Living in A Capricious Universe

Lent 3     February 28, 2016                “Life in a Capricious Universe”     

Luke 13:1-9                    

13At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ²He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? ³No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. ⁴Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? ⁵No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

A sermon takes place in time. This is, this sermon is happening on Sunday morning, February 28^th, 2016, the day after the democratic primary in South Carolina. And I want to take just a minute to talk about South Carolina . . . one of the two states outside of Missouri where I can be caught preaching fairly regularly.

The population of South Carolina is more than one fourth black, nearly twice the national average. Most black voters in South Carolina vote democratic in a strongly Republican state, so, South Carolina gives the black community an uncommon megaphone for expressing their political perspective because they will make up at least half of the registered voters in this primary.

The African American population in the United States has a lot to say to this nation and to our government. Our policy from the 1990’s of mass incarceration has mostly taken a toll on the black community, destroying black families, and challenging the already bad employment numbers among black men by saddling them with criminal records for the rest of their lives.

Most of these criminal arrests and records stem from non-violent drug offenses ginned up by racially specific stop-and-frisk programs, and three strikes and you’re out policies.

This has, of course, been made much worse by irrational sentencing related to categories of drugs giving lesser sentences for drugs common in white communities than for drugs common in black communities. And, you have to look at the judicial system itself, since reinstituting the death penalty and almost always using on poor black convicts who were found guilty of crimes against white people.

And the dwindling white majority in South Carolina recognizes that the voice of the African American community in their state will soon not only be a majority in their state but their power will begin to have a national impact on the course of politics and so, for the past five years, they have been fighting federal voter guidelines to enact one of the most absurdly strict voter-suppression acts, requiring a government issued photo ID to vote.

They say, of course, that this is to prevent voter fraud though they have virtually no examples of voter fraud in South Carolina. The fraud is on the part of Gov. Nikki Haley who signed this law because she knows that this will keep tens of thousands of poor blacks from voting.

After the sacrifices made during the civil rights movement, after the violence we have all been lately reminded of on the Edmund Pettis Bridge as hundreds of brave African Americans risked their lives to fight for the right to vote, you would think that such voter suppression would be unconscionable but once done, again, you would think that it would motivate every eligible black voter, in angry defiance, to show up at the polls.

I get that voter turn out was at record numbers in 2008. I was among those who were thrilled beyond words at the prospects of the United States electing its first black president. And though he has not been nearly as progressive in office as I had hoped that he would be, I am still so in awe of what a good man he is, what a loving man, what a great father, husband, role model he is. Heck, this guy even sings well!

He has faced unprecedented opposition from the House and the Senate and has been the brunt of racial prejudice in ways that I thought had been buried in the 19^th century. But the election of Barack Obama, twice, did not herald the end of racism in America but has, in fact, revealed how much work we have yet to do.

The good paying manufacturing jobs in our city centers from WWII to the boom in the car industry, created the black middle class, which, in turn, gave America its educated, hopeful leaders of the Civil Rights movement. As manufacturing jobs in our urban centers fell apart, so has the black middle class and, it seems, has also dramatically reduced the number of easily identifiable leaders in the black community.

It has taken me a while to get to this point but here is what I am driving at. The plight of black Americans in the United States is bleak in ways that has not been for generations. There are few times when we need more to see an organized, strong, and unavoidable cry from black communities for economic, racial, and social justice. And yet, voter turn out in yesterday’s primary was very small.

The circumstances of this election year finally turned and handed the microphone to the black community in South Carolina, and, it would seem, they were not interested in saying much.

Men should always be cautious when saying anything about women’s issues and white people should be very circumspect about giving any appearance of criticism of issues within the black community, and straight people need to careful about commenting on gay issues. All that being said, I must politely, cautiously, carefully and with sincere circumspection say to black voters in South Carolina, “what is wrong with you?”

Regardless of which candidate they voted for, and I realize that my favorite candidate was set up for a “yuuuuge” loss in South Carolina, but still! I have always accepted that Bernie Sanders’ candidacy was more about making a moral point than it was about winning but you can’t say it has been ineffective. I have noticed that ever since I have had a Bernie sign in my yard that the Jehovah’s Witnesses assiduously avoid ringing my doorbell and you cannot say that is meaningless.

It is not up to the victims of discrimination to change the institutions of prejudice in our nation. Gay liberation involves changing the way that straight people think. Female empowerment involves partnering between men and women to create a level playing field. And racism requires cooperation between majority and minority populations to fix the inequities that have perpetuated mass incarceration of black people, kept African Americans out of the professions, and made them the biggest losers in every economic recession.

But folks, the reason why we had the banner created when we started this church, this motto from Elie Wiesel, defines our core ideology…. Thou shalt not stand idly by. What I would say to minority voters everywhere is just this, you cannot afford to sit this one out. Well, really, I would say to voters of all stripes, you cannot afford to sit this one out. Just look at how sitting out votes has turned out in the past.

As I said in the beginning, a sermon happens at a point in time. South Carolina’s democratic primary was yesterday. The Oscars are tonight. Now, I will confess that I have never watched the Oscars. I like the movies that I like and I am not much impressed with the opinions of Oscar voters. Beyond that, I have never much cared to spend an evening watching multi-millionaires give golden statues to other multi-millionaires, the shape of which even suggests a certain Freudian comment on the whole enterprise.

However, I may watch tonight just to see how the Oscar’s black host will deal with the fact that this is the second year in a row that this prestigious awards ceremony has entirely ignored the amazing wealth of talent and artistry present in America’s black population. Because somebody has got to say something…somebody has got to put up a visible and audible protest to the reality of racism in America.

And now I must entreat you, kind listeners, to stop thinking about the shape of the Oscar statue and return to our conversation in the present moment. I need to beg your attention for just a few more minutes to consider a crucial philosophical issue raised by our scripture reading this morning from the thirteenth chapter of Luke.

In this brief pericope, Jesus is addressing a false religious assumption that plagues us as much today as it did his peer group two thousand years ago. And that is the often repeated belief that everything happens for a reason… or more pointedly, that everything happens because God is in charge and whatever happens is God’s will.

It is not just modern philosophers, ethicists, and theologians who are calling BS on that belief, even Jesus did. He references recent events in his day, when a tower fell in Jerusalem and killed eighteen people. Evidently, the popular response to that was not simply poor engineering or the capriciousness of natural events but rather, there were those who wanted to reassure themselves with the classic religious out that all things work together for good for those who love God. That no matter how tragic it may look in our eyes, that God has a plan and that it is a good plan.

It is tempting, sometimes, to credit a divine hand at times of crisis. When I was young, the congregation where my family were active members built a new and very modern church. To trump the Baptists, we built the tallest steeple in town. It was made of three massive steel girders that reached 250 feet into the air, topped with a steel cross, all of which glowed in the morning sun every day over my home town. 

One spring a tornado passed right over the church and though it left the building unmolested, it twisted those steel girders and bent the structure over so that the cross was inverted and looked like a giant heavenly finger pointing down at the church, right over the pulpit.

The process of building that tower had taken months but they got it disassembled and removed in short order, to be replaced years later with a much more modest edifice of less than half the former size.

I am tempted to interpret that with no small amount of divine contempt but the fact is, it was just an event of nature. Nature follows iron clad laws of physics but no single event is a divine message to a wayward people.

The melting of polar ice caps, the rise of our sea levels, are predictable events but they are not simply the capriciousness of the universe. These things happen, not for a divine reason, but because of the indifference, greed, and ignorance of people.

Things don’t happen because God is playing dice with the cosmos. The poverty of the black urban centers of our cities is not God’s will, it is the result of NAFTA, CAFTA, and will be made worse by the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement…. All of which amounts to reverse socialism, transferring the wealth of our nation from the poor and middle class into the hands of the super rich and it happens only because we accept a second or third class status in our own world… staying home on election days, failing to organize, accepting anti-union propaganda as inevitable truths.

Traditional religion is a tool used to keep the poor in poverty, the powerless unempowered, it pits poor whites against poor blacks, and leads heterosexuals to blame homosexuals for their personal failures. All of which is a pack of lies that cannot stand up to a moment of honest inquiry.

Real spirituality, honest religion, is a response to the chaos of nature and the evil of human greed that refuses to play the role of being victims, that works, sacrifices, organizes, marches, and speaks prophetically to create justice, to right the wrongs of our society, to defend our planet’s ability to sustain life, and at every turn attempts reduce human suffering in favor of a more fair and loving world.

And that is not just the witness of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Zoraster, and Buddha… that is not just Gandhi, Romero, King, Dorothy Day, and Mother Theresa. This is not just my opinion. In your heart, you already know that I am right and none of us get a pass to sit this one out.

https://youtu.be/9er5saw4oxQ

"Drunken Priests and Baby Talking Prophets"
Isaiah 28:7-13 7 These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink;  the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink,    they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment.  8 All tables are covered with filthy vomit; no place is clean.   9 ‘Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from milk, those taken from the breast?  10 For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,    line upon line, line upon line,  here a little, there a little.’   11 Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12  to whom he has said, ‘This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose’; yet they would not hear.  13 Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them,  ‘Precept upon precept, precept upon precept,    line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little’;  in order that they may go, and fall backwards, and be broken, and snared, and taken.  

      We live in a time when fewer and fewer people go to any church and yet the few churches that are thriving are the ones that get bigger and bigger.  Our culture is choosing greater and greater anonymity, less formal connection. We may have a thousand friends on Face Book but we don’t know anyone to go with to see a movie and many of us barely know the names of the people who live around us.  The spontaneous back yard barbques and neighborhood pick up football games rarely happen. As sociologists have famously noted, more people go bowling than ever before but fewer join bowling leagues.   And, so far as the rapid decline in church attendance goes, I have to admit that we are a part of the problem.

      We are a very small church but we provide religious content for 10,000 people a month who simply sit and watch one of my sermons on YouTube rather than come to a place like this and actually meet people and bind together to pass along a cogent faith and organize volunteer efforts to get involved in the community in meaningful ways.  So why did we start this church and why try so hard to keep it open? Is this community underserved for churches?  That is, are there empty seats in the synagogue or in any of the big Catholic, Baptist, Assemblies of God, and Methodist churches in the area?   There are, of course, thousands of open seats and pews in town this morning though I suspect that you are not much tempted to go sit in those pews and seats.

     We get to a place like this after we found that we simply did not fit in those places.   Both by our unwillingness to assassinate our brains and their unwillingness to accept us because we were female, or gay, or divorced or, in some cases, because we read books and asked questions, we had become the church alumni association.  Some of us thought our way out of traditional religion and some of us were asked to leave.   We open our minds to the wisdom found in other faith traditions and feel entirely free to reject the doctrines and creeds that once chained us in the darkness of irrational superstition, prejudice and falsehood.  

     We are not just self congratulatory philosophers who have rejected the myths and neurotic fear and guilt of the dark ages... hopefully, we will also put hands and feet and heart into our shared faith as we serve the poor together and bring prophetic witness to the social justice causes of our time.  With both food for the hungry and visible opposition to the institutions that create poverty, oppression and violence we have claim a living faith and not a dead philosophy.   The old main stream denominational churches are trying to figure out how to survive in the face of declining numbers and increasing irrelevance and we keep trying to figure out how we can do more.  It may have been fittingly symbolic that our first few Sundays we met, we were not in a country club but rather in a funeral home parlor because we had a body to bury.  We needed to bury the church that we had left and that had left us.

     We had to eulogize a faith that was full of lies, magic and superstition, dead ritual and choking doctrines marked by creeds that sound more like a fanciful incantation in a Harry Potter movie than something gown up people would repeat in the 21st century.  Still, we recognize that the path we have followed was a well worn path that stretches back through the millennia. Isaiah was a poet and a prophet and someone had hurt him pretty badly because even across 2700 years you can hear his anger.  He describes the priests of his day, the keepers of institutional religion in two competing images.  On the one hand he makes the Temple sound like an episode of Tosh.0.  The priests are drunk, stumbling, falling over themselves and, he says quite graphically, vomiting everywhere.  I'm certain that is not a literal description but we know what he means.  What they had to say had the approximate value of drunken vomit.  The other image is a bit less obvious in translation.

     The powerful priesthood who preside over the huge Temple, the pinnacle of institutional religion are, the prophet says, are as sophisticated as a baby that is taken from the breast. He repeats the phrases that their religion is to them, "precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little."    In Hebrew, what he is saying is intended to make this sound like a baby babbling.... it says, "cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav, siershom, siershom."  They are just babies, or drunks.... either way, the prophet asks the question, "Who can they teach, to whom can they explain what is real?" because all that they know is "cav la cav, cav la cav, sav  sav, sav la sav"...... any resemblence that bears to a Fox News program is not just coincidental.

     The churches of our birth were not much concerned with liberation from oppression, fighting poverty or racism.  Though there were heroic and wonderful exceptions, most stood back and watched the civil rights movement. They were silent about the war in Vietnam.  There were the Berrigan brothers somewhere.... there was Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dorothy Day out there getting arrested and being interviewed by Time Magazine but most of us were kids in churches that said pledges to the flag, asked you to pledge your money while they told you about what they had read in the funny pages and made allusions to their favorite sports teams.    All the while expecting you to worry about your soul that you had never seen, and to be anxious about a hell you had never seen, and to lust for a heaven you have never seen and to feel badly about being such a horrible person that God had to kill his own son to make up for your sins......cav la cav, cav la cav, sov la sov, sov la sov..... etc. etc.

     When I was a college student, one of the thinkers I heard regularly condemned from the pulpit was the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell.  In the middle of the 20th century he was begging the modern world to think critically about both religion and government and critical thinking is the one thing that magical superstitious religion cannot stand.  He said: "I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive.  The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true.  I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system."  This is what frightened traditional religion. The suggestion that you only believe what there is good reason to believe..... believe what can be seen, tested, repeated.... because from the time of Constantine, religious people have been asked to repeat rituals, to kneel, genuflect, speak in tongues, weep, shout and empty their wallets because everyone around them was doing it and their parents did it and their grandparents did it.  

     I'm not saying that it was all bad.  There were people who were helped. There were families that stayed together, there were people who reformed criminal or addictive behavior and who controlled their impulses based on their experiences in churches but what happens when you find out that the snake oil you have been taking has nothing in it?  How much of your time, emotional energy, your resources have been poured into believing in superstition and trying to make yourself believe that repeating magical phrases and participating in magical rituals would somehow make imaginary angels and demons do your bidding?  We wasted our time, our energy and our resources while governments sent our young men and women to die in wars fought over land and resources while they told us it was for Jesus and freedom.  We bowed our heads and closed our eyes while corporations treated workers like lumps of coal thrown into the furnace of profit and banks used the people's money to make themselves rich while keeping the people groveling for a chance to have a home or a car to use to get to work to earn money to give to the bank.

      Moses was a liberator of slaves.  Jesus, Mohammad, Zoroaster, Gandhi, Romero, King, were liberators.  They reached out to the poor, the orphan, the sick, the oppressed..... the church, however, has asked women to shut up and be obedient, the church has made gay people suicidal for just existing and treated blacks and immigrants like objects of perpetual charity.... to be given a holiday basket at Thanksgiving and worn out clothes the rest of the year but never to be treated as equals.    Cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav...... man I am so done with that.  In the 21st century, in possession of endless information at our fingertips, science, rational thought, critical thinking.... anyone still sitting in a big church trying to learn how to speak in tongues or waiting for their turn to light a candle in front of a statue or trying to make themselves believe that their Holy Book really is the one true magical formula written by the finger of God is like a bird in a cage where the door has been left open.  

      It is one thing to stay in the cage when you have no choice but those days are over.  It is time to grow up, time to sober up, time to set aside the superstitions of the dark ages and embrace the faith that made the Berrigan brothers set military draft records on fire, that called Martin Luther King into the streets to march, and Dorothy Day to feed the poor and shake her fist at the government and businesses that made them poor.  Three thousand years ago, the prophet said:  11 Truly, with stammering lip and with alien tongue he will speak to this people, 12  to whom he has said, ‘This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose’; yet they would not hear.

      Perhaps, Isaiah, they would not hear, but we hear you.  This is rest.... to give rest to the people who have been shut out of jobs, schools, hospitals and homes. To tell the bandits on Wall Street and the powerful on Capitol Hill that we will no longer bow our heads and close our eyes to their abuses.  And we will tell the priests, pastors, ministers and evangelists to keep their promises of pie in the sky when we die until we see them meeting us to help lobby Florida’s legislature to end this for-profit industry that is filling your poor schools to prison pipeline. … that will drug test members of the state legislature rather than the recipients of public assistance, that will get treatment for the addicted and housing for veterans, the physically and mentally sick, the victims of capitalism run mad who they have ignored.

     I will give them my undivided attention to let them explain to me why I should believe in the Trinity, heaven and hell, substitutionary death, sacraments and intercessory prayer when they first tell me how they are going to turn the minimum wage into a living wage, and guarantee access to health care for the sick, jobs for the unemployed, homes for the homeless..... when their religion has a way of stopping the wars in Syria, and Mexico and can keep those flying killer robots out of the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan but until then, their religion is to me nothing but line upon line, line upon line and, frankly, I have better things to do with my time

https://youtu.be/cH7aznmFty8

February 7, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor           “Honest Questioning and Uninformed Certainty”    

Mark Twain — 'What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.'

May favorite painting in the world hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is a ten-foot wide canvas by Jules Bastien-Lepage depicting Joan of Arc as a 13-year-old girl standing in her parents’ garden. Faintly you can make out the images of the three French saints whom she believed spoke to her. There is a look of intensity and mild shock on the child’s face as she instructed by these disembodied voices to inspire a rebellion in France against British rule.

I have kept a print of this painting over my desk where I write my sermons for 20 years. Her determination, sacrifice, and zeal inspire me. However, it should also be noted that Joan of Arc was certainly a schizophrenic or at least suffered from some form of dementia. The voices she heard were not really the voices of the long dead French heroes. The voices came from inside Joan’s skull.

Still, it would be a mistake to write her off as being simply schizophrenic. She was a brave, young woman of great faith. She was inspired and she inspired a nation and she courageously went to her death defending the voices that both she and her accusers should have known were not real. And, I suspect, many who followed her into battle might also have believed that the voices were not real.

But the voices were spurring the French to fight for their liberation and that was a voice they all heard in their own hearts.

Our evening news is often marred with images of religious fanaticism. Wars, beheadings, suicide bombers, representing a jihadist view of the world… like Joan of Arc, in part inspired by deranged faith, and in part fighting for liberation from Western dominance or for power and dominance the way that people always have.

We can admire strong faith. We value courage. We sympathize with the goals of self-determination and freedom from oppression. But as religious people, I think that we need to take a very sober look at the issue of certainty.

Fundamentalism demands fealty to absolute certainty. It gives people false confidence that they possess absolute truth about things that no one can know.  Even Muhammad’s first reaction to the visions he experienced  was to doubt that they were real.

Muslim fundamentalists never want this part of Muhammad’s history to be repeated, but after his first religious vision, he assumed that he had been possessed by a demon, what in that culture was called a “jinn” or an evil genie. Again, you might suspect some sort of dementia when anyone says that they hear voices and have visions but among religious enthusiasts, you might have expected Muhammad to come running down the mountain after his first vision, full of joy and enthusiasm, euphoric about hearing a divine message delivered by an angel.

But in his own account, he was struck with self-doubt and feared that he needed to kill himself to be rid of the jinn that had taken over his mind. His wife, out of concern for him, sent him to stay with one of her cousins who was an Ebionite.  Ebionites were Jewish Christians who believed that Jesus was a prophet but was not divine. They rejected the letters of Paul and kept Jewish customs.  It was this cousin, Waraka, who told Muhammad that his vision had been of the Archangel Gabriel. She was the one who taught him about the Ebionites’ view of Biblical narratives and beliefs, much of which, not so miraculously, ended up in the Quran.

Now, I do not say this to be disrespectful, though I am certain what I have just said would put me in some physical danger were I saying it in the wrong country. I offer these observations as a corrective, not a rejection.

History museums are full of the artifacts of dead religions related to gods whose names are no longer remembered. Any religion that is too dogmatic, so certain of its own absolutes that it cannot bear questioning, doubts, or changes in direction is destined for a shelf in a museum.

Fundamentalism will not save Islam, it will destroy a beautiful religion. Fundamentalism, literalism, conservatism, will not save Christianity, it will, in stead, make it so irrelevant and out of touch with reality that it will take its place along side other outdated superstitions and magical thinking.

The realities of the universe and of God are simply too big for any one religion. God is not defined or controlled by religious beliefs. God does not recite or write creeds. 

As Gandhi said, God is not a Muslim, Hindu, Christian, or Jew. God has no religion.  I’m not saying that all religions are the same. They are not. I will say, however, that there is no right religion and that there are healthy and unhealthy ways in which you can be a member of any one of them.

The current pope of the Roman Catholic Church, Francis, seems like a very open minded and, at least for a Catholic, a fairly progressive person of faith. His predecessor, I don’t think that anyone could rationally have described Benedict as having been either open minded or progressive but they were both not just Catholics but popes within the last decade.

There are hundreds of millions of Muslims you will never hear about in the news who are hard working, moral, sane, peaceful people who are loving and devout people of faith. We should no more put them under the same heading of jihadist terrorists than we should be put in the same group with Christian Identity or the KKK.

I love the quote from Mark Twain that we used as our wisdom lesson today, that it is not what religious people don’t know that should worry us but rather we should be terrified of things about which they are certain.

All that being said, I want to be clear that problems are not always corrected by going to the opposite end of the spectrum. Religious certainty about things that cannot be seen, verified, tested, or in any way validated is just idolatry, and as you have heard me say many times, all idols are slated for destruction. That kind of certainty is virtual insanity.

However, that does not mean that all beliefs and teachings are of equal value. It doesn’t mean that we can’t know anything, learn anything, grow and improve.  Yes, a sincere faith should question everything. You should be able to ask any question, examine any truth, but you should not be afraid to step out of the shadows and act confidently on what you know to be true…. And there are things that can be tested, examined, observed, and determined to be true.

I don’t often suggest songs to Sean since he seems to know almost everything there is to know about music but I sometimes hear a song being played on one of my news podcasts that I listen to every week and I stop in my tracks, look up the song and send it to Sean.

He is doing one today that I wish we could use on our video but I think we would be breaking a ton of laws to do that though I will risk repeating the verse that made me know that we had to use it in our services:

Who are you to deny your fellowman his human rights


nobody says that you have to agree but you have to let others be free


These are not opinions I am right and you are wrong


your arguments are worthless and your reasoning is flawed


your mind can't be free when it's locked inside an ancient book

When it comes to things about which no one can be certain, we can entertain all kinds of ideas in open, humble, conversation. But there is no room for dogmatism.

But in a world where a governor can decide to poison the water of an entire city just to save a little bit of money, killing a few, lowering the IQs of many, and negatively affecting the mental and physical health of tens of thousands of people, there is no respectable way to be neutral.

When the prejudices of the majority can keep women’s pay less than mens, can so corrupt the judicial system that only poor minorities are ever executed… when we fill our prisons with young people who were caught with marijuana while we fill Caribbean luxury resorts with the bankers who manipulated the market place and brought about a world wide recession then neutrality is something to be ashamed of and not defended.

I believe that the church has historically been guilty of acting like they had absolute confidence about things that cannot be known and about which they seem almost certainly to be wrong, and they have remained indifferent towards the injustices all around them that not only can be known but you have to try to not have the facts thrown in your face on a daily basis.

When it comes to speculative theology, let’s show some real humility. When it comes to social justice, let’s start showing some real courage.  Maybe we shouldn’t have put a cross in this church that is more interfaith than it is Christian but it is here and it should be a reminder to us that Jesus was executed by the state and he was not executed for having the wrong religious beliefs. Don’t ever kid yourself into believing that Jesus was killed for healing the sick and telling people to love one another. Even Rome didn’t kill people for acting like Mr. Rogers.

The cross is a reminder that Jesus wasn’t a moderate and when it comes to matters of justice, we shouldn’t be either.

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.