“Once More, Into the Breach”

“Once More, Into the Breach”     December 29, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Following last month’s presidential election, popular New Yorker humorist and essayist, Andy Borowitz, begged for a week off. He explained, “Dear reader, I have plenty to say about last night’s dumpster fire but today I want to take a break from jokes. Many of you are in pain and I don’t want to make light of that.

You shouldn’t misinterpret my pause, however, as acquiescence or resignation. We all deserve a moment to curl up in the fetal position. But when that moment is over, I want to do what I can to make life better for my children and grandchildren (not to mention people I don’t happen to be related to). I hope you’ll feel that way, too. 

Remaining silent and surrendering to despair is exactly what fascists want us to do. So let’s not.” 

I didn’t publish anything about the election in the immediate aftermath of what Borowitz fitting calls a “dumpster fire” because I didn’t need to simply repeat what nearly every progressive in the world was saying. And, I can’t think of anything to say to make this predicament OK. I can echo thoughts expressed well by others that I am sorry that Biden initially tried to run for a second term. I wish that we had been able to hold a normal primary season and select a candidate from a field of viable options but, still, Kamala Harris did an amirable job and picking her campaign apart is worse than futile.

 

America was presented with a choice between a well prepared, intelligent, and trustworthy candidate and a candidate who is elderly, mentally unstable, uneducated and unteachable, who is a rapist, a adulterer, a serial liar, a con artist and thief. And the majority of American voters cast their vote to return the demonstrably worse president in American history to the highest office in the land. 

As one person paraphrased Robert Frost, “Two paths diverged in a woods and America chose the psychopath.”

 

I am disgusted, disappointed, and, honestly, I don’t like Americans very much right now. Germans, after Hitler, often excused themselves saying that they just didn’t know what he would really be like. American voters cannot claim that excuse. We have seen Trump at work and worse, he has told us what vile and immoral things he plans to do in a second term. No one gets to plead ignorance this time. Now, it remains for persons of good will to decide how we will respond to this tragic event.

There are very few people of my generation who are not familiar with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy so I trust that most of you will remember that bleak moment when Frodo and Sam are facing an impossible task of destroying the ring of power within the confines of Mordor, when Frodo has all but lost the will to go on, he asks Sam, “What are we holding onto Sam?” And Sam, brilliantly replies, “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”  

 

I will tell you, honestly, that in the immediate days following Trump’s re-election, I didn’t have much fight left in me. I am in a committed relationship with a wonderful woman in Thailand. Hui and I have been making plans for her to come join me here in the United States. In fact, we are deep into the process of getting her visa and bringing her here. 

But I had already planned to go spend a couple of months with her in Thailand this winter while we wait for the slow visa process to work its way through the government bureaucracy, but I started to reconsider our plans. 

 

I never wanted to live in Thailand until the evening of November 5^th, but that night I started looking at houses for sale in the southern regions of Thailand on the Andaman Sea. The scuba diving there is much better than it is here in Florida and housing costs are half of what they are here. But, again, as Andy Borowitz said, giving up, despair, is exactly what fascists want from us and I’m not going to allow myself to go down that path. 

 

The majority of Americans voted against democracy, against civil rights, against progress, fairness, decency, and character, and a part of me believes that they deserve whatever Donald Trump is going to do to them, but I am not going to vote against America. 

 

We progressives know the ropes when it comes to being the loyal opposition. We have spent most of our lives kicking against the darkness of prejudice, greed, and privilege, and so we know how to do this. 

 

I woke up about 20 years ago to the realization that I had been seduced by prestige and recognition. I was the pastor of a prominent church in Springfield, Missouri and many civic and not profit organizations had recruited me to serve on their boards. I was on the board of mental health agencies, charities, the community foundation, and many others but while they printed my name on their stationary and put my picture on their websites, it finally dawned on me that they had consistently ignored nearly every suggestion I had ever made. 

I was being used. They wanted my reputation to lend credibility to theirs, but they had no intentions of actually being effectively in service to the values I represented. I resigned from all of those boards, accepting that I had cuddled up to closely to money and power and that if I wanted to be prophetic, I could do better standing on the sidewalk and shaking my fist and the palace and the temple than I could by enjoying a free lunch at the conference room table.

 

I wish that Harris had won. I wish that Democratic candidates in Florida and Texas had won. I wish that the house and the senate had been returned to democratic majorities. And, I wish that the executive and legislative branches of government had been able to team up to fix the judiciary by either impeaching half of the current supreme court or by expanding it to outnumber those who are trying to make America into a Catholic monarchy. But, as my father used to say, “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t keep bumping their butts on the ground.” We didn’t get many of our wishes this time, but we are back in familiar territory.

 

The German/American poet, Charles Bukowski, always gets my attention with his sometimes brutal honesty. One of his first collections was titled, “Poems written just before jumping out of an 8^th story window.” He once said, “We must bring our own light to the darkness. Nobody is going to do it for us.” Folks, this, I believe, is where we are.

 

In 2016 I consoled myself with the knowledge that Trump would surely be impeached . . . and he was, twice! But he managed to skate. We had faith in the Mueller investigation, then we allowed ourselves to be seduced into some confidence that surely, he would be found guilty in the classified documents case in which we had all seen undeniable evidence of his guilt. 

 

We believed that the Georgia election tampering case would surely put him in prison, we heard the evidence with our own ears. And how could he escape being convicted in the January 6^th insurrection case? We all sat in horror and watched his assault on American democracy play out for hours on TV!

 

What I think we must all learn from this is the unavoidable fact that the American judicial system does not have the power to convict wealthy and powerful men. It just doesn’t. There is no cavalry that will come charging over the ridge to save us. And in spite of all of the commentators who had said that, in spite of Trump’s best efforts, America’s institutions have survived, you know that they have not. Has the Supreme Court survived? Do we have justices making decisions based on the constitution? Certainly not the American constitution!

 

Everything that was said by Trump’s family members and former government associates is still true. He is still a fascist. He still represents an existential threat to American democracy. The future of NATO is now uncertain. The Russian invasion of the Ukraine may now end with Ukraine being defeated, and the island nation of Taiwan is now at much greater risk of being invaded by China. The global environment is now much more threatened than it was two months ago, and immigrants of all stripes, legal or illegal, have reason to be fearful. 

 

Farm workers will be deported and farm owners will go bankrupt. The civil rights of women will continue to be eroded. As in all circumstances, it is better to be rich than it is to be poor . . . persons of means can still fly to Europe to access abortion services when needed and the poor will be forced to raise their children of their rapists and incestuous family members in abject poverty.

 

But still, folks, you have to bring you own light to the darkness because no one is going to do it for you. We will have New Year’s Eve celebrations in a couple of days, or, at least, it will be New Year’s Day on Wednesday, whether you celebrate it or dread it, 2025 will see the whole world holding its nose as Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

 

I grant anyone the right to grieve this turn of events. Anyone and everyone has a right to think about moving abroad or just checking out of the news and, as one of my close friends has done, vowing to watch sports and movies and refuse to give any more time or energy to the disgusting turns of politics. And, I’ll tell you now, on the day when Trump is inaugurated, I will be lying on a beach in Krabi, Thailand with my girlfriend. But, I’m coming back. Because I am not going to surrender my faith in democracy.

 

We have made a lot of progress on many issues over the last century but, sadly, progress never marches forward in a straight line. Sometimes progress pauses, sometimes it takes some steps backward. I am an old man and I may not outlive the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong- Un, or even Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, but I will not become indifferent to what they represent. 

 

Over the past 4 decades and more, it has often been both my duty and my honor to stand at the graveside of someone that I just wasn’t finished with yet, and to commit their remains to the earth.

Often, in that moment, I have quoted a passage from Edna St. Vincet Millay’s "Dirge Without Music" where she says:

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

 

With the end of 2024, many of us are grieving a kind of death. In 2008, when Barak Obama was elected, we saw the beginning of an era of progress that brought us close to universal healthcare, to marriage equality for the gay community, to greater fairness for women in the military, and serious reform in issues like sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Now we must recognize that the first term of Trump was not merely an anomaly. Not a brief reactionary blip on the moral radar of our culture. The Obama era is now over. I know. But I do not approve; and I am not resigned to accepting an era of American fascism. 

 

I could wish for some kind of Deus et machina that would turn the world around. I wish that Michelle Obama would announce that she will run for president in 2028 and that she will appoint Willie Wanka to be the new Supreme Court Chief Justice; but I know that here on Earth 1, the task of bringing light into the darkness of 2025 depends upon you and me. 

 

Break down the walls of your isolation. Get out, meet other progressives. Collaborate, organize, encourage one another. Find your voice. Resist the decay of civil rights and demand justice, and please, don’t give up or give in. 

 

Jesus: from preacher to God

Jesus: from preacher to God      

December 15, 2024         Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

 

At the age of 41, I was newly divorced and, it so happened, I had finally, over a period of nearly 20 years, accumulated enough points to claim a free ticket to Europe. On the advice of several friends, I made my first European trip as a tourist to see Paris.

I was working my way through all of the Michelin Tour Book recommended things that a tourist really must see, and that is a long list in Paris. I got through all of the 4 star sites and worked my way down into the 2 and 3 star sites, one of which, was the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

I had been surprised at several points in my tour of Paris, by how much oblation was shown to the memory of a man who had not been portrayed in a very favorable light in my public school education but that only means that my public school was not in France. The sarcophagus sits enthroned beneath a dome that is more than 100 yards high, and the tomb itself is so massive that it could have held the remains of two dozen men of Napoleon’s stature. 

 

Hitler attempted to militarily conquer the world but Hitler is not well remembered in most of Germany but Napolean, who had similar designs on world domination, has grown larger in the memory of the French than he ever was in real life. Everything about him, his apartments, his furniture, his personal effects, are treated with greater reverence than a beloved saint. I made a remark in my own diary of my trip to Paris that, were the French given a choice between having Jesus return or Napolean, that they would choose Napolean without hesitation. 

 

Without debating the good or the ill aspects of Napolean’s character, he is revered by the French because of what he represents, not really for who he was. He represented a time when France strove to be the world’s super power. And, a couple of hundred years later, you wouldn’t have to scrape the surface of the collective French ego to find a still surviving belief that France really ought to rule the world. 

 

People tend to expand the memory of their heroes over time. People in our time comment on the obvious phallic nature of the Washington monument, erected in honor of America’s first president, standing 555 feet tall, which, consciously or unconsciously, says something about the remembered stature of President and Revolutionary War general, George Washington. And, not to be outdone, even after losing the Civil War, survivors saw to the construction of a memorial to the first president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, near his birthplace in western Kentucky. It goes without saying that the monument to Davis, when completed, was dedicated by the Klu Klux Klan who burned a cross at the top of it. 

 

In the ancient world, there was a predictable evolution of historical heroes being enhanced by the generations that followed, for their own benefit, until a late king, like Gigamesh of Sumer, goes from being a popular king, to be a person of super human strength, to finally being portrayed as a god.

 

While most Buddhists would insist that the Buddha was not a god, one need only spend a little time in Thailand to discover that, in spite of the protests, the treatment of the Buddha is a classic example of deification. But, I have also known some Trappist monks whose “veneration” of the Virgin Mary went far beyond fond thoughts about a human woman. Some even call Mary the “co-redemptress” with Christ. It just doesn’t really sound like monotheism, does it?

 

Deification almost always wipes out the intended message of any religion. To the extent that we can take historical narratives about the Buddha seriously, he was born a prince in India and set aside power, position, and wealth to be an ascetic monk. But over the centuries, Buddha stops being such an ascetic figure and is, more or less, brought back into the palace.

The most holy Buddhist temple in Thailand is where this, the Emerald Buddha, is kept. You have to take off your shoes to enter the temple and attention must be given to how you sit on the floor in front of the statue so that the soles of your feet are not exposed to the face of the Buddha. You can’t take pictures or videos and you are expected to be quiet and respectful. The temple is next to the king’s grand palace, so the monk has been brought into the palace of the king, surrounded by ornate decoration and, if the point were not clear enough already, this statue, which is made of Jade, also wears clothing and the clothing is changed every six months by the King, himself, because only the King is allowed to touch this most revered image of the Buddha. 

It may seem like a humbling task for a King, but, come on, no one can touch the statue but the King which doesn’t exactly make the King divine, but he is certainly divine adjacent, right? 

 

No matter what you may say about the Buddha’s message regarding compassion, rejection of material wealth, power, status, none of that means much in a context in which the Buddha’s image is presented in opulence, power, and ultimate status. Deification is how we silence a religious message and turn it over to the government or organized religion where it becomes a guardian of the status quo.

 

Which, it should be obvious by now, is what happened to the historical Jesus. Because trying to describe the historical Jesus is a matter of academic conjecture, it is impossible to come up with an entirely agreed upon description but, using the broadest possible terms, Jesus was a Jewish reformer during the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine. He was killed by Rome because he challenged the authority of Rome and a couple of generations later, Rome tried to wipe out the Jewish population entirely. They destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and the remnants of Judaism, including its branches like the Christians and the disciples of John the Baptist, were pushed into hiding from which they continued to be rather subversive, anti-empire forces.

 

We are now in the thick of the Christmas season and there are a lot of wonderful things to be said about Christmas as a cultural event; especially for the more healthy families for whom holiday gatherings are happy times with feasts and presents and parties and it is a huge boost to the retail economy and it usually even gives Wall Street markets an end of the year shot in the arm. 

 

Forgive me if I can’t be quite to ebullient about the biblical role of the Christmas narrative. I was just 19 years old and actively involved in a college campus ministry that actually encouraged daily Bible reading, something that I was eager to do anyway. But even as a kid who was much more inclined to be defensive of all things Christian and not at all a critic of the Bible, at that time, even I couldn’t help noticing that the two birth narratives in the New Testament, the one in Matthew with the star, wise men, and dreams, and the one in Luke, with the shepherds, angels, and a stable did not read like they were actually a part of the gospels where they are found. The language, vocabulary, and mythic nature of the birth narratives made me ask our professor if they were late additions to the gospels, and I wondered if they were not more imagination than reliable accounts.

 

The students around me were shocked and offended by the question but they were even more shocked and offended by the professor’s response, because even 50 years ago in a conservative Christian college, the professor sighed and acknowledged that the birth narratives were late additions to the gospels and they they should be read as apologetic sermons, not actual accounts of events. The professor ran some professional risk by being so honest but, thankfully, he was one of the good ones who believed that telling students the truth was ultimately easier than keeping up the scam. 

 

You see, the thing is, trying to make a mythic account a literal historical account, robs it of the theological point of the narrative. If you try to take movies like Star Wars or the Matrix as being documentaries, and, it is not impossible that the History Channel might run them as documentaries given how they play equally fictional pieces about Egyptian history as documentaries, but sane people know the difference. The enthusiastic Christians who wrote the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke were, on the face of it, ascribing to Jesus the kinds of things said in their culture about other important figures . . . . philosophers and royalty were often said to have divine parentage, such that they were born to virgin mothers, and sometimes astral signs accompanied the birth of a king, or angels would make announcements.

The writers of the Christmas story were, you could say, padding Jesus’ resume but it wasn’t just that; they were also writing a sermon. Luke gives special place to women in his narrative. He has the Christ child born into humble circumstances and the announcement of his birth was made to the lowest and most poor members of society. Matthew stretches Jewish exclusivist prejudices and has the birth of Jesus announced to foreign astrologers, pagans, rather than to the temple priesthood or to the Jewish king. 

 

There are good messages to draw out of the New Testament’s birth narratives, just not any history. And, in my younger years when I had to try to find ways to bring modern meaning to ancient myths, I tried. I really tried. I had the midnight lessons and carols services on Christmas Eve, with candles and communion. I kept trying to preach demythologizing sermons while still giving some lip service to tradition. 

 

I even tried to change the tradition. A couple of times we did full on theatrical productions of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol,” which really is a Christmas sermon about conversion and compassion. Finally, we just replaced it with musical presentations of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which was fun and it still taught a moral lesson without being as heavy handed as the Christmas Carol or as overtly religious as lessons and carols. 

 

Picking hymns for the Advent and Christmas season got to be harder and harder. Once you demythologize the whole incarnational view of Christmas . . . well, my music director sat in my office one day with tears in his eyes saying, I just can’t sing this Christmas crap anymore. We turned to Christmas albums by Sting and Bruce Cockburn to find more acceptable holiday fare that could be sung with full throated enthusiasm without all of the Little Town of Bethlehem or Hark the Herald Angels singing. 

 

I’ve tried to go to traditional Christmas Eve services a few times, to hear a friend’s kids singing in a choir, or to placate someone’s desire for me to accompany them, but, at least for me, there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. The virgin birth, incarnational tales of the first century lost their power in the age of reason and I don’t think you should feel guilty about not participating in it anymore.

 

Enjoy the family gatherings. Indulge yourself in traditional holiday dishes. Be generous in gift giving, especially to children and to the poor. And there really is some good holiday music out there that you can enjoy, even though you may have to look for it. 

 

I will leave you with the apologetic that Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, offered to him in the Christmas Carol when Scrooge said that Christmas was just “humbug” that never put a scrap of gold in your pocket. Fred said:

 

 “‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round——as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!‘”

 

So, please, have yourselves a merry, albeit rather secular, Christmas!

 

 

 

“Speaking Truth to Power”

“Speaking Truth to Power”   Dec. 1, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

Religious terms can mean very different things depending upon the circumstances. For someone to be a prophet or to be a prophetic preacher can be two very different things. Someone who describes themselves as being a prophet may well be an insane person who may or may not wear head gear made out of aluminum foil. A prophetic preacher is someone, often with no official position within a religious institution, who publicly speaks truths that the official religious institutions or governments don’t want to hear. 

 

In science fiction and fantasy books and movies, you hear the word “prophesy” used to mean some ancient prediction of the future, often the distant future, as with a figure like Nostradamus, the 16^th century astrologer who absolutely did not make accurate predictions about things that would happen centuries after he had died. He didn’t even make meaningful predictions about things that would happen during his lifetime but, the gullible public is always looking for a mystery they can claim offers them special insight since they seem to be so immune to reason. 

 

In the context of theology and biblical studies, neither Nostradamus nor astrologers, nor Chinese fortune cookies are prophetic. Gandhi was prophetic. Martin Luther King, Jr. was prophetic. The Berrigan brothers, to a certain degree, Thomas Merton and the Dali Llama are prophetic. 

 

And, in fact, what it ultimately means to be prophetic has nothing to do with predicting the future and it has everything to do with speaking the truth to power. So, in that light, it is not even necessary for the person speaking to be in any way religious. They just have to be willing to articulate something which they are persuaded is true to institutions and governments that don’t want to hear it.

 

Many of the Hebrew bible’s prophets were also priests though possibly not in great standing since they were often so critical of the priesthood, but some of them were just inspired individual, like Amos who said of himself:  “I am no prophet nor a prophet’s son, but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Amos was a shepherd and a farmer and not a part of a prophetic or priestly community. 

 

I suspect that many journalists, novelists, philosophers, and poets were prophets but not usually mentioned as being such. But then there were prophets who were priests but then it is difficult to tell how many different people and generations wrote using their name. The book of Isaiah may be the most important book in the Hebrew Bible but even though it, on the surface, purports to have been written by one person, the text makes it obvious that the writing stretches from the 8^th century BCE into the 5^th century BCE, so, clearly a lot of people may have had a part in forming a book that covers a time period of 200 years. How much it was influenced by the Temple priesthood is hard to say, but from the oldest part of the book, the prophet has some pretty rough things to say to the clergy. And I would like to spend some time looking at that critique today.

 

I think that I can defend the generalization that all of the great world religions began as a reform movement. Faith becomes a vehicle for the hopes of the victims of power, an appeal to conscience, to higher values but, sadly, every major religion gets coopted by the very power that it began to protest. Christianity was decidedly anti-empire in the time of Jesus but in a very few generations, it became the religion on the empire, a tool used by the empire to raise armies and enforce its abusive economy. The historical Jesus was a liberator who challenged the values of both state and church, but he soon became the symbol of monarchical power and whatever he had once promised to the poor in terms of housing, food, and freedom became the empty promise of heaven after a lifetime of bondage and servitude. 

 

Isaiah lived in a time when the temple was already a couple of hundred years old. The priests had become a favored class who lived under the shadow of the king’s palace. They helped to control the people in return for being allowed to live comfortable lives of what Isaiah thought was drunken debauchery. So, the prophet has some tough things to say as he sees Judah sinking into the swamp of its own privilege and greed. . . made worse by the fact that the priests were totally irrelevant. I am sure that they didn’t see themselves in that light.

 

I can almost hear the priests saying that they just tried to avoid talking about politics. They didn’t want to offend either the King or the congregants. They were trying to be practical. They talked about holy scriptures, they ran the ceremonies and rituals of the temple and kept harmony among the people. If they got upset about something it would be because of a rival religion, mistaken doctrine, errant religious texts, but it wouldn’t be about military abuses, excessive taxation, it wouldn’t be about slavery, misogyny, racism, classism, or any of the practical issues upon which a stable government and society depended.

 

I’ve been there, more times than I care to recount. I had a pretty rough go of it in deeply red Missouri for more than 30 years. I was there, loudly protesting the invasions of Afghanistan and especially of Iraq. Leading in protests and loudly objecting to an obviously illegal war against a nation that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks for which the Bush administration was trying to blame on them. 

 

It was in 2004 that I was given the opportunity of a lifetime, to take a sabbatical from my embattled place in Springfield, Missouri and to go be a fellow at Harvard. Harvard really is a bit like Hogwarts, I was immediately seduced by the architecture, the history, and all of the fame and tradition in which Harvard is steeped. Unlike my years at Vanderbilt, the faculty was amazingly friendly, inviting us into their homes for tea, meeting us for lunch or coffee. I was a fan.

 

But one day the divinity school put on a panel of local Boston clergy to talk about how they were dealing with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in their congregation. There was a Catholic priest, a Muslim Imam, a Jewish Rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a random protestant pastor, and a Unitarian minister. 

 

After laudatory introductions were made, the host went down the row, asking each member of the assembled clergy how they were addressing the wars within their faith communities. And one by one, every single one of them gave an excuse for having never spoken to the issue…. One said that there was a retired Army general in the congregation, another had a board member and major donor who was a military contractor, others talked about fearing public ire if they appeared to not be supportive of the wars. 

 

I had gone to Harvard, determined to not be an obnoxious ass; to keep my head low and enjoy a few months with absolutely no conflict . . . but I had expected to be surrounded by better people. 

I had been risking life, limb, and employment by speaking out against illegal wars and civilian casualties while I worked in one of the most hostile red states in the country. These pastors, ministers, priest, and rabbis worked in Boston, that haven of American liberalism, but even there, they were more concerned about attendance, donations, their own popularity and job security than they were about speaking a word of truth against a nightmare of an illegal war.

 

Isaiah was evidently a priest, a member of the clergy, serving at the nation’s hub of religion, at the temple in Jerusalem. But this is what he said:

Isaiah 28: 7

These also reel with wine
    and stagger with strong drink;
the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink;
    they are confused with wine;
    they stagger with strong drink;
they err in vision;
    they stumble in giving judgment.
⁸ All tables are covered with filthy vomit;
    no place is clean.

⁹ “Whom will he teach knowledge,
    and to whom will he explain the message?
Those who are weaned from milk,
    those taken from the breast?
¹⁰ For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
    line upon line, line upon line,
    here a little, there a little.”^[a]

¹¹ Truly, with stammering lip
    and with another tongue
he will speak to this people,
¹²     to whom he has said,
“This is rest; give rest to the weary,
and this is repose,”
    yet they would not hear.

On the surface, you can see in the English translation of the prophet’s poetry that he is calling them a bunch of drunks. Probably not literally but who knows? It is an ugly scene, like the worst of fraternity parties where people are stumbling and vomiting everywhere. Obviously, whatever they had to say in their religious services sounded like drunken rambling, or maybe even worse.

 

I am certainly no expert in Hebrew but I heard a lecture by a Hebrew professor on this passage in which he said the words, “For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,  line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.”^[a]

Are read like this: cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav, siershom siershom. He said that it sounded like a baby prattling, a baby, not quite old enough to speak clearly. Because their faith was nothing but meaningless word salad; precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line,” and then he says “here a little, there a little,” like a preschool teacher speaking to toddlers in the room, “here little one, there you little one.” 

 

Some years later, after I had burned all of my bridges with my former denomination, I was back in Missouri, trying to start a new church that would be willing to fearlessly share a prophetic message in such a troubled time in America. It was a tough assignment, trying to find enough progressives in Springfield, Missouri to support a new church. 

 

Every “butt in a seat” counted in those early years but that was when the rumors of torture at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison went from being probable to being certain. I railed against this official military practice of physical, sexual, and psychological torture. 

That afternoon I got a call from one of our leading donors and supporters. He just said, “I’m out. I won’t be back.” I was shocked and when I asked why he said that he would not tolerate hearing our soldiers being criticized from the pulpit. And, dumbfounded, I asked, “So you are going to go to a pro-torture church?” and he shot back, “I’ll go where I don’t have to hear about it.” 

 

And I realized, yes, yes, exactly. There were 300 churches in Springfield, and it was a pretty safe bet that there was only one where the issue of Americans torturing prisoners of war would ever be mentioned. Because, for most of the church, faith is just a matter of precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line . . . . cav la cav, cav la cav, sov la sov, sov la sov….. meaningless, irrelevant, religious word salad. 

 

We are all aware that in the past generation our nation has become more divided than ever before. Isolation has become so epidemic that even the surgeon general is talking about loneliness as a major threat to public health. Vitriolic partisan political discourse has us choosing up different news sources that will stroke our own egos and we have, for most purposes, forgotten how to talk with people who are not just like us, which is approximately no one, and so we are more and more isolated in our own little bubble.

 

As churches try to survive this age when church attendance seems to be of less and less importance . . . we’re lonely. We would like to have more friends . . . but we seem to have accepted that the only way to do that is to reduce our conversation to baby prattle. We don’t know how to discuss important matters, so we focus on the mundane. Churches become places of entertainment . . . life enhancement . . . but no longer a place where a prophetic word is welcome.

We don’t have a lot of reliable historical information about the ancient prophets of Judah, but I suspect that Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah and their ilk were pretty lonely characters. I wish that there were more prophetic preachers in the church, but I have taken my lumps. I have been fired, lied about, threatened with bodily harm, and left on my own a good deal and I wouldn’t wish that life on anyone. 

But what I have come to believe in these years of declining church attendance is that we don’t need brave silver-throated prophetic preachers as much as we need prophetic communities of faith, or at least, communities of friends who know how to disagree but to stay in conversation with one another. 

 

After all, Gandhi did not accomplish major social change in India on his own. 

If Gandhi had marched over 200 miles in 12 days in 1930 all by himself to protest the salt tax, we would have never heard about it and it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. It is only because he was joined in his protest by thousands of others that made Gandhi an effective leader.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophetic preacher, a great writer and teacher, but all of those thousands of people who turned up for speeches were not there just to hear a prophet preaching. They showed up because they already knew what he was going to say, what he stood for, the reforms that he was demanding . . . they showed up to make the change happen.

 

Folks, we don’t need another Gandhi or another Martin Luther King, Jr. as much as we need congregations that are willing to show up, to be prophetic communities that will speak truth to power whenever there is a truth that needs to be spoken. German and Polish churches largely watched the holocaust happen. . . maybe they watched in horror, but if they had come together, they could have stopped it.

 

The churches of the south in the 19^th century, had its examples of protesting slavery and maybe even protesting the genocide of the Native Americans but there were not many. 

 

My patriarchal relatives both started a Church of Christ and were the largest slave traders in Kentucky. The Trail of Tears marched thousands of Indians off of their property in a death march towards Oklahoma and walked right through towns and farms, past churches and cathedrals, towards their virtual extinction. That’s where we need to be different, radically different. Because, if we will not be silent in the face of evil, evil will have to hide in shame. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morality and Climate Change

Morality and Climate Change    

November 17, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

 

Click here to see the video

 

 

The week of my first anniversary of living in Florida was greeted by back to back hurricanes. I live between Ft Lauderdale and Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast. While Helene caused massive damage in parts of Florida and as far north as North Carolina, it was nothing but pretty normal rain for me. But Milton was another matter. Living through a hurricane is something like surviving a herd of charging turtles. You know about it for more than a week before it shows up. The news media, dependent upon fear or anger to attract viewers, catastrophizes hurricanes to the point that you might think that there will be no homes and not much sod left behind when it passes through. 

 

For me, even though Milton passed right over us, even Milton was pretty much a non-event. I have a home built to resist hurricanes, with ever hurricane proof windows and roofing. I keep my trees trimmed and thinned to avoid having a threat from falling trees or limbs. My neighborhood maintains storm sewers, there is a retention lake across the street, we have buried utilities, and I am far enough away, and high enough above sea level, to not worry about storm surge. 

 

In short, I survived the hurricane that killed many of my neighbors, destroying homes, tearing off roofs, and closing businesses and knocking out electric and water service to more than 3 million people in the comfort of the insured middle class. I did relief work in the New Orleans area with teams of church volunteers for more than a year after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I have seen what a hurricane can do, and having lived most of my life in the Midwest, I have seen, firsthand, that a direct hit from a tornado can tear down the strongest of buildings, even a modern hospital. But the building codes developed in Florida following previous disasters can and do work. People may hate regulation of building codes and the requirements of even the nailing patterns for putting shingles on a house, but they make a difference.

 

Florida’s removal of the words “climate change” and “global warming” from text books, has turned out to not be helpful. J.D. Vance says that he doesn’t want to discuss controversial science but, in spite of controversy created by climate deniers or people who just don’t understand the science involved, government regulation can make a difference.

 

The conservative government of North Carolina is to blame for much of the loss experienced in the torrential rains dropped by Hurricane Helene in the mountains. The state legislature has rejected legislation to limit construction on steep mountain sides or to require houses to be built at least a foot above anticipated flood levels. 

 

For the first half of my career in ministry, I tried to avoid making any partisan comments in sermons and if circumstances seemed to make it necessary to be critical of one party or another, I always tried to balance that with a criticism of the other party so that I could claim to be above political partisanship. I never had a political sign in my yard or a bumper sticker on my car; but times have changed.

 

I was critical of the way that the Bush administration handled FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina because there were a lot of politically motivated bad decisions being made. But we learned a lot about the changing weather of this century from Hurricane Katrina.

We have done better since then in many ways, but still, we have two political parties, one which may be guilty of occasional exaggeration and one that is regularly guilty of wholesale denial of reality, and, as we have most recently experienced in the lies and conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and Vance regarding FEMA’s response to Helene, we cannot avoid saying that the Democratic party seems to strive to provide meaningful leadership and help and the Republican party seems to be determined to make matters worse, cause more human suffering and death, and to make the worse economic decisions. 

 

What is it that makes climate change politically controversial? Why would anyone be so determined to deny the obvious impacts of a warming earth, seen especially in earthquakes caused by fracking, stronger hurricanes and tornadoes caused by greenhouse gases, and water scarcity caused by deregulation and poor management?

 

 The quote is broadly attributed to the fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, though I confess that I cannot find the source, but he is reported to have said that “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” Coal, oil, and gas interests don’t want us to move towards renewable energy sources. Builders don’t want to raise construction costs and labor by being forced to meet safer building codes. Developers don’t want to have to provide for water retention and drainage when they build new neighborhoods and shopping centers.

 

Electric vehicles are cheaper to build, easier to maintain, and they are, frankly, faster than their gas-powered counterparts. And the evolving self-driving features of EV’s are safer than human operated cars no matter how good you think you are at driving! But we resist the change because so much of the economy, especially in the United States, is tied to gas burning cars and trucks. And, of course, mass transit is more efficient, has less climate impact, and uses up less space than billions of private cars we depend upon now, but that efficiency strikes at the heart of the profit centers of the automobile industry.

 

 High speed rail passes within blocks of my home more than 30 times a day but the nearest train station is more than a hundred miles away because property developers do not want to allow train traffic to stop in the pricy retirement communities along the Atlantic Coast. 

 

We could slow the negative effects of climate change through technological advances if decisions were not so commonly made by monied interests who do not consider the impact this has on the poor and the vulnerable who end up paying the highest percentage of their household income for transportation and who are the most likely to live in manufactured or unsafe housing. 

 

As a pastor, I have mobilized dozens of teams of volunteers to do relief work in Appalachia, the Ozarks, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. I have raised the money to build more than 300 houses for poor families, I have built medical clinics, feeding centers, and emergency shelters. I have provided food for tens of thousands of hungry people, but as Bishop Desmond Tutu said decades ago, 

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” I am deeply grateful for the opportunities I have had to bring relief to the chronically poor, hungry and unhoused, to those who have been victims of floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes; but what sense does it make for religious people to keep trying to rescue people who are being victimized, generation after generation, century after century, by monied interests to rig the system so that they can be enriched by causing suffering for others.

 

In some ways, those of us who volunteer and donate to charitable relief efforts are, in effect, empowering the monied interests to go on exploiting the vulnerable. I don’t want to offer an apologetic for those who refuse to donate or volunteer . . . trust me, I am involved with local relief efforts in the wake of these two hurricanes, but I know that it is not merely an accident of nature that kept me and my immediate neighbors safe while several people who live only a few miles away were killed, and many are now homeless after losing absolutely everything in the hurricane. 

 

We must not stop pulling drowning people out of the river but if we know that someone upstream is literally throwing these people into the rushing water, then aren’t we obligated to try to stop them? Climate change is not ethically neutral. There are winners and there are losers. There are forces of oppression and there are victims.

 

The banner I helped to design when we started our church in 2008 bears a quote from the holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” In his reflections on the holocaust, he concluded that such things are only possible when people refuse to take a moral stand. He explains that neutrality never serves those who are victims of oppression but, in fact, neutrality literally makes you a partner with the oppressor. 

 

My previous career as the pastor of a denominational church had made me sick of the moral relativism of most of mainstream religion . . . always afraid of offending someone, religion is reduced helping the poor to carry their flood damaged furniture and appliances to the curb to be hauled away without ever trying to stem the causes of poverty and extreme weather. 

 

When a group of friends prevailed upon me to start a church for the genuinely progressive people of faith, my primary insistence was that we would no longer try to constantly straddle the fence out of fear of giving offense. There would be no more standing idly by and remaining neutral in the face of injustice. 

 

That hasn’t been an easy row to hoe for us. We gained liberal members when I was critical of George W. Bush and lost many of them when I was critical of Barak Obama. A church cannot remain moral if it aligns itself with a political party. Every employment contract I have negotiated during my entire career has included a passage about the freedom of the pulpit but I found in every instance that most board members stopped believing in freedom of the pulpit when I said something that stepped on their toes. 

 

I will have more to say about this in my next sermon which will be posted on December 1^st.