“God is too big for just one religion”  Nov. 4, 2018 Roger Ray and David Ketchum

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Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. Joseph Campbell

In my family home, the staple food that my mother cooked whether it was Christmas dinner or left overs on a Monday night, was a kind of fried corn bread. She made it every day. I grew up watching her make it from the time I was old enough to stand until I left for college. She poured a generous amount of course ground corn meal into a large mixing bowl and added baking powder and salt. She then scalded the mixture with boiling water and then vigorously stirred in some butter milk. This thick mixture was then fried on both sides in bacon fat into an oblong cake that looked something like a grainy pancake. 

Stacks of this corn bread sat by the stove all day and if any of us were hungry we could get a piece, cover it in butter and jam or peanut butter to hold us until the next meal. When I moved away and was cooking my own meals, I, of course, tried to make corn bread the way she did and could never get it right. I have, in my folder of family recipes, my mother’s hand-written formula for making fried corn bread. Frankly, I could come closer to reality by asking Siri for directions and Siri wasn’t even born when my mother was alive.

My mother’s conscious effort to document the familiar ritual of making corn bread is nothing short of ridiculous, the proportions she listed wouldn’t have been enough to make even one piece of corn bread. Cooking, for my mother, was a matter of practice that happened nearly unconsciously and could not be documented, at least not by her.

I’m not saying that mom’s cornbread was health-food, but I am saying that it tasted good and it kept a houseful of perpetually hungry adolescent boys from starving to death before dinner time. And, so far as religion is concerned, if Jesus had grown up in my house, communion would be buttered corn bread and a chalice of whole milk. And, “no,” I’m not going to make corn bread for everyone every week. 

My point in all of this is to say that, like cooking, the origins of most religions were something done by feel. Moses, as we take the Exodus account, had empathy for the enslaved Hebrews and led them to freedom and self-determination. Jesus, brought up in occupied Judah, became a religious and social reformer who elevated the outcast and abused through a ministry of radical compassion. Mohamed was a caravan pirate who sought to unite and civilize the warring tribes of the Arabic peninsula. 

One cannot really know anything about the historical Moses and relatively little about the historical Jesus and maybe we can know a little too much about the historical Mohamed.  But from what we can reasonably assemble around the first two, we know that Judaism as practiced both as a temple sacrifice cult and later as a rabbinic text-based faith bears very little resemblance to the ancient liberator of slaves and his spiritual beliefs. 

My good friend and founding member of the Jesus seminar, Dr. Charles Hedrick, is fond of reminding me that Jesus was probably not very religious. 

Hardly a decade after Jesus was executed by the state, Paul stole his name and reputation and invented a religion that had almost nothing to do with Jesus, and a generation after Paul had been executed by the same state, the Roman church turned Christianity into something Paul would not have recognized, and Jesus would have hated. 

Most of you know all of this very well but let me plainly spell it out: none of the New Testament was written during the lifetime of Jesus. Paul’s letters are the oldest part of the New Testament. It is almost impossible to believe that the gospels were not written, at least partially, accepting Paul’s entirely uninformed religious prejudices. So we read the gospels looking for hints and echoes of what the historical Jesus may have said and believed and what we find there was a very controversial teacher who challenged the prejudices of his culture regarding the role of women, and of the second class nature of gentiles, prostitutes, and lepers. He evidently was defiant towards the authority of the occupying government and that got him killed, probably with the consent and help of the indigenous religious authorities. 

But, like trying to duplicate mom’s corn bread, you can’t reduce who Jesus was and what he was trying to accomplish into a creedal statement and then try to express it in rituals and dogmas. What he was, in essence, was good. . . so good that people who knew him thought of him as being holy. The religion that evolved in his name over the next century was, in many ways, the antithesis of good and people like me have been fighting that battle for centuries, asking churches to imitate the goodness of Jesus but don’t try to codify and worship Jesus.

What happened to Muhammed was similar to what happened to Jesus. Once he was dead, his story was hijacked by people who needed for him to be more than he was in life and traditions grew up around his birth and childhood to make him seem like more of a Biblical figure. But the truth is that he was largely a product of his culture. He had several mystical experiences before his famously described “first vision” which he initially interpreted as being an encounter with an evil genie that he feared may have possessed him. His first impulse was to commit suicide, not to sit down and dictate the Quran . . . I say “dictate,” because he was illiterate, and Jesus probably was too, but Muhammed’s wife, Khadijacould read and write.

His wife sent him away to visit her cousin, Waraka,who was a Christian mystic and it was Waraka who insisted that it was not an evil jin who had spoken to Muhammad but the Archangel Gabriel. Massaging his mystical experiences into the language of the Judeo-Christian theological narrative, Muhammed, Khadija, and Waraka shaped the early version of the poetry of the Quran. Later generations would make the whole thing out to be a miraculous composition dictated to the prophet from God through the Archangel but, as I have said before, God doesn’t write books and angels don’t exist. This is just the way that ancient people talked.

Muslims claim that the Quran is God’s one and only perfect miracle but there is not much in it that you would find to be all that memorable, although some common sayings that many Christians think are in the Bible are actually just in the Quran. My mother would stop making cornbread altogether if she had known all the times that she told us that “God will never give you more than you can bear,” that she was quoting Muhammad and not Jesus . . . but I never told her and now you can’t! Some religious mythology is best left alone.

But I say all of this by way of echoing what Joseph Campbell said, which is that all religions are true as long as you take them poetically, metaphorically, or existentially, but as soon as you try to distill that experience down into creeds, dogma, and sacraments, you kill the whole thing. The larger truth, is that there is no authoritative book to tell us how to live or how to think. There is no one true religion that trumps all of the others. We are all just mortals trying to figure out how to be good people. Some ways of being religious seem to help out in that process and others seem to hurt and we have to navigate between the lies to find the truth.

David Ketchum, part 2

As long as I can remember, I’ve been less interested in teasing out the verifiable details about the historical Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, or Buddha, and much more interested in exploring how communities related to their stories and teachings. Who was thinking about and remembering these things? Why were these ideas remembered and repeated? How were they understood and applied? How did different communities in different cultures and over different times interact with these stories and teachings? As I’ve mentioned before, what I find most compelling is the potential of religious traditions and communities to either hinder or liberate our humanity. 

So it isn’t a problem to me that the New Testament was written after Jesus’ lifetime, or that the earliest Buddhist scriptures were preserved orally and not written down for nearly 500 years. If we really believe what Roger said, that “We are all just mortals trying to figure out how to be good people;” if we really believe that “Some ways of being religious seem to help out in that process and others seem to hurt and we have to navigate between the lies to find the truth,” then we realize that this process of discernment is what’s been going on all along, probably mostly in haphazard ways, as scriptures were written and preserved, and as traditions were created, adapted, and tossed out. We also realize that this discernment is the most important and urgent task for religious folks today, and that we can do it intentionally, with the goal of giving humans the best chance possible to live in wise and kind ways. 

I stress that the task is urgent and that our efforts need to be intentional, because religion’s track record is mixed at best. It’s certainly historically true that religious folks have spilled a lot of ink and a lot of blood while arguing over the truth of their religious claims, while using religion as a weapon to marginalize, exploit, and oppress folks they labeled as different. Buddhism, which has a reputation for being among the more peace-loving religious systems around, has not been immune, because Buddhism, like all religions, has been created, maintained, and adapted by human beings. 

Approximately 535 million people in the world identify as Buddhists, almost 8% of the world’s population. Within Asia, about 67% of those practice in one of the Mahayana traditions; another 28% practice in one of the Theravada traditions; and about 3% practice in one of the Vajrayana traditions. Only about 7 million Buddhists live outside of Asia. (https://books.google.com/books?id=u0sg9LV_rEgC&lpg=PP1&dq=buddhism%20introduction&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false ) So for anyone unfamiliar with Buddhist cosmology, encountering that world can be bewildering, to say the least. This is especially the case if you have a notion that Buddhism is a philosophy, and not a religion. And it is also the case if you are unaware that there are thousands of Buddhist sects that have arisen over the last 2,500 years. The Buddhism that exists in the minds of many in the West often has very little to do with the actual histories, cultures, geographies, and practices of Buddhists in Asia. Buddhism, like other cultural and religious systems, is more easily romanticized than understood. 

So I want to be honest about the very human limitations that Buddhist individuals and societies have experienced. For example, two weeks ago, I helped provide a tour at the local Buddhist temple to a large group of university students. After we had finished up, one approached me to ask what I thought about the situation in Myanmar. There’s not much good to say about a nation engaging in ethnic cleansing; in the newest wave of violence against the Rohingya, beginning in August 2017, almost 700,000 more people have fled Myanmar to escape state-sanctioned violence. The ongoing repression of this vulnerable people has been made even more bewildering by the inaction of a Nobel laureate and current State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, who was formerly an icon of engaged Buddhism. Instead of speaking out and acting on their behalf, she has justified the atrocities and persecuted journalists. Suu Kyi and about 90% of Myanmar’s population are Buddhists; the beleaguered Rohingya are Muslims. 

Similarly, one of my own past Buddhist mentors was formerly a human rights worker in Sri Lanka, providing mediation and protective accompaniment for high ranking officials and diplomats involved in trying to bring an end to the civil war. That war lasted over 25 years and killed nearly 100,000 people. About 70% of Sri Lankans are Buddhist. 

In all of these kinds of cases, there are contributing circumstances requiring thoughtful analysis. But some of these horrible acts of oppression and violence were justified in the minds of their perpetrators as a defense of Buddhist identity. And in all of these kinds of cases, a Buddhist identity and culture was not enough to prevent them from happening. 

So is it inevitable that human beings will get lost, confusing the metaphors with dogma? And is there any hope at all? There is, and one example of it is found in the aptly named “Amazing & Astounding Qualities” sutta. It starts off with poetry and metaphor; you really get a sense of how the miraculous stories were remembered and handed down in the Buddhist tradition. After an alms round and meal, the monks are gathered together and chatting away, talking about the miraculous qualities of the Buddha Gotama. And just then, as is often the case in the suttas, the Buddha walks in. Everyone gets really quiet, like you do when the person you are talking about is suddenly present. The Buddha sits down and asks, “so, what have you all been talking about?” Ananda, the Buddha’s attendant, tells him, and the Buddha urges him on, “That being the case, Ānanda, elaborate to a greater extent on the Tathāgata’s amazing & astounding qualities.” (By the way, Tathāgata is the title the Buddha often uses for himself.)

And Ananda does. It is quite the list, from the Blessed One’s mindful and alert lifespan in the Tusita heaven before his final rebirth, to the “measureless radiance” that pierced the entire cosmos when he “alighted in his mother’s womb,” to his miraculous birth. I’ll read you the account, from the translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu: 

“When the bodhisatta left his mother’s womb, he left it immaculate, unsullied by fluid, unsullied by mucus, unsullied by blood, unsullied by lymph: pure, very pure. … , two streams of water appeared from the sky—one cool, the other warm—to wash the bodhisatta and his mother. … As soon as the bodhisatta was born, he stood steadily with his feet on the ground and, facing north, took seven steps while a white parasol was held over him. Surveying all the directions, he made a bellowing statement: ‘I am the foremost of the world. I am chief of the world. I am the best of the world.’ … And the fact that when the bodhisatta left his mother’s womb… this ten-thousand-fold cosmos shivered & quivered & quaked, while the great, measureless radiance appeared in the cosmos, surpassing the effulgence of the devas: I hold this, too, to be an amazing & astounding quality of the Blessed One.” (https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN123.html )

For any student of ancient religions and ancient texts, this doesn’t come as a surprise. The remarkable features are, so to speak, unremarkable. But I wouldn’t be reciting this text if this is where it ended. The Buddha, having listened to the litany of praise, replied: 

“That being the case, Ānanda, you can hold this, too, to be an amazing & astounding quality of the Tathāgata: There is the case where feelings are known to the Tathāgata when they arise, known when they remain, known when they go to their end. Perceptions are known to the Tathāgata when they arise, … remain, ... go to their end. Thoughts are known to the Tathāgata when they arise, ... remain, ... go to their end. You can hold this, too, Ānanda, to be an amazing & astounding quality of the Tathāgata.” (ibid)

This reply is remarkable. Here we have the preservation of a tradition that insists that what is “amazing and astounding” is the human capacity to reflect on our experience and consciously, intentionally choose to cultivate what is wise, kind, and just. The tradition also holds that the Buddha said he taught only two things: suffering and the end of suffering. And that seems like a practical way to measure whether our religious opinions and practices amount to anything good. We can know our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. In that knowing, we can choose what is good. We can create lives and communities that bring life and freedom and minimize suffering. It’s not automatic, and we can lose our way. But the possibility lies open, and we can continually embrace it, and we can celebrate how amazing and astounding that is.

“Cancers Grow from Within”    Oct. 28, 2018      Dr. Roger Ray

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Yuval Noah Harari writes in “Sapiens” Homo sapiens rule the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.

Both ancient and modern depictions of Satan tend to make the old demon look both hideous and frightening. Ancient artists, even when they depicted Jesus as looking quite European, would depict Judas as being dark, hairy, with a crooked nose and stooped shoulders.

We do the same in modern films, making the evil emperor in the original Star Wars series or Snoke in the recent series look so hideous that it makes going to the dark side, even for a nice Starbucks cappuccino seem unlikely. 

Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, I don’t even know what happened to him. He was human but as the nemesis of the series, he looks like he is half serpent. And in the Marvel universe, Thanos, the killer of worlds and holder of the 5 infinity stones still couldn’t get a little plastic surgery on that chin and some hair implants. 

But the truth is that the real villains in the world rarely do us the favor of looking the part of the movie or artistic painting of the villain. 

In the late 18^thcentury, influenced by the work of Milton, Sir Thomas Lawrence depicted Satan as being a fallen angel, irresistibly handsome, strong, seemingly pure. This is a more honest depiction of temptation. If you are going to go to the dark side, which one of these literary figures would you most like to spiral into darkness with? The truth is that the most dangerous evils in the world are much more likely to be very attractive than they are to be hideous.

About 20 years ago I wrote a grant request to the Burrell Foundation to do research into Methamphetamine addiction in our area. That is when I first got to know Paul well when Paul was directing research for Burrell. I wanted to know why people ever started using a drug that was so widely known to be highly addictive and that it led to losing your job, your spouse, your kids, and then your teeth and your health and eventually, quite possibly losing your freedom or your life.

I went into the research project assuming that people turned to meth out of desperation to lose weight or to cope with highly repetitive and physically demanding jobs. However, in our survey, we found none of that, not a single case of what I had expected that we would find. In fact, in every one of the more than 60 addicts we interviewed, they all got their first taste of the drug at a party where it was given to them as being something that was fun . . . daring, but essentially, fun . . . just having a good time. No one chooses to take a drug that can transform your body in this way, even though it does…. She took the drug to have fun.

 Our wisdom lesson is a quote from one of the smartest people in the world that you might not have heard of yet. He is an Israeli historian and something of a political philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari. He is in his early 40’s and we will hear a lot more about him in the next few years. In a TED talk in which he discusses this matter of how evil is seductive because it is attractive rather than repulsive, and he relates it to the move towards fascism in many western democracies.  

He very helpfully walks us through what it is that makes fascism attractive. Now, if we had 10,000 people in the room and I asked for a show of hands of all of the fascists present, it is a safe bet that no one would raise their hand. Fascism isn’t a decision that you make, it is a cancer that grows from within.

Nationalism is a sense of identity that we have with members of our nation. We don’t know the 350 million people in our nation but we feel a connection to them so that when there is a disaster in another country, the news media will immediately research how many Americans were on the ship that sank, were on the Asian beech where a tsunami hit, or were killed in a earthquake in Mexico. 

In war, our media reports on the numbers of Americans killed in battle and rarely mentions death tolls of anyone else, not simply because they are the enemy but because, at some visceral level, they are not quite as human as we are. I probably don’t have to remind you that when the news of the horrific murder of the Washington Post reporter, Jamal Khashoggi, reached the president, Trump’s first response was, “Well, we understand that he was not an American citizen,” almost a dismissive, “Why are you bothering me about someone who doesn’t matter?”

 

But within a nation, there are usually several other groups we identify with. When Trump says that he is a “nationalist” many people fear that he means a “white nationalist,” because he often doesn’t seem to include brown people in his considerations.

 

We here identify as Americans, some of us also identify ourselves by gender or sexual orientation, or as black, Latino, or white. In recent years we have seen our nation ferociously divided between Republicans and Democrats to the point that the parties will do things to hurt the nation if it helps their party, which used to shock us but now we expect it. We have always, though usually quietly, identified by class, sometimes by regions of the country, or what college we attended or what sports teams we loyally support. 

 

And those subdivisions can take on a life of their own as we have seen this week as someone sent bombs to the homes of two former Democratic presidents, and three other Democratic leaders. But usually we deal with the sub divisions pretty well if not entirely comfortably. I identify as an American, and a political and religious liberal. My neighbor across the street identifies as an American, and a political and religious right-wing lunatic. We rarely speak though we have had heated correspondence. It would never occur to me to bomb his house, or vandalize his car, or even write the word “psycho” in 6 ft tall letters in his overly manicured lawn with Roundup. And even if I have thought about it, I would NEVER DO IT.

A nation of several million people is comprised of many subsets of tribal identities and we learn to get along with one another where we can and avoid contact where we cannot. Fascism, however, is that form of nationalism that tells you that you don’t have to tolerate the tribes that are not your tribe. Fascism can assert that it is the primary definition of the nation. We hear this out of certain conservative politicians who insist that ours is a Christian nation when it clearly is a nation founded on religious freedom that includes all religions and those with no religion at all. 

 

Fascism is opposed to any tolerance of diversity. Fascism, as Yuval Harari points out, doesn’t tolerate criticism or opposition. So, when you hear Trump calling journalists who have criticized him as being the enemy of the people, or calling them “fake news” when there has never been a more fake news source than our illegitimate president. When you hear him leading chants to lock up political opponents . . . no, strike that, he has never called for locking up any male political opponents . . . just women and I’ll let you reach your own conclusions about that. 

 

When you see Trump navigating his way into a totally reprehensible Muslim Ban, building a wall at the border with brown people to the south, and manipulating legislation to cut taxes on his tribe while cutting services to the majority, then, in all of these things, you can see the dismantling of democracy and the creeping assertion of fascism but it is never portrayed as goose stepping Nazi’s. It is rather portrayed as an attractive process of taking America back for “Americans” if you define “Americans” as rich, white, heterosexual men, with nominal connections to Christianity. 

But, when Trump looks into a mirror, he doesn’t see a misogynist, racist, classist, xenophobe, with serious character defects of lying, stealing, committing treason and tax fraud, he thinks that he is looking at the most beautiful thing in the world. Most Trump supporters look at themselves in the mirror and see that the world is finally realizing how important that they are.

 

Trump doesn’t think that he is destroying democracy and creating a fascist state. He just thinks that he is correcting past wrongs and putting rich, old, white guys back in the driver’s seat where they have always belonged. 

 

When I entered the ministry 40 years ago, there was a German born woman who had been a teen war bride. She told me that as the Nazi’s grew in power and went to war, she didn’t think about the holocaust, she didn’t think about innocent victims in Poland, England, or France. She said, “What I saw were young German soldiers marching in the streets and I felt proud to be German and honored to life in the time of Germany’s return to power.” Fascism looks beautiful to the tribe that is ascending. It only looks ugly to its victims. 

I don’t want to go too deep into the weeds talking about information technology, but Yuval Harari says that there are two things that make fascism more likely in the 21^stcentury than it has ever been before. The first is the amassing of information in the hands of too few people so that they can control the feelings and hence the votes of the majority and, in many ways, that is a matter of engineering and data management. But the other side of that coin if for all of us to learn not to be manipulated by being told that we are much more important, more beautiful, than we really are.

In the past week, the Trump administration has sought to undo progress made in the recognition of transgender, insisting that everyone always be identified by the appearance of their genitalia at birth . . . even when that, in some instances, is quite ambiguous. Well, about 5% of Americans identify as being gay or lesbian and about half of 1% identify as being transgender. So, when the majority seeks to deny the validity of a minority, you can do that and be just like my old friend Jana, who didn’t see Nazis marching in the streets, she saw proud, strong, young Germans. 

The challenge for us, if I may pull the thread of my talk on empathy last week, is for us to care about and feel the plight of that fraction of a percent of Americans who are trans even if you are not trans, even if no one in your family is trans, and no one you know well is trans. Empathy allows us to anticipate and feel with a marginalized minority so that we don’t go down the path of fascism.

Look, no one who is uninsured is opposed to universal health care, right? The people who are opposed to universal health care are people who comfortably have health care. They are too easily infected with a bad case of “I’ve got mine,” so that they sincerely don’t care what happens to the uninsured and the uninsurable. What we need for those people to see is that is exactly what fascism is . . . what is good for me and my tribe is good and what that does to you and your tribe doesn’t matter. 

But like that before and after photo I showed to you about meth addiction, fascism starts out looking attractive but what it turns a nation into is not so pretty. 

The way we fight the ugliness of tribal fascism is not by locking more young black men in prison but by sending more young black men to college and giving them good paying jobs in meaningful careers. The way we make our neighborhoods more safe is not by getting people to buy more guns to defend their little patch of earth but by improving the standard of living of the people who might otherwise have been so disenfranchised that they might turn to crime. 

We don’t need more police, we need a less criminal society. We don’t need to outlaw abortion, we just need to create an economy in which young women can afford to give birth and care for a child. We don’t need to steal more Indian Reservation land to build oil pipelines, we need to build renewable energy resources that won’t kill us with pollution. 

While we are investing in military hardware with the ridiculous notion that we can use ships and planes to maintain a global economic empire, China is investing in artificial intelligence and will be poised to control world markets while our military hardware turns to rust. While we raise interest rates and college tuitions, most of western Europe and much of Central and South America is making college tuition free because they want to have a successful future, a future where the USA will be left in the dust if we don’t change. 

The USA has been the most productive and inventive society in the history of the world. All of that ingenuity and passion is still here but restrained by a stupid and self-serving corporate and political administration that is trying to employ 19^thcentury thinking in the 21^stcentury. They have become a cancer and, somehow, they are ideologically spreading into our own community, into our own families. 

We are gathered here in a week that began with news of pipe bombs being mailed to prominent citizens, former presidents, and media outlets that have had the honesty and character to be critical of our current President; and the week ended with a senseless and horrific massacre in a synagogue in Pittsburg, claiming at least 11 innocent lives. 

The president and those who have so anesthetized their conscience as to be able to defend and support him, refuse to accept the obvious responsibility they have in advocating for partisan violence and division in our nation. We are engaged in a moral contest for the hearts and minds of America. The Trump administration blows the dog-whistles of racism and xenophobia and constantly tells lies intended to trick the prejudiced and simple into supporting the progress of fascism in America. It is our job to fearlessly tell the truth, and to loving try to reunite our democracy.

It is time for America to get healthy again and it sure isn’t going to come from the leadership of the cancerous administration… it has to come from you.

“Exercising Empathy”     October 21, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor                      

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From Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert and Choden,“It has been said that empathy is one of the most important attributes that evolved in humans. It is what makes us distinctive as humans and separates us from other animals. Human empathy is different than sympathy because it involves our ability for awareness and intuitive understanding. Whereas sympathy is an automatic resonance with the feelings of others, empathy is much more about insight and understanding. It is our ability to understand not just that someone suffers but also why, to see into the causes.”

I did my doctoral dissertation on aspects of monastic spirituality. What that substantively means is that I know more than almost anyone you will ever know about a very narrow topic which no sane person would ever want to know anything about. If you hang out around Catholics or mystics of other flavors you will hear names of books and people like the Desert Fathers, the Rule of St Benedict, The Cloud of Unknowing, the Imitation of Christ, and 

such people as St. Teresa of Avila, the Little Flower, and St. Bonaventure, and the guy whose work became seminal for me, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ingnatius of Loyola. 

I dare say that I am the only person you will ever know who actually studied, let alone read, all of these spiritual classics. I’ll be signing autographs at the end of the service today. There was obviously a great deal about this body of classic spiritual literature that drew me in or I wouldn’t have spent so much time with it but these works are not popular in the modern age for a very good reason. 

Almost all of them also promote a certain spiritual narcissism that borders on, if not expresses a full-blown case of, mental illness.

Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church, wrote his exercises as a manual to be used by a person over a 4 week long silent retreat. He writes in the introduction, “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” Ignatius describes an entirely self-centered spirituality in which he encourages his monastic brothers to be so afraid of going to hell that they will not consider committing even the most venial of sins. In one of the early exercises he tells them to come to see themselves as “a sore and an abscess from whence have come forth so many sins, so many evils, and the most vile poison.”

It is a paradox, Ignatius wants to destroy the ego but for a purely egotistical goal, which was to avoid the fires of hell and to attain to heaven. One gets the impression that if Ignatius had not been so concerned about the eternal disposition of his immortal soul that he might have been quite a cavalier, which, in fact, he was in his earlier life. 

Now, granted, Ignatius may represent the extreme but as such he serves as a good illustration of what I mean when I divide the religious would into two groups. There is the religion of Ignatius and his ilk, which may feel deeply and passionately, it is entirely self-serving, and there is the kind of spirituality of which the hallmark is empathy towards others. 

This really started to come together for me the first time that I had to teach a college class a course on the life and teachings of Jesus. One of our textbooks, back in the fall of 1994, was the newly published book by the late Marcus Borg, “Meeting Jesus, Again, For the first time.” It was there that I encountered the description of Jesus, not so much as the dying and rising savior or the exalted Son of God, but, Borg described him as being the “teacher of radical compassion.”

Looking behind the assumptions of the parables, the miracle accounts, the sermons, a historical Jesus emerged whose primary focus was an expression of empathy. Either I was too young to see it when I was in grad school, or the more scholarly text books hid this simple insight from me, but it wasn’t until I had been preaching for 15 years that it started to really make sense to me. 

The religion of Ignatius and, for that matter, most of what passes for Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, is self-centered . . . piety, devotion, worship, prayer, sacraments, all as a kind of divine fire insurance, to keep a psychopathic God off our case long enough for us to slip through the Pearly Gates and then get to be as self-indulgent as we always wanted to be in our mortal existence. 

The historical Jesus wasn’t trying to save our souls; he was trying to open our eyes . . . not at all unlike the Buddha and possibly even Zoroaster. 

I find the common Christian nomenclature of being “saved” to be both intellectually and spiritually insulting but the self-description of the Buddha as one who is simply “awake,” that really resonates with me. Our spiritual practices, coming here every week whether you participate in sacraments, prayers, or rituals, is ultimately a concerted practice of trying to become our full and awake selves. 

The religion of these great spiritual classics and, sadly, of most main stream religions, promotes piety but not goodness. They teach people to avoid the sins of sexual immorality, gluttony, drunkenness, greed, and vanity but a person can be personally sinless and still be of no practical use whatsoever. Think of someone who never smokes, drinks, cusses, uses drugs, steals, hoards, or messes around… would you invite that person to dinner? Or more importantly, would you share your most painful and embarrassing personal challenges with them? Piety is a pursuit for the pious. It may leave them untarnished by the world, but they are also of little or no use to the world.

What Paul Gilbert is writing in Mindful Compassion is that the human is the one animal that is capable of feeling empathy. I don’t want to rile the dog and cat lovers in the audience:  Even a pet can feel sympathy. Your dog or your cat may not know why you are sad or sick but they can sense that you are in pain and they can show sympathy. Empathy is different not only because there is an element of understanding but because there can also be an element of anticipation. 

For example, recently, Sean needed to use the church to rehearse the Opera’s play about wine but recognizing that the AA group would be meeting in the building at the same time, he did not want to put them through hearing jokes and songs about drinking to excess. This is empathy, to anticipate what might cause pain in another and to take corrective action. 

This is was not the biggest deal in the world. Sean was under a time crunch, he needed rehearsal time and space, and our AA group is very small and if one of those guys heard funny songs about getting drunk and decided to leave the meeting and go get drunk, that would not have been Sean’s fault. And it wasn’t because Sean knows anyone in that AA group, or that Sean is in recovery, but because he was able to anticipate that rehearsing at that time might have created an issue for some stranger, even here in our building where he had every right to get his work done, but he decided to work around the A. A. meeting. 

Again, not the biggest deal in the world but it is an example of not only being able to sympathize with the plight of people trying to manage a potentially lethal addiction and being willing to inconvenience himself and the cast of an opera to avoid problems. I’m not saying that your dog doesn’t miss you when you are away or that your cat doesn’t stay by your side when you are sick, but empathy is a uniquely human potential, but it is a potential that is sadly realized. I think that it is the mark of real spirituality and it is what separates the spiritual from the merely religious.  

Let me give you a contrasting illustration. Yesterday there were thousands of Central Americans who are fleeing from gang and government violence, trying to make their way north to find work in the United States. Our president threatened to cut off millions of dollars of aid to Mexico if they allowed them to cross the river between Guatemala and Mexico so they are trapped on this bridge.

And I want to draw your attention to a part of this image: you see off to the side of the bridge, a number of little boats in the river. These guys are ferrying people across the river for 50 cents per person. All of these people trapped in the humidity and the heat of southern Mexico could just keep walking if they had 50 cents to get a boat ride across the river. That is how poor and desperate these people are. 

In defending his refusal to allow these refugees to seek safety in the USA, President Trump said, “These are not babies, these are hardened criminals.” 

The problem with that is, of course, they 

actually are babies, mothers, with children in their arms and on their backs, . . . mothers who don’t have 50 cents to get a boat ride across the river, mothers who have already walked for weeks and plan to walk for more weeks, in the hopes of saving their children from violence, rape, and starvation. Once she gets across the bridge from Guatemala into Mexico, she has 1400 more miles to carry those children to the border of the United States where it is most likely she will be apprehended, her children will be locked in cages and she will be put in detention. 

Folks, after a three-month march through the tropics, this woman will be put in detention and her children will be put in cages on your behalf, by your government, using your tax dollars. How do you feel about that?

Gilbert is arguing in his book that combination of the practices of mindfulness and compassion makes us able to be empathetic, we can literally anticipate what these people will feel in a few weeks when they reach the southern border of Texas. But in the world of psychology, there is a lot of professional conversation about people who are not capable of feeling empathy. It is a trait that we see in narcissists, in psychopaths, in sociopaths, and in some kinds of Autism. 

While it is a common professional practice to avoid diagnosing anyone we have not actually had in a counseling relationship with any of those disorders, we have heard enough from our President to see that he does not appear to feel empathy, that he certainly appears to be narcissistic, and I believe that I could build a pretty good case for psychopath. 

And I know that you know this is not just me being political.

Former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, has warned that Trump is taking us in the direction of fascism. Noam Chomsky has said that the Republican party has become the most dangerous organization in the history of the world. Berkley Professor and former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich is weekly producing videos warning the public about the tax scams and disastrous but self-serving economic policy of the Trump administration, and Michael Moore has warned that his policies could lead to human extinction. I would not use the pulpit for partisan purposes. I am talking about something that is far beyond politics.

But as it directly concerns empathy, let me mention this horrible story we learned of this week of the unspeakably cruel, torture, murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, Trump’s initial reaction was to observe that he wasn’t a US citizen and the Saudi government had pledged to buy more than 100 billion dollars of military hardware from us . . . a grossly inflated number but still, he was making it plain that in the choice between sincere empathy for a brutally murdered journalist and cash, he would choose the cash. And I know that no one here is shocked by that. 

And maybe no one here will be shocked by any stupid thing that televangelist, Pat Robertson says either, but a co-host on his TV show was trying to lead him into being shocked and offended by the murder of Khashoggi but he also took Trump’s position that you don’t want to lose the sale of military hardware to Saudi Arabia even though they are using that hardware in an illegal war in Yemen. 

Religion without empathy does not, in my estimation, deserve to be considered a religion . . . it is just enlightened self-interest with rituals. I accept that it is impolite and probably unethical to criticize another person’s religion, but I would insist that they have to actually have a religion before it becomes something to be respected. People whose faith is not defined by empathy are not members of the religion club and I don’t feel any obligation to treat them with kid gloves. 

The ancient Greeks had a proverb, they said: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit” 

Ignatius was just wrong. The purpose of our lives is not to live in such a way that we avoid hell and manage to get into heaven. Come on, that’s not just self-centered and narcissistic, that’s pathetically stupid. The real purpose of life is to be a blessing to other people, to alleviate suffering, to make the world more safe, more just, more fair, and, dare I say it, more loving and more happy. 

 

I want churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques to raise generations of people whose faith is defined by a practice of empathy. So that you get people like Sean who can anticipate how he might avoid creating a problem for a recovering alcoholic…. And when you have done that for years and your boss at the border patrol tells you to take away the children of refugees and lock them up in cages, you just refuse to do it. Or when your boss, the prince of Saudi Arabia tells you to torture, kill and dismember a journalist, you just refuse to do it. 

 

There is a way to be a Muslim with integrity. There is a way to be Jewish, Buddhist, or Christian with integrity. You just can’t be any of those things without empathy. That’s my opinion and as it turns out, I also happen to be right. 

 To see the video, click here

“Demanding Answers from the Universe”   Oct. 14, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray    

click here to see the video

Job 23:1-9, 16-17       1 Then Job answered:
2 "Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
3 Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!
4 I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.
5 I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me.
6 Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. 
7 There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.
8 "If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.

16 God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me;
17 If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!

In my starting class in seminary, there was a woman, let’s call her Melissa, who was one of the most intelligent grad students on campus. She had emerged from a crushingly conservative and repressed childhood in a Church of Christ in which both her innate intellect and her gender were counted as liabilities. But in the academically competitive environment at Vanderbilt, she was finally free to flourish.

But, even there, Melissa had some social issues. She had never dated, never had close friends, in part because of her oppressive religious background but also, and there is no kind way to say this, but she was one of the most unattractive people I have ever seen. Her appearance also betrayed the fact that she had evidently, just given up years before.

But as sometimes happens at that stage of life, a miracle happened. She met someone. I don’t know how it happened but I do know that for the first time in our class, we saw Melissa smilling, in fact, she seemed to smile all of the time, so much so, that she actually started to look attractive. . . and I know how sexist that probably sounds but trust me, if you had been there you would know what I mean.

In between classes, in casual bits of conversation, she talked about wedding plans . . . they wanted to serve champagne at the reception but if she did her parents wouldn’t come . . . and they wouldn’t come if they used a piano in the service . . . but even her family’s evident disfunction, her happiness shined through. The non-instrumental Churches of Christ worship a mean and petty god. Theirs is a religion that keeps therapists in business. In spite of all of the family issues, they were to be wed immediately after the end of that first grueling year of seminary.

The next fall, when we all came back to class, I saw her in the hallway and I asked about how married life was going. She looked as if I had shot her and she said, “You haven’t heard.” We sat down in a meeting room and she told me, they had gotten married in May and they went to Florida for their honeymoon and spent their wedding night in a hotel on the beach. The next morning, her husband volunteered to get up and go to the store to get some breakfast for them. He didn’t return. It took hours for her to find out what had happened. He had crossed the street, with only some cash in his pocket, no wallet, no identification, and a truck with failed brakes hit him and killed him instantly. 

Faced with this horrifying news, I reached deep into my young minister’s bag of tricks and I quoted Romans 8.28, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” I was just 23 years old. I had only been a minister for a few months. But, honestly, even then I knew better. And, you know, in a moment like that, I don’t know if I was trying to help to minister to her grief, or if I was trying to reassure myself, or, and this is probably really it, I was trying to defend God’s reputation. 

 

I know that you guys already know this, but sometimes religious people watch these videos so for the sake of our more traditionally religious viewers, allow me to make this statement of the obvious: Any God that needs you to defend their honor is not much of a God. 

 

Melissa wept a little, but she was the bigger person that day. She shook her head and took my hand and patiently explained to me that God didn’t kill her husband and that there was nothing good about his death. She had come back to school because she didn’t know what else to do and she thought she needed to be around her friends. I trust that the rest of our peers were better and smarter friends to her than I was on that day, but I learned a lot and I am grateful to her for straightening me out. 

 

Things don’t always work out. We live in a capricious universe. I’m not saying that things happen randomly. There are laws of physics. There are predictable and logical interactions in chemistry, in evolutionary biology, in the formation and explosion of stars. Even in that run-away truck, there was inertia, there was gravity, there was the force of an internal combustion engine. . . but what there was not was a puppet-master up in the clouds who made the truck’s brakes go out just as Melissa’s husband set out across the street on his first day as a married man. There was no meaning, no divine intent, no sacred plan working itself out in history. It was just sad. Horrifying. The worst. 

 

The universe is not random, but it is capricious. Stuff just happens. It always has and it always will. There may be a cause but that doesn’t mean that there is a reason. Religious people will tell themselves that God is in heaven and all is right with the world. Even non-religious people will firmly announce their personal belief that everything happens for a reason. 

 

We are afraid to allow ourselves to accept that we live in a universe in which some kids are born HIV positive in a country defined by poverty, hunger, and violence, and others are born healthy to loving parents who will indulge their every desire. There is not a reason, there is just the “isness” of the universe. 

 

I wish that the people who love the Bible so much would love it a little less and read it a little more. I would be the first to confess that the book of Job is not easy to understand if you just read it without any preparation for it. It is a very ancient piece of philosophy, originally written in Hebrew poetry. 

 

At its core, it is a narrative about a man who has suffered horrible tragedies. His children have been killed. His crops have died. His flocks have been stolen, and his own health has deteriorated to the point that he is just left sitting in the dust, scrapping his boils with a broken piece of pottery. 

 

And in that narrative, Job shakes his fist at heaven and demands an answer. Why did this happen to me? Three friends, poetic interloculars, show up to comfort him but, sort of like me telling Melissa that “all things work together for the good of those who love God,” it becomes evident that they are not really there to comfort Job. They are there to comfort themselves, and, like many of us who feel that we are ordained to speak spiritual truths, they sought to exonerate God. 

 

His friends told him that there is a divine plan, a reason, that is just beyond his ability to understand. When that fails they try to tell him that he is being punished for some sin, though no one seems to even be able to imagine what the offense might have been. The give and take goes on for hours . . . more than 40 chapters. And then, in the end, somehow, God actually shows up to answer the charge, but it is a singularly unsatisfactory answer.

 

It does go on a bit but by and large it is little more than a statement of fact that the universe is huge, complex and incomprehensible. Which is to say, not just that the truth is more than you can comprehend, it isn’t that the truth is more than you can handle. It is that truth is found in the “isness” of existence and it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. It just is. 

 

Now, truly inferior hands tried to made additions to Job through the centuries, trying to soften the blow a bit, perhaps, or to offer more of a defense of God. 

It isn’t hard to spot most of the additions. They are in prose and they are theologically silly. I won’t even dignify the ignorant fake introduction that describes a betting contest between God and Satan to explain Job’s fate, and all of the stuff at the end after the first verses of chapter 42 can be ignored. However, there is one mildly satisfying gesture to be found there when God tells the friends of Job that they were totally wrong in all of the religious gyrations they had been pillorying Job with for 40 chapters. God dismisses them to go sacrifice seven bulls and seven rams, just for saying stupid stuff. 

I know that might seem unlikely, but it is right there in chapter 42 of Job. I miss the good old days when you could give someone a hefty fine for saying stupid things about God, but it is somewhat comforting to think that it happened way back when. 

 

Religious people have used supernatural theism as a way of abdicating any moral responsibility for what happens in the world. As Scott Peck observed, a hurricane is not an act of God, it is an accident of nature. However, when volunteers come from hundreds of miles away to help rebuild; when people open their wallets and checkbooks and donate to help the victims of disaster, I am willing to give license to say that is an act of God, because it is love inspired by compassion and that is as close as we get to godliness. 

 

God is not pulling strings from above the clouds, healing one child’s cancer while, at the same time, sending a truck careening out of control to kill Melissa’s husband. 

You may think that I am being excessively cynical in saying that there is no one in charge of the universe and that things happen for no reason but it was the 16^thcentury Spanish Saint, Teresa of Avila, who said it first.

I’m not saying that I believe in determinism. The world is not just a bunch of chemicals and forces of physics that have been set in motion and that we have no will to change the course of events. Smoking cigarettes is a causative agent for lung cancer. Sugar consumption is related to obesity. Driving while drunk can have lethal consequences. Our choices do matter: 

Take this inquisitive kid for example. He’s going places . . . not Princeton, or Yale, but . . . places. I’m just saying, our choices have consequences. Some choices are better than others. 

We are not big biblicists here, even if that is our heritage. What the churches of our youth failed to point out to us is that the Bible does not represent one world or even one theological perspective. There are passages written by people who did believe that God was a puppet-master who lived in the clouds. There are parts of the Bible that assure us that God is in charge. . . That things happen according to God’s divine plan. . . that God answers prayers, heals us, protects us, finds us jobs, and parking places at the mall during the Christmas shopping season. . . but there is also Job . . . good ol’ Job who stands up in the middle of the pages of the Old Testament to say, “It just ain’t so.” 

 

Kind of like the religious horizon in our area, it might even be fair to say that most of the Bible echoes Paul’s insistence that all things work out for the good of those who love God, even AIDS babies in Africa, war refugees from Syria, and toddler prisons on the American border with Mexico. Most of the Bible sings with the Psalmist that God is our protector, defender, savior and deliverer. And some people who have heard me disparage the notion of God as being a 12 month-out-of-the-year Santa Claus who grants our wishes if only we really really really believe in fairies will say, “how do you know.” And, honestly, I know in exactly the same way that I know that there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, or Easter Bunny. There may be some slight chance that I am mistaken but there is no evidence to suggest that I am. 

 

In the same way, Job, and a lot of the Proverbs and most of Ecclesiastes, offers the minority opinion in the same way that we offer an alternative spiritual view of reality here, and like Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, we may be the minority view but it just so happens that reason and evidence are on our side. 

 

A healthy spirituality can never be achieved through denial of reality. The mysterious spirit of the universe that seems to be in all places and a part of all things, does not feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, or welcome the stranger. That’s our job, that is our part of being the hands and feet of God. It is, as St Teresa said, only through our eyes that God looks compassion into the world. 

 

That’s not a lack of religious faith nor is it caving into cynicism. It is an orientation to reality that I wish we could share with our sister congregations because, since it is true that God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, it sure would be helpful if they would get up out of those pews and give God a hand.