What Do You Do, If You Find Out that You Are the Bad Guy in the Bible?

Dr. David Trobisch
March 17, 2013

John 12:1-8
Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. 3Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
4But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5"Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" 6(He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) 7Jesus said, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me."
Sermon 

I am a Bible Scholar.
When Moses received the Ten Commandments. there was thunder and lightning, the sound of a trumpet filled the air, and smoke came from the mountain.
The people were afraid and trembled and kept at a distance.
They said to Moses: "You speak to us, not God."

And when Jesus walked down the mountain, where he had just delivered the Sermon on the Mount his audience was astonished.
They talked to each other and said: "This is a wonderful teacher."
And another one replied: "He speaks with authority".
And yet a third person added: "Yes not like those Bible Scholars."

I am a Bible Scholar.
What do you do, when you find out that you are the "bad guy" in the Bible?

Believe me, when I finish a class there is no trumpet sounding, no thunder and lightning and no mountain is smoking.
You know why? Because I do not teach with authority but just like one of those Bible scholars.

Today's lectionary reading is from John 12.

Judas presents a perfectly reasonable argument. Why not sell the perfume and give the money to the poor? It makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?
Careful! Judas is "the one who was about to betray" Jesus, and Judas "said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it."

Why do Bible scholars have a bad rap with many Christians?
Take a look at the Bibles that are in your pews. The translation we are using is done by scholars. The title is The "New Revised Standard Version".
You have four disclaimers right there:

·     New. Does that mean that there already was an old Revised Standard Version? - Yes.
·     Revised. So: the Bible of our fathers and mothers had mistakes? - Sure.
·     Standard. Does that mean that there are other translations around as well? You can only set a "standard" if there is some variety. - That's exactly what it means.
·     Version. So this text is just a version? Not the original? - You got it.

Or do you want to know what I think about the story in John 12 that is part of the lectionary reading for this Sunday? Do you really want to know?
At the end of the gospel, in chapter 21, the editors tell us:

·     That they had a manuscript written by the Beloved Disciple
·     That they believe that it is trustworthy "We believe that the witness is true"
·     That they put the book together after the Beloved Disciple had died

It is rather obvious to the reader of this Gospel that the manuscript that was supposed to have been written by the Beloved Disciple contains long passages where the author simply channeled what God was telling him (or her). Very much like some Old Testament prophets, or the Book of Revelation, or the Book of Mormon.
And why would the editors do this?
Because they are correcting the Gospel of Luke.
In Luke the woman comes early in the ministry of Jesus in Galilee. She is portrayed as a prostitute. In John she is Mary, a good girl, the sister of Lazarus.

·     Cleansing of the temple happens during the last week of Jesus' life in Luke, but it is one of the first things Jesus does in John.
·     Date of Jesus' death in Luke is the day after the Passover meal is eaten, in John Jesus dies they day of Passover.

From what I can tell, the Gospel of John looks very much like other gospels of the second century: it makes up stories about Jesus - like the gospel of James, older brother of Jesus. It lets Jesus talk in revelations, channeling what the author hears from God. Very much like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene or Judas. Or the Gospel of Truth that we studied two weeks ago here on Sunday morning..
Do I think the author of John has any reliable historical information about Jesus? No. I don't think so.
Can I be sure? - No, I cannot be sure. I am not talking with authority, just like "one of those Bible scholars".

As a scholar you are trained to formulate your ideas in a way that it makes sense to others. Scholarship is about communicating. It is not enough that it makes sense to you. It has to make sense to others.
The methods we use to achieve this goal were developed by secular sciences. And our audience is not limited to the Christian community alone. We submit our ideas in a form which meets secular standards of scholarship.

Scholarship is not about telling everyone what is right and what is wrong.
Scholarship is about encouraging each other not to act on whatever is said to you with authority but to be critical to go back to the sources to check them and to make up your own mind.
Scholarship is not about repeating what others have said before us, scholarship is about finding your own voice.

I think I made my point.

But don't feel sorry for me. The Bible is full of bad guys, and chances are that you too are one of them:
Are you a

·     A tax collector
·     A lawyer and do not want to part from your money
·     A woman with long hair who makes a lot of money and shows acts of random kindness
·     Someone who thinks that slavery is not such a good institution
·     Someone who thinks that democracy is better than a kingdom
·     Or are you clergy? Something like a Pharisee or a Sadducee or a Levite
·     Or are you a donor, but you ask for a receipt each time you give, so you can deduct your donations from your taxes?
·     Or are you lesbian, gay or transgendered?

Don't feel sorry for me. I was born a hetero sexual, white, Protestant male .When I took my first breath 54 years ago I had everything going for me. I cannot imagine what it means to be black, a woman, Catholic, or to be a Christian who is gay.

The reading from John got one thing right. Just having long hair does not make a woman a prostitute.
Being a Bible scholar does not mean that you cannot be a devout Christian.
The apostle Paul felt called by God to serve the Gentiles. Gentiles is a ten dollar word for "the others".
Where to or three are gathered I will be among them. Be one of those two or three. Don't be quiet about what is important. You and I, we too are the church. And we shall transform it.

So what do you do when you find out that you are the bad guy in the Bible?
Be yourself. Be who you are. Please, don't shut up!

Seeing one another with Softer Eyes

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
March 10, 2013     Lent 4

2 Corinthians 5:16-20
16From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

We have recently crossed a racial line in the United States.  Now there are more children born of non-European white decent than are born of other racial heritages.

Of course, such categories are, at the same time, becoming increasingly meaningless.  I am occasionally reminded of the fact that President Obama had a white mother and a black father and was largely raised by white grandparents.  And yet we say, rather matter-of-factly, that he is black.  You could, just as accurately say that he is white and yet no one does say that.  The fact that no one ever says that hearkens back to a centuries old prejudice that says you can only be white if you are all white but there is no logical context in which that can be true.

When I was a kid, we registered ourselves on government forms as being black, white or other.  Slowly, other categories were introduced.... Asian, or Pacific and one of my favorites:  Latino.  Latino means that you speak Spanish and are not directly from Spain but there are people in Central and South America who speak Spanish and are blond and blue eyed and there are others who are dark skinned Africans.  So what does "Latino" mean.... or "Anglo" for that matter since every color of American speaks English..... and don't even try that word in Great Britain.

There are people who are now trying to say that race does not exist and even though you can make a pretty good case for that genetically and as the races mix and intermarry we will have less and less obvious racial differences, I don't want to deny that race is real because that would imply that the burden of minority is not real and that the history of oppression is not real.  There is such a thing as race and it does matter in terms of self understanding and life experience but the lines are fuzzy and they will be more so.

My daughter was born to Korean parents 24 years ago but spent only 4 months in Korea and has been in the USA her entire life.  MSU offered her a "diversity" scholarship when she graduated from High School and I refused to even consider accepting it because she wouldn't bring any meaningful diversity to the university beyond mere appearance.  She has lived in Texas long enough now that she can do a very impressive Forrest Gump impersonation but I don't think that counts for diversity....and yes, I know Forrest Gump wasn't from Texas but you know how we lump everything south of the Ohio together.

My recent column in the Springfield NewsLeader compared the employment practices of the two retail giants, Walmart and Costco.  My argument was that because Costco pays higher salaries that they have better employee retention and worker satisfaction so they are more productive, making Costco spend less on salaries related to their retail volume than the more conservative Walmart.  My argument being that if Walmart were a more generous employer they would not only improve the communities where they do business but they would also fatten their bottom line.

When I went on line to look at my reader comments, every single critic was writing in to complain about President Obama..... who, to my knowledge, is not in management of either Costco or Walmart.

After 22 years of writing for the NewsLeader, I am aware that just seeing my picture in the paper is to conservatives approximately what it is to show a torch to Frankenstein, "Ugh FIRE". So that when they see that I have published on any topic, their only response is, "Obama BAD."

I have to conclude, that for these people, the black appearance of Barack Obama trumps any record set on the Dow Jones, employment numbers or defense record.  As a liberal, I have not a few bones to pick with our President but conservatives really don't have much to complain about and yet they hate him with a passion that seems in my eyes to be inescapably fueled by ignorant racism.  I could be wrong about this...... no, no, on later thought, there really is no way that I could be wrong about that..... it's racism.

Even some of my best friends were surprisingly ebullient about Hugo Chavez's declining health and recent death.  They tell me about how he controlled the media and arrested dissidents and when I pointed out that his media was less controlled than ours is and that he had not jailed a tenth as many dissidents as we jailed  Occupy Wall Street protestors they look at me like I'm the one whose crazy..... and even if I am.... accusing Chavez of controlling the media and dissent in Venezuela and not screaming about it here.... well, is Obama white or black?  It is all a matter of perspective isn't it?

I know that when Chavez nationalized the oil industry in Venezuela and severed military ties to the US and snuggled up to Cuba that it upset a lot of people in the business world in the US but I can tell you that by making Venezuela's natural resources a national resource, infant mortality was cut in half.  They grew to being number 5 in the world for per capita college graduates.

They cut poverty by 40% and they built power generating plants in Nicaragua, paved roads through Central America, provided food to preschools in Venezuela and many other impoverished nations.  My friends in Nicaragua are terrified about the prospects of the corporate powers taking over the government in Venezuela again and not a few corporate Americans want to make sure that we never know how much can be done for the poor by claiming natural resources for the national interests.

Yes, Chavez was a socialist.... a socialist who raised the standard of living of the poor, fed the hungry and even subsidized heating oil for the poor in the USA.  Was he egotistical, manipulative and self promoting?  Yes he was and if you don't see every Republican and every Democrat that you have ever known as being egotistical, manipulative and self promoting then, I'm pretty sure that you are kidding yourself.... and not all of them are even trying to elevate the standard of living of the poor, provide food to the hungry or electricity and heating oil to the poor.  So give me an insincere socialist any day if they can run a better railroad than a sincere capitalist.  Can I get an "amen" out of you folks or are you afraid to exhale?

The Apostle Paul lived and traveled in a world that was divided by who was a Roman citizen and who was not.  It was divided between slave owners and slaves.  It was divided by Greek speakers and Jews and other Aramaic speakers.  They were aware of racial divides that we would not even be able to tell apart any more than Paul could appear in this room and tell who was Latino and who was Anglo.

But even in that world that, if such a thing is possible, the people were even more divided by race and politics than we are, he wrote to the church in Corinth:

But we no longer see one another from a human point of view.  Is Barack Obama black?  Yes he is.  Is Barack Obama white?  Well, yes he is. Will we all one day be totally embarrassed about having ever cared if anyone is white or black, socialist or capitalist, Democrat or Republican, Latino or Anglo..... God I sure do hope so.

I'm not saying that all people are the same or that all of politics is equal because people are different and politics matters.  What I'm saying is that what does not matter is skin color, language, nomenclature or even what name you call the God that you pray to.  What matters is a life lived in compassion with a passion for justice.  It was the Dali Llama who defined love simply as being the absence of judgment.

If Hugo Chavez decreased human suffering and gave hope to more people in Central and South America through socialism than his predecessors had through capitalism then he is golden in my eyes.  If Barack Obama can end this stupid defense of marriage act we have and decrease gun violence in our streets and increase employment in this nation then he isn't black or white he is red, white and blue so far as I am concerned.

Some of the most wonderful people I know aren't much to look at and some of the most attractive have ugly characters.  Some of the most educated people I know are embarrassingly simple and some of the most humble folks are astonishingly wise.  Some young people can't program your DVR and your DVR was invented by an old person.  Your prejudices are just a weight you have carried for years that has done nothing but limit how far you can go spiritually and limited how many friends you can have and how happy you can be.  You officially have my permission to lay that burden down right now.

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.