“Fear is the Root of Anger”

 “Fear is the Root of Anger”   Feb. 11, 2024     Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many years ago I heard the famous author and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, say in a lecture that if you need therapy but you can’t afford it, pretend that you are an alcoholic and go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It is actually pretty good advice. AA literature is the best distillation of psychological insight and treatment that you are going to find anywhere. It isn’t perfect and clinicians often argue with their methods and conclusions but, there is a lot of wisdom collected through their decades of experience in their literature.

 

One of my favorite passages in AA’s “Big Book”, is found on page 66 where it says: If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.

 

 

I love that phrase that calls anger a “dubious luxury.” There are things to be angry about . . . injustice, racism, poverty, hunger, war, and the media’s obsession with Taylor Swift but as a product of the patriarchal south, I can tell you that anger was sharpened into being the only emotion allowed to men in almost any situation. We were not supposed to cry, we couldn’t be too sad, too depressed, too worried, or scared, but we proved our masculinity by being angry. 

 

I can remember it as if it was just yesterday, nearly 40 years ago my father and I took a trip to visit my uncle, my father’s eldest brother, who was near death. Presley was a kind old bachelor who lived in a little house on a lake near Chicago where he kept an immaculate house and well-tended flower and vegetable gardens. 

 

But this visit was marked by chaos. Presley was wasting away from all of the side effects of diabetes. His clothes hung on his withered body, he was unshaven, and his hair and fingernails were too long. My father saw what I saw, and he became very angry. He was made at the cleaning lady who had not polished the silver or properly cleared the house of cobwebs. He was mad at the neighbor’s son who was sloppy in his job of mowing the lawn and weeding the gardens. He was mad at the visiting nurse because, well, because Presley was obviously dying, and she hadn’t stopped it.

 

What I saw in my father was fear . . . fear of mortality . . . fear of losing his father figure . . . fear that he couldn’t do anything about it. What I saw was that the nurse, the cleaning lady, and even the teenaged neighbor had all realized that Presley was a lonely old man who was near death and so, when they came to his house, they spent time sitting in the lawn chairs just talking to him. They listened to his stories about his years on a farm in Kentucky, about his decades of work in the steel industry, about his late wife, his vineyard, his church, his friends.  Because it was time to let the silver tarnish and the weeds to have their way with the gardens. It was time to just show a dying man some love.

 

When Presley died, his minister came to talk to dad and me, the way that ministers do when an old church member dies . . . he had only known Presley as a sick old man who was rarely able to attend church and so he asked us to tell him about Presley. My dad stuttered and shook and just said that he didn’t know what to say. His mind was so clouded by fear and anger, he couldn’t even describe his favorite person in the world. Presley was the only one of nine children who never had children and so he lavished patriarchal attention on his nieces and nephews. I told the minister a lot . . . that in my childhood, if I got to eat in a restaurant, it was because Uncle Presley was buying. If I got a nice present on Christmas, it was because he sent it. He noticed potential in me that no one else did, and he sent me a subscription to National Geographic so that we could talk on the phone about the places it described.

 

We exchanged photos of the birds at our feeders and talked about the migratory patterns of songbirds. He took me to science museums, the Chicago Adler Planetarium. My father undoubtably had many more profound memories that he simply couldn’t articulate because, well, to say it plainly, anger made him stupid. 

 

Anger is a dubious luxury. I’m angry about the repeal of the Roe v Wade protection of women’s reproductive rights. I’m angry about the thousands of immigrant children who were kept in cages to punish their parents for daring to flee violence and hunger to give their children a better life. And, paradoxically, I’m angry about Israel’s history of oppression of Palestinians, and I’m even more angry about the terrorist attacks against Israelis by Hamas, Hezbollah, and whoever Iran is arming now. 

 

But I don’t want to waste anger on the drivers at the intersection who get so lost in their cell phones that they forget to drive when the light turns green. I don’t want to waste the energy of being angry at the server who gets so caught up in a conversation in the kitchen that they forget to ever come back to the table and actually provide service. I don’t want to be angry about having to wait in line at the pharmacy, at the department of motor vehicles, or at McDonalds when someone ahead of me is staring at the menu board as if they have never heard of a hamburger before. 

 

This topic came to mind lately as the media gave nearly constant coverage to the caucus in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire. Over and over again, interviewers asked voters who they were going to vote for or who they voted for and, as you know, most of  them favored Donald Trump, who they said, “had been a good president.” 

 

They obviously weren’t interviewing people who were on their way out of the monthly MENSA Club meeting, but they looked normal enough, the kind of people you see in the grocery store or in line at the DMV but they were just casually referencing Donald Trump as having been a good president and, I’m entirely sincere here, I have no idea what they are talking about. 

 

And I’ll tell you, after moving to Florida, I found a nearby coffee shop where I liked to sit and study but the owner kept coming over to my table and asked me what I was working on. This past week, when I told her that I was working on a sermon about grievance and MAGA voters, she and her sister came unglued in stereo. 

 

They both insisted that they were not Trump supporters because they were angry about anything but rather it was because Joe Biden is so evil. They insisted that he is giving the country away to China, with no examples given, and that he had turned America into a socialist country, again, with no examples of encroaching socialism . . . Biden is old but public schools, police and fire departments, the army, air force, and navy, all socialist institutions, were not his idea. 

 

It is true that Biden is old and it is true that he isn’t the smartest man ever to occupy the oval office. He is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he may not even be the sharpest spoon in the drawer. He graduated near the bottom of his law school class but he did graduate on his own, rather than having his sister write all of his papers for him which is how Trump got through college. He isn’t an Einstein or even a Kennedy or an Obama, but you just can’t say that he is evil. He is a nice old man who has a big heart who probably shouldn’t have ever run for president but this is how our nominating system works . . . or, more accurately, doesn’t work.  Still, as one friend recently said to me, Biden would be a better president as a cadaver than Trump would ever be and that, in my estimation, is not hyperbole. It is a fact.

 

But let me not go on an MSNBC style rant, what do the people who worked closely with Trump say about him, the Republicans who worked in his administration:

General John Kelly, the former director of Homeland Security, was hand picked by Trump to serve as his chief of staff to bring stability to the White House and the Trump administration but he left in 2020 saying: “The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though its more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever med in my life.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/politics/donald-trump-criticism-from-former-administration-officials/index.html

 

 

His Attorney general, Bill Barr, after defending him against all comers for years, finally broke ranks with him over the theft of nuclear secrets and other classified documents: 

Barr also said Trump is a “fundamentally flawed person who engaged in reckless conduct.” 

“He had no right to those documents,” Barr said. “The government tried for over a year quietly and with respect to get them back, which was essential that they do, and he jerked him around.”

https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/06/19/ex-trump-officials-among-loudest-critics-in-documents-case

 

His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said: “(Trump’s) understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.” Of course, after a private conversation trying to explain NATO to Trump, Tillerson famously left the oval office muttering that Trump was a “fXXXing moron.” 

Mark Esper, the former Secretary of Defense said: “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

 

In a recent article, CNN lists 24 former administration members, from the former vice president to a 20 something-aid to the chief of staff, who have said that Trump is unfit to hold office again.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/politics/donald-trump-former-allies-what-matters/index.html

 

This is not a matter of partisan politics. These are just obvious and indisputable facts, without even going into the personal stuff about his public statements about wishing that he could date his daughter, the dozens of women who have accused him of sexual assault, his recent trial that involved both rape and defamation of character, and the more than 90 indictments against him for voter fraud, tax cheating schemes, and insurrection against the United States…. Of of which my former friend at the coffee shop says, are fake allegations . . . even the ones where we have video and audio tapes of the crimes as they took place.

I think that the Georgia journalist, Jay Bookman put my feelings into words when he said: For me personally, the most painful aspect of his rise has been the damage it has caused to my faith in my fellow Americans.   I do not understand how a person can watch what he says and does and still believe he belongs in the Oval Office. 

This is the issue, isn’t it? What is the attraction of Donald Trump that has a sweet little old lady leaving a New Hampshire polling place saying, “I don’t like how he runs his mouth but I think he is a good president”?

 

Like Cornell West, the Union Seminary Professor, who said on Bill Maher’s show in 2020, “How can, in a country of more than 300 million people, we end up with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as our candidates for president?” And now, he is so disgusted with the fact that we are going to end up with the same choice in 2024 that West is running for president himself, but he has a point. These are two horrible candidates, its just that one is so much more horrible than the other one.

 

Seriously, if we were given a choice between Trump and Charles Manson, I’m afraid that I would still have to vote for Charles Manson . . . at least he has been dead for 7 years and isn’t able to do much more harm; Trump is dangerous to democracy, to the global economy, and he is a friend to every dictator and tyrant in the world. And yet, about half of American voters are poised to vote for him again.

 

What, we all wonder, is the draw? It is too easy to say that MAGA America is a cult. Even a cult has to give you something to draw followers. All I can see that Trump gives to my older brother, to the lady at the coffee shop, and the disgruntled voters of America is a validation of their anger. 

 

But anger is exhausting. I don’t think that anger is the real root of people’s attraction to Trump, I think it is what lies behind anger, which is fear. White people who are afraid of losing privilege. Evangelicals who are afraid of losing control of society and social norms. I think that it is men who fearful of female autonomy. I think it is poor people who are afraid of losing their chance of becoming rich. I think it is low wage employees who are afraid that illegal immigrants might take their jobs at even lower wages. 

 

I have heard Bill Maher say several times that we can hate Donald Trump but we can’t hate all Trump voters but, I will confess that I don’t always feel that way. I hate racism. I hate misogyny. I hate xenophobia. I hate homophobia. I hate classism. And, in effect, isn’t that the same thing as hating Trump voters? 

 

But maybe, just maybe, if we can not react to them as simply being racist, white privileged, angry white fascists and see them as being more pitiable frightened people who need to be made to feel safe in their own homes, who need to be reassured they are not being replaced by poor immigrants, Jews, or college educated people . . . they’re just being replaced by AI and robots . . . because, even if self driving taxis sometimes have accidents, you at least don’t have to listen to their racist screeds while being driven to the airport. 

In the end, I just want to say what I have said to you before through the years. Let go of your racism. Set aside your need for privilege. Embrace immigrants, and people of other gender identities, and religions as your equals and the best way to do that is to simply stop being afraid.

God Doesn’t Write Books

God Doesn’t Write Books     January 28, 2024     

Dr. Roger Ray             

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As I prepared to move to my new home in Florida, I had to dispose of very many things but what I packed to take with me, I put into boxes and labeled the boxes with two pieces of information: what was in the box, and where the box was to go in the new house.

 

As it turns out, there were many books whose contents were described as Biblical Books, and the place where the movers were to set those boxes said simply, “garage.” Lots of other boxes of books were labeled to go into the office but the fact that the Biblical books were being exiled into the garage seemed to upset the head of my moving team. “Aren’t you a minister?” He asked incredulously. 

 

I get similar challenges from listeners who can’t help noticing that I often go months at a time without ever mentioning any passage of scripture. Obviously, this has not always been my habit. I entered the ministry at the age of 23 and I was determined to be quite the Biblical scholar. I read aloud the prescribed lectionary passages in every Sunday service I led for more than 30 years and even when I realized that a service didn’t have to have an Old Testament, a gospel, and an epistle lesson every week, I still picked a few passages from the assigned readings as the foundation for my sermon. 

 

I went to seminary believing that the Bible, though written by men and women, was somehow sacred, somehow uniquely authoritative as if God somehow spoke through its pages. I believed that the gospels accurately preserved the oral traditions of the teachings of Jesus. 

 

For most of my early decades, I asked the Sunday morning congregation to stand up when the gospel lesson was read, out of respect for the teachings of Jesus. But as my grad school education worked its way, deeper and deeper into my awareness, I accepted that virtually none of the Bible was historical and that only five or six sentences in the gospels could credibly be attributed to the historical Jesus and even those were the words, not of a half man- half God figure but to a very human prophet who was sometimes right and sometimes wrong. 

 

Once you fully accept that the Bible not only is not the word of God but it is, in fact, a very human product, written by people so long ago that not a one of them had the slightest idea where the sun goes at night, then all of those years of grad school and years of personal study become something of intellectual curiosity but the whole thing loses any authority as a source . . . there is a lot of truth in the Bible, a lot of insight and guidance that can be gleaned from it, but not because it comes from a holy book and not because it was inspired by God. 

 

Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian scriptures are the collected wisdom of many generations of ancient people. The Quran had a much shorter period of time in composition but even it was influenced by more ancient texts and subjected to the editing of literate family members of Muhammad, who, by the way, could not read or write.

 

While there are some powerful insights in the Bible, there is also no small amount of homophobia, irrational guilt, misogyny, xenophobia, mythology, misinformation, and exclusivism. People have always paid attention to their favorite passages and ignored most of it. 

There are three times in the gospels where Jesus is recorded to have told people to sell all they own and give the money to the poor and only once, in John’s gospel, does Jesus tell someone that they must be born anew but we all know lots of people who claim to be born again and damned few who have ever sold all they owned and gave everything to the poor. 

 

The truth about the Old Testament, or, more properly, the Hebrew Bible, is that it is a collection of religious writings from at least three different countries, and probably more, that were written over a period of about 800 years, and possibly more, from at least 4 distinct perspectives and written by dozens if not hundreds of different people. The Hebrew Bible describes a religion that is based on a priesthood, that practiced animal sacrifice in a singular temple. That is the most ancient Semitic religion but then later parts of the Hebrew Bible describes an almost completely different religion that is based in an emphasis on a religious text and practiced in scattered places of worship. There was the Temple religion and the synagogue religion and that only begins to touch on the diverse ways in which, for several centuries, people were Jewish.

 

The Hebrew Bible contains are enthronement passages that praise the king and the royal family and there are prophetic passages that summarily condemn the very idea of having a king.  There are even two very different versions of the 10 commandments . . . you would think that they would be able to get at least that part of the story right!

 

The Hebrew Bible borrows stories and songs from other religions, other languages, and other nations and when I say, “borrows,” you could say “plagiarizes” if only Babylonians and Persians had copyright laws. 

 

The much shorter New Testament was written over a period of about 80 years. Most of it clearly did not come out of Judah and it was written in the common language of the Roman Empire. The biggest part of it was written by Paul, who never met the historical Jesus and who had almost no interest in the historical Jesus. By his own account, when he did, in fact, meet Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, he refused to let them teach him anything about Jesus. 

 

Paul writes in the first chapter of his letter to the church in Galatia that even though he did eventually go to Jerusalem and spent 15 days with Peter and during that time he also met James, that he didn’t get any instruction from them. . . in fact, they were arguing. 

 

Paul was a mystic who claimed that everything he knew about Jesus had come to him as a revelation and he was, to be honest about it, too arrogant to be instructed by people who knew more than he did and yet he is the church’s primary source on the Christian religion, and I believe, though this is debated among scholars, that the writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were dependent on Paul’s view of Jesus in writing their versions of the gospel and that none of them had ever met Jesus nor did they know much about him. The gospel of John was written much later, in Rome, in large part to refute the theology of Marcion. 

 

People sometimes get very upset about this but the truth is that Jesus was never a Christian. He was a Jew from the Galilee, which meant that he was a synagogue Jew as opposed to being a Jerusalem Temple Jew. There was enough difference in their religion that when the Sadducees and priests called someone a “gentile” they were typically talking about the Jews who didn’t live in Jerusalem. 

 

Why wasn’t Jesus received well when he went to Jerusalem? Mostly because they would not have seen him as being a part of their religion . . . remember, the temple was the center of a priest operated, animal sacrifice religion . . . the synagogues didn’t sacrifice animals, they were focused on religious texts and practices of prayer and purity. Jesus conducted his short ministry, probably nine or ten months long, not three years, out of Capernaum, the hometown of Peter. 

 

Jesus was an exorcist, healer, and miracle worker from the Galilee. The priests in Jerusalem would have viewed him as being something like the way we would view a magician in a traveling circus . . . not someone to be either admired or trusted.

 

The historical Jesus was a traveling preacher who had gathered some illiterate supporters who followed him to visit other Jewish towns during the Roman occupation of Judah. Jesus was probably a Jewish reformer, and he was probably an anti-empire agitator against the Roman occupation. Why he went up to Jerusalem is a subject of academic debate. Did he hope to change Judaism at its birthplace. Did he mean to announce himself to be the King of Israel and to lead a revolt against Rome? 

Whatever his real motivations were, the Roman government viewed him as being just one of dozens and dozens of insurrection leading Jewish agitators and they dispatched him in their usual brutal manner.

 

The hardest part of the history of the early church for me to understand is why the disciples decided to stay in Jerusalem after the crucifixion of Jesus? Why didn’t they retreat back to Capernaum? Why did they stay in the backyard of the temple priests where they were not wanted and where they were not respected? 

 

Whatever their reasons were, it didn’t work out well for them because within two generations the temple was destroyed, the priesthood was lost, any memory of who was from what Tribe of Israel disappeared and the Jews who survived were dispersed all over the Roman empire. By the end of the first century, there were more Jews, and hence, more of various forms of Christianity, in northern Africa than there were in Palestine. In the early second century, a dominant form of Christianity had become rooted in Rome, the capital of the Empire.

 

Mystery religions were abundant in the first century of the common era. Religions that offer hope beyond this visible world, beyond this mortal life, always flourish in times of great social stress . . . like a military occupation, a plague, or severe economic or natural catastrophe. When people give up hope on reforming the world as it is, they imagine another world, a world where things will be just, fair, and happy. Sadly, it is an imaginary world but a whole lot of people invest heavily in that imaginary world because this visible life is just too far gone to be fixed.  

 

So Jesus, and the story of his resurrection, became a central character in lots of afterlife mystery cults, of which Paul was just one. If you go to seminary, you get a brief introduction of several gnostic cults and Christian spin offs but as much as traveling preachers, like Paul, tried to impose a particular way of being the church on the churches they either founded or visited, obviously, they were not very successful in that effort as early Christians made up their beliefs by blending them with all of the beliefs of their surrounding cultures. 

 

The personal friends of Jesus who continued to meet in his name after the crucifixion probably were essentially Galilean Jews who clung to the Torah and interpreted certain passages of the law and the prophets to be references to Jesus. That is why we see so much of that in the gospel tradition, especially in Matthew, where the author totally misappropriates passages from Isaiah and the Psalms to be applied to the Jesus story. That kind of Christianity began to lose its appeal early in the second century and there was an emerging collection of writings that formed a Christian library. This was especially motivated by the fact that Rome had tried to wipe out Judaism and clinging to Jewish scriptures was bad for your health.

 

I mentioned Marcion earlier and I have only in the last decade come to appreciate how important he was in the emergence of a Christian Bible. Marcion was a wealthy Christian from Turkey. His family was in the shipping business which gave him two very big advantages . . . he had money to publish books and he had means and reason to travel all over the empire by ship. Marcion wanted to put distance between Christianity and Judaism, dismissing the punitive God of the Hebrew Bible in favor of the loving and life-giving God of the resurrection of Jesus. And so, he tried to form a Christian bible based on a shorter and earlier version of Luke’s gospel and 10 of the letters of Paul. 

 

Marcion was very influential and managed to form the largest following of any of the kinds of Christianity that might have been a rival to what would emerge as the earliest form of Roman Catholic Christianity. When more subtle forms of persuasion failed, he was condemned as a heretic and he and his followers were expelled from Rome. But he left his mark on the faith, introducing the idea of a Christian Bible . . . his had 11 books but within a century, the church in Rome had added 16 more to that list to eventually give us a 27 book New Testament. Marcion was so influential that even after he was in exile, certain of the church fathers continued to write against him and his influence… in fact, they wrote so much that we can reconstruct Marcion’s writings just from the quotes of his work in the writings of his critics, especially in the five books titled “Against Marcionism” written by Tertullian. 

 

What I am trying to illustrate for you is that our holy scriptures came into existence in distinctly unholy ways. There were political battles among rival forms of Christianity and the winners were often the ones that had the money to pay scribes to copy their books and distribute them. And once you realize these things, it is difficult to get people very interested in reading the Bible as a source of authority in their lives. The Bible has survived among churches out of tradition, out of habit, not out of loyalty to God or reverence for the text. 

 

And let’s face it, the 27 book canon of the New Testament has been the church’s book for 1600 years and yet it has hardly created unity within the religion. There is as much difference between a Pentecostal Church in Tennessee and an Episcopal Church in Massachusetts as there is between a Mosque in Tehran and a Buddhist Temple in Thailand. Having the same book doesn’t end up in producing a singular religion.

 

I have very nostalgic, almost romantic feelings about scripture. I spent most of my adult life deeply immersed in it. I know more about scripture than I know about any other subject . . . I just don’t talk about much in this era because it no longer has the power to leave any muddy footprints on the clean waxed floor of people’s minds. Still there are many people who insist that the Bible is actually the word of God and they claim it as the absolute authority in their lives. None more famously than the Louisiana Congressman and current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who, when he was plucked from obscurity last fall to become Speaker and people wanted to know who he was and what he believed, he told them to understand his beliefs on any topic to just read the Bible. 

 

But what does it mean to be a Bible inspired person in the 21^st century? For Mike Johnson, it meant trying to illegally overthrow the 2020 election and to provide protection for the people who violently attacked the Capitol police and caused the deaths of 4 people. It means opposition to the legal rights of the LGBTQ+ community. It means making it more difficult to get divorced and impossible to get an abortion. It means cutting the Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare programs that give healthcare and food to the poorest among us. 

 

Prior to being elected to congress, he was a spokesperson for The Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This Bible believer might be seen as a savior in a Pentecostal Church in Louisiana, but he would be seen as an anti-Christ in most mainstream Christian denominations. . . . in much the same way that Trump is beloved by Christian evangelicals and considered to be the greatest threat to the world by more intelligent and informed people . . . not to reveal my prejudices in a single sentence. . . but I am out of time and I don’t have the ability to polish the turd. 

 

But, hey, you don’t come here for political correctness now do you? So, we are in a new age. We have lost a lot when the Bible ceased to be a common meeting place for religious people who were united at least by a shared set of stories and a language that was all our own. Now we have to search for truth that can stand on its own two feet…. Truth that we recognize as being true based on its own virtues, not because we can assign chapter and verse to it. 

That may seem to be subject to all kinds of personal heresy but if you ever get nostalgic for the good ol days, drop in a church that advertises itself as being a “Bible Believing” congregation some Sunday and you will quickly see that we don’t want any more of that. 

 

 

What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You (and probably didn’t know)

What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You (and probably didn’t know) 

 

January 14, 2024

 

Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

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

 

 

 

I was born in 1956, just 11 years after the end of World War II. So, the adults who filled my childhood days had all grown up in the midst of that global war. Oddly enough, mentions of that world war were few. It was a profound and horrifying nightmare that all of the adults knew about but the adults in my world elected to only speak of it rarely and only then in hushed and somber tones, usually beyond the hearing of children. 

 

My father fought in the South Pacific where everyone he went into basic training with died during the course of the war. During the war, my mother was a part of a huge typing pool among the thousands of other Congressional secretaries in Washington, D.C. After the war, my father was hospitalized in a mental ward of Bethesda Hospital and it was during that time that mutual friends introduced my mother to my father. They were married in a park in Washington, and soon came back to Kentucky to raise a family. My father went to work for the Rural Electrification Association, building the electrical grid in the rural south, and my mother became our church’s secretary. 

 

My father’s nerves never got a lot better. He stuttered a lot, had occasional night terrors, and sometimes had to have surgery to remove bits of exploded shrapnel buried in his body. He even had a few relapses of malaria, but he never told war stories. And I suppose that I should be grateful for that. 

 

They had experienced a lot during the war years but they came back to their hillbilly roots with all of the racial prejudice, anti-semitism, and even Anti-Catholic feelings they had been raised with, but thankfully, they rarely brought any of that up. There were some embarrassing things said when schools and city parks and pools were integrated and some genuinely stupid things said about the Kennedy family, but they mostly avoided passing that stuff on to their kids. 

 

But when I got married in 1976, I married into another southern family. My father-in-law was a different kind of war veteran. He had been an airplane mechanic stationed in Europe. He told war stories all of the time. He was proud of his military service and attended all of the reunions and veterans events that he possibly could. And boy howdy, they were racist, and anti-Semitic, and Anti-Catholic, and Anti-immigrant, anti-communist, and anti-Democratic, and very very very devout Christians who believed that they were members of the only true church. They were not fond of me, but they would sometimes audibly console themselves with the fact that at least their daughter had married a white man. 

 

Holiday visits were hard for me to take and one year I couldn’t take the combination of war stories and racism anymore and I asked him, “Why did you fight against the Nazis since you agree so passionately with their beliefs?” It was a sincere question. From what little I knew about the Nazis and what I knew way too much about my in-laws, the whole Mississippi tribe, they would have fit right in, in Nazi Germany. 

 

But from that unpleasant conversation, the last time I visited my in-laws, until just the last few years, I never thought again about the roots of fascism in Americans.

I assumed that the racism in my own family and among my in-laws was purely a product of their lack of education and their own feelings of inferiority and I never tried to understand it any deeper than that.

 

I had some real holes in my own education. In undergraduate school I studied Greek philosophy. I tested out of all of the basic history courses and never had to sit in a classroom and be exposed to much information about modern history. In grad school, I studied biblical history, theology, church history, and even with three degrees and a dozen years of classroom education, my knowledge of early 20^th century world history could have fit in a thimble and still had room to rattle around. 

My awareness of American history really didn’t begin until this century when I had a chance opportunity to hear the American historian, Howard Zinn, speak at Missouri State University. I devoured his book, A People’s History of the United States, and I had subsequent opportunities to hear him and spend time in conversation with him when I was a fellow at Harvard, and later when I was teaching at Drury University. When I started the little progressive church where I have worked these past 16 years, our first adult class was a 9 month long study of Zinn’s work because I wanted the whole congregation to be aware of the truth about Christopher Columbus, the genocide of the Native Americans, about child labor, poverty, women’s rights, civil rights, and our nation’s history of racism, sexism, classism, and American nationalism. 

I realized that my public school education in history had been what my old friend, Joe McAdoo, used to call, “a home on the range” version of history, “where ner’e is heard a discouraging word.” The book I am picturing here with Zinn’s book, is a more flatfooted attempt at demythologizing the lies we were told in school that tended to foster our belief that Americans were always the good guys. 

 

I think that “lies” may be too strong of a term. I suspect that my teachers were not so much lying to me as they were simply repeating the version of history that they had been taught. I don’t have too much room to complain about that since I spent the first 15 years of my life in ministry repeating myths that I had been told, even long after I had been to graduate school and knew how much balloon juice the church was filled with. In 2008 I emptied an entire file cabinet of my early sermons into a dumpster so that no evidence would remain of my history of perpetuating myths. 

 

When you look behind the cheap, two dimensional, stage props of the religion and national history we were taught, you can discover some very disappointing things about the rise of the American empire and the firm establishment of white, male, hetero privilege.

 

Just a decade ago, one of our listeners turned me onto another important chapter of American history when he suggested that I read General Smedley Butler’s book, War is a Racket. If you are a regular listener, you will have heard me mention him and this short book several times.  

Robert DeNiro played a character based on Smedley Butler in the recent movie, Amsterdam, but even though I would recommend the movie to you, it was at least 90% fiction, but it preserved at least the kernel of truth about the fact that corporate billionaires tried to raise an army of veterans to overthrow the American government during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and they tried to get Smedly Butler to lead that army. Instead, Butler cleverly led them along, gathering names and information until he was ready to expose the plot to the American Congress where, though the plot was foiled, not a single billionaire was indicted, tried, or imprisoned. . . . because, well, America. 

 

The movie rather whitewashes the whole of the story of fascism in America and that is what I am wanting to highlight today. It turns out that it wasn’t just my family and my in-laws who harbored Nazi styled prejudices, and it certainly wasn’t just the uneducated who promoted Hitler’s agenda in America. In fact, many of the leaders were Harvard grads with otherwise important and influential careers. 

We have mostly only been exposed to the tiniest tip of the iceberg of this sad dimension of our history and that is why we are so easily being seduced right back into it. 

For example, many of us are aware that Henry Ford was antisemitic and that he kept a picture of Adolph Hitler, whom he admired, in his office, but not many of us would have known that Hitler kept a picture of Henry Ford in his office and credited Ford with being his inspiration for his campaign against the Jews in Europe. 

 

It turns out that my young adult quandary about why my parents and my in-laws seemed to be so proud of the American victory in WW II while holding so many of the beliefs of the Nazi movement in Germany was not such a rare issue. It turns out that the Nazi influence in America and America’s influence on the Nazi movement had a lot of cross pollination. 

 

I am going to recommend one more book to you this morning and while the three previously mentioned are very important and they were certainly seminal to my own awakening to a more honest view of American history, I’m going to say that as hard as it is to let the facts in this book into our skulls, it is well researched, well written, and absolutely vital information.

 

In Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel” she carefully describes how America’s post-Civil War racial apartheid, inspired the racism behind Germany’s antisemitic laws that led up to the holocaust. It is over 300 pages long and I have to admit that I have not been able to skim it for highlights. This is a book that demands to be read, one word at a time. If you can’t see yourself doing that in the very near future, then I encourage you to listen to a series of podcasts that Rachel Maddow has out that includes most of the research for this book. Go to iTunes or whatever podcast provider you use and search for “Ultra.” Seriously, please make a note of it and listen to or read this material soon. 

 

I always read, pen in hand, highlighting, underlining, or putting stars in the margin of important passages. My normal habits of marking up a book have been irrelevant in this case because I end up highlighting almost everything. I wish that I had a photographic memory. It is all important to our current political environment. This is not a history lesson, it is a detailed example of how church going, patriotic Americans can be seduced into supporting a totalitarian dictator because the dictator exploits our latent racism and fear.

 

In the past few years, most of us have frequently wondered aloud how we could be going backwards so quickly? We have used the word “unprecedented” constantly to describe the moral outrages that have fallen on us like hammers on an anvil, turning a blind eye to political leaders who are guilty of rape, theft, of taking bribes, and undermining democracy, of legitimizing sexism, even to the point of overturning Roe v Wade, and making it a crime to seek legal reproductive care in other states or other countries. Well, what we need to know is that it has happened before and that this slide into fascism has many more supporters among us than we ever would have suspected even a decade ago. 

 

Remember when America elected its first black president? Yeah, me too. But that America does not appear to exist anymore and what has taken its place should be horrifying to all of us.

 

 Maddow talks about Father Charles Coughlin, a violently antisemitic priest who had a radio show that drew an audience of more than 100 million, more than anyone before or since, who insisted that what was being done to the Jews in Germany was justified and that we should be doing the same in America. He organized an armed militia that had a serious plan to overthrow the American government. 

 

She tells us about the famous female pilot, second only to Emilia Earhart in fame and popularity, a relative of the famous author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura Ingalls, the pilot, actually flew over the Whitehouse and dropped fascist pamphlets all over the property. 

 

It was just that there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in America, it is also true that Nazis learned a lot about how to be Nazis from America. Hitler sent Heinrich Krieger, a German lawyer, to Fayetteville, Arkansas to study American law to learn how, with a constitution that clearly forbid racial discrimination and institutionalized equality, that Americans were managing to pass and enforce Jim Crow laws, legalizing segregation and turning a blind eye to lynching. 

 

Krieger reported to Hitler on how, even after the Spanish-American War, when the US took possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines, that we still refused to give the brown people who lived there the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to white citizens. Krieger paid special attention to the laws that made it possible to reduce the population of native Americans from tens of millions to a few hundred thousand, taking their property and confining them to reservations. 

 

Krieger spent two years in Arkansas and returned to Germany to help write the laws that took citizenship and property away from German Jews, leading up to the holocaust. 

In spite of our history of genocide against Native Americans, our enslavement, and later segregation with all of its lynching and economic oppression of black people, and our slow acceptance of women’s rights, inter-racial marriage, and gay rights, America didn’t slide into fascism early in the 20^th century but this image of a fascist rally held in Madison Square Garden in 1939 should demonstrate that we certainly could have and we came way too close to a violent overthrow of the American government when Franklin Roosevelt was in office.

 

Three years ago, inspired by the fascist rhetoric of Donald Trump, thousands stormed the Capitol building and tried to overthrow a free and fair election, which could have resulted in installing Trump as a dictator for life. I cannot imagine that out of some fear of right wing reprisal, Trump was not impeached and imprisoned three years ago but not only has he and many other legislators and gullible citizens been allowed to avoid prosecution, Trump now stands on the threshold of re-election, in spite of the horrifying similarities between him and Hitler and other fascist dictators. 

 

Men and women, it is not hyperbole to say that the presidential election to be held later this year may very well be the last American election if Trump is re-elected and if we do not purge our senate and our congress of members who have tried to make the January 6^th insurrection a part of our normal political process. 

 

I understand that churches don’t want to turn their Sunday services into political rallies or discussions of current events. I recognize that almost all religious people instinctively want to hunker down and work on personal piety, moral improvement in themselves and their families, but most churches were silent about slavery in the 19^th century but we only talk about the religious leaders who stood for liberation. 

 

Most churches in my childhood were silent about segregated schools, neighborhoods, toilets and even drinking fountains…. They were silent about the war in Vietnam and the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. But we only remember and praise the religious leaders who went against that silence, kicking at the darkness. 

 

I have lost a lot of friends through the years, loudly asking in ministers’ meetings, “Do you really believe that Jesus was crucified for being a moderate?” 

“Finding Balance in a World that Demands Action”

“Finding Balance in a World that Demands Action”             December 17, 2023   

Dr. Roger Ray     click here to see the video

 

As the holiday season arrived again this year, the airways began to shift to the classical holiday songs, one of which we will inevitably hear daily for a couple more weeks is Brenda Lee’s 1958 classic, “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree.” An NPR reporter interviewed the now 78 year old artist recently and in that interview I learned that Brenda Lee was just 13 years old when she recorded that song. 13 . . . and they have been playing that song to death for 65 years. I don’t know what first comes to mind for you when you learned that but what immediately struck me is that this young woman was set for life at the age of 13 on the strength of one song. Now, she went on to have a singing career but, honestly, she didn’t have to. 

 

She is not Elon Musk or Bill Gates rich, but her net worth is over $20 million and I doubt that much of that came from her recording of “Toot, toot, tootsie.” I had a similar reaction when I learned that the beautiful actress who first played Queen Amidala, Natalie Portman, in the 1999 Star Wars movie, the Phantom Menace, was only 16 years old when filming began. I loved the movie but I was immediately envious of the fact that at the age of 16, she was financially set for life. 

 

Of course, there are people who are trust fund babies, born into the security of family wealth, but it seems somehow different when you can see someone move from obscurity into life long security in a single gesture in their teenaged years. 

Our American economy is structured to literally fill us with anxiety from our birth. How are we going to survive? We turn education into nothing more than a means of sharpening our employment prospects, we avoid universal healthcare and tie any affordable healthcare option directly to employment, compounding our fear of the future with uncertainty about where we will live, will we be able to eat, get healthcare, and, “Oh my God,” what if we become disabled, or pregnant, or what if there is another recession, or, “God forbid,” another great depression? 

 

The American economy is built on fear and dread, even though we are the richest country, not just the richest country in the world, but the richest country in all of human history. Maybe that anxiety has helped to turn our Protestant work ethic into national wealth; but it sure hasn’t done much to make us a happier or more mentally healthy society. We didn’t hear much about the hard fought battles to establish a 40 hour work week or to safeguard a two day weekend for most workers, but, I can tell you, whatever semblance of employment security, safety, and fair compensation that we now enjoy, it came with a bloody price tag.

 

Still, in the USA, if you are lucky enough to have paid vacation at all, it is almost never more than two weeks…. 10 paid days off. And many employers offer exactly none. For most of my adult life, as a pastor, I officially had 4 weeks of vacation but my work load was such that I never got to take it. At times, I went years without a vacation, obviously working weekends and holidays, and rarely getting 24 hours off in any week and there was always some board member who thought I was lazy. 

 

But let me just clue you in about paid vacations around the world. 

 Only Micronesia gets fewer vacation days than Americans and they get 9. Mexico gets 14, Canadians enjoy 19 days off, and most of Central and South America gets about a month off every year. Our allies in western Europe are all way ahead of us, Great Britain gets 28 days, except for Scotland which gets 38 days. Most of Europe and Africa get about a month of vacation every year.

What’s more, think about countries that Americans tend to think of as being heartless nations with bad human rights, China gives their people 16 days of vacation every year, Russians get 42, and the nation with the most generous paid vacation in the world is Iran with 52. Because, people, as much as this may come as a surprise to many of you, there is more to life than going to work!

 

When I turned 65, rather than just retiring, I split my job with our friend, David Ketchum. The idea was that we could both work half-time and so we began to figure out different ways of dividing our church duties so that I could travel more. My first 2 week vacation came right after my 65^th birthday. I took my scuba gear to Cozumel where I rented a one room apartment a few miles from the beach where I was surrounded by other international vacationers.

I met a delightful 30-something couple at the pool who were living very frugal lives in a tiny apartment there. He was from Argentina, she was from Kansas, they had met working in a hotel in Australia, and they had decided that they would work for a few months, save everything they could, and then not work until they had to try to go make money again. They were managing to work less than half of the year every year. I have to tell you, I have never experienced so much self doubt about the choices that I have made in my life and career. 

 

I had always taken vacations when I was at the point of exhaustion. I would lay down my axe and take a few days off when I felt drained, burned out, sometimes at the breaking point. They were working only when they needed to pay the rent and buy groceries. I’m sure that their parents thought that they were horribly irresponsible. I would die if my daughter decided to do something like this, and yet, even though they were not saving for retirement and they certainly didn’t own a house or a car, but, guys, they had broken through the myth that we exist only to work. They had conquered the fear of poverty and hunger. 

 

Let me say it again, you were born for more than to go to work every day. I have realized that as I have pulled my work schedule back from constantly leaning forward in the saddle that not taking enough time off is the largest reason why I was not more successful. I was so ambitious, so afraid of failure, that my life was entirely out of balance. I really wanted to be the best pastor, the best counselor, I wanted to be the best preacher, the best at presiding over weddings, baptisms, and funerals. I even took singing and guitar lessons because I wanted to be able to make a positive contribution to the church’s music program . . . which was a colossal waste of money and time. 

 

I don’t wish that I could have lived my adult life as my friends in Mexico were doing it. I didn’t need to be liberated from work for several months out of the year, but I did need to step back enough to find balance, to gain perspective, to understand why working harder and more hours wasn’t making me more popular and more successful. 

 

And what I am going to say now may be more specific to life as a Protestant pastor than to anything else, but when I entered the ministry in the late 70’s, churches had come through a boom time that was all a part of the Baby Boom in post-World War America. WW II created the technological and economic innovations that created the middle class and with it came the suburbs and suburban churches with their huge edifices that later generations struggled to fill.

In 1991 I became the Senior Pastor of this sprawling Georgian Colonial church whose sanctuary seated 250 but the two education wings provided classroom space for 500. In the 1960’s, it had seemed reasonable to this church that they could fill the sanctuary twice every Sunday and fill their Sunday School classes with 500 people every week. But in the 1970’s, as families became smaller and divorce became more common, Sunday School attendance fell off a cliff. In the 1980’s, mainstream church attendance began to fall off precipitously. 

 

But the church of that era still had an active memory of when, in the 50’s and 60’s, they had been full and they were desperate to return to those days without any accounting for how the world had changed. I worked myself to death trying to have a successful 1960’s church in the 1990’s. We tried to rebuild youth groups, children’s choirs, Sunday School classes, church camp, Vacation Bible School . . . all things that belonged to another era. 

By the early part of this century, I realized that we were spending so much money on staff and attractive technology and entertainment, trying to attract the children of that generation, that we could have been more successful if we had just paid them $15 an hour to attend. I was desperate, to the point of panic, wanting to be successful but I never stepped back far enough to realize that a successful church in the 21^st century would not look at all like a successful church of the mid 20^th century. 

 

When I left that church in 2007, the denomination still had ministers filling out annual reports to tell them how successful we were being by telling them the numbers…. What was our average attendance, how many new members were brought in that year, how many new baptisms, how much capital money was raised, what was the weekly offering? They wanted us to count what could be counted without ever asking ourselves what really counted, the things that cannot be counted in any objective way. . . marriages saved, suicides prevented, moral encouragement given, direction, meaning, training in compassion, and real service to those in need. 

 

No one ever asked about those things which, necessarily means that those things didn’t matter as much as donations, attendance, and numerical growth. I wish that I could go back in time and explain all of this to my 35 year old self but I am not sure that I could have believed it back then. 

 

Still, even when I moved pass formal Christianity and the prison of institutional church life, I poured my energy into being a social activist. I fought against injustice with the same passion I had expended trying to fill up a huge church. 

 

We are living in a dynamic time. Somehow, at least half of our country seems to be determined to destroy our constitutional democracy and replace it with a fascist dictatorship that will take away civil rights, oppress minorities, and inflict unspeakable cruelties on people that will make only getting 10 days of paid vacation each year seem unimportant… the worst possible things are increasingly probable for the future of our country and somehow these horrible things seem likely to be voted in by popular vote. It feels like America is living out a constant “opposite day” that makes no sense at all. 

 

I am advocating for intentional balancing in a world that is desperately in need of action, of leadership, of greater personal investment and greater involvement but because the need is so great, leading a balanced life is just that much more important.

 

Because the world seems almost to be teetering on the edge of self-destruction, you should take time to go to the beach, take a walk in the woods, spend an evening with friends, go out and hear live music, attend a live theater production. How long has it been since you had a meal with your family without cell phones or a TV on in the background. Do you know what exhibits are currently at your local art museum? Are you living or just going to work?

 

Spend time with your family. Let your inner child come out to play a bit at Christmas. Wear the ugly sweater, drink the punch, spend too much on gifts, eat too much and regain some sense of yourself and what you are doing with your life. I’ll see you on New Year’s Eve.