The Moral Vacuum of Insatiable Greed

August 16, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Mahatma Gandhi
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
John Kenneth Galbraith  The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

On our long list of things to be mad about in the world, out of nowhere came a different kind of story that momentarily took our minds off of police shootings or unarmed black teenagers, figuring out who is responsible for creating Isis, and why we had to lose Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the same miserable year.  For several days, the world had a new person to hate, the previously fairly obscure Minneapolis, dentist, Walter Palmer.

Palmer actually had enjoyed a certain celebrity among big game hunters but last month he mistakenly killed one of the oldest, most rare, and most beloved lions in the world, Zimbabwe's rare black manned lion, Cecil. And though Palmer has since apologized and said that he did not know that Cecil had been lured off of a game preserve and was wearing a tracking collar, after they wounded and two days later finished killing Cecil, Palmer saw the tracking collar, cut it off and hid it in a tree.  He was then so horrified by what he had done that he, reportedly, turned to his native guides and asked if he could kill a really big elephant the next day.

It is not that anyone thought that killing Cecil was more important than recent human tragedies; it was that it just made no sense at all.  There is no friction in Minneapolis between the dentist community and the lion community.

He had to go half way across the globe, spend a ton of money, and then lure a harmless lion out into the open to shoot it.  It was an obscene act to satisfy a nearly incomprehensible and arguably mentally perverted need to kill a rare, indeed, an endangered, beautiful, beloved and majestic animal.

It is an obscenity of excess.  There is a market for rare meats around the world.  I don't know how tired you have to become of beef, chicken, and fish to feel like you need to eat a bear, or a lion, or a rhino, I know that I have not felt any such appetite.

There are of course those who see little difference between killing a cow and killing a lion and though I am sympathetic with people who are vegetarians by reason of conscience, I do think there is a matter of self-preservation involved.

For all of the fear and hype about sharks, or Ebola, or even Isis, in the past year, only one American has died from a shark attack, one from Ebola, and only one from Isis, but cows killed 22 Americans .... I'm just sayin.... Do the math. I'm just doing my part to keep Americans safe.

But there is a serious moral issue here and one that is not always easy to define or to understand.

Spiritual people of every world religion have gone through phases of emphasizing the value of self-denial, of living an ascetic life, without possessions and in an embrace of poverty.  Others have seen the accumulation of wealth as a sign of God's blessings.

The Buddha taught that the middle way is more sane, more balanced, more distinctly human.  You know me, I'm never one to praise moderation when it comes to our passions for justice and our commitment to radical compassion, but when it comes to our appetites, the middle way is clearly the lane we are looking for.

Capitalism often seems to teach that there are no boundaries.  There is an element in our society that seems to believe that more is what we are to always strive for.  Our appetites for food, sex, money, land, things, power, can run over us and turn decent people into moral monsters.

Like a lot of my peers, I have struggled with my weight for most of my adult life.  I don't feel like I am a bad person but I know when I try to fit my hips between the old theater seats at the Gilioz or at the Landers that whether I'm a bad person or not, I am a big person and I would be more healthy and more comfortable if I could be smaller.

And not to make this too personal and certainly not to invite unsolicited diet advice (which is considered justifiable cause for homicide), but I have to concentrate on the difference between wanting to eat because I am hungry and wanting to eat for the sheer entertainment or pleasure of eating.  Foods that taste good are a form of entertainment, regardless of whether my body actually needs food.

For a lot of us in the middle class, we can afford to buy virtually anything that we want to eat and so we have to make a conscious decision to eat smarter and not simply to consume because we can.
One of the most helpful continuing education events we held at the university when I sometimes teach was when we invited the poverty specialist, Ruby Payne, to come do a seminar for us.  She described the different ways in which our economic classes approach their family dinner this way, she said, after dinner:

A poor father will ask his children, "Did you get enough?"
A middle class father will ask his children, "Did you like it? Did it taste good?"
And a wealthy father will ask his children, "Did you enjoy the experience?"

For those whose lives are often marked with food insecurity, just making sure that your children are fed is a source of real anxiety.  For those who are not especially afraid of hunger are concerned with making sure that their children as having a good life and not just getting the bare necessities but are, in fact, enjoying their meals.  The wealthy might not really enjoy even good food if it is not served in an environment that is also esthetically pleasing.

All of these things have to do with how we have trained our appetites.  I eat beef and chicken but I would take no pleasure in going onto a farm and personally killing the animals that would end up in the skillet on my stove.  I don't understand the pleasure people get out of hunting but I recognize it as being a part of how humans function in the food chain and I do not judge someone who hunts for food.... Though hunting endangered species or even entirely impractical sources of meat is an extreme of appetite that we should not be afraid to label as being evil, sinful, extreme to the point of mental illness.

The Desert Fathers, the ascetic monks who lived in the Alexandrian desert in the early centuries of the Christian movement, sought to challenge the power of their appetites so that they could devote themselves to spiritual causes.  They taught that if you will not even satisfy your thirst for water, that you will never long for wine, and that if you never take your fill of bread, you will not crave to eat meat.

Many of our appetites do not have a natural stopping place.  We have to decide that we are going to be in charge of ourselves.  The Apostle Paul spoke critically, in the 3rd chapter of Philippians, of those "whose god is their belly." People who have lost all impulse control, who never willingly say "no" to any of their appetites..... a spiritual weakness facilitated in modern times by credit cards and Payday loans that allow people to indulge themselves in the present moment what they ultimately cannot afford to have.

Our society rarely questions our appetites and in fact encourages indulgence, excess, hoarding, and greed.  The liquor industry runs ads telling people to drink responsibly but they know that alcoholics purchase four out of five drinks consumed in America.  If it were not for the addicts, most beer and liquor companies would go bankrupt.  Casinos post signs encouraging people who have a problem with gambling to seek help and yet, they know exactly who is in the building, how long they have been there and how much they have lost.... If they were concerned about gambling addicts, they could easily turn them away at the door of the casino but, in fact, their bottom line is entirely dependent on addicts.

I am no prude and I am opposed to censorship in almost all forms, but I know that very many people find that they quickly move from being occasional viewers of porn to being fired for watching porn at work.  WebMD estimates that there are nearly 450 million pornography websites now which is about one for every six people who have access to the internet.  Clearly, this is not just couples trying to spice up their love life.... This is a social addiction that can hardly be seen as anything short of a malignancy.

We have advertisements beamed at us night and day through every form of media.  We are encouraged to buy, consume, indulge and to never think of the consequences to the earth, or how our excesses cause scarcity for others, or even how indulging our appetites can create an obscene and abusive industry on the other side of our consumption in which there are victims without number.

We have to be smarter than the marketplace.  We have to be more decisive than the alcohol industry, the gambling industry, the sex industry, and even the automobile and clothing industry.  We have to decide to live sane lives, balanced between necessity and obscenity.

As Gandhi said, in matters of conscience, you cannot depend on majority opinions.  There is no substitute for critical thinking, for self-examination, and for choosing to live a sober, and meaningful life that does not exploit the poor or the earth nor even the animals that share our earth with us.

Somewhere between only eating salads and indulging in an appetite for killing endanger species there is a sane place where we can all live.

This Must Be Said

August 9, 2015
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.  William Blum

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.  Marian Wright Edelman

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, or steal bread.  Anatole France

As you might gather from the wisdom lessons today, I want to talk about one of the biggest problems, or maybe one of the most significant opportunities, facing our nation at this time.  I want to talk about money, both capitol and income, and its unfair and very unequal distribution.  A topic which is arguably the most important issue facing our nation today and one that was not even mentioned in three hours of presidential candidate debates this week.

And to get to what I want to say, I want to remind you of two important parts of what I suspect was our shared childhood experiences.  And these two images are very far apart.

The first is that popular board-game that was born in the early 1900's and marketed for most of the 20th century by Parker Brothers, called "Monopoly."  In those hot Kentucky summers before anyone had air conditioning and when daytime TV was all soap operas, the kids in my neighborhood would all gather at Mickey Huffman's house because his house had a naturally cool basement.  And we would lie on the cement floor of Mickey's basement and play monopoly for hours.
You all know how the game is played.  Everyone starts with an equal distribution of cash and then you roll the dice and move your game piece around the board.  If you land on a property that no one else had bought, you can buy it if you have enough cash, and if someone else owns it, you have to pay them to rent the spot for a turn.

It usually takes a couple of hours of combining strategy with the roll of the dice, but one player starts to rise and the others start to sink until, one by one, players go broke and have to drop out of the game and one person wins by making everyone else go broke.

Of course, for us, the real point of playing in the first place was so that we could hang out together in a cool place out of the sun.... so the winner would start going off script and loaning money to other players to keep them in the game.  Everyone is happier when everyone is still playing and still has a stake in the game.  Sadly, the real world rarely works this way.

The other image I want to call to mind, and one that might not have the same power for those of you who are much older than I am but I find that there are fewer and fewer people who fall into that category!....I want to ask you to think for a few minutes about the popular TV show, Star Trek.

It was brilliant and sometimes even prophetic for the time in which Gene Roddenberry was writing those scripts. One of the most adamant aspects of Roddenberry's view of the future was that there was no money.  There was no accumulation of wealth and no profit motive to anything that anyone did.  There was no price set on food, drink, clothes, or even living quarters.  Everyone had what everyone needed. There was to be no currency in the futuristic Federation. Roddenberry was able to imagine a lot of things in the 1960's that did later come into existence but a society in which the basic necessities of life are simply provided without any need for currency we have not seen but, if you let yourself think about it, it is not only doable, it is logical to do so.

The concept of accumulated wealth based on a dollar value of property and investments is how the rich stay rich and how the poor stay poor.  Imagining a way of sharing space, food, and resources without currency and without hoarding is crucial to a sane future.

One of the most purchased but least read books over the past two years was the French economist, Thomas Piketty's book on Capital. I am guilty as charged, I bought it and assumed that I had gotten the point in the first twenty pages and left the other 800 for posterity.  The indisputable fact is that we cannot resolve poverty if we allow the wealthy to hoard most of the assets.

It would be like trying to join in on a game of monopoly after your friends had been playing for an hour.  You might get the same starting cash from the bank that everyone else got at the start of the game, but if the property is all owned already, all you can do is fairly quickly fail.  But that's exactly what we do in our economy.  We tell new college graduates from poor families that they have the same chance as everyone else but the truth is, virtually all of the winners in a capitalist economy are the ones who start out with capital.
As Anatole France said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, or steal bread."  The people who have capital are the ones who have the influence to write the laws, they own the banks, they control consumer lending, and, surprise of surprises, they always end up on top of the pile of money.

We think of Great Britain as being more class conscious than the new world nation of the United States, and maybe that was true, but if you are born poor in Great Britain, you have a 30% chance of staying poor for the rest of your life.  In the United States, if you are born in poverty, you have a 42% chance that you will always be poor.  Compare that with a nation that has a socialist economy, like Denmark, and there you have nearly an 80% chance of working your way out of poverty.

In the USA, the system is designed to keep the rich, rich and to keep the poor, poor.  It has not always been this way.  The great American middle class rose up in the years following WWII at a time when the economy was much more balanced with both personal and corporate taxes.

In the years when we were playing monopoly, the highest tax bracket on the wealthiest earners in America was 91% and even with tax deductions and loop holes, the best a wealthy person might hope for was to get that down to about 50%.  In those days, the average difference between an entry-level employee and a CEO was 1 to 50.  Now the rich pay approximately 10 to 15% of their income in taxes and yet CEO pay is 350 times the pay of an entry-level worker.  The NewsLeader this week listed some corporations where the ratio is 80 to one.....this is the stuff of revolution!
It is true that our tax code has become horribly complex but seriously folks, why do you think that is?  Do you honestly believe that fast food workers have lobbied for all of these amendments and complications in the tax code?  Do you see McDonalds employees banding together to demand special consideration for their tax posture?  The tax code is complicated because the powerful wealthy have fought for every form of favoritism imaginable until the system is rigged so that they cannot lose.

When we were young, there was a national passion for what we called the "War on Poverty." But the War on Poverty has become, in many ways, a war on the poor.  We blame the poor for being poor when the system is structured in such a way that they could hardly be anything else.

The middle class is taught to despise the poor and to blame their own hardships on the recipients of public assistance. In Arizona and Florida, governors have proposed administering drug tests to all recipients of food stamps and other forms of public assistance.  In Arizona, after spending millions to test 150,000 people, they found a total of 3 people who tested positive.

There was about the same results in Florida except that in Florida, the drug testing company was owned by the governor.  So Rick Scott makes millions of dollars on a program he initiated while saving the state nothing by humiliating tens of thousands of citizens.  And there was no impeachment, no criminal malfeasance charges, and blue-collar workers still largely believe that the very poor are their enemies.

It reminds me of KKK members who are almost universally very poor, uneducated, and low functioning white people who believe that they are superior to blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Catholics, and the gay community.  When, in fact, poor whites have a lot more in common with poor blacks than they ever did with their white managers and employers.

Conservatives who defend the system that keeps the rich on top of the economic pile, constantly try to get the poor to fight with each other because when the poor stop fighting one another and start to organize there will be a redistribution of wealth and that can happen in one of two ways:

It can happen peacefully through the reintroduction of a fair and justly progressive tax system, or it can happen violently through revolution.

I'm in favor of the peaceful method but as a person spiritually devoted to justice, I'm willing to say to the wealthy, it has to happen, one way or the other.  Peace without justice is just surrender and there is nothing about our faith that would make surrender look like a legitimate approach.

If I may return to the Monopoly game again.... When one person wins, even they have lost because they can't keep moving their piece around the board over and over if they have put everyone who used to pay them rent out of business.  This is what unbridled greed never seems to realize.  I will say more about this next week, but when winning is defined as impoverishing everyone else, then even the rich lose.  If you destroy your customers, you are out of business.

A year ago, when Seattle decided to raise the minimum wage in their city to $15 an hour, the 1% went nearly crazy announcing that this act of economic compassion towards the poor would result in massive layoffs and job losses that would kill their economy.  What has actually happened?  Unemployment has gone down by 25% because people who earn low wages spend every bit of a wage increase that has resulted in a huge boon to their retail economy.

How hard is it to understand that if you impoverish people, they won't spend money, and if you pay them a fair wage, they will spend it?  Only those blinded by an evil degree of greed can believe that they are better off if more people are suffering.

As Marian Edelman said, we do not have a shortage of money in America.  We have a shortage of morality, of decency, and compassion. If the church has any reason to exist, surely it is to increase compassion, inspiring our civilization to be more decent, and to make more moral choices.

What is certainly clear is that if we were hoping for some moral leadership from anyone in the huge field of Republican presidential candidates, that we have to accept that there is no getting blood out of a turnip.

Either you are the light of the world or we need to learn to live in the dark.

Believing What Is True

August 2, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

"There may be a conflict between soft-minded religionists and tough-minded scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective worlds are different and their methods are dissimilar. Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Disney animated version of "The Little Mermaid" came out in 1989.  It so happens that my daughter was also born in that year and so the VHS tape of the children's movie was a part of early, and, tediously, a repetitive part of my life for a few years.

When she was about three years old, while watching Ariel singing with her beautiful voice, Valerie told me, very matter of factly, "That's me." "Oh," I replied, "you are a mermaid?"  "No," she said, "That's me singing, that's my voice."

Of course, my three-year-old daughter had no way of knowing about Jodi Benson who voiced the character of Ariel and many other Disney roles, she just knew that she had always loved that song and he assumed that she could just claim it as her own.

Now, it wasn't true, it wasn't realistic, but it was understandable for a three-year-old.  What is less understandable is that for 500 years, white European descendants have told themselves that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas.  It was not until the last generation that people have begun to challenge the notion that anyone can claim to have discovered a continent that already had 90 million people living on it.
On this, our seventh anniversary of being a liberal, progressive, outpost of a church in the midst of the reddest of red American states where we are surrounded by the Assemblies of God seminary and colleges, a right wing Southern Baptist seminary and colleges, and even a state university with no religious affiliation that often seems to act like a right wing religious college, we have tried to very publicly, even globally, keep offering a progressive religious message.  But we must remember that our message, our perspective, our insights, our scholarship, did not begin with us.

We have lots of people around here who may think that we are all alone, but we are not. It has always been our stated goal to close the gap between the classroom and the pews, to bring the best of religious scholarship into corporate life of the church.  That has been so rare that it may seem to many like we are the first or the only church that does it but we are not.

There were early American progressives:  Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Paine, to name a few. But even some of the religious leaders who would seem to most people to be more mainstream, were really progressives.

I know of no better statement of what we mean when we say "evidence based faith" than this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that we take as our wisdom lesson today.  Fifty years ago, when he was a very young man who had recently graduated from seminary, King spoke to the alleged divide between science and religion saying:


"There may be a conflict between soft-minded religionists and tough-minded scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective worlds are different and their methods are dissimilar. Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary."

Many of us have felt like we have stumbled into this demythologized way of thinking and living as if we were Christopher Columbus setting foot on a previously unknown continent of liberated thinking that allows religion to do what it does best, which is to contemplate meaning and ethics, and let's science and reason do what it does best, investigate, discover, analyze and record.

None of the ancient biblical writers were trying to be deceptive or misleading.  They tried to account for the world in the best way that they could.  They were often wrong about history and science, but they were surprisingly insightful, at times, about people, ethics, about living and loving and forgiving.

You look at a fairly embarrassing passage of scripture, like Genesis 6 and Numbers 13 that refer to the giants, called the Nephilim, who once roamed the earth who were the product of the sons of God having affairs with the daughters of earth.  In Numbers the text says that we are like grasshoppers compared to them.


These texts are obviously echoes of ancient myths that found their way into the Bible but when people in those days happened upon the fossilized bones of a dinosaur when they had no knowledge of any such animal having ever lived on earth, and given how anthropocentric humans always are, they could only assume that these were the bones of giants.  Some ancient cathedrals actually displayed dinosaur bones as relics of the Nephilim, not because they were stupid or because they were trying to be deceptive, but because it was, for them a logical explanation.

What is stupid is to take an uninformed explanation and turn it into a doctrine or a creed and declare that you have to believe that it is true in spite of better evidence and reasoning.

The Great Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, said that there are two ways to be wrong.  One is to believe what is not true and the other is to refuse to believe what is true.  Anyone can be guilty of being mistaken about the facts but when you hold onto a mistaken world view once you have had the facts revealed to you then you are choosing to be stupid and that, men and women, I submit, is a great deal of what is wrong with modern religion.

The absurdities of traditional Christian creeds have been exposed over and over to the point that there really is no excuse for thinking people to keep trying to reinvest themselves in primitive myths.  Robert Ingersoll, a 19th century lawyer, a hundred and twenty years ago, said: The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation.
It is too absurd to seriously discuss and yet so many people seem to be resigned to that mental prison.  Michael Larsen posted a meme on his Face Book page yesterday that show Jesus in a cloudy heaven surrounded by angels and the caption read, "Love your enemies, while I torture mine in hell for all eternity."  How can people not see the inherent lunacy of this?

Many Americans have become so disgusted and so disillusioned with how backward the church is, how much science denying, other worldly mumbo-jumbo it dispenses, that they have given up on the church and looked outside of our own culture for some guidance.

We are fortunate that the Dalai Lama has become so proficient in English that he has become a real source of light to those who will not hear reason from Christian scholars.  The Dalai Lama has said: This is my simple religion.  There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

In our church, we do not owe any fealty to any ancient books or to institutional constructs that define god or faith narrowly or absurdly.  We are on a path of discovery, not unmoored from our Christian heritage in the instructive teachings of Jesus, the prophets and the saints, but not obliged to parrot their views of science, history, or even of morality and sexuality.

We have willingly given up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. In seven years time we have moved from being a liberal, progressive, Christian church for a handful of church alumni association members in Springfield into being a global church, affirming the faith traditions of all of the world's religions while being primarily focused on a fact based approach to spirituality that addresses the real and profound needs of people and of the earth itself.

I love the church we have become and I look forward to seeing who we will be in another year, or two, or three.  I hope that there will be more members of our tribe and that we will find sympathetic faith communities springing up all over the world.

We didn't invent progressive faith but we are trying to make it look good.

Spirituality, Sexuality, Propagation and Pleasure

Proper 12   July 26, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

2 Samuel 11:1-5                    
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. 2It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. 3David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, "This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." 4So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. 5The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, "I am pregnant."

This time of year our evenings are often filled with the nearly deafening sound of the mating calls of the male cicadas. It won't last long though.  If you will look around when you take a walk anywhere in the Ozarks you will see the remains of these loud summertime lovers.

The cicada is born as a worm, usually from an egg sac carefully placed in a cut in the bark of a tree by a female cicada, but when they are born they drop to the ground and dig down a foot or so and there they live in the damp darkness of the earth, feeding off of the fluids of tree roots.

And there they will live, sometimes for decades.... Year after year, never seeing sunlight nor gazing on a blue sky.  But after 13 or 17 years, when the temperature of the soil is just right, these worms will crawl up out of the ground and climb up on the tree where they have fed for years and there they are transformed..... one of the most amazing transformations in nature.

What we are hearing these days is the Kansan brood IV cicada that was born in 1998.

In a matter of days after crawling out of the ground, they will grow legs, eyes, and even amazing wings.... And these former worms will take to the air and burst into lusty song in the warm summer days and mate with partners in their gathering trees....for a week or two, and then they die.
I see the exhausted remains of these large bugs on the sidewalk near my home and I want to ask, "Well, Romeo, was it worth it?"

If you ever wonder why you see box turtles out in the road during the spring and summer and no other times, it is much the same.  They are risking their lives, slowly walking out in traffic, in search of love....well, at least in search of sex.

There are no evangelical worms among the roots of trees warning the congregation against the perils of growing wings and flying, which can lead only to very noisy sex and nearly immediate death.  There are no box turtle mothers lecturing their sons, "You are the slowest moving four-footed animal on earth, you must never venture out onto the pavement, ever!"

There is no moral deliberation to sex in most of nature.  The reproductive lives of insects, fish, mammals, and reptiles evolved in ways that best served the survival of their species.... Though you have to admit that the whole thing about growing a new body with legs and wings is outrageously elaborate, it still embodies no will, decision-making, or morality.  It just is.

Morality is a human invention and a relatively recent one at that....so recent, in fact, that it does not yet appear to have infected the entire population.

Sexual behavior is instinctive in all living things.  In some, to serve the evolutionary survival of the species, things that we would call family, or herd, or tribe, or flock, emerged, even monogamy.

And, even in nature, though it is instinctive, it is not always about propagation.  Marine scientists insist that dolphins have sex for fun. And as anyone who has spent much time on the farm knows, homosexuality is not found only in humans.  Clearly, sexual contact is a part of bonding and relationship building that is not always about propagation.

The difference between animals and humans is that we have become self-aware and developed the ability to communicate through speech which has led to the building of civilizations and things like houses, cars, farms, and boats which eventually meant that what once came naturally to us became closely defined by society and laws, replete with lawyers, tabloids, and the whole industry of pornography, and its cousins in the fields of fashion and cosmetics.

I have done a lot of relief work in rural Nicaragua and for many years I served on the board of the Rainbow Network with other very good and well-intended people who wanted to help the poor in those impoverished jungle villages.  We had one couple from Ohio on our board who were very adamant that, as a part of our educational mission, that we had to include abstinence education.

Now, Nicaragua, situated very close to the equator, has 12 hour days and 12 hour nights all year long.
In the villages where we worked, there are no electric lights.  There is no TV, radio, or movies.  They don't have musical instruments and most families can't even afford candles.  And this very Puritanical couple wanted us to teach our adolescent friends in these villages not to have sex.

What I tried to say to them, quite unsuccessfully, I might add, is that human civilization with all of its rules, morality, and ethical ideas, is less than ten thousand years old.  Human evolution with all of its reproductive and sexual impulses is more than two million years old.  In the dark nights of the Nicaraguan jungle, in any clash between civilization and its rules and evolution with its instinctive drives, my money is on evolution.

But that is not to say that everywhere you look in Matagalpa you see pregnant teenagers or that there are mothers who do not know who the fathers of their babies are.  It is not that civilization and its scruples do not have some management influence on instinct, I'm just saying, in matters of sexual relationships, evolution has the upper hand.

What many of my religious peers seem to resist acknowledging is that there is no distinct and forever religious ideal for sexual mores.  The 20th century western ideal of a man and a woman being faithfully married to one another for life has not only been fairly rare in its realization, it is a late comer on the stage of human civilization.

For most of Biblical history, having lots of wives was viewed as a sign of God's blessing on a man.  Men, in antiquity, were encouraged to grow the size of their tribe and so even sexual slavery was not only accepted in their culture, it was encouraged.

It was not until their lands were faced with over crowding and limited resources that the rules began to change to favor the needs of the civilization.

Modern critics of Islam have accused the Prophet with having been a pedophile because one of his wives, Aisha, was only six years old when Muhammad married her and nine years old when he consummated the marriage. And while anyone who did such a thing in the modern era would absolutely be considered to be a pedophile, and though there were those even in Muhammad's time who objected to this practice, it was not uncommon.  Muslims remember Muhammad as the most perfect human who ever lived, however, if he had sex with a nine year old in our era, we would have locked him away in prison and never let him out.

Our wisdom lesson today comes from the well known account of King David's affair with Bathsheba.  David was another prominent religious figure who was popularly considered to be a "man after God's own heart." He had multiple wives, none of whom had any personal choice in the matter and many of whom were a part of the spoils of military conquest and yet even in that barbaric context, even the King was not allowed to have another man's wife.

There was tremendous shame and guilt associated with this affair, so much so that there was even a murder orchestrated to cover up for it.  Politics and sexual scandals seem to always be with us.
Very often, these scandals reveal not only the hypocrisy of an individual public figure but also the hypocrisy of social norms and expectations.

Following the advent of the creation of effective birth control and the legalization of abortion, we began to hear people trying to carve out a modern ethic for sex that said that anything that happens between two consenting adults is no one else's business.

That is a simple and straightforward proposition that removes cultural prejudices against same-sex relationships, inter-racial and inter-religious relationships, but it simultaneously opens the door to debate what amounts to consent.

We all agree that children cannot meaningfully give consent and so we define adult life as beginning at age 18 and for years college professors were among the most predatory people in the world, regularly using their status to seduce the young adults who populated their classes.  It wasn't until the 1980's that universities begin to lay down the law about ethical conduct even among what otherwise might have been seen as a consenting relationship.

But we would not be inclined to charge two 16 year olds with any crime for engaging in adolescent sex but we might if one was 16 and the other was 20. And, of course, we have the remarkable unfolding account of Bill Cosby's use of drugs in a career long casting couch practice that was ignored by his peers for 30 years and now that it is revealed, the formerly beloved comedian seems to be genuinely confused by society's condemnation.
But Cosby is not alone in this.  One of my favorite authors, the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, was notorious for having sex with some of his clients. His book, The Road Less Traveled, one of the all time best selling books in the 20th century, even casually mentions the fact that he sometimes had sex with clients and that phrase was hardly noticed for twenty years. By the end of the 20th century, this would have given him a jail cell right next to Muhammad but at the time it didn't even provoke his wife, Lilly, to divorce him.

But there are still more fine points to what is considered to be legitimate consent.  In the past couple of years, the book Fifty Shades of Gray, seems to have raised the question, is it rape if the perpetrator is really really rich?  And, indeed, there seems to be no problem in finding any number of women who are willing to be paraded in a sexual exploitation obsenity called, "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?"

There are countries that have legalized prostitution and in doing so they appear to have reduced the instances of rape and sexually transmitted diseases and yet, thinking people are still forced to wonder how often a woman actually enters this trade willingly.  Most are either victims of molestation or they have been trafficked, tricked, or coerced into the sex trade.

And no matter how much we would want to defend free speech and oppose censorship, you cannot escape the awareness that most women who work in the pornography trade did not end up there because that was their best and easiest way to make a living.
For cicadas and box turtles, there is not much conversation around morality.  For humans, there is no end to discussion, redefining, and trying to work our way towards equality and justice in this matter of both the greatest personal privacy and the greatest potential for abuse, psychological damage, and exploitation.

I hope that the Catholic Church has learned that its practice of celibacy is not only unnatural but it is inevitably going to lead to perversion and abuse.  I hope that both right wing politicians and evangelical religious leaders can look to their own ranks to see how absurd their abstinence only priorities are a piece of the same cloth as the Catholic Church's institutional insanity regarding healthy relationships.

Universities that were remarkably late to the table in realizing that there can be no meaningful consent between a professor and a student are finally also realizing that even among the student population, that there can be no meaningful consent between students if one of them is intoxicated or high, whether they ingested those intoxicating substances knowingly or unknowingly.  Neither silence nor acquiescence is tantamount to consent.

So, what can a church that is married both to concepts of individual freedom and social responsibility say about sex in the 21st century?

There is no Bible passage nor is there a technical medical definition that will entirely suffice.  In the end, I can only tell you what I believe and you are not only free to disagree you are encouraged to work this out for yourselves and I invite your reasoned responses:

1)    Sex between consenting adults should be considered to be a private and entirely personal matter free from the judgment of either the church or your neighbors.  Still, consent is a matter of vital importance and should not be polluted with power or coercion of any sort. Don't listen to gossip, don't start or repeat gossip, and don't try to invade anyone else's private lives to do them harm or to satisfy your own curiosity. 

2)    Sex should be approached with mutual respect and with an informed awareness that it is virtually never just recreational.  It always means something and has the potential to do one or both persons involved great personal harm, so it should never be entered into only to meet your own personal desires but should always be a mutually beneficial relationship. 

3)    Divorce is neither evil nor is it to be applauded.  Many people are an excellent match for one another at one stage of life and the relationship can become toxic due to no fault of either party and society is not well served by trying to force people to stay in unhealthy unions.  However, there is a great deal to praise in marriages that last for a lifetime, solving their problems, growing together, and fostering the kind of communication that rises above the issues that prove to be fatal in other unions.  We should not judge those who choose to part company but we should celebrate those who show the rest of us how two thoughtful people can succeed where so many of us have failed.  Never envy your single friends.  Trust me, it was not our first choice. 

4)    And finally, I would like to encourage you to see your sexuality, not as a source of shame or guilt but as a gift... something that should be fun and playful, full of good humor and happy memories.  It does not only give the gift of children to your family but it can be a part of the cement of trust, vulnerability, affection, and intimacy that binds two people to one another.

And finally, for those of you who choose to believe that sexual intimacy should be pursued without conscience or concern for consequences, I can only suggest this... try to grow a pair of wings and fly but don't expect it to end well.

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.