Augustine, Scripture, and Science

Augustine, Scripture, and Science   March 17, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 (chapter 5 of Armstrong’s “Case for God”)

God had adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it. One of the Psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine’s time, that there was a body of water above the firmament that caused rainfall. It would be absurd, Augustine said, to interpret this literally. … whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.

Nicolina Newcombe is one of our longtime listeners and supporters. She lives in Hamilton, New Zealand. We talked on Friday after I learned of the shooting in two mosques in New Zealand that left 49 people immediately dead and nearly as many with serious wounds. She told me that the shooter, an Australian man who, because of strict gun laws in Australia, could not acquire and gun to carry out his evil plans near his home, so he flew over to neighboring New Zealand where gun laws are more relaxed because they have never had a mass shooting, on this scale, there and there is not much of a gun culture on the usually peaceful island nation. Nicolina told me that there had been a shooting planned at the mosque near her home in Hamilton but that the police had thwarted that plan.  Her community gathered at the mosque in Hamilton last night for a shared memorial. 

 And, as any sane nation would after such a horrible event, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden vowed that their gun laws would be immediately amended to prevent another such attack. Something that Americans remain just too jaded to do. 

We should, however, take note of how an elected official acts when they are not in the employ of the National Rifle Association and imagine a different America.

I’m glad that the American media has finally learned not to splash the name and picture of the shooter on the news, giving them, inevitably, the attention they crave. I’m glad that they didn’t publish his white supremacist manifesto because the reasons for his violent madness do not need to be repeated . . . that would be doing him a favor. 

But the journalists let us have a little peek into his skull, enough to feel sick about it. We must never acquiesce to the unnatural and unprecedented fact that terrorists of this sort name Donald Trump as their inspiration, and even someone in Australia, celebrates America’s second amendment and the insane gun laws defended in its name. It is not normal for America to have a white nationalist president. It is not normal for racism to be defended from the oval office. It is not normal, and it must not be tolerated, and it absolutely must not be repeated.

There are myriad reasons for the frictions that have resulted in mass shootings in churches, synagogues, mosques, movie theaters, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, bars, and shopping centers. Immigration frightens some people. The diminishing majority of white people scares some. Drug use, alcoholism, a lack of education, a lack of proper mental health care, economic conditions. They are all factors which, in our own country, are exacerbated by insanely lax gun laws and a dangerously stupid, racist, president. 

These past days my thoughts have been with Nicolina and the people of New Zealand, and the Muslim population there who immigrated to New Zealand to escape the violence in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the oppression they have experienced in Iran and Saudi Arabia, only to, as Nicolina sadly observed, encounter unexpected violence in peace loving New Zealand. 

As I said, there are lots of factors: race, economics, immigration, gun laws, and such, but the elephant in the room is the influence of religion and religious prejudice and that, men and women, is our turf. We may have influence on other factors, but where religion is a factor, we have responsibility to clean up our own house.

I don’t always believe that religion is really the cause of all of the wars and conflict that are carried out in the name of religion, but, it would be absurd to suggest that it was not a huge factor but not always the real cause. As you have heard me quote H. Richard Niebuhr before:  Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.

Individual soldiers in Iran and Saudi Arabia may be very invested in the subtle differences between the Sunni and the Shi’a but the real government engines that keep the conflict stirred up are concerned with money, power, and real estate. Note that Donald Trump wanted a ban on all Muslim immigration to the USA but his first trip abroad after becoming president was to go bow and kiss the rings of wealthy Saudi rulers. 

He wants to build a wall to keep Latin Americans out of the USA but all of those people are Catholics and Pentecostals, very many are members of the Assembly of God. You would think that our local Assemblies leaders would screaming protests over this wall that is keeping their Christian sisters and brothers out of the USA . . . it sort-of makes you wonder why you have not heard a peep out of them . . . but cataloguing the hypocrisies of the Assemblies of God is way too time consuming and too emotionally exhausting for me to even get started on that project.

 There are healthy ways of being religious and there are unhealthy ways of being religious. I am convinced that the two are polar opposites. Looked at critically, there are things about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that are just as irrational and dangerously crazy as there is about Scientology and Mormonism but we all know people who are ardent members of Scientology or Mormonism who are good people who have managed to take the best of their religion and ignore most of the crazy stuff. Well, . . ., let me dial that back a bit . . . we all know Mormons who are good people who have managed to take the best of their religion and ignore most of the crazy stuff. 

What I believe marks the read divide between healthy and unhealthy religion is critical thinking. As someone observed, we should teach our children how to think, not what to think. But indoctrination in unsubstantiated beliefs is where religion goes off the rails. Please don’t ever get tired of me reminding you of what Voltaire said: Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities. 

Faith that is based on inherited beliefs that are memorized by rote and institutionalized in creeds simply trains you to believe things that are absurd. And once you learn how to believe things that are obviously and clearly just not true, then you can be persuaded to do almost anything . . . to the point that we no longer even react to being lied to.

I don’t want to give Trump too much oxygen in this sermon, but I would just ask you to consider the two years we listened to him say that he was going to build a wall all across our southern borderandMexico was going to pay for it. 

I strongly suspect that there were not a dozen people in America who believed that and yet, it is like being told that Moses divided the Red Sea, Jesus turned water into wine, and Muhammed rode a winged horse up to heaven. You don’t really believe it, but you know that you are supposed to believe it. 

Last fall, just before the November election, when Trump was saying that he was going to get a middle-class tax cut passed in November, a few journalists challenged him, pointing out that Congress wasn’t in session and wouldn’t be until 2019 . . . there was no legislation, no talk of legislation, no possibility of legislation, and he would just say, “I’ll get it done,” which, of course, he did not, but then, no one believed it anyway. 

I blame creedal religion for limbering up our society to just play along with lies. Religion should never teach people to believe in things that cannot be demonstrated to be true. We should all insist upon having an evidence-based faith.

Let me give you an example:

In the early 1990’s, when the Dalai Lama was first coming and speaking in the West, he was asked about gay rights and he very forcefully said that homosexuality was not in keeping with Buddhist tradition. That strong statement led to a much-publicized meeting he had with seven gay and lesbian people in Fremont Hotel in San Francisco. They talked with him about the medical and psychological research that supported the conviction that same sex relationships were normal, natural, and that they should not be the object of either religious or political discrimination. 

After thoughtfully considering the evidence, the Dalai Lama changed his views on the matter, saying that if two people of the same sex came together by mutual consent in a loving relationship, there is no reason to be opposed to them.

Buddhism has centuries of tradition and fairly complicated teachings, but the Dalai Lama was able, through a reasonable consideration of the evidence, to do in a few hours what decades of Catholic popes and Evangelical churches have not been able to do. Faith is not a matter of forcing yourself to believe outrageous and obviously untrue things. There is no extra credit given for being dumb enough to believe lies.

And the truth of it is, the church was not always mired in this kind of creedal and Biblical literalism. Karen Armstrong is exhaustively clear in her book, A Case for God, that history has been littered with scholars, bishops, and philosophers who were not fooled by literalism in their religious faith. 

No one had a bigger impact on scholarship prior to the modern era than Augustine of Hippo. The 4^thcentury teacher insisted that even though the Bible clearly described the earth as being flat and covered by a solid bowl that separated the waters below from the waters above, that to take that literally would bring shame on the Christian faith since it obviously was not true. In the 4^thcentury, Augustine knew that you had to interpret scripture in the light of science and not to make the church look stupid by denying science on the basis of revealed scripture. In the 4^thcentury, Augustine was saying to the conservative evangelical crowd, “Come on guys, knock it off, you are embarrassing us.” 

In the 5^thcentury, no one less than the prophet Muhammed said that Jesus wasn’t really the incarnation of God because that whole idea is ridiculous. Jesus was a great religious teacher and prophet, but no human is God. Think about it. The claim doesn’t even make sense. It is poetic language at best and not great poetry. 

I won’t bore you with a recitation of everyone who tried to make the world wake up to the difference between literally interpreting creedal religion and the poetic metaphor of trying to express our highest ideals in the crude container of language but over the years you have heard me quote major thinkers from Voltaire, to Thomas Paine, Soren Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Neihbur. We cut our teeth here when we started this church on books by Borg, Crossan, Armstrong, and Spong, all of whom have sold millions of books over the past few decades and yet, I am left to worry about the future of the progressive movement.

Even with all of this clear, rational, scholarly information available to people who have read the books, heard the lectures, watched the videos, but it seems like the evangelical world has a strangle hold on society that is so strong that people come down to this false dichotomy:   that you either accept the whole of religion on its face as being literally true or you reject it and become an atheist.

Forgive me for quoting Woody Allen, who is, obviously, a sorry excuse for a human being, but he illustrates my point for me, so we’ll give him a moment of sunlight…. In a commencement speech he delivered years ago, he sardonically concluded by saying, “More than any other time in history, we face a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

The choice is not between being an atheist or a traditional evangelical. There is 500 years of great biblical, theological, and philosophical scholarship that represents the best and highest of human thought and it offers to us a rational, progressive way into a future that allows human dignity, community, sustainability, and profound scientific and technological progress to flourish. 

Competing religious sectarianism is not the only cause of the mass murders we saw in mosques in New Zealand on Friday. But you cannot ignore the fact that religious fundamentalism, literalism, sectarianism, has fueled mass murders in churches, synagogues, and in mosques. It fuels racism. It emboldens xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia. 

The choice for church goers is not literalism or atheism but I am willing to insist that staying the same and teaching people to believe myths and magic is not a valid choice. The ancient religions we have brought from the Middle East of long ago into the 21^stcentury Western world all need to undergo a progressive reformation and they need to do it now. 

To paraphrase St. Augustine of Hippo: It is time for religious people to stop being stupid. 

Honesty and Hope

Honesty and Hope (March 10, 2019)

David Ketchum

 click here to see the video

          One of the common ways we’ve described our community of faith is that we have given up dishonest certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. Especially for those of us who came from fundamentalist religious backgrounds, there was some point in our spiritual journeys when we turned a corner and made that choice. For me, it is strange to remember the days when outrageous and outlandish claims appeared self-evident. There was no need to prove any of them; they felt obviously true. There were other claims that I accepted more unwillingly, but I accepted them nonetheless. They seemed to be required, and I was assured that there was a long history of folks that knew better than me and who had steadfastly believed in those things. When that internal world crumbled, around 2006 or so, I became resolute that I would not be duped again.

          However, that requires more diligent practice than I initially guessed. There was a whole world of outrageous claims to avoid, to be sure. And keeping up on the ongoing research dedicated to understanding the world takes more than a little commitment and time. But there was more to it than that. For as long as I could remember, I had used my dishonest certainty to cope with depressive tendencies. Embracing honest uncertainty also meant taking seriously my own mental and emotional well-being that were not possible before. That was great, but it was also hard work. Along the way, I began exploring the ways that dishonest certainty helped me cope with both traumatic experiences and the everyday complexities of life. My local church, the fellowship of dishonest certainty, had also been my main source of community, not to mention employment. Leaving that community meant losing networks, relationships, and resources. There was a lot more uncertainty to embrace than just my beliefs.

          Like all humans, I’ve experienced hardship, from health conditions to traumatic experiences to economic vulnerability to marginalization and rejection. My irrational religious beliefs, and the church that went along with them, gave me something that felt like solid ground to stand on. In my case, that didn’t make me passive. I found myself most at home among the troublemakers of Christian history, folks who stood up to injustice, embodied radical compassion, and insisted that the world could be and would be a different place. I still claim that history, and see myself as part of it, though the certainty is gone,. However, being honest about just how far that uncertainty extends into daily life is, usually, neither comfortable nor easy.

Growing Uncertainties

          “Honesty,” said the poet David Whyte, “is reached by the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, our world, or our self.” He goes on to say that -

“Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.” (https://web.archive.org/web/20160415045433/http://riverbankoftruth.com:80/2013/08/18/honesty-by-david-whyte/  )      

In other words, while humans have created oppressive systems that create a boundless amount of unnecessary suffering, some amount of suffering and uncertainty is inescapable. Learning to honestly face the things that make us recoil, experiences and circumstances we feel compelled to avoid or hide, is a vital part of growing into our full humanity, “a robust incarnation” into the way things are with a grateful, kind, wisdom.

          But the recoil is real. Against our embrace of honest uncertainty is the fear of loss and the risk of false hope. There has been a very small subset of human beings, mostly in places like the United States, who have been able to believe without question in the inevitable progress and stability of the world. This has not been a safe assumption for most humans during most of history, with the only certainties offered to the masses being exclusion, coercion, and exploitation. And though it seems to be amazingly easy to forget the past uncertainties, recent years have forced more and more U.S. residents to remember. Since 2014, researchers at Chapman University in Orange, California have used an annual survey to document the ways normal folks in the USA have experienced uncertainty and fear. The topics range from government to natural disasters to personal anxieties. (https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/research-centers/babbie-center/survey-american-fears.aspx )

          Over these last five years, two striking trends are emerging. First, US residents are becoming more afraid. In 2016, for example, the number one fear in the nation was held in common by 60.6% of respondents, and the other top fears were held by no more than 40% of the population. In 2018, the top fear, government corruption, was shared by 73.6% of the population, and “all the top ten fears were held by more than half of Americans.” The second trend is rising anxiety due to environmental concerns. “Not a single environmental concern made the top 10 list in 2016.” In 2018, five of the top 10 were environmental issues. (https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2018/10/16/americas-top-fears-2018/ )

           And it is no wonder. After all, “The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates an increase of 250,000 excess deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 due to the ‘well understood impacts of climate change.’” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5984805/ ) And we already know that environmental catastrophes have a profound and negative impact on mental health. For example, researchers have documented the relationship between depression and PTSD with natural disasters, such as hurricanes. If these disasters occur more frequently, so will the resultant mental health issues. Similarly, one recent study showed that living with impacts of climate change has already resulted in “significantly worsened mental health” for those who lived in impacted regions.

“For each degree of average temperature increase, mental health worsened by a 2 percent increase in the rate of reported mental health issues. … extending their findings to the whole US population translates into nearly 2 million extra people with mental health difficulties in any given month when the weather is worse.”  (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201810/how-ignore-climate-change )

          As a result, psychologists are now discussing Climate Anxiety as a way to better understand how climate change exacerbates anxiety and depression. (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-09-21/psychologists-explain-our-climate-change-anxiety/ )  In other words, we aren’t just being pessimistic, and we aren’t making up these impacts. The same could be said of the other fears on the list, none of which are unreasonable or outrageous. On a host of urgent issues facing our society, there are sound reasons to feel concern, outrage, and even fear. And here we are, a community that has committed itself to honest uncertainty.

          In an era of Climate Anxiety and growing fear, that honesty must include our struggles to enter into that uncertainty, to acknowledge our relative powerlessness, and then resolve to keep making decisions and living life in ways that make a sustainable, just future possible. A failure to do so only makes us increasingly vulnerable to the very dishonesty that we were certain we already discarded. A failure to do so makes us increasingly vulnerable to inaction, either because we avoid the issues that feel overwhelming, or have a false optimism that everything will turn out okay. Both paths easily lead to inaction and an accommodation of injustice.

          My own preferred weakness has been despair. I’m not saying I am immune to optimism, but I can say it has never stuck. It’s become something of a truism that humanity has the technology to build just and sustainable societies right now, and has for some time, but it does not yet have the psychology for it. Our best hope is that we survive as a species long enough for our psychology, and the related structures and cultures, to catch up. I don’t think that is certain at all. And yet, I also know that if we give up, there is no chance.

So I drag my discouraged self out, again and again, to try to do the work of social change. I am not an optimist, but I have become somewhat skilled at not giving up. I am convinced, with Vaclav Havel, that “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” That is a type of honest certainty that I can live with.

Adapting the PERMA Model

          I haven’t yet found a really comprehensive tool for intentionally reflecting on these issues, and western models often seem deficient to me in several key areas. Martin Seligman’s PERMA model (https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/perma-model/ ), which I’ll reflect on in just a moment, is no exception. It has too often been used prescriptively, when, if I understand correctly, it was intended as a descriptive and theoretical model. It is perhaps too focused on the individual’s psychology and doesn’t adequately include physical well-being or social systems. And it generally isn’t oriented around or inclusive enough of the experiences of oppressed and marginalized communities. (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/cap-0000036.pdf )

          That being said, I have found it helpful as a reflective practice and a good way to help me navigate that treacherous strait between naivete and despair. It can provide a bit of a check-in, helping me notice my discouragement before it blossoms into depression. And it can be a practical action, something to do when I don’t feel like I can do something else, or don’t even know what to do.

          My reflections begin with Seligman’s fourth aspect, Meaning. For my purposes, meaning is about intention and aspiration, what inspires and keeps us going. We recognize aspiration when we notice our spirit rising, rather than sinking. For me personally, this means that, when I sit down to meditate, I begin by remembering my aspirations to experience life with curiosity, kindness, and gratitude. And then I try to carry those aspirations with me throughout the day.

          This is closely related to our vision of how society could be. Socially, my aspirations are oriented around building equality in community, dismantling oppressive systems, and establishing social relationships that are non-hierarchical, just, and kind. We spend a lot of time focusing on the things to resist, and we don’t always have a choice in the matter. We have to notice and resist oppression and environmental destruction. But Paulo Freire reminded us that we must announce the new world with as much, or even more, time, energy, and enthusiasm as we denounce the way things are. This can be difficult, especially when there is simply so much suffering, but despair is never closer at hand than when I lose touch with my intentions and aspirations.

We remind ourselves what we are fighting for, why our effort is important and beautiful, and why we cannot give up.

           This connects well with the second aspect, Engagement. If something happening in the world is feeling particularly overwhelming, it can be helpful, hopeful, and empowering to do something practical, especially in cooperation with others, that connects with our aspirations. This can be tricky, because there is only so much any one of us can do. There is an ongoing dialog between engagement and equanimity. All of us need rest, all of us need to work with our limitations, and all of us have to figure out what works for our own unique selves.

          For example, there is a steady stream of bad news when it comes to the exclusion and bigotry aimed at queer folk, such as the recent decision by the United Methodist General Conference to exclude lgbtqia+ folk from leadership positions and marriage. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/united-methodists-fracture-lgbt-plan-rejected/583693/ )

While the Methodists were getting most of the news, the first anti-LGBTQ bill of 2019 in Missouri, HB927, was introduced into the House of Representatives on February 25. This bill would empower student groups on campus to use their religious beliefs as a cover to discriminate against lgbtq students. (https://legiscan.com/MO/text/HB927/id/1911562 )

          There seems to be no end to this kind of thing, and it can be overwhelming. So, in addition to supporting and participating in organizations like the ACLU, I help facilitate local transgender/nonbinary support groups. This is often both exhausting, requiring a a lot of time and a great deal of emotional and physical energy, and energizing, making a space to intentionally and lovingly accept and show care for one another. And even though the conversations and situations can be heavy, there is also joy. I know that this work isn’t going to solve everything, but it keeps me engaged, reminds me that my identity and well-being are real, important, and beautiful, no matter what terrible news might come my way.

          And Engagement like this also brings us into community, into Relationships that can sustain us. Most of you already know my stories of growing up as a queer person in southwest Missouri, overflowing with internalized oppression. Last June, a straight friend from out of town joined me here to celebrate Pridefest. And, as I was introducing him to folks and he was slowly realizing he was completely surrounded by queer folk for the first time in his life, I gradually realized just how many wonderful friendships I had in the lgbtq community. That may not sound like a big deal, but it was. When we moved back to this area in 2010, I felt increasingly isolated.

Getting involved with activities and organizations advocating for lgbtq rights and well-being, made it possible to find a larger network of friends, fellow activists, and allies than I had dreamed possible. I still remember the joy and relief of sitting in a room for the first time and realizing that all of us there were both nonbinary and on the asexual spectrum, and we didn’t have to explain anything to each other.

          There is a parallel experience for most of us when we gather together here, where we can unite around the crucial social justice issues of the day without argument. We know that black lives matter and native lives matter. We stand on the side of immigrants and refugees. We work for economic dignity and justice and insist on the value of labor, against the insatiable greed of those who hoard wealth and power. We believe that education, health care, and housing are human rights, and that our policies and communities should reflect this. We know that women’s, and lgbtq rights, are human rights. And we know that our well-being and our very survival as a planet necessitates caring for the earth, restoring ecosystems, and creating sustainable, regenerative societies. Because we share these convictions, and others like them, we can relate with each other much more freely. We are not all best friends, but I trust you more readily, and I am really happy when we get to know each other a little better.

          There’s a lot more to be said about relationships, but since I’m preaching about social rejection in April, I’ll leave it at that today. Instead, let’s focus on the role of cultivating Positive Emotion and recognizing Accomplisments. I like to think about positive emotion in terms of gratitude and goodwill. Too often, positive psychology as it has been popularly presented has fallen short when it comes to addressing issues and populations related to oppression and social justice. (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/cap-0000036.pdf ) It is too easy to talk about positive emotion in such a way that folks feel obligated to try and create these emotions, which can feel all the more frustrating in situations of injustice. A wide range of emotions are appropriate responses to the suffering of a the world, including anger and grief. We move forward through those emotions, not by denying them.

          Yet it is also true that an emotion like anger isn’t the only emotion we feel, and, at least for me, it is not an emotion that sustains either my activism or my well-being. But when I am in touch with my aspirations, or when I engage in meaningful actions alongside people I care about, gratitude and goodwill arise quite naturally. We don’t have to force anything; we can just recognize it and enjoy those moments.

          We need the relief that comes with joy. When we are dealing with stressful, depressing circumstances, we can quite easily be carried along by our negativity bias.

And it is easy to fall into the trap of identifying only with those stressors, to the neglect of everything else. So we need to take special care to recognize and savor the times when pleasure and joy break through. We need to intentionally recognize gratitude when we feel it, and take time to enjoy and express that feeling. Similarly, when I feel the tug of despair, I pause to connect with goodwill and kindness. My actions can be an expression of love for all of us who live on planet Earth, now and in the future. Gratitude and goodwill are much better motivators for me. They energize me and, even if they don’t make me optimistic, they do make me want to go on and not give up.

          And this is true for all the ways, little and large, that bring us closer to this more sustainable, just, and caring world. When the obstacles are so large and the journey is so long, we need to really celebrate Accomplishments along the way. Back in 1984, Karl Weick pointed out that conceiving of social change on a “massive scale” could actually be counterproductive. Anticipating the problem we began with today, Weick said that -

“People often define social problems in ways that overwhelm their ability to do anything about them. … When social problems are described this way, efforts to convey their gravity disable the very resources of thought and action necessary to change them. When the magnitude of problems is scaled upward in the interest of mobilizing action, the quality of thought and action declines, because processes such as frustration, arousal, and helplessness are activated.” (http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Small-Wins_Redefining-the-Scale-of-Social-Problems.pdf )

          In contrast, focusing on -

“a small win has an immediacy, tangibility, and controllability that could reverse these effects. … By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.” (ibid.)

           This is how we build movements. This is how we build community. Practically speaking, this necessitates processes like strategic planning and action-reflection, which have their own skill sets. But the principle is simple: identify your goal; make a plan; break it up into small, manageable steps; celebrate even the little accomplishments; and make adjustments to keep you on track. Human psychology seems to thrive on these kinds of baby steps.

In one study of workplace moods and activities, researchers

“generated 12,000 person-days of data on moods and activities at work. The striking conclusion is that a sense of incremental progress is vastly more important to happiness than either a grand mission or financial incentives … . Small wins ‘had a surprisingly strong positive effect, and small losses a surprisingly strong negative one.’” (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/09/change-life-small-victories-burkeman )

          Anyone who knows the satisfaction of marking something off on a to-do list knows exactly what’s being said here. We need to be realistic, yes, and acknowledge that the small acts we do are not sufficient to change everything in the world that needs to be changed. But our realism must also include human psychology, and it is very likely that we will find our greatest motivation and encouragement to keep doing the hard work of social change when we take the time to recognize and celebrate - even, and perhaps especially, the small accomplishments.

One Another and Ourselves

          All of this is to say that, while we cannot offer guarantees, we can offer ourselves. We can refuse the easy pathways of inaction. We can even, sometimes and perhaps in small doses, honestly face the overwhelming difficulties we face as a society. And we can act. We can offer: patience as we wrestle with powerlessness, courage as we let go of ignorance, and love as we move through loss. We can face uncertainty with honesty and grace. We can stay grounded in our best aspirations, and we can live out our convictions: without guarantees, but with faithfulness to the best visions within us for communities that are wise and kind.

Jesus: teacher of radical compassion (this stuff is hard!)

Jesus: teacher of radical compassion (this stuff is hard!) Feb. 24, 2019 Dr. Ray
Luke 6:27-38  

click here to see the video
27“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.29If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. 31Do to others as you would have them do to you. 32“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.34If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. 36Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
37“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

I began teaching at Drury University about 20 years ago under their old curriculum when they were still, at least marginally, a church related college that had at least one required class in religion. The title of that class was the rather pretentious sounding: Life and Teachings of Jesus. When I took on the task of teaching this class, I didn’t want to talk about what the church said about Jesus, I wanted to try to drill down into what Jesus said and what made his teachings unique.

What would you say was the unique thing that defined the life and teachings of Jesus? What sets Jesus apart from other early common era preachers?

So, you go to the gospels and you ask, well, what did he do? He started off
exorcising demons but, you know, he wasn’t the only demon exorcist running around Palestine at that time. Exorcism might get you movie rights in our day but back then, exorcism was as common as chiropractors and with similarly controversial reputations among other professionals. I’m not saying that casting out
a demon or adjusting your spine has about the same amount of science behind it, unless, of course, that is exactly what I’m saying. But I digress . . .
Jesus did exorcisms, and so did a lot of other people. Jesus did miraculous feedings. So did a lot of other people in his era. He was said to have had a miraculous birth, that certain miracles were attributed to him, he was even described as being the son of God . . . none of which, I am afraid to say, was uncommon in the first century.

A careful reading of the Jewish Histories written by Josephus in the late first century can yield the names of about 50 Jewish messiahs with various claims to the sort of things we find attributed to Jesus. So, I ask again, what is the unique aspect of what Jesus did that gives him a job description that is different from all other messianic characters of the time?

When I went to seminary in 1980, I was sure that I knew, as most of us who grew up in more evangelical, or Orthodox, or Catholic settings, were sure that we knew: Jesus died on the cross for our redemption, becoming our savior from a richly deserved eternal sentence in hell, giving us the hope of attaining to heaven.

And I understand that would still be the answer for a whole lot of people and I don’t want to be the one who goes around to Kindergarten classes telling 5-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and there is not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. People generally come to these realizations as
they are intellectually and emotionally prepared to allow themselves to figure out the difference between imagination and reality.

In grad school, when you are forced to put your Kindergarten faith under the microscope, you begin to realize that the biblical gospels were ancient religious narratives that had very little to do with the actual historical Jesus. Gospel writers recorded events of Jesus healing and even raising the dead, to connect him to certain Hebrew fables about Elijah and Elisha. That stories about Jesus feeding the multitudes and walking on water were simply derivations of the stories about Moses providing manna in the wilderness and dividing the waters of the Red Sea.

And if all of that wasn’t obvious enough, the gospel writers even invented this transfiguration story in which Jesus was standing on a mountain top talking with Moses and Elijah. It is a literary technique, similar to Obi Wan appearing to Luke in movies after the first Star Wars movie in which we saw Obi Wan killed. It is literature, it isn’t a historical account.

I know that I make people mad when I say that sometimes because it is not what you were told in years and years and years of church going but before you send me hate mail, let me ask you this: Who you should you be mad at, the people who filled your head with fairy tales and lies for years or the guy who is finally telling you the truth? You might want to think that I making this up or exaggerating but I assure you that there is nearly 200 years of the best of biblical scholarship behind
what I am saying to you and some amazing historical examples of insightful philosophers and historians through the centuries.

There is a core to the historical Jesus tradition which is profound and unique and later generations attempted to fatten up his resume by heaping up claims and titles on him that they took from other religious and political figures of their time.


Roman coins of the era called the Caesar “Lord,” and “Savior,” and tradition had it that he was a son of god, born to a virgin. The early enthusiasts for the Jesus tradition didn’t want him to be second to any Old Testament prophet or current ruler and they put him up on a literary pedestal above all others. But what a real scholar, an honest seeker wants to know is “why?” What was so unique about Jesus to inspire this kind of adoration?

I am grateful to the late author, Marcus Borg, who so compassionately articulated an understanding of the historical Jesus that gives back to the name of Jesus some of the credibility it loses with all of the magical and superstitious attributions that have been heaped up on him for most of the past two thousand years. When you look past the later myths, the exaggerations and the obvious additions of later church leaders . . . when you look at what may be actual quotes from Jesus, or at least the echoes of what he taught, you do find a unique message. Borg says that the job description that Jesus filled was just this: he was a teacher of radical compassion.

In fact, if you look at the conclusions of the hundreds of scholars involved in the Jesus Seminar over the past two generations, the one statement in the gospels that almost every agrees actually came from Jesus, the one verse you can imbue with some real academic certainty is a fragment of this verse that led off our wisdom lesson from Luke, chapter 6, verse 27: Love your enemies.

Luke sets it in a narration, “But I will tell those who will listen; love your enemies. Do good to those who harm you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.” Jesus may have just said, “Love your enemies,” but Luke wants to drive the point home. . . love your enemies, do good for people who have hurt you, bless those who cuss you out, and have good thoughts about the people who have abused you.

Before the empire prostituted the name of Jesus to be a salvation cult that kept
slaves obedient and hard at work so they could go to heaven when they died, before the gospel writers buried the message of Jesus in silly miracle stories and magic carnival shows, he was the teacher of radical compassion and by radical, I mean, undeserved, counter intuitive, maybe even bordering on neurotically excessive . . . forgiveness, generosity, kindness.

Am I the only one here who kinda wishes he hadn’t said that? When my father died a decade ago my older brother, John, asked me, “Do you want any of dad’s guns.” And I immediately answered him, “I don’t want to own a gun because I know too many people who deserve to be shot.” I don’t think I would ever do it, even if I owned a hundred guns. But I don’t want to spend any time fantasizing
about revenge against liars, users, socio-paths, child molesters, wife beaters, or murderers.

We are a people who believe in revenge. After 9-11, we bombed out almost every structure that was in the country where Al Qaida had hidden training camps and when decimating Afghanistan didn’t satisfy us, we attacked a whole other country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with it at all. We are big on revenge.

There may be countries where the penal system is designed to reform criminals but ours isn’t. Our prison system is designed to make criminals “pay a debt to society,” and by that they mean exacting an eye for an eye. Our jails and prisons are set up to make inmates feel that they are subhuman and that we have a right to treat them like garbage. In this sense, our institutions are a reflection of what is in us, collectively, as a community of individuals.

We prefer revenge to reform. We would rather get even than to choose to forgive. What made Jesus stand out from almost every other religious and political voice of the day; what made him unforgettable, even when you honestly would kinda like to
forget him, was that he insisted that we love our enemies, that we pray for our abusers, that we return kindness in response to hurt.

Jesus introduced the radical idea that revenge doesn’t work, that evil doesn’t end evil. . . what the modern twist of Old Testament ethics says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leads to a blind and toothless society.” As Martin Luther King said, “Darkness doesn’t drive out darkness, only light does that.”

We are now daily faced with the inescapable paradox of a nation full of religious people who continue to support the world’s most abusive prison system, the most vengeful judicial system. We have religious people insisting that the most prejudiced, elitist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, xenophobe in modern government is actually some kind of divinely appointed president.
And these are the people who 20 years ago were taking the Left Behind series seriously and now they seem happy to declare a virtual anti-Christ to be a modern messiah. Religion has gone off the rails. Traditional Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have lost their way, expressing their faith in excesses of militarism and a preference for a fascist government.
It was Missouri’s own Richard Neibuhr who made the observation that “religion makes good people better and makes bad people worse.” It is true. Healthy religion inspired spiritual people to start our local hospitals, homeless shelters, domestic abuse shelters, emergency food and medical services. It is a healthy spirituality that gives us relief agencies like the Rainbow Network in Nicaragua, the Convoy of Hope, Doctors without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, and countless congregations who care for their own elderly, infirm, and troubled individuals, who encourage healthy marriage, loving and stable families, and ethical behavior.

But you can’t say that without being aware that there is unhealthy religion, often sharing the same pews with healthy religion. There are people who, in the name of Jesus, teach their own gay and lesbian children to loath themselves to such a degree that they have become the largest single reason for teen suicides. They
teach the kind of misogyny that keeps our spouse abuse shelters filled with the victims of domestic violence. And they foster the kind of paranoid exclusivism that makes them turn away Muslim, Mexican, and other brown refugees who come to us seeking our aid. Unhealthy religion denies reality, preferring instead a magical and superstitious world view that is leading to a too slow response to pollution, climate change, and destruction of our eco-system and the extinction of many forms of life on our planet.
The good that is done in the name of religion does not obliterate the bad that is done by unhealthy religion. We cannot, in the name of tolerance, simply avert our eyes and pretend that whatever someone else chooses to believe is their business any more than we would ignore it if Campbells started putting a lethal dose of cyanide in their tomato soup. We know the difference between healthy faith and toxic faith, and it is our obligation to teach the former and extinguish the later.

As Karen Armstrong wrote: The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.

Honestly, this is why John Churcher and John Shelby Spong have both become a bit upset with me when I even mention retiring. They have not stopped speaking and not only are they old than I am by a decade or two, Churcher has cancer and Spong had a stroke, but the need to teach a healthier way of being people of faith is too important to abandon. The mainstream church is still refusing to give up on the “die and go to heaven in Jesus’ name” scam. And we have to keep trying to find another way to say it, to be more persuasive, to be more insistent. . . beyond your fear of hell and lust for heaven is a real faith, a faith in a man who was not just a man, because he was a man who was willing to say what no one else would say and most of us didn’t want to hear: love your enemies. None of us will ever find any semblance of salvation until we can do just that.

The Bible and Immigration

The Bible and Immigration              Feb. 17, 019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

Leviticus 19:34              

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

 

 This is a map of North America, it uses color codes to identify the lower 48 states of the United States, and Alaska, separated by Canada, with Mexico to our south, and the several Latin American states of the southern tip of Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Columbia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.     

But contrast that with a simple photograph of North America. Both images represent a certain reality. The photograph shows no boundaries, no national borders. It shows the earth, a singular planet, which is host to humans, mosquitos, various forms of marine life and birds. But both images represent certain truths. All of North America is not the same. Most people up here in Greenland speak Danish, in Quebec, most people speak French. English is the majority language in most of the rest of Canada and the United States, with Spanish being predominant in Mexico and south. There are pockets of Inuit, Sioux, Cherokee, and other indigenous and ethnic tongues. 

But a political map is little more than a portrait of a moment in history. Before Columbus landed on a Caribbean Island, North America looked more like this,

With more than 90 distinct tribes claiming agricultural and hunting grounds across this part of the world.

When we learned American history in public school, most of our teachers viewed the growth of the United States from a European political perspective. When our nation was very young and Napoleon was cash starved by his European wars, we bought the “Louisiana Purchase” from France. This is the territory that becomes Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, the Dakotas, part of Texas, and Wyoming. 

The truth is that the French claim on the territory was tenuous at best. They traded there but not many lived in what was Sioux, Cheyanne, and Crow, Native American territories. Admittedly, Small Pox had dramatically reduced the native population but to call this region French is absurd.

Shortly after the Louisiana purchase, the territory to the west and south that had been controlled by Spain, fought several wars to establish Mexican Independence, both against Spain and to repel an invasion of Napoleon’s forces. 

Again, many of us were given the impression that the western movement of the United States was a matter of European decedents fighting off tribes of Native Americans. Obviously, that fails to tell the whole story. Mexico claimed control of what is now New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and western Colorado. Some of that land was purchased, some taken in border clashes and wars, and a great deal of it was just stolen at the point of a bayonet by our military. 

When Abraham Lincoln was in Congress, he vociferously fought against these border wars with Mexico and decried the use of soldiers to steal farms from Mexicans who were literally harvesting their crops. Much like Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric, James Polk would claim that Mexicans had killed Americans and Polk proclaimed that American blood has been spilled and we must retaliate. Lincoln knew he was lying, and he kept asking, “Show me the spot where American blood was spilled.”  He raised this objection so often during the war that newspapers of the day started to call him “Spotty Lincoln.”

We took the northern half of Mexico and made them a part of the United States and now scream about how many Mexicans live “illegally” in territories that were illegally taken from them. All of that without even mentioning nearly 50 years of efforts to annex Canada in the early days of our union. 

Please forgive me for taking so much of your time to review something almost everyone here would already have known but I want to make the point that, in the end, we have only one planet, national boundaries are fluid, and people move, immigrate, resettle, or migrate all during every page of history. 

 Again, I have obviously just been talking about North America. The same is true of other parts of the world. This was the Middle East a century ago, and this is what it looks like after the British and Americans said, “Here, let us help you.” Turning four or five major regions into dozens of chronically warring states.

It is more than a little pretentious of me to boil modern demographics down into this nut shell in the presence of several history and geography professors but what I really want to talk about is more in my wheel house. 

I advertised this message as a biblical perspective on immigration and I did so, as a rare tip of the hat to the revised common lectionary that is used in most mainstream Protestant denominations, which quotes this passage from the 19^thchapter of Leviticus which says: The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

This passage makes it clear that there is no such thing as an “illegal alien.” There is just “someone who is new to the neighborhood.” The passage turns on a kind of historical compassion:  We used to be immigrants ourselves, we have no right to be abusive of the next wave of immigrants. I love that line in Michael Franti’s song, Hello Bonjour, where he sings: 

I don't need a passport to walk on this earth
Anywhere I go cause I was made of this earth
I'm born of this earth, I breathe of this earth, and even with the pain I believe in this earth

But the Bible is not so simple. You should always beware of anyone says conclusively that the Bible has a clear message on any ethical issue. The fact is that the Bible is a collection of religious literature written in several languages, over several centuries, in several countries. It is more like a leather-bound cultural debate than it is a solitary word from God. 

If you look for racial prejudice and militant views towards foreigners and immigrants, you can find that in the Bible too. We liberals who claimed that the core of the Christian message is radical compassion, always gravitate to passages like this verse from Leviticus but it is not the perspective you can find in the Bible.

The 23^rdchapter of Deuteronomy says clearly that Moabites are not allowed to live among God’s people. But then, the whole book of Ruth is about Ruth the Moabite and her immigration into Judah and she later appears in the genealogy of Jesus.

Jeremiah was willing to declare the people of Uz as being pure evil. But then, the favorite book of wisdom literature, Job, is named for a faithful man of Uz. 

The book of Deuteronomy clearly condemns all eunuchs, but then the book of Acts describes the baptism of a eunuch as one of the first converts to Christianity, and the whole of the reconstruction era literature in the Hebrew Bible condemns Samaritans but then Jesus keeps telling stories about how Samaritans are more righteous than his peers who are Jews.

So, who are you going to believe about these foreigners? Jesus or Donald Trump?

Like Ezra and Nehemiah, Trump wants to build a wall and keep foreigners out, and like Jesus, we don’t want ‘no stinkin’wall and we choose to take a more kind approach to immigration. Even though I do not consider myself to be exclusively Christian, it always feels better to be on Jesus’ side of an argument, especially when it is an argument between Jesus and Donald Trump. 

I was in Mexico last week and was pleased to see that most people are keeping a pretty good sense of humor about this horrible period in American history, so far as our immigration policy goes. But the truth behind most of immigration is rarely very funny.

The debate we see in the pages of scripture are not much different from the debate we see raging in American politics today, though our much more densely populated globe complicates everything. There were times in the history of Judah that their primary concern was for doing what they had to do to protect and preserve Judah. The more xenophobic and paranoid passages of the Bible come from those times. 

But there were prophetic voices, and some of them also were to be heard during challenging times in Judah’s history, but the prophets kept trying to get people to raise their ethical standards, to try to see the world more compassionately and more fairly. Frankly, our own treatment of the Bible is that, for generations, we have picked and favorite passages and ignored the pro-slavery, anti-feminist, polygamous, classist, racist passages that are, I assure you, abundantly present in the Bible. As progressives, we can feel fully empowered to say flatly that those passages are just wrong. They are not the word of God and they don’t even sound very good when those sentiments are expressed by a low browed racist like Donald Trump. 

Any rational read of current events makes it plain that this xenophobic fear of brown people is irrational. We have serious things to be afraid of: domestic gun violence, deaths from drug over doses, and fatalities on our crumbling roads. 

Just those three add up to more than 100,000 preventable deaths per year so, clearly, the declaration of a national emergency to build a wall along the border with Mexico is economically stupid and morally tragic. 

Trump recently claimed that more than 60,000 Americans had been killed by illegal immigrants since 9-11. A truth claim that has no basis in fact and is traceable only to the ranting of the clearly racist Republican Congressmember from Iowa, Steve King. Not that murders have not happened, they have, it is just that illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to commit any crime than native born citizens. King’s numbers are inflated by several thousand percent. You are about as likely to be killed by lightening as you are to be killed by an illegal immigrant and, frankly, many who are killed by lightening were playing golf in a thunderstorm, so, if you consider holding a lightning rod up in the air during a thunderstorm as entertainment, I might be persuaded to see your death as a part of Darwin’s natural selection. But I digress…

Immigration, in our complicated time in history, is not something that can be managed with a open borders policy, even if that is what Jesus might have done. But as spiritual people, what I am imploring of you, is to strive to take the most compassionate view of immigration that you possibly can.

I will not wade into the weeds about how many times we have invaded our neighbors to the south, or assassinated unfriendly political leaders, or bribed and threatened our way into creating the Banana Republics that have empowered cruel dictators and corrupt governments which have impoverished the people of Central America and left them vulnerable to the violence of drug cartels and civil wars. 

America is not the cause of every unstable government in the world but when you are the elephant in the room, it is difficult to say that you don’t have some influence over everything else that is happening in the room. Our foreign policy and our trade policy have been designed to keep wages low in poor countries and to keep our military empire beyond local threats. As such, our policies have been profit-driven and stupidly short sighted. 

An intelligent, long range view for the Americas must acknowledge that successful governments and economies in Central and South America are ultimately good for the environment, for our national security and theirs, and probably for the economy because we need markets more than we need slave labor. And, trust me, when living conditions are bearable in Central America, they have little or no desire to immigrate north, legally or illegally. Remember to be mindful of the ice on the parking lot when you leave today . . . and that is something you will never hear in a church south of the border. 

A friend of mine, Javier, works in a Microsoft call center in Nicaragua for $1.25 an hour. We were talking last week about their efforts at unionizing for better wages, hours and working conditions. He told me that his managers at Microsoft, one of the most-wealthy corporations in the world, told them that if they unionize, they will move the shop to India where they can pay less than a $1 an hour for college educated workers. 

So, when Augusto Sandino warned Nicaraguans a hundred years ago not to trust the Gringos, you can’t say that he was wrong! Javier, nosotrous en la lucha por la paz y la justica, mi amigo.

Americans voters have elected a monstrous government because they were vulnerable to manipulation by fear and prejudice. I have one point to this sermon that though it comes with Uncle Sam pointing his finger, my listeners in England, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand need to know when the shoe fits as well:

I want you to stop being afraid, afraid of other skin colors, religions, sexual preferences, gender identities, and especially of immigrants. For God’s sake, I can’t end with a “thus sayeth the Lord” but clearly: The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were too were once aliens and you are better than prejudice and fear.