American Exceptionalism Revisited

Proper  6    June 14, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Ezekiel 17:22-24
Thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.

On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.
All the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the LORD have spoken; I will accomplish it.

Mark 4:30-32
He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."                 

Visitors to the famous Tower of London are treated to what might be called a "home on the range" displays of English history... because, while you will see the Crown Jewels and many historical artifacts, "seldom is heard a discouraging word" about England.  Twenty years ago, when I first visited the Tower of London, which had been used as a prison during the 16th and 17th centuries, they were displaying a rather more honest depiction of what it had been like to be a prisoner in this above ground dungeon.

The torture devices where shocking.  Iron skull masks with spikes pointed inward that could be screwed tighter and tighter to kill a prisoner over months of agonizing pain.  There were racks and whips and weapons that, frankly, made me mild suspicious of everyone with an English accent.

But now, if you see a commercial with someone with an English accent on TV, you can bet that they are trying to sell you something that is either terribly over priced or that it absolutely does not work.  For some reason, in spite of having had to fight a very bloody war to gain independence from England, Americans are still so smitten with the Brits that we will believe almost any manner of hogwash delivered to us with an English accent.

Growing up in the former British colonies, we were reared on movies like Mary Poppins, and nearly every Disney animated cartoon from Peter Pan to 101 Dalmatians, to view the English as being terribly sophisticated and the authors of modern civilized behavior.  This is, of course, nothing but deceptive propaganda.

Every nation creates a narrative for itself in which they can narcissistically put themselves on a pedestal and declare that their nation is the greatest nation in the world.  If you remember the comedy film released a few years ago, Borat, this sense of absurd self-worship was especially on display as he sang a fictitious version of the national anthem of Kazakhstan.  It gets too ribald for me to repeat here towards the end but it starts out saying:

"Kazakhstan greatest country in the world - all other countries are run by little girls. Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium! Other countries have inferior potassium...... Kazakhstan, friend of all except Uzbekistan, they very nosey people with bone in their brain."

Of course, Borat, was an entirely fictional comedy but, you know, laughter is, psychologically speaking, a pleasant reaction to surprise.  That is why you don't laugh at old jokes.... If there is no surprise, generally speaking, it isn't really funny anymore.
But even though Borat is trying to be funny by being so absurd, think about some of the nationalistic claims nations really do make that no longer surprise us.

Christians and Jews treasure an ancient book in which Jews three thousand years ago wrote about themselves that they are God's chosen people and that God gave them a land that was, ironically, already entirely occupied by another nation. Now, if you think about it..... that's more absurd than saying that your potassium is better than everyone else's potassium and that the people in Uzbekistan are nosey and have a  bone in their brains..... and yet,
Thousands of years later, we have American preachers standing up in pulpits announcing that the Jews are God's chosen people and God have Israel to the Jews without ever noticing how very ironically convenient it is that a book they wrote gives them clear title to a land they stole by killing its inhabitants and swearing that God told them to do it.

And no less a person than Abraham Lincoln used this imagery to describe the United States of America as "God's almost chosen people," and claimed that the Almighty was using him to accomplish the Divine goal of making America a new promised land that was established by killing the people who lived here and taking their land.  We don't laugh at these claims only because we grew up being taught to believe that such outrageous claims were true.

We still celebrate Columbus Day as a national holiday in America even though we know that Columbus landed on Caribbean islands and led in a wholesale genocidal slaughter of the natives he found there and led in enslaving the survivors.

Europeans began importing captured African slaves to work on those island plantations, only after they had worked the indigenous people into extinction.  Please forgive me if it seems that I am belaboring this point but I wanted to set the context for these two passages of scripture we are looking at today.

Our first text is from that confident and self-laudatory passage in Ezekiel in which the prophet poetically says that God is going to take a little sprig of cedar (representing the tiny nation of Judah) and will make it grow to be the tallest tree in the forest and all of the birds of the air will come and build their nests in its branches..... a very poetic way of saying that they will one day dominate all of their other nations of the world.

Our second lesson is from the gospel of Mark where Jesus makes fun of Ezekiel's image of Judah as a dominant nation.  Jesus says, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

In spite of the way that text was read to us in Sunday School, let me invite you to hear the subtle joke that Jesus is telling.
The mustard plant was not the tallest plant in the garden... it only grows to be about 18 inches tall.  It is not a strong plant.... It dies in the first frost... and no bird that valued its own survival would build a nest in a plant so close to the ground.  In fact, in spite of how much nutritionists tell us today, people in Jesus' day only fed mustard greens to their cattle.  Kale, spinach and mustard greens only became edible when non-Jews realized that when you cook them with bacon that they are actually quite tasty, though decidedly not kosher.              

Jesus was making the nationalism of his peers sound more like a scene in Borat than a passage of sacred scripture...which might help to explain why they killed him.  Jesus was not a politician who said things to appeal to his base... he tried to help his own people to be self critical, to think about the absurdity of domination.

When our Declaration of Independence was published, it talked about the high ideals of liberty and justice but we know that in 1776 the majority of people were not afforded either liberty or justice.... Certainly not black African slaves, not indentured servants, not the Indians and Mexicans we were killing to take their land, and even the majority of the population, meaning all women, were not afforded the justice or liberty of full citizenship.

America has not become a great nation because God chose us as Divine favorites or because this is an economic promised land.... We become great when we ended slavery, when we extended the right to vote to women, when we paid reparations to the Japanese who were interred and robbed of their property and businesses.  And we have the potential to be more exceptional when we get real about immigration laws, especially when it applies to Latinos who are living in lands that we stole from them.  And we will have nationalistic bragging rights when we finally find the morality to bring an end to poverty.... A task which we can easily accomplish whenever we decide that we are willing to stop currying favor with the rich and start to treat the poor as if they were our brothers and sisters.

May I take just a moment to remind you that each of those very real and substantive steps towards justice did not come about through legislative decree... they happened when Americans decided to set aside the propaganda and to deal courageously with the truth.  Congress didn't provide the moral leadership, it was radicals who suffered abuse and imprisonment.... People like Dorothy Day, like Black Elk, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Listen to our political rhetoric today.... Jeb Bush can say that single mothers should be publicly shamed in order to prevent irresponsible behavior... but he is not called a radical.  Rick Santorum can say that gay couples are the moral equivalent of man on dog sexual relationships and he is not thought of as being crazy. Marco Rubio can deny all of the scientific evidence that points to human causation of global climate change and yet he is called the savior of the Republican Party.

But let Ron Paul suggest that using drones to kill thousands of innocent civilians should be stopped and he is described as being unelectable.  Elizabeth Warren says that we should stop making money off of student loans to struggling lower and middle class families and refinance those loans at the same rate we charge banks and corporations to borrow money and she is said to be an extremist.  Bernie Sanders points out that income disparity is killing the American economy and driving the middle class into extinction and he is called a radical who is too far off the scale to be a serious candidate.

Clear, incontrovertible, scientific and mathematical facts are being labeled as crazy, while militaristic, classist, misogynistic anti-poor, anti-immigrant, and totally irrational religious claims are passively accepted and go unchallenged by our corporate owned media.

What this church is trying to do is to speak a word of sane, rational, and critical thinking reality to a nation that wants to be exceptional but can't quite stand the light of reality....we're just trying to do when Jesus did when he talked about mustard seeds... most of the religious universe thinks we crazy which only means that we need to be louder and more persistent.

Winston Churchill famously said that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.  Well, my fellow Americans.... I think that we can now officially say that we have tried everything else and now it is time for us to do the right thing.

Being Prophetic in the Land of Unclean Lips

May 31, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Isaiah 6:1-8
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3And one called to another and said:
'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.' 
4The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. 5And I said: 'Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!'
6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: 'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.' 8Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I; send me!'

       
The state of Texas has experienced unprecedented flooding in the past week with nearly all of its major cities facing either flooded rivers or flash flooding from heavy rains. An image on the internet showed houses and cars standing in several feet of water and the caption read, "Why don't you try cutting taxes on the rich and then letting the free market fix this?"

The earth, speaking globally, is very slowly warming.  That warming is causing some shifts in weather patterns that actually makes some parts of the globe abnormally cool and is causing movements in the atmosphere that seems to be preventing rain on the west coast and brining uncommon rain fall in Texas and Oklahoma, along with the often discussed rise in the sea level that will eventually cover most of Florida, New York City, Boston and many other places that we would really rather not give back to the seas.

There are long-term solutions to our environmental challenges.... But, to date, our nation and much of the rest of the world remain unwilling to work on solutions.  There is not Republican and Democratic science.  There is just good science and junk science.
However, there are attempts at making science partisan.  The Republican control states of Florida and North Carolina have, by act of their legislature, made it illegal for state employees to use the term, "Global Climate Change" or any of its corollaries such as "global warming," and "sea level rise."  They have to say things like "nuisance flooding."  Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, have all taken similarly science denying state policies.

C. S. Lewis made the helpful observation that a lunatic cannot blot out the sun by writing "darkness" on his cell wall.  Refusing to deal with the facts, refusing to say the words, like Scarlet in "Gone with the Wind" saying, "I'll worry about that tomorrow," is just deadly ignorant.... Literally.

However, even though it is somewhat satisfying to see Texas officials who voted against funding for Sandy relief just three years ago, now demanding federal relief in light of their much less devastating flooding in Texas, it is not helpful simply to make fun of their hypocrisy.

In this scripture lesson Jennifer read fro us from Isaiah, in a vision the young prophet feels that he is being called upon to confront the hypocrisy, the injustice, the evil within his culture but he objects saying, "I am a man of unclean lips who lives among a people of unclean lips."  Which is to say, "Sure, we're pretty messed up right now... we have a huge income and capital disparity between the ruling class and the working class... most of our food is produced in near slave-like conditions and our foreign policy is likely to get us killed but, I am a part of the society that has created all of these problems.... Who am I to speak?"

You don't typically think of the words "humble" or "modest" when you think of Isaiah or, for that matter, any of the Old Testament prophets.  Preaching, in and of itself, is all the evidence you need to accuse someone of arrogance.  Expecting hundreds of people to sit quietly while I tell them what I think about matters of utmost importance is a narcissistic exercise that could only be trumped by printing your own picture on currency and yet, this is what a prophet is supposed to do.

But I appreciate his modesty, even if it was only in a vision and he was only telling it about himself.  The fact remains, Isaiah identified himself as being a part of the same corrupt society that he was being sent to confront.  And that is a helpful reminder for all of us.  

Late night talk shows and news-parody shows have trained us all to be rather snarky in our conversation about politics as if we were all trying out to take the place of Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart and I'm especially guilty of that because I have this 20 minute weekly gig in which I want to appear to be simultaneously persuasive and also terribly witty.

I have good friends who regularly try to get me to tone down my rhetoric, insisting that there is guilt on both sides of the political divide and no progress can be made until we meet in the middle. I get that.... I and we are a people of unclean lips who live in a society of unclean lips but the offenses are not anything like equal and false equivalencies don't help us to get at the truth.

My politics are based on my approach to spirituality and ethics.  I know that a lot of conservative religious people would say the same thing.  The right wing of religion, whether your are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, tends to resist equal rights for women, or the rights of women to manage their own reproductive life... they tend to be very pro-business and anti-union, ... they usually oppose gay rights and they are willing to edit both science and history to suit their own purposes.

Those of us on the religious left, again, of all three major western faiths, take nearly opposite views on civil rights and poverty issues.  That does not, however, make me a very good Democrat.  I sometimes say that I hail from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party because it seems to me that the party, as a whole, has been willing to talk the talk but then walk the military and corporate walk.

I was very surprised the first time that we lost church members because I was critical of our Democratic president.  I would never assume that a prophetic pulpit owed any kind of fealty to a political party but clearly that is not a universally shared opinion.  It appears to be one thing that Republicans and Democrats do have in common, they are not very good at being self-critical.

I am very critical of the plan to build a new pipe-line over major aquifers of the United States in order to pump tar sands out of Canada.... Not just because of the environmental risks presented to American water sources but because we really should leave that nasty carbon sequestered in the ground.

But, I did drive a gas powered car to church today and as much as I am opposed to slavery, I am wearing a suit that was manufactured in slavery-like conditions in South Korea.  I had English tea at my home this morning but I know the tea wasn't grown in England and I'm equally sure that I would be appalled by the circumstances under which it was grown and harvested.

I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a nation of people with unclean lips.  I suspect that I am employed by a church comprised of people with unclean lips.  None of us are innocent and yet we must not be paralyzed by that fact.  Isaiah, in his vision, endured an angel pressing a hot coal to his lips as a sign of purification so that he could then speak the truth to power.

Minus the hot coals to the lips, that is our job too.  What do you believe are the most important issues our society must face and solve in the next decade?

You may have a somewhat different list but I would say that the biggest challenges we must solve are:
1)    Income disparity
2)    Dependence on fossil fuels
3)    And, a foreign policy based on maintaining a military empire
But what do we talk about most in the news?  Benghazi... Hillary's email server... gay marriage.... The sexual peccadillos of politicians... and mostly we talk about which candidate will be allowed to serve the interests of corporations and the super rich next.  Do you see the problem here?

As long as the media keeps us focused on the trivial and political parties both engage in dog whistle manipulation of voters then the poor will become more impoverished, the corporation that make money off of wars, medicines, food, and banking services will continue to run our government for their own benefit, while the earth itself becomes uninhabitable and the concepts of freedom and individual prosperity will become matters of history.

We have been a part of the society of unclean lips but we can be the prophetic voice that guides our path towards a more peaceful, sustainable and just society.  If we fall in love with the truth, and find the courage to step out of the system the world can be changed.

Faith in the 21st Century

Easter 6    May 10, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, Pastor

Psalm 1                  
1 Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers;
2 but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
   and on his law they meditate day and night.
3 They are like trees planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.
4 The wicked are not so,
   but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement,
   nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
   but the way of the wicked will perish.

In my recently published book, Progressive Faith and Practice, I explain the initial invention of religion as the attempt of early civilizations to cope with two things:  the capricious nature of the universe, and their awareness of their own inevitable death.  When humans became self-aware, they attempted to project a personality onto the earth, weather, agriculture, the seas and the skies in order to account for why they did what they did.  The earliest of religions did not include a belief in an afterlife but for many, especially in western culture where individualism seemed to be increasingly important, a belief in eternal life was added to western religions and to varying degrees, it has also pollinated some eastern faiths.

For most people, it seems, the function of religion has never really progressed from just that level.  From the time when ancient Palestinians believed that God sat on a throne in the heavens right above their temple on Mt Moriah in Jerusalem, to the announcement of Mike Huckabee last week in Hope, Arkansas in which he reflected on his childhood experiences in school, saying, "We prayed at the start of each day, and we prayed again before lunch, and I learned that this exceptional country could only be explained by the providence of almighty God," religion has not evolved.  Jews thought that God had chosen them to rule the world and that God hated all of their neighboring nations.  Mike Huckabee would say that God created all of the world and all of the people in it, but God only seems to really like the white folks in America. God is funny that way.

At this most simple and self-serving level, religion in most churches is basically what it was when the first cave man stood in the morning light and silently prayed that the gods would give him success in the day's hunt.  But, and today I would like to say a profound, "Yes - But" even to myself and my own published summation of the genesis of all religions.  Yes, it is true that human self-consciousness led to the creation of religions based on a personification of aspects of nature and a lust for some assurance that we will not all die in the way that cows, chicken and pigs seem to die, never to rise again.

Yes, religion was initially a psychological balm to comfort the anxiety of primitive self-awareness but that is not all that it was and not all that it is and most certainly not all that it must be in the 21st century.

I could point to many earlier historical quotes but in light of Gov. Huckabee's theological interpretation of what make America great, I will assert that it was a unique and powerful blossoming of the American Enlightenment in the mid 1700's.  The American Enlightenment was certainly sparked by the European Enlightenment but ours carried some unique markers and amazing insights in turning sectarian religious thought into moral deliberation.

Thomas Jefferson is famous for having taken his knife to the New Testament, cutting out every reference to the miraculous, to claims of divinity and immortality, and preserving the moral teachings he found there.  The primitive magical thinking and superstition, along with the wishful thinking in hopes of invisible friends who help you out of tight spots, were seen as the packaging that real religion came in.... packaging that was best discarded so that you could get at the real point of it.

Unlike many in our day who, once they give up on the packaging of religion, are willing to toss the virtues in the garbage as well, the leaders of the American Enlightenment not only didn't reject religion, they doubled down on its core message.  Because, alongside of the more visceral motivation to create myths to help you to cope with a capricious universe and a short personal lifespan, there has always been the dual purpose of trying to define what it means to be a good person.

You have often heard me reference the ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, that gave birth to post-exilic Judaism, early Christianity and Islam, that taught that the good life is lived by achieving three things:  right thoughts, right words, and right actions.

Professor Mark Berkson of Hamline University has distilled what he believes the core virtues of classic Greek thought, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Christianity... I've printed them in your bulletin and for those of you who are joining us online, if you want to see it written out, you can find the entire text of this sermon on our website.  Berkson's list is this:


Classical Greek thought:  Wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance
Confucianism: Benevolence, propriety, righteousness, and wisdom
Buddhism:  Compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity
Christianity:  Faith, hope, and charity

A reasonable person might argue with aspects of Berkson's summary but in general what we see here is a broad outline of what it means to be a good person.  In Greek society, it might have been described as the good citizen.  Confucius spoke of being a gentleman though clearly what he meant is more of what we mean by saying that someone is a gentleman and a scholar. Buddhism cannot be meaningfully discussed, in my opinion, without also mentioning detachment, but the ideal Buddhist is someone who lives without greed or competition and is at harmony with others and at peace with her or himself.

Christianity is a bit harder.  Clearly, he is drawing on Paul's letter to the Roman church but if you can translate "faith" to mean a courageous commitment to principle, and "charity" to mean both compassion and unjudging love, then I can say a hearty "amen" to his list.

What I would ask you to notice about this list, even the beginning with Zoroastrianism, is that there is no need for a supernatural theistic person in the heavens to make this true.  Virtue is true in an existential way.  Virtue becomes its own evidence.  That leading a good life, improves the quality of your life and the lives of those around you.  Virtue in the individual is lent to the community, infusing society with is compassion, love, empathy, with its willingness to sacrifice courageously for the greater good.

But none of this is necessarily natural.  Theft, violence, self-serving appetites.... Those are natural.  Virtue is a choice.  Virtue is a matter of practice, of discipline, of determination.

To reference our American Enlightenment once more, in a memoir written for his son, Ben Franklin described how he methodically identified 13 virtues and took on one at a time to try to make them each a part of what it meant to be Ben Franklin.  You would not be surprised to know that "thrift" was one of Franklin's chosen virtues, but so was moderation, the ability to be silent, humility, courage of convictions, temperance, productivity, orderliness and cleanliness, and he even mentioned chastity which he no more achieved than most of our modern politicians.

The point is that religion, the good part of it, the virtues that we need to bring to the 21st century, are not accidents of our occasional association with any faith system.  Practicing a faith is not about sacraments, rituals, liturgies and hymns.  Practicing a faith is about carefully identifying who you want to become, about choosing virtues that address the broken places in your life, in your character, that may inspire you to be healed, to be more whole, to be a better person.

The claim is that this is best done in community.  We don't read texts in our gatherings to satisfy God.... We read them because they are supposed to instruct our character, to inspire us to try again.  We do not pray to ask God to perform magic in our lives or anyone elses.... We pray as reflective meditation in the hope that we might be changed for the better.

We don't sing to placate the ego of a Divine entity that expects praise.  We sing because the poetry of music is more powerful in its inspiration than is the spoken word.... Except of course for the lyrics of most Country Music and, for that matter, Italian opera, but we don't need to discuss that now.

If there is to continue to be a church in the later part of the 21st century, certainly it must be a place that is free of the packaging of Iron Age myths and superstitious thinking.  I believe that every educated member of clergy already knows this and would be saying it if they were not afraid of unemployment.  But unemployment is coming if we continue to try to bolster belief in absurdities and remain loyal to creeds rooted in truth claims that have no substance other than that they feel somewhat familiar and might take the edge off of fear and grief.

If the church has a reason to exist, surely it is to raise a prophetic voice to challenge the evils of our society in the big picture, and to individually draw that down to the teaching, encouraging, and maybe even confronting of the same in ourselves.  You will not become a saint by following the path of least resistance.  Everyone is naturally the hero of their own novel in which we always make ourselves the main character crying out only to be sympathetically understood.

We will become the good people we want to be, we will help to bring about the good society we know should exist, only by making a courageous and fearless commitment to self-examination, by being determined to work and sacrifice to be better people and by being willing to encourage others to do the same.

I don't know if the church will survive the death of superstition but I hope it will.  I'm staying because I know that even in my advanced years, I am nowhere near being the person I hope to be and I hope that you will help me to become more like that person every week when we gather to do whatever it is that people like us do in church.

The Passion Story We Live

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!

Loving without Owning

March 29, 2015
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.

Letting in the Greeks (and Mexicans, Haitians and Muslims)

Lent  5      March 22, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

John 12:20-23
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.

Max, 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.

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.

Coming to the Light

Lent  4    March 15, 2015
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.