“In This Life”       July 15, 2018     Dr. Roger Ray

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 Harper Lee,  To Kill a Mockingbird

 “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

We all know the story of Ann Frank, the little German girl who was forced into hiding from the Nazis in the attic of their home in Amsterdam. We know that the family and their four friends who hid with them were found and executed but the diary that Ann wrote while in hiding is a classic that few people in the west have not read.

There is one passage in that diary that strikes me as being apropos to our current situation. She wrote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

We are living in a time in which we have grown tired of hearing people on the news say that what Donald Trump did today was “unprecedented.” In fact, MSNBC’s news host, Stephanie Ruhle, started to fine guests on her show $1 for every time they even uttered the word, “unprecedented,” because our president’s willingness to insult our oldest and closest allies, his willingness to ignore the very serious crimes of dictators and our most dangerous foes, as well as his whole demeanor of narcissism, greed, racism, and moronic, misspelled tweets, not only embarrasses us but it gives leaders of governments around the world reason to be quite rationally afraid. 

I was a kid in the 1960’s but I remember the turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement, the protests of the War in Vietnam, and the economic woes of serial recessions. I don’t want to exaggerate our current situation and say that it is the worst ever, but it is bad. It is the worst in a couple of generations and, I think it is safe to say that, Trump is the dumbest and most mentally unstable person ever to sit in the Oval office, and that includes the White House custodial staff. 

But, as Ann Frank said, people are basically good, and even though this present moment is revealing some of the absolute worst aspects of our national Id, I am confident, as she was, that this is just a season in history and it will pass and our society will again find our river banks and return to sanity. Peace and tranquility will return, one day, at least for those who survive this mess. 

But I took as our wisdom lesson today, this brief quote from Harper Lee’s famous 1960 novel, To Kill a Mocking Bird, in which the Alabama, depression era lawyer, Atticus Finch, explains to his daughter, Scout, why the people in their quiet little town are so full of racism and malice. He says: “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

In Scout’s world, people were polite, church going, respectable folks but when a black man was falsely accused to raping a white woman, she was forced to see her town in an entirely different light. It is difficult not to vilify people for doing bad things, evil things, horrible things, but the rational truth of it is that most people are basically good, even though they have blind spots and they make bad decisions for self-serving reasons. 

I honestly don’t know who to give the credit for coming up with this observation first, but it has been said that, “A religious person will do what he or she is told to do regardless of what is right. A spiritual person will do what is right regardless of what he or she has been told.” I should add a footnote that all of us are religious sometimes, even though we strive to be spiritual. 

Harper Lee was drawing a controversial sword in 1960 when she has her character, Atticus Finch, point out that religion helps some people to be better people, but it covers up the moral failings of others . . . or possibly worse, it may even provoke them to do many more evil things because they have been told that they are right.

The physicist, Steven Weinberg, said, “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” The goal of the progressive faith movement is not to discard our faith heritage or to despise it but to restore it to sanity. I believe that the root of all of the world’s religions is really an ethical conversation about how to be a good and compassionate person. It is only when these ethical conversations are mixed with dogma and magical thinking that they go off the rails.

If we, something like what Thomas Jefferson did, simply take a pen knife to our Bible or any other religious book, and cut out anything about stuff that is other worldly, invisible, or based purely in magical conjecture, then take a look at what you have left. Even what remains may not be moral teachings you would want to repeat in the 21^stcentury but the great majority of it is.

The difference for us is that we want to be in dialogue with religious texts, we don’t just want to be obedient. Many traditional Christians such as Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians, were raised on creeds and taught to memorize answers to a catechism. Those of us from more evangelical backgrounds had a lot more in common with Muslims, in that we were expected to read and memorize our holy books, but in all quarters there was a stated or implied insistence upon rote memorization and obedience.

You really can’t say that we don’t do much the same in other arenas of our lives. I cringe a little bit anytime someone calls me “Rev” or implies that I am a Christian because I don’t want to own the associations with those words, but I have the same reaction when someone says that I am a Democrat because at least half of what the democratic party has done in the past few years would embarrass Charles Darwin.

My former in-laws, true children of the south, were staunch members of the conservative Church of Christ and they were convinced that Baptists, Methodists, and even their cousins in the Christian Church were as hell bound as Muslims and Buddhists, but they felt the same way about being American, and more specifically, about being Republicans. They were as offended by learning that I had voted for Jimmy Carter as they were by my Disciples of Christ roots.

Dogma doesn’t teach us to think, it stops us from thinking. And that is as true for politics as it is for religion. I fear that it is probably also true for grammar, who is to say, after all, that “a lot” is always two words and never one, or that “y’all” is always slang and a sign of a lack of education? Well, ok, I say those things, but maybe I shouldn’t. 

I am not trying to make light of our current crisis, but I am making something of a faith statement in that I believe in the basic goodness of our species and this current cloud will pass, this too shall pass. People will return to sanity. The question is how can we help them to get there a bit quicker?

I am willing to be totally over most of the literature of the self-help movement of the 70’s and 80’s but if you don’t mind me snatching one little gem from the dung heap of pop-psychology:  The very popular book of the 1970’s, Dr. Eric Berne’s Games People Play, diagramed the interactions of the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego, in our relationships with one another. 

To make it a bit easier to understand, he called our three ego states, the parent, the adult, and the child. Our prejudices and immediate decisions tend to come out of our parent ego state. That is also where religious dogma lives. Our child ego state is where our fun loving, impulsive, and sometimes our needy thinking resides. Even elderly couples who have been married for many decades will sometimes speak to one another as a parent speaking to a child: “You didn’t really spend money on that did you?” or “Would you please start doing your own dishes?”

Dr. Berne asked his readers to see that the parent voice in us tries to control others through shame and dogmatic statements, and the child in us tries to manipulate through willfulness, name calling, and temper tantrums, that the only way out of this is for someone to start thinking and speaking as an adult. 

It is one thing to call our president a liar, and he is, but it is another to remain in an adult mode and when Trump says that Germany is entirely controlled by Russia because they get 70% of their energy from Russia, we can flatly reply, “No, Germany gets just 22% of their energy needs from Russia and that is just natural gas that they prefer to burning coal, which they have in abundant supply.” Also, Germany is adding more and more wind and solar powered energy sources so Russia has no hold on Germany at all. That is an adult response and if Trump or his supporters keep shouting “fake news” it is up to us not to fall into a child ego state and start arguing out of insults. The more Trump acts like a child, the more important it is for us to act like adults. 

When he says that the USA pays for 90% of Nato’s expenses, we can correct that quite factually by just saying, actually, we only pay 22%. When we shame our Trump supporting family members and friends for having voted for a child stealing, misogynistic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, moron, then we are taking on the role of a parent and that never really helps. It may feel a bit cathartic at the moment, but it doesn’t help.

You don’t speak to their child and you don’t speak to their parent, you speak as an adult to an adult, and it may take months and dozens of exchanges but the hope is that we will have more adult conversations and less name calling and shaming. 

About 25 years ago I visited a counseling client who was a patient at the Marion Center, a local mental health hospital. She had gone through a divorce and some rocky relationships and she had begun to try and manipulate everyone through attention seeking suicidal gestures that finally led to police action and a forced stay in a mental hospital. She said something to me during that visit that has stuck with me as one of the basic facts of human psychology; she said, “I have learned that if you don’t want people to treat you like you are crazy, you have to stop acting like you’re are crazy.” 

Traditional expressions of Christianity, with all of its Bible studies, sacraments, guilt, and shame, has not proven effective in stemming the tide of insanity that is pouring out of the White House and the Congress and is now spreading threateningly into the Supreme Court. Every provocative tweet, every incendiary allegation, every dishonest, narcissistic statement, invites us to get down in the mud with him and his supporters, and with good reason . . . just don’t do it. 

If shaming people for being ignorant would make them smarter, we would be living in the MENSA Club capital of the world. If provocative name calling and push back would make people be rational, Putin would be a Peace Corp volunteer and Kim Jong Un would be a hairstylist. 

But the truth is that we have some hard work and some hard times ahead of us. I wish that all Christians could get their head out of the clouds, stop worrying about

Heaven and hell and start worrying about kids getting lead poisoning from tap water in Flint, brown kids being put into kiddy prison in Texas and Arizona, and poor people dying from lack of access to health care. I don’t mind their theological diatribes on baptism, communion, and their tediously repetitious praise hymns if only they would feed the hungry, house the homeless, care for the sick, and welcome the aliens in our midst. 

You have been going to Bible studies all of your lives, and when you hear Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, tell you that it is biblical to take children away from their parents, you don’t need me to remind you that the Bible in their hands is as dangerous as giving the car keys to a drunk Stevie Wonder. You know better. I know that you are basically good and that, removed from your partisan invective, that there is an adult in there that is ready to return to sanity. I just want to help to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Escape from suffering

Escape from suffering     July 8, 2018      Dr. Roger L. Ray

click here to see the video

(I will post the full text within the next 24 hours)

The 4 noble truths of Buddhism provide an path out of the suffering that defines human existence. Seeking the middle way is a spiritual goal that should be familiar to persons of all faith backgrounds, helping us to find a healthy way through a culture that is always pushed towards the extremes of consumerism, hoarding, addiction, pornography, and partisan bickering. 

These progressive sermons are available as podcasts at:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485

“An American Creed”

“An American Creed”                      July 1, 2018             Dr. Roger Ray

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From Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”

"Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

And have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and In every motion and joint of your body."

         I received a phone call last week from one of our listeners in Chicago. Tom introduced himself saying that he was a progressive before they were called progressives and he sent me a copy of a book he wrote 40 years ago to prove his point. And, in fact, 30 years ago, we progressive religious types were more often called “liberals” and before that we were called “academics.” I have no doubt that in a few years we will be called something else. I may more generally prefer the way that the Buddha is said to have described himself, he said that he was not a God, or a demi-god, nor even a prophet. He said simply that he was awake. 

Tom was understandably proud of having seen through the fog of religious supernatural teachings without the benefit of having gone to college or having had a mentor to help him. 

That is not a small thing to be able to say about yourself but I have made it almost a hobby to find examples this kind of awakening in literature and among the people that I meet. A last week we read a 2000 year old passage from Marcus Aurelius that revealed a very mature progressive insight and we often use quotes from Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, or Thomas Jefferson that reveal that a lot of people who did not spend years in seminary or a graduate school of religion were able to literally wake up from the illusions and magical thinking that have left so much of history in a fog.

For our Independence weekend, I had selected this passage from Walt Whitman’s most famous book of poems, “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman first published this collection when the United States was not yet even 75 years old, but it reflected the imagination and progressive view of religious and political liberty, and a deep respect for the rights and value of every person. I took this passage as almost a creedal statement for what it might mean to be a patriotic American:

       "Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

This is the America they told us about in school, isn’t it? The America that was a beacon of liberty, in which there was to be no aristocrat and peasant, and where there was to be no religious coercion, and where every person’s rights would be equally respected. 

I often run into people who act like our progressive views on faith and civics is some kind of brand new, far left, and uninformed concoction but see, this is Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, this is Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony. What we are trying to articulate, what we demonstrate and protest for, what we stand for, is not a new vision but it is one that is at risk. 

For people who are awake, this has been a bad week in the news. Even before Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, the Supreme Court handed down rulings that further the cause of the wealthy elite who want to break the back of labor unions to drive the wages of working Americans even lower than they already are. . . literally a political favor for the Koch brothers. And they voted to affirm the blatantly religious discrimination in Trump’s “Muslim ban,” a decision that anyone with a single freshman class in civics would know was unconstitutional but the constitution doesn’t say what it says, it says what the majority of Supreme Court Justices say it says and, right now, they are interpreting it so far to the right that it would seem to undermine the Revolutionary War and reinstitute a monarchy with its classes of lords and commoners in America. 

This week we had another mass shooting, this time at a newspaper office in Maryland. This is an example of what you have heard me say several times. . . the charged rhetoric from the right, when Trump calls journalists “the enemy of the people,” and the “lying media,” and when he points them out at his rallies and encourages people to boo and shout insults at the press, calling them “disgusting” people . . . it is not that Trump will have journalists shot, it is that their rhetoric encourages their unhinged followers to do it. 

When the President of the United States repeatedly and publicly derides the media, while praising the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jun-Un, and Xi Jinping, then there will inevitably be some gun nut who takes him seriously, someone who will kill journalists. 

I have lately been reading Tailspin, a book by Yale Journalism professor, Steven Brill, about the 50 year downward spiral America has been in, abandoning the noble vision of this country articulated by Jefferson, Washington, Emerson, Whitman, Paine, and Thoreau, that has been threatened by people and politicians who want to make themselves great rather than to make America Great. 

I’m a news junky and it is tempting to focus so microscopically on the current moment that we lose sight of the big picture in which the growing influence of money in politics and the massive transfer of our nation’s wealth into the hands of the few, is a process that has been going on for a very long time. 

I don’t understand how some movies are released on Direct TV or Netflix before they are released in theaters, even when they boast a cast of big dollar talent, but the 2017 movie, Shock and Awe, is worth figuring out how to see it. It documents the journalistic work of Knight Ridder in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Knight Ridder is generally recognized as being the only news agency to accurately call out the Bush administration’s false narrative that created their case for going to war. Sadly, Knight Ridder is a news agency, not a newspaper, so their associated newspapers elected not to run most of what their excellent and courageous reporters wrote. 

I know the feeling. During 2003, I spent most of my time and energy trying to wake people up to the evident fact that the Bush administration was lying to us, and my efforts didn’t amount to much except alienating a lot of formerly supportive church members. But the New York Times eventually apologized to their readers for just printing the lies of the Bush administration rather than the honest stories written by Knight Ridder. I’m still waiting for an apology from National Ave. Christian Church but, as Confucius said, “He who waits for roast duck to fly into his mouth, waits a long time.” 

But in case anyone has forgotten, let me retrace some of these 15 year old steps. The Bush administration used the Al Qaeda attacks on the US on 9-11 to manufacture a case for invading Iraq. It was a completely spurious claim, cooked up for President George W. Bush by Vice President Dick Cheney, 

The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and advisor to the President, Condoleezza Rice,

and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and sold to the UN by then Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell. 

I don’t want to be melodramatic about this. . . I don’t want you to hear me as being partisan, or divisive but here are the facts, facts that I knew in 2003 and facts that virtually everyone has acknowledged for the past decade: These six people dismissed reliable intelligence and knowingly inflated what they knew to be entirely false intelligence in order to start a war with a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11 and which had not and could not attack the United States.

They lied to the American people to start a war where we still have troops engaged on the ground, 15 years later. A war that has already cost us $2 trillion dollars and in which more than 36,000 American troops have been killed or seriously injured, and, if you can stand to think about it, more than a million citizens of Iraq have been killed… a million men, women and children who had done nothing to us.

This is, in the most flat-footed, even handed, rational way of thinking, undeniably a war crime against Iraq and treason against the United States of America and yet none of these six people have ever been charged with so much as jaywalking! There are nations where they do not dare to travel because they would be arrested and charged with war crimes but here in the USA, they smile, appear on talk shows, write books, and paint while sitting in the bathtub. 

I heard Colin Powell speak at MSU a few years ago and I went fully expecting to hear him apologize for his role in selling the UN on all of the lies that let to this inexcusable war and he actually spent over an hour nearly breaking his arm, patting himself on the back for his storied role in American history. I was disgusted by Powell but even more, it has left me to wonder about the privileged class in America. . . the entitled, who, no matter what evil they do, are never charged with a crime and are never held responsible for their actions.

As soon as he took office, Obama announced that he would not prosecute the war crimes committed under the Bush administration because the nation needed to look forward and not backward. Now, folks, I can understand that when Ford pardoned Nixon, it was for the good of the country to avoid a trial that would have ended up sending a former President to prison. I am not sure that I agree with it, but I understand it.

But with two million Americans in prison for smoking pot, shop lifting, and burglary, how can you cook up a plot to waste $2 trillion American tax dollars, kill or wound 30,000 soldiers, and murder a million innocent civilians and just get book deals and six figure speaking fees? Are we a nation of laws? Is Justice blind? Or are there people who have to obey the laws or face severe consequences and another class of people who can do absolutely the most evil things done in the world today, and suffer no repercussions at all?

Am I a crazy, leftist liberal to believe that all of us are equally accountable to the law? Or am I just awake? I’m not trying to be strident about this. I think that our judicial system is out of control in being way too eager to hand out prison sentences. I wish that I could put at least 3/4ths of the people in prison on parole today. Prison should only be used to protect us from violent criminals, but these six people are directly responsible for having murdered more people than everyone we have in prison now, combined! 

And they have never been charged with a crime and for that everyone in America should be ashamed of our country. Is that too strong? Am I wrong here?

I want America to be great but I want us to be great for being a free nation, a nation that values liberty, civil rights, and has a justice system that is the same for blacks and whites, gay and straight, rich and poor, and for the powerful and for the rest of us. 

To get back to our current situation . . . Two years ago, Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court appointment from President Barack Obama. In an entirely unconstitutional and unethical political theft, he refused to give Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland a Senate hearing. Obama should have fought back hard but he seemed to accept it, and, frankly, most of the rest of us were passive about it because we were mistakenly confident that Clinton would win the presidential election, and when she didn’t, we were too shocked to muster much complaint. I didn’t get too excited because I thought Garland was way too conservative for the Supreme Court . . . you can mark that down in your little book as being at least one time that I was wrong. There may be other examples but I encourage you not to be petty.

So Trump was able to appoint the 49 year old, conservative darling, Justice Neil Gorsuch, to the court, giving at least 30 years to another anti-gay, anti-civil rights, pro-voter suppression, and anti-abortion voice on the nation’s highest court, and now Trump is cued up to appoint another nightmare to lock down the right-wing, anti-American nature of the court for another two generations.

Folks, I may be delusional. You will have to decide that for yourselves, but I do not see this current state of affairs through the lens of a battle between Republicans and Democrats, or between conservatives and liberals. In my mind, we are engaged in a battle for a free and democratic America. We are engaged in a struggle between those who want to take reproductive rights away from women, who want to take living salaries and job security from blue collar workers who want to take voting rights from minorities and the poor, and who have demonstrated that they are willing to literally take mothers’ babies from them in order to scare immigrants from coming to our country – we are in a struggle against vicious insanity and a morally awake America, an America about which we can be patriotic with good reason.

Now, I don’t want to be the kind of person who stands up here and wastes your time with a lot of political “woe is me” stuff, just pounding my chest over how angry I am about illegal wars, aggressive immigration tactics, and ham-fisted management of the government without giving some positive suggestions. I have a lot, but this is not a stump speech so let me narrow it down to just this immediate concern: 

Since Mitch McConnell clearly unconstitutionally prevented Merrick Garland’s rightful place on the bench, I think that Senators who are awake should make it clear that they will not vote to approve anyone Trump nominates other than Merrick Garland. 

We need to stand up for what is right and start insisting that our government do the same. And, yes, I know that it probably won’t work but that doesn’t mean that we should cave in so easily.

Secondly, we should vote this illegitimate regime out of office this fall and when we have control of the house and the senate, we should change the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13 or 15. There is nothing in the constitution about how many justices comprise the Supreme Court and if we have five right-wing justices who want to protect corporations and take rights away from citizens, we need to outnumber them with people who are more woke. 

And we need some real diversity on the court. Sure, we have some women and one sort of black guy but every single member of the Supreme Court for the past generation has been either a Catholic or a Jew and every single one of them attended either Harvard or Yale. That’s not diversity and that’s not reflective of America. 

However, I understand the value of appointed younger jurists so that they have a longer tenure on the court, but I would like to see this tactic and raise it one . . . there is nothing in the constitution that says that a member of the Supreme Court has to have graduated from Harvard or Yale or, for that matter, any law school at all.

I’d like to nominate people who might not have experience on the bench but who have shown that they have courage and that they understand ethics. 

I would like to nominate David Hogg and Emma Gonzales, survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Florida. They strike me as being great citizens and exemplary leaders. And there might be a reason to expect sane gun laws to finally come to America.

I don’t know their names, but I would like to find a couple of the mothers of these kids who have been taken from their families and made to sleep on the floor of Trumps dog kennel prisons in Texas, I think they would make good jurors and I would have a lot more confidence in their ability to hand down decisions related to immigration than this Muslim-ban-approving-posse occupying the bench right now. 

And just to show that I can also be inclusive, I’d like to nominate one more Catholic and one more Jew . . . Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. 

Sure, they’re comedians but sadly, over the past 20 years, they have made more sense and shown more insight than any elected official, Republican or Democrat, that I have heard speak. And I can say this about them, something that I cannot say about many politicians I have ever known, I feel like we can trust them. That would make a court of 15 people and I believe it would be the best Supreme Court we have ever had. 

It has been a difficult week for people of conscience, but we are a part of a long and storied heritage of progressive people who have a vision for our nation, a nation founded in liberty and justice, and always striving for a kind of equality that we know is right, even if the world has never yet seen it. 

I refuse to give up on America. We have lost a lot of territory in the last two years but I am not ready to surrender and I pray that you are not either.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXGUNvIFTQw)

“Because We are all Connected”

“Because We are all Connected”     June 24, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray    
click here to see the video
        

Marcus Aurelius -  Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.

 We have one fact stated as undeniable in two entirely different perspectives. The famous astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, succinctly says: We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

And the revered Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, has said that we are here to awaken from our illusion of separation. That is, your sensation of, your belief that you are separate from other people, from the earth itself, is just an illusion.

I like the way that Eckhart Tolle says it: You are not in the Universe. You are the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.

From both a scientific and a spiritual perspective, we affirm one of those very basic facts of existence, we are all connected at the most fundamental level of existence. Why then is there so much apparent division, such rivalry, so much prejudice and partisanship?

In the early days of our church, Michael Larsen captured these two photographs that we have long displayed here in our building. This is a photo of two of our children when they were very young, the picture literally preaches a sermon about the innocence that children can experience before they are exposed to prejudice. A lily-white child and a black child find friendship, affection, joy, in simply discovering the wonder in one another’s faces. This is the natural state of the world before prejudice is taught.

And this picture of Ruth Miller, a senior white woman, the wife of a retired pastor, lovingly touching the face of a young black gay man. This is a better sermon…. This is a sermon about how you can live in a world that fills you with prejudice, mistrust, rejection, rivalry, can be overcome. The connection can be restored. If a church is what a church should be, the church should be a place of healing, of restoration, of literally unlearning the messages of division, prejudice, and partisanship that the world is so full of.

The wonderful song from South Pacific, You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught, prophetically says:

You've got to be taught To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught From year to year,
It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

We learn prejudices from our families, from subtle messages of assumed divisions that just hang in the air, prejudices are portrayed in sit-coms, and whispered in gossip. The little town where I grew up in Kentucky was 90% white, and about 10% black. To the best of my knowledge, there was not a single Hispanic or Asian living there. There was one Jewish family, only a few Catholics, but my father was a case study in irrational prejudice.

He was prejudiced against black people in general, though notably generous and considerate of the black people he actually knew. He hated Jews though he loved buying his clothes from the men’s clothing store owned by our only Jewish family in town. But strangely, he hated Asians, and communists, and socialists, and oddly seemed to think that they were all basically the same. He actually believed that Japan was a communist country because the Japanese are Asian. The only people who were communist who were not Asian were labor union members.

My dad, however, was not stupid. I think that he was inherently, quite bright, but he was gullible. He uncritically preserved the prejudice of his slave owning ancestors, he accepted the anti-Catholic teachings of the Church of Christ where he was taken to church, and he embodied the brain washing of his military training. During WW II

young men taken from the farms of the mid-West were not killers. They were not soldiers. They might have been rough in lots of ways but to turn them into fierce soldiers, they were pilloried with images of Nazi’s burning books and raping American women. The Japanese were portrayed as monkeys with tails and as rapists and murderers. My dad wasn’t stupid, but he was carefully taught by the United States Army.

But that was a long time ago. Where is all of this prejudice and division coming from today? As tempting as it is to blame almost everything on Donald Trump, it isn’t that he invented dog-whistle politics, he is not the author of racism, or xenophobia. But, when he launched his campaign by invoking fear of immigrants saying: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have losts of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people…” he was just throwing another log on the fire of prejudice that has been smoldering in America all along, a flame that had been building up fuel all during the eight years that a black family inhabited the White House, and during the time when the United States government, intentionally or by inference, fed the public on fear of Arab Muslims.

Here is the fact that I am extolling today: We are all connected. There is only the most slight differences biologically between races, slight differences theologically between religions, insubstantial differences based on languages or nations of origin. Every attempt at division is deception. It is trickery, manipulation, it is a lie.

Trump didn’t invent the lie. But he knew how willing that Americans are to believe the lie. You may of seen tweets by the imaginary character, Werner Twertzog, a clever creation intended to dispense wry observations on life in the style of the German film-maker, Werner Hertzog, but this one grabbed my attention as going far beyond clever immitation. It is shockingly true, as we have watched people trying to defend the recent practice of putting babies in cages at the southern border of America, something that would never happen on the northern border of America, that America is waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of our people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 just watches.

There are some seriously messed up things going on in the world right now. I have always been one to ignore those who made constant references to Nazi practices and tendencies but when Trump brought out a group of victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens, it really did look like a page out of Hitler’s playbook.

Hitler used to publish lists of people who claimed to have been victimized by Jews in order to imply that all Jews were criminals. Trump is trying to trick you into believing that all Hispanic immigrants are criminals.

This kind of propaganda can work. The Russians probably changed the outcome of our last presidential election by filling social media with deceptive charges against Hillary Clinton. It isn’t that she, or anyone else for that matter, was squeaky clean but trying to blame her for the deaths at Benghazi or act like the use of a private email server was the most horrible crime since the abduction of the Lindberg baby, only worked on people who were willing to be led by the nose through manipulation into doing Russia’s bidding at the ballot box by delivering their useful idiot to the White House.

I have a three-point sermon today. I can’t usually say that but today it works out that way. The first point is that we are all connected. That is a fundamental truth. It is true scientifically and it is true spiritually. The second point is that the world is being torn apart by those who insist upon dividing us between Republicans and Democrats, between conservatives and liberals, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims, the rich and the poor, the black and brown and the white, the young and the old, the educated and the experienced. Trump’s arrogance and ineptitude increase the chances that nuclear war may break out in Asia or the Middle East or even here. The stakes are high, and we must remain informed and involved.

But my third point is that we must not become what we loath. We have to remain meaningfully engaged but we don’t need to be drawn into the divisive battle in a way that turns us into the kind of people we find to be so dangerous and repulsive.

To that end I really appreciate the meditation exercises that David Ketchum has been leading us in during class time. It seems to me to be vitally true that if we are going to meaningfully engage in fighting the injustice and insanity of the world that we must remain centered, sane, peaceful, and united ourselves.

David asks us to picture ourselves sitting on the bank of a river and when negative forces try to drive our thoughts into anger, hostility, or division, to just come back to that vision of ourselves, sitting peacefully by a river. Of course, in monastic tradition, they often will use an icon to center their meditation, or a candle, or the sound of a bell. Whatever takes you back to that place where you can remember that we are all connected and all the prejudice and division the world is trying to drag us into is nothing but deception and manipulation.

I have lately found myself coming back to this little video of a two-year-old girl dancing to the music of her own soul. I don’t know if she knows that she is black. . . That there are already millions of people who will not hire her, daddy’s who will not let their sons take her to the prom, or movie producers who will never be able to see her beauty.

I don’t know if she knows that she is poor and that most doors to education will be closed to her. I don’t know if she knows that she lives in a dangerous neighborhood and that she might have to fight to even keep her brother alive through his teen years.

Maybe I’m being silly. Maybe I am indulging myself in fantasy. But, I feel like she’s got this.

I don’t usually lose my cool. I don’t think that I get a lot of credit for it but I can actually be quite patient, even in the face of mind numbing stupidity.

But I had a bad day this week… it just so happened that I had a lot of different places to be, several community organizing meetings. And it seemed like a domino effect. Everything that someone said to me was dumber than the last thing that someone had said. The train of community organizing had jumped the track and was headed for the munitions factory.

I managed to just walk out of the last meeting without betraying my thoughts and I searched for a friend who could let me rant for a while and, as it happens sometimes, everyone I normally abuse with my screeds was safely otherwise occupied.

So I just came home and visited this little clip of Coco. The practice of separating families at the border was stopped. Smart and caring people are working to restore the children in dentention to their families. Melania’s coat may declare that she doesn’t really care but a whole of people who do care also vote and November is just 4 months away.

There is still a lot of stupid prejudice in this country but in 2045 there will no longer be a white majority in America and some things are gonna change.

There are bad things in the world. You have had false friends who have betrayed you. Family members who have rejected you. Love relationships that became toxic. People you have loved and needed have just died on you, before you were ready.

Crazy, bad people become heads of state of powerful nations, and CEO’s of major corporations, and sometimes they take charge of the EPA and the State Department. I’m not asking you to deny those facts or forget them, I’m just inviting you to rise above them. Don’t let the bad stuff that has happened rent too much space in your skull.

The people who have hurt you are not lying awake at night thinking about you so why are you wasting your life thinking about them? Don’t do your critics any favors. Take a giant step above the mud puddle they tried to drag you down into.

We are all connected, and the more we move away from the illusion of our separation, our perceptions of differences in race, gender, sexual orientation, nation of origin, or political party, the more we move into the kind of spiritual integrity that we came here looking for in the first place.click here to see the videoClick here to watch on YouTube