Moral Mondays: the Whole World Is (not) Watching

Moral Monday Sermon   May 18, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, Pastor

A Zen Story                    
During the civil wars in feudal Japan, an invading army would quickly sweep into a town and take control. In one particular village, everyone fled just before the army arrived - everyone except the Zen master.
Curious about this old fellow, the general went to the temple to see for himself what kind of man this master was. When he wasn't treated with the deference and submissiveness to which he was accustomed, the general burst into anger. "You fool," he shouted as he reached for his sword, "don't you realize you are standing before a man who could run you through without blinking an eye!"
But despite the threat, the master seemed unmoved. "And do you realize," the master replied calmly, "that you are standing before a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?"

You may have seen it on the news.  Certainly, several of you were there on Thursday morning when we gathered with a few union organizers and fast food workers to try to launch a strike at the McDonalds on West Kearney.

There were only about 25 people carrying signs and marching at 6 a.m. when the managers unlocked the doors.  The management had intimidated all but one of their employees into changing their minds about marching with us but several members of this church marched and chanted on their behalf for a living wage.

If there had been 500 of us, we could have closed the store down and forced a conversation with owners.  If there had been 200 of us we could have at least blocked the drive-thru and put a noticeable dent in the morning's business.


Within minutes of our arrival, the Springfield police began to show up in force.  Just as they did the first time we tried to stage a demonstration at a different McDonalds.  The north side residents in the poor neighborhoods of this city have a hard time getting the police to respond to crime in their area.  I have heard complaints that 911 calls to help in cases of domestic violence or even rape can take one to two hours.

However, within fifteen minutes of 25, mostly retirement aged church members and do-gooders, there were 8 patrol cars with almost as many armed police officers on the ground as we had sign wielding senior citizens.  I don't say that to take a jab at the police whose job it is to keep our city safe and to fight crime.  We were, after all, potentially violent and dangerous criminals.  I have always felt that I personally have the potential to be a Hamburgler myself... only fear of the police restrains me.

I do believe, however, that we should take a moment to consider the juxtaposition of a handful of labor sympathizers standing in the cold in front of a fast food restaurant with a congregation of police cars, armed officers and a paddy wagon standing at the ready to haul us off to jail if anyone slowed down access to the menu board where people ordered the food like substances they wanted for breakfast.

The majority of the children in that neighborhood live below the poverty line.  Some of their parents work for $7.50 an hour at McDonalds.  In that part of town, most of the young girls will be sexually assaulted before they graduate or drop out of school.  Most of the young boys are far too familiar with violence.
We cannot afford sufficient police presence to make their worlds safe.  We cannot afford to pay their parents enough to raise them out of poverty.  But, as a society, we will spend tax dollars extravagantly to protect commercial business.  That, my friends, is a fact.  It is a fact that I witnessed with my own two eyes on Thursday morning.  It is a fact that we must acknowledge and allow to sink into our awareness.

I'm leaving as soon as we dim the lights in our sanctuary to drive to Raleigh, NC where I will participate in the Moral Monday March that will take place there tomorrow.  I've been wanting to go since I first heard of these demonstrations taking place in the capitol of North Carolina last year.  The movement was started by Rev. William Barber, the state president of the NAACP and an ordained Disciples of Christ minister.

I met William Barber at a conference I attended a couple of years ago and, I will confess, that my first impression was not all that great because he is quite a traditional Christian thinker and I was looking for soul mates in the progressive movement.  But though we are not standing on common ground in our approach to religion, he is a very smart man and he has become a very effective man.

When the state legislature meets in North Carolina as they continue to try to restrict access of minorities to voting places, as they continue to try to take back the rights of women to manage their own bodies, they are faced with growing numbers of demonstrators marching in the streets of Raleigh, NC.


Raleigh is a fair sized city of about 400,000 people, two or three times the size of Springfield.  The first official Moral Monday March of this year was held in February.  The NAACP estimated that 80,000 marchers took part in that event.  That's enough people to snarl ever downtown street and to literally make the ground shake as they walked.

I couldn't go then but I wanted to attend the next march and so I started calling around to see when I could be certain to get one on my calendar.  The day that I called I couldn't find anyone at Rev. Barber's church who could give me a schedule.  There was no one in the state office of the NAACP that could help me.

So, Barber is a Disciple minister.  I used to be a Disciple minister.  I pulled out my trusty Disciple directory and I called the Disciple church in Raleigh to find out when the next march would be.  The pastor was not in but the office administrator was more than happy to help me.

But she told me, "Rev. Barber, no, I have never heard of him.  Did your say, Moral Monday?  I have never heard of that either and, I'm just as sorry as I can be but I don't know anything about any demonstrations here in Raleigh."

I'm not saying that it would be impossible not to notice tens of thousands of largely black people marching past the Hillyer Memorial Christian Church at 718 Hillsborough Street in Raleigh because I have noticed that it is very easy for people to look right past what they don't want to see.


On Thursday morning, while we stood and shouted, "This is what democracy looks like." And we yelled at the cars turning into McDonalds to order their egg McMuffins and bacon, egg and cheese biscuits, that "low pay is not OK," they ignored us, pulled up to the window and gave their money to employees who can't afford a car or an egg McMuffin and whose children will endure unspeakable violations and violence because we do not regard them as being worthy of a decent living.

They don't know the words to the labor union organizing songs.  They have never been taught that it is only be refusing to cross a picket line that anyone ever got a 40 hour work week, or weekends off, or paid vacations, or access to health care.  They don't know that it is only when the pilots support the flight attendants, and the carpenters support the plumbers, and the electricians support the teachers, that anyone ever gets a decent wage, the opportunity to retire when they are old and a chance to see the doctor when they are sick.

The cars filled with people talking on their cell phones, rushing to get to work or school, could not be inconvenienced to just this one time, go somewhere else for a breakfast sandwich... to make a little sacrifice out of compassion for the poor people all around them.  They don't know.

They won't hear about it on the news.  They won't learn about it in school.  Heaven knows that they are not likely to hear about it in church.

Two years, when the police were breaking up Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that had spread across the country, protesters often warned the police, "The whole world is watching."  The same warning was often heard shouted during the Arab spring as millions took to the streets to demand freedom from oppressive governments.

But the whole world wasn't watching.  We watched for a moment.  But we know more, right now, about Justin Bieber's drunken run-ins with the law and Miley Cyrus' naked efforts at gaining public attention than we know about the plight of millions of innocent people in Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan.

The revolution will not be televised. The corporate media will not tell you about it.  The public schools will not teach the real history and philosophy of labor.  The churches that worry primarily and exclusively about their own survival will not challenge the machinery that creates poverty.  The politicians who gain their seats in power by the largess of wealthy donors will not tolerate it.

The revolution will not be televised.  The revolution will not happen until people of faith decide that they are willing to no longer play dead.  I'm ready for some resurrection up in here.  How about you?

The Price Tag of Integrity

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Easter 4a    May 11, 2014

1 Peter 2:19-25  
19For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. 20If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God's approval. 21For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. 22"He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth." 23When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. 24He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. 25For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

Nature does not know about good and evil.  Nature is morally neutral. We talk a lot about defending the earth, protecting and restoring the environment, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson as recently observed, you really don't have to worry about the earth... the earth will be fine no matter what we do.  The question is whether human beings will survive.

Whenever we talk about preserving the environment, what we really mean is keeping the environment in that narrow and delicate zone in which humans can survive.  Dinosaurs come and go... but nature lives on.  Various species of plants, birds, fish and animals come and go but nature is indifferent.... Nature is morally neutral.

At the core of the Genesis myth of human awakening is the dawning awareness of good and evil.  It is that knowledge that separates us from the rest of nature and the rest of the animal kingdom.

We project human emotions onto animals and some people are convinced that there is more than instinct in their pets or even in certain marine and wild animals but if you will permit me to make this fundamental observation:  A snake that eats a bird's eggs is not evil or malevolent, it is just a snake.  And a hawk or eagle that eats a snake is not getting revenge, it is just doing what hawks and eagles do.

The arguably unique claim that we humans have is that it is possible for us to sin... we can choose to do what we know is evil, whether it is a crime or not, we know that we are not neutral players in human history.  Our actions have moral dimensions, even when we want to insist that they do not.

A great deal of what we call mental disorders is, in one way or another, a reaction to our awareness of the fact that we are moral players in society.  Scott Peck wrote in the Road Less Traveled that most people who seek psychiatric help are either neurotics or people with character disorders.  The two are, basically, opposite sides of the same coin.

The neurotic tends to take too much responsibility, making themselves miserable with feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  People with character disorders make everyone around them miserable by blaming everyone else or the universe itself for their actions.  The neurotic frequently says, "I ought to..." or "I should..." while the character disordered person will say, "I had to.." or "I couldn't."

Now, it is entirely possible to be a character-neurotic but today is Mother's Day and so we should show some deference to the people who are able to simultaneously belittle themselves for all of their inadequacies while making everyone around them feel somehow guilty.  I am, of course, speaking only of mothers who attend churches other than ours.
Seriously, neurotics can be tedious to deal with, but character disorders seem to be the ones who are in charge of the public narrative in our day.  Most of us are the heroes of our own plays.  Whenever we describe the events in our lives, we rarely describe anything that ever happens as having been a failure on our own part.  Someone else, or bad luck, the weather, the government, our parents or the opposite sex are all somehow conspiring to make our lives not go the way that they should.

Our natural, animal instincts lead us to avoid suffering, to make sure that we get enough to eat and the safe, warm, confortable sleeping spot... our conscience is what tries to justify those choices to ourselves and others.

Again, when we turn to that myth of beginnings in the book of Genesis, when Cain has killed Abel and God asks Cain, "Where is Able?" and Cain replies, "Am I my brother's keeper?"  The unspoken answer, the answer you are suppose to feel rising up from your heart rather than from reading it off of the page is, "Yes, yes I am my brother's keeper."

What gets "mom" on the short list of things we value along with "baseball and apple pie," is our awareness of mom's who genuinely have suffered, sacrificed, worked, to care for and improve their lives of their children.  Giving birth does not make someone a mother any more than being the male actor in propagation makes you a father.

A character disordered person can have a child for selfish purposes... to have someone to love them back... to have someone to care for them in their old age... to shape another person as an extension of themselves, like "Mini-Me" in an Austin Powers movie.  If you love a child only when they reflect your personal values, your religion, your beliefs, then you have never really loved the child and, in fact, are not deserving of even the greeting card holiday that is either Mother's or Father's Day.

I was asked recently if we have a lot of gay people in our church and when I thought about it, I realized that we have more parents of gay people than we have gay members.  We have, over the years, been more likely to inherit a church member who had to struggle to come to terms with the sexual orientation of a son or daughter and could not, in good conscience, continue to go to a church that either directly or by default, condemned their children.

It is heart breaking to realize how many people remain in churches where they try to "pray away the gay" so that they can make their children more like their parents.... There is nothing sacred or noble about that.... It is just sick... a kind of sick we call narcissism.

Both character disorders and neurosis are, in a way, a reaction to moral compulsion we feel to take responsibility.  A healthy form of spirituality is to embrace that moral responsibility in a factual and realistic way.  Neurotics go to extremes and make themselves emotional invalids, character disorders find a way to completely deny the reality of the morality of their actions.

It may be unfair to pick on just one person to illustrate my point but here in Missouri, any time we can use someone in Arkansas as a negative example, it feels fair, doesn't it?

Many of us in this part of the world have made the short drive down to Bentonville to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum, which is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.  The architecture of the buildings is worth the trip, the landscaping on the campus is stunning and the ever-growing art collection is soon to be the American rival to the self-love expressed in the French collection of the Louvre.

Of course, with a budget of around a billion dollars, how can you fail?  A billion dollars.... That's a thousand million dollars that the Wal-Mart heiress, Alice Walton, has donated to create this museum that is free to the public.  Why did she do this?  She explained that she and her family had been looking for a way that they could give back for all of the wealth they had accumulated through Wal-Mart.

Their wealth has come to them through vigorous union busting, by teaching their under-paid employees how to apply for public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, subsidized child care... shifting their labor costs onto the backs of tax payers while they keep an international army of poor people living in poverty to fatten the bottom line of Wal-Mart stock dividends.

The widow of Sam Walton and their three children together have as much wealth as the bottom 42% of America's economy...one family has as much wealth as 150 million Americans, many of whom work for the Walton family.  How on earth could they give back?..... an art museum!

I don't usually say anything about Mothers' Day because there are so many people for whom that has not worked out too well.... Those still grieving the too soon loss of their mother, those who always wanted to be a mother and never could be, mothers estranged from their children and those of us who never felt the sincere warmth of the kind of mother for whom the emotional tributes of this day are inspired.  But there is a spiritual quality we look for in all of us that I believe lies at the root of what makes motherhood a status deserving of praise.

It is moral responsibility. I admire the Crystal Bridges Museum but I never drive away from it without recognizing the sacrifices made unwillingly by millions of impoverished workers to allow a single family to enjoy the appearance of largess.

We honor mothers because in the USA, unlike most of western civilization, women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn because women sacrifice promotions in their careers, forgo advanced degrees, leave the office in time to pick up kids at school and put a meal on the table, coach the soccer team and direct traffic in front of the school so that their children will have a better life.  Don't think we don't notice.... Ok, I noticed!

There are no ads on TV tempting you towards responsibility and virtue.  Every bit of media stimulation speaks to your appetite for a more sparkly diamond, a nicer home, more alcohol and a more attractive spouse but nothing tells you that there can be something redemptive about meaningful self-denial.  You are likely to only get that here so I hope you can hear me.

How Jesus Lives in the Church

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Easter 3a  May 4, 2014

Luke 24:28-35
28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29But they urged him strongly, saying, 'Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.' So he went in to stay with them. 30When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.31Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 32They said to each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?' 33That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34They were saying, 'The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!' 35Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Many of you came to us from churches that taught you to take biblical stories fairly literally.  Most of you grew up as Catholics, Baptists or members of the Assemblies of God or the Church of Christ.

Many of you have expressed both shock and a tinge of outrage when you have learned that most of the Bible's history is not historical and that none of the miracles or other worldly claims should be taken literally.

I didn't grow up in a conservative church through I sure did grow up in a conservative part of the world that, even after the passage of half of a century has only evolved to the point of being sufficiently liberal to elect the likes of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to represent them in Congress.

The church I grew up in, even in the 50's and 60's was a labor union organizing, school integrating, capital punishment opposing, war protesting congregation with a prophetic and academic pastor.

But I did have a flirtation with fundamentalism.  As a college student majoring in philosophy, I was naturally drawn to religious debate and I found myself, for all of the wrong reasons, married to a very ardent member of the hard right wing, non-instrumental Church of Christ.

We were both students at Memphis State University and as involved in the Church of Christ campus ministry there as were any of the full-time paid staff members.  I was just a 19 year old sophomore but I was so curious about Biblical studies that I audited classes at the Church of Christ Graduate School of Religion.

Now, there were right wing evangelicals there who were as literalist as any reality denying televangelist you have ever seen but that was not true of the Bible scholars.  Even there, even 35 years ago, even in the heart of the deep, deep south, the Bible professors were telling us not to take talk about incarnation, substitutionary death or even resurrection literally.

I strongly suspect that none of the students sitting around me in class who were going on to become Church of Christ ministers ever breathed a word of this in the churches that would later employ them, but I know, because I heard it with my own two ears, that they were exposed to a critical understanding of scripture.

This came to mind for me as I read over the scripture reading from the lectionary for this third Sunday of Easter because there was a day when, in a fit of adolescent self confidence, I challenged one of the graduate students about the resurrection of Jesus by quoting this Emmaus Road text from Luke.
He was not more than three or four years my senior but he looked as if my ignorance was breaking his heart as he shook his head and looked at the floor.  He said, "Can't you see that this is just an early church sacramental myth?"  And, I had to be honest, I not only didn't see it but I didn't know what the word "sacramental" meant.  It was a painful conversation.

And just as an aside, I want to assure you that while monolithic churches like the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Church, the Lutheran Church, etc. may have all kinds of parish pastors and priests who deal in magic and superstition day in and day out, they all have scholars among them who know better.  The Catholic Church has some of the most amazing scholars in every field of religion but their work unfortunately tends to stay bottled up in graduate schools, rarely finding a footing in either the church or the Vatican.

But Biblical scholarship can be sort of like looking at a "Where's Waldo" puzzle.  You can't see Waldo at all until the moment you do see him and from that moment on, any time you look back at that puzzle, your eye goes right to him. Once you can see how the gospels were constructed to teach a theological message but not to give a historical account, it is so obvious that you can never go back.

The disciples and the members of the early church had some kind of profound experience of the continued presence of Jesus after he was dead.  They tried to articulate that experience in ways to pass along both their experience and to tell successive generations that the same potential existed for them.
Paul, the earliest of Christian writers, does not claim that there was an empty tomb on Easter morning or that the literal body of Jesus showed up at meals and church gatherings.  The earliest layer of Christian tradition described resurrection as being visionary.  The resurrection accounts were always metaphorical with even the same authors occasionally contradicting themselves.

Luke, who wrote both the gospel we are reading today and the book of Acts, in the former says that Jesus ascended into heaven on Easter day but then in Acts he says that Jesus appeared for 40 days and then ascended to heaven.  Of course, Matthew, Mark and John don't say anything about an ascension at all... they conclude their metaphorical accounts in other ways to suit their literary needs.

All of the resurrection accounts are symbolic and formulaic.  They all serve the intended message of the writer.  They are not eyewitness accounts of a historical event.

If this is the first time you have ever heard anyone say this, then you are feeling some of what I felt that afternoon in Memphis nearly 40 years ago when this student pointed out to me that all of the resurrection appearances happen on Sundays and each had something to do with the theology of the book in which they appear.

This text, the Emmaus Road account, is literally a metaphorical description of early church worship.  Our services are structured in basically the same way.  The text begins with Jesus explaining the Hebrew Bible to the disciples just as our services begin with a scripture or wisdom reading followed by a sermon that hopefully illuminates the reading for the congregation....

I don't know how often you say to one another on the way home, "did not our hearts burn within in us when he taught us," but that's the idea of the text.

And, just like us, following the proclamation they gathered at the table and broke bread.  No one recognized the presence of Jesus until he broke the bread.  So, while this is not a literal account of an Easter event, it is a symbolic message that says, you will encounter the resurrected Jesus when you meet in community, share in a discussion of scripture and celebrate communion with your brothers and sisters in the faith community.

And then, in the narrative, Jesus simply disappears but the disciples are affected by the encounter.
So, if the resurrection accounts are not to be taken literally, what is the intended message?  What does resurrection mean for the church two thousand years later?

If either our good friends and Bible scholars, David Trobisch or Charles Hedrick, were here preaching this message today, this is the point where they would stop talking and sit down.

A good Bible professor will basically tell you that what you grew up believing is absurd and indefensible.  This is what the text meant to the author.  But when it comes to posing the question, "What does this mean for you or for the church today?" they would leave that entirely up to you.
And that, my dear friends, is the difference between a Bible scholar and a pastor. You are always welcome to completely ignore us but we feel compelled to tell you what we think it should mean to you!

Seriously, the most obvious and the most likely reaction to being made aware of the fact that the Bible should not be taken literally or historically is to then be fairly dismissive of it.  You can tell your friends, I used to consider myself to be a Christian but then I found out the Bible was just a bunch of myths and metaphors and now I don't care anymore.

Which is pretty much how we all feel about Greek mythology, right?  We read the Iliad and Odyssey in middle school but we don't then start to worship Zeus or pray to Aphrodite for a prom date.  You read it and it affects you the way that a lesson in history, or sociology affects you but it does not dig down into your psyche the way a religious message might.  And you no more believe that Jesus turned water into wine than the Greek god, Bacchus, was said to have turned water into wine a thousand years before the story was attached to Jesus.

There is even evidence that the priests at the Bacchanal temples rigged up a fake duplication of the miracle annually, locking a drum of water into chamber over night where secret tubes drained the water and replaced it with wine to amaze the faithful each year.

But Luke is not trying to sell his readers on Christian hocus-pocus.  They knew their accounts were not literal but they also knew that they were true.  They describe Jesus appearing on Sundays as a metaphoric way of saying that whenever a few of you are gathered in his name that his is in the midst of you. They didn't literally see that with their eyes, but they experienced it.

And some people are going to describe that spiritually and others would describe it psychologically but what you can see from the spread of the faith and the survival of the faith is that people continued to experience something that was life altering and profound.  For me, the hocus-pocus gets in the way of the deeper reality that is symbolized when we gather, discuss wisdom teachings and share a symbolic meal.

Faith communities are not immune to melodrama, gossip or petty competition but what Luke, and John, and Matthew hold out to later generations in their Easter story is that is a potential for a life altering encounter in community that is not available on any other day of the week.

The old religious hocus pocus was convince people that they had an invisible soul that was destined for an eternity in an invisible place of torment but the church, that created the problem, was also the only institution that could sell you a cure.... A cure that not only would cost you morning a week and a lot of money but would also involve denying you almost everything in the world that is pleasant for a person to do.

That is not Luke's story... it is not my story and I hope that one day soon the old bad theology of threat and cure will pass away and we can get back to a serious understanding of what the gospel writers meant when they referenced the faith community as being the body of Christ.

Healthy spirituality has been so obscured by unhealthy religion that it would be easy for those who, once liberated from mythological religious manipulation, to toss the whole business without ever slowing down to see the value of true community.

The literal can hide the real.  Magic and make mystery seem absurd.  But as Tillich said, sometimes you have to kill the little god in order to be able to see the big God.

Behind all that is wrong about traditional religion stands a reality, clothed in mystery, and promising personal transformation and if I can take these texts seriously, it is found only in community.

Allow yourself to suspend doubt for a moment.... Let yourselves believe what the gospels say is true... that the resurrected Jesus is found within the people standing around you.  How is he to be revealed?

Certainly he will not show himself by dissecting one another through gossip and criticism... he will not be found by enumerating and cataloguing one another's irritating qualities or bad habits, nor will he be found through dismissal of those who lack physical beauty.  Still, there is a way and discovering that, I can only leave up to you.

Those Three Magic Words (I Forgive You)

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Easter 2   April 27, 2014

John 20:19-23
19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you."22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

My daughter is movie star beautiful.  I say that with a certain shameless pride because, clearly, I made no genetic contribution to my very Asian daughter's appearance.  She is movie star beautiful but she is not perfect, a fact which seems to often get lost in the eyes of those who are easily star-struck by beauty.

As an Asian in a 96% white school system, she stood out and, I believe both her school peers and her teachers gave her a pass on many assignments and expectations because people naturally liked her and wanted to be liked by her.  Before adopting this little rock star, I had never had reason to consider the potential liability of beauty.  When friends and success come too easily, you can start to assume that the world owes you kindness, generosity, the best seat, the first place in line, and you can afford to be dismissive of people who don't measure up to your unrealistic standards.

We had several conversations in the process of growing up about the minimum expectation that if someone is nice to you the very least that the universe demands of you is to be nice in return.  Boys fight, vandalize, tear stuff up, and generally test the boundaries of civilization as they are growing up but girls.... Girls verbally cannibalize one another.

When all of her very pretty friends from her cheerleading squad were over for a sleep over, I often found myself thanking God that I was not one of people in their school they were dissecting. Few things made me more proud as a father as when I heard her chiming in to defend one of their peers.

And when she was in college and, naturally, joined the pretty girl's sorority, I was proud when, as an upper classman, she defended the candidacy of young women who were not attractive, who had weight and complexion problems, or who didn't have the resources to have nice clothes.

When I was a kid, one of the most popular movies was they syrupy sad film, Love Story.  Perhaps the single most quoted line from any movie in those days was the claim that.... And I bet you can say it with me.... "Love means never having to say 'I'm sorry.'"

I was no Einstein but even as a very young kid, I knew that was a load of bologna.  I grew up as the youngest of four kids in a family that was, as Elizabeth Warren described her childhood, on the ragged edge of the middle class.  Resources, both financial and emotional, were scarce and so there was some fierce competition among us and we did not always fight fair.

Remaining in a relationship.... Be that marriage, family, friends, work associates, or neighbors, means being willing to say, "I'm sorry."  It means choosing to be grateful for kindnesses shown.  It means learning the relationship skills of not taking others for granted... not abusing them and assuming that it is their job to take it off of you and pretend the next day that it didn't happen because you are so special that you deserve extra grace.
Humans are pack animals.  One of the most cruel forms of punishment in any prison system is solitary confinement.  We do not do well without other people in our lives.  The famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, lived as a hermit for years on the grounds of the Gethsemane Monastery.  His abbot agreed to let him live in a hermitage rather than in the monastic house with the rest of the monks because, he said, that Merton was the most difficult person to get along with he had ever met.

Yet Merton wrote in his journal, "Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone. We find it with another." I find that the ability to maintain meaningful friendships, family relationships, marriages and sibling relationships to be one of casualties of the modern era.  Our mobile population with so many forms of entertainment and distraction, and myriad methods of communication has, in many ways, turned us all into the pretty girl in elementary school who can afford to be mean to people at will.

I live alone and work alone.  Other than public services and counseling appointments, it would be entirely possible for me to spend days on end without ever having to interact with anyone.  But I have hundreds of channels on TV, podcasts and videos to approximate human voices and interactions.  I have hundreds of friends on Face Book and thousands of viewers with whom I correspond on line.  Still, I feel the existential reality of my own isolation and am shocked with how fragile real human connections really are.


Most of you know that with this Wednesday's paper, my long running opinion column in the Springfield News-Leader will come to an end.  I was not ready to give it up, even after 20 years of being the most vilified of liberal writers in Southern Missouri, because that media contact with the people of Springfield has been a vital outlet for me.

Still, I am realizing that the drum beat of hate mail, and especially the vicious comments posted every week in the newspapers on-line comment area, have been poisoning me for years.  I never gained the discipline to just not look.  I seemed to be as drawn to the comments as a cat to cat-nip, and I often felt as humiliated by my reactions to the mean and critical posts I read as a cat walking away from a cat-nip mouse hoping that no one saw her behavior.

I'm no saint, but even a saint has a limited supply of patience and thick-skinned endurance.  I believe that for a lot of the past generation I have walked around with most of my supply of patience and generous kindness about a quart low because it was used up on hostile readers.  I am going to make it my conscious goal to be a better friend, a more patient and tolerant person and more naturally forgiving.  But, like when it comes to weight loss, I will not likely appreciate being reminded of this goal or being offered unsolicited advice on how to do it.

Our gospel lesson today comes from the gospel of John.  I usually avoid reading John in our services because the Jesus John describes is the most magical and least human of all of the gospel accounts.

At the end of the first century, John is at such pains to elevate the image of Jesus above any competing religious figures that he gives us gross exaggerations of walking on water, miracle healings and a magical transformation of water into wine.  His resurrection stories make Jesus out to be so much God and that places him beyond meaningful connection to actual people.

But there is something about this story that I can't let go of.  This Jesus, whom John describes as being give sight to the blind, feed the multitudes and to even raise the dead, comes to see his disciples after his own miraculous resurrection and he gives to them one magical power... and I would go so far as to say that it is a magical power... a power given to the apostles and given to you and to me.... John says that Jesus breathed on them.  Breath is symbolic of the force of life, of soul, of spirit... Jesus breaths on them and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit....now if you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven."

If ever there was a time that you were going to take John literally, please do it here.  You have the power to forgive sins... you just have to be willing to do it.  You have the power to heal broken relationships...To restore family ties...You have the ability to end hostilities...to give strength, confidence, and renewed ability to your own children, if you will choose to forgive.

Marriages don't have to run out of love.  Sisters and brothers do not have to become estranged.  Friendships do not have to die from time and distance.  You never have to throw a co-worker under the bus.  You do not have to give reign to your bad moods to emotionally abuse the people near to you.
The French poet, Anais Nin wrote, "Love never dies a natural death.  It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.  It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals.  It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

Remember the source of what made you fall in love, what common bonds made you friends, the shared vision of justice, compassion and love that drew us together.  And do not forget to use your magical powers for good... forgive... be the first one to forgive.... Forgive generously, recklessly, divinely.

Saving Jesus

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Easter    April 20, 2014


Among the historically anomalous gather of geniuses who were the signers of the American Declaration of Independence and who later gathered to write our constitution was that Renaissance-man, and our third president, Thomas Jefferson.  Though more famous lately for some siring a family blood line through a mistress who was a slave on his farm, other than being a fairly typical 18th century scoundrel, he was also a man who had many interests in which he was well ahead of his time.

He studied architecture, botany, animal husbandry, agriculture, medicine, surveying, government and, of personal interest to me, he dabbled in historical Jesus studies.  He didn't have much to go on beyond his own intuition but he was an uncommonly smart fellow.

Those must have been heady days, once the War of Independence had been won and this robust gathering of thinkers stood on the starting line of what would be the most rapid advance in technology, transportation, communication and philosophy that the world had ever seen.  They were both liberated and compelled towards greatness.  They looked backwards for guidance from the great civilizations of human history but they gave themselves complete liberty to do new things.

Most of our nation's founders were either deists or they were nominally Christian.  As indifferent towards religion as we believe our own time to be, some religious historians estimate that only about 2% of Americans actually attended church at the time the Constitution was written.
The reason you didn't run into any traffic jams on the way here this morning is because even on Easter, only about 20% of Americans are going to church.

An American president couldn't do it today because our nation is much much more religiously conservative now than it was two and a half centuries ago, but President Jefferson read the Christian gospels and felt that there was a message there that was vital to preserve but that message was obscured by a layer of miracles, magic. To recover the teachings of Jesus, Jefferson wrote that, "we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves."

He removed the resurrection texts, the miracles and all references to the divine and had the end product published at tax payer expense so that he could give a copy to every member of Congress.  Something that would have resulted in an impeachment in our era though even then it did kick up a bit of a furor.

Jefferson didn't have the benefit of having access to well thought-out books of theology or historical reviews of scripture.  He was, however, a very intelligent rational man and he just knew that the magical parts of scripture were the commercials but not the real show.  There were those in the ancient church who knew this as well.... When I learned about them in seminary, we called the "heretics".... Arianism and Ebonism both argued for a human Jesus but their perspective and their literature was stamped out by what became the official orthodox view in the time of Constantine.

In the past century, better equipped scholars from the early part of the 20th century tried to rescue the message of Jesus again.  Albert Schweitzer, Paul Tillich, and Rudolph Bultmann would be among the more familiar names from a rising tide of Biblical, theological and historical scholars who worked to bring rational thought back to the practice of faith.

When Tim Rice wrote the lyrics to Jesus Christ Superstar, he was only in his mid-twenties and he claimed to have no particular theological training beyond his parochial school experience.  I find that almost impossible to believe given that I was also a product of the church of the 1960's and there was no such sophistication present in the religious lessons in my childhood.

It is possible that he, like Jefferson two centuries before, just looked at the story and was able to dismiss most of the obviously contrived theological hocus-pocus that had been layered over the real Jesus.  The lyrics of Jesus Christ Superstar do not rise to the level of the work of Tillich or Bultmann but it sure does have a better beat.

Were it not for this music, I doubt that I ever would have gotten around to reading Bultmann or Tillich.  Tim Rice claimed that he was trying to tell the story from the perspective of Judas and, to a certain degree, he does though there is a lot of power in the words of Mary, Pilate and even Caiaphas to let us hear the teachings of Jesus more clearly.

I regret for those who follow us on YouTube and iTunes that we cannot legally share with you the music as we are hearing it performed live here today.  I do encourage you to dust off your old album or video and give it another listen.

For those of us here in Springfield, though, I am pleased to be able to join you in this experience of hearing a musical rescue of the Jesus whose teachings still define us.

The Passion Narrative as Autobiography

Community Christian Church of Springfield  
Roger Ray, pastor
Palm Sunday    April 13, 2014

Matthew 27:27-37
27 Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor's headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. 28They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, 29and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, 'Hail, King of the Jews!' 30They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. 31After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.
32 As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross. 33And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), 34they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. 35And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots; 36then they sat down there and kept watch over him. 37Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, 'This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.'

It seems that spring is finally here to break the icy grip of one of the most miserable winters in recent history.  Today is Palm Sunday which means that next week we can look forward to a family holiday replete children excitedly wearing their new Easter clothes outside hunting for eggs, the sanctuary will be filled with women in spring hats, and now that the Final Four is over, husbands and wives can try to break the icy silence and begin speaking to one another again.

So I know that the one thing you all want to hear me talk about today is the tortured logic of the Supreme Court's decision to dismantle campaign finance reform regulations.... Don't ever tell me that I don't know my audience!

I happened to be in attending a conference in Washington, DC in 2005 when Chief Justice Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court.  I met an attorney friend of mine for dinner while I was there and she could hardly stop talking about how excited she was to have Roberts appointed to the court.
She had worked with him in a Washington law firm and she told me, "Roger you are going to love this man.  He is an ardent Catholic, a great family man and one of the most honest and intelligent people in the world."

I think that I made some desultory comment about how unlikely that it seemed that I would like anyone appointed by George Bush and we moved on to our remarkably overpriced entrees.  Everything in DC seems overpriced to me but perhaps we have to try to see such things through the eyes of one of Justice Roberts' "Stone Aged" peers on the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia said regarding the McCutcheon vs. FEC ruling that lifts that donation aggregate ceiling from $75,000 to $3.5 million, "I don't think that $3.5 million is a heck of a lot of money."

Once you are in a position to say that $3.5 million is not a heck of a lot of money, then paying $75 for half a chicken breast on a bed of pasta makes more sense.  But Justice Roberts, this ardent Catholic, honest, intelligent man, said about this ruling:

"Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties, does not give rise to such quid pro quo corruption. Nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner 'influence over or access to' elected officials or political parties."

Now, don't let this slip past you.... Justice Roberts.... This brilliant legal mind, said that people who donate millions of dollars to a political campaign are not necessarily expecting to either influence what candidates do when they are elected nor do they even expect to have greater access to the people to whom they have given millions of dollars.

And you have to say right up front that there is no way that you can claim that Justice Roberts is not a smart man.  This is a very intelligent man who is deeply entrenched inside the Washington bubble who can straight faced look into the cameras and say that people who donate millions of dollars do not want anything in return.

These recent Supreme Court decisions that have opened the flood gate to unlimited political influence peddling is an undeniable attempt on the part of the ruling elite to hold onto power even as their voter base is quickly dying off.  They are manipulating voter registration and voting laws to limit the number of poor, elderly and minority voters will be able to cast votes, and removing all accountability around the money in politics so that the party of the super wealthy can hold onto control of the government for a little longer.

So, when Justice Roberts says that multi-million dollar donations have no influence on either policy or access to elected officials, he is not dumb enough to believe that it is true but, and here is the point of my narrative, he wants to believe that it is true and by wanting to believe it, he can convince himself to deny reality, lie to himself, lie to the world, and ignore the consequences.

And one last political point, because I believe that this needs to be said:  Sheldon Adelson, the casino operator who donated $93 million dollars in the 2012 election cycle, is a conservative Jewish Zionist.

Now let me say that even if I were the dictator of the world and could just move national boundaries around at will, I'm not sure what I would do to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem.  We are more than a half a century deep into a very wrong headed land theft and resettlement program that just isn't workable.  I have sincere feelings of sympathy on both sides of this issue and I have no idea how it can be resolved peacefully.

Still, what I know with certainty is that the American military subsidies of Israel are so huge and so irrational specifically because of the financial influence on our government by political donations from people with mindsets like Adelson.  Adelson donates tens of millions to political campaigns and then our government gives over $3 billion every year to support Israel's military... and though we cannot make huge political campaign donations, we do pay hefty taxes to pay for Israel's military.

With all due respect for Justice Roberts' wishful thinking, I'm suggesting that there not only is a "quid pro quo" involved in these political contributions but I am saying that the quid pro quo come with a huge price tag for you and for me and, more importantly, it keeps us from doing things like extending unemployment benefits, providing mental health care for returning veterans, and appropriate and safe schools for children in poor neighborhoods.

If I can bring this back to the gospel lesson today and pose the larger question, "Why do otherwise good people tell lies and act like they are not lying?"  I am inclined to take my friends word at face value... she knew John Roberts as an attorney, a family man, a business partner and a Christian.
Now the whole world can see that he is also a hypocritical liar but what does he see when he looks in the mirror every morning? My guess is that when John Roberts looks into his bathroom mirror every morning, he sees a brilliant, Supreme Court Chief Justice who is a good family man and a good Catholic.

So we read the passion narrative in the gospels.  Jesus is falsely accused.  His brothers and sisters are nowhere to be seen.  His good friends fade back into the shadows.  Religious leaders conspire with political officials to trump up a case against him.

The priests can say, "Thank God we saved the people from that socio-path they were following."  His siblings can say, "His arrogance finally got the best of him."  The political leaders probably didn't say much at all..... Jesus never came close to the old $75,000 cap on political donations so he never really mattered to them.

We read the passion narrative of Jesus, not because we think that Jesus was God or even because we think the gospel writers are giving us a reliable historical account.  We read it as a story, an archetypal story. We read it because it tells our own story.

When you read any great story, you have feelings for the characters in the story and a lot of those feelings are rooted with how deeply you identify with the characters.  Why do you think that Halloween is such a popular holiday for children?

They have a deep, a primal desire to be the characters they have seen in their stories.  It always worries me a little bit when you see a kid choose to be Darth Vader or Freddie Krueger.... I don't want to over interpret that.
But when you read the passion narrative, you probably want to identify with Jesus, as sad as the outcome of the narrative is.  You don't want to be the callous and morally indifferent governor of Palestine.  You don't want to be the unfaithful friends, the lying religious leaders, the back stabbing best friend who throws Jesus under the bus.  Nobody wants to be Peter on that day.  No one wants to be Judas, or Pilate or Caiaphas.

But what do you want to bet that Caiaphas brushed his teeth that night and went to bed with no trouble at all?  That Pilate got up the next day, looked in the mirror and saw a powerful and wise ruler?  The gospels tell us that Peter was ashamed and Judas killed himself but it this were a real life drama, I would bet that they both would have gotten up the next day and said to themselves, "I sure am tired of all of the drama that Jesus creates."

The passion narrative has staying power through the centuries because, at some level, we have lived it, felt it, known it.  Like all archetypal narratives then, it is cathartic to us to hear it again, to feel it again.  But is there a larger point?

I hope so.  What if Justice Thomas, also an ardent Catholic, had looked at Justice Scalia and said, "You're joking.  $3.5 million dollars is an obscene amount of money and it could ruin our democracy."  What if Justice Kennedy would have pulled Roberts aside and said, "Do you realize that the legacy of your court is going to make you look like a corrupt joke in history?  Don't you want to work to preserve democracy rather than flushing it down the toilet?"

We somehow live in a world in which a President and a Vice-President can say that torturing prisoners is not torture because we don't torture and if we did it that it wasn't torture.  And presented with that circular logic, the country shrugs its collective shoulders and doesn't put that President and Vice-President on trial for war crimes.

Could it be that we are willing to pass on such things because we have grown so accustomed to it in our personal lives?  That people wish that something was true and so they tell themselves that it is true... have we allowed our conscience to wander away from reality so far that we believe in our own innocence, we believe our own lies, we abandon family members, throw friends under the bus, and acquiesce to falsehood to keep ourselves out of any uncomfortable fray?

Would any of us rushed in and saved Jesus from Judas' betrayal, Caiaphas' false allegations, or Pilate's depraved indifference?  If you wouldn't, if you know that you wouldn't, then decisions like our recent Supreme Court decisions and all of the times that you have felt betrayed just make sense... they are par for the course.

I think that what we owe to the universe is more than a casual acquaintance with the truth.  When it really matters, when someone is getting hurt, don't let your friends lie to themselves about their involvement.  Don't turn your back on your siblings when they really need your support.  Don't throw your friends under the bus just because doing so may raise your status or give you a temporary feeling of power.

Don't be Pilate, or Judas, or Caiaphas, or Peter or any of the unnamed siblings or disciples who risked nothing and cost Jesus his life.  You be the game changer, the truth teller, the one who wouldn't go along to get along.
You'll have fewer friends but better friends and when you look in the mirror in the morning you won't have to lie to yourself.

Preaching to Bones (I Can't Believe that I am Still Protesting this Same Old Stuff)

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
Lent 5    April 6, 2014

Ezekiel 37:1-14
37The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I answered, "O Lord God, you know." 4Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord." 7So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." 10I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.11Then he said to me, "Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' 12Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act," says the Lord.

I know that it is said that if you remember the 60's that you were not there.  I suppose that I have some advantage for having enter the 60's as a pre-schooler but I remember where I was when I learned that President Kennedy had been shot.  I was at my grandparents' home when Bobby Kennedy was shot.

I remember the Walter Cronkite telling us about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  I remember segregated schools, coloreds only drinking fountains, and more than that, I remember the vociferous debates about women's rights.

I remember enough that if you long for the good ol days that I am willing to say that you were not there.  I remember when my sister had to wear a skirt to school in the dead of winter even when we were being dropped off by my dad on his way to work and we had to stand outside for 30 or 40 minutes while my sister and all of the other girls shivered in their absurdly short skirts.

I remember the public humiliation of anyone in the church who got a divorce for any reason.  I remember the shame involved with out of wedlock pregnancy and the fight that did not come to the Supreme Court until the 1970's for a woman to be able to govern her own body and I remember how we lost the first for an equal rights amendment to the constitution.

The arrival of the birth control pill was relatively new in those days, setting off a heated debate about God's role in pregnancy and the moral decisions to either prevent pregnancy or terminate an unwanted pregnancy.  The private and most personal aspects of a woman's life were literally on the witness stand of a culture that did not want to give up on 19th century morals in light of a 20th century culture.

I don't miss those days.  The prevalence of television news, the advent of a phone in every house and the explosion of publication were helping the world to awaken from its infancy.  But there were casualties along the way.

We did not know how to protest a war and honor the poor who were drafted to fight in the war.  The seeds of political polarization and distrust for government were planted in those years with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the televised impeachment of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.  No matter how much TV sitcoms may try to romanticize this era, I was there and it was nothing to idealize.... And I was a white, male, Protestant, middle class, heterosexual which, in almost every way that mattered, meant that this was the pinnacle of social success for people like me.

I had only just adopted my little brown daughter when I moved to Springfield and at my first Council of Churches annual dinner, the speaker was a former president of what was then called Southwest Missouri State University.  This distinguished white, male, Protestant, upper middle class, heterosexual spoke at length about the changing demographics of America.

In intonations of dread and fear, he recited the numerical shifts from a majority white America to a majority non-white America...from a safely secure English speaking America to a bilingual America. The brown, immigrant, woman I had mistaken taken to the dinner with me kept looking at me as if I had taken her to a KKK rally that I had innocently enough assumed would be a church dinner.

I'm pretty sure that the speaker was trying to say that we all needed to prepare for substantive change in our nation but he was not saying it with joyful anticipation.... It was more of a call to stockpile weapons and provisions for the coming anarchy.

More than 20 years have passed since that day and I'm certain if the speaker in question were to hear my description of his presentation that he would be mortified and would, just as segregationists of the 1960's did after integration, and he would insist that he had recited these numbers as a ebullient herald of good times to come.

The gains made in civil rights and women's rights in the 1960's and 70's and the gains made in gay rights as the millennial mark was passed were, in many ways, concessions of a majority to a minority. Now, as that majority fades into the reality of the approaching minority status, we are seeing some old bones of battles fought long ago, coming back to life to fight once more.

The image of a field of dry bones in the book of Ezekiel is, of course, a highly symbolic account.  The question being posed to Ezekiel is if the ruined remains of Judah can ever be revived.  The vision is set on a battlefield where Judah had suffered its most decisive defeat.

The text has appealed to preachers who see themselves as the prophet and their congregations as the field of dry bones.  It seems to rarely occur to preachers just how narcissistic that setting really is.  I have always hated the association with shepherding language in the ministry in which the pastor is the shepherd and the congregation is a flock of sheep.  If you know much about sheep, that is not much of a compliment.

You are not sheep and I am not a shepherd.  And you are most certainly not a field of dry bones being addressed by a prophet.  We are either a prophetic community together or I am just an opinionated corpulent cleric as full of hot air as the next excessively opinioned guy with a web page and a podcast.

The dry bones that I am seeing come back to life in our nation right now are the dry bones from the 60's and 70's from battles that I thought we had won long ago and would never need to be discussed again.  What we called "the pill" way back then is, for reasons I find to be absolutely beyond comprehension, under discussion again.

Rush Limbaugh made a complete fool of himself calling a young college student derisive names for wanting birth control bills included in their health care coverage two years ago but that that time he looked like a loan lunatic.  Since then we have had corporations, churches, and even politicians weighing in from former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, suggesting that women just need to hold their knees together to just a couple of weeks ago, Alaska state senator, Pete Kelly insisting that women who use contraception lacked self control and even going so far as to say that women should have to take a pregnancy test in bars before being allowed to order a drink.... All of which is an attempt to put American women, not so much back into a skirt but into a social burka that would place them back in the control of men.

And, not that this is a comfortable topic for the pulpit, but just in the past three months there have been more than 40 state and federal attacks on providing birth control to women without so much as a mention of the money provided for both male impotence medications and even the $172 million dollars spent by Medicare for a pump used by men.



A device that, until recently, I just thought was an Austin Powers movie joke but, and I am sad to tell you, this is true, these devices exist and we are paying for them with our tax dollars for senior citizens while trying to deny young women basic birth control.

Abortion rights, hard fought for in the 1970's, has been under attack ever since but now, failing on that front and facing a declining majority, there is a veritable American Taliban trying to bring back an era that none of us would want to live in even if it could be brought back.

Just this week the conservative majority of the Supreme Court struck down, over minority protests, what little remained of the election reforms passed by congress after Watergate.  As their voting base gets smaller and smaller, the white, male grip on power is taking desperate measures to make it harder for minorities to vote and easier for rich people to buy elections.

The congress passed these election contribution limits so that people could regain confidence in our government and believe that we were really a part of a democracy.  But Chief Justice Roberts said that the campaign contribution limit of just less than $75,000 every two year election cycle was limiting freedom of speech.

Now, folks, work with me here... in a democracy, doesn't freedom of speech mean that we all have the same freedom?  But if money is speech, then the people who have more money, have more speech, right?  Did lifting the maximum contribution to political campaigns of $75,000 affect any of you?
Do any of you have more freedom of speech now than you had last year?  Most people of modest income don't contribute anything to political campaigns.  The highly motivated might donate $5 or $10.  I am very highly motivated, I earn a professional salary and I have never made a political contribution of more than $50 because, quite frankly, I can't afford much more.

If I thought it was urgent.... Let's say that Wendy Davis had a real chance of winning her gubernatorial candidacy in Texas or if Elizabeth Warren were running for president, I might go crazy and donate a $100.  Of course, now the very wealthy on the other side of the equation can donate a million dollars or more.  So one wealthy person can have as much freedom of speech as a thousand people like me.

Or if you are one of the really big players, like Sheldon Adelson, who donated $93 million dollars in 2012, then he has more voice than a million people like me, and if you factor in the people who will donate $5 then this one casino owner has more freedom of speech than twenty million Americans.  Is that democracy?

We have, at times, derided the compromise our founding fathers made in writing the constitution in which they decided that a black person was three-fifths of a person.  There were those who felt that slaves were not people at all and southern slave owners who wanted to count their slaves in order to gain more political influence in the federal government so they settled on the compromise of the three-fifths rule.

That was a horrible, demeaning, morally repugnant page in American history but looking at our Supreme Court today, I would say that it was at least three-fifths!  In matters of political speech, no one in this room is three-fifths of a person, none of us are one tenth, one hundredth of a person.

If we do not speak collectively, our voices cannot be heard at all.  We do not exist.

These protections of democracy are being dismantled in hurried succession with the assumption that the collective will of the people that demanded an end to the war in Vietnam, an end to segregation, an end to gender discrimination and a liberation of the gay community is now either asleep or lying scattered around a field of dry bones..... no longer willing to muster the energy or breath to resist a return to the days of domination, oppression and control.

The greatest criticism I have of the modern day progressive is that our cynicism has become our sacrament.  There is no collective action ever taken by people who are just privately bitter.

The real gift of Martin Luther King in the 60's and Rev. William Barber, the organizer of the Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina in our time, is that they have been somehow able to get people to bring their anger, their cynicism, their disappointment, their refusal to accept oppression, into collective action to stand together, to march together, to sing together, to worship, protest and organize so that they can bring the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the union movement, the gay rights movement, together to speak with one prophetic voice for justice.

Can the dry bones of our former passions be knit together, covered with flesh and given new breath?  I don't know.... I honestly don't know.  But I hope so.  The only substantive hope is if we will stick together.