Evidence Based Faith

Evidence Based Faith  “Haud Ignota Loquor” (Speak not of what is not known)     

August 4, 2019       Dr. Roger Ray 

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1.    Evolution is true.

2.    The Bible isn’t inerrant

3.    Women have the same rights as men.

4.    Homosexuality isn’t a sin.

5.    Owning a gun isn’t a God-given right

6.    America isn’t God’s chosen country.

7.    Neither Republicans nor Democrats are God’s chosen political party.

8.    The modern state of Israel isn’t God’s chosen people.

9.     Decisions about abortion should be left up to individual women.

10.  No religion has any real information about either heaven or hell.

I don’t typically repeat a sermon or a lecture unless I am on tour but I am going to share some thoughts with you today that I prepared for the Anderson Progressive Theology conference earlier this year which they failed to record very well. So I tried it again in Exeter, England in June and their rented recording equipment broke down just as we were starting the conference so, other than my good friend, Paul Thomlinson who has brought his guitar along with me as I spoke in a Presbyterian Church in Clemson, a Baptist Church in Anderson, and a Unitarian Church in Columbia, SC, hopefully this will be new material to be added to our online catalogue.

I promise you that nothing I tell you today is something you would not hear in a classroom at Harvard or Vanderbilt, Yale, or Princeton; I try to make the best of current academic thought seem to be persuasive and to encourage churches to embrace it, but we are all striving to figure out what it means to be progressive and it is a moving target, isn’t it?

Please allow me to engage you in a little memory experiment. I am going to quote a very familiar passage of scripture and I would like for you to repeat it back to me:

 Ich bin gekommen, daß sie das Leben und volle Genüge haben sollen.

If you speak German, or at least my Kentucky accented German, you might have been able to do it, but otherwise, it is nearly impossible. But let’s try that passage again in English. It is John 10:10, most of you have known it forever:

 “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”

Even if you had never heard the passage before, it probably would not have been difficult to repeat because, as English speakers, we have places in our brains for English words, places created through repetition. 

My 30-year-old daughter has had the same cell phone number for 15 years and I could not begin to tell you what it is. From the beginning, it has been programed into my phone and I have never had to actually dial it in all of this time. I can, however, tell you the phone number from my parent’s home, where I grew up, even though that number has not been active for nearly 50 years. That number, through repetition, cut a groove in my brain and it will be one of the last things that I forget. 

Most of us who have had loved ones who have sunk into the fog of dementia or Alzheimer’s know that even when they can no longer remember our names or recognize our faces, we can start to sing familiar Christmas carols or old hymns, and they will often brighten up and sing along. 

The challenge, then, for progressive theology, is that new information has to go up against centuries of tradition and virtual muscle memory. For a hundred years we have been sending young seminary students to graduate school and, at least in the better schools, they have been introduced to biblical critical studies, helping them to let go of the kind of magical and superstitious thinking of the pre-modern era, and to see scripture and theology from a rational and historical perspective. 

In grad school, generations of students have learned that God didn’t write the Bible. They learned that scripture is not either history or science but rather the product of ancient cultures attempting to articulate their understanding of the world and as such, they provide us with philosophical insights, inspiration, and devotional thoughts expressed poetically in metaphors and stories but not facts.

But these young men and women graduate, they are ordained, they look for jobs in churches, appointments or calls, and what they face are churches that have had very little of the training that they have had, but they have inherited generations of traditional faith experience and teaching. 

Ministers then try to straddle the fence. At least initially, they try to maintain academic integrity while using a kind of coded double-speak to use the language of the church but to, at least in their own heads, change the meaning of the words.

I am not going to make this talk too tedious by cataloging major scholars and seminal books, but I do need to mention this one. In the 1940’s, the German biblical scholar, Rudolf Bultmann began publishing a series of books that were used in graduate schools for more than half a century. Many of us cut our teeth on understanding the historical Jesus and the literary nature of scripture by reading Bultmann. He was a true genius and he was uniquely gifted in making the material accessible to grad students, but I have one bone to pick with him and it is this: He literally encouraged seminarians to use the language of the church but to change the meanings of the words. 

They did, but who got changed in that deal? In the end, the church didn’t change. Ministers either became disillusioned and dropped out of ministry or they conformed to the expectations of the congregations. 

So, this huge gulf grew, between what scholars were aware of; facts, insights, honest approaches to belief, and the church. We have a hundred years of scholarship bottled up in graduate schools of religion, and tens of thousands of churches that have built up defenses to remain intellectually and ideologically locked into the 4^thcentury. 

In the 1980’s, the former Vanderbilt professor, Bob Funk, called together 50 biblical scholars and 100 eager lay practitioners, to form the Jesus Seminar. The stated purpose was to drill down into historical Jesus studies and to present the best of academic conclusions to the world in a way that would finally reach into the pews and change the church. Their methods of voting on passages with colored beads was intended to get media attention and to provoke churches in a way that would wake them up and make them use critical thinking skills in the practice of their faith. Many of these scholars have been broadly published but the most famous are almost household names in progressive churches:

I suspect that you know them well: my friend, John Shelby Spong, Jon Dominic Crossan, Karen Armstrong, and the late Marcus Borg.

Millions of books sold, thousands of conferences, specials on PBS, the BBC and even interviews on popular TV talk shows but the impact of progressive thinking on the church still looks more like a scratch than a reformation. 

Let me give you an illustration:  For several months we had the good fortune of having one of the world’s leading textual critics, Dr. David Trobisch, stuck in Springfield dealing with family property and developing the next phase of his career. So, we had him guest lecture for us in our Sunday class during that period. 

He was doing a series on the use of narrative myth in scripture… brilliant, really helpful stuff, and during the Q and A one Sunday, a longtime member, a good guy who had heard Spong at our church several times, he had heard me for years, and Trobisch for months and he asked, “In the Noah story, I can understand God killing all of the people who were evil but why would God kill all of those animals, they weren’t evil?” 

I was both embarrassed and angry. How could you listen to all of this for years and still think that God actually flooded the whole earth, killing off almost everyone and every animal that wasn’t a fish? I announced, “Look, it never happened. It is just a story.” And David interjected, without even a blink, “But Roger, it happens every time the story is told.” 

That is a very nice, very academic, very existential way of treating ancient narratives . . . it allows you to preserve the story within congregational life but, and here is my beef: It allows people like this very nice guy to just go on believing that God flooded the earth, And believing in angels, heaven, hell, Jesus being physically resurrected, and the prospect of having oft repeated prayers answered. 

We have this divide among progressive scholars. The last Jesus Seminar meeting I 

Attended was in the spring of 2005. Bob Funk was near death, finally succumbing to cancer. One of the founders was giving me some recognition for my work in popularizing progressive faith in the congregation where I worked at that time and Bob Funk flew into a rage. He was very angry at me for still working for a church. Bob had given up on the church ever changing and he felt that I should be working in a media or college environment where I might do more good. 

Bishop Spong, on the other hand, still goes to an Episcopal church most Sundays. He publicly recites the Apostles’ Creed, sings the old hymns, and participates in traditional baptism and communion rituals. No one in the last generation has done more than these two guys to bring scholarship to the church but Bob gave up on the church before he died, and John is still in the thick of it. 

I respectfully disagree with both of them on this point: I do not believe that we should give up on the church emerging from the shadows of the Council of Nicea, but I do not agree that we should placidly go on repeating the language of traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

The world needs progressive communities of faith. We have a lot of important work to do in giving birth to a better, more just, and more sustainable society, but I don’t think that we can get there by just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need a modern reformation that dismisses magical thinking in favor of critical thinking, and lets go of superstition in favor of scientific congruity in an evidence based faith. 

We need to start writing liturgy that does not undermine what we are trying to say in our sermons. The liturgy, the hymns, the anthems, and prayers of our public gatherings are teaching opportunities and, if you look at almost any book of worship from any denomination, what the liturgical resources teach looks like it comes straight out of Darwin’s Waiting Room. 

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 pastors quote major thinkers from Voltaire, to Thomas Paine, Soren Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Neihbur. I suspect that many of us here escaped the mental prison of traditional churches by reading 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. 

As the great Dane said: There are two ways in which a person can be fooled. One is to continue to believe what is clearly not true, and the other is to refuse to accept what is true. 

The progressive reformation asks the church to let go of ancient myths and creeds which clearly are not true and to embrace the best of scholarship which is as close to the truth as we humans can get. And embracing that means that we have to change how we talk. It changes how we approach Christmas and Easter. It changes what hymns we sing and what readings we put in front of our people.

Because, as Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Religion has made men confident that they were to rule over women, that homosexuals were inherently evil, and that only Christians were right. None of which is true and all of which needs to go away.

For far too long the church has accepted that there is some mutually exclusive choice we have to make between faith and critical thinking when, I am here to argue, that what we really need to do is marry our faith to our critical thinking. 

First, please allow me to try to rescue the meaning of the word “faith.”

We have tended to use the word to refer to things that we believe because we believe them. We “take it on faith,” or we claim that it is an article of belief. 

There is no evidence of the existence of angels or demons, of heaven or hell, of souls, spirits, ghosts, unicorns, leprechauns, or dragons but history is dotted with individuals who say that they have seen them and insist that they are real. 

It does not come as a surprise, however, that when the Virgin Mary puts in an appearance somewhere, it is always to Catholics. People who report a vision of Jesus tend to be Protestants and people who report a vision of the Buddha tend to be Buddhists. They are not, in many cases, being dishonest. They have had a profound experience and they report it in the language that they know.

When the prophet, Muhammad, had his first vision in a cave in Hira, he thought that he had encountered an evil genie. He, in fact, considered committing suicide because he feared that he had been possessed by this evil spirit. But his wife sent him to talk with her cousin, who was a Christian, and she convinced him that it was the Angel Gabriel who had visited him and that he should go back to the cave and listen again. Muhammad’s wife, Khadija and her cousin, Warqah, gave Muhammad the images and the narratives from Jewish and Christian scriptures and he combined that with his own Arab history of superstitions and personal experiences to produce the Quran. He didn’t actually have a series of encounters with the archangel Gabriel, but he had mystical experiences that he expressed through the language and images he had been given. 

But faith is not about believing in ghosts. Karen Armstrong talks about this at length, describing the early church’s practice of baptism that when a person was lowered into the water, as they came up, they shouted the Greek word for faith, “pistus.” For them, it was an exclamation of courage. In those early years, becoming a Christian was an act of defiance against an oppressive state and its emperor worship. It was not a suspension of reason but a two-fisted grip on courage. 

Martin Luther King has said that “faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” That is not a matter of assassinating your brains. It is a conscious choice to have courage. 

It may not immediately feel like it is related but I need to introduce, or re-introduce another theological concept that is important to what we talk about next, and that is 

“Personification.”

As humans evolved consciousness, self-awareness, their experience of life was interpreted through their emotions. They felt fear, elation, sadness, and desire. And they tended to interpret the world based on their own experience. Storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the change of the seasons, were not matters of meteorology or tectonic movements. 

They projected personhood onto aspects of nature and interpreted events as the emotions of persons. The sun, the wind, thunder, rain, rivers, the ocean, the earth itself, become gods and goddesses, who, like them, fell in love, got jealous, hungry, angry, or sleepy. 

This instinct is not foreign to us, even now. The nature conservancy produced an a

mazing series of short videos in which their recruit actors and actresses with very familiar voices to speak as though they were aspects of nature. Do yourself a favor and look these up on YouTube, they are amazing! Julia Roberts is mother earth. Harrison Ford voices the ocean, Penelope Cruz is water, Robert Redford speaks as the Redwood forest. Personifying these aspects of nature makes nature more relatable, it draws us closer and we are more easily persuaded. 

But is Julia Roberts mother nature? Is Harrison Ford actually Poseidon, the god of the ocean? No, of course not. These are just the images we use to talk about important things… the same way Muhammad turned his mystical experience into conversations with Gabriel and people have, through the years done the same with Jesus, Mary, Buddha, Zeus, Odin, etc. 

While personifications may be helpful in telling a story or as a teaching technique, we should not confuse our illustrations with reality. Now, you might reasonably ask me, “why does any of this matter?” If your cousin goes to a Pentecostal church and speaks in tongues and they really believe that they magically channeling the voice of God or of angels. 

If your Catholic aunt prays the rosary, lights candles at the feet of statues of saints, and wears a scapular under her blouse to keep demons from jumping into her soul, or if your Mormon neighbor still wears magic underwear in the belief that it will protect him from car accidents and plane crashes, what’s the harm?

Well, maybe I could be more gracious and say that it doesn’t matter. Anyone can believe whatever they want. But I have this caveat: 

I think that Voltaire said it best: Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities. 

What goes through the mind of the person who killed all of those Muslims in Christ Church in New Zealand in May? And the guy who killed the people in the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston? Or the guy who murdered all of those people in the Pittsburg synagogue last October? What about when your religious beliefs inspire violence or perpetuate misogyny, homophobia, racism, sexism, or nationalism? 

One of our native sons of Missouri, H. Richard Neihbur says it this way: 

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse. A great deal of the magical and superstitious aspects of traditional religion is just way too easily coopted by people who use it to oppress women, discriminate against gay and lesbian and transgender peopled, and to justify military and terrorist violence between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Religion can promote good things or bad things and we have come to a time when we need to work hard to extinguish the bad and emphasize the good.

As Karen Armstrong famously writes in her autobiography:  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.

The church has been sold a truck load of snake-oil, being told that you have to put your brain on the shelf and believe any number of totally ridiculous things in order to be a good Catholic or Baptist, or Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist. 

May I remind you that, if you take the narrative at face value, Moses became the founder of a religion by leading slaves in a revolt and an exodus. Buddha, tradition has it, was born a prince but he abandoned the palace and lived in poverty, teaching others to care for the poor. Jesus was a teacher of radical compassion, befriending lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes and foreigners. Muhammad, in stark contrast to the caliphs and sheiks who succeeded him, lived in a tiny house and wore ragged clothes in a lifelong identity with the poor. 

I contend that every major world religion began as a reformation intended to bring social justice to the poor and vulnerable. In each case, after the deaths of the first generation of leaders, the religions evolved into creedal faiths, manipulated by the powerful to control the vulnerable. 

Moses didn’t set out to create a Zionist form of nationalism. He spoke truth to power and told the pharaoh “Let my people go.” Jesus wasn’t some lunatic who thought he was God who was going to die for the sins of the world, he was a teacher who told people to love their enemies and to forgive their brothers and sisters. 

Our religious narratives should not be encased in stained glass windows, repeated in creeds, and diving into wishful thinking about an afterlife. Our faith should be a matter of good deeds, kindnesses, mercy shown to the undeserving, and compassion shown to the sick, the poor, the immigrant, the imprisoned, the grieving, and the lonely. 

Now, there are those who will insist upon reiterating a literal belief on Easter Sunday that Jesus came physically out of the tomb. There are those who, without evidence, will insist that heaven and hell are real, that they have an eternal soul that chickens, pigs, and fish do not have. They may continue to believe in a supernatural theistic friend who lives in the clouds and grants wishes, but I don’t know anything about those things.

What I do know is that more than half of the children in the school system in Springfield are growing up in poverty. I know that one in three girls and one in four boys will be sexually molested before they turn 18. 

I know that millions of people are being refuse healthcare, housing, and access to education in the richest country in the world. I know that more than 30,000 people in my country are going to die from gunshot wounds this year and more than 60,000 will die from drug addiction. I know that our border security is currently holding 15,000 children in tiny, nasty cages, separated from their parents. I know that in 2019 women still earn significantly less than men, on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, no woman has ever been elected the head of state.

And that most churches still think that you have to have boy parts in your underwear to be able to preach, baptize, or serve communion. I will tell you, I have boy parts in my underwear and have never, in a 40 yearlong ministry, used them in any way in the writing or delivery of a sermon or in the administration of religious rituals . . . and I have a strong sense that policy will not change. It is time for the church to get real. 

In closing, let me quote Virgil, who wrote in the Aeneid: Haud Ignota Loquor

Speak not of what is not known. We must get our heads out of the sand and be more concerned with how we live our faith and less concerned about the magical beliefs of our ancestors. 

“We’re All Connected (but I got mine!)”

“We’re All Connected (but I got mine!)”        July 28, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

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schadenfreude: pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This word is taken from German and literally means "harm-joy". It is the feeling of joy or pleasure when one sees another fail or suffer misfortune.

I was quite surprised by a question very casually posed to me by an old friend one day. He took a long draw on his cigarette and asked, “Why do you still do this church stuff when you don’t really believe in anything?” The question reminded me of what I really like about preaching . . . people sit quietly while I am talking and I can indulge myself in the fantasy that I am being understood. But I can’t be too hard on my friend. Most people were taught that they should be religious so 

that they could go to heaven and avoid the fires of hell. I was only ten or eleven years old when I pointed out to my parents that going to church in order to get a golden ticket on the train to glory was selfish and it just couldn’t be right . . . and they predictably told me that faith was a matter of believing and not of thinking. And, generally, it is. Even people who think their way through the ridiculous church manipulation of the heavenly carrot and the hellish stick, still go on believing that the only reason to be religious is some kind of divine fire insurance. Which is why most modern people rarely or never go to church and why most movies, plays, and novels that have a minister in the cast, portray that person as a con man, a fraud, or an idiot.

The sixteenth century founder of the Jesuit movement, St. Ignatius of Loyola, wrote the Spiritual Exercises which shaped not only a lot of modern spiritual practice but he also gave me the outline impetus for my doctoral dissertation, so this dead monk and I spent a lot of years together. But behind all of the genius of Ignatius was this familiar assumption, he writes: Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

This transactional approach to having a relationship with God is obviously morally and intellectually corrupt and yet most people still believe that it is the reason to be religious and I think it should be obvious that it is the worst and most reprehensible, and, frankly, the most embarrassing reason to be religious. Though that might be at least a part of why there are 8000 people down the road at 6 Flags over Jesus this morning and only 40 or 50 here . . . but I digress. 

And here is the over-arching point that I have to make today: the fundamental difference between a spiritual world view and what I may call a “selfish” world view is that spiritually we acknowledge that we are all connected . . . and to be clear, many humanists, atheists, and agnostics acknowledge this connection as well, but most of the world, the religious and the not religious, primarily approach the world as an individual in competition for resources against the rest of the world. 

You can see this dichotomy played out in both religious and secular circles. A fundamental teaching of Buddhism is that all perceptions that we are separated from one another and from the earth itself is nothing but an illusion. 

Looked at for its virtue rather than negatively, the whole spiritual transformation sought in Christian monasticism is a denial of self, possessions, and appetites, so that we can set aside ego boundaries to be existentially united with God and everyone else. 

I wrote a whole book about this 20 years ago that I am still waiting for Oprah to discover and endorse. But it is not just religious people who affirm this. Few things make me happier than listening to the autotuned voices of physicists affirming that we are all connected, just as Christian mystics and Buddhist monks have for centuries.

(Rob, can we legally import the first two minutes of this video?)

What does this mean to us, to assert that we are all connected? I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. said it very clearly:

“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

This issue comes up in political debates in the most disgraceful way. Whether you favor a “Medicare for all” plan, or single payer, anyone who does not favor some path towards universal coverage is saying that a system that leaves millions of people uninsured is somehow acceptable to them. They have medical coverage that they like and they don’t want to change a system that works for them, even if that means that hundreds of thousands of people die prematurely and unnecessarily. 

What kind of monster could be so callous and heartless as to suggest that people with high salaries and good jobs should get the best health care

And people who have less affluence should just die sooner and suffer more?

Who could be so devoted to a caste system in which the upper class gets great care and the lower class gets little or none, or faces the whole sewer of medical bankruptcy, payday loans, and constant fear about getting their next vial of insulin?

When the talking heads on the morning shows discuss Democratic debates, their hair catches on fire at the notion that candidates suggest that illegal immigrants within our borders would also receive health care. Well, what else? Let them die by the side of the road? 

And when you are vacationing in France, or Spain, or England, or Germany, what do you do when you get sick, when you break a tooth on your caviar spoon? You will go and receive virtually free health care because that’s what happens in civilized countries! There is a mentality in this nation that simply reels in fear that someone might get something of value at the expense of the public. 

Does Joe Scarborough believe that he earns $14 million dollars a year for interrupting intelligent people on the set of Morning Joe five mornings a week? Look, if wealth were tied to hard work, if pay was based on labor, the richest people in the world would be the women who live in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Any guess how long Joe would last if he had to carry water on his head for miles, search for fire wood, and then prepare a meal for his family? Anyone who is born white, male, and heterosexual in North America, with every possible advantage given to those who have plundered the world’s wealth for most of two centuries who then can manage to muster rage about providing healthcare to someone who happens to be within our borders when they have an accident or fall ill is so blind to reality as to be nearly unteachable. 

When I go to speak in Great Britain, I go with no worries about needing medical care there because I know that I would be given whatever I needed. My friends in England, however, have to take out a temporary health insurance policy when they come here because our country has yet to wake up to the reality that illness is not a profit-making opportunity, it is a problem to be solved by rational, reasonable people. 

We are all connected. If you recognize that you are a part of a civilization, then you don’t want to live in a giant house in a gated community while hundreds of people are homeless. 

Sure, hard work and ingenuity will always be rewarded with a better or more comfortable life, but demanding that others suffer to add to your comfort and security is obscene. 

Sadly, many people only become woke to ethical issues when it affects them personally. I have a German friend whom I get to see now and then. His sense of humor, possibly typical of Germans, often comes in the form of a very personal punch below the belt. We were having breakfast recently, just catching up on our various travels, publications, and work. I shared with him a bit about my work with young men who have been sentenced to long prison sentences after being found to possess child pornography. He shook his head and laughed, and said, “How do you always get tied up with such messes. We have a saying in Germany, ‘shit draws flies.’” However, when he learned that one of the young men is the son of a German friend of his, his view of the whole problem transformed in a second. Suddenly, he wanted to know what he could do to help the family. And I asked, “Aren’t you afraid of drawing flies?”

The real test of sincere compassion is to care about those with whom you do not have social ties. If I am generous with my daughter, that is hardly a claim of nobility. If I am generous with the child of someone I do not know, because they are in need, then I may be affirming what I have claimed about my faith in a connected spirituality. 

I want to see people of faith being concerned about the 2 million people who are incarcerated before one of your own children, neighbors, or friends is in jail. I want for all of us to be concerned about the opiod addiction crisis before someone you know dies. 

We liberals have done a lot of hand wringing over the past two years about how people continue to support Donald Trump even after all he has said and done about immigration, race, and poverty issues. But nowhere has the heartless nature of his administration been more on display than in the child separation policy at the 

border. How can anyone witness this nightmare of traumatizing 15,000 children and still support Trump?

Well, and here is why I chose the definition of schadenfreudeas my wisdom lesson today. 

There are those who have speculated that the suffering at the border, the suffering of those whose applications for asylum, for immigration, are being denied is, as they say, “the feature and not the bug” in the system. The suffering is what Trump is giving to his base who enjoy knowing that even if their salaries are going down, their jobs are being exported off-shore, their roads have pot-holes, and their kids can’t afford to go to college or even to get their teeth fixed, at least these poor brown people at the border are suffering even more. 

I’m not suggesting that this is true of everyone who continues to support Trump after all of these horrible atrocities but, you cannot deny that a certain degree of schadenfreude is a part of the formula for his success and as bad as that makes him, it sure doesn’t make me any less ashamed of the much of the voting public in America. 

I asked Rob to be our liturgist this morning because of his long work with the movement to abolish capital punishment. This week our Attorney General, Bill Barr, announced that the Federal government would end its own moratorium on capital punishment and make steps to execute some of the more than 60 federal prisoners on death row. 

Demonstrating to me, once again, that the Trump administration not only cannot do absolutely anything right, but they rather seem to be determined to dismember modern civilization, brick by brick. 

Now, I am opposed to the death penalty, even in the face of the most egregious crimes because if the criminal has been arrested and is in prison, killing them is just social revenge. If they are captured, they do not represent a danger to society so killing them isn’t justice, it is murder. But even if you cannot join me in feeling connected, even to the most guilty among us, let me remind you that our justice system is so flawed that I wouldn’t let our court system balance my checkbook, let alone rely upon them to accurately decide who is guilty and who is not.

Our justice system is so corrupt that a 18 year old kid on the autism spectrum can be sent to prison for 15 years for child porn on their laptop computer and Jeffery

Epstein can get away with trafficking young girls as sex slaves at his homes in New York, Florida, and on his private island for years while law enforcement at every level has turned and looked away and even when finally brought to trial, he received a sentence so light that it would have embarrassed the most corrupt government in the most remote of third world countries. 

Our judicial system routinely releases rich criminals and jails poor people for minor offenses and we should trust them with life and death decisions? Since DNA testing has become more available in criminal defense, dozens of death row inmates have been released . . . and there would be many more if DNA evidence existed. Fair estimates are that one in every 25 prisoners who are executed were innocent. So, how many people can the state wrongfully murder before we are all complicit in state sponsored murder? There is no reason to execute even the guilty who are already captured and are of no danger to society but to execute the innocent because we continue to accept this justice for sale court system . . . folks, this is morally intolerable.

Any sense you may have that you are not connected to the millions of people who languish in prisons, even the ones on death row, is an illusion. We are connected to the immigrant, the refugee, the convicted criminals, and the mothers who are carrying their children on their backs through civil war and gang violence to bring their babies to safety.

I want to close with a favorite preacher story, and like a lot of preacher stories, it might be entirely fictitious but since that never stopped anyone who wrote the Bible, I’m not going to let it stop me. . . if you have heard it before, don’t stop me:  

It has been said that during the dark days of the depression, the famous New York Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, would sometimes don magistrates’ robes and sit in municipal court. 

Into a courtroom typically filled with pimps, prostitutes, and pushers, the bailiff brought in a haggard looking old woman who had been caught stealing bread from a local grocer. The woman cried and begged for mercy, explaining that her grandchildren were starving, and she only stole the bread to give them something to eat. The grocer was resolute: she had to be fined to send a message to other thieves that the same would happen to them.

It is said that La Guardia then banged his gavel and found the woman guilty and charged her a fine of $10 but even as he pronounced the fine, he was reaching into his own pocket and threw $10 on the bench to pay the fine. La Guardia then banged his gavel again and announced that everyone in the courtroom was guilty of living in a city where a grandmother has to steal bread to feed her children and he order the bailiff to collect a fine of 50 cents from everyone in the courtroom and to give the collection to the defendant. . . . a fine that a red faced, and angry grocer was also made to pay. 

Folks, we all live in a nation that is imprisoning the poor on our behalf. Our tax dollars are keeping those 15,000 kids in deplorable concentration camps at the border. Our elected government is a reflection of who we are as a nation and that is what must be changed. Immigrants are not the reason there are so many poor people in America. Race is not the cause of crime in America. The people on death row will not hurt you. I know that I should always end a sermon like this with meaningful suggestions about what we can do to change things but the first thing that needs to be said here, is that Americans must stop being afraid all of the time.

Don’t vote out of fear of criminals, immigrants, minorities, or vegetarians…. Don’t you see that they are leaving more bacon for the rest of us?

I’m glad that I have access to good health care, but I get to live in a better world if all of you do too. I am glad that I was able to feed and educate my daughter, but the world is better if your kids get to eat well and go to college too. We must reject the politics and religion that allows us to find some satisfaction, no matter how private, from the suffering of others. Sincere empathy, radical compassion, is the spiritual choice we want to make but we have to practice it every day until we don’t have to live in a city where a grandmother has to steal bread to feed her grandchildren.