“Making America Great Again”   Advent 4    December 18, 2016   

Community Christian Church

Roger Ray, pastor   

click here to see the video

Matthew 1:18-25     Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ ²²All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

²³ ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’ ²⁴When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

This was a big week for Star Wars fans. The release of Rogue One jumps the story line of the seven existing Star Wars sagas and slips one in sort of between the chapters. It purports to tell the story of the brave and heroic rebels who managed to steal the plans to the Empire’s Death Star, the plans that Princes Lea hid in R2D2 in the movie released in 1977.

Of course, other than some basement dwelling perpetually virgin nerds, everyone knows that this movie is not about real people or real events. Science fiction goes beyond mere fiction. Science fiction typically doesn’t just tell an imaginary story about something that didn’t, or hasn’t happened. Science fiction, such as Rogue One, tells a fantastic story about something that really any rational person would realize cannot happen.

And yet, I was there on opening night and, if you promise not to think less of me, I’ll probably go again this week. The point of such a movie is not to inform.

It doesn’t teach you any facts about history, or science, and, arguably, I would have to admit that it isn’t even very good literature. But I go because it is a story about a handful of people who find the courage to fight against the overwhelming power of an empire. And, of course, as can only happen in the movies, even though most of the heroes die in the process of accomplishing their goal, they are victorious.

I spoke to my friend Manar Shabouk just before I went to the movies. Manar is a refugee from Aleppo who is now teaching Arabic in New York. I have thought of her every day this week as the Syrian government finished the horror of their genocide in her home city, even shooting at ambulances and school buses that were attempting to escape the final destruction of that once great city.

I said, “I wish you could come see the movie with me. At least in the theater a few good people can beat an evil Empire.” She replied, “Good people beat tyrants and dictators every day. We will eventually win.”

I don’t know though. One day David slew Goliath but most days Goliath enjoys a David sandwich without much trouble. Which, of course, is why we tell stories like the story of David and Goliath, that is why we watch movies like Rogue One. We tell stories to inspire hope, hope that has courage even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

The stories we always read in churches this time of year about the birth of Jesus are stories of the David and Goliath sort… and, when it comes down to magical stars that lead a band of astrologers, or choirs of winged angels singing up above the earth, then they come close to the beyond fiction sort of narrative we see in Rogue One. Because they are not just fictional, they are stories that include elements of the impossible which, as I said about the Star Wars movies, could only possibly be taken seriously by the same sort of basement dwelling, perpetually virgin, sorts who take both the implausible and the impossible literally.

If you try to make Luke’s version of Christmas to fit with Matthew’s version you lose all credibility just before you lose your mind. In a reverse Dragnet, In Matthew and Luke, only the names of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are preserved, but the facts are all messed up. In Matthew, the holy family lives in a house in Bethlehem and only resettle to Nazareth under threat of the new ruler of the Empire. Only Matthew talks about the star and the wise men and the flight to Egypt. Only Luke talks about the census, the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem and giving birth in a stable. Only Luke knows about the shepherds and the angels.

They tell two completely different stories that cannot be in any way accurately depicted in a manger scene. However, the stories can be put together in one sense and that is that they are both stories intended to give hope in the face of overwhelming odds.

The only way to miss the hopeful, even radical message hidden within the Christmas story is to try to take it literally as if it was describing history. It is better if we just would take them like a couple of fiction movies…. Don’t try to make yourself believe that Jesus was really born in Bethlehem to a virgin mother, just sit back and listen to the story.

Both of the birth narratives look like they were artificially added onto their respective gospel hosts as an afterthought. The elements of the stories do not appear anywhere else in either Matthew or Luke and we have a pretty good version of the proto-Luke that Marcion had which did not have a Christmas story in it.

These were sermons, concocted out of someone’s imagination to give an introduction to the gospels, to prop up Jesus’ resume’ a bit, and to give the readers a little bit of hope during a very dark time in their history.

The story is set in a tiny nation that has just lately become a part of the ever expanding Roman Empire. People were being enslaved in the public works projects of building roads, sewers, aqueducts, coliseums and public buildings. All of which also cost a lot of money. People were taxed into poverty. What middle class that may have once existed had joined the ranks of the always-nervous poor who perpetually stand at the edge of extinction.

The emperor had appointed one of the really paranoid Herods to rule over the region… a man whose ego was trumped only by his self destructive paranoia….any of this sounding familiar?

They had enjoyed a time of self-rule. A time of rebuilding family businesses, growing a family farm. But that time had come to a sudden end and there was not much light on the horizon…no credible reason to believe that things could get better anytime in the foreseeable future.

For years we have talked about where we were on the morning of 9-11.

We all remember where we were when the Challenger blew up. Most of us here have at least faint memory of the day that John Kennedy was assassinated. Now we all have an election-day memory to talk about. I was scuba diving in Belize. I went to bed with absolute certainty that Clinton would win the election in a land slide and awoke to the awful news that the man who wants to deport millions of Hispanics, who sexually assaults women, who wants to ban Muslims from our nation, who insults and stereotypes black people, who wants to take away the rights of gay couples and the right women have to manage their own reproductive lives… all under the banner of “make America great again,”….. we’ll be telling that story for a while.

And in the month since we awoke to this awful news, have you wanted to just shrug and give up? Having lost so much of what we had thought were a lifetime of moral progress won through years of advocacy, protest, demonstrations, voting, donating, door-knocking…. How does Darth Vader, I mean, Donald Trump get to drag our nation back into segregation, into homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia? It makes me feel tired to think about it.

In the movies hope comes with superheroes with super powers…. It is the X Men, the Avengers, it is Superman or Batman, it is Dr. Strange or Luke Skywalker.

In the Christmas story, it is the opposite of all of that. The hope comes in the form of a baby. In Matthew, it is a baby the Empire wants to kill but in both Matthew and Luke, it is a baby that draws the poor to his side, who brings foreigners, people from other and strange religions, the powerless and dispossessed. In Luke the baby inspires his mother to sing about how the mighty have been cast down from their thrones and how the lowly have been lifted up. She sings about how the rich have been sent empty away and the chronically poor and hungry have been filled.

The story closes with Herod still on the throne, with Cesar still in Rome, with all of the darkness of the Empire still all around them… but there is this baby… this reason to believe in the future.

You know how I love that Bruce Cockburn song, Lovers in a Dangerous Time, where he says, “we have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.” Against everything in us that is tired and despondent, that wants to give up, we have to look for the little ways in which we can kick at the darkness.

I can only comfort my friend who has survived the fall of Aleppo until Aleppo can rise from the ashes again. I cannot stop the pipeline in North Dakota but I can take food, firewood, hats and gloves, and some hope to the camp at Standing Rock and shiver for a few days in the cold with my native brothers and sisters.

Those of you here already know about this but for our internet audience, let me tell you that we have a teacher in our church, Holly Ketchum, who has proposed to publish a children’s book about what really makes America great. Holly and David have taught in Russia. They have done relief work in Cambodia.

They have put their very souls into living with conscience and now, with the prospect of seeing so much hate and prejudice spread across our country, Holly has proposed to write a children’s book about inclusion of people of different sexual orientations, different abilities, different races and religions and to hire illustrators from among these marginalized communities to create the pictures for the book.

Because, what makes America great is when we can welcome a Syrian refugee; when we can help an undocumented worker to get their documents. What makes America great is when we can meet people who speak another language, who practice a different religion, who even love and create family differently, and rather than reject them, we include them, embrace them, and try to learn from them.

I don’t want to offend any of our international listeners but I have to say this, Americans have lead the world in sciences, in invention, medical research, in engineering, computer sciences, and our universities are the envy of the world. Even our music, our movies, our literature are all just amazing because, specifically because… these things are only true, because of our diversity. White protestants have contributed a lot to the modern world but you wouldn’t want to live here without the contributions of Jewish scientists, composers, directors. You wouldn’t want to live in a world that hadn’t been changed by Martin Luther King, Jr. Heck, there wouldn’t be a church music program anywhere if even our most conservative churches really did expel all of their gay and lesbian church members.

So I’m committed to helping Holly to raise a few thousand dollars to get this book produced because I want to volunteer to go read in some of our local schools when I can take that book with me. I want to sit on the floor with five and six year old children and engage them in seeing those who are different from them as being the best thing that ever came into their lives.

I want to infuse the coming generation with a kind of moral vision of the future that will make America great. I wish that we could just blow up the death star and go on to the celebration but that isn’t how we win. We win by kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. We lost an election, but I refuse to lose my hope.

Character Education     Click here to see the video

Dec. 11, 2016      Community Christian Church of Springfield,MO    

Roger Ray, pastor   

MLK Jr – I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weight evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction.

            The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals.

            We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

The intensity of our recent political campaign has spawned, beyond a lot of hand wringing and shouting, some new phrases that have found common usage in the media. We are said to be living in a “post-truth” or a “post-fact” era. Mika Brzezinski, disgusted with the way that Vice President – elect, Mike Pence, kept going on TV to say that Donald Trump did not say what we all had heard candidate Trump say the day before. She called it “Pencing” when any of the Trump surrogates were trying to walk back, obfuscate, or totally deny what their candidate had said or tweeted.

Propaganda is not necessarily bad. I would even say that almost all of the canonical gospels in the New Testament are, in a very real way, propaganda. The gospels tell a story about Jesus in a very laudatory way, sometimes using facts but more often massaging the historical narrative to make a point and to persuade readers to become a part of the Jesus movement.

We more often think of propaganda as used by the Nazis under the direction of Josef Goebbels that used prejudice, conspiracy theories, and outright lies to gain and maintain power. From the west we have often viewed the propaganda of the Soviet Union and Communist China with disbelief that anyone could be so gullible as to fall for it.

Blasé Pascal once said that, “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” There is, of course, no such thing as objective truth, or pure news, or entirely unvarnished facts. We can come close, but all of reality is interpreted through the lens of our experience, influenced by our senses and our instincts.

A propagandist like the writers of the gospels are not only not trying to deceive, they are trying to convey what they believe to be true with such enthusiasm that their exaggeration and overstatement is just a part of the way that they try to convey their truth. We could wish that they were more concerned with facts than with persuasion but I think that we can understand why they did what they did.

When, however, the Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, tells the parents living in Flint that their water is safe and they need not fear allowing their children to bath in it or drink it, then we have propaganda of another sort.

It was Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, who said rather prophetically the week before the election that the problem during the campaign was that the media took what Trump said literally but did not take him seriously while voters were taking Trump seriously but they did not take what he said literally. That refrain has been repeated quite often since then.

We are being told that much of what Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, General James Mattis, and certainly Kelly Ann Conway, say in public cannot fairly be taken literally. Which makes me think, why should we listen to them at all?

Though the impression that politicians lie has been a part of our common speech forever, I can’t recall a time when there seemed to be a plan to just tell so many lies so fast that the deception literally shouts down the truth. At first I thought it was just Kelly Ann Conway but then it seemed to be a technique employed by most of the Trump campaign surrogates on all of the talk shows. They just started talking, changing the subject, and spewing out so much misinformation, deceptive propaganda, and misdirection that the hosts were always just left sitting back in their seats, hardly knowing where to begin.

I have never seen speed lying as a technique before but it appears to be not only in use but it may be the official policy in our post-truth era. There has been a lot of talk recently about the influence of “fake news” on the recent election and on public opinion. The issue especially comes to a head in Donald Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose gullibility for conspiracy theories, hate speech, and fake news is legendary.

Flynn had worked in intelligence in the Obama administration but he was fired after two years because the intelligence he passed along was so often not only not true but was, in fact, outrageously and obviously not true.

The question that I believe is relevant to ask here is why do highly educated, professionally experienced, and even highly placed intelligence officials believe things that are clearly not true? Why, when 98% of environmental scientists agree that our planet’s climate is dangerously and rapidly being altered by the use of fossil fuels are there so many elected officials who swear that it isn’t true? And you can certainly ask this of most religious people in the world: Why do they hold onto beliefs that are clearly contradicted by evidence?

The reasons are not simple and I don’t want to say it is one thing when there are really many reasons. One of things that makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories and fake news is, forgive me for being so flat footed about this but, a whole lot of people suffer from paranoid personality disorders. This is true for liberals and conservatives. Because I have written a liberal ethics column for our local paper for so long, I have attracted a lot of people who, though they are liberals, also suffer from paranoid personality disorders. They may be attracted to me because I publish an article that says that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to our invasion but then, after they come to church for a couple of months, they want me to tell people that the CIA is putting mind control drugs in the chem trails of jets flying overhead.

People who suffer from paranoia need to believe that they are right about everything and that people who disagree with them are not only wrong but they are also evil. So, a lot of the extremity that we hear in conspiracy theories from both the left and the right have a great deal to do with mental illness and in such cases, logical argument is not only not effective, it can usually only serve to provoke. Poking a stick at people who are paranoid only drives them further into their delusional thinking. Some of you are thinking of a family member with whom you recently shared Thanksgiving dinner right now.

I don’t want to make light of any mental illness. It is a serious form of suffering and paranoia isolates people and destroys family but I am not sympathetic enough to allow paranoia to influence national or military policy… we have had quite enough of that. Treatment, counseling, compassion – sure – keys to the Pentagon or the Oval office…. Not so much.

Beyond mental illness there are character issues. What I mean is, people often believe what is clearly not true because they want to, because the lie serves their personal interests. I do not believe for a moment that the Koch brothers actually dispute climate science, they reject scientific fact because they have become unspeakably rich through fossil fuels and they are willing to destroy the planet as long as they get rich off of it.

People believe that their own religion is right and all others are wrong because they believe that their religion validates their race, their life style, their preferred form of government, and their religion holds out the promise of a piece of pie in the sky for themselves.

They often refuse to examine their religious beliefs because their religious beliefs serve their own interests. No thinking person could critically look at the beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Mormon Church, or, for that matter, any fundamentalist Christian Church or even the Catholic Church and continue to identify with the JW’s, the Mormons, the evangelicals, or the Catholics. But the absurdity of the religious claims never sinks in if they have a stronger bond to that group identity than they have a commitment to reality.

Still, there are many who believe fake news simply because they are gullible. Hysteria can be more entertaining than facts. The mere fact that Fox news is often dispensing fake news does not trump the fact that do it with beautiful blond women, sneering, condescending men, and a tone of anger that makes D and F students feel superior to A and B students.

When their politicians tell them lies that they want to hear, and their favorite fake news channel tells them lies that they want to hear and then, on Sundays, they go to a church where they are told lies that they want to hear, then you end up with a public that is wholly uninformed, who can be manipulated with fear and propaganda, and where people are terrified of Muslim extremists who may kill a dozen Americans a year while paying no attention to the fact that more than 30,000 are dying every year from heroin addiction and another 30,000 from gun shot wounds.

Our wisdom lesson today is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. who, fifty years ago, was bemoaning the fact that our education system was failing on two fronts: the first being that we are failing to teach people how to think criticially…. To be able to sift through all of the media, religious, and political input we receive and to be able to tell what it true and what is fake news. The other failure of education, King says, is that even when we do teach scientific and objective facts, we are not teaching character.

That is, some of the worst monsters of history were very intelligent, very educated people, who used their intellect and their information to do horrible things. It is not enough to teach people to think critically if we do not also teach them to prefer the truth over a lie.

In a time when so many of us are exposed to hundreds of messages every day through social media, how do you tell what is true and what is false? In far too many instances, we assume something is true if we agree with it and insist that it is false if we disagree with it. When we do that, the real issue is a character issue. When presented with evidence that challenges our beliefs, a person of character will feel the cognitive dissonance. They will feel obliged to think about it, to consider changing their beliefs or at least to reconsider them. But in the absence of a passion for the truth, a person will generally dig in their heels deeper and redouble their commitment to the falsehood.

There were always Americans who knew it was wrong to kill Indians. There were always Americans who knew it was wrong to enslave Africans.

There were always men in America who knew it was wrong to deny women the right to vote. There are men and women in the Congress and the Senate right now who have repeatedly voted against gay rights, against equal pay for women, against universal healthcare, and have voted against a living wage, who continue to deny climate science, who know that what they were doing was wrong, time after time after time but they did it, not out of a lack of information, but out of a lack of character.

Admittedly, some of them, especially our congressman, don’t understand the facts… that’s an IQ problem, but most of the people who vote against these social justice causes know all too well what they are doing is wrong.

George Orwell is said that, "In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."  You may not see yourself as being a revolutionary but, in the face of the challenges we are facing in our country and in the world at this juncture in history, we need to stop whining and get busy starting the revolution.

If our nation starts registering Muslims, I’m going to publicly convert to Islam. Now that the Trump administration has asked for a list of names of EPA employees who have attended climate change conferences, I’m going to do everything I can to counter climate science deniers and to defend our scientific community that is more interested in truth than in corporate profit.

Orwell also said that, "Truth is treason in an empire of lies." The sobering reality we must face is that we now live in an empire of lies that requires that people of character, people of conscience, have the courage to repeatedly commit the treason of telling the truth, no matter what.

¡Viva la Revolución!

“Economics of Externalities”

 4, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor    

David Suzuki – Economics is not a science – YouTube video as the wisdom lesson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NiauhOCfsk

Click here to see the video 

There is a scene, not one of the better-known ones, in Gone with the Wind: The war is over, Scarlett is in desperate straits and she comes into the plantation house at Tara and finds her now deranged father counting money…. But it is Confederate bills. It is obvious that Gerold O’Hara has gone insane because he is counting the now worthless confederate money as if the currency of the fallen south actually had any value. The image comes to mind for me today because, in a very real way, Gerold O’Hara has become the symbol of corporate America.

As the Buddhist philosopher, Alan Watts, has famously put it, money does not exist. It is nonsense to talk about not having enough money for education, healthcare, housing, or infrastructure because money is only a concept, a measuring tool. You would never hear a carpenter saying that he couldn’t finish building a house because he had run out of inches.

Money is only how we measure value, it is the way that we have agreed to exchange things that really are valuable. Money has no inherent worth. But What does have inherent worth?

Things that have a limited supply have value. Land has value because they are not making any new land.

Clean water, clean air, have value because we need them to live. Our lives have value because we are mortal… we may extend our lives but we know that there is a limit, even to that.  Money doesn’t really exist, but forests do, the fish in the ocean exist, you and I…we’re real, we have value.

That’s what I love about the little video clip we used as our wisdom lesson from David Suzuki today. Economics is not a science. It is an aspect of sociology but we tend to treat it like it is on par with chemistry or mathematics. It isn’t.

Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election repeating a fundamental claim: “It’s the economy stupid.” And that resonated with people because what he really meant was not the “economy”…. What it really was, was unemployment… it was poverty… it was homelessness… it was trying to live without health insurance or a retirement program. And for a lot of us, it was really fear… fear that we would grow old and sick without the resources to care for ourselves…. It was fear that we wouldn’t be able to provide for our kids if something went just a little bit wrong with our income. It was fear that our kids wouldn’t be able to get an education, that they would get stuck in a crummy job and would always be unsatisfied with their lives.

Clinton could say that it was “the economy” but the fact is that the real issue is that economic reasoning is what has created almost all of our fear. The people who control the economy, the captains of industry, the banking system, Wall Street, they keep rigging the system so that more and more of what has real value belongs to them.

Natural resources are limited and if we talk about using natural resources in a renewable way, they are even more limited. But, as Gandhi said, there is more than enough for the world’s needs but there is not enough for the world’s greed. There is no morally defensible reason for homelessness or hunger in this century. We have more empty, foreclosed houses in this country than we have homeless people. We throw away ten times more food than what it would take to make sure that hunger came to a screeching halt in this country.

If only we had a more just and humane way of distributing goods, everyone who wanted a college education could have one. Laborers would not work more than 32 hours a week and everyone would get at least a month of paid vacation every year. What’s more, if we had a more equitable means of distributing resources, we would have more actors, poets, musicians, artists, and architects. We would have more research scientists and inventors.

Our society is technologically, scientifically, and intellectually capable of so much more than we have realized because so much of our government, employment, and even our healthcare and education systems are run by economics in stead of humanity.

Things like clean water and air, a safe food supply, or even a life lived as a musician or an artist, is what an economist will call an “externality.” For an economist, the value of a great work of art is only what its cash value at auction would be but when you go through the Nelson Adkins art museum in Kansas City and you stand in front of that grand canvas of Monet’s water lilies, is the first thing that comes to you mind the approximate value of the painting?  If you have ever had the good fortune, as I have, to walk through the British Museum, to walk among the Elgin Marbles of the Greek Parthenon or to stand in front of the Rosetta Stone, is the value of those works of artistic and historic value purely based in what they would bring at auction?

In economics, a forest only has value if it has been cut down, turned into lumber and sold. For an economist, the value of a cold mountain stream is nothing, unless it can be bottled and sold in a grocery store. Men and women, at best, our economy is only one concern among many and it is much less of a concern than the health of our ecology and the happiness of our children and grandchildren. Surely this is obvious to us and yet it does not appear to be honest to the decision makers in our government.

We are, of course, now very engaged in raising support for the Native Americans who are rallying around the Sioux tribe at Standing Rock, North Dakota. The Indians and others who are gathered there in peaceful protest choose to call themselves “water protectors” because they are not there to riot, they are not leading a protest, they are just trying to protect the Missouri river from the prospect of being polluted with crude oil.

It is not a hypothetical issue. Just since 2010 there have been more than 3000 gas and oil pipeline accidents, leaks, and explosions. More than 80 people have been killed.

Over a million gallons of crude oil has been spilled. Over 800,000 gallons were spilled in North Dakota in 2013 when lightening stuck a pipeline and caused it to explode.

Just a month ago a gas pipeline in Helena, Alabama exploded. Friends in the area called me because they knew that my brother lives in Helena. So I called him and though he was actually fairly close to the explosion, he and his family were safe. I knew that someone had been killed and 80 or so people had been injured. My brother’s response was that he was afraid that the incident would make gasoline prices go up in their area…. That’s how economics teaches us to think. I hung up the phone and could hardly believe that was my own brother’s take on things…. Though since I have learned that he voted for Trump, my expectations of logical thinking have gone down for my Alabama family.

But folks, I turned on NPR… good, reliable, liberal, National Public Radio, and they described the explosion and mentioned the casualties and then said, “Locals fear that their gas prices will be going up.”

This is no accident. This is a lifetime of training to think about everything in terms of dollars and cents.  As I have been reading about the Native American cultures our European and African ancestors encountered on this continent, one of the stark differences between our cultures, one that showed up in our languages, was that Native Americans didn’t commonly have a word for “work.” They didn’t have careers. They didn’t leave their children behind and go to the office… they did what they did to survive together.

The language, the logic or economics has so seeped into our skulls that we literally raise our children to believe that the purpose of living is to get a job and pay your bills. People, do you know that you are more than a job and that living is more than just paying your bills? Native Americans helped one another to build their shelters. They hunted, fished, and farmed but they didn’t have a word for work, or job, or career, or even retirement.

Not many of us, I’m guessing, would embrace returning to a stone age standard of living, but our choice in this century is not one of constant anxiety and pressure or living off of the land.

You have heard me say that I believe that the Dakota Access Pipeline project will eventually be finished. I believe that because it is a $3.8 billion project and more than $3 billion of that has already been spent.  So what is the value of the Missouri River, that joins the Mississippi River at St Louis and they meet the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, and together they flow past Memphis all of the way to New Orleans? What is the value of a water system that provides drinking water for millions and waters the farmland that feeds half of this nation?

I’m just saying, it’s the water, stupid. It’s the air. It’s the land. It is food, and breath, and drink, and life itself. If we are not protectors of land, air, and water then what are we but just some crazy old man counting confederate dollars while the world falls apart all around us?

Thanksgiving from an Indian Perspective

click here to see the video 

Nov. 27, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor                 “Thanksgiving from an Indian Perspective”    

This is taken from Wamsutta James’ Suppressed Speech on the 350th Anniversary of the Pilgrim’s Landing at Plymouth Rock (September 10, 1970)

It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you—celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.

Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.

Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.

These are arrowheads my cousins and I found in the fields of our family plantation near Edmonton, KY. They probably belonged to Cherokee hunters in my home state whose name derives from Cherokee description of the area which meant “dark and bloody ground.” I don’t know if that is how they viewed Kentucky at the time or if that was a prophecy for when they would elect Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to the United States Senate…. But I will not speculate further on that point. 

One of my relatives, for whose family I am named, Edmund Rogers, settled there following the Revolutionary War to establish a slave plantation. Since these spear and arrowheads were found lying on the ground in freshly tilled fields, it is likely that they come from the most recent period of Indian occupation…. Which was probably about when Edmund Rogers showed up.

Archaeologists loosely break down ancient history in the categories of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Until four thousand years ago, virtually all weapons used in hunting and in war were made of stone, wood, or bone. Civilizations were overtaken when a neighboring civilization made an advance in their weapon technology, replacing stone tipped spears with bronze swords and shields, and then the harder iron weapons cut right through bronze helmets.

Gun powder eventually gave birth to cannon and guns. Edmund Rogers rode his horse from the early modern era of the British Colonies into what was still the Stone Age of the Native Americans of the west.  He didn’t have any greater claim to the land than the Cherokee who had been there for centuries, he just had better weapons. 

I listened to a few Thanksgiving sermons this week on line. I was, frankly, shocked by how many otherwise seemingly intelligent speakers still talk about Thanksgiving in the mythic terms of a grand meeting of generous natives with struggling European settlers. I’m not going to argue the finer points of that first Thanksgiving today but suffice it to say that your elementary school plays didn’t give you a very factual account of the meeting of these two cultures.

By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, European diseases were already spreading across North America and the native population was realizing the beginning of what would amount to a genocide. 

There were instances of cooperation and trade between whites and Indians but mostly it was a competitive relationship between millions of Native Americans and thousands of well-armed Europeans. The first reflex of Christopher Columbus upon meeting Indians in the Caribbean was to capture them and take them back to Europe as slaves. 

The first reflex of starving European pilgrims was to rob them of their food and, this is an ugly thing to relate, but they even dug up fresh graves and ate the newly deceased natives… not, I must admit, the only instance of cannibalism among our founding fathers.  Oh, and they didn’t eat turkey back then. They ate eels. I didn’t want to bring this up before Thanksgiving but I felt like a little reality orientation was due.

There were moments of sharing, trading, and positive contact but when you talk about the European settlement of North America you have to look at the whole, and not just a sit-down dinner of beans and corn and fish…. Let’s call them fish… that’s easier for some of you to imagine. 

We stole food, we stole land, and we violently killed millions of Indians. I don’t think that you can accurately say that white settlers are directly intentionally responsible for killing the estimated 90 million Indians who died in that time period because I think that Small Pox and other diseases may have killed many more than our swords and muskets but, still, there is no reason for Natives to have warm fuzzies about Thanksgiving.

This year, on Thanksgiving, we are in the midst of a Native American civil rights movement whose images of attack dogs, tear gas, rubber bullets, and fire hoses being turned on the Indians gathered at Standing Rock, North Dakota rivals what we saw in Mississippi and Alabama during the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960’s. 

Thank God for the internet, without it we would never have heard about the protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. When the corporate media says anything about it at all, it is usually propaganda to cover up the illegal activity of the Pipeline Company and the local law enforcement. 

The Dakota Access Pipeline is a $3.8 billion project that has already built most of its 1100-mile-long pipeline. Though I wish that the whole project could be scrapped in favor of leaving that dirty oil in the ground and focusing on wind and solar power, I am relatively certain that while we might hope for some solution other than putting the pipeline under the Missouri River on Sioux land, the pipeline project just has too much money behind it to stop it entirely.

The more than 3000 people who are determined to remain camped out at Standing Rock through the winter are unlikely to be successful if you define success in terms of getting the project entirely shut down. But there is a larger victory here, in my mind. The Indian demonstrators, who prefer to be called “water protectors,” are, in their protest, raising a lightning rod that is bringing indigenous tribes together in a more powerful way than has been seen for a hundred years. 

My friend, Stacy Wheeler, just returned from spending a week volunteering at the camp and she has decided to get her affairs in order here and to return to the camp indefinitely.  The camp is following strict rules of non-violence, demanding that they follow the law in their protests. There are no weapons and not even things that might be mistaken for weapons. They do not allow drugs or alcohol in the camp. 

They are devoting themselves primarily to prayer and religious ceremonies. They are living communally, sharing food and shelter, and using their own bodies to impede the construction of the pipeline. The excessively militarized security guards working for the pipeline company and those deputized by the Morton County Sherriff’s department have sprayed down hundreds of the demonstrators with fire hoses in the subfreezing temperatures. They use tear gas, rubber bullets, and attack dogs against peaceful demonstrators. Lately, crop dusting airplanes have been flying over the camp at night dropping what his believed to be pesticides on the camp. According to my friend, Stacy, just about everyone has developed skin irritations and a cough from whatever it is that they are spraying in what amounts to chemical warfare.

Several of the deputies brought in from surrounding counties have left their posts, refusing to support the unjust and probably illegal practices of the Morton County Sherriff. Some of his own staff members have quit their jobs and joined the Indians in the camp. I believe that the pipeline will eventually be completed but I also believe that the Standing Rock Sioux have already won the moral battle and the longer they can remain encamped in large numbers the more the media will have to start telling the story of this 21^stcentury civil rights movement. 

In a separate video that I will post as a companion piece to this one, I’ll tell you more about how you can support the camp at Standing Rock. I and some friends will be going up there on Christmas Day for a few days. 

I will be back here to tell you about what I saw on New Year’s Day. If, for some reason, I am not able to be back here by New Year’s Day, then I bet I will have a much more colorful sermon to deliver whenever I do get back. 

Just like in the days of the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, the pipeline company and the government in North Dakota are sure that their aggressive tactics and the harshness of the Dakota winter will wear down the resolve of the Indians. Our federal government has already sent FBI agents in to infiltrate the camp. Obama is doing nothing to stop the abuse of the Native Americans and Donald Trump has received millions in political donations from the pipeline company. You might say that the dye is already cast but I will leave you with this thought:

Just before the battle of Little Big Horn, Gen. George Custer wrote reassuringly in a letter to a friend -“There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”