“This is Not Normal”

“This is Not Normal”   March 24, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

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Jimmy Carter was still in the White House when I started grad school at Vanderbilt. I chose Vanderbilt because it was the most liberal school I had access to in the south and I thought of myself as a liberal, although, I was not prepared at the tender young age of 24 for just what it meant to be “woke” forty years before people started talking about being “woke” as either a good or a bad thing.

 

At orientation, we entering students in 1980 were rigorously indoctrinated into gender inclusive language. It was a brand new concept to most of us and it was controversial on two fronts. We had all used the pronoun “he” to reference either a man or a woman in any non-specific sentence. It was correct grammar at the time to say something like, “The next voter in line must present his ID.” Now, we were told, we must say it, “The next voter in line must present his or her ID.” It seemed to be unnecessarily cumbersome and there was no small amount of grumbling about it but the other issue was considerably more powerful.

 

We were, after all, grad students in theology, we were ministry students, future biblical scholars, and the Bible clearly referenced God as “Father,” and Jesus, who, in our minds, could hardly have been wrong, called God “Father.” We, however, were no longer to call God “Father,” and if we did in any assignment, the paper would be returned for correction and if left uncorrected, the paper would be given an “F.” That struck us as being arbitrary and heavy handed. 

 

Vanderbilt, as a liberal school, even in 1980, accepted women and men, gay and straight, and all races of students. We had believers and atheists, biblical literalists, Catholics, and Unitarians. In fact, we were free to believe anything we wanted to believe, there was just one thing, there could be no references made to God using male centered language. So, we invented pronouns; rather than “Himself” we would write “Godself.” And we stumbled and fumbled around with how to relearn how to speak our native tongue until, after a few years, it would have been jarring to hear someone reference God with male language.

 

The point of the Divinity School faculty was that words do more than just communicate. Words, in fact, create categories in our minds. Words don’t just convey what we are thinking, they can help to shape what we are thinking. In 1980, women were allowed to go to seminary in most mainstream denominations. They could apply for ordination, but, sadly, they almost never got hired. Or if they did get a church job, it was to be in charge of Sunday School, children’s ministries, or to be a women’s minister or chaplain. It was rare, very rare, for a congregation to accept a woman as a preacher. 

 

Of course, tradition formed most of that barrier but at least a part of it had to do with language. Religion was a male bastion and laws that made gender discrimination illegal in the workplace did not and could not, and still do not, apply to churches. Churches can legally discriminate all day long because of the separation of church and state. 

So, with insight that was initially difficult for me to believe, changing the language eventually began to change the prejudices that made churches think that religious leadership always had to come from a man. When I started in ministry, only about 2% of American preachers were women. 30 years later, nearly one/third of preachers were women. I suspect that the current statistic would be a lot higher, especially if you factored out the Catholic Church, which, in most matters that require thoughtful reflection, I always do dismiss the Catholic Church. 

 

We are often asked to take care about matters of language, especially as it pertains to race. We call people from Asian countries “Asian,” even though it was common a couple of generations ago to just as easily call them “Oriental.” Initially, there was no insult intended by calling someone from what was called “the Orient” “Oriental.” But it came to imply an object more than it did a person. A tea set might by oriental, a rug can be oriental, but my Korean daughter is an Asian. 

 

The “N” word that no decent person would now use was not especially insulting when Mark Twain used it in his novels. The word “Colored” was in common usage when I was a child and it is still enshrined in the NAACP which is, as we know, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. There have been members clamoring for a name change for 50 years but the title has stuck, just as the word “Negro” is still a part of the United Negro College Fund though it would be a rather insensitive person who would use common speech today.

 

As Blacks in America have continued to suffer from racial discrimination, people who are trying to advance civil rights are regularly trying to massage our terminology to affirm the full humanity of black citizens in this country. And, I would say, albeit cautiously, that there has been considerable progress, even though it isn’t time to pull out George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner. 

 

The trans community has been asking us all to adapt our use of pronouns to be more inclusive of those who do not want to be tied to either gender. Many registration forms now ask us to include with our name and address, our preferred pronouns, “he, or him,” “she, or her,” or “they, or them” using they and them as a singular pronoun…. Which is as awkward to me as avoiding calling God “Father” was in 1980 but I am determined to get the hang of it because I want violence and discrimination against trans people to stop and I know from experience that changing the way we talk can change the way we think. 

 

The grammar change can seem trivial, but the desired outcome is a crucial issue. What is common language can become the barbed wire fence of the status quo. When a concept gets rooted in acceptable language norms, then the idea, itself, can be difficult to uproot. 

 

Those of us who dream of a more just world, a friendlier, more loving, more safe world, often find ourselves being gatekeepers on dangerous ideas that are trying to edge their way into normal ways of speaking and thinking. Look at how the anti-vaxers during the pandemic managed to normalize and anti-science mentality so that people who made C’s and D’s in high school biology could assert that they knew more about virology than Dr. Anthony Fauci.  

In fact, the governor of my newly adopted state used Dr. Fauci’s name in place of the more common “F” word vowing that the government wouldn’t get to “Faci Florida.” And, thanks to Gov. DeSantis’ anti-science policies, Florida had one of the highest death rates from Covid-19. . . a fact that the anti-vax crowd likes to call, “fake news,” because they still think that math is a matter of opinion. 

 

And now independent presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, Jr. is leaning towards an anti-vax running mate, and if he chooses the New York Jets running back, Aaron Rodgers, he gets both anti-vaxer and someone who claims that the Sandy Hook School shooting was a hoax. 

A conspiracy theory that you might of thought would have lost popularity after the talk show host, Alex Jones, was ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars to victims’ families by a Connecticut court. If Aaron Rodgers has any friends, I hope that they can talk him off the ledge before he loses whatever he has left from his pro football earnings. 

 

Maybe I should be more worried about RFK and Aaron Rodgers but they seem to be enough out on the fringe to be a minor concern but what has really been chewing on me was an election that was reported on “Super Tuesday.” Not the Trump or Biden votes which were entirely predictable but rather the election in North Carolina for a gubernatorial candidate. 

 

North Carolina, voters will elect a new governor this fall and the candidate who won the GOP battle on March 5^th was their current Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson. 

Four years ago, Robinson prevailed in a field of eight candidates to become the first black Lt. Governor in the state’s history and now he is poised to become the first black governor of the state. 

 

But Robinson’s nomination is no cause for celebration. This is not an instance of progress in racial diversity. Robinson is a fascist who claims that the Nazis were “not that bad,” that the accounts of the holocaust are just “hogwash,” and he is radically opposed to gay and lesbian rights, abortion rights, and, well . . . this is a frightening man whom Donald Trump has described as being “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Of course, Donald Trump is, and I must beg your forgiveness for using technical psychological terminology here, but Trump is a racist moron who can only see that Robinson is black and would have no way of understanding that Robinson is the opposite of everything that King was. 

 

I have spoken in churches in North Carolina. I have vacationed in North Carolina. I believe that some of the most beautiful places on earth are in North Carolina, but, folks, North Carolina has become fertile soil for some of the most dangerously crazy ideas in America. Robinson won the GOP nomination by a margin of 43 points, a landslide. Even though he does not believe that women should be allowed to have an abortion, or, for that matter, he doesn’t think that women should be allowed to vote. He has threatened to use his AK-47 against the government. He also believes that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the music industry is run by Satan. 

 

North Carolina has tended to be a purple state, passing the office of governor back and forth between the parties. If Robinson is elected, he will be the state’s first black governor. However, this holocaust denier is running against democrat, Josh Stein, who, if elected, will be the state’s first Jewish governor. You would think that this wouldn’t be a tough choice for North Carolina, but current polls indicate that the two are in a dead heat. Which means that for nearly half of the citizens of North Carolina, ideas such as antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and even disrespect for families with children slain in the nation’s worst school shooting, are now part of the acceptable status quo and that, I submit, is horrifying.

 

Please, listeners in North Carolina, get me booked into your churches as a guest speaker as soon as possible. I would like to say in your pulpit what your permanent pastor may not want to have to say. These sick ideas did not become part of mainstream language in North Carolina or in other conservative pockets in America over night. They slip into office chatter, into conversations at church pot-lucks, and between pickleball matches at the senior center. And what is worse, most of Robinson supporters are under 50. How have younger voters become so vulnerable to the most insane and idiotic conspiracy theories?

 

Somehow, this violent, prejudiced world view crept into the language until it became sufficiently normative that now, the next governor of North Carolina may be even more dangerously sociopathic than the GOP’s nomination for president in this fall’s election and that, men and women, is a mouthful. 

 

You can’t see it in the video but the caption on this banner behind me, the banner we had made for our church when we started in 2008 is a quote from Elie Wiesel. It says, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” Wiesel said that the holocaust would never have happened if only the people of that time had not stood back, even in horror, but they stood back and allowed it to happen. 

 

Now, in 2024, racism, antisemitism, anti-women’s rights, anti-gay rights, and anti-science thinking is threatening the western world, it is threatening liberal democracy, it is threatening all of us with a world we do not want to live in. You cannot stand idly by in this time of crisis. Speak up. Get involved. And please share this video with your crazy uncle who needs to know where you stand before those family cookouts start up this summer because it is going to be a long, hot, election year!

 

“Redemptive Suffering”

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“Redemptive Suffering”         March 10, 2024     Dr. Roger Ray, pastor                 

https://youtu.be/26tc9osy0Hw?si=yUWeqEisiRW_-4DH

 

Just a few days ago, on Friday, March 1^st, huge crowds gathered in the streets of Moscow to attend the funeral of Alexey Navalny in spite of government efforts to stop any public display of grief for Navalny. Dozens were arrested and hundreds were detained by police but still the crowd grew, extending more than a half a mile down the street from the church where the funeral was held. Putin had withheld the body for two weeks, hoping to avoid this public display but the people of Moscow and many other communities have shown tremendous courage in response to Navalny’s death, which seems, unavoidably, to have been caused by his captors. 

 

I have not heard anyone express any surprise that Navalny was murdered in the remote prison he had been sent to. My own surprise was that he lasted this long. He has been Russia’s most outspoken critic of the abuses of Vladimir Putin. Twice in 2017 he was attacked with a green dye that stained his face and nearly blinded one eye, making it nearly impossible for him to hide. He was clearly marked for assassination.  Navalny has been poisoned 2020, arrested, and imprisoned and yet, against all reason and natural self-preservation, he kept up his good humored ridicule of Putin’s administration and even after he had been taken to Germany to be saved from the nearly fatal poisoning, as soon as he was able, he boldly returned to Russia. 

I could only wish to be so brave. I know that I couldn’t have done it, but Alexey did, and I want to invite us all to spend a few minutes thinking about that fact and what it represents. Why did he do it? What does his sacrifice really mean? Was it worth it?

 

In theology, we have a term to describe this kind of martyrdom, it is called “redemptive suffering.” A great deal of our spiritual energy is focused on preventing or ending avoidable suffering. For example, hunger, in general, is not a matter of there not being enough food, it is a matter of distribution based on profit . . . and so we are against hunger. But in certain circumstances, we might choose to suffer in order to correct or redeem a certain social ill.

 

 Several students at Dartmouth went on a hunger strike this past month to protest the colleges’ investments in Israel, demanding that the college defund the Israeli war on the people in Gaza. 30 students at Harvard went on a 12 hour hunger strike, which is kind of embarrassing…. That’s just interval fasting, but several students at Dartmouth were on strike for a week and some went as long as 12 days and they were hospitalized. The strike is over now and the success of their effort is not yet clear, but they courageously chose hunger to make a point. Whether you agree with the protest or not, you can see that it was a noble effort at redemptive suffering. 

 

History is littered with examples of people who changed their culture through personal sacrifice, through choosing a form of suffering that made people think and change the way they acted.

A strong case can be made that the gospel accounts of the passion, which started with Mark, is offered in praise of martyrdom. Not that Jesus died for our sins . . . I don’t know about you, but even though I am far from perfect, I haven’t done anything that requires capital punishment or a blood sacrifice to atone to even a blood-thirsty, psychotic god. Jesus died in rebellion against a punitive and evil system while leaving us an example of radical compassion. 

 

More recent examples may be easier for us to get our heads around: 

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 chose suffering to redeem his people.

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. 

 

I wish that Alexey Navalny’s story could have ended with his release from prison and being elected to be the president of Russia but it didn’t.

 

Nelson Mandela didn’t know that his story would end any differently from Navalny’s, thankfully, it did, but was Navalny’s death of lesser value because he was murdered in prison? We don’t know yet if the courageous crowds in the streets honoring Navalny will maintain the protest. We don’t know if time will dilute his influence, but I am convinced that his cause was right and his courage is admirable, and I hope that he has seeded the hearts of the Russian people with a vision of what his widow now calls, of a beautiful Russia. 

 

Folks, dictators have power, autocrats stay in power for one reason, because the majority of the population allows it. Those students at Dartmouth believed that most people would not tolerate the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza if they only knew about it, if only they were paying attention.

 

The majority of Americans want sensible gun laws, restrictions on the kinds of weapons citizens can own, who can own them, as well as proper training, insurance, and storage. Why, with an outrageous death toll from mass shootings, domestic violence, and suicide, can’t we get some kind of sensible gun reform? Only because the public tolerates it. We get upset when school children die in a mass murder but we don’t stay concerned.

 

I like to blame the NRA and Republican legislators bought off by gun lobby donations, but really, seriously, if you want to know who to blame for the fact that you are now more likely to be shot and killed than you are to die in a car crash, as V in the famous Vendetta movie says, “you need only look in a mirror.” It is our acquiescence to an insane set of gun laws that keeps this blood bath going. 

Jesus was murdered by the state, Alexey Navalny was murdered by the state, Nelson Mandela was nearly murdered by the state, as John Lewis was nearly murdered on the Edmund Pettis Bridge by the state. But redemptive suffering is not always played out at the extremes. We are not often asked to run into a burning building to rescue an infant. We are more likely to accept the imperceptible sacrifice of supporting school lunches and healthcare for economically challenged families. 

 

Let me give you another example from just a few years ago:

 

In 2020, 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. 

Of course, Bernie didn’t win the Democratic nomination, because both Democrats and Republicans labeled him as being “crazy” because he thought that the USA could have the same kind of universal healthcare that 32 of 33 developed nations already have but still, these union members knew how important healthcare is and they were willing to have less if everyone could have some. This, at least in my mind, becomes the major dividing line between the conservative 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. 

I would love to believe that this goes without saying but our recent experience with a global pandemic forces us to realize just how self-centered we can be. I mean, do you remember the run on toilet paper early in 2020? I never understood the connection between a respiratory virus and toilet paper but I know that when they finally got resupplied at my local box store that I had to stand in line to get my ration. I was probably the only single man with a bidet seat installed on my toilet in southern Missouri but I was all out of options! 

 

As in most things, not many of us are made of the kind of stuff to become an Alexey Navalny, or a Nelson Mandela, or a Martin Luther King, or a Gandhi, but we can learn from them, we can strive to be more like them, and we can resist our innate desire to be concerned only with ourselves.

We come into the world screaming and crying to be fed, changed, comforted, held, carried . . . I’ve never understood the saying, “I slept like a baby,” because babies don’t really sleep all that peacefully . . . ask anyone with a newborn in the house. We come into the world screaming and crying to have our personal needs met and, as the pandemic revealed, a whole lot of us never grew very far past that. To become better than that, we have to choose to be better. We have to choose to consider others, even those who will live on when we are gone.

 

I have this piece of good news, a bit of wisdom I got from Henry David Thoreau many years ago, a quote that I have carried with me in my collection of quotes for more than 40 years now. Thoreau said, “I know of no more encouraging fact than our unquestionable ability to elevate our lives by conscious endeavor.” 

 

I am in awe of Alexey’s courage and moral sacrifice. I am no Alexey Navalny but I want to choose to become more like him and I want to invite you to, by conscious endeavor, choose to be more like him too.

 

“How Much Does it Cost Me?”

“How Much Does it Cost Me?”        Feb. 25, 2024         Dr. Roger Ray

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Like most parents, when it came time to start teaching my daughter about how to manage money, I started to give her a small allowance so that she could save for the things she wanted to buy between major gift giving holidays. Somehow, she seemed inherently to be very good at saving, and by saving, I mean that she never wanted to spend “her” money but still managed to come up with passionate requests for things that cost money to buy.

 

I must have made a mistake at some point and offered to subsidize a purchase; I don’t remember the incident, but I know that we went through about ten years of her asking me, “But how much would it cost me?”  If the necklace she wanted cost $50, she would seriously ask, as if there were an automatic princess discount, “But how much would it cost me?” Somehow, her money was always more precious than my money. My money was fluid and evidently an endless resource. Her money was like a family heirloom to be treasured and never to be parted with. It is possible that she learned this perspective from her mother, but it would be rude for me to speculate about that here.

 

My daughter’s question, however, continues to be a part of our entire culture. Countries that have universal healthcare may have free medical service at the point of receiving the medical care, but that doesn’t mean that it is free. Someone is paying for it somehow.

 

In most cases there is no charge to drive on our city streets, or for calling the fire department, the police department, or for sending our children to public schools, and yet all of these things cost a great deal of money. 

 

What is disturbing to many of our peers is the simple fact that the United States is not, on the whole, a capitalist country. Our economy is more socialist than it is capitalist, we just don’t want to allow ourselves to be made aware of it. I have always found it odd that with rare exception, even the most conservative among us, do not object to the fact that public schools provide 13 years of education at no charge to the families that use it, however, when we it is suggested that community colleges and state universities should be made to be tuition free, we begin to hear protests about socialism. We have free public schools because we are a better and more prosperous society if most of our citizens are literate. But most countries in the world realize that they will have an even better and more prosperous society if those are able to take advanced training. As some kind of trade school or college education becomes more and more crucial to economic success in our country, we will become an increasingly economically tiered society if only the children of the affluent can go to college. 

 

Looking at this map, you should take special note of the fact that countries that are wanting to emerge economically, are making the sacrifice to make higher education tuition free. If you get tired of not being able to find a physician, physical therapist, or dentist, who is from the United States, take a look at this map and you can see why. We are importing professionals because it is simply too expensive for most Americans to even consider going to college long enough to earn those degrees.

 

It may surprise you to learn that there was a time when fire departments were owned by insurance companies. If your home was insured, the insurance company would send the fire department to put out the fire in your house but if your neighbor’s house was on fire and they were not insured, well, get out the marshmallows because that baby was going to burn. But, as it turns out, letting my neighbor’s house burn is not good for my house. We are all better off if the fire department is dispatched to the houses of the poor, even if it adds to the tax burden of the community. 

 

And when it comes to healthcare, you don’t want to be watching TV with me when one of those commercials comes on featuring kids with cancer or with serious birth defects, begging for donations for life saving treatments, prosthetics, surgery, or wheelchairs. Every other developed country in the world realizes that the whole of society needs to provide basic healthcare to those who need it but in the richest country in the world, the richest country in all of human history, will still trot out kids with horrible diseases to beg for change from donors to get the care that they need. We tend to accept this as just being normal but if you travel abroad, it is pretty hard to defend this situation to others.

 

I was visiting Copenhagen a few years ago, to visit the grave of Soren Kierkegaard, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of our regular listeners. I was sitting in a coffee shop, studying a tourist guidebook, and a local struck up a conversation with me. He was a dentist who had immigrated from Iran, and he was so proud of his adopted homeland that he insisted on being allowed to give me a tour of the city himself. 

Waving his arm around the world’s largest open air shopping mall, he exclaimed, do you notice that there is no one begging in the streets? No disabled people asking for help? Sure, he said, our income tax rate is about 50% but we don’t have a homelessness problem, we have very few people in jail. Higher education is provided by the state and even with a high tax rate, I live in a nice home with a view of the ocean, I have two cars, lots of time off, and I travel around the world when I vacation. 

 

If you ask him, what does it cost him to live in a compassionate, civilized society, he would tell you, it costs him half of what he earns, but unlike most of our American peers, he is happy to pay it in order to have such a wonderful life. 

 

What does it cost us to not have tuition free higher education, to not have universal healthcare, to not have enough public housing, enough child care, and mental health services? What it costs us is chronically feeling unsafe on our city streets. It costs us in panhandlers at busy intersections. It costs us having home security and enough paranoia to make many of our citizens arm themselves like they are preparing for a zombie apocalypse. It costs us in having the highest rate of incarceration in the world:

This chart shows incarceration by percentage of population. You would think that Canada wouldn’t be that much different from us but we have five times as many people in prison as they do. Ten times as many as Denmark. We have more of our citizens in prison than any other western nation, by far. AND we have nearly 4 million people on parole. 

What does it cost us to not pay a living wage to workers, to not provide educational opportunity to the whole of the population? What does it cost us to limit medical and mental health care? It costs what we spend on building bigger prisons, hiring more police, paying higher insurance premiums, and, of course, being afraid to go downtown at night or ride on public transportation. 

 

As it turns out, it costs a lot of money to be greedy and cruel. Look, I know that using words like “greedy” and “cruel” may seem harsh but this is what it comes down to. Still, it is counter intuitive because we end up paying more in taxes to beef up our police forces, and build larger prisons than it would cost us to make healthcare universal and to make it easier to go to college. And we should be aware that our national greed and cruelty ends up costing you your quality of life, your feelings of safety and security, and makes it hard to go insisting that this is a great country. This is a rich country with a lot of poverty and a lot of citizens in prison.

 

For my entire adult life, I have drawn a salary from a charity, and not just any non-profit but, rather uniquely, a non-profit that ostensibly provides exactly the same services to those who do not donate at all as it does to those who donate very liberally. In fact, in my experience with church, nearly half of those who attended never donated, at least not in a way that we could record. There were those who made an impressive pledge every year who never actually donated any of it, year after year. Oddly, the families in question were rather wealthy and they didn’t mind throwing their weight around in board meetings but, in actual fact, they had no skin in the game. 

 

Hospitals are non-profits but, trust me, they don’t wait for your donations for the services they provide. 

But churches are unique in that they need money to survive but they can’t bill their users. Which is why they tend to talk about money so much. I have not brought up the matter of supporting my work for several years. I bring it up now because even though we have several thousand listeners, we have only about three dozen donors, some of whom donate as little as $1 a month. So, do the math, how much of your money will it take to keep me off of the pickleball courts for a few hours per week?

 

Forgive me for making this so personal but, I’m afraid that it needs to be said. We are now nearly a generation removed from when people paid for subscriptions for newspapers and news magazines. We get most of our content from the internet but who is producing that content and are they reliable, do they have credible credentials? Increasingly, we are a generation that no longer attends any church but I’m trying to hold onto a place on the internet to at least provide a spiritual perspective on current events and public ethics.

 

Our congregation in Springfield, Missouri was the heart of my work for many years, but the pandemic coupled with my looming retirement made us decide to sell our property and to eventually stop having services in Springfield at all. I packed up this pulpit and microphone and moved to Florida where it has been my plan to continue to work on a part time basis. The church now physically exists in two rooms in my home, one is an office, and the other is this recording studio.

 

I believe that health care and higher education should be paid for out of the public purse, but I accept that churches, even an online only church, only continues to exist when those who value its work will donate enough to keep it afloat. 

 

I could charge a download fee, but I have resisted that idea because, just like a bricks and mortar church, I want people to have access to our progressive content whether they can or will also donate. In that sense, I am a real capitalist. My listeners get to vote with donations to keep me going. When what I do is not sufficiently important to people to support my work, then I will start kayaking more often and playing more pickleball. 

 

When I sample what other progressive religious exists on line, I still feel like what I am doing is valuable and contributing significantly to the available content. If you agree, I hope that you can get some skin in the game with me and begin to support us at whatever level you can afford.

 

You can donate through Paypal by clicking on our website: wwwspfccc.org

Or you can set up monthly donations to come from your bank’s bill pay option, sending your donations to the Emerging Church at 1015 E. 13^th Square, Vero Beach, FL 32960. 

 

I hope that this content matters enough to you for you to become a partner with me in making it available to the world.

 

“Fear is the Root of Anger”

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

 

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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.