Creating an Exceptional America

Independence Day Sermon   June 29, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Martin Luther King, Jr. - "A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world."

It was 11 years ago last month when then Vice President Dick Cheney addressed the 2003 graduating class of West Point.  He told the young officers:

"If there is anyone in the world today who doubts the seriousness of the Bush Doctrine, I would urge that person to consider the fate of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq,"

OK, then, I will:  Now, after 12 years of war, tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars spent, the Taliban is making a resurgence in Afghanistan and the old government of Saddam Hussein, in the form of ISIS, is sweeping back into Iraq.  Based on the facts of history, the Bush Doctrine was a nightmare.

In light of the religious civil war in Iraq, a nearly completely inept news media has rushed to give interviews to the very people who were abolutely wrong about everything they said, predicted and wanted to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I cannot imagine how the likes of Cheney, John McCain, Paul Wolfowitz, or even Mitt Romney can imagine that anyone cares what they have to say on this topic and yet the media rushed to record their completely irrational views.

Still, even someone who has sold out to right wing extremism as much as Fox News' Megen Kelly, had to pull the plug on Cheney's narcissistic ramblings to remind him that he was entirely wrong about Iraq during his time in office and no amount of revisionist history can change that.

But on both the left and the right, we have been treated to a couple of weeks of very public recriminations of Iraq's Prime Minster, Nouri al-Maliki, for not having created a coalition government that gave Sunnis, Shi'a, and Kurds a share in power.

Let me say that a little slower so it can sink in..... Republican and Democratic elected politicians in the United States have been critical of al-Maliki for not building a cooperative coalition government in Iraq where all sides can peacefully get along.  Can you feel that irony?

It may be that once western powers withdraw their forces and allow the tribal and religious contests of the Middle East to run their course, that there will be a redrawing of the lines that separate many of those nations.  We may see fairly monolithic Sunni and Shi'a nations emerge next to a new Kurdistan and maybe even a new Persia.

What I know with certainty, what I said about this more than a decade ago, is just this:  American military intervention can only make matters worse.

And even when the civil wars are over, the Middle East is facing a huge crisis in the very near future as alternative fuel sources will destroy the market for their dwindling reserves of crude oil.
Imagine a Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait without a huge and constant influx of oil dollars.

Imagine over populated Egypt without the economic support of oil rich neighbors.  If I were the Czar of the Middle East, I would immediately imitate China's "one child" program to quickly reduce the total population and then I would invest heavily in manufacturing and agriculture so that a smaller population could support themselves in the late 21st century when oil will no longer drive the global economy.

Nothing else, in my opinion, can give them a future past the next half-century. No military action, no government manipulation can solve the real problems that lie ahead of them.  Maybe the Sunnis will prevail, maybe it will be the Shi'a or the Kurds, but without a radically different economy, they are all going to starve.  This is the real issue and yet I have never heard this glaring fact discussed in any corporate media.

I am not an isolationist but I have come to regard these Middle Eastern challenges something like my desire to choose the man my daughter will marry.  I am confident that I know more about what would give her happiness, stability, and security than she does, but I have had to realize that all I can to give my daughter to guide her into a healthy marriage is to set a good example for her.... In which case, I really need to get busy working on my own issues and allow her to find her own way, for good or for ill.  And that, I believe, should describe our foreign policy towards the Middle East.

This week as we celebrate Independence Day in the United States, replete with all of the fireworks that imitate the artillery and bomb blasts of the war that gave us our independence from that foreign nation that kept sending troops here to teach us how to manage ourselves, we have a lot of serious challenges facing us.

 While the Middle East is seeing the future of the oil market collapsing, we are riding a tidal wave of new resources of natural gas, a renewed oil market and, I believe, we are standing on the brink of economically feasible wind and solar power.  The economic and political face of the world is going to change and it is likely to change very dramatically.

No great social change is good for everyone.  Massive transfers of power or wealth necessarily means that there will be winners and losers.

The only thing about which we can be certain is that the status quo, in America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia will not remain the same.  Good outcomes are not guaranteed on any of these continents.  People may become more free or governments may become more authoritarian.  Wealth may be distributed more equitably but all of the trends right now seem to be pointing towards a growing gap between the poor and the super rich.

4th of July Celebrations are usually marked by fireworks, baseball games, loud music, picnics and political speeches about how great our nation is. Most of the applause seems to go to military veterans and the chest-thumping politicians who want to send another generation of young women and men to war.

I want to take a few minutes in the midst of this holiday week, to talk about American greatness, not about what made America great when we emerged from among the nations as a global military and economic power but rather I want to talk about what can make America great in the future.
I want to talk about American exceptionalism, not from a partisan Democrat or Republican perspective but from the perspective of a parish pastor.

Our progressive faith is rooted in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth about radical compassion.  We are invested in a social justice ethic that seeks the greatest good for the largest number of people.  Because of that approach to ethics, more often than not, we will sound more like Democrats than we will Republicans though, when it comes down to actually living out our values, I don't think that we owe any loyalty to either party.

Let me just list some things that I think Republicans, Democrats and Independents should work on together to make America the greatest nation in the world.... Please hear this as religious values and not political views:

1)    We should stop all military interventions in foreign countries except when a broad international coalition is taking action to stop genocide.  We can use our superior military hardware, intelligence and ability to stop horrible social crimes but we should stop using these gifts to commit horrible social crimes.

2)    We should dramatically downsize our military presence in foreign countries, closing military bases that have not been needed since the end of WWII and the Cold War.  We should, I believe, reduce our military budget so that we have a military that can reasonably defend our borders but not try to enforce empire authority around the world.

3)  Our federal budget should be dramatically redesigned, away from military spending and towards priorities in scientific and medical research, education, alternative energy, mass transit and infrastructure. Let me offer some specifics:
 
a.  Education is key to success in the 21st century.  As such, we should stop debating the interest rates to be charged on student loans and actually subsidize education so that students who are earning degrees relevant to our nation's future should not have to take out loans.  That is, there is currently little or no connection between high education and the marketplace.

We have to recognize that there are fields of study that are crucial to our nation and others that are distinctly less so.  I'm not saying that we should underwrite an unlimited number of communication, marketing, and humanities degrees.

We need more students educated in engineering, math, science, physics, chemistry, and biology.

Yes, the world needs musicians, poets and maybe a couple of preachers and politicians but our education system has gotten totally out of sync with reality.  Why graduate a hundred young people with degrees in marketing to sell the invention of only one person who graduated in engineering?

b.  Much of what has made America great in the past was our superiority in the sciences.  For a century, most of the significant and life changing inventions in the world have come from the United States.  We are innovative, creative, imaginative people though we have lately put way too many of our smartest people into the military industrial complex and into Wall Street banking.  We need to get those people back into the business of inventing and designing for the civil market.

We invented automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, space ships, computers, cell phones, the internet, and hot pockets.... No one is right all of the time.

We have led the world in medical research, agricultural sciences, transportation and communication but we have allowed the rest of the world to do a much better job distributing, manufacturing and improving our inventions than we have.

High tech inventions come out of our Silicon Valley but all of the jobs they create end up in Asia and too much of the profits end up in secretive, tax sheltered, off shore accounts.  We need to get our greatest minds back in the fields of research and development and we need to structure our economy so that our American genius translates into good paying jobs in manufacturing and sales.

4)  To become the greatest nation in the world, we have to come to grips with the fact that not only are we not in Kansas anymore, there is no longer and likely never way a Mayberry.  While I am deeply concerned about the social and health impacts of drug abuse, our "War on Drugs" has proven to be an abysmal failure.  During this war on drugs, we have move our incarceration up over these past 40 years by 800%.... now reaching more than 2 million citizens in jails and prisons... which is robbing our nation of the resources needed to fund schools while ruining millions of families.

We should begin immediately to release every single person who is currently in jail for marijuana possession.  We should wipe out any related criminal history from their records that has kept them from getting decent jobs, educations or being able to start a business or buy a home.

Marijuana should be legal, taxed, and regulated.  Proceeds should be used to fund addiction treatment programs and substance abuse counseling.

Unlike a lot of popular jargon on the topic, I do believe that there are people who do have a serious problem with marijuana but not nearly as many as have a problem with alcohol and we have managed to make it legal, regulated and taxed.

5)  America has two great sources of shame.  The first is our treatment of the Native American Indians and the second was our violent and abusive practice of slavery.  Our Band-Aid approaches to these past grievous sins only makes matters worse, destroying the dignity and family integrity of both Indians and African Americans.  Reparations are in order but, in my opinion, not in the form of a financial hand out to the people with Indian and African ancestry but in an all-out education and jobs creation program.

Ours is one of the only nations in the world where school funding is based on the property values of the neighborhood.  We have allowed the poor districts to have the most impoverished schools while wealthy districts, where the children already have every advantage in the world, have the best funded schools.

That needs to be reversed.  The most money should go to the schools that need resources the most and it doesn't take long to see why life on Indian reservations or in inner-city broken down schools are not leading to the radical compassion we say is at the heart of our faith and it sure doesn't make America the greatest nation on earth.

We cannot realistically give North America back to the dozens of Indian Nations forced off this land nor could we give former Africans back their pre-slavery lives but we can make them real owners of property and careers in modern America and that can be done through serious education and job creation.

6)  Gasoline powered private automobiles brought modern life into existence in the middle of the 20th century but that approach to life is not sustainable.  It is killing the environment, using up natural resources while killing 40,000 people in traffic accidents every year.  We need to rebuild our nation's transportation system around fuel-efficient mass transit powered increasingly by alternative energy sources.  Unfortunately, all of the lobbyists work for the automobile, oil and highway construction companies.  We have allowed them to keep our nation deeply invested in the last century while Western Europe and China is pulling far ahead of us into the 21st century.  We can either resolve to catch up or we will have to accept a growing third world status in service to the nations that had the good sense to invest in the future rather than investing in the past.

7)  Finally, it comes down to job creation that is good for our nation and good for our personal health and the health of our environment.  But it is not just jobs.  As Jim Hightower has pointed out, slaves had jobs.  The issue is not just jobs, it is jobs with good wages.

We have cheap food and cheap clothing and cheap manufactured goods because we have lowered our standards to the point where we don't even notice if our clothes are manufactured by children living in slavery or if our food is harvested by virtual slaves.  And we have been willing to live in a world filled with disposable goods and imitation foods.

We need to stop shipping tomatoes two thousand miles from a vine in Central America to a store in the Ozarks.  We need to dramatically shift our food supply away from foreign sources.

We need to stop genetically modifying our foods, stop injecting the animals in our food chain with anti-biotic, and we need to stop drenching our vegetables in poisons.  We will pay more for our food.

There will be spots on our apples and strawberries will be closer to the size of our thumbs than to our fists but we will restore agriculture as a decent, honest, well-paying profession in America.

Our shoes will cost three or four times as much if you pay someone a living wage to make them and we'll just have to get by with a dozen pairs of shoes instead of five dozen.  If a dozen children in Malaysia, South Korea and China have to live as slaves so that we have to have huge walk in closets filled with clothes and shoes then unless you have a cold hard place where your heart was supposed to be, then we need to change this situation.

America has the genius to be great again.  But we have to want it.  It will not happen by our taking the path of least resistance.  Greatness is in our genes, it is in our spirits but it is not in our shuttered factories, coal mines and army bases.  It is, however, in our hearts if only we can get it out of our imagination and into our government, economy and into our churches.

Speaking Up in a Silent World

Proper 7   June 22, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

Jeremiah 20:7-9
O LORD, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.
 For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, "Violence and destruction!" For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.
 If I say, "I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name," then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV4qg_l8HOw

In the decade following the Revolutionary War in the United States, a handful of men were charged with writing a constitution that would guide the government of this newly independent nation.  Many among the former subjects of the British crown were reticent to invest a new national government with the kind of authority that they had only recently suffered from as colonists of Great Britain.

In order to persuade the wary colonists to ratify the constitution, James Madison presented ten amendments, a Bill of Rights, that were intended to limit the power of government and to insure certain rights and privileges to the citizens of the United States.

The fourth amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This was based on the old English law concept of the Castle Doctrine that protected each persons home and private thoughts, speech and writing as their own business and not the business of the government unless there was probable cause to believe that there was something illegal going on. Even still, the government didn't have a right to search anyone's whole life on a fishing expedition to see if they could find some crime they could prosecute.

This castle doctrine, this 4th amendment, this corner stone of our Bill of Rights, was added to the constitution when we were a tiny, weak nation that had no track record, no proof that all of the colonists who had been loyal to the British crown or the new immigrants who might be willing to work against the new American government might not be hatching some horrible plot to overthrow the government.... When we were weak, we still guaranteed citizens that the government would not go snooping in the private corners of your life, looking for something they could use to take your freedom, your liberty, your property away from you.

The man that seems to have our Secretary of State, John Kerry, all wound up and huffy about is a young guy who used to work for the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden.  Snowden saw that the government was ignoring the 4th amendment, ignoring probable cause, ignoring the due process of obtaining a warrant based on evidence and they were, instead, gathering what is called "big data" on absolutely everyone in the nation.

Snowden grabbed electronic copies of that data, headed for China and then began leaking the data to reporters to show that our nation's federal government had lost its way, was in the moral ditch, off the rails.

John Kerry tells us that Snowden is a traitor.  He says that he has hurt our nation's ability to conduct intelligence gathering... that he has endangered operatives, shown terrorists our play book and has aided America's enemies.

Euphemistically, Kerry demands that Snowden come and stand trial but then he also pronounces his guilt in the same sentence.

Now, to be fair, Snowden took a lot more data than he could have looked at in a lifetime.  He has, no doubt, leaked materials that he should not have leaked.  He has handed useful information about our intelligence agencies, staff and procedures to the people who we really don't want to have that information.  But is he a villain or a whistleblower?  Which was the greater treason, elected officials ignoring the constitution and invading the privacy of the citizens, or a citizen who exposed the massive government abuse of authority?

And Kerry thinks he should stop hiding in Russia but even though Snowden is a young man with little education and not much international spy savvy, he does know what our government did to Private Bradley Manning after he leaked documents to Wikileaks regarding war crimes committed by American soldiers. Manning was locked into solitary confinement, naked in a cold cell without bedding for a year before he was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

We get bent out of shape about the torture of captured enemy soldiers who are suspected of having information about future terrorist attacks.  Manning was tortured and he was one of us.... He was tortured for revenge.

And John Kerry thinks that Snowden should come back to the US and stand trial here.... When he already knows that the constitution and the Bill of Rights mean nothing to this government when they want to torture you in revenge for making them look bad.

John Kerry is not calling on the people who lied to the congress about Weapons of Mass Destruction, or aluminum centrifuge tubes that were part of making a nuclear weapon, or the secret trafficking of refined uranium... all of which led to more than 4000 American soldier's needless deaths and incalculable carnage in Iraq for the past 11 years and now, apparently, into the foreseeable future.

Dick Cheney is appearing on talk shows defending his record and George Bush is painting portraits of world leaders and his own toes in the bathtub.  If Kerry wants to put someone on trial, why the whistleblower and not the war criminals?  Tax payer employed guards escort Bush wherever he wants to go.... Though you will note that he does not travel abroad where most governments would arrest him and put him on trial for war crimes.... He is free, rich and protected.... But Kerry wants Snowden in a cell next to Manning.

I'm not saying that either Manning or Snowden are innocent of all wrongdoing.  Both of them broke oaths and leaked materials that they had sworn to defend.  I'm just saying that their crimes look small in comparison to the crimes they were trying to reveal.

I will defer to my favorite historian, Howard Zinn, who said it best:

"...you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who 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."

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for two years.  There are people in the American government who want to arrest Assange and bring him here to put him on trial for treason... such is the imaginative reach of some of our Tea Party supported elected officials.... They are literally so stupid that they do not know that you can't put an Australian on trial for treason against the American government.  You may think that I am exaggerating but Senator Joe Liberberman said on Fox News that he didn't understand why the Justice Department had not charged him yet.  It was December 7, 2010.... Look it up. (http://www.nysun.com/editorials/wikileaks-and-treason/87163/)

He is not hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy because of treason charges.  We did what we normally do when we can't find a real reason for arresting someone.  He has been charged with having unprotected sex.... Not nearly as serious as the president's own married Secret Service agents having drunken sex with prostitutes while on duty.... No one mentioned arresting and imprisoning those bad boys...
But Assange is hiding because he knows that if he comes out this will not end as a simple civil matter.... He is in the cross hairs of a government that has shown it has no problems with torturing people for a long long time to get even with anyone who dares to defy their monarchical authority.

You have every right to wonder why I am all exercised about Manning, Assange, and Snowden today and if it is not obvious, it was this bit of scripture from today's lectionary reading... prescribed long ago for this Sunday in the A cycle of readings on the day that is called "proper 7".... It sounds better in Latin.

Long before Assange, Manning and Snowden were born, our church leaders carved up the Bible into bits they wanted read in church services for all time.  So we hear Jeremiah's handwringing about the fact that nobody likes him.  He is friendless in Jerusalem.  The king thinks he is a traitor.  The priests think he is a heretic. The population demands that he be put in chains and thrown into a dungeon, why?  Why?, you ask.

Because he dared to tell the public the truth.  Because he dared to tell the people that their government was lying to them. ... that their military was lying to them... does any of this sound familiar?

This text is being read in Catholic Churches, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, UCC and Disciple Churches all across North America, Europe, parts of Africa and South and Central America today and I fear, I'm just afraid, that in almost every pulpit there is a history lesson going on.... "Jeremiah was the only one who knew that the armies of Babylon would defeat the defenses of the city of Jerusalem...." As if telling the truth was dangerous in the fifth century BCE and it is safe now.

What Jeremiah is saying is, he tried to keep the truth to himself.... He didn't want people saying he was a traitor.  He wanted his neighbors to like him.  He wanted to go to the coffee shop and talk about Obamacare, and Benghazi, and about how Obama wants to take our guns... but the truth burned him inside when he tried to keep it in and it tasted like honey when he said it.

We all want to fit in.  We all want to avoid conflict.  We would all like to have nice holidays with our in-laws, pleasant relationships at the office, and neighborly cookouts on the 4th of July and we would like to not become targets of the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI.  But there is a price to be paid.

The 20th century Hindu teacher, J Krishnamurti, said: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."  I sincerely hope that in this time in American history that you will be the most maladjusted people in this nation. Popularity is over rated and honesty is far too rare.

For the Common Good

Pentecost         June 8, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

I Corinthians 12    4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

So much has been happening in the news this week that conservative commentators have hardly had a chance to either bring up Bengazhi or to explain why Obama Care is a job killing failure even though we have just had fifty consecutive months of job gains and have managed to sign up 17 million people for health care.

There are several things I want to comment on today but first I want to reveal the thread that ties this disparate list of events and thoughts together.  We pick up the unifying concept in this passage from Paul's letter to the church in Corinth in which he is expressing some considerable displeasure with how they have been acting.

The church was having some internal squabbles... people were not getting along.  There appears to have been some considerable posturing on the part of some people who wanted more authority, more recognition than they were receiving.  There was nothing new there.

And, to be entirely honest, people are not the same.  Some people are more vital to the existence of a church, or a family, for that matter, a business or a nation, than others.  We declare a moral principle that all people are created equal but that goes to their value as human beings.... We may be equal but we are not the same.

Paul acknowledges that they are different and that some have more talents, more gifts, more ability than others but he makes an important claim.... And this claim is at the heart of what it means to be a religious person... this claim is vital to the difference between a person who has progressive opinions and a person who is a spiritual person.  He says, you can see it at the very ending of our pericope, in verse 7, "everyone has gifts...for the common good."

This is a way of seeing the world that you either agree with or you don't agree with it.  I stand up here and I tell you that we are all connected, that the welfare of one is the welfare of us all.  You can go home and watch Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Cosmos and as a scientist; he will tell you that we are all connected from a perspective of chemistry, biology and physics.

You would hear the same sentiment echoed profoundly in the teachings of Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam.  Still, it is not universally acknowledged.

We've had a number of fatal shootings in the past two weeks.  Following a rampage at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Richard Martinez, whose son Christopher was a victim in the incident, went on TV and emphatically blamed his son's death, not on the individual shooter, but on the collective of NRA influenced politicians.  And he posed the question to gun rights enthusiasts, "What is your right to own a gun compared to Christopher's right to live?"

The political sideshow made famous in the 2012 election cycle known as Joe the Plumber, replied through the media.  He said, "Your dead kids don't trump my constitutional rights."

And there you have the crux of the conflict between a narcissistic worldview and a spiritual worldview, between a generous worldview and a compassionate worldview, between individual rights and the common good.

The TV talk shows have been abuzz in the past month over a very complex and rather long book by the French economist, Thomas Piketty.  His exhaustive review of the evolution of capitalism in the industrialized world has documented both mathematically and historically what many of us have been aware of more intuitively for sometime... that is that the growing income gap between the wealthy and the poor is pushing us towards a social and economic disaster.

And more than income disparity, Piketty talks about the capital disparity in the world.  As land and precious resources are increasingly transferred into the hands of the few, no amount of hard work, discipline, sacrifice and ingenuity can get a person out of poverty.

As Bishop Desmond Tutu said, "When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."  In an economic system where an elite minority holds the capital assets, everyone else must become a servant to those who have the capital.

Piketty pointed out that it was the progressive tax system in the United States following WWII that made the United States the economic power that it was.  The more we undermine that progressive tax rate...
the more we fail to invest in infrastructure, in education, technology and medicine, the more the capital assets of the nation are transferred into the hands of the elite.  This process ends in choking the economy and creating widespread poverty and suffering.

Still, the political conversation revolves around whether we will continue to allow this to happen or not.  The budget proposed by Paul Ryan seeks to escalate this spiral into national poverty by cutting infrastructure and education investments by $1.2 trillion to give further tax cuts to the super wealthy.  You would think that someone would have to be crazy to propose something like this but.... Well.... I don't really have a "but" to that statement.... You would just have to be straight up crazy to not realize that the current transfer of wealth into the hands of the elite is going to destroy this nation and take away anything that meaningfully could be called either freedom or opportunity.

Consider the case of the controversial prisoner exchange that took place earlier this week.  President Obama orchestrated the release of Bowe Bergdahl from an Afghan prison controlled by the Taliban.  In order to win his release, our President agreed to release five Taliban prisoners from our infamous prison in Guantanamo Bay.

There has been public outrage about this for several reasons, most importantly because the prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay were said to be especially dangerous people who hate America.... Perhaps because we have kept them in an off shore prison for a decade without ever charging them with a crime or putting them on trial.
The other big reason concerns Sgt. Bergdahl himself.  None of us have all of the facts but it appears that Bergdahl may have deserted his post after becoming disillusioned with the war, the army, and America's given reasons for occupying Afghanistan.

Before his capture, he had written to his parents: "And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."

I have heard commentators railing against Bergdahl and his parents, even to the extent of blaming him for the deaths of several soldiers who later died while on patrol, perhaps a part of their patrol was a search for Bergdahl.

Still, I want you to try to see this in terms of the nation as a whole and not just the responsibility of a 23-year-old soldier as an individual.  Deserting while on the battlefield does endanger your peers.  This is not a small or insignificant charge.

However, he had been lied to.  You have been lied to.  Why are we occupying Afghanistan 12 years after we blew up whatever terrorist training camps were there prior to 9-11?  There are those clamoring now for Bergdahl to be put on trial and to be sentenced to several years in an American military prison for having deserted his post.  Where is the hue and cry for putting our current and former presidents on trial for having lied to us to get us into these wars?

Why is the congress not being held responsible for sending 22 year old boys and girls onto a battlefield under false pretenses and expecting them to die in defense of what has become little more than a smoke screen for the continued transfer of capital into the hands of the elite?

As Elizabeth Warren has been pointing out, for what we have spent on these wars, we could have made going to college in America free to all citizens. And you have to understand; an awful lot of the soldiers who are in Afghanistan and Iraq are there because they couldn't afford to go to college without first serving in the military.

But our congress won't even agree to lower the interest rate on student loans.  We have impoverished so many Americans, and cut support of our universities and trade schools so that anyone who has the ambition to further themselves through education is then enslaved by a student load debt that keeps them from being able to own a home or even to plan to have children!

Our congress then is literally enslaving these students with a loan burden, not because the loans cost us so much but because they are making $10 billion a year in profits from the labors of young people who are just trying to get started in life.

Yes, it is a sobering thought to release five Taliban prisoners who are highly motivated to strike back at us.... But don't kid yourselves, five people are a drop in a bucket containing millions upon millions of others who have seen through the smoke screen just like Sgt. Bergdahl did.  We need to stop counting on our fingers and toes and start looking at the big picture.

It is not one ballet dancing, California raised soldier who got himself into a bind in Afghanistan and it is not a couple of hundred prisoners that we keep off shore where no one can see what we are doing to them.... It is not the individuals, it is the whole.  We are all connected.  So do we need to keep Bergdahl in prison or should we trade five or six members of Congress who helped to send him to Afghanistan with a gun in his hands be traded to the Taliban in exchange for Bergdahl?  Should Bergdahl be put on trial or should the president who told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the senators who voted for a war on false pretenses and an illegal occupation be put on trial?  And in this Senator McCain and Senator Clinton are equally guilty.

Is Edward Snowden a bad guy for giving away classified American intelligence?  Should he, as Secretary of State Kerry has suggested, come home and strand trial or should the White House administration that has carried on illegal spying on American citizens in the first place be put on trial?

Private Manning is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking documents regarding war crimes committed by our own soldiers against Afghan and Iraqi citizens.... Manning is in prison for revealing the truth... the war criminals were not charged, reprimanded, demoted or even subjected to public shame.  We blame the poor for being poor.  We lie to our young soldiers and put them in prison when their conscience gets the best of them.

Should Manning be in prison or should the people who authorized torture under the shameful nomenclature of "enhanced interrogation" be behind bars?

Or maybe, just maybe, we should stop looking for individuals to blame, put on trial, drag through the media and lock away either into a tiny Pashtun jail, Gitmo, or the Fed Med.  Maybe we need to start realizing how we are all connected... that your dead kids really are a lot more important than my right to have an arsenal of weapons in my basement.  We can realize that among the hundred thousand civilians we have killed in Iraq were people who were just as victimized by terrorism as we believe that we have been.

Bergdahl, Snowden, and Manning are not our enemies.... Each of these young men made questionable decisions with possibly dire results but each one simply stood up in the midst of a society that was going morally way off the rails and tried to do something to wake us up, to make us pay attention, to remind us that we are not the kind of people who torture prisoners, who spy on millions of innocent people or who occupy the lands of foreign nations.

Is it just me or does it seem to you that the longer we are engaged in a war on terrorism, the more we seem to look and act like terrorists?

The wealth, technological skill, scientific knowledge and ingenuity of this nation is not for a handful of billionaires.... It is for the common good.

The freedom and liberty this nation loves is not a club we use to destroy other nations, occupy their lands and steal their resources... it is, from this pastor's point of view, for the common good.

Loss on the Way to Enlightenment

June 1, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

"Make no mistake about it - enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imaged to be true."Adyashanti

A young neighbor to my former parish visited our Sunday morning service one week and immediately asked for an appointment to come talk with me.  He was clearly agitated when he walked into my office and he wasted no time getting down to what was on his mind.  "Who do you think you are to have so many people in your church who are obviously homosexuals and you are telling them that it is OK with God to be gay?"

He was angry but also very upset.  He had been a lifelong active church member in a Methodist church that he attended with his family, played in the bell choir and gone on mission trips.  He had immersed himself in Bible study, prayer and church programs, much more so than most of his peers because he was using religion to keep a part of him safely imprisoned, hidden from the light.  A toxic secret that was both killing him and keeping him within the expectations of family and church.

We talked for hours about scripture, the evolving nature of sexual mores in the Judeo-Christian faith history and how I had arrived at the conclusion shared by most of the scholarly religious world, that there was no reason to be prejudiced against gay people.

You would think that this young man who had felt imprisoned in a rigid, toxic and cruel religious lie would be jumping for joy to realize that he no longer had to pretend, that he no longer had to deny himself the opportunity of falling in love, to be who he was in a fully actualized life.

But that is not how enlightenment works.  We all initially experience change, even change for the better, as a loss.  A baby in the womb grows until their environment is crushing them, they are jammed into an airless space that they simply must escape, and yet they come into the world painfully and usually screaming their heads off.

The young man I met on that day never became my friend.  He left my office after that first visit deeply confused, wanting to believe what I had said to him and yet unwilling to believe that all of his previous pastors, Sunday School teachers, and even his parents had either lied to him or were profoundly mistaken.  He did continue to come to church.  He met a very nice young man who eventually moved in with him and they attended church together until they eventually moved out of state.

He was increasingly civil during that time and I'm sure that there was some gratitude in there somewhere but for the most part, I had been to him something like a surgeon who performs open heart surgery without anesthesia.  I only meant to be a liberator to him but the process of liberation had also destroyed almost everything he had formerly believed to be true and changed his relationship with everyone he had previously trusted.

I desperately want to be a good guy, a kind and loving pastor but I have never figured out how to be that while being a prophetic preacher and a liberator at the same time.

This business of enlightenment is tricky.  For example, there is no one here who would want to defend the institution of slavery.  We would all quickly agree that owning another person and forcing them to surrender a life-time of uncompensated labor is entirely evil.  But a hundred and fifty years ago, the economy of the south was predicated on slavery as an economic system.  Farmers made a huge up-front labor investment when they purchased a slave and so, in spite of the growing moral arguments against slavery, no other system had arisen to take its place.

Ending slavery not only came at the price of the most deadly war of our nation's history but it also plunged the southern states into poverty for more than a century and there are parts of the nation that you could say have never recovered.  Even so, there is no one who would argue in favor of going back to that economic system.... Except maybe for an odd Nevada cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy, and maybe a Kentucky Senator named Rand Paul but when I say that their views really don't count... what I mean is... their views don't count.

No one would want to go back to the 19th century practice of slavery but you can understand why so many resisted the phenomenal suffering that change would necessarily involve.

When I leave our little gathering of very rational, reality oriented, critically thinking church members and drive by churches packed with hundreds or thousands of people who at least pretend to believe in the literal and historical truth of talking snakes and flying chariots ... who watched Noah's Ark like it was a historical documentary .... and I just can't believe that so many people would feign acceptance of what is so clearly Iron Age mythology, superstition, and magic.

They force themselves into an intellectual girdle in which they both have to defend the truth of the Bible that clearly describes the earth as being flat, while simultaneously insisting that anyone who believes that the earth is flat is just nuts.  The only reason why people would continue to embrace such absurdity in a scientific age is simply this:  it would cost them too much to leave the womb.

As the Buddhist teacher, Adyashanti, says so clearly, " - enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imaged to be true."

No one, once liberated from the bondage of such mythology with all of its neurotic guilt and fear and denial of reality, would ever be willing to go back into that intellectual prison.  But leaving it is absolutely terrifying to those who are afraid to let go of the certainty and social connections of traditional religion.

How to be the source of that liberation in the right way, in a way that is like unlocking a cage but not like cutting off someone's legs is a skill that I have yet to master.

Still, the majority of our peers in 21st century middle-America will remain tangentially connected to a traditional church while their doubts grow.

They become more comfortable with just not going to church than they would be with trying to confront their doubts and find a faith community where their minds would be an asset rather than a liability.

People are leaving traditional churches in large numbers.  The majority of churches in the United States now have fewer than 40 people in attendance on Sunday mornings.  But very few of the people who are leaving will be willing to be entirely honest and say, "I just don't believe that stuff any more and I don't find what I get out of going, from either a social or moral perspective, to be with the time."

They will almost always find a way to blame the institution rather than accept personal responsibility... they will say that they don't like the music, or the preacher is boring, or the church is only interested in money... but they do not want to say to their family or church peers, "I just can't pretend to believe in fairy tales anymore."

Most of the founding fathers of the United States were not Christians.  They professed a form of Deism that rejected the formal doctrinal beliefs of all religions and attempted to embrace a faith that called for greater justice and mercy.  Thomas Paine predicted at that time that the revolution in government embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would naturally issue in a revolution of religion.  Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and others were just certain that a time of freedom from religious superstition had finally arrived.

Their hopes were dashed by revival that we call "The Great Awakening" but there were always some who tried to rekindle an honest awakening that rejected talk about salvation in an afterlife, preferring a salvation that comes from social justice and good deeds in this life.  Abraham Lincoln being one of the more notable advocates of this move.

250 years later we still see a generation more likely to go to the lake for the weekend than to go to a progressive church. Which, of course, leaves you to wonder if traditional religion was ever anything more than a kind of enlightened self-interest.  If people are religious because they want to go to heaven or because they are afraid of hell, then they were always just superstitious narcissists.

If, however, you want to try to prevent warfare, fight injustice, work to end poverty and save the earth from environmental ruin, well, then, there is a substantive faith alternative for you.  You can say that science deals with knowledge of what is real, what actually exists and can be known.  Religion deals more with what ought to be, how we imagine the world to be better.

Healthy religion then takes the facts of science into account and marries those facts to an ardent desire to see the world improved.  An unhealthy religion denies the reality of the world in favor of an imaginary world that they wished existed.  I am grateful to find myself here in your company.  I earnestly hope that our numbers grow and that communities like ours will arise from among the church alumni association in cities all over the world.

A tradition has grown up around here of applauding after every sermon... whether it merits applause or not.  I appreciate your generosity but I feel the need to turn the tables today.  I applaud you for being people who did not give up... who discarded the magic but stuck with the community to find its deeper meaning.

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.