"A Moral Apocalypse"

"A Moral Apocalypse"   Dr. Roger Ray    June 17, 2018

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money - modern Native American saying

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I was in high school when I decided to read the Bible from cover to cover. I suppose that is not a surprising thing to hear a minister say, but it really wasn’t all that noble. There were no video games, no computers, no internet, and the TV only had two channels. Reading the Bible was, like, a really exciting option in Glasgow, KY in 1972. I know that I have told you before that the zip code in my hometown was literally “e-i-e-i-o.” The primary difference between Glasgow, KY and a cup of yogurt is that there is an active living culture in a cup of yogurt. Can you feel me?

So, I’m reading the Bible every day, the dull parts took longer and most of it had no apparent application to my life so it was mostly like pouring water on a rock, but it just so happened that in 1973, when I was a newly licensed driver, when my siblings were already gone, my parents decided to go on vacation and let me stay home alone. It was the first time that I had the house to myself.

That week also happened to fall when I was just about to finish reading the Bible. In a quiet and dark house in rural Kentucky, I opened the book of Revelation and very nearly scared myself into become a 16-year-old bed wetter.

As cavalier as I may be about it now, in those days, the Bible was handed to me as being the word of God, if not inerrant, it was at least more accurate than the phone book and nothing in it could be taken as having been wrong. A lot of it didn’t make sense and most of it seemed like history that was totally irrelevant, but this last book of the Bible purported to be telling the future and it was a very bleak future for all but a very very few lucky people.

It was obviously highly symbolic and it repeated itself endlessly in cycles of horrors but what was clear was that the four horsemen of the apocalypse represented horrible ways in which most of the people of the world would suffer death through disease, starvation, warfare, or foreign occupation.

I read this at a time when we were still doing Civil Defense drills, teaching us how to live in a basement for years, waiting for the radiation from a nuclear war to subside enough to allow us to venture back outside. The Watergate hearings were starting and we were still fighting in Vietnam. At least a part of my lizard brain was willing to fall simultaneously into the fear and thrill of believing that God would soon be entering human history in a violent, bloody, and decisive way. It seemed real enough to me and a lot of other people during that “Late Great Planet Earth” period of history.

By the time I got into Bible classes in college and grad school, it became evident that the Revelation was just one of the pieces of first century apocalyptic literature that was willing to give up any hope that the world could be redeemed from the mess it was in during the expansion of the Roman empire.

The Essenes, who authored most of what we call the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” and fragmentary bits of other books of the period, often reacted to the violent occupation of Rome in a religious way, assuming that the world as we have known it was winding down to inevitable death, and whatever salvation they could hope for would come in the form of divine intervention and deliverance into a new and different world, made all the more enjoyable by the reassurance that the Romans and all other rival nations would spend the rest of eternity burning in hell after having suffered a torturous death on earth. Happy times!

But I didn’t really appreciate the power of apocalyptic literature until I first visited rural South and Central America. I was lecturing in a school for lay preachers in the mountains of Ecuador, a tedious day of waiting for my every sentence to be translated, first, into Spanish, and then into the indigenous language of most of the preachers in the room, Quichua. It was evening when we started the question – answer time.

The Quichua are typically quite short in stature. They live hard lives trying to farm on mountain sides in a country that is their ancient homeland but where they are treated as third class citizens… the fair skinned descendants of Spain who typically hold all of the government positions and own most of the businesses are the upper class. The mix blood “mestizos” are second class, and the Quichua, from whom the land was taken, are regarded as being something slightly less than human.

They have national health care in Ecuador but if a Quichua Indian shows up at a hospital, they are either turned away or made to lie in the hallways.

It is a racial divide that has existed for hundreds of years. And so the first question an indigenous preacher wanted to ask me was about signs of the coming apocalypse, which my translators begged me not to answer out of fear that it would launch a debate that would end in a fight.

At the time I assumed that my hosts were steering me away from the topic that interested these native preachers the most because their beliefs were based on a kind of sadly childish reading of scripture but eventually I came to understand that it was more than that. The horror of an apocalypse is based on the perspective from when you see it. In their world, the Four Horsemen were not coming for the Quichua, they were coming for the white people.

For people who have been under the thumb of foreign occupation and racial apartheid for 400 years, an apocalypse is not something to dread. . . it is something to hope for. They were nice to me but it became clear that the whore of Babylon mentioned in Revelation was not, for them, ancient Rome, it was me and people who looked like me who had taken control of their rivers, their coasts, their good farm land. Who treated them like slaves whom they could impoverish and work to an early death while never even becoming aware of their suffering. The preacher who asked me to talk about signs of the coming apocalypse was, through a circum locution, checking to see if I was aware that I was about to be burned in hell.

You see, an apocalypse is a moral thing. It isn’t arbitrary, not even in the minds of 1^st century religious obsessives. An apocalypse is caused by a moral failure, a collapse of decency, sanity, compassion, and intelligence. The Bible tends to describe things through a lens that German scholars dubbed, “Heilsgeschichte,” . . . which is kind of fun for seminary students to say . . . it means “salvation history” or “history told from the perspective of a religious interpretation.”

For we progressives whose theology does not lead us to interpret historical events as the invisible hand of God making things happen, an apocalypse is a catastrophy caused by the moral failing of society. Think about the current crisis on our southern border. We have hundreds of young children being taken from their parents and put into detention in dog cages . . . but this is not a crisis caused by a hurricane, it wasn’t a tornado, an earthquake, a wild fire, or a volcano. This is a crisis caused by the moral failing of government. . . it is policy gone mad.

It could be stopped by a 51% vote of our legislature but you can’t muster a 51% vote because, well, because, there are political and financial issues at stake… there is also the conservative base of voters who have been manipulated for years by tall tales of fears of immigrants and you can’t go all weak in the knees about a couple of thousand crying babies. . .

You see, what makes moral decision making difficult is because there is always someone who is deriving some profit, some benefit, from the immorality. Attorney  General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, tells us that taking these babies from their mommas is the law and the Bible tells us to obey the law. He is backed up by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee, who says that what they are doing is just what the Bible tells us to do.

Now, I’m just a dumb country preacher, but I’m pretty sure that is not what the Bible says.  I remember, shoot, I was just in High School, but I remember it says in Deuteronomy 10 ⁹ You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

And it says in Exodus 23 ⁹ You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

Even in Leviticus 19 ³³ When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. ³⁴ The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

I would even quote Matthew 19 where Jesus says, “suffer the little children to come unto me,” but that would be a bit heavy handed wouldn’t, Mr. Sessions, and you don’t want me to open up a whole can of Jesus WhoopAss on you do you?

Sessions and Huckabee, you don’t fool me. I’m a southern Christian and I’ve been wiping your kind of religious hypocrisy off of the soles of my boots since I was a little boy. Sessions, or Trump, could stop this immediately but instead there are now 50 children being taken from their parents every day. That means there will be two more while we are in here this morning.

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell could stop it in a matter of days… but we already know that they don’t care about this sort of thing. This is a crisis of our own creation. We could stop it at any time we decided to do what is right rather than what is profitable or expedient.

God does not intervene in human history. I know that not many ministers will tell you the truth about that fact. The Bible is written through the lens of heilsgeschichte but we don’t talk that way now.

You already know that the universe itself is morally neutral, chaotic, unpredictable. God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, no eyes, no ears, but ours and if this moral apocalypse is to be stopped, it is we who will do it because it is we who started it.

Folks, let’s get real honest about the partisan divide in our nation and in the world. It isn’t about the power scramble between Republicans and Democrats. It isn’t “red states” against “blue states.” It isn’t the conservative or labor parties in England or even the Shia’ and Sunni divisions in the Middle East. The real struggle, the real partisan divide is and always has been between the haves and the have nots. The haves inevitably control the government and the police and the have nots are trying to feed the kids and stay out of prison.

 

As our country has transitioned away from democracy towards oligarchy, there are a handful of very wealthy families who are pulling the strings of government through political donations. It is a good investment for them. It is not secret why they do what they do. For example, casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who is estimated to be worth more than $33 billion has donated about $200 million to Republican candidates in recent years. If you have $33 billion, then donating $200 million will not mean that you are going to have to clip pizza coupons to make ends meet. But rich people rarely give money away for no reason.

Their donations are really investments. For example, he expects his bought and paid for politicians to keep on-line gambling illegal so that people will continue to come and lose money in his casinos. And that appears to be working out for him. He is also very concerned about American support for Israel, primarily in the form of military aid but also in such symbolic victories as getting the American embassy moved to Jerusalem. His $200 million in donations has bought him billions of dollars in American tax income being spent on his pet causes, which, as you can see, is a pretty good deal.

I don’t want to keep you here all day but to just say the words, “the Koch  brothers,” brings up a whole oligarchy driven apocalypse all its own. Again, an apocalypse looks different depending upon where you are standing when you see it coming at you.

They are an aristocratic family. They donate to support the arts in New York, they give to hospitals and medical research. Among oligarchs, they enjoy a good reputation. However, their money comes from fossil fuels.  They inherited a fortune from their father who made a lot of his money building refineries for Hitler. He even brought back a very ardent Nazi woman to be their nanny. She, however, abandoned the family when France fell to the Nazis in 1940 because she wanted to go and help the Fuhrer to build the new Nazi world order.

This isn’t just mudslinging political jargon, these are frightening facts about the people who call the shots in our political world. Charles and David Koch, who blackmailed their oldest brother out of the family business with threats of exposing his sexual orientation, have sought to monetize the earth in a way that allows them to keep making money off of oil and coal while they kill the planet we live on.

They have invested in voter repression, fake science, they have tried to control the media and the government to keep climate science from tightening their purse strings in a thousand ways but let me just mention one before I wrap up:

Koch brothers picked up an aspiring business partner from their hometown in , Wichita, KS. They made Mike Pompeo, a wealthy man. Then they backed him financially to elect him to congress in 2010. They even installed a Koch lobbyist to run his congressional office, making him, literally, the congressman from Koch. Pompeo went on to become the director of the CIA and now of the State Dept. where he can control foreign policy in a way that serves oil and gas interests for the Koch brothers. He is one of the actually intelligent members of the Trump administration who uses Trump like a puppet to run the government in a way that benefits the Koch empire’s business interests.

They were worth $80 billion when Trump went into office but they made another $12 billion in his first year in office and the future is looking pretty bright for them . . . well, if by future, you mean their financial bottom line over the next few years. They are making profits but, as the modern Native American proverb says:

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream  Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money

But, again, an apocalypse is always judged from where you sit when it comes.

Before they decided to buy the government through political donations, in 1980, David Koch made a run as the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Libertarian ticket. I will not take the time to give you any commentary on this, I just want to quote, verbatim, what David’s platform said at that time:

For the sake of time, let me sum up some of the rest: they want to end compulsory Social Security, the postal service, corporate taxes and all capital gains taxes, and any criminal prosecution of tax evasion. They want to do away with minimum wage laws, public schools, income or property taxes.

They want to close down the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Transportation, the Food and Drug administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and they want all Rail Roads to revert to private ownership and all usury laws should be revoked. And it will come as no surprise to you that they want to end all welfare programs and services for children, because, they say, such government programs are: paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient.

God will not send the four horsemen of the Apocalypse to earth to bring history to an end. But the Koch brothers might. They will bring about an apocalypse of income disparity with the crushing poverty that necessarily follows it. They will spoil the earth, making it uninhabitable, especially for the vulnerable poor, while they gouge the earth and foul the air and water for profit. They will transfer all power into the hands of a few, restricting healthcare and education to the masses in order to keep them frightened and compliant.

This is not titillating religious myth intended to scare children and empower the church. This is a real political movement that has the power of the economy and the government behind it and the only thing that will stop it from happening is if the masses become informed, organized, and motivated to choose morality over money.

I know that I will get a lot of mail this week accusing me of trying to start some sort of class warfare. But folks, as Warren Buffett said years ago, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” I just think that it is high time we start fighting back.

“The Trouble with Kings”    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   June 10, 2018   

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1 Samuel 8:4-20

4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, ⁵and said to him, ‘You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.’ ⁶But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, ‘Give us a king to govern us.’ Samuel prayed to the Lord, ⁷and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. ⁸Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. ⁹Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.’

10 So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 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; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’

19 But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, ²⁰so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.’

The United States, a nation of more than 300 million people, has a senate that is limited to 100 members. Our senators are a tiny body of elite legislators who provide oversight to our entire nation. 

Last Sunday, a senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, traveled to Brownsville, Texas to the site of a now closed Walmart that has been converted to serve as a detention center for children who have been taken away from their parents at the border, when they came here to seek asylum. By the way, an asylum seeker is not an illegal immigrant. The legal process for seeking asylum is to show up at the border and ask for it. 

The Trump administration’s ramped up policy is treating asylum seekers as if they are criminals, sending the adults into detention and sending children to facilities where we only hear stories about how the children are cared for. Senator Merkley provided dramatic evidence that not only are reporters denied access to know what is going on, but even a sitting United States Senator cannot even enter this federally funded program to just see how the children are being treated. The for- profit operators of this facility in Brownsville, TX called the police who barred Senator Merkley from entering the front door. It is as if we were living in a new imperial America. 

Later this week, the Senator did gain access to the facility only to confirm what we had feared: that the children in this repurposed Walmart are being kept in small cages, like dog pens. 

This is how it starts, when an American border agent demands that a crying child be torn from the arms of her mother to be housed in a cage, possibly for months, without ever seeing a family member. This is our imperial government at work.

I don’t want to be melodramatic or emotionally manipulative but it is too much to suggest that we should really study this child’s face for a moment because this is what our nation has come to and I don’t think that any of us should be passive about it. What you are seeing right there is a child being traumatized. It may be that she will be released to the foster care system, never to see her family again. She may be subjected to the nightmares we have heard too much about – what really happens to children who disappear into the system. Where do terrorists come from? Why do so many people hate America? If you think about it, it really isn’t all that hard to figure out.

This came at the end of a week when the president declared that he had the right to pardon himself for any and all crimes and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, publicly stated that the president could have shot FBI director, James Comey, and the president could not have been indicted because, he insists, a sitting president cannot be indicted. If you are sleeping well these days, you are not paying attention.

Almost 500 years ago, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, Samuel Rutherford, wrote the book whose title gave us the phrase “Lex, Rex” or “Law is King.” Rutherford wrote as the English Civil War around Charles I abuse of power was being challenged by Parliament and Charles responded to their complaints by dissolving the Parliament. Though Rutherford’s book and the philosophical argument he described in Lex, Rex about limited government power and the need for a constitution to be more important that the whims of the monarch, you can’t say that he was a successful author. He was charged with treason and would have been executed had he not died prior to his trial and his book was the subject of the last official book burning in England. 

His basic argument was that the law should rule over everyone, including the king, a concept that heads of state frequently seem to find to be too limiting.

It is almost impossible to believe that in the last week our head of state’s attorneys actually sent a letter to special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, saying that the President has absolute authority of the judiciary and that he could fire Mueller, or order the investigation closed, or pardon anyone involved. 

And while this is clearly some of the dumbest and most irrational tripe that any attorney has ever written, a large portion of our country is ready to burn copies of Lex, Rex all over again, applauding the fact that our president is placing himself above the law. 

I have received a couple of letters this week from a local pastor who has been shocked and offended by my newspaper column in which I called President Trump “a dangerously incompetent, misogynistic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, racist.” This young pastor tells me that he “thanks God” every day because Trump is president.

And there you have it, a large portion of society is willing to be subjected to an imperial president, no matter how dangerously incompetent, misogynistic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, or racist the imperial president may be. 

I took as our wisdom lesson today the Old Testament lesson suggested by the Revised Common Lectionary from the 8^thchapter of I Samuel. In this church, we do not read passages from the Bible because of our loyalty to church tradition and certainly not because we think that God wrote or inspired the Bible. If I read a passage of scripture in our services it is because it strikes me as being true. The Bible is not the Word of God but it is the collected wisdom of a whole lot of people over a very long period of time and though we respectfully disagree with large portions of it, when you read something like this passage today, every cell of your body stands up and says “Amen!”

The people of Israel, according to the text, had lived as fairly disorganized tribes who had respected the leadership of prophets and judges but they had lived without a king, without a head of state. And they were demanding of the prophet Samuel that he anoint a king for them and he really didn’t want to do it.

Now, mind you, this text was not actually written before there were kings in Israel, and it wasn’t written by Samuel or any contemporary of Samuel. It was written by priests in the temple who had already experienced how corrupt the monarchy could be. The monarch could probably have written about how corrupt the priesthood could be, but priests have a better shot at getting their musings published in the Bible. Even though the account is very one sided, you have to admit, this priest nails it. He records Samuel as warning the people:

 ‘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.’ 

Beyond the obviously dated illustrations, this is true enough isn’t it? An Imperial President will give tax cuts to his wealthy peers and shift the burden of supporting the nation onto the backs of those who work the hardest and have the least. An Imperial President will spend heavily on the military while cutting the programs that provide health care, education, and basic food and housing to the poor. He will literally enslave the majority of the population through economic exploitation and endanger the world through hapless military threats and misadventures.

What I want to say clearly today, and I hope all of you are with me in this, this passage in I Samuel was not written 3000 years ago to warn us about Trump. Though Trump is our tyrant de jour, this text was written to defame several ancient kings who had already usurped too much of the people’s power for their personal gain. This is not so much about Trump as it is about power . . . that classic observation that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

Sadly, examples are not difficult to find. I know of no swing greater than my own contemporary, the Haitian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide graduated from seminary about the same time that I did. He and I, and people like Archbishop Oscar Romero, were schooled in Liberation Theology. He was passionate about confronting the abuses of the Duvalier dictatorships. So much so that entered politics and was elected president. He attempted to initiate a number of major reforms, nationalizing businesses, raising the wages and the standard of living of the poor of Haiti.

But he got a lot of opposition from both businesses and the military. There were coops and violence and “the little priest” of Haiti was transformed into a violent dictator who used a practice called “necklacing,” in which his opponents had a car tire chained abound their neck, the tire was then filled with gasoline and set on fire.

Aristide was heard to say one morning, “I love the smell of burning tires.” Opposition turned him into just the kind of violent dictator he had despised. Now, I mentioned Oscar Romero because, in El Salvador, Romero took liberation theology to new heights, suffered repeated imprisonments, and beatings, and was finally murdered by an assassin while he was saying mass. Last month, Pope Francis started the process of making Romero a Catholic saint. I mention Romero and Aristide side by side because we have to recognize that while power almost always corrupts, it doesn’t have to. You can choose to do otherwise. 

No one is perfect. No one is immune to the seduction of power, whether it is to make your own life more comfortable, or to acquire more money, or whether it is the ego appetite for power itself, none of us can claim to have never strayed from the straight and narrow. 

We all do exercise power, either by what we do intentionally, or when we choose to stand idly by while injustice spreads like a dark cloud over the earth. It is horrifying that we have elected a narcissist with little intelligence and no relevant experience to the highest elected office in the world. This has been a horrible mistake, exposing some of the greatest weaknesses of our democratic systems. 

However, what I think we really need to drill down on is the psyche of the American voting public that once having elected an aspiring dictatorial tyrant who uses the office to enrich himself and his friends, who legitimizes racial and religious and gender prejudices, and who seems willing to assert power in ways unheard of in America, that those who voted for him are still cheering his every step towards an imperial presidency that looks a lot like a third-world dictatorship.

There will always be another Trump, another Aristide, another Kim, who will worm their way into power and then use it in the most corrupt ways, as long as we allow indifference, fear, hopelessness, to silence our voices of protest, and to slowly erode our freedoms as a people. We have reason to be seriously afraid that if someone as clearly incompetent as Trump is, can do what he is doing, what would happen if an enlightened tyrant were to find her or his way into the Oval Office? 

Trump is a nightmare but there are much more talented people all around him who could bring about a moral apocalypse. I shudder to think of what a Paul Ryan or a Ted Cruz presidency might look like. The Handmaid’s Tale or the Hunger Games could become something like a documentary. 

I know that it is easy to assume that a preacher might be exaggerating but the seeds of this kind of tyranny are already planted in our society.  Cruz’s father is a pastor who has literally said that “My son is an anointed King, destined to take control of all sectors of society.” And before you get too comfortable assuring yourself that it could never happen, please realize that Cruz actually has a law degree, experience in government, and is much more intelligent than Trump and Trump has managed to become an imperial president. All it takes is apathy on the part of voters and it could happen.

There has been endless conversation about how Trump managed to win, whether it was clever manipulation of the Electoral College, or Russian involvement, or split votes for Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, but we should be painfully aware of this: nearly half of all voters did not vote. In fact, if “did not vote” had been a candidate, “did not vote” would have won in 41 states. Fatalism is our real enemy here. Defeatism, the acceptance that the poor and the middle class are just the hockey pucks of the Republican and Democratic parties. We must vote in ways that limit the power of government.

We live in a nation with over 300 million citizens. We cannot do what Samuel suggests and simply live as good people without a government. We have to have an organizing and regulating government to have this many people living this close to one another. And there is no doubt that a dictatorship is a much more efficient way to govern a large nation. There is less waste, less bureaucracy, things happen faster and more efficiently than any democracy. It is, however less satisfying for the citizens. Any one of us might be in favor of a government by enlightened despot as long as we could be the enlightened despot.

It is as Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for everything else.” Absolute power should never be given to anyone, especially not to ourselves. As messy as Democracy is and as inconvenient as giving individual rights to others can be, we have reason to remember what happens when you make anyone a king. 

A few years ago, a local Pentecostal church started a movement to repeal some of the city’s human right’s policies that provide protections to the LGBTQ community. I, of course, campaigned against this repeal and when my neighbors kept stealing my “vote no on April 7^th” signs out of my yard, I power-washed the message in six-foot-tall letters on a 40 foot stretch of my fence. Have I mentioned that some of my neighbors are jerks?

I have been very engaged in the fight for civil rights for the LGBTQ folk for more than 25 years. Not because I am gay, or because I have gay family members. I have put a lot of professional and personal risk into this because it is the right thing to do. But we lost that vote. We didn’t lose it by much, but we lost it. On April 7, of 2015, I was out knocking on doors, encouraging people who had not voted to go to the polls and vote.

My very last door on that day, just a few minutes before the polls closed, was the home of a young lesbian couple. They admitted that they had not voted. 

I told them where there polling place was and let them know that they only had about fifteen minutes to get there. They looked at one another then turned back to me and said, “Not this time. We’ll try harder to vote next time.” I had been fighting for their civil rights from before they were born. Perhaps their lives had not been so hard. Maybe they had not encountered the violent prejudice that same sex couples had endured in Springfield just a decade ago. . . but they very mistakenly seemed to believe that their rights were guaranteed and that nothing could ever take them away. 

And I am not going to blame that couple or the thousands of people like them who just didn’t go to the polls, even though, realistically, the failure of that referendum was their fault. But laying blame accomplishes nothing unless you can be satisfied with smugly saying, “I told you so.” 

We have to try to awaken the sleeping giant of indifferent voters. I spent my day yesterday, knocking on doors and registering voters. There is a better world waiting to be born and as messy and unattractive as that may seem, you are the midwives that will help to give birth to that world.

We need to help the poor, the hopeless, the defeated, the oppressed to become informed voters because we know that the alternative is an imperial king and haven’t we had enough of that already?

This is no time to surrender. 

“No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”

“No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”      June 3, 2018      Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

 
 

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 Mark 3:1- 6 Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. ² They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. ³ And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” ⁴ Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. ⁵ He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. ⁶ The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Marcus Aurelius    The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. 

The largest food chain in the world is McDonalds. 1% of the world’s population will eat at least one meal at a McDonalds today. In the United States, about 10% of us will eat at McDonalds today. 

The golden arches is now a more recognized symbol than the Christian Cross. There are more than 30,000 locations world wide and one of them is owned by the Queen of England. They are selling 75 hamburgers every second of every day. The consistent taste of McDonalds food has become so familiar to so many people that, along with the fact that they have become the largest toy distributor in the world, we find that when we are serving lunch at our local domestic abuse shelter, and we prepare really good home cooked meals that we serve for free, still, a large portion of the clients walk two blocks to feed their children at a McDonalds. 

But with millions of people eating there every day, does that mean that it is good food? Does that mean that it is healthy food? And it isn’t even inexpensive, especially when compared with the free food that we provide. They have huge numbers but their product is overpriced, the legal equivalent of poison, and a lot of it only vaguely tastes like what it is supposed to be. 

If people voting with their feet were any clue as to what is great food, you would have to give the prize to McDonalds but we know by lots of different factors that it not only is not the best but it is some of the worst and it is contributing to childhood obesity and early onset of diabetes the world over. McDonalds is proof that you can serve what may be among the worst of food products, but win the economic and numbers contest through successful marketing.

I have good friends who were active in our congregation before they moved to Florida. On some holidays, Ron and June would invite me to go with them to the Chateau on the Lake for the special Easter or Mother’s Day buffet. Our route of travel from our Sunday service took us by the gargantuan mega-church, the original 6 Flags over Jesus, whose campus is visible from the highway as we headed south. We would pass by as their thousands of members were being guided out by dozens of off-duty police officers managing the traffic. And Ron would jest, “Why don’t you draw crowds like that?”

Well, he was teasing but it is not an illegitimate question. Why do we have only a few dozen people here on Sunday mornings? When I travel and speak in Ohio, Texas, California, South Carolina, or in all of the communities where I just spoke in England, in St. Albans, Malvern, Hove, and Brighton, why is it always just a few dozen or maybe a hundred at best, when progressive thinkers gather to discuss our issues?

And I don’t want to fall prey to sour grapes interpretations of those numbers. I don’t have any aspirations of having a warehouse sized church building with a Starbucks in the lobby but it would be affirming if we had several hundred people here on Sunday mornings and if my book sales would at least rise to somebody’s best seller list but the fact is that progressives are not in the main stream. We are destined to be in a rank minority because we are thought innovators, thought leaders, we are prophets in the sense that we have accepted the challenge of speaking truth to power.

There is a bell curve of innovation. A hundred years ago, electrical power was a for profit product. The wealthy could get a power line run to their home so that they could enjoy the benefits of electrical light and refrigeration and electric fans and heaters.

But some progressive theologians at the time, people like Washington Gladden, who history remembers as a social gospel preacher, insisted that the benefits of electricity should be shared with the rich and the poor alike. It was not, initially, a popular idea. A small group of innovators protested, spoke up, demonstrated, and slowly there were early adopters and final a majority that made sure that electricity was available in all neighborhoods. 

Progressives offer innovative ideas for a society, suggesting that water, electricity, and gas lines be run through all neighborhoods. That public schools are free and available to all, with even transportation assistance and after school programs as needed. Then that schools should be racially integrated. 

None of these ideas were initially welcomed, and, as you know, some were violently opposed and took generations to implement, but that is what we do. 

The gospel lesson we took today from the 3^rdchapter of Mark tells one of those stories about the tension that Jesus had with the prevailing culture. This is one that was a standout story for me throughout my tenure in a denominational church . . . Jesus’ critics are watching him, looking for some flaw in the fabric, some Achilles’ heel that they could exploit. So he is presented with a disabled man on the Sabbath when Jews are not supposed to work. He asks the rhetorical question, “Are such religious laws intended for our good or as punishment?” No one answered the question. Jesus heals the man, and then the text wraps up the disfunction of group think, of majority rule, of the sacrament of the status quo – when Jesus heals a disabled man, Mark tells us, They went out immediately and conspired against him, plotting how to destroy him. It is often true that no good deed goes unpunished. But if you are an innovator, you do the right thing when the whole world is telling you not to care, not to get involved, to mind your own business. 

The only proverb I can claim to have created myself, I came up with 30 years ago after my first decade in parish ministry. My proverb says, “If you light a candle in a dark place, you will draw bugs.” That is, no matter what good thing you try to do, you can rest assured that critics will show up to tell you that you did it the wrong way, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, or for the wrong people. Because of that, most people give up quickly on even trying to be a social reformer, in order to stay in the good graces of the majority. 

That’s why I love this 2000-year-old quote from the Roman Cesar, Marcus Aurelius, The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. Let me say this very clearly:  Ethics has nothing to do with majority opinions. If we had waited for a popular vote to end slavery, child labor, racial segregation, or gay rights, we would still be living under severe Puritan rule. I would love for us to have some big numbers. I would love for our advocacy of social justice to be a lot more popular, but on matters where the majority gets it right, there is no need for us to do anything but applaud.

Over my 25 years of writing opinion columns for the Springfield News-Leader, I have lost count of how many arguments I had with publishers and editors who objected, not to the facts of my articles, but to the sheer public offense and unpopularity of the topics I tackled. The thought is not original to me, but I certainly used it liberally in my meetings with editors, “Journalism is when you write something someone doesn’t want you to write. Everything else is just advertising.” 

I understand that newspapers have to run some fluff pieces, some sports scores and recipes, and some just had data reporting, but where is the journalism in newspapers today? Where is the challenge to authority, the investigative reporting? Where is the courage to speak truth to power? I have to keep reminding my Christian friends that they did not kill Jesus for being a moderate who avoided offending people. No innovation, no progress, ever takes place without someone being willing to make nearly everyone uncomfortable and is it any wonder then that we almost never hear that moral challenge coming from beneath tall steeples?

There is a very helpful saying about this, that has been falsly attributed to Gandhi, but probably originated among early 20^thcentury union organizers, that says: “First they ignore us, then they make fun of us, then they fight us, then we win.”

Genuine innovation always starts with a tiny minority that is willing to face social isolation, ridicule, and opposition, but when your cause is right, you don’t give up just because you are always in the minority. It is perhaps quoted too often, but Margaret Mead’s encouraging proverb deserves to be repeated:    Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. 

But I can tell you this: living heroically doesn’t make most people see you as a hero. If you want to be popular, if you want people to like you, if you have some hope of being famous, then you have to set your sites on the top of the bell curve and not at the humble beginning where real prophetic and innovative thinking begins. And if the gospel stories about Jesus are a good teaching tool, when you really knock yourself out to help someone, to assist in some cause, for reasons of jealousy, resentment, competition, or just plain meanness, there will be those who will respond by immediately plotting to bring about your demise. 

Even on the personal level, I have known for 35 years that the fastest way to lose a church member is to agree to loan them the money to get caught on their rent or their utility bills, or even to agree to provide long term counseling. People are more likely to disappear than to simply be polite about having accepted help. But if we are sincere spiritual people, we don’t do good things in order for people to feel indebted or to use such generosity in exchange for loyalty or popularity. We do what we do because of who we are, not because of who they are, and if we are certain about who we are, then it really doesn’t matter whether other people deal with our sincere efforts well or not. 

I don’t know who originally said it, except that I know it wasn’t actually Mother Theresa, no matter how many people try to give it to her, but the wisdom stands on its own two feet:

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.  

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.  

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies.  Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you.  

Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.  

Create anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.  

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, will often be forgotten.  

Do good anyway.

Give the best you have, and it will never be enough.  

Give your best anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God.  

It was never between you and them anyway.

My friends, you are the light of the world, you are the salt of the earth, you will most likely never be recognized or treated kindly for the good that you do but regardless of the plotting and scheming of the majority, you go get busy changing the world for the better. There will be bugs but you have more important things to worry about.