Why Are We Still Having to Fight for Workers' Rights?

Labor Day Message   August 31, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Deuteronomy 24:14-15
14You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. 15You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.

It is not my goal to be partisan.  When we first started this church, just three months before the history making 2008 election, we actually had several of the leaders of the Greene Co. Democratic Party in our church.  I celebrated the election of our nation's first black president with as much enthusiasm as anyone else at the watch party.  I was a huge fan of our Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill.

Prior to that time I had been regularly contacted by officials in the Democratic Party trying to recruit me to run for various elected offices because, for a generation, I had been writing opinion columns in the Springfield News-Leader that took our elected officials to task for illegal wars, cuts to education and poverty programs, environmental degradation, and for misogynistic and homophobic policies.

However, when we had prominent Democrats in the White House and the Senate and I was critical of them for illegal wars, undermining education and poverty programs, failing to defend the environment, and for tacitly supporting misogynistic and homophobic policies, I stopped hearing from the local and state Democratic Party.  Many of those Democratic loyalist members of the church left and left so angry that I can sometimes clear out several tables in the coffee shops where liberals hang out just by walking in the room.
Missouri's favorite son, President Harry Truman, was often called "Give-em Hell Harry" but Truman objected, saying, "I never really gave em hell, I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."

But what I find the most interesting and simultaneously the most disappointing is how the issues that Harry Truman was so adamant about nearly 70 years ago as he ran for re-election are so very current as to make one despair about our ability to make progress.

This is a longer quote than I typically use in the pulpit but indulge me for a moment to share a piece of one of Truman's campaign speeches and where he uses the words "Republican Party" try to translate that as "elected officials" because there is not much of merit on either side of the political fence.  He said:

Well, I have been studying the Republican Party (let's just say "politicians")  for over 12 years at close hand in the Capital of the United States. And by this time, I have discovered where the Republicans stand on most of the major issues.Since they won't tell you themselves, I am going to tell you.They approve of the American farmer-but they are willing to help him go broke.They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing.They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights.They favor a minimum wage--the smaller the minimum the better.They indorse educational opportunity for all--but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools.They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine--for people who can afford them.They approve of social security benefits-so much so that they took them away from almost a million people.They believe in international trade--so much so that they crippled our reciprocal trade program, and killed our International Wheat Agreement.They favor the admission of displaced persons--but only within shameful racial and religious limitations.They consider electric power a great blessing-but only when the private power companies get their rake-off.They say TVA is wonderful--but we ought never to try it again.They condemn "cruelly high prices"--but fight to the death every effort to bring them down.They think the American standard of living is a fine thing--so long as it doesn't spread to all the people.And they admire the Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.

If the president of the United States could state the hypocritical nature of the economic divide so clearly, and he could state it in a democracy where the masses who are the victims of this economic inequality can vote, how is it that nothing seems to have changed?

John Maynard Keynes succinctly describes the problem this way, he said: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.


It is difficult to motivate productive work, innovation, invention, or denial of any immediate personal fulfillment in the absence of a promise of some personal reward.  Capitalism holds out the promise that if you will work hard, delay gratification, and save that you will reap a wonderful reward of economic security if not wealth, and comfort if not luxury.

The problem is that when the American Dream becomes American Wishful Thinking, when hard work, delaying gratification, and saving doesn't allow you to retire with dignity, have access to health care or to ever own a home, then the promise of capitalism becomes a lie.  With the right rules in place, capitalism and its rewards inspired invention, innovation, hard work and it produced the strongest middle class in the history of the world.

But when we vilify teachers and police and auto-workers, all labor unions, for insisting on a living wage and a pension that let's a person buy Bermuda shorts, black knee socks and sandals that they can wear around the retirement home in Florida where they can criticize the government full-time, then capitalism is no longer a gift, it is a lie and a curse.

The late Jewish Croatian economist, Branko Horvat stated: ... it is now well known that capitalist development leads to the concentration of capital, employment and power. It is somewhat less known that it leads to the almost complete destruction of economic freedom.


Everyone who has ever played the old board game, Monopoly, has a basic understanding of unbridled capitalism. If you keep rolling the dice and moving through life in a capitalist system, eventually one person ends up with all of the land and money and everyone else is out of the game.

You can change the rules so that all of the players have a chance to get back into the game, rules that keep one player from quickly acquiring all of the land, utilities and infrastructure.  In truth, our nation has been up and down that rollercoaster a few times in our 240 year history.

In our earliest days, Thomas Jefferson, one of the primary architects of the nation, said "I hope we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country".

The most wicked of men will not, of their own accord do what is right for the poor, the laborers.  It was not natural market forces that brought slavery to an end.  It was not the invisible hand of the market that ended child labor.  It was not the competition of the marketplace that made the workplaces more safe, that gave us the modern invention of the weekend, the 40 hour work week, paid vacations or sick leave.

It was organized labor working in conjunction with spiritual leaders and visionary politicians.  When things go a little too well for a little too long, the unions become weak, the church becomes irrelevant and politicians are sold to the highest bidder.

Franklin Roosevelt, who had to rally America to respond to Facism, Nazism, Communism, and nationalism, also found the time and energy to warn the Congress of the United States that their constant caving into corporate power threatened to bring America as a free nation to an end.  He said, on April 29, 1938:
 [T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

I am currently perplexed by the involvement of someone who has seemed to be an advocate for a more fair tax system, Warren Buffett, in the proposed move of Burger King's headquarters to Canada to avoid paying corporate taxes in the USA.  The media in concert with corporations has given this process the benign sounding name of "inversion." Inversion sounds much nicer than bank robbery doesn't it?

For there to be a functioning democracy where people can buy Whoppers and fries, there have to be paved roads, water and electric lines, police and firemen, schools, hospitals, and airports.  Corporations love to harvest in the fertile fields of the American economy but they don't want to pay their fair share of the taxes that plow the fields and plant.

When Walgreens wanted to jump through the tax loophole called "inversion" an angry public pointed out that the majority of their income derives directly from government supported prescription payments.

They realized that their lack of patriotism was going to cost them a lot of customers and even though they backed down and stayed here, the fact that they wanted to take their money to Ireland has made me drive past Walgreens several times and I'm not seeing that trend changing anytime soon.

For all of the screaming corporations do about American taxes, the larger companies have already influenced the writing of tax codes to get their effective rate down to nearly 0%.  You don't think that the lobbyists for Burger King hamburger and French fry cooks wrote those tax codes do you?

One of our long time listeners is an American ex-pat living in Scotland.  Robyn recently wrote to ask me who it was that always yells "amen" at the end of my sermons.  She went so far as to say that sometimes my sermons make her feel depressed but she always hangs on to hear Rev. Mel shout "amen" because that always makes her feel good.

I never get tired of telling people about my friend, Rev. Mel Miller who has spent his life fighting for social and economic justice, fighting against racism, warfare and prejudice.  But I told her, Mel is 90 now and not getting around as well as he used to.  And she opined, that it was going to be horrible to lose that voice when he is gone.

I thought about it for a moment and tried to imagine what church will be like when Mel isn't able to be here and I just felt, I felt it deep inside, that the first day Mel can't come that probably everyone left here would yell amen in his honor.

Mel has spent a lot of his life as a lone voice calling for school integration, housing for the poor, justice for American Indians, and support for poor farmers.  I've felt pretty isolated here in southern Missouri, performing weddings for same sex couples, fighting corporations, hospitals and churches that abuse the vulnerable.

But if it is just me bloviating about progressive religion and Mel shouting Amen then we are a pretty silly pair of preachers.  Corporations have as their mission statement that they are going to pay a dividend to their shareholders.  Politicians have as their unstated mission to be re-elected by any means necessary.

What stands between the corporations and the government and all of the people who have no voice, who are too poor to have a lobbyist or to have politicians come courting their donations?  You and me.  Just you and just me.

We are the prophets now.  We are Isaiah, Moses, Jeremiah, and Amos.  We are the ones who will demand that workers be given a living wage.  We are the ones that will insist that laborers who build houses get to live in one that they own.  We are the ones who will defend the immigrant farmer, the child growing up in urban blight in underfunded schools.

We are the ones who will prevent our economically disadvantaged young men and women from being recruited to go die in a war for oil and military spending.

How can we defend justice against the combined power of corporations and government.  Ah, my friends, you defend justice the same way you defend a lion..... you let it out of the cage.  You talk about it, you don't give up, you shout amen until you are hoarse.

Old king Pharaoh, "let my people go."  And Burger King, if you don't love the poor people who eat your crummy food enough to help pay for their schools, health care, and housing then you can go but you won't be taking my dollars with you.

Walgreens, you want to give advice to seniors about which Medicare prescription benefit to choose?  Alright, but I will advise those seniors to take their prescriptions to locally owned pharmacies who are not trying to rob this nation of its future.

It is not teacher and police pensions that are threatening this nation's economy.  There are no teachers with off shore accounts and apartments in Paris.  Business owners may cry out against the minimum wage being raised so something slightly better than slavery but look, if everybody went to an Ivy League college and got a Phd somebody would still have to nail shingles to roofs, make pizzas and milk cows..... at some point we have to acknowledge that the people who make like possible are people who deserve to have their lives made possible.

What I know for sure is that the corporations and the government will never get this right until you tell them and tell them often enough and loudly enough that they can't pretend that they don't hear you.

Well, I guess that's what I've got to say.  Now, what do you have to say?

The Path to Centering Spirituality

August 24, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

In the same way I saw an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times. And what is that ancient path, that ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times? Just this noble eightfold path: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration...I followed that path.
--Nagara Sutta

Henry Davis of Ferguson, Missouri had the misfortune of being a black man with the very ordinary name of Henry Davis.  It was a misfortune because there was another black man named Henry Davis who was suspected of having committed a crime in St. Louis Co.

When Henry Davis was arrested in the fall of 2009 he was taken to the police department where they discovered that this Henry Davis had a different middle name and a different social security number than the Henry Davis they were looking for.  They decided to hold him overnight anyway.

When they tried to put him into a one bed holding cell that already had an occupant, he objected.  When he objected, five officers took him out of the cell and beat him severely.  All of this is absurdly incompetent, violent and inexcusable but that's not why I am telling you Henry Davis' story this morning.  It is what happened next that makes me want to talk about this in relation to the first step of the eight fold path of traditional Buddhism.

When Henry Davis was arrested he was just a welder living in Ferguson, MO who had not been charged with any crime.

After his false arrest and completely unethical beating at the hands of the Ferguson police.... he was charged with property damage because.... Wait for it.... Wait for it.... It appears that Henry Davis, while being beaten, got some of his blood on the uniforms of the officers who were beating him.
http://rt.com/usa/180680-ferguson-henry-davis-blood/

Now, standing here in a pulpit that is 200 miles removed from Ferguson, MO and five years removed from the incident, it is clear to us that this was just nuts.... This wasn't simply abuse of authority or even extreme police brutality.... This was crazy.

It is obvious to us but it wasn't obvious to them.  Prejudice, as you have heard me say before, has its own logic. Absent the kind of mindfulness, the kind of dedication to reality, absent the courage of self criticism, prejudice becomes a short hand form of logic that interprets everything around your own comfort, convenience and profit.

The police had made a mistake.  They complicated that mistake with a violent crime against an innocent citizen.  And in order to not face charges themselves, they created an embarrassing charge against their victim. This, I assure you, happens in less bloody and extreme ways in interactions between human beings all of the time.

In his famous and still very helpful book, Scott Peck writes in the first section of The Road Less Traveled, that there are four tools of discipline necessary to lead a sane and happy life.  They are:

1. Delaying gratification
2. Acceptance of responsibility
3. Dedication to truth
4. Balance

I would personally put them in a different order but Peck was certainly influenced by Buddhist thought in this list.  It seems to me that in our day the third one, dedication to truth or reality, is more urgent.  Thirty years ago when this book was first published, we did not yet have 24 hour news networks and newspapers employed actual journalists.  In our day, where propaganda and prejudice pass for news, the public is increasingly distanced from a healthy orientation to reality.

We will insist that something is true because we want it to be true.  The general public still thinks that Obamacare is bad but if you ask them if affordable health care is good, if you ask them if they think that insurance companies should not exclude pre-existing conditions from coverage, or that insurance companies shouldn't be able to cancel your coverage because you are sick, then the overwhelming majority of citizens favor every aspect of Obamacare, they just don't like that policy that that black man came up with.

In fact, in some polling, we see that the majority of Americans approve of the Affordable Healthcare Act while still opposing Obamacare because they don't know that they are the same thing.  At a certain level, that is just a matter of being uniformed.  But there is a difference between ignorance and willful ignorance.

To quote Scott Peck again, one of the most useful definitions of evil is just that:  willful ignorance.  Being stupid is not a crime but denying reality and willfully ignoring facts is, if not evil, it is certainly the gateway to evil.  It is this disengagement from reality that allows for racism and misogyny to continue to exist.  A failure to have this "right view" that the Buddha taught allowed us to ignore readily available evidence and to engage in a lethal, bankrupting, and decade long war in Iraq, leaving behind billions in assets and weapons for an army of terrorists to become a nightmare for the people of Syria and Iraq.

But, to be completely honest, we have to acknowledge that religion has played a role in this as well.  We teach impressionable children to force themselves to believe in angels, demons, souls, in heaven and hell, and all manner of reality denying magical thinking and then we are surprised when they don't vote or act rationally in matters of great importance.

Progressive faith asks us to invest ourselves in evidence.  The Buddhist faith has always insisted that the spiritual path is devoted to reality in a right view, right speech, right action, and even a right occupation.

Prejudice and even traditional religion asks us to believe without evidence or even to believe in spite of contrary evidence.  The eightfold path calls for mindfulness, concentration, it asks us to be aware, focused, informed and caring.

We come into the world as screaming narcissists.  There is nothing wrong with that.... That's how babies survive.  But we expect them to grow up.  Within a few months we want them to be able to hold their own bottles and then to feed themselves.  We expect them to learn to control their bodily functions and their emotional outbursts.

When they get to be a few years old, we expect them to learn to tell the difference between a cartoon and reality, between imagination and experience.  Eventually, they need to be able to figure out for themselves that there are no monsters under the bed and that their bad dreams are just bad dreams but not bad realities.

Somehow we have not expected the church to grow up.  We have allowed the church to confuse imagination with reality, to invest bad dreams with waking reality and to fail to come to terms with the real spiritiual challenges that face us.

We can all by sympathetic with a child who is afraid of the dark.  My modest proposal is that we no longer tolerate an adult religion that is afraid of the light.

We choose to follow a path that is devoted to reality, that struggles to say the right things, do the right things, to concentrate, focus, to balance the personal good with the social good, to follow a spiritual path that not only heals our own lives but offers the hope of substantive salvation to the world.

Offending the Pious

Proper  15       August 17, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Matthew 15: 10-18
10Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, "Listen and understand: 11it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles." 12Then the disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?" 13He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit." 15But Peter said to him, "Explain this parable to us." 16Then he said, "Are you also still without understanding? 17Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? 18But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.

Like most of you, I grew up going to church, though I doubt that many of you would have gone as often as I did.... I'm talking perfect attendance.  Even on my "stay out all night" senior prom night, my dad met me in the garage as I was taking off my coat and bow tie after a night of being "all grown up," and said, "Keep your coat on son, if you are man enough to stay out all night, you are man enough to sit up in church for a couple of hours."

I didn't think that I was man enough, but it turns out that I was.  But even with perfect church attendance, church turns out to give you a little bite of religion every week.  I had regular doses of Jesus in Sunday School and in church all of my life, but it wasn't until about 20 years ago, when I was asked to teach a college course on the "Life and Teachings of Jesus" that I had to step back and try to see the big picture.

In church you read a passage here, a passage there, you talk about what that might mean and what this might mean but I had never asked myself, "What was the primary point of Jesus' teaching?"  "Why was Jesus important?  Different?  Noteworthy? Why do we still care what he said?"

I'm indebted to Marcus Borg's little book, "Meeting Jesus Again (for the first time)" for giving me a big picture context.

Borg points out that the primary message of Jesus is a message of radical compassion and the primary conflict in the gospels is the conflict of the message of radical compassion against the prevailing religion of purity or piety.  You can see it in our reading from Matthew 15 today.  Jesus is saying that all of the obsession about kosher laws, of things you can't touch and things you can eat are absurd. He even rather graphically says that everything you eat simply pass through your body and becomes sewage.

What really matters is not what goes into you but what comes out of your heart, your mind, your mouth.

It is important to see that this is not a matter of Christianity verses Judaism or Jesus against the Jews. This is a conflict between worldviews.  There is, I might dare to say, a great deal more piety in traditional Christianity than there ever was in ancient Judaism.

You have often heard me stress that the practice of a healthy spirituality has to do with behaviors rather than beliefs.  In that sense, piety can masquerade as healthy spirituality because it does stress behaviors... the problem is that there is no compassion in piety.... It is all narcissistic, it is all about keeping oneself unstained by the world, pure enough to be acceptable to God.

If someone says, "I'm having impure thoughts," we tend to think immediately of sex... as if sex were ipso facto impure or somehow defiling.

Which is more impure: the decision to be intimate with your significant other or the decision to spend all of your money on yourself rather than to help the poor?  Which is more impure: watching an R rated movie or keeping your employee's salary down so low that they can't live on their wages?

Traditional religion, whether it is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, has expended huge amounts of energy on the containment of private sexual thoughts and actions, blended with obsessive concerns with alcohol, drugs, and certain foods, while waging insane wars, creating an economic system that serves the rich and impoverishes the majority.

The United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the world.  Poverty tends to lead to crime.  Piety says that we need to build more prisons in which we can punish the impure.  Compassion says that we invest in our children, giving them decent housing, access to health care, and good schools.

Consider how the tragic murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO has unfolded in civil strife in this past week.  An unarmed man, holding his hands in the air, was killed by a small town policeman.  There is little doubt that Michael Brown was not innocent of aggressive behaviors but there is no plausible defense for the lethal force used on him by that policeman.

The public responded with outrage and, at least a part of the public, let their outrage turn into looting and arson.

The initial police response to protest, looting and arson was to roll out armored military vehicles and to have police in full military battle gear, aim weapons at a public already enraged by excessive violence on the part of the police.

A more compassionate response by the state police, once they were put in charge of the situation, saw the officer in charge marching with the protestors, sympathizing, understanding, affirming their cries for justice.  Piety can enforce order but compassion can heal.

The movement from looting and burning towards peaceful demonstration was halted, of course, when the police released video from a convenience store security camera that appeared to show Michael Brown stealing some cheap cigars without releasing any details of the shooting of Michael Brown.

You see, the official pious technique was simply to display Michael Brown as a large, menacing, black man engaged in petty theft... as if to say, "Well, of course, he was asking to be shot."  Piety seeks to diminish a person's worth to the point that you don't have to see them as being human.

Do you remember in the early years of our awareness of AIDS that people, even on network news, would talk about the innocent victims of AIDS... and by innocent they meant people who contracted the HIV virus through a blood transfusion or an accidental needle prick in a hospital room.  Which meant that anyone who contracted AIDS by having sex with an infected person was then deserving of a fatal illness.

Even my puritanical mother would not have suggested that sexual conduct was cause for execution! ... exile maybe, but not death!

The piety system cannot hold a candle to radical compassion.  So the tension in the gospels was that Jesus' teaching about compassion flew in the face of organized religion... of the government.... The police.... The banking system.... The enforcement of wealth for some and poverty for others.  So, they killed him.

It is no longer common to crucify people who defy the piety system but in Ferguson, MO they are doing what they can.... They are arresting journalists for covering the police actions.  I want to say this very clearly for all of you and for all of our American audience and I hope the same is true in most countries, but it is legal in all 50 states for you to take out your phones and video the police at work.  In fact, video cameras have been proven to prevent police violence.

In Rialto, California, the city required every member of their police force to wear a camera while on duty and they discovered a dramatic reduction in the number of times that their officers used their batons, tasers, tear gas or guns.  They have had a 90% reduction in complaints against the police.

As much as I despise the NSA's spying on American citizens and foreign governmental officials, there are times when having cameras turned on can help them to remember their humanity.

H. Jackson Brown famously said that "Character is what you do when you think no one is watching."  That may be true, but even if they are only pretending to have character, I think we need to help our overly militarized police forces to remember that they are here to protect and serve, not to harass and shoot.

Talking about radical compassion offends the pious.  To quiet the prophets of the gospel, they will threaten, ridicule, sometimes arrest and pepper spray and sometimes they will even shoot.  But it was a message that Jesus of Nazareth thought it was worth dying to teach and I am convinced that it is certainly a message that is worth living for.

A Prophet in Hiding

Proper 14    August 10, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

1 Kings 19:9-14
9At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" 10He answered, "I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away." 11He said, "Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by." Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.13When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" 14He answered, "I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away." 

I have a long treasured fantasy.  Probably nothing I have to say now could possibly live up to your expectations but it is my fantasy, not yours.  Mine is a fantasy that was born in the final months of my tenure as the senior pastor of a large denominational church... when I had to take medications to calm my stomach and others to cope with the political insanity of my circumstances.

I bought a lottery ticket every Saturday afternoon and I would stop at a store and check it on my way to church on Sunday to see if I had won, literally to see if I could "call in rich."  In those days I dreamed having enough money to buy a Starbucks on the coast of Florida where I could change my name and just stand behind the counter and make cappuccino drinks all day and officially stop trying to care about what happened in the news or to the church.

I never won the lottery but I did find myself unemployed and investigating the purchase of a Starbucks only to learn that Starbucks doesn't sell franchises.  All of their stores are company owned.

Returning to pastoral life was not a straight line and when life gets a bit more challenging than I think that I want to continue to bear, I return to my fantasy of what I call my own personal "Elijah moment."  I am sorry to be speaking so personally this morning but I can't help but think about my Starbucks fantasy whenever this Elijah story comes around in the lectionary.

We read just a bit of it this morning but let me remind you of the larger context.  King Ahab, the king of Judah, had married a queen from a neighboring kingdom who was determined to replace the worship of the Jewish God, Yahweh, with her own native religion.  Jezebel was a determined evangelist for Baal, killing those who would not comply by converting.

Elijah has a great show down with the priests of Baal.  It was a red-letter day for Elijah who succeeded in calling down fire from heaven and then personally slaying the priests of Baal with a sword.  Ecumenical relationships were at a low ebb at that time.

Jezebel then threatens to kill Elijah and even though he had proven himself to be a friend of God and pretty handy with a sword, he was horrified and he ran into the wilderness to hide.  He hid in a cave and prayed that God would simply take his life.

Now, of course, this story is full of hero-worshipping exaggeration but the core narrative tells a tale that I can certainly relate to and I suspect that most of you can too.

He didn't run and hide because he no longer had the strength to stand up for the faith he had defended.  He didn't go into hiding because he was afraid of one woman, even though she was a queen.  He went into hiding because he didn't believe that he had any friends.

Elijah was a powerful prophet, certain of his convictions and unafraid of his enemies but, as you see it in the beginning of this pericope we have from I Kings 19 today:  The Lord calls to Elijah who is hiding in the back of a cave, "Why are you hiding?"  And Elijah answers, "I've been so zealous for the truth, I've worked so hard, but everyone else has just given up and given in... they have forsaken the message, accepted the religion of the government.. and," Elijah says, "I, I alone, am left."

You know how a shy child will sometimes just pull his shirt tail up over his head so that, well, so that no one could see him though the truth of the matter is that everyone can still see him, he just can't see anybody.  It is one of those things that children do that adults aren't supposed to do but the text says that Elijah did, he pulled his mantle up over his head..... which doesn't look very mature.... But it does look sadly desperate.... Depressed... hopeless.

In the months that have passed since my newspaper column ended, my mail has changed pretty dramatically.  The mail that I received in response to my News-Leaders articles were mostly very negative and some were even threatening.  But the mail I receive in response to our YouTube and iTunes listeners is typically very positive.  Of course, that is a self selected audience and the newspaper is a general circulation publication so people who don't like my stuff on line will usually just go away. ... but not always.

I get an occasional letter from a fundamentalist who is praying for me, telling me that I need to believe in God's word and in Jesus Christ.... I don't pay any attention to those.  But when I do get a negative response, it is usually pretty forceful, usually a bit too personal, and it sounds like it was written from the mouth of a cave in the wilderness by someone who feels abandoned and desperate.

One of our listeners, Tony Khoshaba, and Iraqi Christian, wrote to ask me why no progressive Christians are talking about the slaughter of Christians in Syria and in Iraq by the Isis extremists. I replied, frankly, that though I and others address current social justice issues that we are not a news service.  While I try to take a wide angle view of social issues, I am disciplined about exposing myself to a lot of non-corporate international news... I still cannot say that I am comprehensively educated in current events.

Tony, though the plight of your people, the Yazidis, is dire, and I know that hundreds have been murdered and thousands are stranded in the mountains without food and water, and I affirm that very little media attention is being given to this emergency, I do want you to know that we are not indifferent to your plight.  The Yazidis, which means, "children of the son," have lived in Christian community in Iraq and Syria from the days of the apostles themselves.

Since the rise of Islam, I know that you must feel much like Elijah, where everyone has abandoned the faith, turned to the majority religion and now, under the Iraqi banner which reads, There is no God but Allah, your people are being hunted down and killed.

There have been demonstrations in major cities on both the east and the west coast of the United States, sometimes drawing out thousands of desperate people who have fled from the Middle East for the safety of the United States, but the TV cameras don't show up and no one seems to hear your cries.

I hear your anger and I can bear the fact that you are angry even very specifically at me.  Still, there is nothing that I can do to change the policies of the governments of Iraq, Syria or even the United States, but I can tell you that you are not alone.

The only reassurance that Elijah gets is that he is not alone.  He is still in a tiny minority, but he is not all alone.

But there is something more I would like to add for Tony, for myself, for any of you who feel like pulling your shirt over your head, getting a meaningless job and officially checking out of society.

In his book, The Impossible Will Take a While, Howard Zinn writes:

Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness.

It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act. 

We have been successful on many fronts, even when the success is far too slow.  And I realize that 200,000 refugees in the mountains of Iraq do not have time to wait for water, food, and protection from an army of terrorists, I don't want to be dismissive of that in any way.  Still, the larger issue is the historical cessation of war.... The issue is that we have to stop creating more refugees, moving national boundaries by force and allowing regional civil strife to become genocide.

If we are ever going to do that, we have to get out of the cave, we have to find each other.  You don't have to be friendless or isolated.

Pull your shirt down off of your face, go find your tribe and make your tribe strong enough for your voice to be heard.  Isolation is the same thing as surrender and we are not the kind of people who give up.

(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.