Education is Food for the Soul

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
August 18, 2013

Elie Wiesel was asked, "What is it that you know for sure, that you have no doubt about?"  Here is the response:
"I have no doubt that we are here for a purpose. I have no doubt that the purpose is not only to bring God closer to his creations, but to bring his creations closer to one another. I have no doubt that a human being is human simply because he or she is human--and we have no right to say that a poor person is of less value to society than someone who is rich.
I have no doubt that education is good for the soul, not only for the mind. I have no doubt that questions have their own magic, their own charm and their own immortality. I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option.  I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And, of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person outweighs them all

For all of us who are involved in education, this week is when they may as well drain the pool and roll up all of the beaches because we are back in the classroom and as my daughter always said of this month, "life as we have known it is now officially over."

But if you are a college student there is at least one bit of good news.  This Congress has not been able to do much but with a lot of pressure from the White House, they were able to pass a bill lowering interest rates on federally insured student loans.  It was an amazingly hard fought bill because there was considerable political pressure to double interest rates on student loans under the banner of fiscal responsibility.  Republicans complained that it was costing the government too much money.

Never one to sit in the back of math class, my new heart throb, Elizabeth Warren, fired back that the government was making over $50 billion a year in profit on the loan program.
Not that is likely that many members of congress actually believed their own rhetoric.  They had a larger reason for wanting to continue to make higher education unavailable to the public.  Conservative politics depends for its future on an unquestioning, compliant, uneducated population.

Not that I want to make too fine a point here, but how many of you were encouraged by the pastor of the church you grew up in to take classes in religion in college?  The priest and the preacher, along with the politician and the captains corporate industry, prefer an uninformed public.

You may think that is unnecessarily cynical of me but let me go to the lowest common denominator to make my point, and by the lowest common denominator, you know I can only be referring to the diva of talk radio, Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck, who tumbled from grace being fired first by CNN and later by Fox because, frankly, Beck is even too crazy for Fox, has landed in a radio program where Forbes estimates that he is earning about $80 million a year..... proving the old adage that there is a sucker born every minute.

Beck keeps himself in the news by entertaining his largely paranoid and racist following with one outrageous statement after another.  A couple of days ago he told Oprah Winfrey that she disgusted him..... I have not been an Oprah fan since the Color Purple but even I know when it is not safe to shoot your mouth off.

But recently Beck was on a tear about higher education, vowing to his audience that he would never send another of his children to be indoctrinated by university professors.  He would prefer, he insisted, that his children just be auto mechanics, even bad auto mechanics working at a gas station where no one ever goes to allowing them to go and be tainted by higher education.

Now, two things about that..... obviously, nothing puts distance between Glenn Beck and another person, whether it is a listener or one of his kids, as much as being exposed to accurate information.  But the larger issue is that it is all a ruse...... Beck is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  His kids will never have to work nor will his grandchildren or great-grandchildren.  On the strength of a very gullible audience, the Beck family has crossed the Rubicon that you and I will never see.

So what he is really saying is not that he is willing to see his kids working as an inept, uneducated mechanic leading an impoverished and unfulfilling life.... He is, however, willing to see your children and your grandchildren leading an impoverished and unfulfilled life.

A retired friend of mine told me that he planned to audit one of my religion classes at Drury University where I teach but when he called and found out what it would cost him, he decided that I couldn't possibly know anything that valuable.  The rise in the costs of higher education, even in state universities, is rising so fast that it is becoming entirely out of the reach of more and more people.

When the Great Depression and World War II had brought our nation to its knees, the government went to great lengths to make university education accessible to anyone who had the discipline and intelligence to go get it.

When I started in college 40 years ago, the tuition for a 4 year state university degree did not cost as much as the tuition charged for one of my classes at Drury.  More importantly, it was possible for me to work a low paying restaurant job and still put myself through school.  The buying power of entry level salaries has gone down and college costs have gone up.

Not very many years ago, there were states that made sure that there was no tuition charged to state residents because it is good for the economy, good for advances in technology, good for government, the environment and even for the military for our population to have a better education.... The only thing that education is bad for is conservative politics and traditional religion.

Elie Wiesel said that education is good for the soul as well as for the mind.  Questions afford their own path to purify the soul.  I remember hearing Scott Peck say that anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.  And so we question everything.  We question our own religious tradition and the kind of unquestioning patriotism we were taught as compliant citizens and obedient warriors.

One of my heroes, Howard Zinn, said, "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.  Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over 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 all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

Some of you saints have actually suffered through reading my book that was a rewrite of my doctoral dissertation.  Though I would not recommend that anyone suffer through it, the topic is important.  My research was on the spiritual practices of monastic communities.  I wanted to try to speak clearly about the goal of the spiritual life.

What I discovered in my research is that for very many centuries monastic leaders understood that the spiritual journey had three specific stages:  purgation, illumination and union.  Purgation had to do with making confession, separating yourself from the carnal desires of the world, disciplining yourself to live a life of self denial, prayer and peace.

The second stage, called illuminative, was about learning, study, becoming informed and illuminated.  The third step, the more mystical union with God was, it was said, not possible without the other two.  Interestingly there was no particular curriculum prescribed by any of the major authors.  It wasn't that they expected everyone in the monastery to become a Biblical scholar or to be schooled in philosophy, but they did expect them to become informed.... To work at it, to think, to read, to understand.

They chanted the Psalms for hours every day.  They sat in "chapter room" while the Abbot read to them from their book of order.  They ate in silence while one monk, a lector, was assigned to read to the community from some spiritually edifying book.

I spent seven years visiting monasteries, staying for days or weeks at a time.  Worshipping with them, listening to instruction, studying and though many of them maintained a religion that I just don't identify with, they also often had a vocabulary that would send you to the dictionary anytime you were alone.

Those years of my life affected me and it has influenced how I am a pastor among you.  We have more guest lectures from college professors in this church than any other church I have ever known of.  We do book studies, hold conferences and stay in the literature because, I am convinced, the only spiritual life that is not entirely self serving is an informed life.

Though being informed is sometimes painful and sometimes it can lead to cynicism, I believe that education is the only way out of either political or spiritual tyranny.

When I look at what separates most of us from the way old politics, old religion and old business runs the world is sort of like farming.  If you asked a farmer if he was in favor of planting or in favor of harvest, he or she would look at you like you are crazy.

And you would be crazy..... no one can be enthusiastic about harvest if they are not equally invested in planting and you would have to be nuts to plant but never harvest.

I believe that our current congress, our current Supreme Court, our major corporations and our military industrial complex look at the world only as a point of harvest.  They want power and money and they want it now.  And if we let them take it all there will be a very small ruling class in this nation, surrounded by a class of permanent peasants.

We plant by educating the next generation of inventors, physicians, researchers, designers, architects, builders, teachers, statesmen and writers.  Every time we cut funding to schools, raise tuitions, force students to go deep into debt to get an education, we are deciding to harvest without planting and when we do that, the harvest has to get smaller and smaller and we all become the more poor for it.

We began this sermon with a reading of what Elie Wiesel said that he knew for certain, about which he had no doubt.  I will conclude with a bit of the same:

A university education should be free to any American who has the ability and the discipline to obtain an education.  The interest our government charges students should not be one bit more than they interest they charge to banks because the investment we make in students is more vital to our nation's health than anything banks will ever do for us.  And you, my friends, both seated here and viewing us on line.... You should question everything.... Question authority, question the government, question the church, question me, examine your own closely held beliefs... think critically and never stop seeking to learn, be informed and to understand the world around you and own heart.

The Only 'Beliefs' that Matter are the Ones We Can See

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 15    August 11, 2013

Isaiah 1:11- 17
11What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. 12When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; 13bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation-- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. 14Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. 15When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
16Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

A gay couple I knew very well here in town were forced to spit up by the Federal government.  Now, they wouldn't see it that way but that was the net effect of their actions.  One of the men was from Springfield and had a job in Kansas City.  The other had been an international student from Ecuador and when his student visa ran out, in spite of many attempts, he could not get a green card to stay here and work.

If he had been a she, and the two could have been legally married, this would not have been an issue.  At that time the federal government did not recognize same sex marriages because of the Defense of Marriage Act.  Now that DOMA has been over turned, most instances in which gay couples living in the United States look for our government to smile on them have been resolved..... but not in matters of immigration.

Yes, the American probably could have gone to Ecuador where he did not know the language and would have little prospect of employment but that is not a relationship stress placed on straight couples is it?

A huge part of the push for immigration reform is to make it possible for families to live together who have been forced by economic circumstances to live in different nations.  And when you are already poor, when your housing, food and medical care are already pretty dubious, you don't get to spend a lot of time traveling internationally to visit.

Now, honestly, I'm anything but confident that any real immigration reform is going to happen this year since our Congress is still paralyzed in partisan bickering, but there was some impetus from both sides of the isle to do something about this and even if the motivation may have been little more than desperation to curry Latino votes, still, letting families live together is a good thing.

But the delicate coalition began to break down around the familiar battle line of the definition of who is a family.  Conservatives both want to recruit more Latino voters and hold onto their traditional right wing religious base which means they are threatening to pull out of the immigration reform coalition if gay families get to be reunited at the same time as straight families.

This is obviously irritating to those of us who are tired of this antiquated prejudice rearing its ugly head once more on its way to the graveyard of indefensible discrimination.  But one of the things that has disappointed me is seeing how some religious leaders who had been warming up to being advocates for gay rights now quickly turning to throw the gay population under the bus.

I don't want to use the pulpit as a club to beat specific people over the head..... it is much better form for me to club bad ideas than it is for me to identify any people as being bad people.
And I hope I can make a little space for myself here when I say that I fully accept that a lot of people with whom I have sharp disagreements also do a lot of good and very praiseworthy things and some of the people with whom I identify theologically are useful for little more than shade or as a paper weight.

I have followed the work of Jim Wallis for 30 years. I have read his books.  I subscribed to Sojourners magazine.  I took a course with him at Harvard. And during that fall in 2004 I ended up taking him out to eat and driving him around to various media meetings where he was being interviewed about the presidential election

But Jim was out of place at Harvard.  He insisted and still insists on a very evangelical theology.  He holds to the traditional view that God is a person like we are persons who is "out there" somewhere and God sired a man child who died for our sins and was literally raised from the dead.

I heard a couple of professors try to reason with him, as I certainly did, but he kept insisting that without that dogged devotion to supernatural theology that no one can maintain commitment to a life of fighting injustice.

A claim that is, on the very face of it, simultaneously insulting and preposterous.  No one around him at the time he was insisting on these ancient creedal beliefs agreed with him and I suspect that most of us felt pretty committed to our convictions regarding liberation and social justice......

And I know that a lot of you would counsel me that everyone has a right to believe whatever they want to believe and what harm can it do if Jim Wallis still believes in a literal heaven and hell, a divine murder to atone for our undefined sins and a literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative?  But my contention is just this:  if you can get someone to believe something for which there is absolutely no evidence, no reason for believing it other than that I just want to believe it or because of some grand personal claim of having heard voices or seen visions..... once reality becomes a matter of personal preference, then your moral compass can never be reliable.

This week, Jim Wallis, who about 20 years after the rest of us concluded that gay rights are civil rights, quickly threw gay families under the bus saying "this is not the time,"..... this is not the time to worry about the rights of one of the most discriminated against minorities in the world..... it is not the time because Jim Wallis is willing to sacrifice their rights if that can advance the cause of straight immigrant families.

And when someone has already told you that rational thought, critical thinking, evidence, reality orientation are not important to them.... That they believe what they want to believe even though there is no way to check those beliefs out or even to rationally criticize them then when they decide to throw a few million people under the bus in order to achieve a personal objective there is also no way to rationally argue the point.

Jim has often absolutely been on the side of the poor, of immigrants and of women, as long as those women were willing to sacrifice self-determination over their reproductive lives and lately he has been a very tardy and reluctantly evolving supporter of the gay community but that house of cards fell apart this week.

I believe there is a connection.  None of us who are straight here today were reared to be open and affirming..... we thought our way into a progressive set of conclusions because we valued evidence, rational thought and a clear orientation to reality even in, nay, especially in matters of faith.

Sloppy thinking can lead to entirely irrational and undependable results. Rational progressives don't always get it right but we are not arbitrarily picking our truths out of thin air and when presented with evidence to the contrary, when we are being honest, we are willing to quickly change.

Irrational religious convictions have, through the centuries, caused many parents to disown their own children for being gay, or for not being virgins, or even for getting a divorce.  Irrational religious fervor has justified oppressing races, women and gays and it is not an unfamiliar part of our hostility towards immigrants.

But I am not saying that everyone needs to be a trained theologian, philosopher or Biblical scholar because the most obvious of spiritual truths don't come from deep within your gray matter.  The prophet Isaiah says in our reading today that what God wants from you is not a lot of religious rituals and doctrines but, as we see in verses 16 and 17, right at the end of today's reading: cease to do evil, 17learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Check your own hearts.... You didn't take your kids to Sunday school just so they could rattle off the names of the 27 books of the New Testament.... You hoped that somehow they would learn to do unto others what they would like for others to do unto them.

No one can be very wrong about their theology if they are doing good to other people and no one can be right enough about their theology if they are not doing good things for other people.

There is a form of the golden rule in every religion of the world..... sometimes you have to look past a lot of silly rituals and a good deal of prejudice, misogyny and homophobia to find it, but it is there.

Being frightened of people who are different from us is a purely natural reaction.  Straight people are naturally uneasy about homosexuality.  Europeans are uneasy about Arab immigrants, North Americans are frightened by Latino immigrants, apparently Republicans are frightened by intelligent women..... I kid Republicans.... Even if it is true.

Many critics of progressive Christianity say that by rejecting what cannot be known that we are rejecting faith.  I think that is a gross misunderstanding of what faith means.  I don't believe that faith has anything to do with irrationally making yourself believe in something that either cannot be known or is obviously false.

Faith is more like being faithful, committed.  When you ask your spouse if they have faith in you, you are not asking them if they believe that you exist.  You are asking them if they are with you, if they support you, if they are committed to you.... If they have the courage to stand with you against your critics.

The New Testament Greek word, "pistis" that we translate as "faith" is almost always used to denote courageous, committed faithfulness.  My faith has nothing to do with ancient claims about spirits, demons, angels or the heaven and hell where there are said to live.

For me, faith is about looking at the examples of the prophets, of Jesus, the apostles and saints and trying to find in them the inspiration to have the courage to do the same things.... The courage to overcome our prejudices about people who are different from us or even our willingness to abandon our ethics, throw a minority under the bus, in order to gain the support of the majority.

Before Christians were called "Christians" they were called "followers of the way."  I believe that before Christianity ever became a set of creedal beliefs, it was first and foremost a way of living.  That's what we're trying to recover.  I have a degree in philosophy and two degrees in religion.  I am fascinated by Biblical studies and enamored with theological debate but love is my religion and radical compassion is my true worship.

And if you agree with me you shouldn't leave Rev Mel hanging out there on his own when he says:  Amen.

Drunken Priests and Baby Talking Prophets

Community Christian Church Fifth Anniversary Celebration   

August 4, 2013

Isaiah 28:7-13                
7 These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink;
the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink,
they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink;
they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment.
8 All tables are covered with filthy vomit; no place is clean.
9 'Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message?
Those who are weaned from milk, those taken from the breast?
10 For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,  here a little, there a little.'
11 Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12  to whom he has said,
'This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose'; yet they would not hear.
13 Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them,  'Precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little';
in order that they may go, and fall backwards, and be broken, and snared, and taken.

Five years ago we began this journey, meeting in borrowed space, just long enough to see if this experiment had a chance of survival.  If there is anyone among us who started out in life as a liberal progressive Christian, I do not know who they are.  Most of us grew up in more traditional churches and either found ourselves to be unacceptable to them or they became unacceptable for us but in most cases arriving here has been a combination of the two.

Both by our unwillingness to assassinate our brains and their unwillingness to accept us because we were female, or gay, or divorced or, in some cases, because we read books and asked questions, we had become the church alumni association.  Though you will not often hear me talking about either providence or miracles, I count the fact that we have found one another to be as close to one or both of those things as I am going to come.... in any event, I think we are very lucky.

I think that it is safe to say now that five years ago we knew a lot more about what we didn't want than what we did want.
A couple of years ago when we first launched our on-line channels we discovered that there were thousands of people who were feeling the same longing we were feeling.  From this tiny little church on the edge of an obscure mid-western city, we are joined by viewers on every continent of the world.  Though our official name is "The Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO", We are no longer a Springfield church.

 In the past month we have had more than 30,000 people join us through the web.  This weekend we have had the wonderful opportunity to host several of our viewers from all over America and even from Europe.  And just as we have realized that we are not bound by geography, we have also realized that we are not actually bound by the designation of being Christian. Many of our viewers are Muslim, some are Jewish and even more self identify as atheists.

We open our minds to the wisdom found in other faith traditions and feel entirely free to reject the doctrines and creeds that once chained us in the darkness of irrational superstition, prejudice and falsehood.

The one word in our name that I cling to is "community."  We are not just self congratulatory philosophers who have rejected the myths and neurotic fear and guilt of the dark ages... we have put hands and feet and heart into our shared faith as we serve the poor together and bring prophetic witness to the social justice causes of our time.  With both food for the hungry and  visible opposition to the institutions that create poverty, oppression and violence we have become a community.  Though we may be one of the smallest churches in town, our direct service to the poor is greater than churches that are ten and twenty times our size.

The old main stream denominational churches are trying to figure out how to survive in the face of declining numbers and increasing irrelevance and we keep trying to figure out how we can do more.

This first five years has been a fabulous journey and I cannot wait for our tenth anniversary to see who we will have become.

It may have been fittingly symbolic that our first few services were held in a funeral home parlor because we had a body to bury.  We needed to bury the church that we had left and that had left us.  We had to eulogize a faith that was full of lies, magic and superstition, dead ritual and choking doctrines marked by creeds that sound more like a fanciful incantation in a Harry Potter movie than something gown up people would repeat in the 21st century.

 Still, we recognize that the path we have followed was a well worn path that stretches back through the millennia.  That first Sunday in August of 2008, we read the same text from the 28th chapter of Isaiah that Nicole just read for us a few moments ago.

Isaiah is a poet and a prophet and someone had hurt him pretty badly because even across 2700 years you can hear his anger.  He describes the priests of his day, the keepers of institutional religion in two competing images.

On the one hand he makes the Temple sound like an episode of Tosh.0.  The priests are drunk, stumbling, falling over themselves and, he says quite graphically, vomiting everywhere.  I'm certain that is not a literal description but we know what he means.  What they had to say had the approximate value of drunken vomit.
The other image is a bit less obvious in translation. The powerful priesthood who preside over the huge Temple, the pinnacle of institutional religion are, the prophet says, are as sophisticated as a baby that is taken from the breast. He repeats the phrases that their religion is to them, "precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little."

In Hebrew, what he is saying is intended to make this sound like a baby babbling.... it says, "cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav, siershom, siershom."  They are just babies, or drunks.... either way, the prophet asks the question, "Who can they teach, to whom can they explain what is real?" because all that they know is "cav la cav, cav la cav, sav  sav, sav la sav"...... any resemblence that bears to a Fox News program is not just coincidental.

The churches of our birth were not much concerned with liberation from oppression, fighting poverty or racism.  Though there were heroic and wonderful exceptions, most stood back and watched the civil rights movement. They were silent about the war in Vietnam.  There were the Berrigan brothers somewhere.... there was Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day out there getting arrested and being interviewed by Time Magazine but most of us were kids in churches that said pledges to the flag, asked you to pledge your money while they told you about what they had read in the funny pages and made allusions to their favorite sports teams.

All the while expecting you to worry about your soul that you had never seen, and to be anxious about a hell you had never seen, and to lust for a heaven you have never seen and to feel badly about being such a horrible person that God had to kill his own son to make up for your sins......cav la cav, cav la cav, sov la sov, sov la sov..... etc. etc.

When I was a college student, one of the thinkers I heard regularly condemned from the pulpit was the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell.  In the middle of the 20th century he was begging the modern world to think critically about both religion and government and critical thinking is the one thing that magical superstitious religion cannot stand.  He said:

"I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive.  The doctrine in question is this:
that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true.  I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system."

This is what frightened traditional religion. The suggestion that you only believe what there is good reason to believe..... believe what can be seen, tested, repeated.... because from the time of Constantine, religious people have been asked to repeat rituals, to kneel, genuflect, speak in tongues, weep, shout and empty their wallets because everyone around them was doing it and their parents did it and their grandparents did it.

I'm not saying that it was all bad.  There were people who were helped. There were families that stayed together, there were people who reformed criminal or addictive behavior and who controlled their impulses based on their experiences in churches but what happens when you find out that the snake oil you have been taking has nothing in it?

How much of your time, emotional energy, your resources have been poured into believing in superstition and trying to make yourself believe that repeating magical phrases and participating in magical rituals would somehow make imaginary angels and demons do your bidding?

We wasted our time, our energy and our resources while governments sent our young men and women to die in wars fought over land and resources while they told us it was for Jesus and freedom.  We bowed our heads and closed our eyes while corporations treated workers like lumps of coal thrown into the furnace of profit and banks used the people's money to make themselves rich while keeping the people groveling for a chance to have a home or a car to use to get to work to earn money to give to the bank.

Moses was a liberator of slaves.  Jesus, Mohammad, Zoroaster, Gandhi, Romero, King, were liberators.  They reached out to the poor, the orphan, the sick, the oppressed..... the church, however, has asked women to shut up and be obedient, the church has made gay people suicidal for just existing and treated blacks and immigrants like objects of perpetual charity.... to be given a holiday basket at Thanksgiving and worn out clothes the rest of the year but never to be treated as equals.

Cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav...... man I am so done with that.

In the 21st century, in possession of endless information at our fingertips, science, rational thought, critical thinking.... anyone still sitting in a big church trying to learn how to speak in tongues or waiting for their turn to light a candle in front of a statue or trying to make themselves believe that their Holy Book really is the one true magical formula written by the finger of God is like a bird in a cage where the door has been left open.

It is one thing to stay in the cage when you have no choice but those days are over.  It is time to grow up, time to sober up, time to set aside the superstitions of the dark ages and embrace the faith that Jesus was willing to die for, that made the Berrigan brothers set military draft records on fire, that called Martin Luther King into the streets to march, and Dorothy Day to feed the poor and shake her fist at the government and businesses that made them poor.

Three thousand years ago, the prophet said:  11 Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12  to whom he has said,
'This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose'; yet they would not hear.

Perhaps, Isaiah, they would not hear, but we hear you.  This is rest.... to give rest to the people who have been shut out of jobs, schools, hospitals and homes. To tell the bandits on Wall Street and the powerful on Capitol Hill that we will no longer bow our heads and close our eyes to their abuses.  And we will tell the priests, pastors, ministers and evangelists to keep their promises of pie in the sky when we die until we see them meeting us on Commercial Street with some bread and roses for the addicted veterans, the physically and mentally sick, the victims of capitalism run mad who they have ignored and treated as symbols of their largess.

I will give them my undivided attention to let them explain to me why I should believe in the Trinity, heaven and hell, substitutionary death, sacraments and intercessory prayer when they first tell me how they are going to turn the minimum wage into a living wage, and guarantee access to health care for the sick, jobs for the unemployed, homes for the homeless..... when their religion has a way of stopping the wars in Syria, Mexico and can keep those flying killer robots out of the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan but until then, their religion is to me nothing but line upon line, line upon line and, frankly, I have better things to do with my time.

We have loved the liberating works of Marcus Borg and John Spong.  We have turned to the insights of our own David Trobisch and Charles Hedrick to help us to be forever free of the tyranny of the dogmatic old religion that once held our minds captive.  But for me, no one says it more succinctly and clearly than that Jamaican musician, poet and prophet, Bob Marley.....

We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.
We know when we understand:  Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light  We gonna stand up for our rights!
  Preacher man, don't tell me,  Heaven is over the earth.
I know you don't know What life is really worth.
'Alf the story has never been told: So now we see the light!
Most people think, Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth, You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light, You stand up for your rights.
Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )

Can You Name 10 Good People?

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper     July 28, 2013

Genesis 18:20-23, 31-32          
20Then the Lord said, "How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! 21I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know." 22So the men turned from there, and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord.
23Then Abraham came near and said, "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? .....31He said, "Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there." He answered, "For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it." 32Then he said, "Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there." He answered, "For the sake of ten I will not destroy it."

No one, including Osama Bin Laden, thought that the World Trade Towers in New York would completely collapse when struck by airplanes, until, of course, they did. That does not diminish the courage of the firemen who rushed into the burning towers to help evacuate people who consequently lost their lives in the line of duty.  A decade later there was a crisis in Japan.

An earthquake and the tsunami crashed into Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, making a crisis of nature combined with a human mistake of putting a power plant on a coast, resulting in one of the most dangerous situations faced in Asia since World War II.  The potential of deaths from radiation was almost impossible to calculate but the radiation leaking inside the plant made it virtually impossible for anyone to go inside to take action to contain the danger.

 The 800 employees who worked at the Fukushima plant were immediately evacuated while robots were sent in with cameras and detectors only to confirm their fears that a major radiation leak was unavoidable.  At that point, 50 specialists and firemen volunteered to go in.  The Asian media called them the Fukushima 50.  Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, frankly, the workers were "prepared for death." Which was a good thing because many of them did and you have to assume that all of them have dramatically shortened their life expectancy. I doubt that anyone volunteering for military service or any other form of public service could have been as certain of stepping into personal sacrifice as did these workers.  Their number started out at 50 and grew.


It wasn't like a super hero movie or a Die Hard, Red or G I Joe movie in which people heroically save the world and the heroes all live.  The Fukushima 50 didn't even fix the broken reactor.... It is still leaking radioactive waste into the ocean.  They just make a horrible situation better and saved a lot of people in the process of shortening their own lives.

Two years have past.... Do you remember hearing about the Fukushima 50?  There was some media coverage of their heroism and personal sacrifices at the time but not one percent as much as we have heard about the British royal baby or even Anthony Weiner's junk shots.

We read portions of the Old Testament story about the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Please, let me say clearly, this is not history. This is a story.  A lot of the myths of the Old Testament are built around an oral accounting of why something in their region of the world is the way that it is.  There may have been some villages burned up in volcanic activity or some natural disaster that was then interpreted as being the activity of God but let's be very very very clear about the fact that God doesn't go around burning up cities because of the sinfulness of the city.


If you don't believe me, just go to Washington, D.C. and see that it is still there which is proof enough that God doesn't destroy cities because of the sin of the people who work on Capitol Hill.

The charred remains of an ancient village may have given Jews a reason to create a narrative but the point of the narrative is what gives the account gravity in scripture.  What we look at today is a case of pleading between Abraham and the Almighty, which is not unlike other prophetic pleadings with God in Hebrew scripture.

God has told Abraham to get his family out of harm's way while he burns up a sinful city and Abraham tries to bargain with God.... "But what if there are 50 good people still in town?"  "What if there are 20?"  Finally, "What about 10, if there are 10 good people, could you really burn up 10 good people because there are ten thousand others who really deserve to be fried?"

God relents and gives Abraham the opportunity to name 10 good people in his village and he couldn't do it.  Could you?  Seriously, could you?

What I find interesting about the martyrs of our memory is that they are almost all dead.  When I took a course in religious biography at Harvard, we studied the lives of some of modern history's most remarkable people:  Gandhi, King, Day, Romero, Niebuhr, and even though my professor, Dr. Harvey Cox, had known most of them as personal friends, they were all, to we students, dead people.


When we bought this building, I put up framed images of some of faith's great modern examples which included the people I just mentioned along with Black Elk and many others but the only one on display here who is still alive, and I'm not even sure about that, is Wang Weilin, who may have been the unknown protester who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

So, if we were to personalize this text..... if you were standing in Abraham's shoes and God had told you to go to the lake for the weekend because Springfield had pushed God just a little too far..... could you name 10 people from among your peers to save Springfield from having fire rained down on it from heaven?

Could you name the mayor?  The superintendant of schools?  The city manager?  What about the director of the United Way?  What about the Catholic Bishop?  Or the President of the Assemblies of God?  How about the people who are sitting around you here in church?  Are you up to 10 yet?

At everyone's funeral, you are always talking about a good person but the sobering fact is that you may not have ever thought of them as having been a good person until shortly after they had died.  Abraham was asked to quickly come up with the names of 10 good people who were alive, who were his neighbors and he couldn't do it and I suspect that for the most part, we couldn't either.

I can't name a single one of the Fukushima 50, you may not know the names of more than one or two of the community leaders I just mentioned and I bet you couldn't repeat the name of the guy standing in front of that tank in Tiananmen Square and I just told you what it was...... I'm pretty sure it was Wang Weilin.

But if I asked you to name the New York governor who resigned because of his relationship with prostitutes, or which New York mayor candidate sends naked pictures of himself to young women, or which governor got his house keeper pregnant or which governor disappeared while visiting his mistress in Argentina..... you can name all of them.

Some of that is because we are trained to think about people's failings and whenever someone sticks their head up above the crowd, the majority instinct is to try to find some plausible reason to cut their head off.

Our government is starved for leadership but no one wants to lead because as soon as you step out in front of the line, a hundred people want to stab you in the back.  The progressive church is simply not making much progress in the world because progressives do not champion one another.... We are much more likely to cut one another down than to build one another up.

We are afraid to praise anyone these days because we are afraid that we'll find out something about them that will disappoint us.  John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, no one that we now confidently name as great leaders would have withstood the scrutiny of the current media's neo-puritan witch hunts.

The only reason we can name anyone from the past century as a hero is because the 24 hour news media didn't come into existence until the end of the 20th century.

So, I have two things to say about this.  The first is that we all need to decide, right now, right here, that we are going to stop be lead around by the nose by gossip.  We need to be much more concerned about what a person has done right, what they have accomplished, what they can do than by how many black marks we can put on their moral score sheet.  Capable, wonderful, intelligent, talented people make mistakes.  Now, Anthony Weiner is just crazy.... That's different..... but I'm saying, get your head out of the sheets and look at the world in a more balanced way.

Besides, you know, lions don't spend much time worrying about the opinions of sheep.  Don't think like you were just a part of the herd of sheep.

The second thing is that I want to suggest to you is that try your best to live in a way that earns you a place on that list of good people.  Sure, if you try to stick your neck out, someone will try to cut your throat.  But as that famous poem that was mistakenly attributed to Mother Theresa goes:

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;

Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
    Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;

Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;

Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you've got anyway.

The only proverb that I can claim as my own comes from years of experience in ministry.  My proverb says:  If you light a candle in a dark place, you will draw bugs.  I realized this after years of trying to do really good things in ministry and always being confronted by irrational, jealous, hyper-critical and sometimes plain old stupid opposition.  No good deed goes unpunished but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be the one who is ready to be inconvenienced, or have to sacrifice for doing some good things.

You may not ever be called upon to run into a nuclear reactor filling with radiation but aren't you glad that there are some people who have that kind of character?  And really, wouldn't you like to have that kind of character whether you were ever called upon to do it or not?

Leon Bloy said that anyone who is a Christian who is not a hero is a pig.  Now, I know you don't want to be pigs so, if Bloy is right then you know what you need to do.  Don't be shy, don't be timid, don't be swayed by gossip or fear of judgment.... Be a hero.

Peace without Justice is Surrender

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 12   July 21, 2013

Luke 10:38-42
38Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. 40But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." 41But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

Though I was inspired by their passion, dedication and courage, I was not one of the people who watched the protests during the Arab Spring with much hope.  My one week in Egypt nearly 20 years ago hardly qualifies me as an expert, but I was pretty sure that the massive public protests bent on ousting the secular military government of Hosni Mubarak would not necessarily lead to anything much better.  Angry people tend to over correct.... If they are mad at one kind of government leadership, they will often race to embrace it's opposite only to discover that they despise that even more.

The strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood looked like the cure to the excesses of Hosni Mubarak when the protesters in the public square but what they needed was a more sane middle path.  As I had feared, the excess of the first democratically elected president in Egypt in its 5000 year history, Mohamed Morsi, infuriated Egyptians.

Democracy is not an easy thing.  Democracy must mean more than the tyranny of a 51% vote.  The Muslim Brotherhood, long denied a fair place at the table of power in Egypt, once they were able to muster a tiny majority in the polls, decided that they then had absolute power and could jail, torture and murder their political opponents.

We have more than two centuries of experience in democracy and, though we tend to be a bit more subtle about it, we're not very good at it either.  In 2013 we are in possession of two houses of Congress that are more ineffective and more paralyzed than in any time in modern American history.  Democrats control the White House and the Senate, Republicans control the Congress and, as sad as it is to say it, even our constitutionally non-partisan Supreme Court is controlled by the Republican Party.

When I see Mitch McConnell talking about anything President Obama wants to do, I get the distinct sense that McConnell just doesn't believe that our freely elected president has the right to be the president.  There is a level of contempt there that makes you think that McConnell just feels that Obama is beneath him and his mere presence in the White House is a personal insult.

And, like many of my fellow liberals, I am generally inclined to return the favor and feel the same way about McConnell but it is exactly that kind of mutual contempt that has set Egypt and Syria on fire.  There has to be a better way.

Still, there is clearly some point at which gridlock becomes something more than mere obstructionism. At some point it surely becomes such a challenge to the health of the nation that it begins to look like treason.

As Ron and June Hertenstein leave us this week to move to Florida, among their stated reasons for leaving behind the privilege it is to live in the Ozarks, is to devote more time to an organization called, "No Labels."  No Labels is striving to create a problem solving conversation among politicians who are able to see beyond the partisan divide enough to actually work on solutions.  Though I hate to see them leave, I wish them Godspeed in trying to find ways to get our elected officials to act like intelligent grown ups..... recognizing that in many cases it could never be much more than an act.

I am sincerely cynical about the prospects for success in getting our currently elected members of Congress to participate in a sane middle path but I would love to be wrong about that.

As I have watched the coups in Egypt with interest this week, I have marveled at how little influence America seems to have on Egyptian politics even though we give them $1.6 billion dollars a year in aid.  Now, to be clear, this is not because we have a warm place in our hearts for the struggling poor in Egypt.... We basically pay them a huge annual bribe to keep them from attacking Israel.

I don't want to diminish the diplomatic success that is known as the Camp David Accords but when I gave my lunch money to the bullies in the boys room in elementary school so that they wouldn't beat me up, I didn't walk out into the hallway declaring diplomatic success.

Now that there has been a military coups, we can't give them their usual bribe money because there is no longer a legitimate government in Egypt.
So, Ron and June, if I may pass along a suggestion to the "No Labels" solution seeking committee, why don't we use our Middle Eastern bribe money to fund democratic elections in America.....because, with the corporate and billionaire money in our elections, they are not really free and fair democratic elections, are they?   If we can get genuine campaign finance reform in American politics then we could let the people freely elect a government that actually represents our interests.

Without NRA political donations buying politicians we could get sensible gun laws and without Insurance and Pharmaceutical money we could get a national health care program and without a bloated military budget we could actually create a globally competitive education system and an environmentally friendly power grid.  How's that for a workable solution?

And especially since you are moving to Florida where the "for profit prison industry" is in full swing you might want to spend some time on that issue. The state of Florida is becoming famous for their school to prison pipe-line.... By cutting funding of public schools, you create more crime and then you need more prisons.  Housing a prisoner costs more than educating a kid but this is not a math problem, this is a for-profit-prison and political contribution problem.

And I can't really blame the public for not being more outraged about this because there just isn't much about it in the news.  Here is my weekly rant about the media:
It is the job of a good journalist to make things that are important interesting.
They have to investigate it and be skillful enough in their trade to write about it in a way that informs us, that makes us take an interest in the things that matter.
But what we are getting in the media is entertainment.  They are not making important things interesting, they are, in stead, choosing things that are interesting and by reporting on them they make them important.

The media will focus on a story about a missing white girl, or a political sex scandal or some recent revelation about a Hollywood divorce, a baseball player on steroids or the release of a new super hero movie but they don't tell us much about why 90,000 Syrian civilians have been killed in a civil war or even about the civil war raging on our southern border in Mexico that we are fueling with our drug money.  You aren't being told which corporations are funding the political campaigns of your senator or members of congress or why your grocery store won't tell you what is in the food you buy.

Journalists are supposed to do the hard work of making what is important interesting enough for us to pay attention but in stead they are taking what we are interested in at a very juvenile level and making it seem like sex scandals and athlete juicing is important.

The gospel text today places two sisters in juxtaposition.  One is focused on the task at hand.... Feeding a house full of guests, the other is seizing on what may have been, for her, a once in a lifetime chance to listen to the teachings of Jesus.
Now I clearly bear the marks of a man who has not missed many meals and I love Martha's devotion to getting dinner ready but we all know that Mary is making the better choice.

The media knows we are always interested in the smell of cookies in the oven.... We've all been to the movie theater when the popcorn was the most memorable part of the trip but we also know that is not how it is supposed to be.

Martha represents the responsible though unimaginative aspect of living..... of getting the leaves out of the gutter and the dishes out of the sink.... Of making sure we have our retirement fully funded before going on a trip to New Zealand.  And Mary is probably also planning to eat dinner again.... If not that day, surely by the next day..... but she is able to discern what is the most important at the moment without getting into a fight with her sister about the mundane.

Martha wanted to start a fight.  Martha wanted Mary to be more like Martha, which in Martha's mind, was the only decent way to be.  Liberals think Conservatives are stupid and Conservatives think that Liberals are lazy and unrealistic.  Democrats want to run the government and Republicans seem to think that they are the only ones who should ever be in power, regardless of who has been elected.

Somewhere between the ignorantly unaware and the angry arsonist, there is an intelligent middle way.

I accept that in my 20 years as an opinion writer in the NewsLeader, that I have come to be something of a cartoon character.  It is my job to write columns that are sufficiently provocative for people to pause during their morning routine to read my 500 word screed but I know that if I tried to talk to my friends in that same tone that I wouldn't have any friends.

Here, in the still, contemplative environment of our church gatherings we want to find the truth.  We never want to fail to speak or act due to lack of courage.  We do not want to settle for peace without justice but we do not want to let our anger or our passion for justice to lead us to such extremes that we cut off conversation with those with whom we disagree.

I'm not a moderate and I'm not encouraging you to be either.  There is a difference between what we call "the middle of the road" and what the Buddha called "the middle path."  We have to remember that Jesus wasn't crucified for being a moderate.

Please remember this important truth:  Peace without Justice is just Surrender.  No one here is enamored with surrender.

We are interested in justice but we should not interested in revenge.  We are interested in justice but we do not need to set the church, the government or even the banks on fire.  We are interested in justice and we want to get there as sane, intelligent people of character and when we get there, even our opponents should still be able to speak well of us.

Trayvon is Dead and None of Us are 'Not Guilty'

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
July 14, 2013    Proper 10

Luke 10:25-37
25Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 26He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" 27He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." 28And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live." 29But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" 37He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

We stood out on the church lawn yesterday and some of us speculated about the jury's verdict in the Zimmerman trial.  I was confident that though there was not a premeditated murder here there was at least a manslaughter conviction that seemed to me to be inescapable.  No one in America was more surprised than I was at the announced "not guilty" verdict.  What is perhaps more sad is how many African Americans who were not surprised, for whom this verdict looked more like "business as usual."

In 1852, in a speech entitled, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro," freed slave, Fredrick Douglass, said:

"At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."

It is that quickening of conscience that I am looking for this morning.  This is not a time for wit or irony.... It is time for us to expose the hypocrisy of our nation's racial failures.  It may be that the facts of the February 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin left the jury unable to move beyond reasonable doubt but had the roles been reversed.... Had a seventeen year old black teenager followed an unarmed white man through a dark neighborhood and, in the midst of a confrontation, had shot and killed the white homeowner.... Then that young man certainly wouldn't have gone home and slept in his own bed after the police were called and he would not have come away from the trial with a "not guilty" conviction or even a manslaughter conviction.  Had Trayvon Martin shot George Zimmerman he would have been lucky to avoid the death penalty.

Race was surely an issue in this case as was class.  There is no way to prove it but I am personally convinced that had O J Simpson not been a famous rich person, he would not have been found not guilty in the murder of his former wife and her friend.  Race is a huge factor in our judicial system, second only in unfair rulings to the presence of money.  It is very uncommon for an impoverished David to ever win in court against an economic Goliath.

The jury, charged with the difficult task of rendering a decision in this case, decided that Zimmerman was not guilty which is a long way from saying that he was innocent.  But I would say in this incident that Trayvon Martin is dead and not a one of us here is "not guilty."

We are all a part of the society that has made it unsafe to walk down the street while being black.

There are 30,000 gun deaths in America every year, more than 10,000 of which are homicides and young black men figure in that number at a disproportionate rate.  So, there are several thousand young black men gunned down every year in the United States.  This one case has risen to national attention because the circumstances around seem to perfectly symbolize our American angst.

Things are better than they used to be but none of us should pretend that racism is a thing of the past.  Nor should we be silly about switching from one kind of prejudice to just another kind of denial of reality.  He has been quoted so often now that he probably regrets having ever said it but the Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked that nothing makes him more uncomfortable that hearing footsteps behind him on a city street and turning and being relieved when it is a white person.

Crime among angry young black men is not an urban myth.  It is real.  Of course, poverty causes crime regardless of race.  Bad schools, lack of decent and safe public housing causes crime.  Broken down family relationships and addiction causes crime..... crime is not a race issue and, besides, when you take the long view of history, no one has killed more people, enslaved more people, tortured more people and stolen land and property from more people than white men..... in that sordid race, my peeps are still undefeated.

What we saw in the Zimmerman stand off with Martin was an employed homeowner in a neighborhood with a crime problem and a black young man who was visiting in the neighborhood with his father's girlfriend.

Trayvon Martin fit the profile of the kind of person Zimmerman didn't trust and Zimmerman fit the profile of what made Trayvon Martin angry...... if it takes anything to make teenagers angry. The inequality here is that the creepy cracker was able to get a conceal and carry license and this morning he can legally be back out in his neighborhood with a firearm, loaded, round in the chamber with no safety on, just like he was that night last February.  Applause for the NRA!

We are all aware of this trial because of what it represents which is all about race, class and stage of life.  In the dark, in a high crime neighborhood of Florida, these two met one another and only one walked away.

Now, if I can ask you to make a great leap in time backwards, four, maybe five minutes ago, Patrick read to you the familiar passage from Luke that we know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  Most of you have had this story interpreted to you by preachers and Sunday School teachers since before you could take the training wheels off of your bicycle.  In spite of how familiar it is to you, I would like to ask you today to picture the scene in your minds again, only this time I want to ask you to see it as an encounter, not of a Samaritan and a Jew, but as Travon Martin and George Zimmerman.

And really, it could go either way, Trayvon is walking back to his father's girl friend's house with a bottle of tea and a bag of Skittles, talking to a friend on his cell phone when he sees George Zimmerman lying in the street, robbed, beaten and half dead.  Or you could see it the other way around.... Zimmerman is out on his neighborhood watch, looking for some of those...... who always get away, and he happens on the hoody wearing skinny form of Trayvon, lying wounded in the street.
Look at it either way because these are two guys who are not going to like each other in any setting.  They have been trained by very real an often repeated bad experience to despise one another.  Either one could have found the other one lying in the street and had a very private moment of satisfaction..... this time the creepy cracker got it.... Or this time the thug got it.

What I'm asking you to consider about this biblical parable is that the guy we call the Good Samaritan may have found this beaten, half dead Jew and even though he stopped, picked him up, took him to get help and even paid for it out of his pocket, he may very well have still hated that man and everything he represented.

The text didn't say that this was the one Samaritan in the region who happened to be such a good guy that he was free of prejudice and that he had entirely forgiven the Jews for what they had done to the Samaritans..... or the other way around.

The choice that the Samaritan had to make in this parable was, when confronted by a person he undoubtedly saw as an enemy, he didn't have to decide about what he thought about Jews, he had to decide who he wanted to be.

When George Zimmerman called 911 to report a suspicious looking person in his neighborhood, it was not the first time he had called 911 to make such a report.  It wasn't the 10th time or the 20th time.  Over the eight or nine years that Zimmerman had been on the neighborhood watch, he had place 46 calls to 911 all to report suspicious looking people walking through his neighborhood.

When asked to describe the suspicious looking people, would you believe that all 46 of them were black young men.

I'm not saying that there is a pattern here.... Oh the heck I'm not..... George Zimmerman profiled black young men and there is good reason to believe that black young men had perpetrated some of the crime in Zimmerman's neighborhood.

It is also true that neighborhood watch volunteers are not suppose to follow suspects or go out with a lethal weapon.  Even if he fired in self defense, this is not an innocent incident..... there were a number of bad decisions that led up to the very sad and very wrong death of Trayvon Martin.  But no one here should pretend that there is not someone in this world that you are afraid of.... Someone you distrust from the very sight of them.

In the Ozarks we tend to think that everyone who speaks with a Spanish accent is from Mexico but I can tell you that they are not and that in Central America, Mexicans tend to look down on Cubans and Costa Ricans tend to look down on Nicaraguans and in Ecuador the white European Spanish descendants look down on the indigenous Quechua and, my friends, religious fundamentalists don't often get to be the heroes of the stories we tell in this room, do they?

Yes, yes, yes, many of you have been victimized by fundamentalists, evangelicals, magical Catholics and crazy Pentecostals but right now I'm not talking about who they are, am asking you to think about who you want to be.

If you got George Zimmerman alone in a safe place and asked him about his history with young black men, he might be able to convince you that he had plausible reason for his prejudice.... I'm saying "might"..... for some of us, you have to suspend reality here for just a minute..... but even if he had plausible reason, he had a choice to do something about the problem..... like volunteer to mentor a kid in foster care, or be a reading buddy at the local elementary school.  He didn't have to put a gun in his belt and go out roaming the neighborhood at night.

I'm not telling you that there is no reason to be afraid, that there is no reason to be prejudiced, or that I have no sympathy for those who are tired of being victimized.  I'm just asking you now, here in the clear light of a sunny Sunday morning to decide who you want to be.  Do you want revenge or do you want to grow your spirit to the point of being able to forgive?  Do you want to feel safe and empowered and aggressive, or do you want to choose to be vulnerable enough to love an enemy and to show kindness to someone who doesn't deserve it?

Jesus told a story about a man who chose to be bigger than his fear, his anger, his need for safety or revenge.  It was just a story.  However, you are not just a story.  You are real and you have real choices to make.

Please don't assume that I'm neutral here..... that's the job of those other preachers.  I'm here to tell you that I believe that the Good Samaritan made the right choice and George Zimmerman made the wrong choice.  I want you to make the right choice..... and until it is safe to walk while being black in America all of us need to keep exposing the hypocrisy that is alive an well in our nation.

A Government for the People

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Thoughts on Independence Day    July 7, 2013

Isaiah 10:1-4                                              
Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, 2to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey! 3What will you do on the day of punishment, in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, 4so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain? For all this his anger has not turned away; his hand is stretched out still.

An important educational value for those of us who were in public schools during the Cold War was to be thoroughly convinced that we were right and the communists were wrong, evil, bad, dangerous and that they had bad weather, couldn't dance or sing and that they had bad breath.  I suppose that it is fortunate for us that students in China were now subjected to the same education during that time since we are not dependent upon that communist economy to keep loaning us enough money to keep our nation afloat...... but I digress.

An important building block in our anti-communist education was the reading of George Orwell's "Animal Farm."  As you recall, in Orwell's allegorical tale, the animals on a farm revolt against the farmers and take over, saying that they want to create an egalitarian utopia in which everyone shares equally in both the work and the resources.

Of course, the experiment in self-rule fails.  Some animals, especially the cat, managed to scam the system.... Eating but not working.  Others, the pigs, claiming superiority, take over control of the farm and eventually evolve into being just as like the farmers.  Which says something of the hopelessness of the communist ideal but it doesn't say anything all that great about capitalism and democracy either.  The working poor lose in both scenarios.
Still, I find that thinking about role of government in creating a good society is easier when you think about it on a small scale..... Orwell used a single farm, I like to think about an island with a hundred people on it.

If we wanted to create the most fair and just society possible on an island where everyone knows everyone we would divide labor on the island in a way that served the greatest good.  We wouldn't all be farmers, we wouldn't all be dentists and we wouldn't all be mayor of the island.

We wouldn't let just one person own all of the housing or all of the farmland.  We wouldn't built a mansion for one family and let ten other people remain homeless.  That's not to say that the more productive or even the ones who provided a more vital service might not fair a bit better than the rest but the difference would be a matter of degree and not a matter of multiples.... Right?

Assuming that there would be some who were elderly or infirm and some who were dependent children, we would have to support some of our 100 islanders while they cared for children and the ill.  Hopefully you would still want to support a pastor but I bet I would need to learn how to make furniture or something equally useful.

If we ask the question, "Does the state have an obligation to take care of the poor?"  The answer is a lot easier to see if you are thinking about a state that is comprised of a hundred people in a small space.  And in this place we can add a corollary question, "Is there a spiritual obligation to care for the poor," and even parse that between the corporate state responsibility and individual responsibility.

In the current political debate, we often hear conservatives arguing that the Christian value of compassion towards the poor is an individual obligation and not a state obligation.  There are not many times when you can say that one religious view is right and the opposite view is wrong but this is one where we can be absolutely clear.

In spite of how often evangelical Christianity uses the word "personal" as in "I have a personal relationship with God" or "I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior," if you take scripture seriously you have to immediately acknowledge that the word "personal" is not in the Bible.  It is not in the Hebrew Bible and it is not in the Christian New Testament, nowhere, not once, nada, it is not there.

American emphasis on a "personal" relationship was based on a very poor reading of John Calvin and, it should be noted, John Calvin was not born until quite some time had passed after the writing of both the Old and New Testaments.  In Jewish faith, both reward and punishment was primarily seen in the entire nation.  Scriptures describe a corporate ethic that was never just personal, it always had to do with the entire community taking care of the poor, the sick, the elderly, widows, orphans, foreigners and all of the most vulnerable members of society.

Modern politicians may not want to do that but they cannot in any honest way point to the traditions of Moses and claim that the government can take a pass on caring for the poor.

The New Testament was composed when Israel did not rule itself.   It was an occupied nation and none of the material that forms the Christian part of the Bible was written to a government and yet all through it was a deep community concern that finds expression in the stories from Acts about the new church members  selling everything they had to share with those who were in need. Far beyond the leather binding of the New Testament, we have letters and sermons of the early church that are often concerned with managing the appropriate distribution of food and resources.

Sure, it is easier when you think of an island of 100 people than a nation of over 300 million.  On that island you would know who really needed help and who was just taking advantage of your compassion.  There are always complexities that arise in scale.  It is more efficient to have one water system for the city than it would be for all of us to keep a well and a cistern at our homes.  It is generally better for school systems, police and fire departments to embrace a fairly large population rather than dividing such things up into islands or neighborhoods of a few dozen but large-scale bureaucracy invites abuse and inefficiency as well.

The real deception that has been fostered by both conservative politicians and right wing evangelicals is that the poor are to blame for the hardships experienced by small business owners and those on the lower end of the economic scale.  It is not true.  It is true that small businesses and lower income families are struggling now and have been for several years, but the large corporations and right wing politicians have tried to convince them that their suffering is because the government takes their money from them and gives it to the lazy, indifferent and chronically poor.

Those of us who get up and go to work six and seven days a week and do everything we can to be successful while still struggling to get by can feel the injustice in our physical exhaustion, our lack of savings and our dim prospects for retirement.  So people are angry, I get that.  And people want their religious values to answer the anger but the answer they think they want cannot be found in the pages of the Bible.

Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, recently wrote about this myth of blaming the poor for the hardships of low income families.  The real reason, according to Reich, is this radical shift of resources from the lower and middle class into the hands of the super rich.  American workers are more productive than ever before but they get to keep a smaller and smaller slice of the wealth that they create.

If wages had kept pace with productivity, middle class families that were earning $50,000 a year twenty years ago would be earning over $90,000 now but the fact of their existence is that their income has grown only a few percentage points while the people at the top of the income ladder are doing so well that you cannot read the Biblical prophets who railed against the wealthy and the ruling class for their oppression of the poor without seeing our wealthy and ruling classes as being the ones to whom these prophets shout their warnings.

We pay lip service to competition and capitalism in the United States but in the socialist democracies in Western Europe, we often see a much more healthy capitalism.  In the United States, we have allowed businesses to become monopolies so that things like our monthly cell phone bills are more than three times higher than the same service in France or Spain where in stead of two big cell providers like we have here, they have five or six competing companies.

This past week, Congress failed to pass the farm bill that will gut the SNAP program, what we now call our old "food stamp" program as if our economic challenge in America is that people eat.  Interest rates on student loans were doubled, even though at the lower interest rate the Federal government was making billions of dollars of profits.

On our island of 100 people, we would make sure that all of the young people had equal access to education, not just because that is fair or Christian but because the entire island nation is better off with higher levels of education.  The same is true for our island of 300 million but we are making phenomenally stupid moves to limit the access of the poor and middle class to higher education, fostering the creation of a permanent aristocracy and a permanent peasant class which will destroy America as we have known it.  That's a strong statement and I don't make it lightly.

When a nation makes the decision to deny education to the young, retirement to the elderly, health care to the sick, housing to the homeless and jobs to the unemployed then that is not just a moral failure, it is an economic failure.... It is sacrificing the future for a very brief increase in profits.  It is the equivalent of not paying your utility bill in order to save money when, obviously, it is going to end up meaning that your water and electricity service will be turned off in a month or so.

The ethical values expressed in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament are not arbitrary.  It is not like there is a God sitting enthroned in the clouds who makes up rules just to see if we will obey them.

The ethics we find in the Bible are there specifically because these values of compassion and mercy promote the health of the whole nation. Anyone, in political office, in the corporate board room or on an island of a hundred citizens who claims that they have a God given right to own so much of the island that other people are in danger of starvation, homelessness or illness is not expressing a Christian value.... They are just greedy jerks looking for a divine right to exploit the weak and it was just those sorts of folks who inspired the Persians to come up with the concept of an eternal lake of fire that the New Testament authors called "hell."  And if there is anyone listening who is working on Wall Street or in Washington, D.C., open your office window and take a deep breath..... that just might be brimstone you are smelling.