Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
When you turn on your TV at night, you know that if you watch a sci-fi movie like the X-Men, or the Avengers, or Star Wars, that these movies contain no history and do not portray anything that ever has or ever will happen.
But if you watch House of Cards, or Newsroom, or West Wing, you know that though most of the main characters are fictitious, the story lines do often deal with real historical events and people and that these shows, though fundamentally a fictional account, may help us to understand the nuances of real events.
And, if you turn on the news, most of you know that what you will see is a corporate sanitized version of the least relevant things that happened that day, used to keep you from knowing anything about real events. .... Or maybe that's just me.
No one could understand Star Wars if you watched it thinking that it was a documentary or a news show. You have to understand the genre you are watching to grasp the message.
This is nowhere more true than in trying to understand the Bible. Those who insist upon reading the Bible literally, or who insist that every part of it is historical, will never understand what they are reading. The gospels are not recording history or trying to give an "eye witness" account.
The gospels are religious literature. In a very real way, they are sermons to be heard in the early church. Bishop Spong says that we have to read them as if they are liturgy and not as history or we will remain forever deaf to their message.
Today we are recounting the passion narrative through the brilliant music of Jesus Christ Superstar, which is based on the gospel of Matthew, which was based on the gospel of Mark, which was, and here is the important point, loosely based on the events surrounding the death of Jesus.
Fifty years after Jesus was executed, Mark fleshed out the bare bones of the church's story in a dramatic narrative that is, we believe, set in the historical location: Jerusalem. And it includes certain historical figures: Jesus, Pilate, and Peter. The gospels contain the names of some of the priestly figures of the period though they play fast and loose with the details. Mary Magdalene may have been a historical character but scholars are uncertain.
What may surprise you is that scholars generally agree that Judas and Joseph and Barabbas are all literary creations.
Paul, the first New Testament writer who mentions the execution of Jesus and the people around him does say that Jesus was betrayed but he does not indicate that it was one of the twelve apostles who did it. In fact, twenty years later, Paul still refers to the "12" as if he has never heard of Judas or of Judas' suicide.
The name, "Judas" is simply a Greek spelling of "Judah." Judas is a symbolic character who represents all of the Jewish people. His full name in the gospels, "Judas Iscariot", is even more symbolic since "Iscariot" means "assassin."
By the time Matthew is writing, the Jewish temple has been destroyed and most of the Jews in Palestine have been killed. The Christian religion is trying to put some distance between itself and Judaism because Christianity is spreading through the Roman Empire and though the Christian faith is, at its root, a Jewish reform movement, the gospel writers wanted to shift blame for the death of Jesus from the Empire and onto the plate of the Jews.
Rome didn't execute preachers for teaching love, healing people, performing miracles and upsetting local religious leaders. Rome killed people who threatened the goals of the empire. There is no doubt that Jesus and his followers were in tension with the Jerusalem priesthood but we should not believe that the priests turned Jesus over to Pilate to be killed. Pilate wasn't the sort to do the bidding of the priests, actually, it was very much the other way around.
Matthew, deeply imprinted by the Jewish scriptures, especially Psalm 22 and the Suffering Servant songs of Isaiah, edited Mark's version of the passion to include multiple elements of Jewish heritage and scripture that are invisible to our eyes or are, typically, not especially relevant to us.
Though the gospels are not concerned with the details of history and, in fact, they take some liberties with the facts to protect the early church from the ire of Rome, they are, none-the-less, brilliant.
Historically speaking, I don't know if Jesus expected to die when he took his movement to Jerusalem but he certainly had to know that he was placing himself in grave danger. Just as every time Gandhi or Martin Luther King knelt down in prayer while taking a beating from a policeman's club, they didn't know if they were going to die that day or not. They didn't know if they would be killed by the government or by one of their own people.
Thomas Merton didn't know if his war protests would get him killed or jusr reviled by Catholic conservatives. Oscar Romero didn't know if he would survive any one of his imprisonments, nor did Dorothy Day. Romero was killed by an assassin trained at Ft Bennings, GA. Gandhi was killed by an assassin, as was King. Day managed to survive into her elder years and died naturally after suffering a lifetime of abuse. Thomas Merton died in what was made to look like an accidental death though many continue to speculate that it was a CIA execution.... I used to think that was silly, until I learned a bit more about covert government actions.
In the end, the story is a story about martyrdom. It is about being willing to pour out your life for a message of liberation, of love, of defiance of authority, and to compassionately give voice to the voiceless who suffer oppression. In that sense, the Jesus story is the story of Gandhi, King, Romero, Merton and a whole cloud of saints who were killed in the service of the greater good....
And it is the story of Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa and countless others who were not murdered but who gave their lives, one day at a time, in the pathway of radical compassion, placing their lives at risk and sacrificing the comforts we take for granted.
Like Jesus, each of these examples of faith were betrayed by false friends, used by others, and they have all been exploited by insincere religious institutions.
We divide up the parts each year when we do the music from Superstar. My friend Paul, sings the Jesus parts, Sean sings Judas, others are Mary, Herod, Pilate, Simon... but in the real world, we too play a part in the passion narrative we know all too well and we are not assigned parts. We get to choose a part.
You can choose to betray a friend. You can choose to side with power, the power of the state or the power of the marketplace or even the power of the church. Or you can choose to live compassionately, which almost always means that you will have to live sacrificially and try to survive betrayal and corruption.
The Easter resurrection of Jesus is not, in my opinion and in the consensus of Biblical scholarship, a literal account of a man who was dead being brought back to life. The resurrection is a metaphor about courage, determination, faithfulness.... The willingness to, even when you have been defeated, to try again. The choice to live for a reason even if that reason will involve pain and sacrifice.
In real life we may not get just one role. We may have made a bad choice at several junctures of our life's story but this story invites us to choose again and to choose better this time.
Free yourself from fear of the power of the state. Refuse to be imprisoned by the guilt of institutional religion. Do not be enslaved by the desire for money or security. Live large, love generously, forgive without limits, do not be defeated by false friends, not divorce, cancer or bankruptcy.... Re renewed in the resurrection of your own life by your own choice. Christ is risen but Christ is only risen in you!
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Loving without Owning
March 29, 2015
An Observance of Baptism at Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
One of my favorite gospel stories in John is the account of the healing of the man who was born blind. In the 9th chapter of John, we read this story about a man who has been blind from birth and Jesus, according to the narrative, heals him but he performs this miracle on a Sabbath Day and so, John describes and ensuing controversy created by this violation of religious rules.
The part that I really love is when the religious leaders ask the man who had just been healed of a life-time of blindness where Jesus was, the man was able to say, "I don't know." I love that. The way John tells this story, Jesus was able to give a man a gift that was unimaginably wonderful and yet let him entirely free... free of guilt, free of obligation...free, indeed, of even knowing what Jesus did next.
He gave him a gift and left him free to do whatever a man who was finally set free from the limitations of blindness needed to do.
It is the freedom that attracts me to this passage of Kahlil Gibran's Prophet. I find most of Gibran's work to be pretty shallow sophistry but I have never been able to get this passage about children out of my head.
His suggestion that we should not make our children into little replicas of ourselves. Our children do not belong to us. They belong to the future. We give them life. We care for them when they are sick. We feed and house them. We protect them when they are young and we worry about them for the rest of our lives. But we do not own them and if we are good at being parents, they will leave us without the feeling that they owe us anything.
I hope that my daughter continues to visit me frequently in the future but I do not demand it of her and I fully accept that if I want to make that vital transformation from parent to friend, that I have an obligation to be a good friend. I need to let go of any control, be sparing in offering opinions, and to be enjoyable when we are together. I will do my best not to be a burden to her as I grow old and I will strive to leave her enough of an estate to make a difference in her life. But there is no more contract between us.... Just love and a lot of great memories.
She has told me not to worry about retirement that when the time comes she will just move me into her house but I am afraid that she has told her mother the same thing and I know that I couldn't go through that again!... but I digress.
But talk about setting your children free into the future without tying them to the past has very real implications. The religious and the non-religious, the conservative and the liberal, all have passionate feelings about children, specifically about babies, but opinions without personal sacrifice is just a spring board into hypocrisy.
The 19th century American evangelist, Alexander Campbell, said that if you get down on your knees and pray for something that you are not willing to then stand up and sacrifice and work to make happen that you are not only disappointing yourself, you are also insulting God.
For the past 40 years we have been vigorously debating whether or not a woman should have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The religious right joined arms with Catholic leadership in condemning abortion under virtually all circumstances. And while those of us on the left have been inclined to support a woman's right to govern her own reproductive life, we have tried to call our sisters and brothers on the right onto the common ground of supporting children when they are born with good schools and access to health care. That is a conversation that we seem to be having difficulty getting started.
In fact, a decade ago I published a column in which I pointed out that the abortion rate went down by over 50% during the Clinton administration, not because of restrictive laws regarding abortion but because of low unemployment and rising wages. When women believe that it is economically possible for them to properly care for a child, then abortion becomes less and less likely. Under economic hardship, it becomes more likely.
Conservative administrations try to make abortion illegal and if they can't do that they make it nearly impossible to obtain. Now, in the state of Missouri, we have only one abortion provider and that is in St. Louis. We have added a 72 wait that would require a young woman from our area to make a 400 mile round trip and spend three nights in St. Louis to obtain her legal rights. So, I pointed out that it is one thing to make life hard on the poor but it is another thing to actually do something about it. Conservatives pay lip-service to the value of human life while fostering the economic circumstances that make abortion happen more often.
I've received a lot of hate mail in response to my columns over the years but that was the only column that inspired a lengthy bit of hate mail from a local Catholic nun. That may seem funny to you but I can tell you very honestly, that sister had some talent with a poison pen!
We may never all agree on the moral issues around reproductive decision making but if we cannot agree on making the personal and social sacrifices necessary to give newborns health care and decent housing and an opportunity to obtain a decent education then the rest of the conversation is really just smoke and mirrors hiding our selfish hypocrisy. I assume that I don't need to say more about that.
Gibran talks about our children being the future and that sentiment has been really driven home to me this week as I learned that Chile has decided to make going to college tuition free... and they are doing it by adding a 24% tax on their corporations.
I was jealous when I heard that Germany was going to make their colleges tuition free.
Allowing the children of the poor to receive the same education as the children of the middle and upper middle class is a vote for the future generation in any country. In Germany, it was logical. Germany is very economically successful right now and they want to remain very competitive in the European and global market.
But Chile is a very poor nation that is not competitive at all.... Which is why it makes even more sense for them to sacrificially subsidize the education of their college kids. Chile is deciding that they want to be the next first world economic power and they are doing it by liberating their children from the hurdle of college tuition or student loans. At both ends of the spectrum, Germany and Chile, are sacrificing for their children.
You should already know but I am going to state it for the record, that is the opposite of what we are doing in the United States. We are cutting education from our state and federal budgets so that the cost of going to college is constantly rising making it prohibitive to all but the economically secure.
As my next girlfriend, Elizabeth Warren, has been ardently pointing out, we are not only not helping our college students to go to school, we are burdening them with high interest student loans so that we can make a profit off of them! (Look, Elizabeth, if you are watching this video, let's not let this get weird.... I know that you are happily married.... I was just kidding).
Every day our government loans money to banks at nearly 0% interest for the banks to use for their own profit. But student loan rates are set to double this summer, ending up at over 6%.
We have members of this church whose student loan payment is higher than their house note and that fact alone makes them delay if not forego making the decision to have children. What does that say about the future of America?
Germany and Chile are investing heavily in their young people's education, our government is currently taking over $50 billion in profit from poor and middle class students and so far has refused to even allow student to refinance at a lower rate if they can get a better deal at a bank. We are feeding our own college students into the gristmill to make profits for the present moment as if we did not believe that America even has a future.
Look, we talk here about evidence based faith. We talk about a spirituality that matters. We need to get honest about how our talk and our actions don't match up when it comes to children. Are children are the future and so we owe them a shot at a decent future and that takes more than telling them that we love them and saying that they are important.
Here in Missouri we need to expand Medicaid so that all of our children have access to health care. We need to adequately fund our schools which means paying our teaches enough to keep good people in those positions. We need to make our colleges and universities tuition free and make student loans interest free.
We need to shut off this insane school to prison pipe-line. We need to decriminalize non-violent drug users and put resources behind addiction treatment rather than incarceration and life-long criminal records... in short, we need to stop stealing their futures before they get out of pre-school.
These may sound like big things. You may feel like these things are out of your grasp. But in a democracy, exactly whose grasp are they in? If our kids are to have a future we have to stop saying that we care and start acting like we care, which includes voting as if it mattered.... Because it does.
An Observance of Baptism at Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
On Children by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
One of my favorite gospel stories in John is the account of the healing of the man who was born blind. In the 9th chapter of John, we read this story about a man who has been blind from birth and Jesus, according to the narrative, heals him but he performs this miracle on a Sabbath Day and so, John describes and ensuing controversy created by this violation of religious rules.
The part that I really love is when the religious leaders ask the man who had just been healed of a life-time of blindness where Jesus was, the man was able to say, "I don't know." I love that. The way John tells this story, Jesus was able to give a man a gift that was unimaginably wonderful and yet let him entirely free... free of guilt, free of obligation...free, indeed, of even knowing what Jesus did next.
He gave him a gift and left him free to do whatever a man who was finally set free from the limitations of blindness needed to do.
It is the freedom that attracts me to this passage of Kahlil Gibran's Prophet. I find most of Gibran's work to be pretty shallow sophistry but I have never been able to get this passage about children out of my head.
His suggestion that we should not make our children into little replicas of ourselves. Our children do not belong to us. They belong to the future. We give them life. We care for them when they are sick. We feed and house them. We protect them when they are young and we worry about them for the rest of our lives. But we do not own them and if we are good at being parents, they will leave us without the feeling that they owe us anything.
I hope that my daughter continues to visit me frequently in the future but I do not demand it of her and I fully accept that if I want to make that vital transformation from parent to friend, that I have an obligation to be a good friend. I need to let go of any control, be sparing in offering opinions, and to be enjoyable when we are together. I will do my best not to be a burden to her as I grow old and I will strive to leave her enough of an estate to make a difference in her life. But there is no more contract between us.... Just love and a lot of great memories.
She has told me not to worry about retirement that when the time comes she will just move me into her house but I am afraid that she has told her mother the same thing and I know that I couldn't go through that again!... but I digress.
But talk about setting your children free into the future without tying them to the past has very real implications. The religious and the non-religious, the conservative and the liberal, all have passionate feelings about children, specifically about babies, but opinions without personal sacrifice is just a spring board into hypocrisy.
The 19th century American evangelist, Alexander Campbell, said that if you get down on your knees and pray for something that you are not willing to then stand up and sacrifice and work to make happen that you are not only disappointing yourself, you are also insulting God.
For the past 40 years we have been vigorously debating whether or not a woman should have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The religious right joined arms with Catholic leadership in condemning abortion under virtually all circumstances. And while those of us on the left have been inclined to support a woman's right to govern her own reproductive life, we have tried to call our sisters and brothers on the right onto the common ground of supporting children when they are born with good schools and access to health care. That is a conversation that we seem to be having difficulty getting started.
In fact, a decade ago I published a column in which I pointed out that the abortion rate went down by over 50% during the Clinton administration, not because of restrictive laws regarding abortion but because of low unemployment and rising wages. When women believe that it is economically possible for them to properly care for a child, then abortion becomes less and less likely. Under economic hardship, it becomes more likely.
Conservative administrations try to make abortion illegal and if they can't do that they make it nearly impossible to obtain. Now, in the state of Missouri, we have only one abortion provider and that is in St. Louis. We have added a 72 wait that would require a young woman from our area to make a 400 mile round trip and spend three nights in St. Louis to obtain her legal rights. So, I pointed out that it is one thing to make life hard on the poor but it is another thing to actually do something about it. Conservatives pay lip-service to the value of human life while fostering the economic circumstances that make abortion happen more often.
I've received a lot of hate mail in response to my columns over the years but that was the only column that inspired a lengthy bit of hate mail from a local Catholic nun. That may seem funny to you but I can tell you very honestly, that sister had some talent with a poison pen!
We may never all agree on the moral issues around reproductive decision making but if we cannot agree on making the personal and social sacrifices necessary to give newborns health care and decent housing and an opportunity to obtain a decent education then the rest of the conversation is really just smoke and mirrors hiding our selfish hypocrisy. I assume that I don't need to say more about that.
Gibran talks about our children being the future and that sentiment has been really driven home to me this week as I learned that Chile has decided to make going to college tuition free... and they are doing it by adding a 24% tax on their corporations.
I was jealous when I heard that Germany was going to make their colleges tuition free.
Allowing the children of the poor to receive the same education as the children of the middle and upper middle class is a vote for the future generation in any country. In Germany, it was logical. Germany is very economically successful right now and they want to remain very competitive in the European and global market.
But Chile is a very poor nation that is not competitive at all.... Which is why it makes even more sense for them to sacrificially subsidize the education of their college kids. Chile is deciding that they want to be the next first world economic power and they are doing it by liberating their children from the hurdle of college tuition or student loans. At both ends of the spectrum, Germany and Chile, are sacrificing for their children.
You should already know but I am going to state it for the record, that is the opposite of what we are doing in the United States. We are cutting education from our state and federal budgets so that the cost of going to college is constantly rising making it prohibitive to all but the economically secure.
As my next girlfriend, Elizabeth Warren, has been ardently pointing out, we are not only not helping our college students to go to school, we are burdening them with high interest student loans so that we can make a profit off of them! (Look, Elizabeth, if you are watching this video, let's not let this get weird.... I know that you are happily married.... I was just kidding).
Every day our government loans money to banks at nearly 0% interest for the banks to use for their own profit. But student loan rates are set to double this summer, ending up at over 6%.
We have members of this church whose student loan payment is higher than their house note and that fact alone makes them delay if not forego making the decision to have children. What does that say about the future of America?
Germany and Chile are investing heavily in their young people's education, our government is currently taking over $50 billion in profit from poor and middle class students and so far has refused to even allow student to refinance at a lower rate if they can get a better deal at a bank. We are feeding our own college students into the gristmill to make profits for the present moment as if we did not believe that America even has a future.
Look, we talk here about evidence based faith. We talk about a spirituality that matters. We need to get honest about how our talk and our actions don't match up when it comes to children. Are children are the future and so we owe them a shot at a decent future and that takes more than telling them that we love them and saying that they are important.
Here in Missouri we need to expand Medicaid so that all of our children have access to health care. We need to adequately fund our schools which means paying our teaches enough to keep good people in those positions. We need to make our colleges and universities tuition free and make student loans interest free.
We need to shut off this insane school to prison pipe-line. We need to decriminalize non-violent drug users and put resources behind addiction treatment rather than incarceration and life-long criminal records... in short, we need to stop stealing their futures before they get out of pre-school.
These may sound like big things. You may feel like these things are out of your grasp. But in a democracy, exactly whose grasp are they in? If our kids are to have a future we have to stop saying that we care and start acting like we care, which includes voting as if it mattered.... Because it does.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Letting in the Greeks (and Mexicans, Haitians and Muslims)
Lent 5 March 22, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
All that Gloria has to do is support those four American children here in the USA for the next eight years while they grow up without a father. Every case of undocumented immigration is not like Max and Gloria and every case of deportation is not as silly and unfounded as this one clearly is. And I understand that no government can have totally open borders and still manage their economy and their crime rate.
I'm not saying that illegal immigration is not an issue, in fact, I'm saying that it is an issue... it is an issue that impacts crime, unemployment, school systems, taxes as well as families and that to this point our nation has not responded to the real issues in either a compassionate or a realistic manner.
There really are very few ethical issues about which our Jewish and Christian heritage is more clear than the issue of immigration. In the early portion of Deuteronomy, in the giving of the law to the nation of Israel, it says in Chapter 10 that God is a defender of the weak and that the people of God are to be kind and generous with the aliens who live among them because, and this shouldn't be hard to understand, they had also been aliens in their heritage.
That really ought to translate easily for Americans because with very few exceptions, our families were once aliens in this nation. I believe that my first patriarchal ancestor fled to America to keep his head on his shoulders after Cromwell fell out of power in England but, like most white people in America, I am certain that my family tree is made up of all kinds of northern Europeans who came to these shores to escape economic hardship in England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Holland and Eastern Europe. Our black sisters and brothers generally have a much more ghastly tale of surviving the journey here in chains but as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, we came here in different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now.
Our Latino sisters and brothers have a more complicated tale. Most of them carry both the blood of indigenous tribes and the blood of southern Europeans. We tend to talk about them as if they are all immigrants but, in fact, most of the southern United States was once northern Mexico. We occupied and took Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and Colorado.
In the mid 19th century, our federal government often tried to buy these territories from Mexico but they refused to sell at any price. Abraham Lincoln was in congress when he bemoaned the fact that President Polk decided to use our army and navy to take what we could not buy. Lincoln said: "...the president unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced a war with Mexico....The marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, un- provoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us."
A hundred and fifty years later, white Americans look around in these former Mexican states and ask, "How did all of these Mexican's get here?" It may not be possible to simple create a unified North America in the way that the European Union seems to be coming together but something that recognizes the fact that there have not only been 19th century land grabs and deportations but we have been a player in the perpetual poverty and violence found in much of Central America.
It is the drug trade that is fueling the civil war in Mexico in which more than 40,000 Mexicans have lost their lives. The drug money comes almost exclusively from the United States and almost all of the weapons and ammunition comes from the United States. There are six thousand gun shops along our border with Mexico and there is only one legal gun shop in Mexico.... So when I say, "do the math" on that one, there is not much doubt.
We export sweat shops and prop up banana republics to keep fresh fruits and vegetables coming our way and we give them our used military equipment and ask them to stop their drug cartels and then we sell weapons to the drug cartels. We are playing both sides of fence and then insisting that poor working families stay there because we don't want them bringing their criminal conduct here.
And even in that there is no small amount of hypocrisy. We talk about e-verify and do sweeps to gather up and export undocumented workers but we always manage to turn a blind eye when migrant farm labor is needed to move up the west coast and the east coast when it is harvest time.
And even in our little entertainment Mecca of Branson that mothballs itself after the Christmas holidays, you don't seriously think that there are hotel maids and cooks that can afford to just take off from December to March on the salaries they earn there do you? Branson is all white on stage and all brown behind the scenes.... Brown and undocumented. And the farmers and business owners don't want the situation changed. Otherwise they would have to pay a decent wage and have to comply with employment laws that they now conveniently ignore.
Xenophobes in the Tea Party and right wing talk radio talk about how the undocumented get on welfare, use up tax payer provided services and threated to cast Democratic votes....but, of course, the undocumented actually pay into Social Security and Medicare but they cannot draw benefits, so they are being forced to subsidize our tax system. And they cannot vote without first obtaining citizenship no matter how long they live here in the shadows, mowing our grass, nailing in our roofing shingles, making our beds, cooking our food, and harvesting our groceries.
Behind all of the yelling about building a fence and blocking citizenship is just smoke and mirrors for insisting that no one change the status quo. So we keep a cheap labor force that cannot go to court to protect their rights, have access to services, or even have a voice in the government they serve and support.
The most common trick of a stage magician is to get you to look at Bambi, his scantily clad assistant, or to watch the pigeon flying out of his hand while he is setting up his real trick with the hand you are not paying any attention to. The most common trick of politics and the media is to get you to be mad at someone who is no threat to you so that you don't realize who is really robbing you blind.
I resist making references to Nazi Germany because unless the think you are comparing it to rises to the level of murdering 6 million people then you are wearing the analogy out. But, if you will allow me in this instance to reference the fact that the Nazi's needed someone to blame for the social and economic woes of post WWI Germany and the Jews were a target made believable by constantly telling and retelling the same lies over and over again.
The real villains of society are always looking for someone to scapegoat to keep the sheep-people bleating about all of the wrong things. Last summer, my second favorite economist, Robert Reich, said:
"The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion (and I would like to add, "illegal immigration"). It's insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street's gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy."
It is like the current conservative sand storm about wanting access to what Hillary Clinton wrote in her private e-mails but they don't want to accept responsibility for very publicly writing a treasonous letter to a foreign government that most of them signed.
I began today by reading a rather peculiar couple of verses from the gospel of John. I don't think that this text accurate describes anything that Jesus actually said but rather it is an example of John's literary way of helping to transform the historical Jesus, who was likely a painfully sectarian Jew, into a more ethnically inclusive religious figure.
In this narrative, some Greek speaking Romans asked to have a conversation with Jesus, a request that had to be handed up the chain of command from Philip, to Andrew, to Jesus. Jesus does not even reply directly to the request but, again, in this fictitious account, says something that seems to our ears to be entirely off topic. Andrew says, "There are some Greeks who want to talk to you," and Jesus replies, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified."
In the Roger Ray's literal translation this reads, "Andrew says to Jesus, 'Hey, there are a couple of white guys who want to talk to you.' And Jesus replied, 'It must mean that this is the end of the world.'"
The fear, xenophobia, paranoia, that keeps the world divided into racial, national, tribal, class, and religious warring tribes needs to come to an end. That can only happen when we consistently refuse to be drawn into prejudice against whoever the real abusers try to scape-goat and we make a conscious effort to understand one another across racial, religious, class, national and even political divides. Then the world as we have known it will come to an end and we will have a chance to see all of the sons and daughters of human kind glorified.
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
John 12:20-23Max, a Mennonite pastor in Iowa City, was snatched from his home in the early morning hours of March 3rd, while his wife Gloria was in the shower and his four children were still asleep. He was not abducted by criminals nor was he arrested by a local police force for some egregious crime. Max Villatoro was arrested in immigration sweep aimed at deporting undocumented immigrants who were, officials said, the worst of criminal offenders. What was Max's crime that brought the INS to his door? He had applied for an Iowa drivers' license. The consoling reassurance offered to his four children who are now between the ages of 7 and 15, is that if Max applies for legal immigration status and stays in Honduras for the next eight years, he may be approved to return.
20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, 'Sir, we wish to see Jesus.' 22Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23Jesus answered them, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
All that Gloria has to do is support those four American children here in the USA for the next eight years while they grow up without a father. Every case of undocumented immigration is not like Max and Gloria and every case of deportation is not as silly and unfounded as this one clearly is. And I understand that no government can have totally open borders and still manage their economy and their crime rate.
I'm not saying that illegal immigration is not an issue, in fact, I'm saying that it is an issue... it is an issue that impacts crime, unemployment, school systems, taxes as well as families and that to this point our nation has not responded to the real issues in either a compassionate or a realistic manner.
There really are very few ethical issues about which our Jewish and Christian heritage is more clear than the issue of immigration. In the early portion of Deuteronomy, in the giving of the law to the nation of Israel, it says in Chapter 10 that God is a defender of the weak and that the people of God are to be kind and generous with the aliens who live among them because, and this shouldn't be hard to understand, they had also been aliens in their heritage.
That really ought to translate easily for Americans because with very few exceptions, our families were once aliens in this nation. I believe that my first patriarchal ancestor fled to America to keep his head on his shoulders after Cromwell fell out of power in England but, like most white people in America, I am certain that my family tree is made up of all kinds of northern Europeans who came to these shores to escape economic hardship in England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Holland and Eastern Europe. Our black sisters and brothers generally have a much more ghastly tale of surviving the journey here in chains but as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, we came here in different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now.
Our Latino sisters and brothers have a more complicated tale. Most of them carry both the blood of indigenous tribes and the blood of southern Europeans. We tend to talk about them as if they are all immigrants but, in fact, most of the southern United States was once northern Mexico. We occupied and took Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and Colorado.
In the mid 19th century, our federal government often tried to buy these territories from Mexico but they refused to sell at any price. Abraham Lincoln was in congress when he bemoaned the fact that President Polk decided to use our army and navy to take what we could not buy. Lincoln said: "...the president unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced a war with Mexico....The marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, un- provoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us."
A hundred and fifty years later, white Americans look around in these former Mexican states and ask, "How did all of these Mexican's get here?" It may not be possible to simple create a unified North America in the way that the European Union seems to be coming together but something that recognizes the fact that there have not only been 19th century land grabs and deportations but we have been a player in the perpetual poverty and violence found in much of Central America.
It is the drug trade that is fueling the civil war in Mexico in which more than 40,000 Mexicans have lost their lives. The drug money comes almost exclusively from the United States and almost all of the weapons and ammunition comes from the United States. There are six thousand gun shops along our border with Mexico and there is only one legal gun shop in Mexico.... So when I say, "do the math" on that one, there is not much doubt.
We export sweat shops and prop up banana republics to keep fresh fruits and vegetables coming our way and we give them our used military equipment and ask them to stop their drug cartels and then we sell weapons to the drug cartels. We are playing both sides of fence and then insisting that poor working families stay there because we don't want them bringing their criminal conduct here.
And even in that there is no small amount of hypocrisy. We talk about e-verify and do sweeps to gather up and export undocumented workers but we always manage to turn a blind eye when migrant farm labor is needed to move up the west coast and the east coast when it is harvest time.
And even in our little entertainment Mecca of Branson that mothballs itself after the Christmas holidays, you don't seriously think that there are hotel maids and cooks that can afford to just take off from December to March on the salaries they earn there do you? Branson is all white on stage and all brown behind the scenes.... Brown and undocumented. And the farmers and business owners don't want the situation changed. Otherwise they would have to pay a decent wage and have to comply with employment laws that they now conveniently ignore.
Xenophobes in the Tea Party and right wing talk radio talk about how the undocumented get on welfare, use up tax payer provided services and threated to cast Democratic votes....but, of course, the undocumented actually pay into Social Security and Medicare but they cannot draw benefits, so they are being forced to subsidize our tax system. And they cannot vote without first obtaining citizenship no matter how long they live here in the shadows, mowing our grass, nailing in our roofing shingles, making our beds, cooking our food, and harvesting our groceries.
Behind all of the yelling about building a fence and blocking citizenship is just smoke and mirrors for insisting that no one change the status quo. So we keep a cheap labor force that cannot go to court to protect their rights, have access to services, or even have a voice in the government they serve and support.
The most common trick of a stage magician is to get you to look at Bambi, his scantily clad assistant, or to watch the pigeon flying out of his hand while he is setting up his real trick with the hand you are not paying any attention to. The most common trick of politics and the media is to get you to be mad at someone who is no threat to you so that you don't realize who is really robbing you blind.
I resist making references to Nazi Germany because unless the think you are comparing it to rises to the level of murdering 6 million people then you are wearing the analogy out. But, if you will allow me in this instance to reference the fact that the Nazi's needed someone to blame for the social and economic woes of post WWI Germany and the Jews were a target made believable by constantly telling and retelling the same lies over and over again.
The real villains of society are always looking for someone to scapegoat to keep the sheep-people bleating about all of the wrong things. Last summer, my second favorite economist, Robert Reich, said:
"The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion (and I would like to add, "illegal immigration"). It's insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street's gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy."
It is like the current conservative sand storm about wanting access to what Hillary Clinton wrote in her private e-mails but they don't want to accept responsibility for very publicly writing a treasonous letter to a foreign government that most of them signed.
I began today by reading a rather peculiar couple of verses from the gospel of John. I don't think that this text accurate describes anything that Jesus actually said but rather it is an example of John's literary way of helping to transform the historical Jesus, who was likely a painfully sectarian Jew, into a more ethnically inclusive religious figure.
In this narrative, some Greek speaking Romans asked to have a conversation with Jesus, a request that had to be handed up the chain of command from Philip, to Andrew, to Jesus. Jesus does not even reply directly to the request but, again, in this fictitious account, says something that seems to our ears to be entirely off topic. Andrew says, "There are some Greeks who want to talk to you," and Jesus replies, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified."
In the Roger Ray's literal translation this reads, "Andrew says to Jesus, 'Hey, there are a couple of white guys who want to talk to you.' And Jesus replied, 'It must mean that this is the end of the world.'"
The fear, xenophobia, paranoia, that keeps the world divided into racial, national, tribal, class, and religious warring tribes needs to come to an end. That can only happen when we consistently refuse to be drawn into prejudice against whoever the real abusers try to scape-goat and we make a conscious effort to understand one another across racial, religious, class, national and even political divides. Then the world as we have known it will come to an end and we will have a chance to see all of the sons and daughters of human kind glorified.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Coming to the Light
Lent 4 March 15, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
I had a free day between lectures during my recent tour of Great Britain and my hosts in Glasgow Scotland very generously took me on a tour of their art museum, the university and the historical collection housed there.
Later we drove a few minutes south of the city to visit the remains of Antonine's Wall, the farthest north border of the Roman Empire. The Romans wanted to rule the world and they did a pretty good job of accomplishing that. They moved their boundaries from Caspian Sea all of the way through Europe and England right up to Scotland where Emperor Hadrian just decided that the Scots were too tough to beat and he built a wall there to keep the barbarians out.
Antonine', a successor in the second century, wanted to best Hadrian by pushing the Scots back another hundred miles. He was only marginally successful for a very short time. The Scots simply refused to be occupied and the Romans were, in a few years, beaten back to Hadrian's Wall.
Much of what they left behind is on display in the history museum on the campus of the University of Glasgow.
Less than a century ago, people in our area heated their homes by burning firewood in a fireplace, they carried water into their houses from a well or stream, and they had an outhouse in their backyard that stood over a hole in the ground.
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Romans had paved roads, sewers, aqueducts and they heated their homes against the cruel Scottish winters with under the floor radiant heat from hot air.
Samples of their household items along with their art, architectural facades and armament are awe-inspiring. I have a feeling that if the Romans had managed to harness electricity and to develop the internal combustion engine that they no only would have conquered Scotland but we might all be speaking Latin right now.... Veni, vidi, vici
The culture that produced our New Testament was primitive in many areas of what is, to us, commonly understood science.... But in many aspects of philosophy and art, we may still be far behind. They were giving birth to western civilization, battling the violent, ignorant, and dark aspects of humanity.
Of course, during my rather occasional access to the news while I was watching from across the pond, I realize that our civilization was struggling at a few rather similar points..... 47 American Senators sent a letter to the government of Iran to scuttle treaty negotiations aimed as preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
The Prime Minister from Israel spoke to our Congress, basically encouraging us to start a war with Iran because that would stabilize the middle east.... This is the same Israeli politician to who told our congress in 2002 that if only we would take Sadaam Hussein out of Iraq, that would stabilize the Middle East.... And yet this guy got the longest standing ovation in congress given to anyone in modern history as if he were a reliable source of information.
All the while, our politicians and media keep up the drum beat to make Isis the rock stars of terrorism because of their horrifying practice of public beheadings, still, both our government and most of our media is silent about the fact that Isis couldn't hold a candle to our long time allies, Saudi Arabia, where the government publicly beheads between 50 and 100 people a year, every year, and have been doing so for decades while taking huge amounts of support from American tax payers.
Mean while, our elite Secret Service, charged with protecting our first family, was found to be driving drunk on the White House lawn in the wake of their having allowed intruders into the White House, an armed racist nut job onto an elevator with the President and who have lately been found drunk in the hallways of foreign hotels after the prostitutes they had hired had locked them out of their rooms.
Just across the state line, young white college students raised in privilege yet still afraid of their dark skinned neighbors who have not yet tasted opportunity, sing racist songs to bolster their courage to defend a segregated social life against all decency and reason.
And, of course, here at home, we have been racing back towards the dark ages, limiting the long standing rights of women to manage their own reproductive lives, maintaining enforced poverty in low wages, restricting access to health care, and in nine days we'll go to the polls to see if our neighbors will take away civil rights protections from gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the trans community.
We have advanced technology but our civilization has not kept pace with the progress made in medicine, physics, and engineering. In many ways, it seems that our advanced communication techniques and our superior college and university systems have made us less informed and more morally indifferent.
So, when we read the New Testament, even though I have often reminded you of the clearly true fact that it was written by people who didn't know where the sun goes at night, an objective review of the current news could easily lead us to the conclusion that our culture doesn't know how to tell its left hand from its right.... So there is some attentive humility needed here.
The passage before us today is mostly very familiar to us.... Even if you only watch wrestling or baseball, you know John 3:16.... For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that those who believe in him might have eternal life.
And if you read on, the author further illuminates his views which, if I read it in context, I would insist that he is saying this as a corrective to some of the more threatening moralizing of Paul's letters..... he says that Jesus did not come to condemn but to save.
When I was younger we used to study the Bible to try to figure out how every line in it agreed with every other line in it. It wasn't until much later that I realized that the Bible is not a single unified message from God to humanity it is rather a very public debate between groups of religious communities that very sharply disagreed with one another and they were often earnestly trying to correct one another.
One of Marcus Borg's last book projects before he died was to print the New Testament in the order in which it was written so that you could see how the thinking of the faith community was evolving in the early years....and, admittedly, not always evolving for the better.
But in this beautiful and much loved passage from the last of the canonical gospels, John, the author seems to be throwing reassurances our way.... God is not hostile towards us. God does not view us, as the American revivalist preacher of the 18th century declared, "Thy God doth despise thee as a man who holds a spider over a flame."
No, John says, God loves you and sent Jesus to us to communicate that love. But, again, if you keep reading, John still draws a very disturbing line in the sand, saying, Jesus didn't come to condemn those who believed in him, BUT!!! Read verse 18
Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
You think we are progressing towards a religion of love and away from all of the fear, guilt and judgment and then you see he was just building Hadrian's wall so that the decent civilized folks could be on one said and the crazy, barbarian, Scots would have to stay on the other.
I absolutely reject John's exclusivism in suggesting that Jesus was a talisman you hang around your neck to keep God from hating you. What I have been trying to say to you for years.... And I apologize for how often I have said it indelicately as if you had to be jarred into rethinking this issue.... We do not despise the Christian Bible because it has cultural blinders.... We can love it because it has many great cultural insights to teach us.
But we can also debate with it just as it debates with itself. John was talking about love in the midst of a violent empire. He didn't get it all right and he wasn't entirely consistent about it and no one on earth in any period of history should know more about that than we do!
John was trying to set aside a religion of obligation, of piety, fear and exclusion. He wasn't able to do it all at once.... And I'm right there.... It has not been a straight line for me from rural Kentucky evangelical faith to a more open and loving progressive approach and I still have some demons that need to be sorted out because such things do not go away easily.
John tried to project his insights onto the blank screen of a supernatural theistic God in the heavens above us who was the one who loved us. I am convinced that all of that talk about the God who is up there is a fundamental failure to acknowledge that what can be known of God is known within the community.
It is not that a heavenly God has decide to forgo judgment and warfare against us and to love us in spite of ourselves.... The harder reality is that we have to forgo judgment and warfare against one another and to love others... and no just the ones who block your path in the grocery store aisles or who take up two parking places in the mall parking lot.
We have to love Muslims.... The peaceful ones and the ones that are acting really crazy right now. We need to love immigrants.... The ones that came here two hundred years ago and the ones that came last week. We need even to love the people who are going to vote against civil rights for our gay sisters and brothers, and for fraternity brothers that keep alive racist sentiments that were born in the shadow of the Civil War and have never been rooted out of our psyche.
White college students don't hate black college students. They are afraid of them and the fear makes them do things that perpetuate the reasons why they are afraid. Christians don't hate Muslims.... Its just that many Christians have been taught to fear Muslims.... And our one hundred year history of bombing Muslims perpetuates the very real reasons why we should be afraid. Republicans and Democrats don't hate one another.... They fear being removed from power, from being moved from privilege to disadvantage when, clearly, their partisan bickering is hurting everyone.
John tries to make it sound noble.... God knew that we are crazy, violent, greedy, partisan, racist, homophobic, and dishonest but God loved us anyway and was willing to sacrifice for us to heal us. What we need to say that we recognize that we have been lied to, disappointed, rejected, victimized, made to be simultaneously afraid and angry, wanting to ignore the world, right after we get revenge.... But we have decided in stead to love and to love in a way that will require some personal sacrifice in order to heal the world.
If you could bomb terrorists, punish criminals, and undermine political adversaries to make the world a prosperous and peaceful place, I would be all for it.... But we have tried that and it has not worked.
John says the way is through deciding not to judge... not to condemn... and to love sacrificially. I don't think that we have tried that yet. I think it might work.
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
John 3:14-21
14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17 "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.
21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God."
I had a free day between lectures during my recent tour of Great Britain and my hosts in Glasgow Scotland very generously took me on a tour of their art museum, the university and the historical collection housed there.
Later we drove a few minutes south of the city to visit the remains of Antonine's Wall, the farthest north border of the Roman Empire. The Romans wanted to rule the world and they did a pretty good job of accomplishing that. They moved their boundaries from Caspian Sea all of the way through Europe and England right up to Scotland where Emperor Hadrian just decided that the Scots were too tough to beat and he built a wall there to keep the barbarians out.
Antonine', a successor in the second century, wanted to best Hadrian by pushing the Scots back another hundred miles. He was only marginally successful for a very short time. The Scots simply refused to be occupied and the Romans were, in a few years, beaten back to Hadrian's Wall.
Much of what they left behind is on display in the history museum on the campus of the University of Glasgow.
Less than a century ago, people in our area heated their homes by burning firewood in a fireplace, they carried water into their houses from a well or stream, and they had an outhouse in their backyard that stood over a hole in the ground.
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Romans had paved roads, sewers, aqueducts and they heated their homes against the cruel Scottish winters with under the floor radiant heat from hot air.
Samples of their household items along with their art, architectural facades and armament are awe-inspiring. I have a feeling that if the Romans had managed to harness electricity and to develop the internal combustion engine that they no only would have conquered Scotland but we might all be speaking Latin right now.... Veni, vidi, vici
The culture that produced our New Testament was primitive in many areas of what is, to us, commonly understood science.... But in many aspects of philosophy and art, we may still be far behind. They were giving birth to western civilization, battling the violent, ignorant, and dark aspects of humanity.
Of course, during my rather occasional access to the news while I was watching from across the pond, I realize that our civilization was struggling at a few rather similar points..... 47 American Senators sent a letter to the government of Iran to scuttle treaty negotiations aimed as preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
The Prime Minister from Israel spoke to our Congress, basically encouraging us to start a war with Iran because that would stabilize the middle east.... This is the same Israeli politician to who told our congress in 2002 that if only we would take Sadaam Hussein out of Iraq, that would stabilize the Middle East.... And yet this guy got the longest standing ovation in congress given to anyone in modern history as if he were a reliable source of information.
All the while, our politicians and media keep up the drum beat to make Isis the rock stars of terrorism because of their horrifying practice of public beheadings, still, both our government and most of our media is silent about the fact that Isis couldn't hold a candle to our long time allies, Saudi Arabia, where the government publicly beheads between 50 and 100 people a year, every year, and have been doing so for decades while taking huge amounts of support from American tax payers.
Mean while, our elite Secret Service, charged with protecting our first family, was found to be driving drunk on the White House lawn in the wake of their having allowed intruders into the White House, an armed racist nut job onto an elevator with the President and who have lately been found drunk in the hallways of foreign hotels after the prostitutes they had hired had locked them out of their rooms.
Just across the state line, young white college students raised in privilege yet still afraid of their dark skinned neighbors who have not yet tasted opportunity, sing racist songs to bolster their courage to defend a segregated social life against all decency and reason.
And, of course, here at home, we have been racing back towards the dark ages, limiting the long standing rights of women to manage their own reproductive lives, maintaining enforced poverty in low wages, restricting access to health care, and in nine days we'll go to the polls to see if our neighbors will take away civil rights protections from gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the trans community.
We have advanced technology but our civilization has not kept pace with the progress made in medicine, physics, and engineering. In many ways, it seems that our advanced communication techniques and our superior college and university systems have made us less informed and more morally indifferent.
So, when we read the New Testament, even though I have often reminded you of the clearly true fact that it was written by people who didn't know where the sun goes at night, an objective review of the current news could easily lead us to the conclusion that our culture doesn't know how to tell its left hand from its right.... So there is some attentive humility needed here.
The passage before us today is mostly very familiar to us.... Even if you only watch wrestling or baseball, you know John 3:16.... For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that those who believe in him might have eternal life.
And if you read on, the author further illuminates his views which, if I read it in context, I would insist that he is saying this as a corrective to some of the more threatening moralizing of Paul's letters..... he says that Jesus did not come to condemn but to save.
When I was younger we used to study the Bible to try to figure out how every line in it agreed with every other line in it. It wasn't until much later that I realized that the Bible is not a single unified message from God to humanity it is rather a very public debate between groups of religious communities that very sharply disagreed with one another and they were often earnestly trying to correct one another.
One of Marcus Borg's last book projects before he died was to print the New Testament in the order in which it was written so that you could see how the thinking of the faith community was evolving in the early years....and, admittedly, not always evolving for the better.
But in this beautiful and much loved passage from the last of the canonical gospels, John, the author seems to be throwing reassurances our way.... God is not hostile towards us. God does not view us, as the American revivalist preacher of the 18th century declared, "Thy God doth despise thee as a man who holds a spider over a flame."
No, John says, God loves you and sent Jesus to us to communicate that love. But, again, if you keep reading, John still draws a very disturbing line in the sand, saying, Jesus didn't come to condemn those who believed in him, BUT!!! Read verse 18
Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
You think we are progressing towards a religion of love and away from all of the fear, guilt and judgment and then you see he was just building Hadrian's wall so that the decent civilized folks could be on one said and the crazy, barbarian, Scots would have to stay on the other.
I absolutely reject John's exclusivism in suggesting that Jesus was a talisman you hang around your neck to keep God from hating you. What I have been trying to say to you for years.... And I apologize for how often I have said it indelicately as if you had to be jarred into rethinking this issue.... We do not despise the Christian Bible because it has cultural blinders.... We can love it because it has many great cultural insights to teach us.
But we can also debate with it just as it debates with itself. John was talking about love in the midst of a violent empire. He didn't get it all right and he wasn't entirely consistent about it and no one on earth in any period of history should know more about that than we do!
John was trying to set aside a religion of obligation, of piety, fear and exclusion. He wasn't able to do it all at once.... And I'm right there.... It has not been a straight line for me from rural Kentucky evangelical faith to a more open and loving progressive approach and I still have some demons that need to be sorted out because such things do not go away easily.
John tried to project his insights onto the blank screen of a supernatural theistic God in the heavens above us who was the one who loved us. I am convinced that all of that talk about the God who is up there is a fundamental failure to acknowledge that what can be known of God is known within the community.
It is not that a heavenly God has decide to forgo judgment and warfare against us and to love us in spite of ourselves.... The harder reality is that we have to forgo judgment and warfare against one another and to love others... and no just the ones who block your path in the grocery store aisles or who take up two parking places in the mall parking lot.
We have to love Muslims.... The peaceful ones and the ones that are acting really crazy right now. We need to love immigrants.... The ones that came here two hundred years ago and the ones that came last week. We need even to love the people who are going to vote against civil rights for our gay sisters and brothers, and for fraternity brothers that keep alive racist sentiments that were born in the shadow of the Civil War and have never been rooted out of our psyche.
White college students don't hate black college students. They are afraid of them and the fear makes them do things that perpetuate the reasons why they are afraid. Christians don't hate Muslims.... Its just that many Christians have been taught to fear Muslims.... And our one hundred year history of bombing Muslims perpetuates the very real reasons why we should be afraid. Republicans and Democrats don't hate one another.... They fear being removed from power, from being moved from privilege to disadvantage when, clearly, their partisan bickering is hurting everyone.
John tries to make it sound noble.... God knew that we are crazy, violent, greedy, partisan, racist, homophobic, and dishonest but God loved us anyway and was willing to sacrifice for us to heal us. What we need to say that we recognize that we have been lied to, disappointed, rejected, victimized, made to be simultaneously afraid and angry, wanting to ignore the world, right after we get revenge.... But we have decided in stead to love and to love in a way that will require some personal sacrifice in order to heal the world.
If you could bomb terrorists, punish criminals, and undermine political adversaries to make the world a prosperous and peaceful place, I would be all for it.... But we have tried that and it has not worked.
John says the way is through deciding not to judge... not to condemn... and to love sacrificially. I don't think that we have tried that yet. I think it might work.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Detente with Demons
Epiphany 5 February 8, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
I don't typically pay any attention to the National Prayer Breakfast. I quit going to the local observance more than 20 years ago when I realized that it really was just a public affirmation of the love affair between conservative politics and evangelical Christianity. They always tried to make the invitation sound like it wasn't that but that is what it always turned out to be, a kind of religious and political PDA that was more than a little nauseating to have to watch.
But on the national plane, the organizers feel obliged to invite the President to be the speaker and even though it is clearly an event for right wingers of both political and religious bent, the President usually feels obliged to attend. In years past, what few clips I have heard in the news made it sound like President Obama went into hostile territory and tried to polish his Christian bona fides a bit before returning to the safety of the Oval Office.
But this year, this horrible year in which religious extremism seems determined to rush back into the dark ages, our President decided to step out a bit at this event.
He didn't just condemn Isis and Boco Haram, whose attempt at establishing a radical Muslim Caliphate has seen them capturing children and forcing them into marriage or, more honestly, selling them as sex slaves before their 10th birthday. And, even more shockingly, dousing a fellow Muslim in gasoline and burning him alive in a cage and posting the video on line as if they were proud of their barbarism.
He did condemn those things but he also reminded his largely Christian audience that extremists in the Christian faith had a bloody history as well, all of the way from the Crusades, through the practice of African slavery, and down to the lynching's and Jim Crow history of America. It was nothing that I and many others have not said but the President came in for some outrageous criticisms in response to his Prayer Breakfast speech.
The morning after, former congressman and MSNBC news host, Joe Scarborough, nearly blew a fuse on Morning Joe, mocking the president as a pseudo-intellectual, and screaming about how insulting it was for him to bring up things that happened 800 to a thousand years ago.
Scarborough was shouting and demanding that everyone on the set agree with him, even though most tried their best to look away and avoid being engaged in the rant.
But it wasn't just Scarborough who was enraged. Rush Limbaugh has nearly blown a fuse and Jim Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia, said that the president's remarks were the most offensive words utter by a president in his lifetime. And, of course, Franklin Graham felt obliged to demonstrate his lack of comprehension of either history or religion as well as he attempted to represent the outrage of Evangelical Christians.
Though many were wagging their heads and attempting to shame the president, none could actually say that anything the president said was not factually true, and that is what astonishes me. Of course, Scarborough, trying to bury these things in the distant past, was just absurd denial.
The Crusades were a millennia ago, the Inquisition was 800 years ago, but the American slave trade is not nearly so deeply buried in history and Jim Crow laws and lynchings remain in the memory of almost everyone in the room today. Lynchings, generally involved hanging, but sometimes victims were set on fire or drug behind a horse or a car until their bodies fell into pieces.
Racially inspired lynching continued right up into the 1960's during the Civil Rights movement and who can forget the 1998 lynching of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, Wyoming... a 21 year old university student murdered on the suspicion that he might be gay.
These events were Christian in more or less the same way that the immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot was Islamic. We can say that the KKK had nothing to do with real Christianity in the same way that Muslims can say that Isis and Boko Haram are not Islamic but....well, it is not that hard to draw the lines, is it?
There are many official Islamic organizations statements of condemnation of terrorist acts done in the name of Islam but, what worries many of us is that there is also way too much sympathy hidden in Muslim congregations for these heinous deeds.
And while the practice of racially motivated lynchings in America peaked in the 1890's, there was still far too much sympathy for modern atrocities hidden in our Christian churches during the civil rights movement and not a little violent homophobia lurking, right up in to the 90's when Matthew Shepherd was murdered and it is not gone yet.
When we read the synoptic gospels, it is evident that high on the list of the memories of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a memory of Jesus of Nazareth as a demon exorcist. Most of us have been inclined to read such things with a mixture of embarrassment and skepticism.
Clearly, some of those accounts were primitive descriptions of epilepsy or of mental illness, but the gospel writers described them in very matter of fact ways, as real, present, and disgusting creatures who lived among them.
Of course, I do not take such accounts as being literal but I will assure you that I do believe that there are demons that live among us. The ancients talked about demons as external things..... that is a trick of psychology that has persisted through the centuries.
Demons, in the sense of grave and horrible social evil, exist for sure but we always like to project them onto something external. I'm a democrat so republicans are evil. I'm an American, so Russians are evil. I'm a Christian, so Muslims are evil.
We know that evil exists. It frightens us. Out of fear we do extreme things, militarily, through police action, and in mob mentality. Out of fear we seek to annihilate the "other." But what the gospels always seem to say is that the demons are actually quite close at hand. In the passage just before the one we read from Mark today, Jesus encounters the first demon in the gospel in the most disturbing place..... in church.
I always wonder, how long had that demon been there in that congregation and no one else had noticed? I take these accounts to be metaphorical in nature but that does not mean that they are not true.... It just means that they are more true and true at a deeper level.
We tend to make peace with the demons that are the most familiar to us. I can tell you, existentially, I grew up going to a segregated school and I didn't even know it was segregated. I worked with the children of black tenant farmers on neighboring farms and never wondered where they went to school on Mondays. I was a blissfully ignorant white southern boy who had not spent a moment thinking about the injustice, the violence, the oppression of America's Apartheid until segregation was ended through judicial coercion.
No one at my church talked about the evil of segregation. The death of Martin Luther King was not mentioned that April week in 1964 when he was murdered. No one in my church said that he should have been shot but the demon of racism could comfortably come and go from that church for many more years.
The evangelicals who were so offended by the President's prayer breakfast comments do not want to see that there is a connection between Christian extremism and Islamic extremism. They do not want to see how their history of racism is made of the same cloth as the more current excesses of Jihadists. But it is.
What I find captivating about the way the gospels describe these stories is that somehow, when Jesus showed up, something about Jesus, something in his character, his demeanor, his honesty, his integrity, made the demons visible..... like turning on the kitchen light in some of my old college apartments would reveal all of the cockroaches living in the student slums. They would run for cover but there was no denying that they were there.
Our problem is that we get way too comfortable with our demons.... So comfortable, that we like to pretend that they don't exist. They become so much a part of the scenery that we can get really angry when someone calls our familiar cultural furniture just what it is..... demonic.
We get used to industries that ruin the environment. We accept that our poor neighborhoods have the most underfunded schools and our wealthy neighborhoods have our best schools and never let ourselves acknowledge that it should be the other way around. We have twice as many foreclosed upon, empty houses as we have homeless people and yet we insist that there is no solution to homelessness.
1% of our nation holds 90% of our capital assets and yet we say that there is not enough to solve the problems of poverty. Most political donations are made by less than one in every 100,000 Americans and yet we do not want to be told that we have sold our democracy to the highest bidder. We drive past payday loan shops and sex shops that sell this week's version of Meth, preying on the poor and the desperate and we do not notice because we are not poor and we are not desperate....yet.
Historically, we have had a tendency to kill the people who reveal the demons of our culture rather than to be outraged by the presence of the demons themselves. Too much of our society is content to live with the cockroaches and just insist that no one turn on the lights.
I don't know about you, but I want to be more like Jesus. I want to turn on the lights. I may not be able to drive out all of the demons but I sure don't want them to think that they can stay hidden when we walk into the room.
Islam needs to change.... And so does Christianity.... And let me tell you, so does Judaism. But the demons we have to fight are not out there, or over there.... They are there but they are not our problem to solve.... We have plenty close at hand that we need to deal with. First, we have to be willing to turn on the lights and be honest with ourselves.
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Mark 1:32-39
32That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 35In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." 38He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." 39And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.
I don't typically pay any attention to the National Prayer Breakfast. I quit going to the local observance more than 20 years ago when I realized that it really was just a public affirmation of the love affair between conservative politics and evangelical Christianity. They always tried to make the invitation sound like it wasn't that but that is what it always turned out to be, a kind of religious and political PDA that was more than a little nauseating to have to watch.
But on the national plane, the organizers feel obliged to invite the President to be the speaker and even though it is clearly an event for right wingers of both political and religious bent, the President usually feels obliged to attend. In years past, what few clips I have heard in the news made it sound like President Obama went into hostile territory and tried to polish his Christian bona fides a bit before returning to the safety of the Oval Office.
But this year, this horrible year in which religious extremism seems determined to rush back into the dark ages, our President decided to step out a bit at this event.
He didn't just condemn Isis and Boco Haram, whose attempt at establishing a radical Muslim Caliphate has seen them capturing children and forcing them into marriage or, more honestly, selling them as sex slaves before their 10th birthday. And, even more shockingly, dousing a fellow Muslim in gasoline and burning him alive in a cage and posting the video on line as if they were proud of their barbarism.
He did condemn those things but he also reminded his largely Christian audience that extremists in the Christian faith had a bloody history as well, all of the way from the Crusades, through the practice of African slavery, and down to the lynching's and Jim Crow history of America. It was nothing that I and many others have not said but the President came in for some outrageous criticisms in response to his Prayer Breakfast speech.
The morning after, former congressman and MSNBC news host, Joe Scarborough, nearly blew a fuse on Morning Joe, mocking the president as a pseudo-intellectual, and screaming about how insulting it was for him to bring up things that happened 800 to a thousand years ago.
Scarborough was shouting and demanding that everyone on the set agree with him, even though most tried their best to look away and avoid being engaged in the rant.
But it wasn't just Scarborough who was enraged. Rush Limbaugh has nearly blown a fuse and Jim Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia, said that the president's remarks were the most offensive words utter by a president in his lifetime. And, of course, Franklin Graham felt obliged to demonstrate his lack of comprehension of either history or religion as well as he attempted to represent the outrage of Evangelical Christians.
Though many were wagging their heads and attempting to shame the president, none could actually say that anything the president said was not factually true, and that is what astonishes me. Of course, Scarborough, trying to bury these things in the distant past, was just absurd denial.
The Crusades were a millennia ago, the Inquisition was 800 years ago, but the American slave trade is not nearly so deeply buried in history and Jim Crow laws and lynchings remain in the memory of almost everyone in the room today. Lynchings, generally involved hanging, but sometimes victims were set on fire or drug behind a horse or a car until their bodies fell into pieces.
Racially inspired lynching continued right up into the 1960's during the Civil Rights movement and who can forget the 1998 lynching of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, Wyoming... a 21 year old university student murdered on the suspicion that he might be gay.
These events were Christian in more or less the same way that the immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot was Islamic. We can say that the KKK had nothing to do with real Christianity in the same way that Muslims can say that Isis and Boko Haram are not Islamic but....well, it is not that hard to draw the lines, is it?
There are many official Islamic organizations statements of condemnation of terrorist acts done in the name of Islam but, what worries many of us is that there is also way too much sympathy hidden in Muslim congregations for these heinous deeds.
And while the practice of racially motivated lynchings in America peaked in the 1890's, there was still far too much sympathy for modern atrocities hidden in our Christian churches during the civil rights movement and not a little violent homophobia lurking, right up in to the 90's when Matthew Shepherd was murdered and it is not gone yet.
When we read the synoptic gospels, it is evident that high on the list of the memories of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a memory of Jesus of Nazareth as a demon exorcist. Most of us have been inclined to read such things with a mixture of embarrassment and skepticism.
Clearly, some of those accounts were primitive descriptions of epilepsy or of mental illness, but the gospel writers described them in very matter of fact ways, as real, present, and disgusting creatures who lived among them.
Of course, I do not take such accounts as being literal but I will assure you that I do believe that there are demons that live among us. The ancients talked about demons as external things..... that is a trick of psychology that has persisted through the centuries.
Demons, in the sense of grave and horrible social evil, exist for sure but we always like to project them onto something external. I'm a democrat so republicans are evil. I'm an American, so Russians are evil. I'm a Christian, so Muslims are evil.
We know that evil exists. It frightens us. Out of fear we do extreme things, militarily, through police action, and in mob mentality. Out of fear we seek to annihilate the "other." But what the gospels always seem to say is that the demons are actually quite close at hand. In the passage just before the one we read from Mark today, Jesus encounters the first demon in the gospel in the most disturbing place..... in church.
I always wonder, how long had that demon been there in that congregation and no one else had noticed? I take these accounts to be metaphorical in nature but that does not mean that they are not true.... It just means that they are more true and true at a deeper level.
We tend to make peace with the demons that are the most familiar to us. I can tell you, existentially, I grew up going to a segregated school and I didn't even know it was segregated. I worked with the children of black tenant farmers on neighboring farms and never wondered where they went to school on Mondays. I was a blissfully ignorant white southern boy who had not spent a moment thinking about the injustice, the violence, the oppression of America's Apartheid until segregation was ended through judicial coercion.
No one at my church talked about the evil of segregation. The death of Martin Luther King was not mentioned that April week in 1964 when he was murdered. No one in my church said that he should have been shot but the demon of racism could comfortably come and go from that church for many more years.
The evangelicals who were so offended by the President's prayer breakfast comments do not want to see that there is a connection between Christian extremism and Islamic extremism. They do not want to see how their history of racism is made of the same cloth as the more current excesses of Jihadists. But it is.
What I find captivating about the way the gospels describe these stories is that somehow, when Jesus showed up, something about Jesus, something in his character, his demeanor, his honesty, his integrity, made the demons visible..... like turning on the kitchen light in some of my old college apartments would reveal all of the cockroaches living in the student slums. They would run for cover but there was no denying that they were there.
Our problem is that we get way too comfortable with our demons.... So comfortable, that we like to pretend that they don't exist. They become so much a part of the scenery that we can get really angry when someone calls our familiar cultural furniture just what it is..... demonic.
We get used to industries that ruin the environment. We accept that our poor neighborhoods have the most underfunded schools and our wealthy neighborhoods have our best schools and never let ourselves acknowledge that it should be the other way around. We have twice as many foreclosed upon, empty houses as we have homeless people and yet we insist that there is no solution to homelessness.
1% of our nation holds 90% of our capital assets and yet we say that there is not enough to solve the problems of poverty. Most political donations are made by less than one in every 100,000 Americans and yet we do not want to be told that we have sold our democracy to the highest bidder. We drive past payday loan shops and sex shops that sell this week's version of Meth, preying on the poor and the desperate and we do not notice because we are not poor and we are not desperate....yet.
Historically, we have had a tendency to kill the people who reveal the demons of our culture rather than to be outraged by the presence of the demons themselves. Too much of our society is content to live with the cockroaches and just insist that no one turn on the lights.
I don't know about you, but I want to be more like Jesus. I want to turn on the lights. I may not be able to drive out all of the demons but I sure don't want them to think that they can stay hidden when we walk into the room.
Islam needs to change.... And so does Christianity.... And let me tell you, so does Judaism. But the demons we have to fight are not out there, or over there.... They are there but they are not our problem to solve.... We have plenty close at hand that we need to deal with. First, we have to be willing to turn on the lights and be honest with ourselves.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Sorting out Fact from Fiction
Epiphany 4 February 1, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
I have only one friend from seminary with whom I have stayed in contact over the generations. We don't get to see one another often but when we do it is a loud and long meeting, and even our phone calls rarely clock in at anywhere under either sixty minutes or 60 decibels.
Charles often says that we "fought for our friendship" and the word "fought" is crucial to that understanding. As a young white man from rural Kentucky, Charles felt that there were a lot of things about racism that I needed to learn from his urban, Atlanta black experience. He was not always a patient teacher, and the lessons were often adorned with colorful language but, I believe, we finally got there.
But a couple of decades ago the shoe shifted to the other foot. When Charles heard some of my messages about gay rights and the ordination of homosexuals we discovered that we had another huge issue to discuss.
He was especially unhappy when he heard me call gay rights a "civil rights" issue because he did not believe that the discrimination he had experienced as a black man growing up in the south should be compared to the discrimination being shown to gays and lesbians. Because I really love Charles Lee, I was more patient with him on this issue than I have been with most people. Charles was with me in class, he was with me when I graduated. He was with me when my daughtered arrived from Korea, and years later he stood at the bedside with me as we watched my mother die. Charles was too important to me to allow our disagreement to damage our friendship.
He and his wife, Wynnett, live in Birmingham, AL and I always spend time with them whenever I am passing through. This past year, when our friends, Andrea and Jill had moved to Birmingham, it was with some trepidation that I called to let Charles know that I was going to be in town and that I would be staying with Andrea and Jill.
And he said, "Well, are you going to bring them to church?" And I said, "Well, Charles, they are lesbians." And he asked, "Will they being doing anything outstandingly lesbian while they are in church?" He explained, "As long as they don't have to physically demonstrate their sexual orientation during the worship service, I would like to meet them!"
I compromised and agreed to bring them to lunch after church because, well, you know Andrea.... You can never be sure what she might do!
The point being, 20 years ago, Charles, in spite of his excellent education and his long term experience in civil rights work, was not ready to accept that being a homosexual was not a sin.
Ten years ago he was willing to more or less look the other way. Now, given time and space to let his views evolve, he has repeatedly reached out to Andrea and Jill to help them to feel welcome and at home, even in Birmingham, AL. This growth has taken place only because I did not insult his faith or his intellect in the process, because our mutual love was stronger than our disagreement. And in the safety and security of absolutely certain love, he has been able to grow in this area.
Charles called this past week after his grand-daughter had brought her boyfriend home from college to meet the family. She is certain that this is the one. The boyfriend in question happens to be white. Charles said, "Roger, when they left, I realized that I was not really ready for this." He said, "All those years ago, I thought I had put all of those prejudices behind me but now I realize that we need to carve out some time to talk about this again."
Racism, prejudice, that all too human inclination to divide people, one against the other, doesn't die easily and typically it doesn't die very quickly, nor does it die just because you have decided that you are done with it.
I have prejudices that live inside of me that I do not want.... They are demons that are not welcome.
I have locked the doors of my mind to shut them out and then, when you turn out the lights, you can hear them breathing in the shadows of your character.
Now, it will come as no great surprise to you to hear me say that I do not often cherish the work of the Apostle Paul. The version of Christianity that Paul writes about in the New Testament, in my opinion, has very little in common with the religious teachings of Jesus and, frankly, I often find Paul to be rigid, misogynistic, and prejudiced but then he will say something that makes me have to pause and give him another chance.
One of the ways that people in the first century divided themselves into racial and religious subgroups was by what they ate and how they ate it. In the polytheistic world of the growing Roman Empire, small temples and altars were blended into the marketplace. Most butcher shops were associated, in one way or another, was an altar to one or more gods. So, if you bought meat in the marketplace, a part of it had likely been sacrificed to one of these gods.
Many pious people in those days would, on moral grounds, refuse to eat meat that had been sacrificed to an idol. My father, a veteran of WWII, would refuse to ride in a Japanese automobile. I have met people in Jordan who would not eat an orange if they thought it had been grown in Israel. I do not eat in local restaurants that display campaign signs for Republican congressman, Billy Long.... If they would vote for Billy Long, how could I have confidence they know how to cook without poisoning us?
This is a basic competency test, right?
Paul is being very matter of fact in this letter to the church in Corinth. Sacrificing the unusable parts of an animal on an altar doesn't change the spiritual character of either the meat or of the people who eat it. The color of a person's skin, a person's nationality, religion or sexual orientation is, in the end, of no real consequence, unless, of course, you think it is.
Paul is fairly evolved on this point. There is no reason to be prejudiced but, he cautions, give your sisters and brothers enough time and safety to get to the same place. I am convinced of this truth about psychology..... people do not often change because they have been humiliated, criticized, or attacked. They change when people love them enough for them to feel secure because it is only in that place of safety that we can genuinely give ourselves permission to change.
Now this is a tough challenge for us. Our little progressive church exists, in many ways, for the express purpose of offering a liberating approach to faith that gives people permission to set aside the magical and superstitious thinking of traditional forms of religion. Our challenge to conservative ways of thinking often comes across as being condescending, insulting, dismissive and is, on the whole, too controversial for most people to be able to accept it.
So there is a challenge.....how many steak dinners do you have to turn down because someone else in the restaurant believes that a good Christian can't eat meat that has been sacrificed to an idol? How many times do you have water rather than beer because someone at the table with you thinks that alcohol is always sinful?
When do you put your foot down and refuse to go to a Catholic Church service because Catholics still won't ordain women, or to a Baptist or Assemblies of God church because they still condemn our gay and lesbian friends? How do we talk about our progressive faith that is free of supernatural theism with all of its angles, demons, lakes of fire and streets of gold in the clouds, with making our traditional church going friends feel like we think they are stupid.... Even when we kind of do think that?
And now you will hear me say something that you do not commonly hear.... Where do we draw the line? When do we say that we will no longer tolerate prejudice and ignorance? Frankly, I don't know. And honestly, I am afraid that more often than not, I have erred on the side of pushing for progress too hard.
What I know from my long term relationship with Charles is that I was able to grow out of a lot of stupid white-southern prejudice because he loved me enough not to give up on me. And Charles has been able to grow out of a lot of his stupid heterosexual homophobia because I have always loved him in spite of himself.
So, in the battle between being right and being kind, in the contest between awareness and affection, between being insightful and being loving, in almost every case, we probably need to assume that being more loving is not just better but that it is more effective than just being smart.
I say that, not simply because it is incumbent upon preachers to favor love but because it, honestly, it works better. If I could successfully insult my traditional Christian friends into opening their minds to be more progressive I would have done it a long time ago.
No one ever changes when they feel threatened. We can really only grow in an emotionally safe environment. It isn't just that love smells better and makes us feel good, sincere love is the fertilizer in which we all can grow.
Paul was telling his church friends to love one another long enough to give one another the chance to finish growing up. And that is a message we can all stand to be reminded of from time to time. You even have my permission to occasionally remind me that I said this in public.
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that "all of us possess knowledge." Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; 3but anyone who loves God is known by him.
4Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that "no idol in the world really exists," and that "there is no God but one." 5Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth--as in fact there are many gods and many lords-- 6yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
7It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. 8"Food will not bring us close to God." We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. 9But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. 10For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? 11So by your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed. 12But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. 13Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.
I have only one friend from seminary with whom I have stayed in contact over the generations. We don't get to see one another often but when we do it is a loud and long meeting, and even our phone calls rarely clock in at anywhere under either sixty minutes or 60 decibels.
Charles often says that we "fought for our friendship" and the word "fought" is crucial to that understanding. As a young white man from rural Kentucky, Charles felt that there were a lot of things about racism that I needed to learn from his urban, Atlanta black experience. He was not always a patient teacher, and the lessons were often adorned with colorful language but, I believe, we finally got there.
But a couple of decades ago the shoe shifted to the other foot. When Charles heard some of my messages about gay rights and the ordination of homosexuals we discovered that we had another huge issue to discuss.
He was especially unhappy when he heard me call gay rights a "civil rights" issue because he did not believe that the discrimination he had experienced as a black man growing up in the south should be compared to the discrimination being shown to gays and lesbians. Because I really love Charles Lee, I was more patient with him on this issue than I have been with most people. Charles was with me in class, he was with me when I graduated. He was with me when my daughtered arrived from Korea, and years later he stood at the bedside with me as we watched my mother die. Charles was too important to me to allow our disagreement to damage our friendship.
He and his wife, Wynnett, live in Birmingham, AL and I always spend time with them whenever I am passing through. This past year, when our friends, Andrea and Jill had moved to Birmingham, it was with some trepidation that I called to let Charles know that I was going to be in town and that I would be staying with Andrea and Jill.
And he said, "Well, are you going to bring them to church?" And I said, "Well, Charles, they are lesbians." And he asked, "Will they being doing anything outstandingly lesbian while they are in church?" He explained, "As long as they don't have to physically demonstrate their sexual orientation during the worship service, I would like to meet them!"
I compromised and agreed to bring them to lunch after church because, well, you know Andrea.... You can never be sure what she might do!
The point being, 20 years ago, Charles, in spite of his excellent education and his long term experience in civil rights work, was not ready to accept that being a homosexual was not a sin.
Ten years ago he was willing to more or less look the other way. Now, given time and space to let his views evolve, he has repeatedly reached out to Andrea and Jill to help them to feel welcome and at home, even in Birmingham, AL. This growth has taken place only because I did not insult his faith or his intellect in the process, because our mutual love was stronger than our disagreement. And in the safety and security of absolutely certain love, he has been able to grow in this area.
Charles called this past week after his grand-daughter had brought her boyfriend home from college to meet the family. She is certain that this is the one. The boyfriend in question happens to be white. Charles said, "Roger, when they left, I realized that I was not really ready for this." He said, "All those years ago, I thought I had put all of those prejudices behind me but now I realize that we need to carve out some time to talk about this again."
Racism, prejudice, that all too human inclination to divide people, one against the other, doesn't die easily and typically it doesn't die very quickly, nor does it die just because you have decided that you are done with it.
I have prejudices that live inside of me that I do not want.... They are demons that are not welcome.
I have locked the doors of my mind to shut them out and then, when you turn out the lights, you can hear them breathing in the shadows of your character.
Now, it will come as no great surprise to you to hear me say that I do not often cherish the work of the Apostle Paul. The version of Christianity that Paul writes about in the New Testament, in my opinion, has very little in common with the religious teachings of Jesus and, frankly, I often find Paul to be rigid, misogynistic, and prejudiced but then he will say something that makes me have to pause and give him another chance.
One of the ways that people in the first century divided themselves into racial and religious subgroups was by what they ate and how they ate it. In the polytheistic world of the growing Roman Empire, small temples and altars were blended into the marketplace. Most butcher shops were associated, in one way or another, was an altar to one or more gods. So, if you bought meat in the marketplace, a part of it had likely been sacrificed to one of these gods.
Many pious people in those days would, on moral grounds, refuse to eat meat that had been sacrificed to an idol. My father, a veteran of WWII, would refuse to ride in a Japanese automobile. I have met people in Jordan who would not eat an orange if they thought it had been grown in Israel. I do not eat in local restaurants that display campaign signs for Republican congressman, Billy Long.... If they would vote for Billy Long, how could I have confidence they know how to cook without poisoning us?
This is a basic competency test, right?
Paul is being very matter of fact in this letter to the church in Corinth. Sacrificing the unusable parts of an animal on an altar doesn't change the spiritual character of either the meat or of the people who eat it. The color of a person's skin, a person's nationality, religion or sexual orientation is, in the end, of no real consequence, unless, of course, you think it is.
Paul is fairly evolved on this point. There is no reason to be prejudiced but, he cautions, give your sisters and brothers enough time and safety to get to the same place. I am convinced of this truth about psychology..... people do not often change because they have been humiliated, criticized, or attacked. They change when people love them enough for them to feel secure because it is only in that place of safety that we can genuinely give ourselves permission to change.
Now this is a tough challenge for us. Our little progressive church exists, in many ways, for the express purpose of offering a liberating approach to faith that gives people permission to set aside the magical and superstitious thinking of traditional forms of religion. Our challenge to conservative ways of thinking often comes across as being condescending, insulting, dismissive and is, on the whole, too controversial for most people to be able to accept it.
So there is a challenge.....how many steak dinners do you have to turn down because someone else in the restaurant believes that a good Christian can't eat meat that has been sacrificed to an idol? How many times do you have water rather than beer because someone at the table with you thinks that alcohol is always sinful?
When do you put your foot down and refuse to go to a Catholic Church service because Catholics still won't ordain women, or to a Baptist or Assemblies of God church because they still condemn our gay and lesbian friends? How do we talk about our progressive faith that is free of supernatural theism with all of its angles, demons, lakes of fire and streets of gold in the clouds, with making our traditional church going friends feel like we think they are stupid.... Even when we kind of do think that?
And now you will hear me say something that you do not commonly hear.... Where do we draw the line? When do we say that we will no longer tolerate prejudice and ignorance? Frankly, I don't know. And honestly, I am afraid that more often than not, I have erred on the side of pushing for progress too hard.
What I know from my long term relationship with Charles is that I was able to grow out of a lot of stupid white-southern prejudice because he loved me enough not to give up on me. And Charles has been able to grow out of a lot of his stupid heterosexual homophobia because I have always loved him in spite of himself.
So, in the battle between being right and being kind, in the contest between awareness and affection, between being insightful and being loving, in almost every case, we probably need to assume that being more loving is not just better but that it is more effective than just being smart.
I say that, not simply because it is incumbent upon preachers to favor love but because it, honestly, it works better. If I could successfully insult my traditional Christian friends into opening their minds to be more progressive I would have done it a long time ago.
No one ever changes when they feel threatened. We can really only grow in an emotionally safe environment. It isn't just that love smells better and makes us feel good, sincere love is the fertilizer in which we all can grow.
Paul was telling his church friends to love one another long enough to give one another the chance to finish growing up. And that is a message we can all stand to be reminded of from time to time. You even have my permission to occasionally remind me that I said this in public.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
In Search of Our Myth
January 25, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, Pastor
"No," I said, "it had been a gift from an elderly aunt, something she had given to me just before she died about 30 years ago. I'm not the kind of guy who would choose to hang a piece of painted china on my wall, regardless of its value or artistry. I'm gay friendly but not actually a member of the club.
I assured her not to worry about it. Accidents happen. It's no big deal. But when I got home that night, she had left her paycheck behind with a heart-felt note of apology. I will get the money to her, of course. I am certain that she does not clean other people's houses for the entertainment value of it.
What has captured my attention about this little exchange is this person I hardly know has such a clear set of values, that she is so earnest to take more responsibility for her actions than anyone could reasonably expect.
They have not made much of it for a couple of centuries now but Catholics used to talk about deeds of "Supererogation" which literally means going above and beyond what is required but it carried the implication of trying to be even better than God expects you to be. I mention it now because there are so few opportunities to meaningfully say supererogation in polite conversation.
In a world where the Catholic hierarchy has moved pedophile priests and my own former denomination, The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) hid pedophile denominational leaders by moving them from state to state to evade criminal prosecution.... Where elected officials in this ostensibly Christian nation will torture prisoners, turn the mentally ill out onto the streets to die from exposure to the winter weather, and invade nations on false pretenses, where people you have supported in their times of greatest need will betray you for nothing more than the power they feel in being able to hurt you.... Comes a stranger with more evidence of character than is often found in congress, cathedrals or even in your backyard at a family barbeque.
I'm currently preparing to go on my first real speaking tour and I have the good fortune to be doing that in Scotland and England. I asked my Scottish host to suggest some readings that would help me to understand my audience in Glasgow. He sent me several articles about the recent vote around Scottish independence and wrapped that up with a suggestion that I read a recent book by the British author, Russell Brand, entitled, Revolution.
I regularly have lunch with our good friend, Dr. Charles Hedrick, and this past week, when he asked me, as he usually does, "What are you reading these days?" I felt obligated to name several other things and avoid mentioning Brand's book because, Brand is a well known alcoholic, drug addicted, womanizing, famous, millionaire movie star, and I wasn't sure that I should offer that particular bit of information.
But, I have to admit, I've really liked Brand's book and have been shocked to discover how much I have in common with him.... Other than the alcoholic, drug addicted, womanizing, famous, millionaire movie star, part.
Brand became a famous and wealthy person on the strength of his stories about his exploits as a spoiled and self-serving addict but this book is about his recovery in the AA movement, his discovery of a largely rational and social justice based spirituality. He is no intellectual but he has become an avid reader and he has been willing to analyze his personal faults in a very public way.
Like a lot of us, he found it increasingly necessary to dismiss the creedal religions that lost all credibility for us in the face of the reality both of science and of the undeniable human suffering caused by irrational religion and governments controlled by the super-wealthy.
In sobriety he has found the gratitude we so often hear expressed by former addicts who find the bliss of sobriety and a life lived oriented to reality. But, again, like many of us, he has found it difficult to give an account of his new found spiritual enthusiasm to his peers who have found religion to be all too easy, and dare I say, necessary to abandon.
I suspect that we are likely to be the only church on earth where a Russell Brand quote is the wisdom lesson for the day but this comment he made about Joseph Campbell seems to really speak to our current challenge. The stories that come to us from wandering Palestinian shepherds and barely settled agricultural societies of first century Judah no longer have the power we have tried to give them by claiming that God wrote them.
Campbell's observation that we need new communal myths to guide us into relevant moral living seems to be right on to me. I have been inclined to think that we can replace those with modern biographies... the recent release of the movie, "Selma," seems like a good example. The problem, however, with lifting any modern leader into that role is that we also have access to information about their faults.
Jesus may have been guilty of some of the racism of his culture but we have little to go on to make that point. He is protected by two millennia of the fog of memory. But when you talk about Gandhi, or King, or even such bright lights as Dorothy Day or Mother Theresa, we can also enumerate the ways that they disappointed us.
We have difficulty in appreciating anything that anyone does without also wallowing in their more salacious failings. This is almost as true of public figures as it is of religious leaders. Though he has recovered a lot of popularity, history will likely remember Bill Clinton more for his tryst with Monica Lewinsky than his rise from Arkansas poverty to the White House.
We've watched the conservative world trying to find a soft place in Barack Obama where they can stick a dagger in for six years. Their attempts often seem rather desperate, such as in Mike Huckabee's criticism of the Obama's poor parenting in allowing their daughters to listen to music by Beyonce'.... In spite of the fact that Huckabee's son was found guilty of hanging, torturing and killing a neighbor's dog..... this is not a game of moral finger pointing that he is likely to win in the universe of bad parenting wars.
We have got to be able to praise the decision of 18-year-old John Lewis to kneel in prayer on the Evan Pettus Bridge during the Selma march while Alabama State police mercilessly cracked his skull with their batons.... We have to be able to tell the story of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the Montgomery, AL bus that started the bus boycott that fueled the civil rights movement without trying to go through their garbage to tell ourselves that we don't need to follow their example.
Gossip is used to destroy reputations of leaders to give ourselves a pass on all of our own shortcomings. We have got to rise above these false diversions so that we can be more concerned about virtue than we are about trying to drag everyone down. I'm guilty of it too but I can tell you that the 21st century is starved for meaningful myths and examples to guide us, to inspire us, and to motivate us to deeds of kindness, compassion, and liberation.
All the while, we are being fed false heroes. At the same theaters that are now showing "Selma" larger crowds are going to see "American Sniper,".... A hero tale about a man who evidently killed more than 200 Iraqis.
The self-aggrandizing auto-biography of a soldier who claimed to have beaten up Jesse Ventura in a bar fight which has been proven to be false in a libel suit, and who claimed to have killed two car-jackers in Texas and shot looters during the Katrina aftermath.... None of which was true.... Nor was his claim to have given all of the proceeds of his book to charity.
Clint Eastwood claims that the movie is not political but the twitter feed of those who have seen it would seem to contradict that, as enthusiastic movie goers have reported that they came out wanting to shoot as many Arab Muslims as they could. If there is a vacuum of real heroes in modern culture, it seems that we will create role models that we really shouldn't follow.
Athletes, movie stars, rock stars, and snipers may be pushed up in the public consciousness because they are famous, or wealthy, or even because they are portrayed as being brave but I come back to this house-keeper who, without much thought, has a reflex reaction to do the right thing, even more than the right thing..... I'll say it again.... To commit an act of supererogation..... you know that you'll want to use that this week....
Largely unchurched Western Europe seems to do a better job of showing compassion to the poor, the mentally ill, and even to those guilty of crimes than in our heavily church populated country.
But it doesn't have to be that way. My fear is that without spirituality, pure reason can lead human kind into a moral vacuum. We just have to acknowledge that there are good and bad myths.
There are popular role models who are dangerous and there are others whose virtues are to be praised and imitated. And there are very unhealthy forms of religion and very helpful and promising forms of faith. As the famous scholar, Karen Armstrong, has written:
"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."
Let's not leave the future up to chance. Let's think, and act, following in the pathway that leads to liberation, courageous compassion, non-violent transformation, and into a consistently loving community.
Our progressive faith should free you from bondage to old myths that no longer work in our modern society but that liberation should not lead to either cynicism or rabid individualism. Together, we really must learn anew how to be the people we always inherently admired for their good deeds and to learn again the way of living that leads us to love one another.
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, Pastor
"Joseph Campbell said all the problems that we are experiencing - economic disparity, ecological meltdown, crime, alienation, atomization, war, starvation - are the result of us having no communal myth. A story that unites us, defines us, in relationship to ourselves, other people, and nature. Campbell says the myths that we do have are antiquated and irrelevant 'desert myths.'" Russell BrandIn truth, I hardly know her, though she has a key to my house for five years and she comes over every two weeks to do the housekeeping that I don't want to do myself. I ran by the house this week to make a quick change of clothes into a shirt and tie that did not have bits of my lunch on them and there on the kitchen counter were the broken pieces of an old hand painted china plate. She was very embarrassed and offered, "Can I replace it."
"No," I said, "it had been a gift from an elderly aunt, something she had given to me just before she died about 30 years ago. I'm not the kind of guy who would choose to hang a piece of painted china on my wall, regardless of its value or artistry. I'm gay friendly but not actually a member of the club.
I assured her not to worry about it. Accidents happen. It's no big deal. But when I got home that night, she had left her paycheck behind with a heart-felt note of apology. I will get the money to her, of course. I am certain that she does not clean other people's houses for the entertainment value of it.
What has captured my attention about this little exchange is this person I hardly know has such a clear set of values, that she is so earnest to take more responsibility for her actions than anyone could reasonably expect.
They have not made much of it for a couple of centuries now but Catholics used to talk about deeds of "Supererogation" which literally means going above and beyond what is required but it carried the implication of trying to be even better than God expects you to be. I mention it now because there are so few opportunities to meaningfully say supererogation in polite conversation.
In a world where the Catholic hierarchy has moved pedophile priests and my own former denomination, The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) hid pedophile denominational leaders by moving them from state to state to evade criminal prosecution.... Where elected officials in this ostensibly Christian nation will torture prisoners, turn the mentally ill out onto the streets to die from exposure to the winter weather, and invade nations on false pretenses, where people you have supported in their times of greatest need will betray you for nothing more than the power they feel in being able to hurt you.... Comes a stranger with more evidence of character than is often found in congress, cathedrals or even in your backyard at a family barbeque.
I'm currently preparing to go on my first real speaking tour and I have the good fortune to be doing that in Scotland and England. I asked my Scottish host to suggest some readings that would help me to understand my audience in Glasgow. He sent me several articles about the recent vote around Scottish independence and wrapped that up with a suggestion that I read a recent book by the British author, Russell Brand, entitled, Revolution.
I regularly have lunch with our good friend, Dr. Charles Hedrick, and this past week, when he asked me, as he usually does, "What are you reading these days?" I felt obligated to name several other things and avoid mentioning Brand's book because, Brand is a well known alcoholic, drug addicted, womanizing, famous, millionaire movie star, and I wasn't sure that I should offer that particular bit of information.
But, I have to admit, I've really liked Brand's book and have been shocked to discover how much I have in common with him.... Other than the alcoholic, drug addicted, womanizing, famous, millionaire movie star, part.
Brand became a famous and wealthy person on the strength of his stories about his exploits as a spoiled and self-serving addict but this book is about his recovery in the AA movement, his discovery of a largely rational and social justice based spirituality. He is no intellectual but he has become an avid reader and he has been willing to analyze his personal faults in a very public way.
Like a lot of us, he found it increasingly necessary to dismiss the creedal religions that lost all credibility for us in the face of the reality both of science and of the undeniable human suffering caused by irrational religion and governments controlled by the super-wealthy.
In sobriety he has found the gratitude we so often hear expressed by former addicts who find the bliss of sobriety and a life lived oriented to reality. But, again, like many of us, he has found it difficult to give an account of his new found spiritual enthusiasm to his peers who have found religion to be all too easy, and dare I say, necessary to abandon.
I suspect that we are likely to be the only church on earth where a Russell Brand quote is the wisdom lesson for the day but this comment he made about Joseph Campbell seems to really speak to our current challenge. The stories that come to us from wandering Palestinian shepherds and barely settled agricultural societies of first century Judah no longer have the power we have tried to give them by claiming that God wrote them.
Campbell's observation that we need new communal myths to guide us into relevant moral living seems to be right on to me. I have been inclined to think that we can replace those with modern biographies... the recent release of the movie, "Selma," seems like a good example. The problem, however, with lifting any modern leader into that role is that we also have access to information about their faults.
Jesus may have been guilty of some of the racism of his culture but we have little to go on to make that point. He is protected by two millennia of the fog of memory. But when you talk about Gandhi, or King, or even such bright lights as Dorothy Day or Mother Theresa, we can also enumerate the ways that they disappointed us.
We have difficulty in appreciating anything that anyone does without also wallowing in their more salacious failings. This is almost as true of public figures as it is of religious leaders. Though he has recovered a lot of popularity, history will likely remember Bill Clinton more for his tryst with Monica Lewinsky than his rise from Arkansas poverty to the White House.
We've watched the conservative world trying to find a soft place in Barack Obama where they can stick a dagger in for six years. Their attempts often seem rather desperate, such as in Mike Huckabee's criticism of the Obama's poor parenting in allowing their daughters to listen to music by Beyonce'.... In spite of the fact that Huckabee's son was found guilty of hanging, torturing and killing a neighbor's dog..... this is not a game of moral finger pointing that he is likely to win in the universe of bad parenting wars.
We have got to be able to praise the decision of 18-year-old John Lewis to kneel in prayer on the Evan Pettus Bridge during the Selma march while Alabama State police mercilessly cracked his skull with their batons.... We have to be able to tell the story of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the Montgomery, AL bus that started the bus boycott that fueled the civil rights movement without trying to go through their garbage to tell ourselves that we don't need to follow their example.
Gossip is used to destroy reputations of leaders to give ourselves a pass on all of our own shortcomings. We have got to rise above these false diversions so that we can be more concerned about virtue than we are about trying to drag everyone down. I'm guilty of it too but I can tell you that the 21st century is starved for meaningful myths and examples to guide us, to inspire us, and to motivate us to deeds of kindness, compassion, and liberation.
All the while, we are being fed false heroes. At the same theaters that are now showing "Selma" larger crowds are going to see "American Sniper,".... A hero tale about a man who evidently killed more than 200 Iraqis.
The self-aggrandizing auto-biography of a soldier who claimed to have beaten up Jesse Ventura in a bar fight which has been proven to be false in a libel suit, and who claimed to have killed two car-jackers in Texas and shot looters during the Katrina aftermath.... None of which was true.... Nor was his claim to have given all of the proceeds of his book to charity.
Clint Eastwood claims that the movie is not political but the twitter feed of those who have seen it would seem to contradict that, as enthusiastic movie goers have reported that they came out wanting to shoot as many Arab Muslims as they could. If there is a vacuum of real heroes in modern culture, it seems that we will create role models that we really shouldn't follow.
Athletes, movie stars, rock stars, and snipers may be pushed up in the public consciousness because they are famous, or wealthy, or even because they are portrayed as being brave but I come back to this house-keeper who, without much thought, has a reflex reaction to do the right thing, even more than the right thing..... I'll say it again.... To commit an act of supererogation..... you know that you'll want to use that this week....
Largely unchurched Western Europe seems to do a better job of showing compassion to the poor, the mentally ill, and even to those guilty of crimes than in our heavily church populated country.
But it doesn't have to be that way. My fear is that without spirituality, pure reason can lead human kind into a moral vacuum. We just have to acknowledge that there are good and bad myths.
There are popular role models who are dangerous and there are others whose virtues are to be praised and imitated. And there are very unhealthy forms of religion and very helpful and promising forms of faith. As the famous scholar, Karen Armstrong, has written:
"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."
Let's not leave the future up to chance. Let's think, and act, following in the pathway that leads to liberation, courageous compassion, non-violent transformation, and into a consistently loving community.
Our progressive faith should free you from bondage to old myths that no longer work in our modern society but that liberation should not lead to either cynicism or rabid individualism. Together, we really must learn anew how to be the people we always inherently admired for their good deeds and to learn again the way of living that leads us to love one another.
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