Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By

March 23, 2014    Lent 3
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Romans 5:3-5a
And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us,

A week ago our senator, Clair McCaskill, was in town to deliver a speech at Drury University in which she announced a new initiative to combat rape on college campuses.  Rape is a problem on college campuses and so, on the one hand, it is good to hear that she is against it.  But as politics goes, is there a "pro-rape" constituency?  Not withstanding some of the colossally stupid things that have been said about rape by some of our other Missouri politicians, it is actually difficult to imagine that Clair was risking a lot of political capital by going on the record as being opposed to rape.

One of my former associate ministers who took a church of her own several years ago decided that she would try and follow my lead in the media and she wrote a passionate opinion column in which she decisively announced her opposition to child abuse.  That was more than ten years ago and we have yet to see the opposing article in which someone goes on record as being in favor of child abuse.

You may think that I have made a career out of tilting at windmills, but, no one can accuse me of charging a windmill that wasn't there.

But let's get back to Claire...our senator came to town to announce her opposition to rape on college campuses a scant week after she had blocked passage of the long fought for bill sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

Senator Gillibrand's bill would have removed the trial process of rape in the military from military courts where they have a backlog of over 1600 cases they have not investigated yet and many estimate that fewer than one in ten rapes are actually reported because of they horrific way these cases are handled in the military.

The case for Gillibrand's bill was bolstered just before Senator McCaskill voted against it by the news that Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair plead guilty to having repeatedly raped a woman under his command and threatening to murder her and her family if she told anyone.  And that news was backed up by a sexual assault charge against Lt. Col. Joseph Morse, who is the army's chief prosecutor in military sex crimes.

I think that Clare McCaskill is a smart woman and I like her politics a whole lot more than her former political opponent, Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin. And, to be fair, I am certain that Clare is actually opposed to rape in the military, on college campuses and everywhere else...the difference is that when she had the opportunity to do something significant about it, she decided to vote with the Rand Paul's and Lindsey Graham's of the Senate to please her Ft. Leonard Wood constituency.

This banner we commissioned for our church that features the winged lion holding up a tablet that reads "Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By."  The quote comes from Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he said that the Holocaust only happened because most people simply watched it happen.  Genocide can only happen if the majority of the population decides not to get involved.

I had latched onto that quote many years ago, and those of you who have been in my home have seen a ceramic relief I had made for the mantle by a different artist because it expressed the core of what I believed prophetic ministry to be and it sums up what has disappointed me about my most of my experience with my denominational heritage.

There was a period of my life when I was very connected to denominational affairs.... And when I say "affairs" sometimes that's what it was.  I became aware of allegations of sex crimes committed by the former General Minister and President of the Disciples of Christ, William Nichols.  The denomination was paying off accusers in out of court settlements and trying to hush it all up.  I insisted on notifying the police and the response from the denomination was to threaten to sue me.

I reached out to members of the clergy I knew from the west coast to the east coast and not a one of them would take a stand with me against hiding these sex crimes.  I emailed more than 6,000 members of clergy and not a one of them would get involved.  I really couldn't believe it but even after all of the Catholic priest scandals have been in the news, when it comes right down to potentially harming your own denomination, the institution where your own pension fund rests, there is not much love of principle.

Standing idly by becomes nearly sacramental.... To commanding officers who are aware of the tens of thousands of military sexual assaults....to popes, bishops and priests who hide pedophilia to solid, salt of the earth, church going folks who don't want to shine a light on injustice, or even know too much about it.... Not enough to have to get involved.

Army officers can say to elected politicians, "We do not want to be held accountable for our misconduct."  And politicians say in reply, "And we don't want to hold you responsible either."  Long after this national conspiracy to hide sex crimes in the Disciples of Christ Church, I reported two incidents of embezzling.... One at the national level and one in our Springfield office of the Ozarks Lakes Area.

Both were swept under the rug.  No criminal charges were ever filed, responsible parties made off with nearly a half a million dollars of donors' money between the two incidents.  Nothing was done.  I couldn't even get our local paper to cover the local crime... no legal charges filed, everything held in personnel files that are not subject to sunshine laws....everyone knew what happened but no one would do anything about it.

The Area Minister even kept his job.  He lives in this neighborhood just over the hill from us which is why I asked to have my name put on the sign in the front yard in large block letters so that he has to see it every morning and evening that he goes passes by.  Maybe everyone else gives silent consent, but I don't.

When we went downtown a couple of years ago to protest the anti-illegal immigrant measure being voted on by the city council, there were some of my old denominational peers out there carrying signs.  They, like we, were protesting the inherent xenophobia behind this E-Verify movement but the irony that struck me hard that day was that they refused to get involved in huge ethical matters about which they actually had a vote.... They have a say in the management of their own denomination but when the authority was handed to them to make a decision, they voted "not present."

When it comes to telling city government how they should run the city, they are ready to speak up but in their own house, they hear no evil, see no evil and will not speak out against evil.


Albert Einstein said, "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a [person] does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses their intelligence."  If you stand up to the injustice of the world you will find that you immediately have a lot of enemies, almost every one of them, however, will reveal themselves to me mediocre, not only in intellect but in morality and in courage.

Paul wrote to the Roman church warning them that they would endure opposition... there will be suffering if you stand for anything, but if you practice, you gain endurance and that endurance will produce character and if enough people care about building character, the world will change.

But, folks, we have created a little liberal enclave for ourselves out here.  We have this progressive church where we can gather with fairly consistently like minded people and we could meet out here once a week and decry the hypocrisy of politicians, priests and the corporations that own them both but, you know, that can become just another way of standing idly by.  There is no substantive reward for holding informed, progressive thoughts if you hold them privately.

I printed on the cover of the bulletin this morning this delightful picture of a girl's soccer team all wearing traditional Muslim headscarves, the hijab.  This is not a soccer team in Bahrain or Indonesia; this is in Aurora, Colorado.

Even though the soccer association had ruled that women could wear the hijab during games, this one referee sent the only Muslim girl on the team off the field.

Now, I've seen high school friends shave their heads in solidarity with a classmate who was undergoing chemotherapy.  And that is a sacrifice and a noble gesture but it is not like there was a pro-cancer club in their school.  It is a symbolic act but their hair will grow back whether their friend survives the illness or not.

But these Colorado girls deciding to identify with a Muslim team-mate... that's a bit different to me.  I don't like the fact that Muslims ask women to cover up in ways that men do not have to.  I think it is unfair, it is sexist, it is misogynistic.

I think that it even poses some security risk for people to be able to enter banks and airports and even stores with their identities partially or entirely hidden.  I suspect that a number of these girls might feel much the same way that I do about the hijab but they put one on anyway.

They didn't wear a hijab to defend Islam.  They wore it rather than stand idly by and curse the referee who was being a jerk.  They wore it rather than putting their arm around the Muslim teammate after the game and telling her they were sorry for what happened to her.  They were not simply opinionated about injustice, they were unwilling to passively watch it.

The Holocaust would not have happened if the people of Germany, Russia, Latvia, Slovakia, the Netherlands and Poland had not let it happen.

That story we have all heard about how the Germans ordered the Jews in Denmark to wear the star of David and the next day the king of Denmark came out wearing a star himself...that didn't happen...that's a myth. We wish the people of Europe had done something like that but they didn't.

The story about the girls in Overland High School wearing the hijab to their soccer game....that happened, and it should happen more often in more places.  But you would never have the courage and self awareness to stop a holocaust if you don't practice...if you are not willing to stand up for a young girl who is being turned away from a soccer match.

Yes, I know, we can't be involved with everything that happens...we have to choose our battles.  I'm just saying, if we got in the habit of standing up for justice we probably wouldn't have to do it so often anymore.

Our government, our religious institutions, our corporations have learned to depend upon our compliance, our silence, our passive indifference and so far they have been right to do so.

Howard Zinn wrote in Failure to Quit, "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."

It is a big problem that has only one solution.  You have to decide that you will no longer stand idly by.

The Origin of Sin

Lent 1     March 9, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7          
15The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
16And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

3Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" 2The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" 4But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; 5for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Like many of the people who voted for this year's Oscar awards, I have not had a chance to see most of the movies that were nominated.  Still, I could not escape either news reports or comedian's commentary on the best actor award recipient's self-congratulatory comments.  Matthew McConaughey did manage to thank God and his parents before launching into a very uncomfortable series of explanations for why he is his own hero.

I want to believe that he is not as narcissistic as he sounded but at the very least this is a good example of why even really good actors need to have a writer to prepare their speeches for them.  The story-line of the film, as I understand it, makes a beautiful and wonderful moral point but it is not hard to be deceived into believing that it is really all about you when you see your own face up on the screen and you are receiving accolades from all of the world.
I always find it painful when news-commentators decide to run for public office.  They have come to believe, over years of looking into a camera and reading off of a teleprompter that they are no longer just reading the news, that they have become, themselves, the news.

For centuries the Catholic Church has implied that the "original sin" has something to do with sex.  That is not what the Genesis narrative suggests.

We may be annoyed when squirrels get into the bird feeder but we do not talk about sinful squirrels.  Squirrels just do what squirrels do because that is the nature of being a squirrel. We sometimes hate it when the deer wander into the yard and eat our vegetable garden, our shrubs and flowers but we do not call them sinful.  They are just doing what deer do.

Human beings, as naked apes, only talk about sin because we consider ourselves to be aware of what is right and what is wrong and even though we are aware, we still often choose to do what is wrong.  The Garden of Eden story says that the narrative of human sin began with hubris.... Arrogance... narcissism.... The desire to be equal with God.

I have often joked that were it not for the church's mastery of guilt and fear that I would not have a job.  Clearly, in the progressive church, we are not too easily manipulated by either of those old standbys of religion but I think that we have reason to slow down a bit and give it a moment's reflection.



Like most aspects of spiritual thinking, there is both the macro and the micro consideration... the personal and the social, the individual and the global perspective.

This past week, Rachel Maddow aired a special to answer the question, "Why did we invade Iraq?"  Based on recently released documents from the Bush administration, it becomes inescapably evident that our nation used the tragedy of 9-11 to attack a nation whose only provocation was that they were dragging their feet about getting their oil onto the world market.

Like many of you, I was involved in protests prior to the invasion of Iraq carrying signs that said, "No Blood for Oil."  Though we suspected that oil was the real reason for the war, if we can trust the honesty of Maddow's reporting on the newly released documents, the indefensible hubris that allowed us to justify killing off our own soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis to keep oil prices low, now seems to be unavoidably true.

How could we not call this sin?  How is this not hubris at a national level?  Energy executives, in secret meetings with Vice-President Cheney, with the blessings of President Bush, mapped out a strategy that would use Iraqi oil to bump up the world supply even though it would mean the deaths of so many people.

Now I watch the unrest in the Ukraine with a mixture of sympathy and fear.  I am not certain that the people there have not been encouraged to sever ties with Russia and align with the west because Russia has been a major exporter of natural gas which flows through pipelines in the Ukraine.
Now that the United States finds itself awash in natural gas, we're looking to export it and that would be much more profitable if we could cut off the Russian supply of natural gas to Europe.  I don't mean to use the pulpit for a foreign policy speech.  What I'm trying to point out is that we can do things out of greed, self-interest, out of a narcissistic world view, all the while telling ourselves that we are doing something noble, praiseworthy, even courageous.

Søren Kierkegaard once said that we are objective about others but subjective in our view of ourselves when, in fact, we should be subjective about others and objective in our self-appraisal.  That is, we look across the globe and we make ourselves comfortable in portraying Vladimir Putin as and old Soviet style dictator and allowing ourselves to view our own nation as being a beacon of freedom and democracy.  What if Putin is really just defending Russia's natural gas trade and we are trying to take it from him?

Can we be objective about our own motives and allow for a bit of subjective view of the motivations of people we do not and cannot know?  That the citizens of Ukraine are in danger is a horrible thing.... But I am not certain that the natural gas market is not what is really ratcheting up the national danger of civil war.  I feel that it is important enough that we must come down off of our imperial throne of national arrogance this time before we do again what we did in Iraq.

Empire building is bad when Putin does it and, we should be able to admit, it is bad when we do it.

But this is no less true when it comes to taking an objective view of our selves on the individual level.  International politics is a complicated, mixed up can of worms but so are our own motivations.  No one is pure.  No one is without ego.  We all have mixed motivations for everything we do and if we cannot be honest about them, the mix can become quite toxic.

It is unfortunate that a great deal of the talk about sin has had to do with piety rather than actual human evil.  I hope that the progressive movement is delivering us from puritanical concerns with believing the right things, praying the right way, worshipping the right way.... I hope that we can put distance between ourselves and all of the really mentally ill obsessions with managing the sex lives of others or loathing our own bodies or natural instincts.  That stuff is really messed up.

But I earnestly hope that we will not abandon entirely an awareness of personal sin.  It is not right to hurt other people, to exploit them, take advantage of them, lie to them, rob them of either their property or their dignity.

Just as we know it would be wrong to stir up a civil war in Ukraine in order to increase our international market for natural gas, it is wrong for us to tear down another human being in order to gain status for ourselves..... or to expect them to work and still be poor.... Or to accept that the well off can have health care and that they need to quietly hurry up and die.



Without a concept of sin we may think that we can return to the unadapted animal state of innocence but do you really want to start growling at the neighbors and licking your private parts in public?  

We have eaten the forbidden fruit.  We cannot claim that we do not know the difference between right and wrong. We cannot, as individuals nor as a nation, live in the dark as if the harm we do to others can be excused because it tilts the scales in our own favor.

Wars are a human creation.  Poverty is a human creation.  Racism, sexism, nationalism are all human creations and the only thing that can prevent wars, end poverty, erase prejudice and create justice are persons who have a conscience that they are willing to use.

Love and Marriage: A Philosophical/Poetic Perspective

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
March 2, 2014

"Commission" by Ezra Pound

Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,

Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,

Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.

Go as a great wave of cool water,

Bear my contempt of oppressors.

Speak against unconscious oppression,

Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,

Speak against bonds.

Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,

Go to the women in suburbs.

Go to the hideously wedded,

Go to them whose failure is concealed,

Go to the unluckily mated,

Go to the bought wife,

Go to the woman entailed.

Go to those who have delicate lust,

Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,

Go like a blight upon the dulness of the world;

Go with your edge against this,

Strengthen the subtle cords,

Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul.

Go in a friendly manner,

Go with an open speech.

Be eager to find new evils and new good,

Be against all forms of oppression.

Go to those who are thickened with middle age,

To those who have lost their interest.

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-

Oh how hideous it is

To see three generations of one house gathered together!

It is like an old tree with shoots,

And with some branches rotted and falling.

Go out and defy opinion,

Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.

Be against all sorts of mortmain. 

One of the most enduring characters of modern cinema is the severely obsessive compulsive writer, Melvin Udall, played by Jack Nicholson in "As Good as it Gets."  The scene in the 1997 film that gives the movie its title is when Melvin makes an unscheduled visit to see his psychiatrist. The doctor refuses to see him unless he schedules an appointment and comes at the proper time.

Forced to leave without getting his way, the frustrated writer stops in the crowded waiting room, looks around, and says to all of those people who were obviously waiting to see a therapist, and asked, "What if this is as good as it gets?"

The assumption being that anyone sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room is somehow profoundly dissatisfied with life but they were stunned by the suggestion that, in fact, this may be as good as it gets. At what point do you compromise with the universe, pitch your tent, sit down and accept that this is as good as it gets?

A great deal of spiritual guidance teaches us that contentment comes from giving up our desires.  Buddhism's noble truths revolve around the belief that all suffering comes from unfulfilled desires and that the way out of suffering is to give up all desires, to empty ourselves of expectations.

In religion as well as in business, there is a popular proverb that says that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  Our insistence on perfection sets us up for conflict, failure and disappointment.  So there is a certain pervasive wisdom that says, "Yes, this is as good as it gets.....so quit your whining."
Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Traveled, often said that the greatest truths are often expressed in paradox.  I just wanted to say that before you decide that I'm either hypocritical or schizophrenic.  I don't disagree with the core teachings of Buddhism.  My first book was about the spiritual disciplines of Christian monasticism in which I praise the virtue of living life very simply with our appetites under control.

But there is a paradoxical "on the other hand" side of the story.  The struggle that took Jack Nicholson's character to his psychiatrist's office in the first place was that his comfortably reclusive life as a successful writer was that he had fallen in love with his waitress at his favorite breakfast diner and everything about that was implausible, impractical and impossibly unworkable for a man who had the kind of OCD issues that he had.  He could not possibly hope to have or give someone love when he was as messed up as he was.

Now, over the years I've found a number of fairly creative ways of changing the conversation so that I could talk about Søren Kierkegaard..... this is no exception.  If there was a philosopher in the last two centuries who was more of a genius than Kierkegaard, I have no idea who that would have been.  But Kierkegaard did one really stupid thing in his life.

He was deeply and hopelessly in love Regine Olson.  Kierkegaard studied her, he learned everything about her so that he could fully understand her before he attempted to court her.  His approach worked and the two fell madly in love and were engaged to be married.

But Kierkegaard suffered from severe depression and he feared that the pain of his depression, which is what motivated his philosophical writing, would make Regine miserable in married life.  So he broke off the engagement, and moved to Berlin for a couple of years so that she could forget about him and he could forget about her.

Sadly, only half of that plan appeared to work.  Kierkegaard obsessed about Regine and wrote two pain-riddled books, Either/Or and Repetition, as he tried to work out how he could be in love and still do the work he felt called to do.  In the end, he returned to his home in Copenhagen to resume his relationship with Regine, only to discover that she had married another man.

Many years later, after both Kierkegaard and her husband had died, Regine told a magazine reporter that she had never stopped loving Kierkegaard but they were both good Danish Lutherans so the fact that they were in love with one another was never mentioned.

Many of Kierkegaard's books are simply too complex for a normal person to comprehend but his personal journal, which he never expected to be published, was almost entirely unguarded in his self expression.  It was in his journal, after the painful realization that he had placed Regine forever beyond his grasp, that he wrote:   "To cheat one's self out of love is the greatest deception of which there is no reparation in either time or in eternity."  Or to say it another way, to make a compromise with life in which you live without true love is a mistake for which there is no second chance, either in this life or in the next.

It is a sad story but a profound one.  The hardest decision Kierkegaard ever faced was the choice between his life as a philosopher or to indulge his heart in true love.  He became the most influential philosopher of modern times and yet, in his own journal, he acknowledged that he made the wrong choice.  And, in his case, he never chose again.  He didn't try to start over with someone else.  He had been in love and turned his back on it.  If I had lived in 19th century Copenhagen I might have tried to encourage him to join Match.Danish but he died in a very solitary life.

I took for our wisdom text today this little known poem by Ezra Pound that probably would have been much better known if he hadn't become more screwed up than Kierkegaard ever dreamed of being.  Odd that a seriously messed up, fascist, anti-Semite could write the most insightful love poem ever but here it is.

Line by line he piles up the crushing imagery of people who have sold themselves short, who have settled for the tepid, the mediocre, the stifling restrictions of bondage to a relationship that robs them of the opportunity of experiencing life more deeply.  Defiantly, he calls out to defy all forms of religious and social inhibition that is, he finally says, the hand of death.

Religious and social rules around love relationships are, at a certain level, necessary to encourage stable families and civil harmony but the idealistic passion of Kierkegaard's value of love and Pound's uncompromising voice also deserve a place in the conversation.


That being said, there are very few things that make me as angry as when a married person schedules a counseling appointment with me and they begin by telling me that they are "unhappy."  Because that usually implies that it is their partner's fault.  Now, there are reasons to be unhappy in marriage.... I apply the four horseman test to these conversations..... I ask, has their been violence, infidelity, child abuse or addiction..... and if not, I don't give much space to the musical beds approach to finding fulfillment.

I'm not saying that there are not other reasons, beyond violence, infidelity, child abuse or addiction to end a relationship but I am saying that happiness, meaning, real love, is not something that you find.  You either create it in cooperation with another person or it does not exist.  As the great American philosopher, W. C. Fields, advised, "If at first you don't succeed, try again.... Then quit... there is no sense making a fool out of yourself."

My frustration comes in seeing people move so quickly to compromise without ever really trying.

As a single person observing the world of married people I know, I can become deeply frustrated by people who just don't seem to be trying to make their relationship the kind of love that they know that they want.  I watch people jockeying around in families, playing power and control games.... Trying to make sure that they are not doing more than their share, that they are not being taken advantage or that they are not losing control of their partner..... all of which is like pouring poison on your own breakfast cereal.

It does take two people to make a relationship work.  It cannot be one-sided.  Still, a lot of us in the universe of single people would have loved to have had a chance at a healthy relationship, if only there was someone on the other side of the net.

I am not single because I have never had a chance to marry.  Getting married is easy enough.  But having been married unsuccessfully, I have been resolved never to settle for anything less than the potential of a partnership that could be the sort of thing that poets write about.  And I will not trade off the potential of something that is noble, and deep and powerful in order to avoid being simply alone.

And, having been a more than casual observer of the institution of marriage, I have seen how alone you can be while living in shared space.  So, when I say to those of you who are married or who live in a domestic partnership, that I believe that it is your spiritual duty to go and "make love" I am not trying to be in any way crass or even sexual.

At least in this context, to "make love" is to do the things that create the real thing.  Don't just try to endure marriage.  Don't find compromises that just keep you out of divorce court.  Don't be so self-involved that all you are doing is posturing and playing power games.

You know the path to the goal that you desire.  You know that you have to forgive.  You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable.  You have to take the initiative to start a conversation, to listen to them, make them feel safe in your affection, cherished, treasured.....
you know that you can't get to where you want to be if you insist upon carrying your resentments with you.  You can't get revenge and true love at the same time.

Is this, in fact, as good as it gets?  If not, what do you need to do to make it better, stronger, more joyful, passionate, meaningful and fulfilling?  And if you have some clue about how to do that, then, what on earth are you waiting for?

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.