“Keep Calm and Carry On”

“Keep Calm and Carry On”  March 22, 2020  Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

To see the video, click here

Brittany Fowler, Business Insider, June 23, 2015

 “In his book, McAlpine breaks down the phrase, further explaining why the British have grown to love it.

There is something quintessential in the way the posters do not say "Don't Panic" or "We Will Prevail"... They say "Keep Calm," and what that means is, "We may be suffering something of an invasion at the moment, but that's no reason to start acting in a rash and hot-headed manner. We may be a subjugated nation — temporarily — but we are not about to start acting like savages."

And what of the "Carry On?"... As a nation, we have been trained to look past the bad behavior of our rudest guests, especially the uninvited ones, and rather than cause a scene, we shall just go about our daily business as if nothing has happened.”

Over the past few years, I have been continually shocked by how many people I encounter who are taking prescription medications for anxiety or panic attacks. And, on top of that, the number of people who regularly use marijuana or other illegal drugs to self-medicate for anxiety or panic attacks. And I have often expressed my confusion about what on earth everyone is so anxious about? Sure, we have challenges but just so much generalized anxiety? I just don’t get it.

Well, my panicking friends, let me apologize if I have not taken your discomfort seriously in the past. Everyone in the world who has any idea of what is going on in the world is now feeling what you have felt. We know that something awful, possibly deadly, is coming down the tracks but we are being bombarded with so much misinformation and contradictory testimony that we are nearly paralyzed with fear.

And so, before we go any further, I just want to share this picture with you.

This is Jettie Mae West, our youngest church member, LeTroy and Camille’s newborn in a milk induced coma. We are being asked to stay out of restaurants, to avoid gathering anywhere where we have to be close to other people, to try to work from home and keep our distance from everyone but I just want to remind you that Jettie Mae don’t know nothin bout no stinkin viruses, and that while our lives are severely truncated for the next few months, the sidewalks are still open, spring is on the way, tulips and butter cups are pushing through the sod, most of us are rich in books we have not read yet, we have movies we have long ago recorded that we never got around to viewing, we have long delayed fix up and repair projects in our yards and houses, e-mails we have been meaning to answer, and old friends we have been meaning to call. And there are babies, ripe with the smell of new skin and milk, there are dogs and cats, and old friends and, folks, as serious as things are right now, this too shall pass.

As the British government advised a population that was about to experience months of bombing and probable invasion just before WWII broke out, “keep calm and carry on.” We are trying to slow the spread of the covid-19 virus but we cannot stop it. 

All of the social distancing, sheltering in place, and even those who are quarantined are going to do much to keep people from getting the virus but these measures are vitally important to slow the spread so that our medical system is not entirely overwhelmed. And that is not a small thing.

Based on the experiences of Asia and Europe, it seems that about 5% of the people who contract the virus will need to be hospitalized. Of those with the worst cases, about half will need to be put on a ventilator. Still, about half of those patients die. On an individual basis, it can feel kind of reassuring, even though most of us will eventually get it, only one in twenty will need to be hospitalized. Only one in 40 will need to be on a ventilator. So, for the most part, we can be somewhat assured that we’re going to see the other side of this crisis.

However, when you look at it from a national plane, the numbers could exceed the casualties we have experienced in major wars. There have been about 10,000 deaths world-wide so far. But, realistically, we’re just getting started.

My now 31-year-old daughter calls most days now. She is working from home in Denver and she is keeping safe but, still, as for most of us, the virus has her stressed out. She has said several times, “I’ve just never been through anything like this,” which is obviously true because no one alive in the world has ever been through anything like this, short of a few 100 year old people who were alive for the Spanish flu but even they were not old enough to remember anything about it.

We’re going through the 21^st century’s version of the Spanish flu and we may get a 21^st century great depression to complicate our anxiety. There is a lovely passage in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring in which the Hobbit, Frodo, is telling the wizard, Gandalf, that he just wishes these dark days had come in another generation. Gandalf wisely replies:

“So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

None of us would have wished this pandemic on our generation but responding to it is now the task given to us. As we hunker down for the worst of us to wave over us here in the middle of the USA in the next week or two, please allow me to tell you what I think should be done nationally, then in our community, and finally, for us as individuals.

A crisis calls for our national government to open the purse strings and to try to meaningfully respond. When a government starts to spend hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars, the war profiteers show up to find a way to take the lion’s share of the spending. This has always been true but you can look at the number of new millionaires and billionaires created after each of our World Wars, after Vietnam and 9-11 and even after the crash of 2007 and 2008. At the end of every war and crisis, the rich are more rich and the poor are more poor.

This is one of my biggest beefs with the Obama administration that, in 2008, decided to bail out the banks and the car industry rather than to give cash to home owners and car buyers.

It is an age old problem that our Oklahoma philosopher, Will Rogers, opined about during the Great Depression, “The money was all appropriated for the top in hopes it would trickle down to the needy. President Hoover didn’t know that the money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hand.” 

The bail out money in 2008 was used for executive bonuses and stock buy backs while banks still repossessed the houses of the poor. Though progressives have been losing ground in the primaries, the virus and the simultaneous economic crash are revealing the wisdom of immediately instituting Medicare for all, and giving economic stimulus in the form of debt forgiveness for student loans, and a massive infrastructure push that will provide a living wage job for all of the unemployed. Instituting Andrew Yang’s concept of a Universal Basic Income would prove to be one of the smartest things that America’s dumbest president could ever do. 

Again, if I were king, I would immediately offer universal health care, forgive student debt, make state universities tuition free, guarantee a job to anyone who wants one, and I would pay every adult American who makes less than $50,000 a year, a $1000 a month subsidy. And, if I had to cut our military budget by about half to do all of that, then I would do it gleefully and I would accept the Nobel Peace Prize later that year. I’m younger than Bernie, smarter than Trump, and richer than Pete Buttigieg because I have paid off my student loans.

And since we all know how the election will go in Missouri this fall, you may as well write my name in.

Seriously, the federal government will surely do some of these things, at least in piecemeal fashion, to help our nation recover from that ravages of the covid virus. There will be a check for every citizen next month . . . it should be every month forever but next month we’ll get one. And while we won’t get Medicare for all, we will get free testing for the virus and unemployment pay if we get it. And that is a start. 

Community wise, as I was saying last week, we have this moral dividing line between those who think only of themselves and those who are aware that we are all connected. I stood in line this week at a big box store like a Soviet era distribution point to be handed one package of toilet paper and one of paper towels. Thankfully, I was at Sams rather than our Walmart on West Sunshine where a young mother was giving birth to a daughter in the toilet paper aisle at the same time on Thursday but, Springfield almost always gets into the national news for something that happened at one of our Walmarts. Walmart: it’s the petri dish for sociology studies.

Still, I shouldn’t have to wait on a rope line to have an employee ration out supplies to me, but we know when they were not doing that, some people would try to wipe out the store’s whole supply. Look people, this whole thing is going to be over one day, it may be a year or longer, but it will be over, and if you find yourself with a garage full of toilet paper, sanitizing wipes, hand sanitizer, and medical supplies then you are what is wrong with American society. This is a time that calls for nobility, self-sacrifice, and compassion. Make sure that your neighbors are taken care of by taking no more than what you need and saving everything else for your neighbors.

Of course, a great deal of what we need to do as a society is involved in the daily practices we follow of social isolation . . . that slows the spread of the virus and it is the most supportive thing we can do for our medical system that is being overly taxed already. But isolation puts a burden on all of us and none so much as those who are already struggling with various kinds of mental health challenges. 

For the last year I have been continually coming back to the theme of social connection as being the best preventative measure for suicide and the best treatment for addiction, depression, and a host of physical ailments like heart disease, high blood pressure and even diabetes. But now we are telling people to isolate, and since a lot of mentally ill people end up living alone, that is solitary confinement.

While Vice President Mike Pence has famously disputed that cigarettes are either addictive or harmful, the rest of us who are not morons know differently. But take what you know about smoking and apply that to social isolation. Solid research indicates that loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day because social isolation is stressful to everyone but to the mentally ill, you can multiply that effect. People who were having depression, anxiety or panic attacks before the 24/7 news started screaming at us night and day that the corona virus is going to start the zombie apocalypse are suffering terribly now.

If you know someone who is frightened, anxious, depressed . . . call them! Talk to them. Encourage them. Tell them funny stories. Look, this stuff is serious but even in the most serious of circumstances, we can inject some levity, can’t we?

I was recently both moved and entertained by the movie, Jojo Rabbit which, makes fun of the anti-Semitism in Germany during the holocaust. It was simultaneously hilarious and deeply insightful into one of history’s worst nightmares. It was similar in that way to the 1997 film, Life is Beautiful, which was set almost entirely in a Nazi death camp but showed how a loving father tried to keep his young son distracted and entertained through the whole experience. It was a Nazi death camp, horrible to be sure, but the character, Guido, brought love, compassion and comedy into that setting to help his son and everyone around them to survive. 

The 18^th century Irish poet, Thomas Moore, said, “The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked.” The covid-19 virus can tank the stock market and fill our hospital beds, but it cannot take away from us our ability to choose how we are going to react to it. Your family, your neighbors, your pastor, need for you to keep trying to cheer them up and encourage them. That is a debt we owe to one another. 

Finally, I want to say just a few things about survival on the personal level. This pandemic is a respiratory virus. It spreads, primarily through water droplets in the air. That’s why we ask people to stay six feet away from one another. An infected person is giving off the virus through coughing and breathing but most of those water droplets fall to the ground in 3 or 4 feet. In spite of our best efforts at coughing into our elbows, most people end up coughing into their hands . . . that’s why we keep telling people to wash their hands regularly and to stop shaking hands…. Stop shaking hands forever…. We have to come up with a better greeting and frankly, waving or bowing is better even that elbow bumping. 

And, dear friends, I sometimes pull a muscle trying not to scream at people who advocate for homeopathic cures that are based on cartoon quality science but in the midst of this crisis, let’s listen to real scientists and stop spreading rumors and absurd remedies. 

And it is not just Russian bots planting misinformation in social media. A physician friend of mine told me that drinking lemon juice in warm water would keep you from getting a virus. I pointed out to him that citrus juice doesn’t kill viruses and he said, “but it boosts your vitamin C and that helps your immune system,” which might be just the tiniest bit true if you were vitamin C deficient which virtually none of us have ever been. 

And neither menthol nor eucalyptus do the slightest good in clearing up your sinuses. They work the same way wasabi does, they just make your open sinuses burn, nothing more. And the only essential oil is extra virgin olive oil, mix in a little garlic and balsamic vinegar and dip your bread in it. It won’t kill a virus but it will make you feel better. 

I was asking a store clerk when they would be resupplying their sanitizing wipes and the woman in line behind me chimed in, “Oh don’t worry about those things, ammonia kills the corona virus.” I asked, “are you a chemist?” and she said, “No, but I clean houses and I know about these things.” Folks, ammonia does not kill viruses. And having a rabbit’s foot in your pocket does not bring you good luck, just look what it did for the rabbit!

Bleach, folks, bleach kills viruses. The ingredient you are looking for in sanitizing wipes, in sprays, in disinfectants is bleach. So if you can’t find the conveniently mixed items readily available, put about a third of a cup of bleach in a gallon of water and use that to wipe down hard surfaces, your cell phone (which is the dirtiest thing you touch all day), your keyboards, door knobs, steering wheel, faucets, and toilet handles. 

Oh, and if some well-meaning person tells you that bleach doesn’t work in hot water, please allow me to correct them, the opposite is true. Bleach is much more effective in hot water. Whenever you can, use bleach in the hottest water you can. Look, people, this is science. Oh, and one more thing . . . if you are still thinking about that cleaning lady, never, never, never mix ammonia with bleach. The combination creates a lethal gas that will kill you in seconds . . . it would be better to go lick doorknobs in Italy than to mix ammonia with bleach. 

The other most infected thing you touch every day is currency and for that, just wash your hands. And, frankly, if you wouldn’t mind, just take your currency and put it in an envelope and send it to us at the Community Christian Church, 4806 E Farm Road 136, Springfield, MO 65809, or donate through our website at www.spfccc.org, because we very may well not survive the loss of donations we’re experiencing while churches are closed. Help us if you can because I want to still be here for you, yelling at the Trump administration, when this is over. 

And remember friends, wash your hands, use bleach and a towel and just don’t panic.

“Redemptive Suffering”

“Redemptive Suffering”         March 15, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor                 

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

Romans 5:3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Last month, the Culinary Workers’ Union in Nevada, rejected supporting Bernie Sanders’ as a presidential candidate because his “Medicare for all” would mean that their members would lose the premium health care that the union had fought for over the past several years. In fact, on the morning of the Nevada primary, the union was sending text messages to members encouraging them to vote for anyone but Sanders. However, when the Nevada primary was held, the rank and file members actually voted for Sanders in a huge majority. 

Those who bucked the union leadership explained themselves in plain moral language . . . while they appreciate having really good health care coverage, they are aware that keeping a system in place that gives some people great coverage while leaving millions of others without care is morally reprehensible. They were willing to give up their enviable status if it would mean that their relatives, neighbors, and friends who were sick but who had no coverage, could at least receive basic care. 

This, at least in my mind, becomes the major dividing line between the con-servative and progressive political wings of our nation, of our churches, of our economic system, and everything associated with it. There is the fear and greed based perspective of “I’ve got mine, I earned it, I deserve it, and I don’t have to care about anyone else,” I don’t make that sound very nice but you get what I mean. And, again, from my perspective, the progressive view is that our whole society is connected to one another and we all have to make personal sacrifices for the good of the whole society. 

This is becoming crystal clear in the healthcare universe as the Covid-19 virus goes from being a problem in China to being a problem that will threatened a global population. There is no containment of a virus like this one. It will travel the globe and though it is presently rare in the Midwest, it will get here. My hope is that in the next months that a vaccine will be developed but when a vaccine is developed, we will all be better off if everyone, the rich and the poor, the insured and the uninsured, the old and the young, will get the vaccine.

Look, they are not closing down daycare centers and elementary schools because children are at significant risk of dying from Covid-19. They are closing them down because crowded schools become incubators for a virus that the kids will share with parents and grandparents . . . especially gray bearded, overweight, pre-diabetic grandparents who are expected to die from the virus in large numbers.

If you have a double digit IQ to work with, you realize that your instinctual fear that says, “I don’t want to get sick,” has to realize that “I also don’t want my neighbors to get sick,” because we do not want to keep multiplying this virus and spreading it to more and more vulnerable people.

I’ve been guilty of this! For years I refused to get the flu vaccine because I never get the flu. I am 63 years old and I have never taken a sick day, which only means, that when I get sick, I am lucky enough not to get so very sick that I have to miss work or church, but that I also means that I have walked around shedding those germs to people who do get very sick from them. So, for the past few years, I have gotten the flu vaccine, not because I am afraid of getting the flu but because I am afraid of spreading the flu around to other people. When you are deciding whether or not to get the flu shot, people, please hear me, it isn’t always about you. You get vaccines to protect your family, your bridge partner, your employees and your neighbors. This really isn’t hard, is it?

If I may be allowed to really dig deep for an illustration, most of us here can remember the irredeemably silly 1960’s TV series, Gilligan’s Island. That this show managed to stay on TV for three seasons may be at least part of why the space aliens refuse to interact with earthlings. 

But I remember this one episode in which the 7 stranded castaways, who had been trying to get off of the island for years, found an inflatable life raft that had washed ashore. Finally, they were going to be saved! But, alas, earlier in that episode, they had discovered gold on the island and they had all been working to mine gold. They agreed that the little life raft could not carry the seven of them and anything as heavy as gold but all of them, except for the guileless Gilligan, had secretly disguised bags of gold among their personal effects and as soon as they cast off, the boat sank.

That is, for me, a metaphor for how our economy works. If we think only of ourselves without equal regard for others, because, people, in this small world, we are all in the same boat, we will sink and drown under the weight of our fear and greed.

I admittedly don’t use Bible verses in our services very often and I won’t wander too deeply into what Paul was thinking about when he wrote this but I like the way he says it: suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us. There is suffering that just is a part of the world . . . natural disasters, aging, and plagues. There is suffering that is a result of human evil, such as war, poverty, and slavery. But there is a kind of suffering that is what we call redemptive suffering. That is, a kind of suffering that can be chosen in order to accomplish a noble cause. That is the kind of suffering that, when chosen for a greater good, that can produce endurance, and more importantly, character and hope. 

This past week, we remembered the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday in 1965, when black demonstrators on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand voting rights, were set upon by the State Police and their deputies, who turned police dogs on the crowd, beating some and shooting others. 

     Congress member, John Lewis, was just 25 years old on the day of that march.  In his own words, he said, "I have been beaten, my skull fractured, and arrested more than forty times so that each and every person has the right to register and vote," 

"Friends of mine gave their lives. Do your part. Get out there and vote like you’ve never voted before."

But here is what I believe needs to be said about this:  before those black southerners ventured out on the bridge, they met for days in churches, being trained, praying, signing pledges, committing themselves to allowing themselves to be beaten without fighting back. What they knew, what Alabama white officials didn’t seem to grasp, was that when America, through TV news reports, saw the police beating defenseless marchers who were not being violent, who were not fighting back, that it would change the way that white Americans felt about their cause. 

If the marchers had crossed that bridge and had an open conflict with the police, it would have frightened white America of 1965. It would have looked like lawlessness, like the beginning of a race war that white Americans had feared since the beginning of slavery in America . . . or don’t you know that the real reason for the 2^nd amendment to the constitution was the fear of white slave holders that they would be outnumbered and killed by their slaves. But what John Lewis knew, what Martin Luther King, Jr. knew, was that if they were seen to be peacefully protesting but being treated with unjust violence, that they were literally suffering for the redemption of their people. 

David Ketchum and I were recently participating in a demonstration favoring the impeachment of Donald Trump that took place at Springfield’s most busy intersection. Trump supporters would roll down their windows and shout obscenities at the gathered demonstrators. And the people around us would shout obscenities back at them. 

We kept moving around, trying to find a place where we could oppose Donald Trump without being associated with people who were acting like Donald Trump. What good does it do to object to a lack of character if we are going to become just like that dearth of character we opposed? 

We have talked about David doing a series of sermons or classes specifically aimed at teaching us all how to participate non-violently in protest movements. You may wonder why I don’t teach that class, but I assume that if you are wondering that, you have not been paying much attention to who I am. . . but that is another issue. 

Let me ask you to consider the case of Nelson Mandela. Though Mandela was heralded as a hero of the end of Apartheid in South Africa, for most of his life he was on America’s terrorist watch list. He was a Marxist and though he had personally been non-violent, he maintained that black Africans had a right to pursue their freedom through militant action. He was involved in the ANC, the African National Congress, and was an active revolutionary in trying to bring down the apartheid government. 

He was arrested and imprisoned in 1962 for his anti-government work and he was sent to prison for 27 years, 18 of which was spent on that rock in the sea, Robben Island.  Prisoners worked in the blinding sun in temperatures over 100 degrees. He was provided with a bucket in his cell for a latrine. He was rarely allowed a visitor and the prisoners had no access to news or mail. 

He could have been released at any time had he been willing to publicly swear off violent means of overthrowing apartheid. He didn’t know if anyone noticed his suffering, he could only hope that by choosing to suffer under the heavy hand of the racist government that he was drawing worldwide attention to plight of black South Africans. He only knew from whispers that there was a “free Mandela” movement. 

27 years. Forgive me for making this comparison, but when Mandela was freed in 1990, I made the observation to my congregation that the church speaks voluminously about the crucifixion of Jesus, an admittedly torturous death but, and maybe it is wrong for me to say it, but his suffering was over within a single day. Mandela spent 27 years in a cell, doing hard labor in blistering heat, to the point that he was nearly blinded from the sunlight by the time he was released, pooping in a bucket and wondering if it would ever end. . . 27 years of suffering to redeem the plight of his people. 

I don’t think that I could have done it for a month, or a week. But he came out of that cell to accept the Nobel Peace Prize and to become, not only the first black president of South Africa, but the first president to be democratically elected by the whole of the population. He served one term and then devoted the rest of his life to working to eradicate poverty and HIV from Africa. South Africa still has serious problems but the fact that Apartheid was ended without a bloody civil war is due, in large part, to the fact that Mandela was willing to suffer for his people and in the end, to work with their white oppressors to turn the nation over to the majority population in a democratic government. 

Look folks, when those demonstrators gathered in Selma to pray and be trained in how to peacefully demonstrate for their rights, those days of preparation, that was all about conquering fear. They knew that there would be police dogs. They knew that there would be horse-backed state policeman breaking their skulls with their Billy clubs. They chose to take the risk, to suffer the blows, the humiliation and their possible death in order to claim their human rights. 

Nelson Mandela spent years protesting, being arrested, writing articles, and testifying for his people until the day came when he had to face prison and he would have had every right to act out of fear, to want to spend his adult life with his wife and children, but he managed to have principles greater than the fear that we would have all felt. 

Every day, he perfected his character, dare I say, his sainthood, in the sweltering heat, with the stench of his own sewage in a bucket in his cell . . . suffering for the redemption of his people. 

When I outlined this sermon, there was no such thing as Covid-19 and talk about the corona virus was a distant concern for China. Now we have two case of Covid-19 in Springfield, another in Kansas City, and this was the toilet paper isle at Target on Wednesday night this week. Covid 19 is a respiratory infection. What has driven the hoarding of soap, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper is fear . . . fear that I will not have enough and so people over buy, stock pile, and create shortages for other people and nothing has even happened yet.

Now, something is going to happen. If the coming spring weather does not dispose of Covid 19 the way that we might hope, it will spread. Estimates are that between half and 70% will get it. Most people will feel ill for a week or two and they will be fine. Some people, especially those of us who are older and who have underlying health conditions, will be in danger of dying. If it does not go away with spring weather, there is a likelihood that our little city could experience 3000 to 4000 deaths from among our senior population. 

How are we going to act in a worse case scenario . . . if our hospitals are full, and most of our healthcare workers are infected and not able to work.  How are we going to act if we are left to quarantine at home and just look after one another? 

I have to confess, what I have seen up to today is not encouraging. The globe, America, Missouri, Springfield, is going to be tested. Hard times, scarcity, fear, reveals where the demons are but it can also reveal our better angels. I’m asking you to start thinking now, start preparing now, not to react out of fear but to allow your better angels to be revealed as we go through this pandemic.

I love the way that my idol and role model for preaching, Jon Stewart, said it:  “If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.” We have been practicing our whole lives for a moment just like this. Now, let’s refuse to be afraid. Let’s refuse to think only of ourselves. Let’s show this little virus who we really are.

“Sinners and Saints”

“Sinners and Saints”           March, 8, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

    click here to see the video                    

John 3:1-9

3Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ ³Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ ⁴Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ ⁵Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.” ⁸The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ ⁹Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’ 

The most interesting class I took at Harvard was a course taught by the former dean,        Harvey Cox, on religious biography. We studied the lives of Walter Rauschenbusch, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Trungpa Rinpoche, and Philip and Daniel Berrigan. It was especially meaningful because Harvey Cox had personally known and worked with all of them except for Walter Rauschenbusch. Every day in class we were thrilled, both by the stories of the lives of people who had changed the world, but also by being able to literally touch history through the stories that Harvey Cox would share with us. 

I have movies about most of these people and some of them are really good. If you have never watched “Entertaining Angels” the story of Dorothy Day’s life, do yourself a favor and watch it. 

But I find that when I have a house guest and we decide that it is going to be a movie night, I usually prefer to introduce them to one of my fictional heroes rather than my historical heroes. 

I never tire of sharing my love of the mysterious Guy Fawkes character of V in the Vendetta movie, or self-sacrificing exorcist, Constantine, in the movie of the same name.  And there is Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings, and Albus Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame. And, though I am not necessarily proud of it, I have even been known to shed tears at a superhero movie based on Marvel comic book characters. 

All I am saying is that while we can draw important moral lessons from studying the biographies of world changing historical characters, that there is also a lot to be learned about character and morality in the arts and literature, whether they are fictional or even fantasy characters. Because, folks, the Bible itself is full of stories about people who are not historical characters.

We have pretty good reason to believe that Jesus and Paul are actual historical characters, and based on Paul’s first-hand accounts, we can be reasonably sure that Peter, James, and John were also historical characters. But, guys, Judas wasn’t. If you have never heard that before and you find it difficult to believe, let me quote 

our good friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, who said, “[Judas] was a totally fictional character, a totally literary character created by early Christian Church in the ninth decade for sole purpose of shifting blame for Jesus’ death away from Romans who were certainly responsible for it, and placing that blame on the backs of the Jewish people,” 

This is my copy of the Jewish historian, Josephus’, work. Is is over 1000 pages of small type. Josephus wrote at about the same time as the New Testament was being written. So, our gospels, each of which is only 20 to 30 pages long, are not first century attempts at writing history. They knew how to do a comprehensive job of writing history at that time. Our gospels are religious stories meant to convey what amounts to a sermon. They may have been based loosely on historical events and characters but writers were not trying to record history . . . they were, and you can’t say this too strongly, they were after your heart.

Mark invented the passion narrative and Matthew, Luke, and John followed his basic narrative and list of characters. The early church had a vested interest in blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus rather than Rome because they didn’t want Rome to snuff out the church in the way that they were systematically trying to wipe out the Jews. But, historically speaking, Jesus was a Jew who was executed on Roman cross under the Roman charge of sedition. I’m not saying that the Jews didn’t throw Jesus under the bus, they may have, but what is clear is that the early church was throwing the Jews under the Roman bus in return. None of it is very noble.

My preaching professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. David Buttrick, used to admonish us, “Your people didn’t come to church for a history lesson.” 

I heard him say that over and over and yet, almost all of our classes were history lessons. They made us learn a lot of history and so, I don’t know that it is always the fault of preachers that most sermons became little more than history lessons. 

It took me a long time to appreciate what Buttrick was trying to say to us, but when preachers open their Bibles in church and start to read, they are implicitly inviting their congregation to join them in leaving the real world, the here and now, and traveling back to the dusty roads of first century Palestine, Buttrick insisted, that when you do that, you are pushing preaching off into an imaginary world where it has no power, no impact on the here and now. And, for evidence of that fact, we need only consider what I mentioned last week . . .  we are a nation full of people, the majority of whom would call themselves Christians, that currently is holding tens of thousands of children in cages where they are being traumatized, sleeping on concrete floors, deprived of contact with their parents, and churches all over America today are talking about a conversation Jesus had one night with Nicodemus . . . a purely fictional character, invented by the author of John’s gospel, to make the Jews look shallow and ignorant. 

This wouldn’t make me mad if they could use the story of Nicodemus to help people wake up to current events but I wonder, of the hundreds of thousands of sermons that will be delivered today, how many of them ever get out of first century Palestine to think about global climate change, to consider how our military budget is consuming the resources we need for universal healthcare, higher education, and a living wage? How many churches move out of that secret, dark night talk with a Jewish elder to think about our drone policy, our wall along our southern border, or the wall between Israel and Palestine? 

The gospel of John was written in the early second century. In terms of its own setting, it appears to have been written by the church in Rome to contradict the popular influence of Marcion. None of that is especially relevant to us beyond simply accepting the fact that this is not history. Nothing in John should be taken as an eyewitness account of actual events. It is a religious story intended to keep the church on the right track. And I’m not telling you that to make you mad or to make you not read the gospel of John. I’m just saying, if you read it to find out what happened it is almost as bad as watching Fox News to find out what happened . . . it is 99% spin. 

So, if I can get you to come with me on this quest, if John isn’t trying to tell us what happened, what is he trying to tell us? And to really see it, we have to pull the lens back a bit:

John pairs two stories for the purpose of contrast. Nicodemus is a leader among the Jews but he sneaks around at night to talk to Jesus because he knows that his religious faith is somehow inadequate and he is struggling to figure that out. John places his story next to the story of the Samaritan woman at the well whom he portrays as being a kind of slutty heretical Jew. I will expect some email this week from people who are enraged that I showed all three of these characters as being white Europeans in ancient Palestine . . . those letters will come from people who were not listening when I said that these are fictional stories about fictional characters. Welcome to my world. 

Without going into the historical nuances of conflicts between Jews and Samaritans or getting lost in the moral codes of marriage and interactions between men and women in the first century, let’s try to see this in something of the way that John is trying to show it to us.

Let’s say Jesus talks one night with Gandhi and the next morning with Paris Hilton. And the surprise ending is that Gandhi just doesn’t get it and Paris Hilton turns her life around and becomes a decent human being. 

You know, like happens in fictional stories. 

John is saying, in this coupling of stories, that not everyone gets Jesus and the people who don’t are sometimes blocked by a lifetime of religious indoctrination and some of the people who do get the message of Jesus are people whose lives are so broken that they are able to receive it. Now, in real life, I suspect that Gandhi would have had a deep and meaningful conversation with Jesus and Paris would probably have blown the whole thing off with a valley girl “whatever!” But let the story seep in. 

It isn’t about real people or real history, it is about potential. Whether you are reading a biography or a fiction, the real issue is to see how the story affects you, how you react to it. Beyond the politics of the early church, John is dramatically setting two characters against one another for contrast. The one you would expect to win doesn’t even get off the starting block, the one that would not seem to have a chance, becomes the hero of the narrative.

The story, as many good redemption stories do, runs counter to the expectations of society. Let me ask you, do people know you by your successes or by your failures? 

When you just say, “Bill Clinton,” do you immediately think, “Rhodes scholar who rose from an impoverished home where he had to protect his mother from his violent, alcoholic step dad in rural Arkansas to go to Yale Law School and eventually become the president of the United States?” Or is all you can think of in association with this president, an inner office affair with an aid? It is all true but somehow rising above a tragically impoverished childhood to go to Yale, become a Rhodes scholar, and then the President of the United States can’t even stand side by side with his moral failings. I continue to believe that a lot of the mess around Clinton’s life was not that his sexual dalliance was uncommon for a man in high office but it was the resentment of blue-blood Washington that could not stand the fact that what they considered to be Arkansas “trailer trash” had made it into the White House and they were going to put a stop to it. I’m not defending what Clinton did wrong, I’m just wondering, given the start he had in life, how many of his critics could have accomplished one tenth of what he did? 

We get trained to go for the jugular though, don’t we? Especially in an election year. But seriously, if your sister was going to date a politician, would you choose Clinton, or Newt Gingrich?

They both had affairs. What makes Clinton known for his affair and Gingrich’s, which, in many ways, was much more smarmy and hypocritical, why doesn’t he get that label? And, of course, the woman he was leaving impeachment hearings for Clinton to go have sex with, in the parking garage, was promoted to Mrs. Gingrich #3 and then appointed to be . . . and you couldn’t make this up, Calista was appointed to be the ambassador to the Vatican because she is such a good Catholic. Something about this seems somehow unfair. Calista and Monika did exactly the same thing, Monika becomes a term of derision and Calista become the United States Ambassador to the Vatican. Clinton gets impeached and Newt later ran for president. He explained his hypocrisy saying that his affair with Calista gave him moral clarity about why he needed to impeach Clinton. Now, don’t try to think about that explanation too much or your head will explode.

How are you known? When your name comes up in a coffee shop and someone has to say just a word or two to describe you, what do they say? That guy who . . . that woman who . . . , you know . . .

In the Bible, Nicodemus at least gets a name, the Samaritan woman at the well is just known as the woman who was married 5 times . . . which is three more marriages than I have had so she is clearly morally inferior to me! Right?

It is unfair of me to quote a song that I didn’t let Sean know that I was going to quote, especially when it is a Leonard Cohen song because, if any of us could sing at all, we would always choose to sing Leonard Cohen songs . . . the song “Anthem” contains this echo from Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack, in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

This is not a historical story about a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Dorothy Day. This is not a superhero story about a Superman or Wonder Woman. This is a story about broken people and, in this case, the one who was the most broken, the one who was able to let the light in through the broken places, becomes the hero of the story.

You don’t come to church for a history lesson. Like in this Phil Ochs song that Sean is about to sing . . . it isn’t about what Jesus did or what was done to Jesus, it is about what you are going to do. Ochs concludes:

Two thousand years have passed and gone
Many a hero too
But the dream of this poor carpenter
Remains in the hands of you
Remains in the hands of you

Our lives aren’t over. We are not a part of history. And even if the people in the coffee shop and some of our own family members think that they own us because they can gossip about some perceived past failure, we aren’t living in that history either. Whatever it was that Jesus set out to do in the world, he sure didn’t finish the job . . . this doesn’t look right to me… the world doesn’t look finished to me. Truth is, my professors told me a lot about history and theology and I’m pretty good at both. What I don’t know is how to fix this mess in the world today.  But this is the truth, the dream of this poor carpenter remains in the hands of you . . . it, remains in the hands of you. So what are you going to do now?

“Is Stupid Worse than Evil?”

“Is Stupid Worse than Evil?”   March 1, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

 click here to see the video

In a never-ending quest to improve my social life, I was having dinner with a woman who wanted to discuss the chapter of my book, Progressive Faith and Practice, about evidence-based faith. She was increasingly frustrated with my refusal to simply believe in things for which there is no objective evidence. Throwing her hands in the air, she exclaimed, “what you think you know as fact is often proven wrong with the next discovery.” Which was something I was inclined to concede. But she went on to tell me about an archaeologist in Bosnia who had discovered and unearthed these huge pyramids that were covered in bronze. She said that he and proven that they were older than the pyramids in Egypt.

I was skeptical, a discovery of that magnitude would certainly have been broadly covered in the news and surely would have come to my attention. Exasperated, she pulls out her phone to “Google” it and we read together about the Bosnian businessman who claims that these hills are actually ancient, man-made, pyramids. He is not an archaeologist or a scientist of any sort, he is just a guy trying to turn these hills into a tourist site to attract gullible people.

So, we learned two things at dinner that night: the first is that there are no ancient pyramids in Bosnia and the second is that consistently being right does not make me more attractive to women. 

A newspaper column about a particularly stupid bank robber came to the attention of a Cornell University psychologist, David Dunning, and he launched a research project to try to understand why people with little or no information or comprehension are so confident that they are actually experts. 

Now, granted, this bank robber was an extreme case…. He had learned that if you write in lemon juice that the writing will be invisible unless exposed to heat, like being held over a candle. He then concluded that if he put lemon juice on his face, that the bank cameras would not be able to see his face unless he got too close to a heat source. He was actually shocked when he was arrested the day of the robbery. 

But what Dunning and Kruger discovered in their research is that there is an inverse relationship between how much a person knows and how confident they are in a specific field of inquiry. 

Literally the less a person knows, the more self-assured they are that their beliefs are true. Which explains almost everyone who tries to talk to you about something they saw on Fox News. 

I have tended to think that people are not simply gullible about these things but that they find it to be somehow exciting to believe what should be obviously false. You might reasonably conclude that a politician might be power hungry and suffer from entitlement issues but to think that they run a child sex ring out of the back of a Washington pizza parlor requires a nearly complete suspension of rational thought.

But, as Dunning pointed out in his study: “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent,” (Dunning wrote in Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself. ) He continued:  “The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

I always return to this observation of one of our nation’s original philosophers, Thomas Paine, who said: To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. 

This is why there is a fairly persuasive bit of political advice floating around these days that suggests that it is a waste of time trying to get a Trump voter to change their vote in the 2020 election because, if they were capable of using critical thinking skills, they wouldn’t have voted for him in 2016. It is much more effective to try to persuade one of the majority of American voters who just didn’t vote in the past to vote this year. The largest block of potential voters didn’t vote.

A Pew study conducted right after the 2016 election showed that what really elected Donald Trump was the inexplicably large number of people who just stayed home. This block of voters skews heavily towards younger voters and minorities who have the feeling that our political system offers them no real hope. It is overcoming that sense of cynicism, of being already defeated, that is our greatest obstacle. But it is hard to convince people who will not listen.

I am a big fan of the New Yorker comedian, Andy Borowitz, who writes satirical news items.  But sometimes you just have to admit that it is funny because it is true. He published this nugget a few years ago but it keeps showing up on the inter-net because, in fact, the earth is endangered by a new strain of fact-resistant humans. 

I am always reticent to draw too many comparisons between the rise of Nazism in Germany and the rise of Trumpism in our age. Hitler was motivated by both murderous racism and a psychopathic lust for power. Trump is motivated by racism rooted in a pathetic inferiority complex and contemptable greed and ignorance. But in terms of the political dynamics, I do find similarities that are worth talking about.

When the pastor and professor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, finally decided that he had to set aside his pacifist views and become involved in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler, you know, like pastors do sometimes, the plot was discovered, and he was imprisoned. While he awaited execution, he was allowed to write letters and I took one of them as our wisdom lesson today. You can feel his pain and anguish as he dismisses his usual polite way of writing in favor of just spelling out how stupid people end up doing more damage in those dark days than do the genuinely evil people involved in the Nazi movement. He was so angry that his people, his countrymen and fellow church members just were not waking up to the nightmare that was going on all around them. 

He says: reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

We call all recognize this phenomenon, can’t we? Though, it isn’t simply that people are misinformed by Fox News or even Russian bots planting conspiracy theories on social media sites, because there is something of the “chicken or the egg” paradox here. Sure, in part, Fox feeds propaganda to the simple and they believe it and they repeat it, but there is also the fact that the simple choose to turn to Fox News because they already believe paranoid and ignorant things and they are simply seeking confirmation of bias. 

But when you use a word like “evil” then you are dragging this political debate into the arena of religion, of spiritual discernment, and ethical deliberation.

Because, as difficult as it is to accept, there are people who are stupid because they simply lack mental faculty, but, and here is the really painful thing, there are people who are stupid because they have chosen stupidity as a preference. 

In fact, the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, who rather looked a lot like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, literally turned the equation around. Peck defined “evil” as being a kind of militant ignorance . . . a decision to deny facts, ignore information, refuse to accept evidence even when convincingly presented. People don’t want to change the way the live or the way that they make money and so they will simply deny climate science. They will commit, what I will be talking about in a few weeks, a kind of application bias . . . that is, you can tell a woman that buying a gun to protect herself actually increases her chances of being killed with a gun by 17x . . . that is just math, but they will insist, “that doesn’t apply to me.” It is a fact. It is math, but they will refuse to apply that fact to their own circumstances. . .  because they don’t want it to be true . . . for them, it is not true. 

Meteorologist and climate activist, Paul Douglas, has been trying to educate people about how the changes in the climate are directly related to our use of fossil fuels and the transportation choices we make but at every turn, you run into people in the coal and oil industry who want to label you as being a liberal, and dismiss your science as mere conspiracy theories. But, as Douglas says, “Being open to facts doesn’t make you a liberal, it makes you literate.” But we are now in possession of a post-fact society, a fact resistant population that swears that something is not true because they don’t want it to be true.

I have wondered in recent months how we just go on as a society with this child detention policy at our southern border, not just continuing but growing? More than 70,000 kids, from infants to teens, were traumatized, some for months at a time last year, being held in cages in unsanitary and unsafe circumstances and we just go on with our lives like this is somehow acceptable.

Forgive me for showing these horrifying images, but many of us here can remember when, in 1963, a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in Vietnam to draw attention to the immorality of the War in Vietnam. The war continued for another ten years but this self-sacrifice did, in my opinion, make a huge difference in how many people both in America and Vietnam viewed the war. 

In 2010, a college educated man in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, was trying to feed his family by selling vegetables in the street but finally set himself on fire to call attention to the corruption of their government and the oppression of the poor. His sacrifice is widely credited with having started the Arab Spring and bringing about much needed reform in Tunisia. 

 

Please forgive me for planting this image in your minds but I have wondered these past months that if I drove down Texas or Florida and set myself on fire in front 

of a detention center if it would even make a difference in our jaded and morally indifferent nation? I would sacrifice my life to reunite these children with their families, I strongly suspect that many of you would as well . . . I know that are people all over this country whose conscience has been pricked by this wretched policy, but this is not Vietnam of the 1960’s or even Tunisia of a decade ago. What could awaken the conscience of Americans in this age of Trump? Frankly, I don’t think that a high profile martyrdom would do it.

I return again and again to the insight of the French philosopher, Voltaire, who said that “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities".

We are traumatizing, torturing, dehumanizing, tens of thousands of children every day as a part of our government policy and somehow, we are all just going along with it. 

This much I know, we have one chance to usher in a peaceful revolution and that chance will come to us this fall at the ballot box. As Bonhoeffer said that he would 

“Never again . . . try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous,” so we will not save the soul of our once great nation by arguing with Trump supporters. We must simply outnumber them. 

There can be no excuse for not voting this year. There is no excuse for leaving social change up to martyrs and revolutionaries when it lies within your hands to simply overcome your cynicism, your depression and disappointment and go to the polls and vote for a restoration of sanity. I would be willing to die to restore those children to their families, but my death would not phase the Trump administration. The only thing that will change this is for you, all of you, every single one of you, to vote.