(Un)Common Sense

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

Voltaire - Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? Which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance, and humanity?

In the decade before the Revolutionary War began here in America, the seeds of revolution were being planted by the modern Enlightenment all over Europe.  The very dramatic social reformation seen in French Revolution took place after the former British Colonies in the Americas had won their independence but the movement had been gaining steam for a generation.

There are always those who resist substantive change.  Albert Einstein said, "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a [person] does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses their intelligence."  But when you question the basic assumptions of a society's mythology, you can expect that opposition to be very fierce.

On the first of July in 1766, the Parliament in Paris carried out the torture, beheading, immolation and scattering of the ashes of a nineteen year old man, The chevalier de La Barre.  He was charged with failing to doff his hat in the presence of the Holy Host and of singing racy songs but the real offense for which this young man gave his life was that he was found to be in possession of this book:  Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary.

Voltaire published this book 250 years ago and it was almost immediately the target for church and government sponsored book burning.  I would hazard a guess that it is not a favorite read among government officials today and I doubt that it would be found in any church libraries or offices here in town, other than, of course, ours.

Voltaire challenged the authority of the church and of the royalty in both plays and books and because that way of thinking challenged the established order of society, he had to live in virtual exile to avoid execution.  Perhaps we are less likely to torture, behead, burn, and scatter the ashes of free thinkers in our day but, believe me, corporations, the media, the government, and the institutional church still have ways of silencing opposition... some of which make beheading sound inviting.

But at least for us, this voice of common sense and critical thinking, not only does not pose a threat but we can look to him for inspiration.  He did not want to do away with religion, he just wanted religion to be sane and intelligent.  He preferred for religious instruction to teach morality rather than dogmatic beliefs.

He thought that being a church goer should help to make people more just rather than more absurd.  He said that the church should not "order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to humankind" and he added that we shouldn't threaten people with being sent into eternal torment for thinking rationally about these things.

I was asked to preside at a funeral service recently for a man who had been a long time reader of my newspaper columns but who had never gone to church and was not very tolerant of religious beliefs.
The family wanted me to do the service which I was glad to do, and in honor of the deceased, I spoke about his personal choice to do what Voltaire had suggested... he gave years of his life working for the poor in Appalachia and then came back to Springfield owned a book store in a north side neighborhood where he tried to foster a love of learning among some of our city's most impoverished students.... But he didn't have much use for religious beliefs and speculations.

You have all been to enough Ozark funerals to know the routine.... Some people want to keep the casket open during the service and at the end, the minister is supposed to go stand by the coffin and there is a solemn procession during which everyone in the room is supposed to make a respectful pass by the body, shake the minister's hand and depart.

At this funeral, the first person out of her chair was a white-haired little woman who charged up to me, took my hand and stood on tip-toes to whisper in my ear, "I think you are a (explicative deleted) idiot."  I'm sure Jesus was proud of her eloquent defense of traditional religion.....  People often have very angry reactions to having their mythology challenged.

There was a research project recently published in the July issue of Cognitive Science that showed that children who are not exposed to religious training can more easily tell the difference between reality and imagination.  I'm sorry that they didn't conduct the research on adults because it seems to me that traditional religion skews the ability of many adults to be able to clearly remain oriented to reality.

I've talked a lot about evidence based faith, about discarding magic and superstition in favor of what can rationally be known and intelligently discussed, but it is not just religion that participates in irrational superstition.
Politics does too.  There is such a thing as an American myth that is often obvious to people in other nations but rather less obvious to us.

There was a tragic event a couple of days ago that has been heavily reported in the news.  As if Malaysian airlines needed another catastrophe after losing an airplane in March, another of their planes was shot down over the Ukraine on Thursday.  I have heard reports on several different media as people have speculated about whether this was the fault of Russia, the government of Ukraine, or, the apparently more likely guilty parties, the insurgents in the Ukraine.

I have heard a lot of anger about how irresponsible Vladimir Putin has been to arm these insurgents, many of whom have described the insurgents in ways that make it sound like someone gave their 13 year old the keys to the family car with a cooler of beer and a bunch of fireworks.

What I have not heard referenced in any of the public discussion of this tragedy is that our highly trained, very professional navy on board the USS Vincennes, while it was illegally in Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf in 1988, accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing nearly 300 innocent civilians.

This has happened about a dozen times since 1980.  In almost every case, this happens when a commercial airplane is flying near a military conflict.  Unlike this most recent incident, when the US makes a horrible mistake like this, we are quick to apologize and make some financial reparations.
The people in the Ukraine now appear to be destroying evidence while Russia is feigning ignorance of the circumstances.  But what I find lacking in the conversation is any humility about the fact that we have done the exact same thing.  Virtually all of us here today were adults in 1988.... Did you even remember the incident with the Vincennes and the Iranian airliner?

I'm not wanting to white wash the incident, but in any rational analysis, we have to say that these things happen when you put these kinds of weapons into hostile arenas.  What we should be talking about is how to settle the disputes among the nations of the world before we start passing off surface to air missiles to the political equivalent of drunk teenagers.

Tensions have risen to a crescendo in the Gaza Strip again, provoking the firing of hundreds of totally ineffective Syrian made rockets at Israel.  No one has been killed in Israel from these very low-tech weapons but they have managed to provoke Israel into armed and very lethal response. Our media seems to view these things in about the same way that they covered the world cup, wanting us to take sides.

Even NPR broadcast an Intelligence Squared debate this week to argue whether Israel or Hamas was to be blamed for this violence.  Ironically, it was not a new recording, it was replayed from a debate they held in 2006..... that's right.... Eight years old and still just pointing fingers to say that it is all the other guy's fault.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is not a religious problem.  It is a real estate problem expressed in religious language.  The conflict in the Ukraine is not a cultural or a language conflict.  It is, at its root, an economic control issue.

The real resolution to our historical wars with England, Japan, and Germany happened when we became economic trading partners.  Now they are our closest allies.  Imagine what could happen if we applied that same rational logic to Cuba.  Imagine what could have been done to resolve the real estate problem in Palestine if we had spent a tenth as much money on the real problem as we have spent on military solutions that never provide solutions.

Voltaire asked his countrymen to give up on a religion that required executioners to enforce their dogma, and that inundated the earth with blood fighting over entirely unintelligible religious claims.  Before you think about beheading, burning me, and scattering my ashes, I'm just saying that maybe we should give rational thinking a chance.

Escape from Suffering

July 13, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

    Buddhism's Four Noble Truths

1. Suffering exists

2. Suffering arises from attachment to desires

3. Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases

4. Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the spiritual path

Reality TV shows have proven to be real money makers for networks.  They capitalize on American's innate voyeuristic tendencies, by producing programs that appeal to that same swath of society that slows down to stare at automobile accidents.  From Survivor type contests, to bachelor and bachelorette dating shows, to this current spate of offerings about the junk people put in storage units and the life threatening junk that people pile up in their houses.

In some ways, I think that this sort of programming is like taking the moral pulse of the nation.  There is a form of philosophical argument called "Reductio ad absurdum" or "reduced to the point of absurdity."  What we see in a lot of reality TV is a reflection of our society in a mirror, and, in most ways, it is a fun house mirror that exaggerates our features.

Over the past two generations, most manufactured goods have become more affordable.  Houses built fifty years ago had fairly small closets but most people managed their lives just fine.  But as things like shoes and clothes became more affordable, our demand for them grew.  Walk in closets were a rare luxury 40 years ago and now even the smallest apartments have them because we have more stuff than we used to have.

Hoarding is an illness and not a form of TV entertainment.  It is an illness that has several possible mental health issues involved.  Most people tend to talk about it as an obsessive-compulsive behavior and while that is certainly a part of it, that is not the only thing going on in most cases.

As a pastor from those old days when a big part of our job was to go visit members in their homes, I can tell you that I have seen a lot of hoarding.  Often times the people who live in these homes emerge from the crowded filth in which they live, properly attired and sweet smelling but the truth of their existence is that they are surrounded by cans of out of date food, stacks of old newspapers and magazines, bags of clothes, and often even used tires, empty bottles and plastic boxes

I suppose people may watch some of those shows so that they can assure themselves that they are at least not that bad but I would like to suggest that the presence of so many hoarders in the midst of our consumer society is nothing more than the reductio ad absurdum argument that reveals the sickness of our own society.  Hoarders are the extreme version of almost all of us who collect, store, save, and attach ourselves to way too many things.                

I used the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism as our wisdom text today because I believe that progressive Christianity and Buddhism have a great deal in common and as such, there is a lot that we can learn from this ancient faith.

The first of the four noble truths is translated in many different ways but essentially it says that life is full of suffering, or that life is suffering.
The second flatly states that the source of all suffering is our desire for, our attachment to things, people, power, or maybe even life.  The third noble truth tells us that the way out of suffering is through detachment.

Clearly, detachment is the opposite of what our consumer society is built upon.  Commercials, advertisements, are scientifically designed to make us want to buy, own, use, and ultimately store, more and more stuff.

Advertisements show us young, beautiful, sexy, and happy people, suggesting that the source of their youth, beauty, sex appeal and joy is the car they are driving, the beer they are drinking, the clothes they are wearing, or the vacation they are taking.

If you will allow me to take this through a reductio ad absurdum, I want to apply this to a couple of other issues.  This part of the country is one of several that claims to be the meth capital of America.  It is not a distinction we should compete for but if we are not the largest consumers of meth in America, we are certainly ahead of whoever is in second place.

What does meth do to users?  It intensifies pleasures for a period of several hours.... A rush of energy, sexual potency, strength and euphoria... but at the same time it burns up the neuro receptors in the brain that make pleasure possible.  The high is so intense that it makes not being on the drug intolerable, addicting first time users at a nearly unbelievable rate.

But a long time user of meth is never again able to take pleasure in normal living.... The part of their brain that allows them to experience joy and happiness has been so damaged that only an artificial drug experience can stimulate them.  These people not only are no longer able to enjoy a song on the radio, a summer sunset, or the smell of baking bread.... They often stop caring about their own children or their own bodies.  Using meth is like setting your own house on fire because you are cold.... It temporarily solves a small problem while creating a catastrophe.

Meth addiction is extreme, but it is the tail end of a society that constantly seeks some kind of artificial pleasure while ignoring the simple pleasures of family, nature, friendship, art, music, and the wonder of a star filled sky.  When was the last time you went to the art museum to enjoy something beautiful that you could not buy?  See, we go to the mall to buy what we like, but there is hardly a category left in our brains for loving something that is beautiful even if it can never be hung on the wall of your own living room.  Our society consumes, we are not especially good at simply enjoying or appreciating life.

I am guilty of having my smart phone in my hands way too much but isn't it obvious that there is no cell phone app that is anywhere near as fascinating as the flowers at the Japanese stroll garden in our park, or the stars on a clear night.... But Americans are spending more than $16 million dollars a year for more time on the popular Candy Crush app.  How crazy is that?

And if you will allow me one more illustration:  I'm not a prude and I'm not a puritan but I am concerned about the pornography industry.  It trains its viewers to have absolutely unrealistic appetites for people with exaggerated sexual features, bodies, and abilities.
It deadens a person's appreciation of the intrinsic value of the touch and appearance of an aging spouse who has supported you, raised children with you, and kept a home with you.  You don't have to nurture feelings of attraction for your spouse, you can just take a pill, watch a video.... And evidently end up sitting in side-by-side bathtubs out in the woods somewhere.... I've been single for a long time so I have no idea that that last part is even supposed to be about.

And, I'll have to ask our internet audience to sit up straight and start listening again... I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that there is a close similarity between pornography and fundamentalist religion.  Fundamentalists and traditionalists demand that mortal life is only a beginning, a drop in the bucket.  They refuse to accept that their time is limited and so, like a hoarder, like an addict, they want to hold onto their existence for all of time.... Real life is not enough.  The 364 sunsets they are given every year, the sunsets they almost always ignore, should, in their minds, be endless for them.  Other religions find this greedy view offensive.... I think it is like a porn addiction in which reality is always inadequate. You have my permission to disagree with me, even though this thought is going to revisit your awareness every time you hear someone confidently speaking of life after death whether you want it to or not.  Once a mind has been stretched to apprehend a new idea, it never goes back to its original shape.

But let me get back to the Buddhist path: The tradition about the life of the Buddha was that he was born to wealth but when he became aware of the suffering of the poor, he could not longer live in the isolation and comfort of the aristocracy.  So he became an ascetic monk, living at the point of starvation and dehydration for years.  Eventually he realized that both opulent wealth and extreme poverty are deceptions.

He taught that the body is a vessel that requires nourishment, rest, and care.  He encouraged his followers to find a middle path, a life of moderation in all things but no extremes of either indulgence or self-abnegation.  There is absurdity at both ends, both for us as individuals and for our civilization.

Buddhism, unlike Christianity, is not wedded to a set of creedal claims that followers are supposed to simply believe.  Buddhism finds deep spirituality in a passionate devotion to the truth.  Following the eight fold path, which is the fourth of the Noble Truths, should not sound foreign to the ears of progressive Christians.

The eight-fold path is about living a spiritual life, a life of disciplined moderation and devotion to leading a good and helpful life.  The path guides you to a right perspective, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, sincere effort, mindfulness, and awareness.   Perhaps I will have a chance to talk more about the eight-fold path later this summer.

I suppose that most religions have a kind of centering mantra that practitioners can return to in times of worry or trouble.  Jews and some Christians would recite the 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," and Christians often simply recite the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father, which art in heaven."
And we know that Muslims of all stripes will say simply, "Allahu akbar," which means, "God is great," though I think it can be more accurately rendered, "God is greater,".... Greater than what frightens me, greater than the obstacles before me.

The mantra often repeated in Buddhism, I find to be the most attractive of all of the world's religious traditions.  I won't try to say it all in the Burmese language but there are a couple of words I would like for you to know.  I apologize for all of the numbers in this sermon.... The four noble truths and the eight fold path but there is a final number, the three jewels or three treasures of Buddhism.

The first is the Buddha, who is the teacher.  The second is the Dharma, which is the teaching of the teacher or, more accurately, simply, the truth.  The third is called the Sangha, or community.  When someone is becoming a Buddhist or being ordained as a monk, they repeat the mantra:

I take refuge in the Buddha
I take refuge in the Dharma
I take refuge in the Sangha

I find my peace, my security, I find my faith in the teacher, and in a dedication to what is true.  Finally, I find my refuge, my certainty, my confidence and my courage, in my faith community.

We live in a world that is seriously out of balance.  The predominant religions of the world create terrorists, suicide bombers, misogynists, homophobes and the worst may be that they create indifference about real world suffering by obsessing about other worldly eternity.
We live among consumers, hoarders, out of control capitalists, corporations that can influence elections and even have a religion though still lacking a moral compass.

For your own sake and for the sake of the world and its future, I encourage you to find a middle path, a path of mindful, disciplined living and let us together take refuge in what is true and find refuge in one another.

Towards a More Healthy Life

Proper 9    July 6, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Matthew 11:16-19, 28-30      

"But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.' For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."

"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Two people in the news this week have died from the most painful and horrifying manner known to us.  A sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir, was captured and burned alive, presumably in retaliation for the abduction and murder of three Israeli youths last month.  The other was a retired Methodist pastor, Charles Moore, of Texas, who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire.

The young man who died in a murderous immolation is just the most recent in a sixty yearlong violent conflict between Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews.  The provocations behind this long and violent feud are real and yet workable solutions have been staring these two tribes in the face for three generations but the solutions elusive in an environment of sick religion, hate-speech, and unending escalation of passionate emotions that deny facts in favor of nurturing resentments, hostility, and a desire for bloody revenge.

Pastor Miller, on the other hand, took his own life.  He was not, by his own reporting, mentally ill.  He described himself as being desperate to draw attention to the unhealthy aspects of American divisions, irrational hostility, and heated, violent, divisions.

On the face of it, these two deaths couldn't be more different.  One was murder and the other was suicide.  What has made me think of them together is not simply because they both died in fire but because they both died because of the intransigence of the world's commitment to unhealthy, inflammatory, prejudice and hatred.  One was a murder among two rival clans that just can't seem to let of their need for revenge long enough to stop the violence.  The other was a suicide, a final, extreme, and, I will say, a misguided effort to draw the nation's attention to the insane divisions that have haunted us for generations.

There is a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous that says:  Don't tell me how sick you have been.  Tell me how well you want to be. When guys are trying to establish their reputation in an AA group, they will often tell stories; wild, fanciful, exaggerated stories, about how much they used to drink.  Meeting time can be wasted, week after week, if they let that stuff go on, glorifying, and bragging about their drinking days.  And so, to bring such story telling to a compassionate end, someone will just say: "Don't tell me how sick you have been.  Tell me how well you want to be."

AA works for the people who really work the program because, in very simple, single sentence distillations of both psychology and spirituality, it keeps inviting people to choose health over illness, sanity over insanity, live over death.  The program depends upon individual members of the group making the decision for themselves that they want to be health. They have to choose physical health, mental health, and spiritual health.  They know that they have a disease that will surely kill them if they don't get healthy. Everyone who has spent any time in AA can list the people they know who drank themselves to death.

I attended a lot of meetings when I was a hospital chaplain working on the addiction unit.  An epiphany came to me one evening when an elderly woman who had been sober for 30 years said, "I'm glad that I am an alcoholic because my drinking forced me to find this path to health."  She went on to describe the insanity of a very sick marriage that led to very bad parenting.  But it was the drunk driving arrests and trips to the emergency room that forced her into recovery.  The illness gave her the reason to change, to choose health.

So that phrase, "Don't tell me how sick you've been, tell me how well you want to be," has stuck with me through the years.  Many years ago when I was trying to deal with some very irrational conflict in the church where I was the pastor, the time for electing church leaders came up.  We had some real stinkers in that church that had run off pastors and associate pastors for years.  Creating drama, feeding gossip, and constantly trying to keep something stirred up.  But they were long time members, and contributors, so they always got re-elected to the board.

But one year I read the job description for elders in this Disciples of Christ church. The elders, it said, were to nurture the spiritual health of the congregation.  And I thought, a couple of these guys have been pouring poison in the well for decades.... They are not leaders; they are agitators, perpetual critics, and dishonest ones at that.

So I said to the nominating committee, let's only nominate congregational leaders who have helped the church to be healthy and refuse to re-elect anyone who has demonstrated that they would rather be unhealthy.

It was a novel and radical idea in that church as I suspect that it would be seen as a radical suggestion in most of the churches in our nation.

The committee immediately responded, "You can't do that!"  And they named two or three people who were going to be very upset if they were not re-elected.  And I insisted, if you are going to nominate anyone to take a board position, you need to be able to describe how they have helped to nurture the health of the congregation, so, none of those agitators were ever re-elected.

And they were angry and they tried to find backdoor ways to become influential again. I can see that there were long connecting lines between that decision to choose health over perpetual melodrama that lead to the end of my relationship with that church but I still defend it as being the right decision.  I would rather be healthy than to find a way to survive in crazy-town.

Any gathering of people can become toxic because the relationships become sick.  That's why there are spouse abuse shelters and runaway centers for families that have become toxic.

There was an entire department at MSU that was just shut down because the tenured professors had fallen into a level of melodrama that escalated to career and character assassination so that no student could survive the program.  Huge and successful law firms here in town have split up and damaged the reputations and practices of everyone involved because the emotional environment had become sick.

Churches can be especially vulnerable to this because churches are voluntary organizations.  There are over 300 churches in Springfield... no one is forced to attend any of them but anyone could change churches every few weeks and never run out of other options in a single lifetime.

Some people are only satisfied by melodrama on the level of human sacrifice... and it doesn't matter what the real issues are. In counseling, we call this a "conflict habituated" family system.  They feel important and excited when they can create drama.  They use their emotions to control the behaviors of the people around them.  Jesus confronts this behavior in this passage from Matthew we read today.  He says:

"But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.'

Literally, "I was upset but you still didn't do what I wanted you to do." Because, in crazy-town logic, if I am upset, you have to change.  In this insanity, I am not responsible for my moods, feelings, emotions.... You are and you have to be something different or do something differently in order to satisfy my expectations.  At one level, this is just emotional manipulation, but it can become emotional terrorism.

Many people who find themselves in emotionally manipulative relationships at home, at work, at school, in politics or in church will tell you that they feel like they are always trying to tiptoe on egg shells.  The least little thing can turn into hysterics.

Of course, in some churches, the clergy often feel that they are being asked to tap-dance in a minefield.  They are expected to be scholarly and yet deny virtually all scholarship.  They are to be prophetic but never say anything with which any donor might disagree.  Hence, we have totally irrelevant churches being pastored by people who survive on anti-depressants and Prilosec.

Jesus, in this passage in Matthew, succinctly describes the insanity of trying to satisfy emotional terrorism.  He says:

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."



The poetic conclusion to this pericope can be read as a plea to return to sanity:

"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

We wrote in the vision statement for our church when we first opened our doors that it was our goal to create a healthy spiritual community.  In part, because none of us ever wanted to be a part of an unhealthy church community ever again.  And, in part, it was to show other churches that it can be done.  You don't have to perpetuate hostilities.  Israelis and Palestinians don't have to hate each other.  Sunnis and Shi'a don't have to fight each other.  Blacks and whites, Latinos and Anglos, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, .... We don't have to keep setting one another on fire.  We don't have to live in conflict for the rest of time.

We can leave Crazy-town if only we can all decide that we like being healthy more than we like the attention and power we think we get from being sick.  Let's see if we cannot show the world how it is done.  Don't tell me how sick you have been.  Tell me how healthy you want to become.

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.