What Do We Mean When We Say "God"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB0w8o5rVHs

Epiphany 4  January 31, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield

Roger Ray, pastor    “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘God’?”

1 Corinthians 13:1-13              

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ²And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹²For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

This summer we’re bringing two guest speakers from England for our annual conference, The Rev. John Churcher, and The Rev. Mo Wills. Together, we are going to try to take an in-depth look at the historical evolution of what people have meant when we say “God.” We are using the nearly encyclopedic work of Karen Armstrong’s History of God in our preparations but the final point is not to just look at what others have meant in the past but to try to find a meaningful and clear way to articulate what we, in the progressive movement, mean when we say “God.”

Those of you watching us on-line, let me tell you that the registration fee for our event here on August 5-7 is nominal. The three of us will give an abbreviated presentation on Monday evening, August 8, at the Immanuel United Church of Christ in Ferguson, MO, and then we travel to Columbia, SC where we will present the entire weekend conference again at the Unitarian Universalist Church on August 12-14.

I wrote a chapter in my 2014 book, Progressive Faith and Practice, on this topic but I have been repeatedly made aware that my brief chapter doesn’t really do more than open a theological door without providing any satisfactory conclusions.

Shortly after we announced that this conference was going to happen, our good friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, started publishing a series of essays in which he is publically grappling with exactly the same topic.  I called and asked him if this was material he was planning to use in the conference we are doing together in Sarasota, FL in a couple of weeks and he said, “no,” that this is material he is developing to use for his 2017 lecture tour.

I can’t believe that an 85-year-old “retired” bishop is already writing material for his 2017 lecture tour but all of us who are much younger and much less productive than Bishop Spong is should take a moment to just ponder that indicting fact. So, I’m trying to work out my August material here in January and that’s about as far ahead as I ever even tried to prepare!

I want to try something different today and begin with my conclusion. That way we all know where we are headed from the beginning.  I will even give it to you in a Bible verse, I John 4:8 “…God is love.” And for good measure, because scripture is not enough for a lot of us, let me quote the Great Dane himself, Soren Kierkegaard:  "This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love."

We have often used the Ziggy Marley song in our services here that announces, “Love is My Religion,” and the Beatles’ hit, “All You Need is Love.” So, that’s my premise, my conclusion, my ultimate point, and you might think, “Why take a weekend to say that?” but the fact that poets, musicians, philosophers, and saints have been saying this for thousands of years makes it inescapable that understanding what this means is evidently darn near impossible.

Of course, much of the problem resides in the fact that the word “love” is so over-worked. We say that we love Adel’s new cd, I love sushi, I love scuba diving, and often even when we say to another person, “I love you,” we say it with such a large “I” and such a small “you” that it cannot always be seen as anything remotely holy.

In saying that “God is love,” we are, or at least most of us are, starting to remove our understanding of God from the more primitive view of God as a person, or three persons, or lots of persons.  Most of traditional religion, has at least been expressed in terms of supernatural theism.

When I was a young grad student, there was a huge battle raging in seminaries about referring to God as “Father” or any male pronoun. Masculine references had been the rule but when you think about what makes a person either male or female, it comes down to body parts and that conversation is a real show stopper. No one that I have ever known wanted to defend the idea of God having a body or being in any particular place in the way that the ancients believed that their gods looked like humans and lived on mountain tops or in kingdoms in the clouds above the earth.

But even when you let go of believing in an imaginary friend who lives in the clouds, it is still difficult to give up on a notion of god as a person.  A person who might favor the Broncos over the Panthers, or the armies of the USA over the armies of Isis. You would not get trapped in a theological argument over whether God prefers blue over green, or Chinese food over Mexican food, but it is harder to give up on the idea that God is somehow still a causative agent in the world.

Much has been made over the implied theology that we see in scifi moves, especially in Star Wars where people talk about the force. In the very first movie, Obi Wan Kenobi explains to Luke, “the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”  There is a dualism in the dark and light sides of the Force in Star Wars… a good and an evil side….Nerds then burn the midnight oil arguing whether George Lukas was influenced by Zoroastrianism, Taoism, or Buddhism.

It is an interesting thought but, of course, Lucas doesn’t remain consistent with whatever religious influences he may have tried to clone into his movies. The Force quickly becomes little more than the energy drink between good and evil guys fighting with light sabers and whatever meaningful and helpful non-theistic conception of God there might have been becomes silly.

But I don’t fault Lucas for that. This is not an easy concept to talk about meaningfully.  The words “force” or “energy” may have roles to play in how we talk about God as love and not as a person who will place bets on the Super Bowl.

In my chapter in Progressive Faith and Practice in which I talk about this, I employ a phrase that I must come back to now. Anytime you try to get to specific in talking about who or what God is, you language starts to become like trying to nail smoke to the wall. As much as it pains those of us who want to express everything in concrete language, the biggest part of this issue is shrouded in mystery.

Albert Einstein is often referred to as having been an atheist but he would not have described himself in that way. It is just that what he did believe was so nuanced, so obscure, that it sounded to traditional Christians like atheism.  He said:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranges and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.

Einstein concludes:

There remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

This the point where Buddhist monks start to sound like astrophysicists and scientists start to sound like religious mystics. Both of them insist that at the core of all existence is the inescapable truth that we are all connected.  We are all connected to one another biologically, to the earth itself chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically.

That mystery, that connection, that force, or energy, we sometimes sense as awe, the great Thou that seems to meet us in our deepest core… all of the world’s religions have tried to describe this, to codify it, to teach it through holy writ, rituals, hymns, art, and architecture and never quite get it right.

Almost in exhaustion, prophets, saints, sages, scientists, and philosophers finally boil it down to just this. . . love. It is my loving others that we encounter the Divine, that is our true worship, our real sacrament, the only scripture that we ever need. 

The Dalai Lama said “Our only purpose in life is to love one another.... and if you cannot do that, try not to hurt anyone.” Which is, in a way, to acknowledge that there is a dark side of the force… there is an opposite to loving… and the Zoroastrians may not have been entirely wrong is saying that the two sides of the force are of approximately equal strength.

There is the love that brings us together, that creates not only marriage, but friendship, and community, and civilization. And there is the darkness of narcissism, greed, self-righteousness that divides us, that pulls us apart, that defeats civilization, destroys the peace, alienates lovers and makes community impossible.

Far too often, the religious impulses that should help us to find a spiritual path into a loving connection with others has become the dark and dividing force that makes real spirituality nearly impossible. Bishop Spong has called for a new reformation, one that allows us to strip away the magic and superstition to reveal a kind of spirituality that is rooted in reality and not in myth and imagination. And I think that we are seeing it happen in important ways.

In our never ending Presidential campaign, we see nearly every candidate trying to polish their religious bona-fides… Donald Trump was seen in a Presbyterian Church and carries a family bible to events in Iowa and still doesn’t know how to say the names of the books of the New Testament and clearly is a stranger to the inside of a church. Attack ads have called out other candidates for pretending to be right wing evangelicals even though they neither attend nor support the churches they claim.

But for the first time in modern memory, we have a political candidate this year who claims no affiliation with organized religion. Now, please forgive me, I don’t want this to sound like a stump speech because I do personally like Bernie Sanders a lot but perfectly sane, intelligent, and well-meaning people support other candidates….or maybe, an other candidate.

I had been saying that if Bernie were elected that he would be America’s first Jewish president but when he has recently been pressed on this issue, even though he grew up Jewish, he was bar mitzvahed and went to Hebrew school, and even lived for a brief time in a Kibbutz in Israel, but now he says that he is not actively involved in any organized religion.

He said, “I think everyone believes in God in their own ways,” he continued... “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”…which is precisely what we have been trying to say.

The unique thing, for me, is that a popular presidential candidate can publically say that he doesn’t practice any organized religion and the country doesn’t come to a sudden halt in shock. What he is saying is not offensive to us, it is not foreign to our ears and, truth be told, it is probably what most of the candidates and public figures actually believe… the only difference is that he was willing to say it.

The façade of false ancient religions is being drawn away from our society. The echoes of ancient religious teachings, married to the mystery and wonder of modern science lead us, not to become atheists, but simply to acknowledge that while we believe in God all we really know about God is our experience of awe and of love and the only path to drawing nearer to God is by getting better at loving one another. This is both liberating and immensely challenging…once freed from the constraints of ancient creeds and religious manipulation, our first impulse is not always to draw one another closer in love but to flee into much more narcissistic endeavors. 

We still have a lot of work to do if we want to grow spiritually and I hope we do… I know that I do and I hope that I am not alone.  I may have been wrong about a lot of things through the years but I am not wrong about this:  God is love and the only way to know God is through loving one another.

Can Progressives form a United Community?

https://youtu.be/_4Ie2v5mk1g

Epiphany 3   January 24, 2016    Community Christian Church

Roger Ray, pastor    “Can Progressives Form a United Community?”

 1 Corinthians 12:12-26             

¹²For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.¹⁴Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. ¹⁵If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁶And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁷If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? ¹⁸But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. ¹⁹If all were a single member, where would the body be? ²⁰As it is, there are many members, yet one body. ²¹The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” ²²On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,²³and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; ²⁴whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, ²⁵that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. ²⁶If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.                      

If you go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, if you turn to the right as you go in, you come first to their collection of Egyptian art and artifacts. With all of the fabulous reliefs, sarcophagi, and statues, it would be easy to miss but there is a passageway there that contains displays of hundreds of pottery fragments that we call “epigraphal” finds. . . that is, they pottery shards have writing on them.

In the ancient world, most household pottery was sun baked and as such it was extremely brittle, so everyone had plenty of broken pieces of pottery around. Paper was expensive, broken pottery had no value, so those pottery shards became the scrap paper of the ancient world.

It was also common practice to cover the floor of your homes with pottery shards and then cover that with a bit of sand to make a hard floor that didn’t get muddy when it was wet. So, many archaeological sites are rich with finds of these little pieces of broken pottery that have writing on them.

Most of them are no more than the ancient equivalent of “remember to pick up milk and eggs at the store,” but others give insights into the daily lives and conversations of ancient civilizations.

This particular collection of pottery shards at the Met were of particular interest to me because they were written in Greek and were from the Alexandrian area of Egypt. They were notes written by the first of Christian monastics, a group of people we mistakenly call “The Desert Fathers,” which is a rather unfair moniker for the nuns who also lived lives of great hardship and isolation in the desert.

But the sayings of these desert monastics formed the original inspiration for my doctoral research and they are featured prominently in my dissertation. I had read all of the collections of their wisdom sayings and I had an image of these ancient saints who seemed so brave, so disciplined, so Christ-like in their loving and sacrificial lives.

These notes, however, their unpublished thoughts, told another story. These amazing people did not seem to get along with one another very well. These pottery shards which were the 4^th century equivalent of e-mail and Face Book posts revealed harsh judgments, anger, gossip, broken relationships, and even jealousy, as if you could compete for who was the most poor, silent, and prayerful monk living in a shack in the desert.

They, like we, had a persona that they thoughtfully presented to the world; the things they had learned through years of disciplined isolation, silence, self-denial, and prayer. But, sadly, they, like we, had a less guarded, less thoughtful, and distinctly less kind side of them as well.

It is no wonder then that the major theme of all of Paul’s letters collected in our New Testament is a concern with preserving community. And the theme continues in the letters of John and Peter, in Hebrews, and in the later letters of Clement and the Didache.

Paul’s illustration of saying that members of the church were like members of a body… the parts are different in appearance, different in talents or usefulness, but none of them should be seen as being easily disposable. You can survive without your eyes but wouldn’t you rather not?

Apparently you can even survive with less than half of a brain but I am resolved not to talk about political candidates today.

But in the Alexandrian desert of the 4^th century, in the persecuted church of the first century, getting along with one another was often a matter of life or death. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that their very lives depended upon their ability to maintain healthy community relationships and yet they seemed to fail miserably at it, enough to fill up the pages of both scripture and early church preaching.

Now, in the modern era, such connections have become remarkably disposable. Modern transportation and homes makes it so that we often don’t even know our neighbors. We are not tied to a plot of land, a tiny village, or blood kin. There are over 300 churches in Springfield, MO. There is no obligation in our society to be a part of a church but if you want to, you could change churches once a month for the rest of your life and you might never run out. There is nothing urgent, or irreplaceably crucial about staying in a particular dinner club, bowling league, bridge club, golf course, or church. And most of us have more than one sibling, parent, or child that we no longer talk to.

We are not as dependent upon one another as we were in past generations and, frankly, social media has allowed us to know one another a lot better than we used to.  I have gone to church all of my life and have been a pastor for 37 years and I can tell you, 20 years ago, I could not have told you with a high degree of accuracy, which of my church members were Democrats and which were Republicans. I wasn’t treated to daily pictures, quotes, shared articles and videos, that betrayed people’s personal opinions quite so well.

It is no secret why most pastors almost never say anything publicly about any current events or anything in their own lives. Sermons in churches across our country are full of sports illustrations, quotes from the funny pages, and long narratives about ancient texts and the nuances of their interpretation.

What do you learn in catechism or church membership classes?  You learn about beliefs but not about ethics.

You learn a series of truth claims about God, heaven, hell, scriptures, sacraments, doctrines, and dogma, not one line of which has even a shred of evidence to prove that any of it is true and clearly, none of has anything to do with anything that any of us ever do. They still have difficulty remaining popular and holding their congregations together but I promise you, if you actually try to prophetically speak truth to power, your circle of friends gets very small.

This is especially true among liberal intellectuals.  People who are used to being the boss at the office, the professor in the classroom, the generally “smartest person in the room” are not willing to be easily organized into a community. We often wear our feelings on our sleeves and demand nearly 100% agreement on all topics out of those with whom we are willing to share confined space, even if it is only for an hour a week.

I could fill a book with stories about inane church conflicts and dramatic exits from the community…. And, in fact, it is more than a little likely that I will write that book, but it will almost certainly be from whatever retirement hiding place I end up in.

But let’s let go of church community for a moment and let’s think about our modern hypercritical selves in an entirely different context.  A British Travel agency recently shared some of the customer satisfaction responses they received from their clients after a beach vacation:

2. "My fiancée and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."

4. "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price."

5. "The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room."

8. "No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared."

10. "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."

12. "It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair."

16. "We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning."

18. "I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes."

19. "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."

I’m not saying that all of our conflicts are quite this silly but a lot of them are. And the ones that are not, the matters of real substance, are exactly where we need to put down our pottery shards, stop libeling one another and figure out how to solve the problem.  As Plato said through the character of his teach, Socrates: When the debate is won, slander becomes the tool of the loser.

In philosophy, it is called an ad hominem fallacy. That is, when you cannot win against the facts, try to destroy the character or credibility of your opponent. Paul compared this to cannibalism…. It is like devouring the flesh of someone you had once claimed to love.

As Dr. Eric Berne so famously said a half a century ago in Games People Play, the only way to stop this kind of game is to just stop playing the game. Just stop it.

As our society continues to become more partisan, more divided by both ideology and class, as we become comfortable with disposing of friends and associations that have inconvenienced or somehow failed to mention the mosquitoes of human interaction, the more the world needs for progressive churches to role model healthy community… known not just for tolerance but for love, no so much out of unanimity of belief as by decisive acceptance of differences. And not just for being well informed and capable critical thinkers but also for being generously forgiving and intent upon reconciliation.

If we can do that, we have a real mission in the 21^st century. If we can’t do that, then, well, we have become a part of the problem haven’t we?

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When the Wine Never Fails

Epiphany 2    January 17, 2016
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

John 2:1-11                      
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." 4And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." 5His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." 6Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim. 8He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. 9When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom 10and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." 11Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

I spent a few days in Florida back in August to help the Unitarian Church where Bishop Spong and I will hold a conference next month to get their planning kick started. Some members of the committee were trying to figure out why a guy who is not a Unitarian was being brought in to organize them and to conduct an educational event for them.

One fairly skeptical gentleman asked, "Why, if you are a progressive pastor, do you still call your church a 'Christian' church and why do you still include communion in your services?'" I don't typically like to answer a question with a question but in this case, it seemed to fit.

I asked him, "Why do you call your church a Unitarian Universalist church when 'Unitarian' means that you don't believe in the Trinity when in fact, you no longer have a formal doctrine of the nature of God at all, and 'Universalist' means that you believe that everyone goes to heaven and you no longer believe that heaven exists?"

The name "Unitarian Universalist" no longer accurately describes what that denomination really stands for but the name has been around for generations and there is not presently a better option that is so compelling as to make them want to change. The same is more or less true of us. We started our church eight years ago and though we had some Jewish, Buddhist, and atheist participants, for the most part, we were a band of former Protestants and Catholics and we named ourselves based upon the preponderance of our experience.

Though our Sunday morning services have continued to evolve, we started out at pretty much the same point where we were when we first left traditional Christian churches. We have never wiped the slate clean but we're not making any firm promises about what we will call ourselves or how we will conduct our services five years from now, but realistically, we are a product of our culture and the influences we have chosen to help shape our present and our future.

This is how religion, language, politics, music, and art all work. As Carl Sagan is famous for saying, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you have to create an entire universe. The truth is that we all work with the ingredients that we have at hand.

So, that being said, today we have heard read the very familiar story from the gospel of John in which Jesus turns a whole lot of water into more wine than any wedding party could possibly consume... literally turning a simple wedding feast into more of a Mardi Gras celebration.

What do we make of this story? Let me get the most obvious thing out of the way immediately:  It didn't happen. John is not the least bit interested in literal history and is not concerned about the fact that he is making up an event whole cloth. He is creating this narrative for theological reasons, not for historical purposes.

And here you may have to trust me a bit, at least until you have time to go and research it for yourself... John is writing after the other three gospels in the New Testament have become fairly well known. He borrows from the previous works when it suits his purposes and he very liberally altars, corrects, or enhances the previous works to guide the evolution of the young Christian movement in the west in the early part of the second century.

You can't really claim that any of the gospels are firmly rooted in Palestine but they do deal a bit more closely with the Jewish elements of the faith of Jesus and his disciples. John is written at a greater distance, probably in Rome, and with greater disdain for all things Jewish.

Though John has shares many parts of the gospel narrative with the other three, one of the important differences is that there is no Last Supper scene in John.  There is no clear precedent for communion.

It is an odd thing, especially when you consider the fact that Paul, the first of the Christian writers, appears to have almost no interest in anything that Jesus said or did beyond his death and resurrection, but he makes a big exception for communion. He stops cold in his first letter to the church in Corinth to describe what he believed was the historical event of the Last Supper to make certain that they were doing communion the right way.... You know, his way.... I totally get that.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke follow Paul's narrative to the "t" only pausing to embellish the story along the way. But John doesn't mention it at all. Is that because he wanted to root the practice out of the evolving church?

Most scholars don't think that was his goal. In fact, in some ways, he raises the ante a bit with a long priestly prayer and he connects it to a miraculous feeding in which he tells the crowds that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. . . . sending the Catholic church cascading down a theological wormhole for 2000 years.

In a more subtle way, this account of turning water into wine is also a kind of communion story. Again, every culture, every movement, every author uses the images and words that are at hand. The first gospel writers used familiar Jewish imagery to interpret the significance of Jesus's sacrifice and so they cast him as the lamb sacrificed at Passover, changing the Passover itself from an annual Jewish observance into a weekly Christian observance.

John borrowed from the more familiar Greek and Roman image of the god of wine, Bacchus, whose temple featured a little priestly slight of hand in which gathered worshippers watched the priests fill a large vat with water. They enclosed the vat over night behind locked doors and the next morning, the doors were opened and the vat was full of wine.  The laity were never to know about the series of tubes that drained the water over night and the tiny seep holes that allowed wine to drip in to take its place.

But John grabs the miracle from Roman tradition and suggests it into the gospel account. Wine might be a year round pleasure for the rich but for the poor it was more of a luxury most of the year.... But not at the time of the Bacchanal Festival at harvest time. When the grapes were gathered and the process of making wine was in full swing, everyone got a taste.

John doesn't call the turning of water into wine a "miracle," but rather he calls it a "sign." If it is a sign, what, exactly, is it a sign of? And that is the crux of the matter... that's why John includes it in the narrative at all.

Most of the time, the poor deal with scarcity. John takes the wine from the communion table, turns it into jars holding hundreds of gallons of wine and tells everyone, this is the sign of the coming Kingdom.... When there is no difference between the rich and poor, when everyone gets their fill.

Several years ago I took a team of church members down to Ecuador to a tiny, remote village in the mountains called Cumbas Conde. We had paid for the building materials and were helping to build a community center where the people would be able to bath, wash their clothes, and have rooms where they could safely store grain. When I was raising money for it in the United States we called it a Sunday School building because storing grain and washing clothes doesn't turn on many lights in big traditional churches.... I will assume that I am forgiven for any mild deception involved in that exchange.

Agriculture in the high Andes doesn't make anyone either fat or rich.

The people there needed all of the help they could get to make their largely bean and grain diet keep them alive. At the end of our week's work, the villagers wanted to have a big festival with us but there were not many chairs in the village and even fewer plates and forks.

So, they seated me and my team in the middle of their church with what chairs and tables they had, and the villagers all sat or stooped down on the floor around us.  In front of us was a huge platter of fried chicken, probably every chicken that had been running around their sparse village that morning. There was rice, beans, and corn, and tortillas and cups of Kool-Aid.

And, we were hungry since not many of us had put in a full week of manual labor in a long time.  But as we filled our plates and started to eat, we noticed that the villagers, if they were eating at all, were eating rice and beans out of their shirt-tails and off of leaves. Once we realized that the chicken was only for the North Americans, none of us could eat anymore.

It was a full 30 minutes before we could convince them to share the chicken with their families. They were so accustomed to giving the best food to white people and only eating what was left that it was nearly impossible to persuade them to do otherwise. If only I had known what they planned to do, I would have shown up that day with so many chickens that they would still be picking the feathers out of their hair but we didn't know.  We had given them a small building that, given our resources, cost us very very little. They gave us their source of chickens and protein that they would take months to replace. It was one of the saddest days of my life.

Artistically, symbolically, in a literary way, John put in the starting of his gospel a vision of a kind of communion that breaks down the walls between the hoarders and the hungry, between the powerful and the weak, between the those who live in abundance and those who daily have to try to survive scarcity.

So, if I still think of myself as Christian, if I still stand at the communion table softly saying to each person in line, "the bread of life," it is because these are the images, this is the language of the church where I discovered a faith that makes me long for justice, that makes me hope for a day when everyone has an equal place at the table, that makes me have faith in the ability of people to change to make the world a more loving and fair place.

So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The hardest connection to make

January 10, 2016
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
― Albert Einstein 

The word "intifada" is an Arabic word that means to "tremble" or "shake." In the years leading up to the first Intifada in Palestine, I was a graduate student taking a course in Biblical archaeology. I joined with a group of other students and pastors to take a tour of historical and archaeologically important sites in Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel.  I was a student of ancient Middle Eastern history but my awareness of current events was stunningly shallow.

I wasn't alone in that naiveté, several of us were unprepared to deal with the aggressive searches and interrogations of heavily armed Israeli soldiers, or the sometimes threatening, virtual theft by some of the peddlers and shop owners. It seemed like four or five times a day, someone was standing in front of you just itching for a fight or at least a loud confrontation.

In one old city shop in Jerusalem, I objected to a floor to ceiling poster of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi flags draped around the walls and I was immediately surrounded by a dozen angry vendors yelling at me about why the then American President, Ronald Reagan, was much worse than Hitler.
I was rescued by a small group of Israeli soldiers who game me a quick lesson in local current events.... "Intifada" pretty well described my trembling reaction to the whole event.

The leader of our little band of students and tourists gathered us up in the hotel lobby for a sermon. He said:

If you squeeze a lemon, you get lemon juice because that is what is inside of a lemon.
If you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice because that is what is inside of an orange.
When you are squeezed, when you are put in a difficult situation, what comes out of you?  Anger? Impatience?  Hostility? Or is it love, understanding, empathy?

The easy days don't reveal much about us. You find out what is in you when you are scared, when you are under pressure, when the world is squeezing you.

Our good friend, I would say the "patron saint" of our church except that he is neither dead nor Catholic so I guess he doesn't get to be a patron saint, but the biblical scholar and author, Bishop John Shelby Spong, has been a huge inspiration and influence on the founding and shape of this church.

In a series of recent essays, Bishop Spong has been saying that he is convinced that the church is now in need of a radical reformation on the scale of the 16th century Reformation that was started by Martin Luther.
This is not a huge departure from what Bishop Spong has been saying for a generation through his books, Why Christianity Must Change or Die and A New Christianity for a New World, but as he approaches his 85th birthday, the good Bishop is not pulling any punches.

A reformation of the sort that Luther started is not merely a shift in creeds or beliefs. It knocks the underpinnings out from under nations, schools, cultures, and marketplaces.  Prior to the Reformation in the 16th century, international authority rested with the church, largely in the person of the Pope.  Kings and rulers had to contend with church authority in almost every aspect of life.

The Protestant Reformation removed authority from the Pope and the centralized church and gave it to individuals. Though princes and kings snatched up a lot of that authority, the ideological move was from an authority shift from the Pope to the Bible, generally called "the word of God."

Of course, we all know that the Bible is interpreted in millions of ways to serve the prejudices of the person holding it but what Bishop Spong is so clearly articulating is the fact that modern Biblical scholarship in combination with modern science has left the claim that the Bible is the word of God standing naked on the street corner, revealed for being the fraud it always has been.

The notion that a supernatural theistic God wrote a singular book that is to remain as an ultimate authority over human life for all of time is patently absurd. So ridiculous, it is embarrassing that virtually all of us fell for it for a huge portion of our lives.

Because it was the teaching of the church, Catholic mothers and fathers rejected their own children because they were gay. Because it was believed to be the teaching of the Bible, Protestant fathers and mothers rejected their own children because they were gay. Catholics and Protestants wasted their lives living miserably in toxic marriages because the church or the Bible demanded that they make a mistake they may have made as teenagers a life long tragedy.

Bishop Spong rather flatly says that the church invented the imaginary concept of hell in order to control people. Fear of judgment and lust for heavenly reward has been a way for the church, the synagogue, and the mosque to control their adherents with an eternal carrot and stick.

That mentality still holds sway in most of the western world and a great deal of the east. And just like in Luther's Reformation, the death of the old underpinnings of society is accompanied by violence, wars, terrorists, and the ever-present kings and princes scrambling to grab up the power that is left on the table.

The mosque and the church do not want to give up their power though the charade they have orchestrated throughout history cannot stand the light of reason and science. So what takes its place? What happens when the carrot and stick neither scare us nor tempt us?

Rose Hamid, a Muslim woman, a flight attendant, stood up in a political rally in South Carolina this week where Donald Trump was speaking. She rose in silent protest to the anti-Muslim rhetoric that has been a part of many of Trump's events. She was wearing a hijab that had these words printed on the front:  Salam - I come in peace.

It was a mild disruption.... A little squeeze, just a silent, little squeeze, one middle aged American Muslim woman standing up in a crowd of thousands of conservative Americans.... What did she reveal?  I don't want to talk about the political candidate and the stupid things that he says.... I don't want to waste my precious time on him.... But I do want to think about what is inside of fellow Americans when we are squeezed, even just a little bit.

When the crowd started yelling threats and condemnation, when she had to be escorted from the hall by the police.... how much hatred, how much irrational prejudice must be in us if it flows out so quickly, so easily, under almost no pressure at all?

In the Protestant Reformation, moral authority left the Pope and was awarded to the Bible and yet both Protestants and Catholics continued to believe and to do very similar things. In our time, in the reformation, the intifada, the culture shaking changes before us, neither the church nor holy writ will be a moral guide. Given in what we see in some of the political displays and language of this election year, one is forced to wonder what will keep us from eating one another.

We have seen, here in our own short history as a church, that when people are freed from the belief that there is a supernatural entity sitting above the clouds who expects you to be religious, who expects you to worship, praise, fear judgment and to prayerfully and piously seek entrance into heaven.... Once that carrot and stick is gone, of people just move on.

They are squeezed by modern scholarship and they find out that what was inside of them was not some noble spirituality that wanted to make the world a better place.... It was ancient fear and lust.... In the absence of those false motivations, they discover that there is not much left.

And I understand... truly, I do. People are often angry when the truth of religious deception is revealed. Many feel like they were manipulated and lied to by religion and the reason that they feel that way is because they were manipulated and lied to. We can't always block the exit long enough to say, "oh but there is so much more."

Freud believed that people created God as a kind of super and judgmental parent in the clouds above us to help us to control our behavior. And, in a sense, religion has functioned in that way as long as the ruse could be maintained that we all had an eternal future, either on streets of gold or in a lake of fire. Take away the giant, judgmental, parent in the clouds and.... Well, you get a Donald Trump rally.....

Seriously, though I am clearly an advocate of evidence-based faith, I want a spirituality that is rooted in reality and conversant with scientific methods and facts, but facts alone do not lead to either morality or a meaningful life.

More than 2000 years ago, Plato tried to describe a society governed by rational thought, headed by philosopher-kings, in his most important work, The Republic. Plato writes this book as a dialogue largely between his teacher, Socrates, and his older brother, Glaucon. Once Socrates has completely detailed this utopian society and persuaded his listeners this this is the most just and reasonable way to run a nation, Glaucon asks the piercing question, "but who would want to live there?"

What is on the other side of the reformation that Bishop Spong describes? When society is cut from the moorings of a judging parent in the clouds or a divine book of rules, how do we choose not to be ruled by either cold logic or emotional hysteria?

What we see in a lot of our political events are the signs of an untethered society in which democracy de-evolves into the majority lording it over the minority... just as unbridled capitalism leads to the rich exploiting the poor.  What we really want is not just a society freed from religious fear and guilt, or a society freed from tyranny only to become little tyrants.  What we want is a good society.... A society that is able to balance individual freedom with social responsibility.

What I believe to be vital to the present day reformation, what Bishop Spong has not yet discussed though I hope he will.... Is the need to do exactly what Albert Einstein said that we must and that is to move beyond the illusion that we are all here as separate individuals seeking our own satisfaction and fulfillment.

Modern physicists tell us what ancient Buddhists have always taught us.... We are all connected.  My child has a better chance of staying healthy if you get your kids inoculated against childhood diseases. My neighbor gets to live in a less crime-infested neighborhood if all of the people in the neighborhood earn a living wage. Your grandchildren have a better chance at having clean air and water if you and I stop dumping toxins into the rivers and sewing the wind with our carbon fumes.

Liberated from the myth-enhanced fears of eternal punishment or even the fantasies of how you would live if you had won the lottery, we are left to rationally and factually recognize that Christians and Muslims are all made of the same star stuff as Buddhists and Hindus and that all of us need to grow up and let our various faiths draw us closer to one another rather than constantly trying to cook up some new reason to go to war with one another.

Lemons and oranges don't get to choose what comes out of them... they can only give what is naturally grown within them. We do get to choose, but you don't want to wait until you are being squeezed to make that choice.

No one chooses to continue to remain in a progressive spiritual community because you think that God demands it or that there is some lake of fire you are trying to avoid or a heavenly mansion you are trying to occupy. We keep coming together because we are trying to choose to be the kind of people who, when squeezed in the coming reformation, will produce wisdom, maturity, kindness, compassion, love, friendship, and justice, acceptance, tolerance, and goodness.

If the self-serving, saber rattling, xenophobic sentiments we are hearing in this election year are any indication of what is in the soul of America, then, my friends, we have our work cut out for us.

Freedom of Speech vs Freedom of Thought

January 3, 2016
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. Søren Kierkegaard

Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people in the world.  Neil Postman 

For most of the past couple of centuries, philosophy and religion have been bedfellows, at least so far as college and university campuses are concerned. During my undergraduate experience, studying in fairly small departments of state universities, there was no small amount on enmity between the two disciplines that were forced to share cramped office space with one another but it was undeniable that they were historically bound to one another.

Philosophers, from ancient times right up to the industrial era, wrote about religion. There were, of course, exceptions to that, but you couldn't really be a philosophy professor and not spend time in study of great philosophical works that treated religious beliefs and claims. No one would dispute the fact that my beloved Søren Kierkegaard was a philosopher but you have to admit, he was a philosopher who wrote almost exclusively about religion.

One of the sayings I was introduced to when I was just a teenager trying to find my way through those competitive department battles was this rather insulting description:  Philosophers are looking for a black cat in a dark room. Theologians are looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there. Or put in an even more mean way, theologians make up stuff about stuff that is made up.
At their root, philosophy is a search for truth, for wisdom, for understanding. Similarly, theology is also a search for truth, for wisdom, for understanding of God. The two are very similar and really ought to work on a ball field with the same rules of inquiry, reason, and critical thinking.

What we all know, however, is that religious folk all too often abandon any rules of honest inquiry and just go off on flights of fantasy that they then try to insist that everyone else pretend to believe to be true.

At some point some ancient Persians come up with the idea of invisible, eternal creatures who look like human beings with wings. Certain sects of Judaism become infected with this idea and then Christians took this imaginary creature in hand and ran with it...listing three different ranks of angels with three types in each rank: with Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones at the top, the second tier featured Dominions, Virtues, and Powers, and at the bottom, closest to human beings, were mere Angels, Archangels, and Principalities.

And this is the sort of thing that makes the philosophy professors refuse to have lunch with the theology professors. In reality, angels do not exist at all, but across the hall, in the theology class, they are giving names, descriptions, and even a census count of the various choirs of angels.

In fact, in spite of the way that we tend to think of certain Muslim countries as being inhabited by religious fanatics, the United States of America has the largest percentage of people who believe in angels.... Nearly 80%....

80% of Americans believe in the literal reality of a purely symbolic religious creation while fewer than 40% believe in the science of evolution... and an even slightly smaller percent believe in global warming.

Søren Kierkegaard said that there are two ways that we can be deceived, one is to continue to believe in what is clearly not true and the other is to refuse to believe what is clearly true. It is evident that the substantive difference between a progressive approach to faith and a traditional approach to faith is that progressives are interested in discovering what it true. We are not eager to reject or dismiss traditional matters of faith but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The point where my conversations break down with very many of my peers in ministry is that theology cannot properly be done simply by matters of personal preference. You may like believing in angels and demons, heaven and hell, in a giant Santa Clause in the clouds who grants wishes if you wish hard enough, but if you want a reasonable person to believe in those things with you, you are going to have to come up with some evidence, or some reason to support those extraordinary claims. In the absence of any evidence or reason for such extraordinary claims, clearly, these religious claims come closer to being the rantings of a schizophrenic than the helpful teachings of a philosopher of religion.

In fact, there was a study done recently to try to figure out why so many people seem to insist upon acting like Deepak Chopra is saying something profound.

At best, some of his alternative medicine suggestions could be called pseudoscience but an awful lot of what he says actually doesn't make any sense at all, but he uses important sounding terms and the mere repetition of some of those spiritual and pseudoscience sounding terms will make gullible people nearly swoon.  He is a quack but, as long as you know not to take his health advice seriously, he is a fairly harmless quack.

What is, I believe, rather more important than the religious mythology that causes so much dumbing down in our society is the more active and present magical thinking that is political discourse.

I get very frustrated with my religious peers who insist upon doing theology by personal preference rather than by evidence but religious people are armatures at confusing opinions with facts when they are compared to politicians.

Immediately following the Paris climate conference at which President Obama agreed to several important goals in reducing greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, a number of journalists challenged him saying that a large percentage of Americans do not believe our use of fossil fuels is contributing to global warming. As if their opinions had anything at all to do with the facts.

People along the Missouri and Meramec Rivers in Missouri may not believe in flooding but regardless of what they believe about it, that is water standing up to their roofline and that is their pickup truck being washed down the street towards the dam.
Since the Isis inspired terrorist attack in Paris, the American presidential race took a decidedly different turn, with most voters citing terrorism as their primary concern going into this election year. Factually, over the past 10 years there have been about 20 Americans killed by Islamic terrorists.... About 20 people. During the same time period, over 600,000 Americans have been killed by gun shot wounds from our nearly plague levels of gun violence in America. Nearly a million have died from lack of access to proper health care because of our for-profit insurance driven health care system.

The combination of political propaganda with the sensation seeking corporate news has made our public more gullible and ill informed than the most superstitious of religious people.  Our 24-hour news cycle tends to point the camera at whatever seems interesting in the moment but such media is not informative.  Think about how much time and energy was wasted on trying to make Americans afraid of Ebola when it never, in fact, posed the slightest threat to us.

Ben Hecht, the 20th century screenwriter, said, "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock." You can get hundreds of images thrown at you, but without proper context, you can really start to believe that ISIS poses a huge threat to your family's safety while never addressing the fact that the NRA members in your neighborhoods are more than 10,000x more likely to kill you or a member of your family than anyone waving a black flag in Syria.

It is alarming that more than 50% of Republican voters do want to ban all Muslims from immigrating to the United States but when you couple that with the realization that 30% of Republican primary voters think that we should bomb Agrabah, the fictional city that was home to Disney's Aladdin, then you realize that opinion and reality don't often travel in close company.

Conservative religious people believe that imaginary religious beings are flying around on wings and conservative political people believe that we should bomb imaginary cartoon cities which would give us all something to snicker about if such sloppy thinking did not end up with very many very real cities being bombed and tens of thousands of people dying from gun shot wounds, poor medical care, and poverty.

My new book should be published next month. It has been a tedious process trying to sort through more than 500 of my published essays to select a representative choir of 150 to rewrite for publication. The title of this book is Progressive Conversation but, like a lot of authors, the subtitle tells you what I really think about it. The subtitle is "Essays on matters of social justice for critical thinkers."

A reasonable person might disagree with any one of my essays on social justice. A reasonable person might disagree with any one of my sermons, but the people who just write to me and tell me, "I like" or "I don't like," or "I agree" or "I disagree," just don't understand what is at stake.  That is not critical thinking. You don't create a meaningful religious life, you don't become an informed citizen, by just trying to pretend that your opinions equate to research and information.
And trust me, the priest and the politician have spent centuries refining the science of how to trick you into believing things that make you a slave to their purposes. Long before the short attention span created by the Internet, social media, and TV news, George Orwell warned:

Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.  

If Orwell could see the kind of public manipulation going on with our modern sophisticated media, I'm not sure that even he could believe it. One of my favorite internet memes of late says, "A banker, a worker, and an immigrant sit down at a table where there are 20 cookies.  The banker takes 19 cookies and says to the worker, 'Watch out for the immigrant or he'll take your cookie.'"

Which is funny, except that sort of political speech seems to be working on the public!  What I hope that we are offering to our community and to our nation is an engaged spirituality that does not make religion a matter of other-worldly concern, but rather seeks both to know the truth and to apply compassionate spiritual concerns to how we live.

We can strive to raise the level of public conversation to help our nation to be oriented to honesty, reality, and to address the real places where human beings are trapped in the violence of poverty and ignorance and deception.

We don't have all of the answers but this much I know, we are not afraid of any of the questions. Let's do our part to speak truth to power in 2016.