“The Profanity of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’”

“The Profanity of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’”   Nov. 12, 2017

Roger Ray, pastor    The Emerging Church

click here for the video

Bernie Sanders (Guide to Political Revolution)

I want to dedicate this book to the younger generation. You are, in many ways, the most progressive generation in the history of our country. You have opposed racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and oligarchy. You understand that greed and the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that we experience is not what the United States is supposed to be about. You know that climate change is real, and that we have a moral responsibility to take on the fossil fuel industry and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

            What this book is about is converting that idealism and generosity of spirit into political activity. And when you do that, I have no doubt but that you and others like you will create a lot better world than the one my generation left you.

It was seven years ago when I first delivered a sermon in which I said to you from this pulpit that offering “thoughts and prayers” is like saying, “I have no intentions of doing anything about whatever crisis you are experiencing.” I don’t often remember my sermons quite so clearly but in this case, it was drilled into my memory by the relatively unexpected death of my father a few days later.

Dad was 91. He had outlived my mother, my sister, and virtually all of his own friends. He died in his apartment in my older brother’s home in Alabama where he had lived the last months of his life. So, we didn’t plan a funeral. His remains were cremated and I met my brothers at the cemetery on the Civil War battlefield in Glasgow, KY. We laid his remains to rest next to my mother. We were surrounded by a few cousins and immediate family and we left to return to our homes and our lives.

I realized that I had taken something from all of you by my previous week’s sermon. If Dad had lived closer, if you had known him, we might have had a funeral here, with all of the flowers and buffet meals that go with church funerals. If we had even had a funeral in Glasgow, you could have at least sent flowers.

If I were going to be coming right back to my own home, you might have even exercised that common southern tradition of showing love by bringing casseroles over to the house. But, circumstances left you with little you could offer but your thoughts and prayers and I had just emphatically told you how little such things mean.

In the last few months, following increasingly violent mass shootings and huge public demonstrations against unjust police killings of black motorists, the use of the phrase, “thoughts and prayers” by too many insincere politicians has brought the hollowness of that offering into sharp public focus.

More and more people are now emphatically replying to these political offers of thoughts and prayers saying, “Your thoughts and prayers are not working,” or “keep your thoughts and prayers and give us real action.”

I want to dial this back just a bit because I have said harsh things about this and now I am hearing similar things being said all over the media. The sincere and loving root of offering thoughts and prayers is when you really do want to express your concern for someone but there is nothing that you can directly do to aid them.

Deb Pierson, a member of our church who has been either in a hospital or virtually housebound due to multiple surgeries and the amputation of her leg for over two years now, suddenly also now has shingles, which she says, is more painful than any of the dozens of surgeries she has lately undergone. I am so sorry about her circumstances but there is not much that I can do beyond offering her my emotional support.

As you know, we have a fairly large internet audience and many of those people have no other church connection but us. I correspond with people who are dying of cancer. I am currently corresponding with three parents who have lost a child to suicide. I talk with people on the west coast and the east coast, in England, New Zealand, and South Africa and though I often find myself saying to them such things as “I grieve with you,” and “I wish that I could more directly give more support,” what I am saying has the ring of “you are in my thoughts and prayers.”

Maybe we just need to avoid using those words because they have become associated with hypocrisy because they have so often been used by politicians who are in a position to actually do something to prevent tragedies from reoccurring but who will choose to do nothing but offer their thoughts and prayers.

I saw meme that sadly depicts this showing a picture of the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, saying to those who have lost family in mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas, “My thoughts and prayers are with you but my votes are with the NRA.”

Sometimes expressing sympathy, showing some empathetic response, is all that we can do but if that is all we offer when we can do more then, well, that is just hypocrisy isn’t it?

Alexander Campbell, one of the famous evangelists of the 19^th century restoration movement said that to kneel in prayer asking God for anything for which you will not then stand and work to accomplish is an insult to God and a disappointment to yourself.

For me, the whole practice of intercessory or petitioning prayer is theologically suspect. It harkens back to a supernatural theistic view of God as a person who grants wishes and that is the God that most thinking people gave up on in their childhood. Prayer, the practice of meditation or contemplation, is rich, beneficial and much to be praised and taught in spiritual communities but the reading of a wish list at the sky as if God were some kind of 12 month Santa Claus is embarrassing and I will even say, potentially blasphemous.

Recognizing that there can be a very laudable and sincere sentiment behind offering someone your thoughts and prayers, and a very legitimate and helpful way to have a rich and meaningful prayer life, let me also give voice to the reason why so many of us find the use of offering thoughts and prayers to be so offensive most of the time.

It goes to these paragraphs we used from the introduction to Bernie Sander’s new book as our wisdom lesson today. Bernie wrote this book for young adults. He tips his hat to the fact that this generation of young people is the most progressive we have ever seen in America. Both Republican and Democrat young people believe in gay rights and favor same sex marriage. They generally believe in science over magical thinking. They have rejected sexism, racism, homophobia, and they are much more likely to understand the dangers of oligarchy than most of our current members of Congress. They want to move away from polluting energy sources towards renewables and you don’t have to argue with them about climate change.

However, and not without reason, they are cynical about being organized. They tend to eschew both the church and the government.

They understand the issues and they are aware that they are being handed a world that is in danger of nuclear war and toxic waste, and that our whole capitalist experiment is failing the majority of the world’s population. They have heard their parent’s generation offering their thoughts and prayers in the face of human tragedy and while they know that we have largely been full of balloon juice, they are not showing great alacrity for laying their hands on the plow of meaningful solutions.

I don’t say that to uniquely point my finger at my daughter’s generation to excuse my own, I am just painfully aware that time is running out for my peer group. When you ask people who they believe can be the organizing figure for the future of progressive politics, too often we hear a litany of names of people who are older than our current president who is, right now, the oldest president ever elected to office. I love Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren, and in my own arena, I love Bishop John Spong, and Jon Dominc Crossan. I’m a big fan of Noam Chompsky, but I also acknowledge that all of those folks will soon likely go the way of Howard Zinn, Marcus Borg, and Ellie Weisel, and I will not be far behind them.

Our generation is leaving an economic, environmental, and political mess to our heirs but one of the worst things we have left to them is the assumed though rarely articulated belief that being aware and cynical is tantamount to having accomplished something. Figuring out the problem is only half of the solution.

Believing in climate science and dismissing old prejudices about race, immigration, and sexual orientation, will not make the world safer to live in, especially if you are one of the target victims of discrimination. We have been the thoughts and prayers generation and we need the next generation to be a lot more than that.

We have taken our churches, our newspapers, our union halls, and human rights organizations for granted… assuming that they would always be there if we ever got over our smug cynicism enough to go back to them so it should not come as a surprise that our heirs do not much attend church, they never read newspapers, rarely join a union and are dismissive of political parties.

So, please forgive me if I have left you with the impression that I think that you should not pray. That is not, sincerely, what I believe. But I do believe that old African proverb that teaches, “when you pray, move your feet.”

Thoughts and prayers, on their own, are not enough if you are capable of more. We shouldn’t pray on our knees. We should pray on our feet, while we are actively trying to do good things.  We feed the victims of domestic abuse most weeks at Harmony House which is a good thing for church folks to do but we should also be doing what we can to change our community where domestic abuse seems to take place at more than twice the rate of other Missouri cities.

I am proud of the work we have done providing tents and sleeping bags and coats to the homeless for years but, folks, shouldn’t those people be living inside this winter. Sure, they have our thoughts and prayers, our sandwiches and sleeping bags but it isn’t time to pat ourselves on the back is it?

Pray, but move your feet. Strengthen the progressive organizations that will give the next generation the means to meet one another, network, and do more than we have done.

"Preserving Democracy”    Nov. 5, 2017     Roger Ray, pastor   

   click here to see the video            

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H. L. Mencken

One year prior to the 2018 mid-term elections, registered voters in Missouri received this postcard in the mail telling them that the next time they go to the polls that they will have to show a government issued photo-id. For those of us who drive cars, this is not likely to be much of a personal affront. If you own a car you have a driver’s license that is always on your person anyway so it won’t noticeably slow you down at the polls.

The larger issue here is voter suppression. The formula is very simple: large voter turnout favors Democrats and low voter turnout favors Republicans. In a true democracy, everyone gets to vote. Who is everyone? In the early days of our nation, “everyone” meant “white men.” In 1870, after the Civil War, black men were granted the right to vote though most southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, and other measures to suppress any actual voting by the black population of their states.

Fifty years after black men were given the vote, after years of protests and demonstrations that were often broken up with violence and multiple arrests, women were granted the right to vote in 1920, when our nation was already 150 years old. Voter suppression, especially of black voters, continued right up until the famous protests of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, culminating in the 1965 passage of the Voter Rights Act.

Most of us here today can remember the historic events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the Bloody Sunday in March of 1965 when the police literally opened fire on protestors, state police rode horses into the crowd, indiscriminately beating demonstrators.

It took almost two hundred years to actually give birth to a democracy where everyone could vote. People worked, bled, and died to gain this right to participate in self-governance. I understand that Republicans still want to win elections but they don’t get to win by eroding democracy. They need to develop policies and conduct campaigns that win the most votes. The claim of voter fraud is, itself, a fraud.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, conducted a research project to find out how many instances of voter fraud have taken place in US elections. Donald Trump claimed that there were millions of instances of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election but Levitt’s research turned up only 31 credible cases of voter fraud in all elections, nation-wide, from 2000 to 2014. Folks, that’s between two and three instances of voter fraud per year in all 50 states. And even if his research missed a thousand times as many as he found, you still wouldn’t have enough votes to affect a national election.

There are no real incidents of voter fraud. Still, states are enacting photo ID laws to solve a problem that does not exist. Who does not have a government issued photo ID? People who don’t own cars: the poor, minorities, the disabled, recent immigrants, and urban dwellers. More than 20 million registered voters do not have a photo ID, 20 million people who just happen to fit the demographic of typical Democratic voters.

We’re good people. We are not narcissistically only interested in what affects us directly. We are, or we should be, outraged by anyone’s right to vote being either taken from them or even just seeing millions manipulated into not bothering to jump through the hoops necessary to vote. But let’s imagine for a moment that we are not good people. Selfishly speaking, does voter suppression affect those of us who do have a driver’s license in our pockets at all times? Of course it does, especially if you believe in democracy, if you value our form of government, if you believe in majority rule, and, in fact, if you ever want someone other than a Republican candidate to win.

When 20 million voters who might vote for a progressive candidate are prevented from voting, then my vote is worth significantly less. I care about voter’s rights because they were bought with a price, one-person, one-vote is the bedrock of freedom and democracy and any attempt at diluting democracy is an assault on any patriotic American. It is heartbreaking to think that any political party would stoop so low as to assault the integrity of voting in order to win more elections.

Let me bring this issue down to a concrete application: The state of Wisconsin was one of the first to enact photo ID laws, preventing more than 50,000 citizens from voting in 2016. Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin by 23,000 votes. It is likely that without the photo ID law, Trump would not have won in Wisconsin and without Wisconsin, he would not have been elected president. So, I hope you can see how important that this issue is.

But, of course, the photo-id requirements is only one way that Republicans are seeking to suppress voter’s rights. They are trying to close voting places, make lines longer, restrict early voting and eliminate weekend voting.

Other nations make election day a national holiday so that everyone is off from work. In America, we always vote on a Tuesday, a work day, so that business owners, managers, the retired, and professionals have no trouble getting to the polls, but hourly workers cannot. If we moved our election days to a Saturday or a Sunday, it would be much more democratic but you almost never hear that idea even being mentioned.

But all of these techniques pale in significance to the real crime of voter fraud: Gerrymandering. This practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts to benefit the party that is in power is now over 200 years old. However, with the advent of digital record keeping and the massive data we have on voters and their addresses, Gerrymandering has reached a new zenith.

Both Republicans and Democrats have been guilty of doing it but as the percentage of the population that self identifies as Republicans grows smaller, the remaining Republican controlled state houses are rigging elections far into the future by twisting and turning electoral district lines for no logical reason so far as common interests goes but very intentionally to establish majority Republican districts that can hold onto power for another generation.

Electoral districts are defined on the state level but they affect national elections. It is legal but it shouldn’t be. It amounts, once again, to taking away, not an individual’s right to vote but rather it renders the votes of more than 40% of our citizens, worthless. I don’t want to sound wonkish about this so let me say it simply: If you love democracy, you automatically hate gerrymandering.

And speaking of being wonkish, let me tax your patience for just another five minutes to talk about something that usually goes entirely ignored for four years at a time until we set out to elect a new president. Our founding fathers, for reasons that were fairly disingenuous in the 1770’s but have become absolutely absurd since the invention of the telegraph, built a monster into our constitution called “the electoral college.”

Article 2, section 1, clause 2 creates a way of assigning each state a certain number of electoral college votes based on the population of each state. Originally it provided an extra layer of protection against a direct, one person, one vote, election in which a gullible public might do what H. L. Menken feared, the public could elect an absolute moron. Now that we have elected an absolute moron, even with the Electoral College in place, we need to give it another look.

What is not in the constitution is any suggestion that any state has to award all of their electoral college votes to any one candidate. For example, in the last election, Missouri was allowed 10 electoral college votes. If 60% of the votes cast in Missouri went to Trump, and 40% went to Clinton, then it stands to reason that Trump would get 6 of our votes and Clinton would get 4. Nothing could be more obvious.

It is obvious except for the fact that states don’t do it that way. Most are winner take all. So if you are a democrat in a red state, your presidential vote is worthless before you go to the polls because our president is not elected based on the popular vote. Voting for democrats in deeply red states is a symbolic protest but it has no impact on the election.

It would take an amendment to the constitution to eliminate the electoral college but amendments are almost impossible to pass. But that doesn’t mean that we are stuck with the electoral college. Either a Supreme Court decision or the Congress could mandate that states apportion electoral college delegates based on a proportion of the vote totals…. Creating election by popular vote… sort like is done in every other civilized nation in the world.

The premise of this book is that most of what stands between the America we are now and the greater America we long for just isn’t all that hard to accomplish. Crucial to the preservation of our free democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. We need to encourage everyone to vote their conscience and we need to outlaw gerrymandering and the winner-take-all state practices regarding the electoral college, and these silly voter ID laws that are just another form of poll tax or literacy tests should be eliminated. And we should make voting easier with mail-in ballots, weekend voting, and easier absentee voting, and our election day should be a national holiday.

I would love to get big money out of politics. I would love for us to have enforced campaign periods of no more than three months, and I would love to see prison sentences for candidates who knowingly lie in campaign speeches and ads. Most western democracies already have these practices in place but each of these would be rather more difficult for us to accomplish. “Difficult” doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done but, as I have said, the point of this book is to encourage Americans to grab the low hanging fruit of reform immediately.

Progressives should never surrender to despair. American greatness is within our grasp.