Not All Religious Legalism is Bad

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Epiphany 7   Feb. 23, 2014

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18                
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 2Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. 9When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
11You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. 12And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord. 13You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. 14You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. 15You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. 17You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

My late father was a stutterer.  I was really glad when the movie, The King's Speech, drew some popular attention to the fact that this speech impediment, though often portrayed comically on TV, is no laughing matter.  I've been told that my dad stuttered a bit when he was young but after an apparent nightmarish experience in WWII, the problem became quite profound.

My father's PTSD was so bad when he finally came home that he was put into a mental hospital.  He got better but he was always a nervous and fairly unhappy man, given to episodic over reaction to minor events and occasional completely out of control incidents in punishing his children  that might have had us all placed in foster care if such a thing had existed in those days.

When he was upset about something and wanted to give my siblings and me a patriarchal lecture, he would begin to stutter and there were two things that could make him give up on the lecture and just commence with the corporal punishment.  The worst would be if you dared to crack a smile in the face of his malady.  The second was if you tried to say the word that he was stuck on for him.  So there were occasions when the four of us were seated in the family room with our red faced father standing before us on the verge of explosion, yet frozen in time.

These very uncomfortable family moments didn't happen often but they didn't have to.... None of us ever forgot them.  And none of us ever wanted to be the cause of another one.  There are better ways to inspire your children to make good grades, clean their rooms, show respect to their mother, do their chores and to sit quietly in church but this was the way it was done in my family.

Now, if your father or mother becomes your first image of a supernatural theistic parent who watches you from above the clouds and is a constant threat of punishment while always being the giver of life, food, health and every other good thing, then you can see how easily I was prepared to accept the Christian view of God.

Traditional Christianity gives us a God who will, in the name of both love and justice, kill his own son in the most torturous and horrible way.

We were taught to believe in a God who was generally distant, but constantly very demanding.  And though we were given an alleged book of directions about how to stay out of trouble, some of the stories in that book just seemed to be kind of crazy.  On the one hand, having lots of wives is a sign of blessing, read on a few pages and you discover that having more than one will send you to hell for eternity.

The whole business is supposed to be about love and compassion and yet there are stories of incest, human sacrifice, warfare, land theft and even directions on selling your own children into slavery.  We were given, in a way, a rather angry, stuttering God who was hard to understand, difficult to make happy and not, if I may say it this way, entirely rational.

As Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer said in his book, Jesus Against Christianity, most of the Hebrew Bible describes God as being a kind of pathological land-thief.  There are aspects of the image of God that was given to us through traditional Sunday School that were really quite neurotic.  As Scott Peck said in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled, the Catholic Church is what kept him in business as a private practice psychiatrist.  And he acknowledged that he simply lived in a heavily Catholic part of the country.... Around here it would not be hard to see how the Assemblies of God or the Baptist Church might limber set you up for an adult life in therapy.

My older brother, who also eventually became a pastor, usually tried to make excuses for dad though I suspect that being the first born, he probably suffered the most from dad's unrealistic expectations and sometimes-cruel enforcement techniques.  He did however, once make the poignant observation that our childhoods were among the uncounted casualties of WWII.  Not that you can lay all of the blame for some really bad parenting decisions at the feet of a bad war experience but it isn't hard to see the causal link.

There were some obvious deficiencies in my family or origin, so obvious that it was fairly easy to know exactly what I did not want to do when it was my turn to be a father.  But, as a father, I quickly discovered that the flaws were not the major part of my own family experience.  There were things to pass along that were family treasures that I could see were absent for many young people.

The most elementary form of religion places a harsh, stuttering, father in the clouds that we were taught to fear.  It wasn't healthy but even still, there may have been a laudable goal in mind.  There are things about our religious heritage that we do well to leave behind but we would not be very wise if we did not recognize that there were some valuable lessons we do not want to abandon.

I tried hard, as a father, to make my daughter know and feel every day that she important, valuable, loved and deserving of being treated with honor and respect by everyone she meets.  But I also taught her to clean her room, work to get good grades, to be honest, fair and to be kind to people, even when they didn't necessarily deserve it.

There were times when our conversations were serious.  She might have even wished that I might have had a speech impediment at times because when I am trying to be clear in moral instruction, I tend to be very very clear.  He didn't go about it in a brilliant way, but my father wanted his children to be honest, hard working, responsible, self reliant people of character.

The churches many of us grew up in also tried to teach us how to be decent people.... Admittedly, they often used threats and promises of rewards that were less than healthy and not at all honest but, when you pull back the curtain.... When you are no longer afraid of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, you find a little flawed chap who was not entirely a fraud.... He really did want to be helpful.

The lectionary reading from the Hebrew Bible today is a kind of holiness code from one of the books of the Old Testament that contains some of the craziest, most neurotic and wacked out examples of why no one should believe that God wrote the Bible.  And yet, this holiness code we look at today starts off by telling those ancient farmers not to harvest all of the wheat from their fields.  It tells them to leave some of the grapes on the vines because there are poor people living among them who need some of your grain, who also need fruit from the vines.

We are far removed from that kind of an agricultural life and yet, it isn't hard to know what this text is teaching us.... There is no stuttering here, no need to finish the thought.  It asks for us to not be so hard hearted, so self centered, that we are not ready to share with those who are in need.

The passage continues to say, "You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.......  and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. 14You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind....  You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor..... 17You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; ....18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

I'm afraid that too often we enjoy repeating to one another how much we despise the neurotic aspects of the religion we inherited while forgetting that the core of it is what made us who we are..... something we do not want to revile or toss out the window.  Sure, we want to remove both the carrot and the stick of outrageous religious promises and irrational religious threats but we still want to be the kind of people who will share our food with the poor.... Who don't slander our neighbors.... Who are able to give up on the all too human desire for revenge and to choose to lay aside our grudges.

We don't want to be guilty of finding ways of withholding workers' wages or passively allowing the rich to control our judicial system or even allowing the poor to scam the welfare system.

I rejected fear based parenting but I didn't reject the values of being a person of good character.
We have let go of a lot of neurotic religious history but come on, do you watch the news????.... don't you realize that we cannot afford to abandon our faith as a source of moral instruction.

I don't need to change my last name to be a different kind of father, I just need to wear it differently.  We don't have to abandon Christianity to get past the crazy stuff..... we just have to do it better.

Forgiveness: the Real Secret to a Spiritual Life

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Epiphany 6a    February 16, 2014

Matthew 5:21-26
21"You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' 22But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. 23So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you,24leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 25Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

A recent letter to the editor of our Springfield newspaper publicly informed me that a group of Christians had gotten together and, they reported, voted me out of Christianity.  Though they applauded my advocacy and service to the poor, they unanimously affirmed that my beliefs were woefully inadequate to qualify me for the title of "Christian."

I was rather more disturbed to see, a few days later, that the director of the local Southern Baptist association of churches, also published an essay saying that though he appreciates what I do, that I really should stop claiming to be a Christian because I have rejected the kind of beliefs that I believe were imposed on the Christian Church in the third century by Emperor Constantine in order to make Christians compliant with his military agenda and to make the church morally irrelevant.

Though I believe that it was both unprofessional and rather embarrassingly simple of him to publish these dismissive insults to me, and by inference, to you, I am not, honestly, too surprised.  Frankly, if their religion of beliefs in incarnation and intercession, of souls bound either for heaven or hell or of magic books and invisible angels and demons is Christianity, then I am not one of them....though I think Christianity is something altogether different.
Most of us were reared to control our appetites and moderate our behavior under the simultaneous threat of punishment in hell and promise of reward in heaven.  In fact, we were so well trained to at least hedge our bets in case these invisible claims were true that we could hardly imagine religion existing without these things.  When we first began to be exposed to the idea that religion is more about a way of living than it is a set of supernatural beliefs we could nod in basic agreement but for years we still kept returning to the comfortable familiarity of rituals and antiquated beliefs.

The dawning awareness in the progressive movement is that religious practices are much more important than beliefs.  For some reason, we've almost always been able to see that as being true for other people's religions.  American Christians could adore Gandhi for what he did and they very nearly idolize the Dalai Lama for his teachings on spiritual practices though most could not reasonable tell you anything about either Gandhi's Hindu or the Dalai Lama's Buddhist beliefs.

If I may be allowed to make a somewhat racial observation, white Christians have always accepted civil rights speeches and marches for social reform led by Black Christians when they would not accept such things out of their white Episcopal or Presbyterian pastors for a moment.  Somehow, we inherently recognize the value of the spiritual life led by outstanding Buddhists, Hindus and Black Christians while insisting that white Christianity remain morally irrelevant and focused on magical rituals and privately held beliefs.


Mainline Christians who insist that religion should not be involved in politics would not have applied that to Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech, or to Gandhi's Salt March nor would they tell the Dalai Lama to quit protesting China's occupation of Thailand.  We understand their religion to be about ethics but we've insisted that Christianity is about an afterlife and a kind of magical approach to this life.

A few years ago I was in the uncomfortable position of pushing for an investigation of some very shady business practices at a local hospital.
It seemed inevitable that a couple of my church members going to prison for a very long time.  One of these pillars of the church who had been using his board position at the hospital to scam his way into several million dollars, cornered me in my office one evening to threaten me with being fired if I didn't stop pushing for this investigation.  The conversation became heated and he started shouting at me.  He said, "Do you know what your problem is?  You think that you are Jesus Christ!"

Without thinking, and in fact, I was rather surprised to hear the words coming out of my mouth, I jumped up and shouted, "No I don't!  I think that I am Martin Luther King!"  And I relate that story only by way of saying, I don't think that any of our newspaper critics would be quite so exercised if we were Buddhist, Hindu or, if I was a Black Christian pastor leading a largely black congregation in agitating for civil rights.  So, in some ways, I think that it would be more accurate if, rather than voting me out of Christianity, if they would just vote me out of the race of white people. Let's be honest, I've never really fit in!

Not to leave you hanging on this story, my former church member did not go to prison.  After the Federal investigation was ended the hospital was fined several million dollars but no one was criminally charged.  So, board members got away with stealing millions of dollars which came out of the pockets of sick people who paid exorbitant medical bills and the fines for these crimes was paid by the hospital whose money comes from the exorbitant medical bills paid by sick citizens.

Admittedly, the public might have been hurt less by just looking the other way because, in the end, they were both the victims of the crime and then they had to pay the fine for the crimes..... and that, men and women, is what we call white privilege in the American judicial and economic system.

Progressive people of faith have given up the confidence that evangelicals and fundamentalists have in their beliefs.  Many of them would look at us and ask, "Why do you bother if you are not afraid of hell or trying to get into heaven?"  In fact, most people among the church alumni association feel pretty much the same way.  Why bother?

Ironically, they would not say that to King, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama.... It makes sense that they bother, whether they believe in heaven and hell or not.  I'm suggesting that our spirituality does make a difference, it is worth the bother..... even if we are a mostly white congregation with traditional Christian roots.

With or without a heaven and hell, we know for a fact that we live in a world full of light and darkness, good and evil, abundance and want, obesity and hunger, comfort and pain.  Once you strip away the magic and superstition of religion and take a clear, sober and rational look at reality, you face some serious choices.

The world is full of things that can make you really mad.  I'm starting to doubt the level of exposure to liberal media that I allow myself to watch because there seems to be an endless supply of genuinely evil, violent, greedy, stupid and unjust things going on in the world.  Like this investigation I mentioned.  The facts were clear.  The evidence was there and none of the criminals were ever even made to give back what they had stolen.

I know that I need to be informed but sometimes I find myself becoming so angry, so full of rage, that I start to see the world in very negative terms.   And I know that some of you get there too.... The problems seem so big that you can become paralyzed with cynicism.... Nothing makes sense.... There is nothing we can do about it.  Nihilism starts to look attractive.

And this is just as true on the personal level. I have to tell you that for most of us in the relatively comfortable middle class.... The personal stuff is much more existentially powerful...... on the personal level we have all had family members or friends who have really hurt us.... And not by accident either.  It wasn't an oversight or a slip of the tongue or a matter of circumstances.....


Most of us have had a lot more than one person whom we have loved, trusted, sacrificed for and really believed would be close to us for our entire lives, do something to hurt us that doesn't even make any sense.... They didn't get money, a promotion, or anything out of the bargain..... they just intentionally, maliciously, viciously hurt you.  People can be like that.

There may be very complex psychological explanations for it.... Sociopathology, borderline personality disorders, adult children of alcoholics... or it might be some very simple human emotions.... Jealousy, envy, gossip... a desire to feel powerful or important, if only for a moment.

Remove spirituality from that equation, remove the sense that we are connected to every other person, every other part of the universe.... Indulge yourself in the cold hard belief that all that matters is your personal comfort, your feelings, your appetites and you can talk yourself into becoming a moral monster in search of revenge.

Or more likely, you can just pull all of that resentment, anger and hurt inside and lie awake a big part of every night, just dwelling on the hurt, reliving it, feeding the fire of your anger.... Investing energy, time and emotion in remembering the hurt.  I'm not projecting.... I'm not speculating.... I'm speaking very existentially here.

I have spent my adult life fighting social injustice but on the personal level, I have had to survive some deep personal disappointments that have given me a storehouse of resentment that has kept me awake more nights than I care to admit.

I have felt personal loss, depression and anger that I have obviously tried to dull with food. I have felt adrenalin pumping through my body demanding some kind of vengeful justice, to set the scales right.  I can identify with Clarence Darrow who once said, "I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."  I'm sure that he meant that with a certain degree of jest but I have opened the obituary page in the paper more than a few times and seen the faces of people who had done me harm and I can tell you that while there is some relief in outliving your enemies that it is not the satisfaction that you hope for.

The most satisfying resolution to hurt is reconciliation.  The best answer to anger is to forgive.  The only real resolution of resentment is lay that burden down.  It would be so much easier if the people involved would apologize but the truth is that in most cases, they will carry the conviction that they did nothing wrong to their graves.... They don't want your forgiveness.  But from a spiritual perspective.... You should forgive them anyway.

You know that is what Gandhi would have done.  You know that is what the Dalai Lama would tell you.  You have read this in Thich Nhat Hanh's work.  What we seem to have overlooked is that Jesus said it too.

Jesus tells us to go and be reconciled to the person with whom you are in conflict before you ever even kneel down to pray.  And as much as I believe in reconciliation, long for it, hope for it.... What I know.... What you know.... Is when it matters the most, it is the most unlikely to happen.

The only meaningful answer to that is to choose on your side of the equation to forgive first.... No matter what they do.... On your side of the offense, you forgive them, let go of the resentment and you decide that you are going to be the better person.

You have my permission to quote this sermon back to me whenever you think that I'm screwing up because, I guarantee you, no one in this room needs to hear this message more than I do.

We have chosen to be a prophetic church.  We practice both direct aid to those in need and we try to challenge in the institutions that create poverty, injustice, war and pollution.  What I'm saying is that a prophetic church cannot be successful if it is motivated by anger.  If we are not motivated by love then we really are just a political organization with a social agenda.

What separates us from being just a bunch of opinionated atheists is that we have chosen a spiritual path and that path seeks to heal the world through both justice and love and I am certain that the first step of that path is to be very very generous in forgiveness.

What is in the Crystal Ball?

Chapter 16 - WHAT IS IN THE CRYSTAL BALL?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

Will churches see the vision and respond to it?  Some will; most will not.  Many churches would, if given the choice, choose to die rather than change.....
These faith-communities will emerge, I am confident, inside our existing structures.  They will ultimately separate themselves from the pack.  They will float freely, taking a wide variety of forms. They will attract the restless, the hungry, the alienated, the marginalized, the open, the honest, the doubters, the seekers.  In time they will recognize kinship with one another, allowing them to coalesce and to build a new consensus.
- Bishop John Shelby Spong ( A New Christianity for a New World, 2001  pp. 244-245)

"Sire, it is in truth the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I am speaking, to endure blows, and not to strike them. But also may it please you to remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers."
- Theodore Beza, a 16th century French Protestant reformer, appealing to the king of Navarre (http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1601-1700/beza-last-of-the-great-reformers-11630054.html)

The famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in 1948 when he was only 33 years old and had been in the monastery for six or seven years.  Though the book was very popular and drew attention to monastic communities all over the nation, it wasn't very many years before Merton was saying that he wished that he could gather up all of the copies and burn them.

Merton was born in France to nominally Protestant parents.  His journey towards faith led him to the Catholic Church, then to monastic life and finally to the most strict of monastic orders, the Trappists.

His journey, which was profoundly intellectual while still being distinctive in its mysticism, made for a very engaging story.  However, when he wrote his autobiography, Merton was still a very young man in the midst of huge life changes.  His book was decidedly Roman Catholic, so much so that it was very nearly offensive to anyone who wasn't.  Within a very few years, however, he became a leading world scholar in comparative religions and was in conversation with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh as well as scholars of Hindu and Muslim heritage.  He wrote his most famous book long before it was time to write his definitive biography.

Awareness of how not ready Merton was to write The Seven Storey Mountain has plagued me during the writing of this book.  Though I am now older than Merton lived to be and I have delayed writing this book for some years, the movement I am trying to describe is moving and evolving so fast that it is difficult to capture in print.  What I know with certainty is that if I had written this book five years ago, I would now be screaming more loudly about gathering all of the copies and burning them than Merton did about his autobiography.

More than a decade ago, Bishop John Shelby Spong offered his vision for the future of the progressive church in A New Christianity for a New World.  He predicted the emergence of new progressive faith communities that would not be a part of the old existing denominational structures and, in fact, we are one of those churches.

Shortly after we first established our presence on YouTube and iTunes, I received a call from a gentleman in Japan who was asking me if I knew of any churches like ours in Japan.  Sadly, I informed him that I didn't know anything about any churches of any kind in Japan.  The caller was very disappointed because he assumed not only that there would be a lot of churches like ours but also he assumed that we would know each other and that there would be a network of like-minded churches.

The Center for Progressive Christianity has tried to create a directory on their web site but it is anything but comprehensive and many of the churches that list themselves on it are still quite traditional in their theology though they are somewhat more open minded about social issues such as gay marriage and divorce and their meetings are often blessed with a wonderful beer garden.  But being progressive involves a great deal more than accepting our gay friends, serial monogamists and drinking craft beer.

The original mission of the Jesus Seminar, to bring a more enlightened, progressive and academic approach to faith into mainstream churches has had, at best, only very limited success even after 30 years of impressive lectures and publications.  A century of teaching higher biblical criticism in our better seminaries and a generation of really insightful publications by John Spong, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong and John Crossan and still almost all mainline denominations continue to parrot a watered down version of the more conservative evangelical line that Jesus is God's one and only divine son who was killed for the forgiveness of the sins of everyone who is willing to buy into incarnational and substitutionary death theologies so that your as yet unseen eternal soul will spend eternity in an as yet unseen place of reward and bliss.

Many people continue to try to persuade me to accept that everyone has a right to their own religious opinions and no one opinion is superior to another. This kind of religious tolerance is true enough if religion is the equivalent of choosing which color of paint you want to put on your bedroom walls. If it is simply a matter of personal taste that has nothing to do with life, health, politics or wars then paint your room any color you like.

If, however, your religion teaches women that they are second-class citizens because they were born women......or if your religion teaches homosexuals to hate themselves, then that is a different matter.  And if your religion teaches that other religions are so wrong that they are evil, evil in a way that may deserve dehumanizing treatment or even warfare....or if your religion teaches you to feel that you are broken, sinful, a worm and to despise yourself for unavoidable human appetites then, you need to recognize, that is not a matter of taste.  That religion is sick.

If you are neutral about neurotic religion that provokes wars, ethnic cleansing, racial and sexual prejudice, misogyny, and religious guilt and fear then you are not open minded, you are just heartless and that is nothing to be proud of. Many people try to mask moral laziness and indifference behind a facade of tolerance but we are not doing the future any favors by pretending that this is acceptable.

There are very many good things that can come from religious education and the practice of a spiritual life but we can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend that there are not many very damaging down sides as well.  We should be civil in our engagement with traditionalists who want to keep the church mired in the Iron Age but we should not be passive and we should not mistake cowardice for open minded sophistication.

If the church has a future, we have to strengthen the good things and find ways of extinguishing the bad.  Pretending that everything is just a matter of opinion and that serious scientific inquiry has the same value as wishing and magic is not helpful.  We must clearly and adamantly refuse to participate in the indoctrination of another generation in the language and belief of false religion.

Still, the immanent death of old religions has been prematurely announced many times.  The church has tried to silence scientists and philosophers from Galileo to Darwin, from Thoreau to Sartre, but in the end, they didn't need to fight so hard.  As Theodore Beza observed five hundred years ago, the church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.

No matter how much science and technology have advanced, there is still a huge human appetite for a belief system that stands outside of reason, which defies rational thought and critical review.  Maybe the real world is too complex, too frightening.  Maybe it is just easier to have an imaginary world into which we can escape so that we don't have to feel the pain of hunger and homelessness, where we do not have to fear terrorism, war or being made to flee our homes and become refugees.  Perhaps we can placate ourselves with the slow and subtle changes that seem to nibble away at the prejudices that have plagued race relationships and even the relationships found around our holiday dinner relationships with gay and straight family members.  We have twice elected a black president and marriage equality is spreading to even the most unlikely states.  But is that enough?

Maybe we can deny the vast earth killing pollution taking place as we burn more coal and fracture the earth harvesting natural gas because we recycle our plastic bottles and aluminum cans.  It may be that the old religions of magic and superstition will die a slow death in the Americas and in Africa as it already has in Europe and most of Asia.  Still, it does not seem to me that we have arrived at a place that is beyond an urgent need for a prophetic voice of reason and faith to cry out for more justice and more compassion.

I realize that my journey from the Memorial Hospital where I was born to the Memorial Gardens where my ashes will be interred is a lot closer to the ashes end of that trip than it is to the loud screaming start of my life's journey but I feel that I have a lot more screaming yet to do.  How people of faith will find one another, network and work together in the next generation is unclear to me.

I don't know if free standing, bricks and mortar churches will still exist a generation or two from now.  I don't know that the commitment of resources and the will to keep a community alive will support much of a future for the church as we have known it.

It may be that churches twenty years from now will look more like the Shrine Mosque looks to us today...a once strong and influential institution that just seems sort of silly in the light of modern reason.

I still write columns for newspapers though fewer and fewer people read newspapers.  I am now written a new book project for a generation that does not read books.  I preach to fewer than one hundred people every week while thousands look in on us through the portal of their computer screen who may never join us in putting our progressive thoughts into actions.

While I am glad to have a global audience and am excited that so many look for a message of progressive faith on their computers, realistically, it is the seated congregations that hire the pastors and scholars who generate that on-line content.  If there was not a church that employed me, I would never have been able to earn the degrees or write the sermons and books that now help to feed the public's appetite for progressive religious messages.  To date, every progressive congregation I know of is barely hanging onto existence and another decade may see a sharp decline in numbers of the now retired generation that still goes to church and donates significant financial support to keep the doors open.

As I write these last lines, it is only 7 degrees outside.  I will take food, blankets and sleeping bags to the homeless of our city this week.  Direct response to the needs of those who are in danger of freezing to death makes sense in my religion but none of those people will be kept warm because a few thousand people have nodded in ascent to my progressive ponderings while watching YouTube.

There is a profound need in our world for communities of faith to continue to exist.  Clearly, most people are looking for whatever religious instruction and inspiration they want through in the internet and not in churches or classrooms or even from bookstores and published media.  Face Book memes can have a certain cathartic satisfaction to them but they are not enough to stop wars, save the earth, or solve the challenges of poverty and prejudice.

One of the heroes of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era was Fr. Daniel Berrigan.  Referencing the cross, he once said, "If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood."  I hope that more progressive churches arise out of a shared conviction and willingness to sacrifice as ours has.  I hope that more denominational churches will seriously choose to close the gap between what their pastor's learned in graduate school and what they feel free to say in their pulpits.    And I hope that progressive persons of faith will commit to a disciplined search for one another to network with one another, join in community action and to build new communities of faith.

I hope that new, more relevant, more prophetic and honest communities of faith will rise up from the ruins of a failed form of modern Christianity but whether the church as an institution survives or not, persons of conscience must not stand idly by.

Preferential Option for the Poor

Chapter 15  OUR PREFERENCE FOR THE POOR
Roger Ray, D.Min.

Now, it's not as if fiscal scolds really arrived at their position based on statistical evidence. As the old saying goes, they used Reinhart-Rogoff the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination.  - Paul Krugman, published Dec. 29, 2013 under the title Fiscal Fever Breaks

Money does not exist. Money is a concept. To illustrate this point, the philosopher Alan Watts used the analogy of a carpenter who came to work one day and was told that they could not finish building the house he was working on because they had run out of inches. A carpenter builds out of lumber but measures the lumber in inches but inches are not real.... Inches are a concept.  Money is not real.  It is used to measure the value of things and to make it easier to trade in objects, labor, energy and land.

Actual wealth resides in resources such as land, rare metals, energy sources, food, water, building materials, labor and vehicles. Money is just a concept we have invented to help us to distribute real wealth. Currency only works if we agree on the system and play by the economic rules that create it.

Real wealth is created when we build something, grow something, mine something, or assemble something. Unfortunately, our economic system allows for a great deal of real wealth to be transferred into the hands of people who do not create wealth, they simply own assets or control them through financial instruments and institutions. When we have idle workers who are not building, growing, and making things then our total real wealth is going down. The best of economic systems keeps people working in the creation of real wealth.
When the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, was speaking poetically of the way the world should be, how it could be if God were in charge, he said about workers that:
"They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.  22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.." (Isaiah 65.21-22)

The remnant of Israelites living in Babylon had been slaves.  They built houses for their masters.  They had been gardening to grow crops for their masters.  And their memory of their people was the memory of slavery in Egypt and service to Assyria.  They longed for justice and to them, what justice looked like was an economic system in which the poor got a share in what they produced.

In ancient times as well as in modern times, there is always some pressure on the economic system to give a smaller and smaller share of the produce to the people who are doing the producing and a larger and larger share to people who manage the financial institutions, the government, the land.  From time to time, societies find that they have to restrike a balance between the rich and the poor or their entire society will collapse.  This scenario has been seen on every continent in every age of history.

Often, it is the voice of the prophet, of the religious community, that tries to encourage a civilization to turn back before jumping off the economic cliff of no return.  The liberation theology movement among Catholics in Latin America of the last century, gave us the phrase, "God's preferential option for the poor."
They noted that throughout the Old and New Testaments, there was a distinct preference given to the poor by God through the prophets, apostles and saints.  For those of us in the progressive movement, this awareness of a spiritual concern for the poor can be traced to our choice to see ourselves as being connected to one another.

We have no shortage in our time of politicians who unashamedly cite the self centered philosophy of Ayn Rand.  Rand liked to call her views "objectivism" though some liken it to libertarianism.  It reminds me more of a "I got mine" philosophy than of anything else.  Most of us live in a world somewhere between the extremes of absolute selfishness and of absolute self-abnegation.  Very few have followed the gospel imperative to "sell all we own and give to the poor," and not many more could accurately be portrayed as being an Ebenezer Scrooge.  But between the extremes of Scrooge and St. Frances, there are a whole lot more people leaning towards the Scrooge end of the scale.

Not because it is mandated in scripture or because it is a part of a romanticized view of poverty but because we have chosen a life defined by radical compassion, we will not silent give our consent to an economic system that unfairly, unjustly, even irrationally impoverishes the many to enrich the few.

If you listen to the political rhetoric of our day, we must hate paying taxes and we love to vilify the lazy that live off of public assistance while rarely questioning why the top 1% in America is taking 25% of the money that is being earned in our nation.
We have an economic system in our country that looks fair but is, in fact stacked in favor of the rich.

It is as if you were going to play Monopoly with three friends but the friends started playing thirty minutes before you arrived.  You play by the same rules, with the same dice and an equal buy-in from the bank but they will have already bought all of the assets and set up houses and hotels on the places where you will have to go.

No matter how hard you work, they are going to end up with everything you have.  Increasingly, our system of economics will prevent the poor from ever being able to work their way out of poverty and will erode the middle class out of existence.

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, preached that we need a revolution in how we think about the distribution of wealth. She said, "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."

When economic commentators insist that we cannot pay those who build, grow, or manufacture, our nation's real wealth a living wage because it would "hurt the economy" then you should immediately realize that you are reading an irrational defense of a filthy, rotten economic system that discourages the creation of real wealth in favor of simply transferring existing wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  They are asking you to accept a system in which they have already won and you have already lost before you ever get to roll your dice.

Those who resist raises to the minimum wage or who insist upon legislation that undermines the unions that protect worker's jobs, wages and benefits often cite studies that conclude that it is the greed of teachers, fire fighters, labor union members and selfish young people who want to go to college that is threatening our economic future. They use these studies, as Paul Krugman says, "the way a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not for illumination."

The stock market continues to climb to new heights, making the rich ever more rich, while real wealth remains stagnant or, in fact, is declining, eroding the middle class and undermining the economic future of our nation. We have been sold a malignant myth that wealthy people are job creators. That is a ridiculous claim.  Rich people don't hire new employees unless there is a consumer demand that makes having more employees profitable.  Demand in the marketplace is what creates jobs and demand comes, as more people are able to buy things.

Still, the far right cries out against labor unions, and a president that they insist upon labeling "socialist" while our nation's existing wealth continues to be handed over to the super rich and the middle class disappears before our eyes.

Naomi Klein describing the documentary "The Shock Doctrine" about her important research into the rise of disaster capitalism, says:
We are witnessing a transfer of wealth of unfathomable size.  It is a transfer of wealth from the public hands, from the hands of government collected from regular people in the form of taxes, into the hands of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the world.  Needless to say the very individuals and corporations that created this crisis.

The system that is set up to enrich corporations and is controlled by the same corporations will never be able to change the system into something that will work for the welfare of the whole nation.  But what system works to create wealth and bolster the middle class?

Economist Robert Reich has a very plausible answer, the system employed in the United States of America between 1947 and 1977 when we built America's middle class and created the standard of living that was the envy of the world.  Reich says in his documentary, "Inequality for All":
Look back over the last hundred years and you'll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income -- as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 -- the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats.
Conversely, Reich points out that when we allow the greedy to control the system and grab all of the assets for themselves, the whole system crashes.  He says:

During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion -- as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day -- growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It's no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the nation's total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 -- the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

We tend to assume that great religious leaders were all very poor and that spiritual people must therefore be suspicious of wealth.  Frankly, I think that is counter to what really alleviates human suffering.  Sure, if there were only a hundred apples in the world and we were only a hundred people, no one should eat ten apples.  The truth is that we have put a lot of apple growers out of business and fired the people who pick them.

While we do not trade in the guilt and fear of past religious eras, there is still such a thing as evil.  It is evil to be so greedy that you hoard resources in a way that puts some out of work, forces others to work for poverty wages, and leaves many living on the edge of death.  That's not evil because the Bible says so, even though it does; but it is evil because it causes suffering.

It seems most likely to me that whatever this is of heaven and hell in the universe is what we do with this life and so, having devoted ourselves to seek the greatest good for the largest number of people, working to defeat a system that creates widespread suffering for the comfort of a few so that we can replace it with an economy that puts people back to work and makes the basics of life available to everyone is the only way we can keep from turning heaven into hell.

The Justice System and Our Prison Nation

Chapter 14 - THE JUSTICE SYSTEM AND OUR PRISON NATION
Roger Ray, D.Min.

When a great man like Nelson Mandela passes, it's also common to wonder if we'll ever see his kind again. But there's no doubt that the Nelson Mandelas and Martin Luther Kings and Václav Havels of the 21st century are striding among us. But you can't see it, because if he or she was shaking hands with world leaders and greeted by adoring throngs and serenaded by children's choirs, then they wouldn't be the next true Mandela or King or Havel.
No, the next Nelson Mandela of the world is rotting in a jail cell tonight, just like Mandela nearly withered for 27 years on Robben Island. Or he is on someone's terrorist watch list, or she is segregated and searched every time she travels through an international airport. Somewhere, government spies are reading the emails of the next Nelson Mandela. They are tracking his cell phone and listening to his calls, or monitoring her meetings with their undercover cops.            
-Will Bunch, Huffington Post, December 9, 2013

For the past several years there has been a very unusual cross-country bike race in France that is for prison inmates.  The "Penal Tour De France" is a program that leaves many Americans scratching their heads.  We think of jail time strictly as punishment, like societal revenge for crimes committed.  In France, however, they take a different perspective.  They are trying to figure out how to use prison time to help inmates learn how to live productive lives within the French society.

We tend to beat down our inmates.  We will not allow them to earn degrees or job certifications in prison.  We used to, but in a "get tough on crime" mentality, we do not want to give a prisoner an opportunity not afforded to people who have not been convicted of a crime.  One could argue that we should give these opportunities of education to everyone in financial need but that, evidently, would be deemed as dirty socialism rather than common sense.

If you agree with my insistence that the future of the church is dependent upon our ability to become morally relevant in society, it is quite possible that one of the primary arenas where we must turn our attention is towards the two million Americans who are currently in jail or prison.  This hidden nation within our nation may need what we have to offer the most while being the least likely ever to have contact with us.

Admittedly, the prison system does not make it easy.  In the early 1990's I tried repeatedly to set up college classes in the Federal Medical prison near my home.  Initially I was told that it would take too much staff time to move prisoners into and out of a classroom; then regulations changed around the use of Federal Pell Grants that made it impossible to find tuition dollars.

Then I applied for clearance to teach basic self-help classes in the local county jail where some inmates live for more than two years without meaningful programming.  The day of my first class there was an incident at the jail as I sat in a waiting area preparing to teach.  Two new guards had urinated on inmates through a screen in the roof of the gymnasium and the prison officials decided that it would be best not to have outsiders working too closely with convicts. I have suspected that my role as an opinion writer for the local newspaper may have increased the warden's discomfort because they really needed to keep prisoner abuse out of the media.

Far from the experience of a bicycle race in rural France, prisoners in our penal system experience violence, rape, and deprivations of every sort and are often put into situations where they have to extort money from family members and friends to pay other inmates for protection from abuse.
Once out of incarceration the humiliations can multiply.  With a criminal record it is very difficult to find employment and yet ex-cons are required to pay fees for their mandatory probation officer visits and follow up supervision.  Some even have to pay back states or communities for the cost of their incarceration.

People on parole are making many of the annoying telemarketing calls we receive because these commission sales jobs are one of the few places where they can find work.  As infuriating as these telephone interruptions can be to us, can you imagine what it is like on the other end of the line as people suffer angry verbal abuse all day long?

Not that it is easy to garner sympathy for sex offenders but may I remind you that nearly all sex offenders were once victims themselves.  They are the most likely to be violently treated in prison and the most likely to be reviled, unemployed and homeless out of prison.  Most homeless shelters will not give them even temporary shelter.

Permanently placed on a publically available sex offender list, they often cannot even live with willing family members or friends because of the reactions of neighbors.  Though we cannot afford to be too lax about the threat posed by those who are likely to repeatedly offend, we also have to do something much better than what we are doing.  If their offenses are not sufficient to merit killing them, then we must find some way to allow them to live!

Because reintegration into society has been made so very difficult, our recidivism rate is the worst in the world.  This has been complicated by the fact that the one thing Americans have been really good at is finding a way to make a profit, even in the midst of tragedy.  Building prisons and then operating them has become a huge profit center.  So much so that some states have started privatizing their prisons so that every night an American is kept in jail is another transfer of money from citizens to corporations.

When for-profit prisons are paid by volume, what possible motivation do they have to try to help prisoners to reform and succeed outside of prison?  In fact, recidivism fattens their profits and so they will do what they can to prevent education, job training, counseling and anything that might make a prisoner less likely to come back and bring more tax dollars with them.
Every nation has citizens who are entirely convinced that their own homeland is the greatest country in the world.  Americans have not only had a loudly stated conviction that ours is the greatest nation on the globe but, for much of our history, we've had the immigration statistics to back that up.

However, our dramatically growing income disparity and class divisions threaten to destroy any plausible defense of that claim. I will discuss income disparity in the next chapter in greater detail. Beyond the issue of the increasingly impassable gulf between the upper and lower economic classes that now keeps the poor in America forever poor we have the former inmate, the growing subclass in our society for whom there is little opportunity for change and even less social sympathy.
We are no longer world leaders in many categories but in one way we are unrivaled at the top of the list, but shamefully, that is for having the largest percentage of our population living behind bars. Seven out of every thousand Americans are incarcerated.

China, long famous for their government's repression of their own citizens, has an incarceration rate that is less than 20% of ours.  Vietnam has less than 10% as many citizens in jail.

How does this once great nation disown so many of its own sons and daughters?  It is, in many ways, a failure of our schools, of our economy, our families and our judicial system.  We must also say that is reflective of a failure of our churches.  In the big picture, it is a failure of our society.

There are too many drugs, not enough decent jobs, too much violence and not nearly enough love. We have too much moral judgment and not enough compassion.  We are too committed to revenge - style punishment and not enough interest in reform and recovery.

The United States is one of the only countries in the world that allows for a huge disparity in education spending based on school districts that allow the affluent areas to have well-funded schools and lock poor regions into ill-equipped, underfunded and understaffed schools.  Anyone can see that it should be the other way around.... The children of the poor need more enrichment in education than their middle and upper class peers whose families can well afford the kind of travel and cultural experiences that give their kids a leg up in life.
We have created a broken school system and a for-profit prison system that work together to fast-track kids from poor neighborhoods from school to jail a tragedy complicated all the more by race.  Even though blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, blacks are three times more likely to go to jail for their drug offenses than are whites.

Some of that is simple racism but a lot of it is an indication of just how corrupt our judicial system has become.  We have prided ourselves on the strength of the belief that our constitutional government creates equality in our nation.  Our courthouses are adorned with images of the blindfolded image of Justice that does not consider race, class or gender but our judicial system does not measure up to these high-minded ideals.

Howard Zinn said that our judicial system does not so much decide on who is right and who is wrong as it decides who can pay their lawyer the most.  Far too little of our justice system is engaged in the pursuit of justice and much too much of it is an institution that serves the interests of income for lawyers and profit for corporations.

There is one judicial system for the wealthy, another for the poor, and, in my experience, a third one that legal professionals use for their own issues, giving lawyers a literal court system for their own fraternity and sorority.  There could not be, in any third world country, more personal favors, disappeared tickets and inexplicably favorable rulings based on kinship and friendship than we have allowed to exist in our court system.

Somehow, over the past half century, the laudable "War on Poverty" evolved into the "War on Drugs." We were making progress in the war on poverty. We don't talk about it often enough but when President Johnson set out to substantively change the face of poverty in America it was working.

But as that movement became focused on drug abuse and all of our resources were devoted to arresting and imprisoning drug users the earlier progress was lost and we have now done something much more insidious.
Technological advances and the deportation of manufacturing jobs have left us with a surplus in our workforce.  We are removing many of the extra laborers from the pool by imprisoning two million of them and leaving millions more with a criminal record that leaves them out of competition for decent jobs.

It is no exaggeration then to say that our nation is in need of a spiritual revival.  Religious people must convincingly teach the message of compassion to our society that has far too often chosen profit over people.

We have continued to pour resources into the complete failure of the war on drugs that could be used to build up schools and fund public infrastructure projects that would pull us meaningfully into the 21st century.

Western European countries that have almost no church attendance compared to the United States also enjoy an incarceration rate that is less than a fourth of ours.  That hurts.  Why would the nation with the most churches also have the most prisons?

I cannot help thinking that traditional religion has played a role in teaching people to deny reality, disregard the aspects of our society that are seriously broken by focusing on perfection in an imagined heaven, and distracting us from the real work of loving one another.

The progressive church has a mission to tell the truth....to shine light into the dark places of our world.  If we are a prophetic church, then we must stand up to things like income inequality, unequal public schools, joblessness and a senseless devotion to the energy sources, transportation technology and foreign policy of war that really went out of appropriate implementation sixty years ago.

We can employ more people by rebuilding our infrastructure, renewing our power grid, building alternative energy production facilities and mass transit.  We can decide to fund our public schools, make it possible for the poor to attend college and make prisons places of healing and learning rather than places of rape, torture and training in how to be a better criminal.

We can decriminalize addiction and assume that anyone who says that they need a prescription for medical marijuana to cope with how crazy our country has been for the past generation probably deserves to have it and they certainly don't deserve to be in jail.

A society bent on revenge is a sick society.  A society intent on healing, forgiveness, compassion and peace is a nation that can deserve to call itself the greatest nation in the world.

Just War Theory in a Nuclear World

Chapter 13 - JUST WAR THEORY IN A NUCLEAR WORLD
Roger Ray, D.Min.



So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and -- yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It's not that we're going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we'll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably -- inevitably -- the indiscriminate massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it's not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this -- all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we're at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we're sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.
We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start.
Howard Zinn speaking at Boston University on November 11, 2009

In the 1997 film, Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon plays a young genius named Will Hunting who was working as a janitor at MIT.  At one point he is required to see a therapist, played by Robin Williams who sees the huge potential that Will has.  To open the young man's eyes to the reality of the world, the therapist suggests that Will read Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States, because, he promises, it will really blow your mind.
Matt Damon's character may have needed an introduction to Howard Zinn but Matt Damon didn't.  Damon actually grew up living next door to the famous historian and he volunteered to be the voice on recorded version of the book.  I have met a lot of famous people in my life but I treasure the memory of hearing Zinn in person, first at Missouri State, then at Drury and finally at Harvard where I had the chance to meet him.

When we started Community Christian Church in 2008, the first group study we did was this same book.  We spent nearly a year discussing because we wanted to ground our shared life in the painful reality of the nation we have inherited.  Zinn died while we were still reading his book together.

The progressive movement doesn't really have a cannon of saints but if we ever do, I want to place the late Howard Zinn's name in nomination.  If, as I have suggested, the mission of the church is to speak truth to power, Zinn is certainly the best modern example of doing just that.

I have been saying that there are four primary arenas of concern for the progressive church in the 21st century.  The first is poverty and social justice.  The second is related to ending racism and prejudice.  The third is a renewed concern for caring for the environment.  The fourth has to do with advocating for peaceful resolutions of international problems and the avoidance of war.

For centuries any religious conversation about a just cause for war begins with the thinking of St. Augustine as formalized by St. Thomas Aquinas.  It is always unfair to try to condense the thought of either of these two giants of church history but for the sake of time, I will boil the tradition of just war to these three points:
1)       The war must be waged as a last resort and only by a sovereign nation.
2)       The war must have a just provocation and not be motivated by the prospect of gaining profit or power.
3)       Finally the war must be fought with a reasonable expectation of success and it must end in peace.

Every war that our nation has been involved in has been sold to the American people as having met these criteria.  We always posture ourselves as either acting in self-defense or we are carrying out a police action that stops the abuses of a tyrant. The particular genius of Howard Zinn is in taking a serious historical look at those claims and helping us to see how we have been lied to and manipulated in almost every case.

In his last major address, quoted above, Zinn talks about the use of the belief in a kind of "holy war" to gain public approval or at least acquiescence to our modern military adventures.  He describes the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII as our "holy wars" whose virtue is beyond question.  And then he goes on to question the historical memory of each.

We then use those holy wars to justify subsequent wars by comparing, for example, the Nicaraguan Contras to the freedom loving Revolutionary War soldiers of our history or comparing Saddam Hussein, or Manuel Noriega or anyone we decided to stop paying to work for us as being the same as Adolph Hitler.

Zinn points out that, yes, the Revolutionary War gave us independence from Great Britain but was that war really about equality, freedom and independence?
It wasn't for the black slaves, indentured servants, or the women or the landless poor.  No matter what high sounding ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution is a document that established a white, male aristocracy in the former British colonies.

And yes, slavery was ended by the Civil War but was that war really fought to give American blacks liberty and equality?  Did they get liberty and equality at the end of the war..... or a generation later, or two, three or four generations later?

WWII did end with the defeat of fascism.  So, do we believe that fascism is now defeated?  Even our most defensible wars have a much more tarnished halo than we like to believe.  You have been told that we dropped atomic bombs on Japan to avoid the greater casualties we would have experienced by having to invade Japan.  That is an absolute lie.  We had killed a hundred thousand Japanese in Tokyo with conventional bombs just before dropping the atomic bombs.  No one ever talks about that and I suspect that most of you didn't know it.

Japan was defeated and ready to surrender before we dropped those atomic bombs.  We dropped them to show the Soviets that we had this terrible weapon and that we had the will to use it.  Do you believe that everyone in Hiroshima was an enemy to freedom and liberty?

We killed 600,000 Germans with conventional bombs, a 100,000 of whom died in a single night in Dresden.  Were all of the residents of Dresden Nazis?  The women, the children, the elderly?  Were they all Nazis?

We like to think of ourselves as liberators, defenders of justice.... We want to be that city on a hill but, in the wise words of Yoda, it is a very rare thing when wars make a nation great.

At the time the United States launched a war against Iraq, a majority of Americans had either been tricked into believing or they had tricked themselves into believing that Iraq was responsible for the 9-11 attack on the United States.

There was no connection, of course, nor were our weapons inspectors mistaken in their repeated attempts at telling the Bush administration that there were no WMD's hidden in Iraq.  It is true enough that Hussein was a bad guy but any kind of intellectual honesty compels us to acknowledge that he wasn't killing Iraqis at the rate that we did for a decade nor can we claim to have, on average, much improved their circumstances.

Earlier this month, Curtis Reeves, a 71 year old retired policeman, shot and killed Chad Oulson in a Florida movie theater because Chad wouldn't stop texting during the movie.  Now, you know how annoying it is to be sitting beside someone in a theater, or in class, or in church while they are starring at their phone and texting but whatever punishment may be appropriate for this annoyance, we're all pretty clear that lethal shooting is insane.

Somehow, we are not able to be similarly clear about when our use of military force is an insanely out of bounds response to provocation.

On September 10, 2001, there were "What Would Jesus Do" rubber bracelets being sold on the counters of book stores and gas stations all over Springfield.  In an entirely uncoordinated but massively hypocritical gesture, every one of those bracelets disappeared on 9-11 because no one wanted to ask that question anymore nor would they tolerate any corollary questions like, "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

The moral problem for Americans was that we were not attacked by a nation.  If any country could actually have been reasonably blamed, it would have been Saudi Arabia but their government was not directly responsible.  Any reasonable military response to 9-11 would have been police action going after terror cells and training camps.

I said at the time and I am repeating now, more than a decade later, that our wars in Afghanistan an Iraq were not wars on terrorism.  They were wars of economic opportunity.  The waging of war makes some people very rich.

The flow of resources to military industrial corporations slows down when there is not a hot war or at least the threat of one.  There are thousands of examples of individual and unit courage, valor, genius and sacrifice from the battlefield.  No one should ever fall prey to the ruse that admiration for the contribution of any individual soldier must also necessitate supporting the politicians who made the decision to put that soldier in harm's way.

You will be told that if you support the troops that you must not question the war and that is an outright lie.  Sure, if I lost a loved one on the battlefield or if I had left my legs or my sanity on foreign soil then you want to believe that this sacrifice was made in cause of defending freedom.... Who wouldn't want his or her sacrifice honored with such accolades..... but what we want doesn't change the facts.

The inconvenient truth is that most wars are an economic scam.  We were told that the proceeds from the oil fields of Iraq would finance our military action there but that was never really the plan.  Already, nearly $200 billion in contracts have been given to the corporations that are involved in Iraq, with the largest winner being Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton.  Some very sober estimates place the actual eventual costs of these two wars at about $2 trillion.

Did we, with this huge expenditure of human life, financial and natural resources, bring an end to the threat of terrorism?
Again, in any honest estimate, we not only did not put a dent in terrorism, we have succeeded in aggravating the problem and virtually assuring ourselves of future terrorist strikes for the rest of our natural lives.

Probably every peace advocate in the world knows by heart the warnings given by President Dwight Eisenhower against the threat of our own military industrial complex.  Most of the time, people mistakenly put together pieces of two speeches delivered by the 5 star general who had become president of the United States.  Shortly after he took office in his first term, Joseph Stalin died.

It was then that he delivered a speech about the prospects for world peace in which he said that, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."

Eisenhower was no idealistic peacenik.  He was not advocating disarmament or pacifism.  But he was pointing out that every dollar we spend on military hardware keeps us from spending that dollar on food, medicine, education and housing.

It was eight years later that the President shocked the world by delivering a farewell speech that concentrated on a warning against the irrational military spending of a coalition between congress and the corporations that build military hardware.  He saw this threat growing larger during his presidency as the cold war sent military spending through the roof.  He saw it, but he failed to stop it.

Since Eisenhower, Republican and Democratic presidents have both found themselves incapable of reasonably curtailing the power of a congress that is controlled by military industrial interests.

Where has the church been in the midst of all of this?  Who are our prophets?  There have been a few and some of them were absolutely of biblical stature.  But for the most part, the church of the United States has been as much of a silent partner to immoral and illegal wars as were the churches of Italy and Germany during WWII.

As Thomas Jefferson famously said:
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own." (Thomas Jefferson Writings Vol. XIV p. 119)

So here is what I have to say to the progressive church of the twenty first century.  Don't ever play the part of a whore for any despot, tyrant or lying chief executive every again.  Don't every play dumb or remain indifferent during a time when someone is trying to sell our nation another war.

And even more importantly, we must ask ourselves what peaceful measures can be taken to avoid the kinds of international hostilities that end up in war.  Wars are very rarely ideological in nature.  They are almost always economic.  Beyond all talk about radical Islam, Communism, Socialism or Fascism there is, simply, poverty.

We currently deploy an army of around 200,000 people at a cost of between one and two million dollars per year per soldier, depending upon where they are deployed.  We deploy this army to help foster global peace and stability.

Let's just imagine, just for conversation's sake, that we cut that military deployment by 75%.  We close all of the bases that were built to fight WWII, pull back weapons that we will never need and radically move our priorities away from the threat of violence and towards creating stability.

Rather than deploying 200,000 soldiers, we could deploy nearly as many teachers, agricultural specialists, doctors and engineers.  What if we make it our goal to raise the literacy rate of the world over 90%, make safe water and food universally available and to wipe out malaria, AIDS and polio?  It is reasonable to suggest that we could accomplish all of these goals for about one fourth of what we spend on the military so that we could cut our military spending in half, transform the world into a stable and safe place and still have the strongest military in the world for those instances when only a military action can do the job.

There are always people who get very rich off of wars and so the proposals I have just enumerated would not be popular on Wall Street or on Capitol Hill but if they can't find traction in our churches, synagogues and mosques then religion really is a fraud.  The program I am suggesting, of diverting military resources to medicine, education, agriculture and infrastructure is not only a workable goal that could create global stability and peace in less time than we have had troops in Afghanistan but, frankly, we would have to be crazy not to do it.

Holy Water, Sacred Land

Chapter 12 - HOLY WATER, SACRED LAND
Roger Ray, D.Min.
January 12, 2014


A tall, beautiful model strides confidently across our TV screens assuring us that coal is our friend, providing both abundant energy and economically important jobs for Americans.  Is she trying to persuade us to rush down to the mall and buy some coal?  No, but the apparent motivation for such campaign advertisements is not always the only one.  Clean coal, which is different from coal only because you say "clean" first, is a myth that the coal industry wants to sell to the voting public so that environmental concerns about the impact of coal on our water, air and global temperatures will not interfere with their profits.

But more than that, buying advertisement from corporate media is a way of protecting a vulnerable industry from unfavorable news coverage.  In the same way the hospitals run PR ad campaigns advertising the services of their physicians when most of us have little choice in which cancer service or emergency room we might go to.  We use the one that is in our insurance provider group.  But when hospitals buy up large blocks of print and broadcast advertising, they are trying to protect themselves from investigative reporting.

In some instances, where the disaster is bigger than mere bribes can manage, governments have been known to step in and silence the media rather than depending on the uncertainty of trying to buy influence.  More than a year after the damaged reactor in Fukushima, Japan began leaking radiation into the adjoining ocean water, the government passed a law preventing any coverage of the environmental risks.  The law carries a potential of ten years in prison for any journalists who actually do what we depend upon journalists to do.

It is understandable that the government has an interest in avoiding public panic but repressing important and possibly life saving information is shameful at best and more likely a kind of governmental malfeasance.

Similarly, in North Carolina and Virginia, state legislators have refused to fund research into anything related to global warming or rising sea levels as if refusing to address the science related to what is happening to their shores will somehow keep it from happening.  After Hurricane Sandy, the largest and most devastating storm in America's history hit New Jersey, that state's Republican governor began to show a great deal more respect for the more fact based conversation about how human dependence on fossil fuels is pushing our planet towards a dangerous tipping point of climate disaster.

Major world religions have had a hard time getting a handle on the topic of environmental ethics. There are a number of important explanations for our past failure, all of which are barriers we must over come.

First, western religions have been very text oriented, seeking authoritative direction from their scriptures, all of which were written in a time when the balance of power between the earth and humans was decidedly on the side of nature.  While we find examples of cherishing life, discovering awe in nature and declarations that certain rivers or places were uniquely holy, there is much more about domination and fear of nature in all of our ancient scriptures.

Progressives must get past this devotion to ancient religious literature.  We do not, for example, have to find a way to interpret the Genesis creation story to create an environmental urgency nor do we have to play fast and loose with truth claims about either Native American or Druid spirituality to insist that we will find substantive direction from these or any other ancient sources.  The motivation for trying to make the Genesis account a demand from God to care for the planet is, at one level, laudable but doing so requires abandoning our efforts at moving away from supernatural theism and the assumption that God somehow wrote the Bible.  You can certainly find examples of a more respectful approach to creation in some primitive religion sources but you can also find contradictions that would only foster more debate about issues that are, substantively, beyond debate in the real world.

The modern world is in a present crisis, not foreseen by ancient prophets or in ancient texts.  Now is a time when we must apply our devotion to both ethics and truth to join the moral will of the faith community to the information provided by environmental scientists.

Secondly, we have, at times, associated our religion with too specific pieces of land or rivers.  Poets often express more urgent truths than do our holy scriptures.  I love the line in Michael Franti's song "Hello, Bonjour" where the poet boldly states, "Every drop of water is holy water and every piece of land is holy land."  Again, the Jewish claim of a Promised Land, the Christian identity with holy sites, Hindu attribution of holy status to one river and Muslim claims to traditional governance of specific nations and holy sites undermines the larger issue that there is nothing about Jerusalem that is more holy than Lexington, KY or more sacred about Mecca than can be found in Belize City.  The Florida swamp is a part of the same earth as the Grand Canyon or the Alps.  Our reverence for one place or body of water should not be determined by tradition, or what we may have believed happened there in our own faith history but that we are a part of the earth and all of the parts of the earth are connected to one another.

Finally, there has been way too much emphasis placed on belief in an afterlife that can devalue the only world we actually know exists and whose existence we can now threaten.  Even for those who feel the need to hold onto belief in an afterlife, I would offer the corrective of Søren Kierkegaard who cautioned that there are things that are true when they are whispered that become false when they are shouted.  Belief in heaven may bring comfort to the dying and solace to the grieving but this belief has been used to dismiss efforts at saving this world because, as some legislators have asserted, God is in charge of the world and nothing will happen to it without God's approval.

From my perspective, the spiritual passion to protect our planet is also threefold.  The first is simply a reverence and awe for the creation in all of its wonder and beauty.  Henry David Thoreau was not the first to find more of the divine in nature than in church and he will not be the last.  One should not exclude the other but they should certainly be partners in inspiring and educating the spirit of both.
Secondly, environmental issues have a huge social justice concern.  Many of the major sources of pollution are profit driven industries that are choosing short-term gain over long term environmental health.  Also, the poor of every nation generally wind up living in the areas where these industries dispose of their harmful byproducts. The resources of the earth should not be the sole possession of those who have manipulated governments and banking interests into giving them exploitative rights that are, in any rational analysis, not the right of any individual or narrow interest.  We an innately understand that the air belongs to all of us but it would be helpful if we could maintain some of that sense of global connection when it comes to real estate.  As we saw in the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, when the rising sea level and stronger storm surges send a wall of water onto shore, in most countries, it is the poor who are living there in very poorly constructed homes who are the most vulnerable.

Finally, this is a matter of compassion for future generations.  The present generation that stands on the face of the earth does not have a right to use up the earth that will shortly be inherited by future generations.  We talk about owning land as a part of our economic and personal safety interests but how can any mortal own something that lasts forever?  We are stewards of the land and as stewards we have a much more vital interest that trumps our desire for personal profit.

This should go without being said.  What could be more obvious than the fact that we must leave behind a planet that can be successfully inhabited by future generations and yet sometimes the most obvious truths are the ones the faith community must repeat the most often and the most loudly.
It would not be difficult to become exhausted with the virtual panic in the voices of many environmental advocates.  However, we should not fail to note when we have become convinced that it needed to be done, we have been able to reverse the trends of planetary degradation.  We have been able to restore forests, clean up rivers and lakes.  We even, through individual effort and changes in governmental policies, reversed the erosion of the ozone layer of our atmosphere even though no one goes camping in the ozone layer or posts vacation pictures from there on their Face Book page.
People can, when given the correct information and the reason to act on it, stop poisoning their own habitat.  Environmentalists often look more like Michael Moore than that lady who keeps telling us that we should have more coal in our breakfast cereal because mercury poisoning isn't all that bad but we have to first choose not to be either gullible or fatalistic.

Understanding how to care for the earth is complicated and it takes an investment of energy and, at many junctures, personal sacrifice will be necessary to make the needed changes in our use of the earth.
The largest consumption of fossil fuels is expended in two arenas, the heating and cooling of our homes and in transportation and this is where we must concentrate our efforts.  It would be wonderful if we were all motivated to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, however, human nature being what it is, doing the right thing is always a bit easier if it saves us some money at the same time.  Strengthening our conscience and protecting our financial resources are not always mutually exclusive.

Learning to recycle, to refrain from using disposable items, insulating our homes and being more cautious about the use of energy with our appliances, lights, television as well has heating and cooling can all lower our bills while acting to save the planet.  Investing in energy efficient light bulbs, water heaters and appliances have upfront costs but they promise long-term savings.

Transportation is a larger and more complex issue.  Larger, more powerful vehicles are attractive to us for comfort, safety, and utility and for reliability in inclement weather.  However, choosing smaller, hybrid or alternative energy transportation is an option for most of us and it is something we can do proactively to help conserve limited resources and to cut back on pollution.

Still, a huge percentage of the consumption of gasoline in major cities is used by drivers who are looking for parking places.  All of us have experienced sitting for long periods of time in traffic jams where there are rows and rows of cars, stopped in multiple lanes as far as the eye can see, all burning fuel while waiting to move.

The creation of energy efficient mass transit would require a sea change in priorities for nations such as ours.  We are not only accustomed to private transportation but our economy is deeply invested in the manufacture, sales and maintenance of automobiles and all of the accompanying road construction.  Both government and private corporate interests will continue to use their influence to keep Americans in cars.

Mass transit could cut down on pollution, consumption of fossil fuels, traffic accidents, the amount of land taken up in parking, personally owned garage space and the time it takes to move from one place to another.  There certainly would be a huge upfront investment to build this kind of infrastructure but that is a small concern compared to the hurdle of persuading Americans to want mass transit rather than bigger cars and more highways.

The technology exists.  Other nations have taken great strides in this direction.  All that stands between us and making huge progress in protecting both our environment and our personal incomes is the collective will to change.

The most important task of the ancient prophets, of the early church and of any meaningful incarnation of the church in the future is to speak truth to power.  Our news media is almost exclusively corporate owned and profit driven.  Even our public media is influenced by government grants and corporate sponsorship.  The church must maintain its independence from profit driven interests and even find the courage to be faithful to the truth in the face of changing public opinions.

Pastors are not environmental experts but we sure do need to expose ourselves to their research and insights.  We need to articulate a passionate, informed and prophetic message to a public that may not hear the imperative truth about our ecology anywhere else.

One of my favorite old hymns, "Once to Every Man (sic) and Nation," says, "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future."  I fear that too much of the main stream church is cowering in a self-defensive posture, trying to hold onto its meager existence for another generation.  What I am trying to say to you about being bold in the area of environmental activism is what William Shedd meant when he said, "A ship in harbor is safe but that is not what ships are for."  The church exists for telling the truth and given the crisis that is at hand in the environment it is past time that we stop being afraid of the consequences of being prophetic because the consequences of silent consent are surely much worse!