Dealing with Facts

Proper 10    July 12, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Amos 7:7-14
7This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. 8And the Lord said to me, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A plumb line." Then the Lord said, "See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; 9the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword."
10Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, "Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. 11For thus Amos has said, 'Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.'" 12And Amaziah said to Amos, "O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; 13but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom." 14Then Amos answered Amaziah, "I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees,

I would not want to upset Donald Trump, but the Biblical text before us today is about an illegal immigrant who came from down south, crossing the border to traveling north to the nation's capital to cause problems.  He wasn't selling drugs, he wasn't trying to commit a crime, and he was not even trying to rape anyone.

He did however cross the border went to the nation's capital and even to the national cathedral and there he called out the government for corruption.... For mistreating the poor, for exploiting the vulnerable and neglecting to care for the sick and the elderly.  He said that the government was so corrupt that it was going to have to be destroyed and replaced by a foreign power.

People don't like to hear that kind of thing, especially not from a foreigner so the people in Israel told Amos to get down off of his soap box and go back to his own country and preach there.  And Amos defends himself saying, "I'm not a preacher nor even a preacher's son, I'm just a farmer."
But Amos says that he has come to hold up a plumb line in Israel.  I love that image.  Amos is not an expert in the Bible.  He is not a college professor or a famous writer.... He is a farmer who tends the orchard and the vineyard.

But when you are telling the truth, it doesn't really matter who you are.  This is a professional plumb line from about 20 years ago.  You can get an app for your iPad now that does this for you but from the time of Amos until the day I was trying to build a stone wall in my back yard, the technology of a the plumb line had not changed.

It is a weight with a string tied to it.  When you hold it up it will always tell you the absolute truth about a straight up and down line whether you are building a cathedral or an outhouse, a mansion or fence, it always tells the truth.  A Republican can hold the string, a Democrat, a socialist, even a musician.

Amos can say that he is not a prophet but what a prophet does is speak truth to power.  Prophets don't go into a trance or hear voices in their heads.... The prophets we are talking about are the people who are willing to hold up a plumb line and tell the government or the church that they are crooked.

Let me give you an example.
Five years ago there was a terrible earthquake in Haiti. In an unprecedented act of bipartisan cooperation, two former Presidents, Bush and Clinton, worked together to raise relief money.  They raised nearly half a billion dollars for the Red Cross who promised to build housing for more than 130,000 displaced Haitians.

All along, the Red Cross has been telling donors about their successful work in Haiti and so NPR, working with a documentary filmmaker, went to Haiti to investigate.  Have you heard about this?  You know how many houses the Red Cross built with $500 million dollars in five years?  Six.  Six houses.

The Red Cross complained that they were blindsided by the NPR report.  They said that there had been complications with getting local government officials to cooperate... that it was hard to get land titles, and that they had really tried.

Now, this is something I have some personal experience with.  In 2004 the Rainbow Network director asked me to head up a project to build 200 houses in rural Nicaragua where poor coffee plantation workers largely lived in mud huts in the jungle.  At the time that I took that project on, the Rainbow Network had built, in five years, about 70 houses, so this was a ridiculously ambitious plan to ramp up to this level of construction.

And there were problems.... We had problems getting clear titles to land.  There were coffee plantation owners who lied to us. There were some of our new employees who stole building materials.

And there were corrupt politicians who always wanted to be paid a bribe so that we could come and help their people.  Keith Jaspers and I made several trips to Nicaragua that year.  We refused to pay bribes. We fired dishonest employees.  We walked away from dishonest plantation owners who tried to get us to build on land that they still owned and eight months later we finished building those two hundred houses, on time, and on budget.

What I'm saying is, that I know it is hard but I also know that it can be done.  Since that documentary has been released there has been a lot of spin.  The Red Cross has talked about tents, water purification, food and other things that they did do in Haiti but their literature said that they provided housing to 130,000 people and the only built six houses and that is not enough space for more than about 30 people.

Now, you may not like what a plumb line says.  You may be offended by the math of a half a billion dollars being spent to build six houses but that's the funny thing about math.... Math doesn't care if you are offended.

Most of you here know that Dr. Charlie Hedrick, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar and an emeritus professor of religious studies at Missouri State University, has been a friend of this congregation from our very first service in August of 2008.  Charlie has been a trusted friend and advisor to me for many years.

Many of the people who see us having lunch at the university every month would not guess that we are friends because we often find ourselves in rather animated conversation about one another's work.

We don't always agree and in almost all of the moments when we find ourselves locked in different perspectives, Charlie will look at me and say, "You know, I am neither a prophet nor a prophet's son."  It is a way of sounding like you are being humble while actually saying, "I am right and you are wrong."  The mere fact that he is usually right is immaterial.

I am very much looking forward to having Bishop Spong here with us again next week.  Over the past couple of years we have become good friends but I did not start out as a big fan of Bishop Spong's work.  And I have told him, when he first published, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, I bought it and I would read a few pages and get so upset that I would shove it back on the shelf and try to forget about it.

What he was saying was just too much.  He was questioning the bedrock beliefs of traditional Christianity and though what he was saying was not foreign to my own graduate school education...what he was saying could be found in the works of Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others but Spong was demanding that I not only take them seriously but that I talk about faith more honestly in the pulpit and back then I was just sure that would get you fired.... And I was right....but I digress.
When I talk about evidence based faith now, what I mean is being willing to hold onto the plumb line and be very very careful not to say anything that doesn't square with reality.... No matter how difficult it may be to recognize that either the church or the American government, or its most popular charities might be crooked.

Exxon Mobile says that they do not fund climate deniers but in fact, they are major funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group known for spreading climate disinformation.  I'm not saying that you should never trust the Red Cross or that Exxon Mobile is always dishonest but one of the things I learned from working as an addiction counselor, you don't do anyone any favors by acting like you believe their lies.

Let me hold up a plumb line in a different area that is very important in our country right now.  The Commonwealth Fund looked at healthcare from the perspective of which nations have the best healthcare and what those nations pay per citizen to receive that care.  They looked at the richest 11 nations in the world and let me quickly tell you who that is:  Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Now, we have lots of politicians who tell us that we have the best health care system in the world but what does it cost?  Ours is a private, capitalist driven system, the other ten have national, socialized, government provided systems.
Because our system is profit driven, we spend more than anyone else, $8,500 per person in the USA -the highest in the world.  The next highest is Norway but still they spend only $5600 per person.  In Great Britain, the National Health Service spend $3400.... Significantly less than half of what we spend.

So do we get much better care than the British?  We spend a lot more, more than twice as much, what do we get for our money? And here is the math..... of the top eleven nations in the world, Britain spends the least but has the best health care.  The United States spends the most and ranks #11, the worst overall health care of the top nations in the world.

You can say that capitalism is better than socialism in some aspects of business but, folks, you did not shower in capitalist water this morning or drive on capitalist roads to get here.  You did not make your breakfast with capitalist electricity and you were not protected while you slept by a private capitalist police force, fire department, weather service, National Guard, air force or navy.  You were surrounded by socialism.  Some of you breakfast food may have been subsidized by government agencies and some was not.

There are things that seem to work more efficiently and more effectively when they are inspired by capitalism's promise of profit but if you believe in math rather than mythology, you have to acknowledge that medicine is not one of those things that benefits from capitalism.  You don't have to like math but you can be certain that math doesn't care.
You don't have to believe in science but science doesn't care what you believe.  You can argue with a plumb line and while you can make yourself look very foolish, you will not change the direction of the plumb line.

As a religious person, as a pastor, I have a concern about social justice.  It is the job of a prophetic church to speak truth to power, especially when the society is increasing suffering among the masses in order to increase the wealth of the few.  I'm not interested in political parties or, for that matter, political systems.... I am interested in justice and in the amelioration of suffering.

But Americans talk about loving democracy but are ironically led into hating labor unions.  We love democracy but we prefer to work in a despotic capitalist system.  What is a union or a cooperative but democracy?....giving the people a voice?  Capitalism and democracy are not the same thing.... In fact, capitalism is closer to feudalism.  Socialism is the economic system that puts ownership of the vital aspects of life in the hands of the people.... That is why the governments of Western Europe are called "Democratic Socialist" governments.

Americans have been taught in almost Pavlovian ways to respond negatively to the word "socialism" but folks, the pope says that he is a socialist.  The Dalai Llama says that he is, and when it comes to water, energy, transportation, food, education, and health care, I am too.  Not because we're mixing religion and politics but because we are trying to bring both wisdom and compassion to society so that more people will be able to lead decent and meaningful lives.
I've been slow to take Pope Francis at face value.... I've become very wary of the people who are at the top of the bureaucracy of institutional religion but he is seeming more and more to me to be the real deal.  He was recently quoted as saying, "We pray for the hungry, then we feed the hungry, because that is how prayer works."

Folks, evidence based faith is rooted in reality.  We don't believe in magic.  We believe in action.  We are spiritual but we are not superstitious.  We do not wait for divine deliverance, we try to become divine deliverance because God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, no voice but our voice.... Which means to me, that we had better be using our hands, our feet and voice.

Thinking about Another War

Proper 8   June 28, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

2 Samuel 1:19
Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places! How the mighty have fallen! 20 Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon; or the daughters of the Philistines will rejoice, the daughters of the uncircumcised will exult. 21 You mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew or rain upon you, nor bounteous fields! For there the shield of the mighty was defiled, the shield of Saul, anointed with oil no more. 22 From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan did not turn back, nor the sword of Saul return empty.
23 Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely! In life and in death they were not divided; they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
24 O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you with crimson, in luxury, who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.
25 How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
26 I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

1:27 How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished!

We have a text before us today, a text that describes the woe felt even by the winners of an ancient war.  But we are gathered here today at the end of an emotional week filled with both great sorrow and with, may I say, almost astonishing joy.

We entered this week still reeling from the murders of nine innocent people who had gathered in prayer and Bible study in Charleston, SC.... We entered this week struggling with both grief and our determination to make certain that these lives would not be forgotten, that their deaths would mean something.  There have been predictable delaying tactics and symbolic opposition but if I may say it just this way....things have gone so unpredictably well that it seems as if news commentators at Fox have almost been afraid to face the cameras in their studios.

Fifty years ago, as the Civil Rights movement began to draw numbers and show signs of potential victory, states across the south began to see Confederate flags in their cheap gifts shops and small minded state legislatures decided to display that flag as a part of their state flag or in their state capitols in order to tell the sons and daughters of African slaves to stay in their place.

In recent years the presence of those flags, especially in states where the black population is actually nearing a majority has become increasingly insulting.  The evil little man who murdered those nine members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston wanted to start a race war but because of the grace, the love, the willingness to forgive and to grieve without violence, on the part of the survivors in Mother Emanuel Church, there not only has not been a race war.... There has been a race peace.

Alabama and Mississippi have voluntarily taken measures to remove the Confederate flag from their capitols and I have confidence that the same will be true in South Carolina.... In fact, I hope to be there to see it with my own eyes..... I start driving tomorrow morning.

Friday I was still trying to enjoy the Supreme Court's decision that upheld the Affordable Care Act without gloating..... I'm really trying to keep the schadenfrueda out of my heart.... Some days, it is harder than others.

I was preparing to listen to President Obama's funeral eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinkney when the news arrived that the Supreme Court of the United States of America had rendered a decision that now ends the legal battle for marriage equality in America.  I started my public life of protest and demonstration during the Vietnam Era.  I'm not used to good news.  I'm used to being on the right side but in the minority, having to be satisfied with small gains, little victories, bits of progress around the boundary lines.

Real progress in eradicating racism, defense of access to health care for the poor, and equal rights for the LGBT community in one week is just about more than my 58 year old heart can stand.

In simpler days, when things are more stable, more predictable, most of us could not name more than two or three justices on the Supreme Court but in this turbulent era most of us know every member of the court, how old they are, who appointed them, where they go to church and often when one of them has a cold.

From the time the high court gave George W. Bush the 2000 election, which he did not win, to their decision to turn our government over to the highest bidder in the Citizen's United decision, some of us have had difficulty praying for their good health. Please allow me the luxury of understatement today, I am trying my best to be nice.

I had one mother and one father, none of my siblings are gay, and I'm not gay but the course of my life pushed me into a position where I either had to publicly defend gay rights or hate the man I had to look at in the mirror every day.  It was never my fight personally, but it has been my Waterloo, Little Big Horn, and D Day for most of my adult life.

The Supreme Court does not have the power or the authority to wipe out prejudice, but you would have to have a cold hard place in your chest where your heart is supposed to be not to recognize that we have won.  Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, our sisters and our brothers are free at last.

So let's take a moment for our viewers on line and those of you gathered here today to congratulate one another, to thank those who have kept up the drum beat, who have worked, sacrificed, been fired, and taken personal risks to see this day arrive.  The most controversial and difficult battle of our adult lives is over and we have won.

Please, let's try not to gloat, name call, demean, or alienate those who hear our "amens" and "hallelujahs" with sorrow.  Let's try to create a path for them to find their way into the celebration of the breaking of chains and the liberation of love.

Expanding health care coverage, removing exemptions for pre-existing conditions, and offering subsidies for those of us who don't have group insurance has lowered health care costs while bringing better health care to millions.  Removing the absurd restrictions the gay and lesbian couples in America have suffered under will stabilize families and will actually have a sizable boost to the economy in home ownership and joint pension and investment holdings.

This week's political "wins" have almost no downside.  But there are battles that even when you win, you have still lost.  If I may return to this Old Testament text we have before us today from 2 Samuel, and I don't expect any of you to be especially interested in the history of ancient Judah, but let me just say that this passage comes at the end of a civil war and it is spoken in voice of the guy who won the war and yet he is full of lament and grief.

David has won a throne.  He is king but both his foes and his friends lay dead on the battlefield.  How the mighty have fallen.

Before we invaded Afghanistan or Iraq, more than 20 years ago, Sting sang this line in a song about losing faith:
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse
Sometimes musicians are prophets.  There may have been times in history when nations went to war to resolve their differences and there were boundary lines drawn and issues settled.... I'm not a historian, I'm willing to believe that sometimes that method worked and had defensible outcomes.  I'm pretty sure, however, that those days are now over.  The unintended outcomes of military solutions are almost certain to be worse than the goals that are accomplished.

There are things to hate about Isis, there are human rights violations enough to sicken our souls in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, in China, in Russia, in Israel, and in the Sudan.... There are crises that cry out for solutions but almost none of them have solutions that can be found at the end of a bayonet.

Shortly before he died, Howard Zinn spoke at Boston University and in that speech he pointed out what should be the obvious fact that:

Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.

Maybe it has not always been this way but it has certainly been this way during my adult lifetime.  We send the children of the poor in our nation to go and kill their children of the poor in another nation and then we sit back and are astonished that it never turns out well.

No one disputes the fact that Saddam was a bad guy but by invading the country we have only made matters worse, killing ten times as many innocent citizens as Saddam killed and, after such excessive violence, we created Isis and now the survivors are much worse off.

I'm not saying that we should do nothing in the face of tyrants and human rights atrocities, I just think that we need to recognize that military action will almost never provide the solutions we want.  Saudi Arabia beheads many more citizens than Isis and, in fact, this year they are on track to set a record and they are one of our closest trading partners.  We have influence in Saudi Arabia and we are not using it.

For centuries there were regional wars between Spain, England, France, Germany... but they are too smart to do that anymore.  70 years ago Germany was bent on world domination but they made the mistake of using armies to accomplish that.  Now they are nearing domination of Europe though advances in technology and the marketplace.... While we are footing the bill for most of their national defense.
China has often been portrayed as a looming competitor with the United States so we're trying to build up a navy big enough to contain a continent while they are building solar panels and wind farms.  We may very well fall into the same trap that snared the Soviet Union in the 1980's.... we may exhaust our nation's resources on military expenditures until we defeat ourselves through economic collapse while China becomes the dominant world player through superior infrastructure and technology.

It should be obvious that our navy will be as useful as a manual typewriter in a computer lab.  We have had the luxury of fabulous national wealth to allow us to go on as if it were 1945, dragging our feet on developing national health care that other nations took care of 50 years ago.  While other nations are making higher education either free or at least very affordable, we are creating for profit colleges and making education less and less accessible, literally dumbing down our nation through economic mismanagement.

I'm grateful for the advances we have made, especially in matters of social liberties though even there we are decades behind other developed nations.  But nowhere are we more out of sync with reality as we are in the universe of military spending and foreign policy.

If all you have is a hammer, the whole world can look like a nail.  I know that we can be smarter than that, and as a pastor, as a spiritual person, as someone who hopes to stir the conscience and inspire the hearts of people, I know that we can be better than we have been.

We need to send more teachers and engineers abroad than we send soldiers.  We don't need more drones and fighter planes; we need alternative energy sources so that we can stop fouling the earth's atmosphere. We don't need more aircraft carriers and battleships; we need to be building water purification plants and desalinization facilities to give clean water to the world. Nothing creates peace like a stable economy and safe environment.

America has been rich and we have been powerful.  Now, in the 21st century, it is time for us to be smart and good....And then we can again say that the United States is the greatest country in the world.

So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and -- yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It's not that we're going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we'll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably -- inevitably -- the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it's not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. and to think, you know, we're at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we're sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.

We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start.

In the Wake of the Emanuel AME Church Murders

Proper 7    June 21, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Job 38: 1-2, 4-7
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?            
I'm working on a new book, a collection of essays edited from the last several years of my columns in the Springfield NewsLeader. The last essay I worked on before shutting up for the day on Wednesday was one about gun control entitled, "America after Sandy Hook."  After that December 2012 tragedy in which a lone gunman killed 20 children and six adults, it had seemed like reform was inevitable. 

Though we have between 80 and 90 gun deaths in America every day, this incident, this nightmare, this horror of the deaths of so many children in one school on one day.... Surely this would cut through the opposition, the indifference, the NRA bribed congress and we would finally find some sanity in America.  There was a lot of talk, some promises, but the weeks went by and people got interested in other things.... Paula Dean was caught saying the "n" word.... The Duchess of  Cambridge had a baby...George Zimmerman was found to be not-guilty when we all knew that he was.....people forget, they move on....and the deaths of the children in Sandy Hook Elementary ended up meaning nothing at all on a national level.

When I got home Wednesday evening and sat down to watch the news, like all of you, I found myself going back to the familiar territory of shock and horror.  A racially motivated young man went into the Wednesday evening prayer meeting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC and executed, murdered, shot, the pastor and eight other church members while shouting out racial epithets from a hundred years ago.... Emotions, beliefs, prejudices, that should be as consigned only to ancient history just as the Confederate flag that still flies over the capitol in Columbia, SC should only be seen in a history museum.

Two weeks from today I will be preaching at the Unitarian Church in Columbia and if that flag is still flying over the capitol I may not be out of jail in time for our service the following Sunday but I am sure that you will understand.

Today the survivors of this horrible mass murder have the sympathy of the world.  Sure, the media and the web have been ablaze with the absurd outliers.... The NRA board member who said that now deceased Pastor, Clementa Pinckney, was personally responsible because he objected to people being allowed to carry concealed weapons into church.... Or the Fox News commentators who initially tried to deny the racial nature of the murders saying that it happened because liberals have led a war on Christianity, some even saying that we pastors should arm ourselves so that we could shoot anyone who threatens us....but these people are too stupid to be allowed to rent any space in our skulls.  They should be summarily ignored and not even be shown the attention of being ridiculed by TV talk show comedians.

Just as I have resolved not to mention the names of shooters in these mass murders and I do not want to recount their story or in any way make them famous for being such evil people, I don't want to dissect the misinformation and propaganda being spewed by conservative talk shows and by Fox News.  I just want to implore you to do the one thing that will hurt them all the most.... Don't watch their news programs, don't listen to their radio programs, and don't repeat the names and messages of murderers.

There is very little reason to even talk to the kind of people who say, "guns don't kill people, people kill people."  I dare say that there has never been a person so deceived as to have ever believed that mantra but anyone who says it has already abdicated any fealty to reason or information and I have no interest in engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.

Still, I recognize that this is not just a gun issue.  I know that the mentally ill have much greater access to lethal weapons than they have access to counselors and appropriate medications.  And I know that there is a serious addiction problem in our nation and that many of the worst crimes committed in our nation are committed by people under the influence of drugs.....illegal and prescription drugs.

And, in the case of this mass murder in a church, there is clearly and unmistakably a racial motivation. And the opponents of gun violence will try to play the game of diverting attention and blame to all sorts of other issues to prevent the one conversation that this nation must have which is that no other developed nation has this kind of problem and the only difference is that those nations have strict gun laws and we don't.

There are literally millions of responsible gun owners who know how to handle, store, and keep their guns safely but when there are hundreds of millions of guns floating around in our nation, there is no reasonable way to keep all of those guns safe.
We do everything that we can conceivably do to minimize deaths from car accidents or product safety issues and yet we do everything possible to make it easier and easier for a crazier and crazier population to kill more than 30,000 Americans a year.

As tragic as the Emanuel Church murders were, those nine deaths represent only 10% of the people that were killed by guns on Wednesday in America!
The NRA uses their lobbying power to do everything they can to keep us from talking about the annual carnage in America. They have made it illegal to sue gun manufacturers for product liability.  They have made it illegal for the CDC to even research and keep records on gun deaths.  They fight even the most obvious and minor restrictions on the number of guns you can buy, the amount of ammunition, the kinds of weapons or even things like cop killer bullets and hundred round drums for semi-automatic weapons.

I am all about reasoned debate and a negotiated solution to any problem but when you don't have anyone with whom to negotiate in good faith.  If facts, information, research, and critical thinking are ignored or suppressed, then we just have to stop feeling that we have to gain the agreement or the permission of the most militant of NRA gun enthusiasts.  They have demonstrated themselves to be, as Jon Stewart has observed, more dangerous to Americans than Isis, and we need to give them no more space in the conversation than we would give to any domestic terrorist organization. We don't need the permission of the NRA to bring sanity back to America.

The lectionary reading before us today is one of those alternative voices from our ancient scriptures.
Most religious people, then and now, were inclined to insist that God is in charge of everything and that everything happens for a reason.  God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked.  We have told one another that the Lord will provide, that the Lord is our shepherd, that the Lord will never give you more than you can bear, and, I love this one, "all things work together for good for those who love the Lord."

But the person who wrote the Book of Job was calling BS on that line of religious jargon.  He had seen the wicked prosper and the righteous get nothing but a raw deal. Job, for 40 chapters, shakes his fist at heaven and tells God that the world is not fair, that horrible things happen that don't make any sense, and, in point of fact, not only do not all things work together for those who are faithful but in fact, the faithful often seem to be the first be the objects of genocides, false arrests, holocausts, beheadings, bombings, and mass shootings during a prayer meeting.

In the end God actually shows up in the Book of Job and confirms Job's accusation is true... he tells him that the world isn't fair and that he doesn't get an explanation... it just is.

Hundreds of years later some ancient Palestinian fundamentalist wrote a theologically terrible new ending to the book and tried to make everything seem okay because Job got new kids, a bigger house and new cash but that's not how the real world works.

And here, men and women, I'm coming down firmly on the side of the minority voice of scripture.  The universe is not going according to some Divine plan.  The universe is capricious, full of chaos.
The universe is devoid of meaning, entirely, unless you bring meaning to it.  Lots of religious people have been quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.'s response to the church bombing in which four children lost their lives more than 50 years ago.  King talked about "redemptive suffering".... Suffering that means something because it changes the world.  You can say that Christ's suffering on the cross, Dorothy Day's imprisonments, Gandhi's hunger strikes, Romero's beatings at the hands of the police... you can say that these are redemptive suffering but I will tell you that there were just examples of senseless violence UNLESS someone makes it mean something.

The universe is capricious and chaotic and devoid of meaning unless you bring meaning to it.  The deaths of those 20 children in Sandy Hook Elementary were not redemptive because we let them die in vain.  We didn't get gun laws changed, no far from it, gun sales skyrocketed.  And all of that insane talk about "Obama's gonna take our guns,".... Both times that Obama has been elected, gun sales went through the roof.... They have not been able to keep ammunition in stock on the shelves at Bass Pro Shops here for years, the most dangerous people on earth buy it up as soon as it arrives.

Suffering in injustice is not automatically redemptive.  It isn't automatically anything at all.  What you do about it, how you react to it, how you change the world.... That makes it either just 9 more graves in a Charleston, SC graveyard, or this event becomes the moment when the world is changed.
 In John Irving's wonderful fiction novel, Cider House Rules, the aging Dr. Larch keeps telling one of the orphans in his care, Homer, to be useful.

The setting of the novel involved ethically challenging circumstances around abortion and caring for unwanted children but the advice of Dr. Larch reaches through the pages of fiction into our real life situations.  Homer does not want to take Dr. Larch's place as the sometimes physician to orphans and sometimes illegal abortion doctor because he does not want to play God.  Dr. Larch points out that in fact we owe it to the world to play God because to do nothing is, in effect, playing the part of an evil god.

Pastors often disappoint me because they try to remain popular by always taking a neutral position on every earthly moral dilemma which is the opposite of what we have pastors for in the first place.  As Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, said, "Take sides.  Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed."

I wish that evil were personified and living in a single crazy shooter who we can arrest, put on trial and execute.... I wish it was that simple..... but you know it isn't.

Blood has been spilled... innocent blood... this can be the blood of martyrs or it can be just the blood of victims of a violent crime.  How you react makes the difference.  I implore you, this time, don't get distracted.  Don't forget.  Don't move onto the next exciting news story.  Stay on this one until it becomes redemptive.  Make yourselves useful. Sacrifice for social justice. Being neutral doesn't make you good unless your goal is to be a paperweight.

I am begging you to play god.

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!