“The Power Hidden in a Choice”

“The Power Hidden in a Choice”       December 31, 2017          Dr. Roger Ray

 click here to see the video

“Treacherous, Hopeful, Two Faced God”

Every new day is a doorway into the future

Though the door is never entirely closed

So that the past can, through obsession or stealth,

Come quietly through to steal the new, poisoning it with memory. 

This day is no better and no worse than any other

Good and ill are concealed in every choice, every turn of the doorknob

Though many deserve blame

Only one holds the key and with both regret and resolve

 we each acknowledge that “I am that one.”

By Roger Ray

                

In seminary you are asked to choose a major. At Vanderbilt we could major in church history, preaching and worship, ethics, biblical studies, or counseling. You had to get several hours credit in all five areas but you had to specialize in one. I was serving a county seat church in Kentucky while I was in grad school and I found out pretty quickly that I already knew more about the bible, philosophy, religious history and liturgy than my folks really wanted to hear but the one area where I was consistently being made to feel entirely inadequate was in counseling.

I was 22 years old and I had emerged from about the most naive, milk-toast, puritanical families in the world but I was daily sitting alone and talking to senior adults who had been raped when they were children, who struggled with addictions to drugs, alcohol, pornography, and shopping. Visiting in parishioner’s homes I discovered that some of my folks were obsessive hoarders, others were hiding domestic violence, or criminal behavior.

I went to Vanderbilt to get a Phd in New Testament but ended up getting a masters and a doctorate in counseling because I was trying to become prepared to actually help my congregation to deal with the challenges of life.

One of the most important accidents during that time of my life was the offer I made to a chronic alcoholic who enjoyed talking to me every week but who I was not helping. His family had disowned him. His employer had fired him. And his health was crumbling. He didn’t want to go to A.A. meetings but I offered to go with him if he would go. Having a young companion seemed to satisfy him and we started going to a meeting in the basement of the Methodist church just outside of Russellville, KY.

In the course of the evening the room would fill with cigarette smoke so that you couldn’t even see the people on the other side of the folding table but you could hear their stories. What I heard in those meetings was the certain claim that alcoholism was not a moral failing, it was a disease but, unlike most other diseases, there was no surgery and no medication to help. A.A. insisted that the disease only had a spiritual cure. Only God could save them.

Naming addiction a disease relieved the addict of the guilt that everyone else had heaped upon them. Regardless of the condemnation of parents, the anger of spouses and children, and the various casualties of the intoxication, it ultimately wasn’t their fault. It was the disease.

I believe that they were sincere in what they said about turning their lives over to “God as they understood God – their higher power” but all of the conversations revolved about what they did to maintain their sobriety.

They talked about “stinking thinking” that could lead them down the path of drinking again. They talked about the dubious luxury of anger, the necessity of letting go of resentment, of embracing forgiveness, of accepting that other people messed up and did things wrong but you didn’t have to let the memories of those things occupy all of the vacant space inside your skull.

My doctoral project was on monastic spirituality and what I found remarkable was how much of what I was reading from ancient monastic sources: St Bernard of Clarevaux, The Rule of St. Benedict, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Imitation of Christ . . . sure, the ancient spiritual writings sounded like monks talking and A.A. literature sounds like drunks talking but the drunks were a lot easier to understand and in the end they were saying many of the same things.

The Desert Fathers say, “Even if you were to raise the dead, if you are angry, you are unacceptable to God.” A.A. will tell you that if you stay mad at your ex-wife or if you keep wallowing in why your mother didn’t love you that you are never going to get sober. And many times they will add, “even if you quit drinking you’ll never get sober.” A.A. talks about the “dry drunk” – the person who has managed to stay off the booze but they still act mean and crazy so sobriety hasn’t done much for them.

Both my ancient monks and my friends in A.A. talked a lot about God but everything they said about how their faith impacted them had to do with them getting their thinking straight and taking control of the appetites.

There is no cure for alcoholism that does not rest on the alcoholic’s decision that they are not going to drink. And they eschew grandiose claims of “I’ll never drink again!” They will say, “I’m not going to drink today.” And on bad days, they might have to divide that day up into pieces:  I’m not going to drink this morning. I’m not going to drink this hour, or in the next minute.

They find strength in a community that is united in their desire to be sober. They often have a sponsor who is a specific person they can call if their strength is waning. Lots of people have a sponsor and they are simultaneously a sponsor to one other two other people as they all work together to help one another reach their spiritual goal which they often call sobriety but we might also call sanity or, more specifically, health.

I have known very many people in the program who will say that they are actually thankful for having been an alcoholic because their obvious addiction led them to a program in which they found something that was much more important than just not drinking.

At this time of year, this entirely arbitrary holiday when we turn over the calendar to a new year, many people will take the symbolic change of numbers to make personal resolutions about how they will choose to live differently in the coming year than they have in the past year. It is no accident that in the last week of the year and the first week of the new year that all of the ads on TV are for diets, exercise equipment, and gym memberships.

And as important as diet and exercise can be, that’s just the vain surface issue compared to the larger issue of choosing to be healthy.

The Romans had a two-faced god named Janus, from whom we get the name January for the first month of the year. Janus was often portrayed as a doorway so that one side always faced where you have been and the other faced where you are going. As with our history of monastic saints and friends in 12-step recovery programs, the talk about a god is really expressing an awareness of the vitality of our own choices.

In the poem about Janus I wrote for our wisdom lesson today, what I want to point out is the obvious truth that the door never seems to be locked. The past can always come into the future to poison us. The stinkin thinking that can lead an alcoholic back to the bottle is the same as the resentment that keeps us throwing another log on the fire of our depression, our anger, our rage over past hurts, disappointments and betrayals.

Thomas Merton said that the most difficult but the most necessary of all renunciations in the spiritual journey is resentment. The question that I would like to pose to you today is not just what you plan to resolve to do in 2018 but rather, how much of 2017, and 2016, and that year when you got fired, when your spouse cheated on you, that time you had to leave school . . . how much of that are you going to carry through the door into the next year?

Most addictions are rooted in self-medication. It is an illness alright, often times an illness of having too good of a memory. People medicate themselves with alcohol, heroin, meth, TV, the internet, Face Book, gambling, in order to silence their memory. Why will people go into a casino and sit in front of a slot machine without moving, forgetting to eat or even go to the bathroom, for hours?

Psychologically, it isn’t so much the thrill of the unknown outcome because it is no great mystery what the outcome is going to be. Gambling creates what we call a “present moment.” Most of the time we are thinking about the past or anticipating the future. Gambling creates a present moment in which you have let go of the past and you are not thinking about the future. You are fully present to that moment. Most addictions work that way. When your kids are playing video games for hours, they have given up their anxieties, their sense of powerlessness, their fear of failure, and they are in the moment. Getting high does that. Getting drunk does that. And, here’s the real kicker for church folk, meditative prayer does that.

When I was much more involved in a counseling practice I once asked a psychology professor why it was that almost all of the Borderline Personality Disordered clients I saw had an alcoholic parent but when they didn’t the parents were usually rigid teetotalers who were deeply involved in fundamentalist religion. And he said, “What’s the difference, both fundamentalist and alcoholics are addicted to a drug that makes them unreliable and emotionally unreachable.”

Casinos are very carefully designed to remove you from reality. There are no windows, no clocks, it is always a little cooler than might be considered to be comfortable, and the slot machines are loud and repetitive, almost hypnotic. Isn’t it odd at mega churches are built with no windows or clocks, and they are always a little cooler than might be comfortable, and the music is always very loud and repetitive? Both give you a sense of being in a present moment while you are being robbed of all of your money. . . but that’s not really any of my business.

Whether it is drugs, alcohol, gambling, or religion, or even obsessively playing video games, scrolling down Face Book, or locking into your favorite polemic hysterical news station, wouldn’t it be healthier to just let go of the past rather than trying to drown it out with noise and drugs? I’m not saying you haven’t been hurt. I’m not saying that you have to get amnesia but, honestly, how much space in your skull do you want to rent to that stuff?

I think that one of the most powerful images in the metaphor of the resurrection of Jesus is that he still had the wounds in his hands and feet and in his side. He refused to stay dead but the crucifixion was real. Your memory of your past may be exaggerated or altered but, I feel ya, it was real enough, it was bad enough, it was painful enough, and aren’t we glad that’s over now? Or it can be, if you are ready for it to be over.

So far as we know, the only reason that shock therapy works when it does work is that repeated shocks will cause short term memory loss, literally giving the mental patient a chance to think again without the cloud of obsessive remembering.

In a few minutes you are going to be invited to come up here for communion. I would like to invite you to think about all of the hurt, all of the resentment, all of the people you can’t help but hate a little bit, and I want you to imagine that you are leaving all of that behind when you walk up to the table to take communion. You can choose to turn the door knob, walk away from that stuff, and never take it back.

A lot of you are going to be going out tonight and New Year’s Eve is famous for armature drinkers giving themselves something to deeply regret on January 1. Be careful but do celebrate the end of a long and challenging year and choose to enter 2018 with resolve to let go of the demons that have haunted you.

As they say in A.A., Don’t think about how sick you have been, think about how well that you want to be.

“If I Lose My Faith”

“If I Lose My Faith”       Dec. 17, 2017     Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

“If I Ever Lose My Faith” by Sting

You could say I lost my faith in science and progress

You could say I lost my belief in the holy church
You could say I lost my sense of direction
You could say all of this and worse, but

If I ever lose my faith in you There'd be nothing left for me to do

Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world
You could say I lost my faith in the people on T.V.
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me

If I ever lose my faith in you There'd be nothing left for me to do

I could be lost inside their lies without a trace
But every time I close my eyes, I see your face

I never saw no miracle of science That didn't go from a blessing to a curse
I never saw no military solution That didn't always end up as something worse
But let me say this first

If I ever lose my faith in you There'd be nothing left for me to do

There are certain epiphanies in life… those wonderful moments when the lights go on and you suddenly realize some important life truth. Those moments when a seemingly impossible concept in math, physics, or biology, just suddenly makes sense… or for me, when some obscure passage of Soren Kierkegaard’s writing finally reveals itself, a moment like breaking out of dense cloud into clear bright sunlight.

But there are also epiphanies that are more like an “ah ha” moment, or an “oh no.” It may be that I pay way too much attention to election politics but I suspect that I am not alone in this room for having been terribly interested in the special election for a senate seat in Alabama. There were a lot of cheap, dime-store novel dimensions to this election. When Jeff Sessions gave up his seat to become attorney general, then Gov. Robert Bentley, appointed the state’s attorney general, Luther Strange, to temporarily fill the slot.

Bentley was, being investigated by Luther for a sordid sex scandal in which he was accused to using state money to facilitate an affair with an aid. Suddenly, and without explanation, Luther ends the investigation and is then appointed to a senate seat. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I don’t want to be the village jester either. This was political quid pro quo in a Dante style lower circles of hell sort of way.

But Luther is then the candidate for this office but because he got the seat under a cloud and because, somehow, he just wasn’t conservative enough, he did not win the primary election in Alabama. Alabama Republicans chose, instead, one of the most comical candidates ever to take a national stage. He was called “Judge” Roy Moore but he had been removed from the bench on two occasions for defiantly refusing to obey Supreme Court rulings . . . both times in his fierce desire to adorn our democracy with his own brand of fundamentalist evangelical theocracy.

The first time was for placing a huge stone monument of the ten commandments on the court house property and refusing to remove it, and the second time for insisting that court clerks not honor the right of same sex couples to marry. During the campaign, Moore flouted his religious prejudices while waving a tiny handgun that would have embarrassed most gun owners, but it fit with his penchant for trying to impersonate an actual cowboy with his ill-fitting hat and laughable horsemanship.

But the real kicker came in November when women started coming forward to tell their stories of having been sexually assaulted or solicited by Moore when they were teenagers. One of whom was only 14 years old when Moore was in his 30’s.

I don’t remember what the total count got up to but it was 8 very credible women by mid-November . . . A number my older brother, an Alabama Methodist pastor, called “hearsay.”

There was reason to fear that in spite of very clearly being a racist, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a xenophobe, and an incompetent lawyer, compounded by the apparently inescapable fact that he had a history of persistent and repeated pedophilia, that he might still be elected by popular vote in Alabama.

Our own Theresa Armstrong cautioned on social media, “Don’t blame this on black voters. This is a white people problem.” And, of course, it is a white people problem. In the end, even though he lost, more than 70% of white voters in Alabama voted for a pedophile who was, before you even put pedophilia in the balance, an absolutely horrible, unqualified, embarrassment of a candidate.

I can agree with Theresa saying that this is a white problem but I’m not sure that I agree entirely with the way it was stated because even though it is an embarrassingly white problem, the only thing that saved America from this guy replacing Ted Cruse as the most hated Senator in Washington, DC was black voters… and specificially, black female voters who voted 98% for Jones.

Now, I’ll admit that curiosity would get the best of me if I could get a chance to talk to some of those 2% of black women who voted for Moore because there is some “splainin” that needs to happen there. But, Theresa, if you will allow me to say as much, while it is a white voter problem, there is a black voter solution.

Republicans have done everything they could get away with for the past 100 years to suppress the black vote and economic and social pressures have fostered a kind of voter apathy among many minority voting districts, all of which is compounded by unethical Gerrymandering everywhere, but still, if you care about our Democracy you have to vote.

So, we woke up on Wednesday morning feeling like we had dodged a bullet but before we went to bed on Tuesday evening, the thought that I couldn’t shake was this, regardless of the final outcome of the vote, the issue remains that the overwhelming majority of white voters in Alabama voted for the most obviously unqualified, immoral, and embarrassing candidate every to run for office since the presidential election of 2016.

And here is the issue that I have been coming back to over and over for the past several months: These are, by and large, church folks. These are people who have been going to Sunday School and Bible studies, they have worshipped, prayed, sang hymns, and participated in sacraments. Most of them were baptized after they had made a personal declaration to reject sin and to choose to live in the manner of Jesus of Nazareth.

They, like we, are steeped in the scriptures that teach radical compassion, that demand that we care for the sick and the poor, that we welcome the stranger, visit the imprisoned, cloth the naked, feed the hungry and stand ready to give a drink of water to the thirsty. How do we square that circle?

It is not exactly scripture but maybe it ought to be:  Maya Angelou advised that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them. I am going to address this issue in more specific detail at the end of next month, but suffice it to say that southern Evangelicals have shown us who they are.

I don’t say that to be divisive. I mean it. I don’t want to judge, reject, and cut off ties with the kind of people who willingly vote to sexual predators, pedophiles, and racists but I do want to say this: We’re not buying the phony religious front you have been hiding behind and we will not pretend to take your religion seriously. We want to be in conversation with you. We want to be able to reach across the divide of conservatives and liberals but we need this from you . . . we need for you to be better people. We need for you to be more honest. We need for you to value character. We need to see that you love democracy. We need to see you struggling to overcome a history of racism, of prejudice, of sexism, and exclusivism.

Now I know that evangelicals are rarely in this building unless they are lost and I know that our internet audience is self-selected and by and large we’re a bunch of liberals, agnostics, Unitarians, and humanists so I might need to ask all of you to repost this sermon on your social media because this is a message that I believe Evangelicals need to hear.

Faith without works is dead. To pretend to be religious in your self-congratulatory church gatherings while still voting for racists, pedophiles, xenophobes, homophobes, and greedy capitalists is hypocrisy on your part and a direct insult to the Jesus you claim to follow.

This past year has been enough for us to all start singing Sting’s song. We lost our faith in politicians and in the church. We have lost our faith in the people on TV. We know that there is no such thing as a military solution and we have seen far too often when miracles of science and progress have been, in your hands, turned into something worse.

We believe in forgiveness and reconciliation. We long for some unity of spirit. But you can’t play tennis if there is no one on the other side of the net. We want to engage our more conservative sisters and brothers in meaningful dialogue but that requires honesty, integrity, character, and a sincere value for ethics and there is no way to say this but to just put it out there: those are things we have not seen on the other side of the net for a long long time.

We don’t need to have only liberal church and we don’t need to only have Democratic socialists in this country. We need at least a two party system… preferably, so far as I am concerned, we could stand to have four or five, but we need at least two and right now it looks like the Republicans are trying hard to burn their own house down. I implore you, save yourselves from yourselves.

The election of a Democratic senator in Alabama has been trumpeted as being something of a miracle but it was a special election and Jones will be up for re-election in just 3 years, at which time, surely someone with fewer liabilities and more desirable qualities will be running against him… so this may be a very temporary glitch in dark red state of Alabama.

But for most of my life we have been talking about a new south arising from the ghosts and ashes of the Civil War. A south that rises above the racism and anti-intellectualism so easily associated with the regions of the old Confederacy. Donald Trump and Roy Moore have gone a long way towards killing off any faith we may have had in that new south and yet, all that the racists, sexists, homophobes, and classists need to win is for us to give up and that, my friends, is the one thing we cannot do.