31At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." 32He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 33Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' 34Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 35See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

One of my jobs during our recent trip to Nicaragua was to interview scholarship students in the rural villages where we work.  When I ask high school students what they want to do when they finish school, in any group of fifteen or twenty students there are always three or four who want to be computer technicians, though most of them rarely if ever see a computer or know what is done with one.  There is a pervasive myth in Nicaragua that computer technicians make a big salary and while that may be true for a couple of dozen people in the nation of Nicaragua, it seems to me that the myth only leads to disappointment for a lot of young people who will get a nearly meaningless certificate in computer engineering and then they will return to picking coffee beans with the rest of their family.

But I usually also hear that someone wants to be a doctor and though ambitious it is possible and I even know of a couple of the kids we have worked with who have accomplished this goal.

But now and then, usually one out of ever two or three hundred kids I meet will say that they want to grow up to be a journalist.
When I hear that, my heart stops and I pause to look into the eyes of a prophet. Because even teenagers in Nicaragua know how many journalists have been found murdered in Central America.  In Central America, newspapers have some of the same afflictions we see here, telling more about sex and fashion than about news, but there are still investigative reporters there.  There are still brave men and women who write stories that expose important truths about government corruption, or about why so many people in La Paz Centro have kidney diseases next to the chemical dumps of  the Kodak corporation.... Where my friend Jairo Cortez nearly died before turning 30.

We say that we value honesty.  We think we want our media to tell us the truth but the fact is that there is always someone on the other side of truth who profits from falsehood and ignorance.  There are things that governments do that they would like for you to not think about too much.

President Obama can talk about transparency in a state of the union address but when it comes down to actually talking about how an American president can order the execution of an unindicted American citizen through a predator drone strike that might kill thirty or forty innocents who just happened to be on the same city block with the target..... then there is not much transparency.

Walmart may have to put content disclosures on their food items but you know that they would not be willing to put a red sticker on their low low priced items that had been produced by slaves in third world countries.

American oil companies would not want you to know what they have done to the environment of Ecuador but there is a reason why so many American corporations prefer to operate in nations with very weak national governments where they can dump toxic chemicals and poison farmland without consequences.

Behind every prostitute is a pimp who makes a living off of the abuse of women and there is a lot of pimping that goes on in corporations and governments that has nothing to do with sex.

So when Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his famous "I have been to the mountaintop" speech the day before he was assassinated that "I have seen the promised land but I may not get there with you," he was not being ironically accurate.  He had been telling the truth in speeches for years.  His house had been bombed.  The FBI had done everything possible to ruin his reputation, literally drawing a target on his chest for some self appointed murderer to take a shot.  King knew that he had relatively little chance of not being murdered.

You could say pretty much the same for Gandhi, Archbishop Romero and a number of other outspoken prophets of the civil rights movement and of liberation theology.  So, when we read in the gospels that Jesus told his followers that he was going to be killed, while such formulaic passages of scripture serve a sort of literary purpose for the gospel writers, I am willing to read them within the historical narrative because Jesus didn't need to be divine or a magical visionary to know that he was not going to live to retire from preaching.
Jesus was an advocate for the poor.  He challenged the values of the empire and he did it with such courage, such honesty and he did it so publicly, that, like King, there was virtually no way that he was going to go to Jerusalem and walk out alive.

Now, let me say this as succinctly as possible..... I believe that the historical Jesus was an advocate for social justice and he was executed by the empire for challenging their principles, their authority and their power.  Very soon after Jesus was dead, his name and the importance given to his preaching and his death was picked up by people like the Paul who knew almost nothing of the content of his teaching but who used him as a symbol of their hope for resurrection in a new life.

Paul belonged to a sect of Judaism that believed in heaven.... All Jews did not agree on that issue and we have no idea if the historical Jesus gave so much as a moment of thought to the topic of an after life.  Paul write the first third of the New Testament and he influenced the writing of much of the rest of it.  While Paul may have had subtle anti-empire sentiments, the empire in this world was not his motivating concern.

And so Paul helped to fashion a religion that actually served the interests of the empire.  I want to be clear about this:  Jesus was killed by the empire for opposing the empire.  The religion that Paul shaped, using the name of Jesus, became a useful tool of the empire by convincing the population to serve the empire unquestioningly...... the exact opposite of the message of Jesus.

Now, there are moral points of contact between Paul and the historical Jesus and I read Paul, study Paul, teach the Paul course at Drury University and sometimes preach on Paul, but I am convinced that Paul's emphasis on life after death obscures the real heart of what Jesus taught.

Sadly, because the Christian religion became the tool that Constantine used to control the masses as he united the Roman empire, the only gospels that survived, the only Jesus materials we have, are the ones that the empire approved of and in these we find, sometimes hidden between the lines, bits and pieces of the historical Jesus tradition.  Mining those bits and pieces is not a certain science...... it is scholarly, to be sure, but it is not certain and so we are always in dialogue with the Jesus tradition, in search of truth but we progressives have had to make a decision to give up on false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty in many things.

As you have often seen, I am very impatient with evangelical theology that seems to me to be very misleading..... it turns the power message of Jesus into a kind of magical incantation to ward off the fires of an imaginary hell and removes the voice of one of the greatest prophets who has ever lived.

Many of us took our children to church to teach them to be good people, to inculcate in them the values of honesty, charity, self sacrifice and love but too often what they got with that character education was an indoctrination into the religion of the empire that taught them to obey without thinking in this life in return for a better life in heaven.

That, in my opinion, should not even be called Christianity.

In fact, I usually just call it Constantinian religion because it reflects the values of emperor Constantine much more than it reflects the teachings of Jesus.  I know that many of you would wish that I was more tolerant of evangelical thought but please understand this:  once you can persuade a person to believe something for which there is absolutely not one bit of evidence then you can get them to believe anything and then you can get them to do anything.

If we cannot ground our spirituality in reality, in rational thought, then there is little difference between the people who, for example, either advocate for peace or who advocate for war..... because it is a matter of interpretation or personal preference.  There is little difference in that world of relative religion between those who advocate for gay rights and those who still advocate violence against the gay community.  Sloppy thinking leads to irrational and irresponsible results.

Religion has too often been the tool by which the empire has made people compliant against all reason and against their own best interests.  Howard Zinn wrote:
 "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders...and millions have been killed because of this obedience...Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves... (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

When I am meeting with those high school students in Nicaragua, and I've been doing this for more than 10 years now.... I have never had a one of them tell me that they want to be a priest or a pastor.  The Vatican has all but extinguished any vestiges of liberation theology from the Catholic Church.

The Protestant Evangelical churches in Central America almost universally focus on life after death and teach a religion based on fear, guilt and pie in the sky.  They don't always know why, but even barely literate kids living in the jungle can see through that junk that has captured the minds of so many otherwise well intended Americans.

But when they say "journalista" I hear taking up the work of Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero and I have hope that Jesus is not dead because the empire cannot keep the truth in a tomb as long as there is still one of us who is willing to speak when the empire tells us to be silent.  Si, se puede.

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.'