The Failed Reformation

June 19, 2016    Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor   “The Failed Reformation”      

H. L. Mencken in Treatise on the Gods  1930

“What the faithful Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would laugh at it. . . Protestantism itself, in its earliest phases, was plainly a movement toward mysticism:  its purpose, at least in theory, was to remove the priestly veil separating man (sic) from the revealed Word of God. But that veil was restored almost instantly, and by the year 1522, five years after Wittenberg, Luther was damning the Anabaptists with all of the ferocious certainty of a medieval Pope, and his followers were docilely accepting his teaching.”

One of our YouTube listeners in Florida wrote to me a couple of years ago and very apologetically told me that he had decided to return to the traditional Catholic Church. Of course, I never tell anyone that they should leave their church but he was one of those people, like many of us here, who had been a very faithful believer in the formal theological teachings of the church and once he had done enough reading and thinking for himself, he simply couldn’t go back. As you have heard me say before, we cherish the teachings of Jesus but the teachings about him seem to be mired in Iron Age mythology.                       

This listener didn’t really stop believing in the truth of his late in life discoveries of a more honest and fact-based faith, but rather, he willingly elected to return to a kind of self-deception. That is, feeling his advancing years leading up to a sudden end, he couldn’t face the thought of just ceasing to exist and felt the need to return to the assurance of an eternal life in a more Catholic vision.

I don’t know how you do that. I wouldn’t have any idea about how to put the genie back in the bottle. If a traditional church tried to make me one of those “offers you can’t refuse” I just couldn’t go back into the world of doing midnight Christmas vigils and Easter sunrise services and trying to offer people certain hope in an afterlife that is anything but certain.  But folks, a lot of people do it.

It has become sort of a hobby for me to look for examples in historical literature of signs of progressive faith breaking out in poetry, philosophy, and theology prior to this current wave of historical Jesus, biblical critical, scholars. It is no longer surprising to encounter someone who writes as if they managed to just stumble out of a dark cave into the sunlight of reason.

I was delighted to discover a book by H. L. Mencken, published in 1930, entitled Treatise on the Gods. Mencken didn’t stumble out of the dark. He was an old school scholar who didn’t have much formal education but he was an amazing reader and researcher. He was a journalist so that might lower your expectations a bit and, in all honesty, he was a racist at a time and place where it didn’t seem that many people could challenge his narrow views but his political commentary was wonderfully controversial and incisive. When he turned his sights on religion, he produced a scathing review of the silly things that religious people believe.

I was delighted to find a self-taught myth buster from the early 20^th century but this passage I am using as our wisdom lesson today startled me in what he pointed out about Luther’s reformation.

Like every seminary student, I had a cursory introduction into the history and writing of the great German reformer but I had never given a moment’s thought to how Luther, on the one hand became famous for being able to see through the absurdity of the papal authority and the clear abuses of the church, but he very quickly engaged in battles with Protestant rivals and he came to think of himself as having the virtual authority of a pope.

The Protestant reformation changed the western world. The incestuous relationship between government and the Catholic Church that had ruled Europe for a thousand years came to an end in a single lifetime in the 16^th century. There were very influential anti-reformation movements within the Catholic Church but it would be difficult to over estimate the way in which Luther’s reformation preaching and writing transformed the nature of modern Christianity and politics.

However, after smashing statues and breaking out stained glass windows, and insisting upon a transfer of authority from the church to the printed text of scripture itself, it wasn’t very long before the reformation church was starting to look a lot like the Catholic Church with only nuanced differences….

The Lutheran Church reinvented itself as a kind of “Catholic light” in a way that reminds you of the final pages of Animal Farm when the pigs who had lead the rebellion against the farmers, are seen with the human farmers having dinner and playing cards in the farm house.

I don’t think that Martin Luther was necessarily trying to usher in a new age of reason but, given the context of when he lived and the oppressive control of the Medieval Catholic Church, he was a 16^th century super hero, but as Mencken points out, the reformation substantially failed.

Are people afraid to think for themselves? Do they want an authoritarian government to protect them from imaginary boogiemen and an authoritarian religion to help them deny the reality of the world around them and their own mortality? Do they prefer the ease of magical thinking over the challenge of critically examining evidence?

I will tell you very honestly that I am sincerely worried that the progressive reformation of our generation may also fail. I have been astonished for years that as popular as the books of John Spong, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, and Jon Crossan have been, millions of people read their books, attended their lectures and then go back to Methodist, Presbyterian, Disciple, UCC, and Episcopal churches and repeat creeds and rituals that they know are not true and, as H. L. Mencken says, literally put on a magic show when they know better.

Is it the comfort of the familiar? Is it, literally, whistling in the graveyard?

And many people tell me, “It does matter.” “People believe what they want to believe and it doesn’t change anything anyway.” But is it okay if I just object a bit?

Because, as Voltaire said, if you can get people to believe in absurdities it isn’t hard to get them to commit atrocities.

Look at just the blatant lies told by the NRA and their gun-manufacturing minions:

They tell us that the second amendment protects the rights of all citizens to own any gun that they want.  Clearly this is not true. You cannot own a machine gun. You can’t own a bazooka. You can’t own tactical nuclear weapons. And the second amendment protects the existence of a well-regulated militia, which has nothing to do with privately amassing an arsenal of lethal weapons.

The interpretation of the 2^nd amendment to give individuals the right to own guns under any and all circumstances was a hoax cooked up in 2008 by a Republican dominated supreme court in the Heller case in one of the most absurd stretches of logic seen in jurisprudence.

The NRA tells us that guns don’t kill people, which makes it seem odd that we feel the need to keep giving soldiers guns …. Clearly, people with guns kill more than 30,000 Americans every year where gun deaths in Japan are always less than 10 a year and in most western democracies the number rarely rises above a dozen.

They tell us that these guns used in mass shootings are not automatic weapons or even semi-automatic, that they are just like other guns. Sure, if you want to parse words, the AR-15 still requires you to pull the trigger repeatedly to fire the weapon but you can put a 100 round drum on it and kill 100 people in less than 2 minutes…. In which case, they are a military style weapon whose only purpose is to kill people.

We keep talking about these shootings being a mental health problem. Well, in a sense, I agree. If a person walks up to the gun counter at the Bass Pro Shop or at Walmart and wants to buy a weapon designed to kill dozens of people at a time, that is all of the diagnostic criteria needed in a sane society to diagnose a dangerous and serious mental illness.

What more do we need to give them a mental health screening? Do we have to watch and see if they serve red wine with fish? The people who went to gun stores after Sandy Hook, and San Bernardino, and Colorado Springs, and Orlando to buy the exact weapon used by the murderers in these nightmare scenarios have self identified as dangerously mentally unstable people but rather than put them on a “you can never own a lethal weapon” list we just sell them the tools necessary for the next mass murder.

Yes, it is a mental illness problem but it appears that it is our Congress that is mentally ill.

The false narratives sold to Americans, I’m convinced, is rooted in the magical thinking of most of religion. When the former president of the United States told us that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, did anyone believe that to be a factual statement?  They don’t hate us for occupying their country? They don’t hate us for installing violently oppressive puppet governments? They don’t hate us for the drone strikes that kill their children and families? They hate us because we eat hot dogs and wear bathing suits at the beach…. Who could believe such non-sense? And yet, we play along, in part because we have been trained to be silenced by the absurd.

We are told that our soldiers are serving abroad to defend our freedom. Who threatened our freedom? There is hardly a two-story building in Afghanistan. They have no navy, no air force, are they going to invade on camel back?  The United States operates 737 foreign military bases on every continent of the world. That’s not protecting our freedom, that is defending our Empire! When the government talks about defending American interests, what they mean is defending the interests of Mobil, Exxon, Halliburton, and GE…. Not your interests, not my interests.

Those of us who oppose these wars for oil are the ones defending our interests and supporting our soldiers.

This is plainly and undeniably true. We all know it is true so how did we become puppets to an empire?

I do not know if the world is ready to wake up from the slumber of not being able to tell the difference between a dream and reality but I hope so. The goal of progressive faith is not to deny reality and believe in an imaginary world, it is to wake up and comes to terms with the world we are living in and to work to make it more peaceful, fair, just, and, dare I say it, happy.

We have wasted enough time having the wool pulled over our eyes. Let’s come to terms with reality and have the courage to change the world.

The Intoxication of Power

(I Kings 21, the story of King Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard)

Proper 6   June 12, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield

Roger Ray, pastor   1 KINGS 21  "The Intoxication of Power"

Bumper stickers are a political art form. How can you sum up some of your most closely held views in just 16 inches of type with letters still large enough for your neighbors to read it?  One that those of us who live in the Ozarks will have seen several times says, “I love my country but I am afraid of my government.”  You could typically expect to see that on the back of a pickup truck that had a gun rack in the back window with maybe a second bumper sticker that said, “Warning: driver chews tobacco”.

But if I had several copies of the one that said, “I love my country but I am afraid of my government” to pass out here today, we might come back next Sunday morning and see a lot of cars sporting this once rather conspiratorial sentiment. And if you asked someone who didn’t have one why they didn’t want to display it, they very well might tell you that they are not so sure that they love their country anymore.

I was still in high school when Congress held the Watergate hearings. Though I had come, at a very early age, to be opposed to the war in Vietnam, I had not taken the next step into accepting that my government, of my country, that America could be corrupt, do and say dishonest things, and betray the character of a nation that prided itself on being the shining city on the hill.

What would have been considered taboo in a previous generation became normative. We were not perfect.

We were still far superior to the Soviet Union and to Communist China but a lot of the enthusiasm was drained out of us.

I have not watched the TV miniseries about the 1994 O. J. Simpson trail because 20 years has not much dulled my vivid memory of how my previous absolute confidence in police integrity was slowly eroded.  I had sincerely believed that the 1991 police beating of Rodney King had been a fluke, bad cops put on trial in a violent city where a fearful population wanted the police to be rough on drunk drivers and people who evaded arrest.

But hours of testimony and analysis of evidence demonstrated that in the Simpson case, there was institutional racism and the police were willing to plant evidence and lie under oath. Of course, in recent years we have no longer had to depend on TV news cameras following the slow speed chase of O. J. down the highway, or the low resolution of that rare privately owned video camera that recorded the Rodney King beating.

Now we all have high-resolution video capability in our cell phones and indisputable evidence of police shootings of unarmed black men and women is just way too common. I will be speaking in Ferguson, MO on the second anniversary of the death of Michael Brown and I don’t mind telling you that even though that is still a couple of months away, it is a chilling thing to think about.

Chelsea Manning showed us video proof that our armed forces not only commit war crimes on the battlefield but that we institutionally cover up those crimes as a matter of course.

Edward Snowden made it obvious that the 4^th amendment’s protections against unwarranted search and seizure of our private documents was being treated as an almost quaint bit of antique thinking and that our government has given itself permission to not only read our mail but to listen to our phone calls and discover everything in our internet browser history…. And most men won’t even let their wives see that!

We grew up being taught to make fun of the Soviet Union and Chinese fake news services that fed their population a constant stream of false propaganda. Having been a writer for a newspaper for 20 years and an avid consumer of TV news, I can tell you that there is a great deal more propaganda in our news media than there is journalism.

I understand that there has to be a chain of command and that governments have to have secure covert operations but am I the only one that would be more comfortable if Edward Snowden was in charge of the NSA and Chelsea Manning was in charge of military intelligence? 

Still, I don’t want to encourage excessive cynicism nor become tolerant of silly conspiracy theories. But a healthy suspicion of government seems like a pretty good idea.

We acted out the Old Testament account of King Ahab and Naboth this morning… an account from an ancient voice that runs all through the Torah, the Prophets and the Wisdom writings of the Hebrews that was just plain old distrustful of their government.

If you look for passages of scripture that praise the Jewish king you will find a lot of them. Especially in the books written while the captives from Judah were in Babylon…. They remembered their history with exaggerated pride and penned stories about David and Solomon that made them sound a lot more important and powerful than they ever were.

But, as you know, there were a lot of different authors in a lot of different time periods who wrote the Old Testament and there were a lot of them looked back fondly on the early history of Israel when they didn’t have a king. Judges 21:25 says: In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.

And the “we don’t need no stinkin king” sentiment gets very strong in the words of the prophets. In I Samuel chapter 8, the people were demanding that the prophet anoint a king to rule over them and Samuel gave them a stern warning:

¹¹He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers.

¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle^* and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves;

The prophet is making an assumption and a very simple one… that whenever you give someone a lot of power, they will abuse that power and take advantage of those with less power.

A member of our internet audience wrote to me this week to request that I do a sermon on a topic of his particular interest… I’ve been trying to find a way to politely say that this is not a “top 40’s show” that takes requests but this writer added to his request, “and see if you can do it without mentioning Donald Trump.” And at that point I knew I wasn’t even going to try to rise to the challenge.

So, now that I have broken the ice, let me just briefly use the Donald once again as a sermon illustration.  Trump has had a bad couple of weeks. For months it has seemed that the man was made of Teflon. Nothing he said, no matter how false, insane, or racist, ever seemed to cost him any public support. But when he took on the Latino judge in his Trump University fraud case, the worm turned.

And here is, I believe, the difference:  When Trump was ginning up fear of illegal immigrants from Mexico, or Islamic terrorists slipping in among refugees from Syria, he was playing on the anxiety that many of his uneducated supporters feel. He was speaking to their fears. But when he racially maligned this Indiana born jurist simply because his parents had emigrated from Mexico he was picking a target that affected only him.

Trump had said a few months ago that he was so popular that he could shoot someone in the street and not lose support but he has misinterpreted his own support. It wasn’t all about him. There is no reason for the public to turn on Judge Curiel…. Trump wants to malign him because, well, the long and the short of it is that Trump is guilty of fraud in the Trump University case and it is going to hurt him financially and it is going to further tarnish his reputation…. If that is possible.

His defense of his clearly racist comments to his Republican detractors has been to point out that he has just set a record for votes in the Republican primary as if getting votes makes racism not matter…. And, in his mind, that is just a privilege of power.

Of course, we are talking about a billionaire who is running for the office of the President of the United States. That is a lot of economic and political power but it doesn’t really take that much to corrupt most of us. 

Like most of you, I have dreamt of what I would do if I were to win the lottery. And I would wager that everyone of us has a charity or some noble cause in mind that would benefit greatly from our windfall.

And yet, once blessed with such a windfall, it almost never seems to bring out the best in us. Lots of lottery winners have died of cocaine overdoses, most end up quickly bankrupt and several have committed suicide but there is one story that stands out as being iconic for me:  West Virginia’s $300 million dollar winner, Jack Whittaker, got real preachy after his win and started spending money on helping to build churches, he gave 10% to his own church but a few months later called the police to report that a briefcase with a half a million dollars in it was stolen from his car while he was inside a strip club enjoying some of windfall.

But, still, it isn’t just billionaires, presidents, and lottery winners. One of my first time jobs was as an assistant manager in a fast food restaurant. If you can imagine that being a manager of a Wendy’s could actually go to someone’s head, let me tell you, I worked for some really hard wired narcissists during my short career in food service.

In our culture, even the middle class exercises a good deal of power, with or without employees. Parents exercise authority over their children. All of us exercise power over others in choosing how we will spend our money, where we shop and what we buy. I can tell you, the little guy who was president of my neighborhood association for several years acted like he thought he was Napoleon.

There was a campus minister who was a member of my former parish who was married to a stockbroker. Twenty-five years ago he was a nice enough sort of guy but as his wife became more and more successful the money went more and more to both his and her heads.

A few years ago their twenty-something daughter’s boyfriend broke up with her… there was evidently no real scandal and in my imagination, he may have just realized that he didn’t want to marry into this toxic family. But the girl’s mother was so outraged she actually hired a hit man to break his legs after trying to bribe a cop to falsely charge him with a DUI.  And she has been mystified that she was charged with a crime… a crime that would have any of us here behind bars right now but she got probation, lost her license to be a broker and has tried repeatedly to cheat on even that restriction.

How do you get from seminary, ordination, being a chaplain to hundreds of college students to hiring a hit man because some guy made your daughter cry?  What I’m saying is, dear friends, we can discover that not many of us are made of the stuff of heroes. A little power, a bit of cash, and we come to excuse a collapse of moral decision-making.

I am asking you not to fall asleep at the wheel. Don’t let a little power make you drive your own life into the ditch. You are the decision maker in your life. Think about who you want to be and how that person you want to be will live both in how you treat others and how you use your wealth and authority. There is no final judgment but there is a judgment that comes every day when you have to look in the mirror. I hope that you will always like what you see.