Ideas Are Immortal

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Easter 2025 April 20      Dr. Roger Ray      Ideas are Immortal

The 2005 movie, V is for Vendetta, is set in a dystopian political future in which the government maintains a fascist control of the people through control of the media in a constant barrage of lies and propaganda. I trust my love for this film requires no explanation.

The plot revolves around a character who wears a Guy Fawkes mask who is planning to complete the gunpowder plot of 1605 and succeed in blowing up the Parliament building in order to awaken and unite the people to stand up to their fascist government. 

 

The subtext of the narrative is that Fawkes can still inspire action, even 400 years after his execution. The main character of V knows that he will die in the process of carrying out his plot, but he is assured that his survival is irrelevant. The point is the idea of the revolution that needs to happen, the idea of freedom, democracy, justice, and as such, it is an idea that cannot be killed… ideas are bulletproof. 

 

Though entirely fictional, martyrdom in order to immortalize an idea has many historical precedents. Many of us here can remember June of 1963, when the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thích Quang Duc, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. His public martyrdom drew attention to the injustice of the Vietnam War and was, at least a part, of the turn of public sentiment from support to protest.

 I was in my first year of seminary in the spring of 1980, having only been introduced to liberation theology, when Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by American trained and funded political assassins in El Salvador. One of his aids came and spoke to us in the Vanderbilt chapel the next month, giving us an eye-witness account of the murder of this liberation theology icon. The progressive priests of Central and South America were systematically captured, tortured, and murdered in the years that followed, all with the blessings of a conservative Vatican that chose to ally itself with brutal dictators out of fear of socialism. 

 

The current pope, though he was a part of the machinery that silenced liberationists in Argentina, is now trying to assuage the Catholic Church’s collective guilt by having Romero canonized as a saint, which, of course, Romero would not have wanted, and which entirely misses the point. But, as I have observed before, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The Catholic Church is guilty of having cooperated with the arrest, torture, and murder of their own priests and rather than confess their own sins, they want to elevate the first well known martyr to sainthood.

 Not at all unlike the way our country has treated the 1964 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We cannot canonize saints but we can make his birthday a federal holiday and then name all of the most dangerous, crime riddled streets in major cities after him. Now even conservative politicians try to use King’s name and quotes to polish their own reputations while trying to ignore everything he said, but, ideas are bullet proof, and even from his grave, King still speaks to our hearts.

 Of course, today is Easter in the western world, following the traditional observance of the events of the Christian Holy Week in which the world’s most well-known martyr is remembered. The oldest biblical accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were actually recorded by Paul, a zealous believer who never met Jesus in the flesh and who knew very little about the real story. It  is important to note, in reading Pau, as the first Christian to write about Easter, but even as a zealot, Paul never implies that there was an empty tomb or that anyone had seen Jesus after the crucifixion in any way other than as a vision. 

 

If you read the New Testament in the order in which its parts were written, it is not hard to see how the mythic nature of the Easter story evolved. Paul wrote his letters 20 to thirty years before the first canonical gospel was written. Paul describes the Easter event in I Corinthians, chapter 15, this way: 

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures ⁴ and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.^[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, 

 

Paul never met Jesus in the flesh and wasn’t a part of his ministry. But Paul was an early convert who preserves a tradition that the church has shared with him. He did believe that 3 days after he was murdered, Jesus appeared to Peter, then the 12 apostles, and then to some gathering of some 500 men and women, and finally, he appeared to Paul. But, you see, he says that they way that other people saw Jesus after the crucifixion was the same way that he did…. Jesus appeared to Peter, the apostles, to a congregation of hundreds, and then to Paul . . . in a vision. 

 

Paul would have believed that the body of Jesus was buried in an anonymous grave somewhere outside of Jerusalem, but the body of Jesus was of no interest to Paul. Paul believed that the Christ, the spirit of God, was appearing to the faithful. 

 

The first canonical gospel, Mark, speaks of an empty tomb but reports no appearances. Mark describes Jesus as an ideal martyr whose death does not end his message. Mark seems to want his readers to have similar courage in the face of Roman occupation and threat . . . the courage to become martyrs in opposition of Rome.

 

The Gospel of Thomas, which probably predates what we have in the New Testament, does not mention a resurrection at all. At the end of the first century, the early church added narratives about a physical resurrection as the message of Jesus was being tamed and transformed from a message of liberation theology, a message of revolution against an evil empire, and into an illusory promise of eternal life after death. 

The church, conspiring with the political authorities of the day, tried to kill the idea of radical compassionate revolution and to replace it with what Karl Marx accurately described as being the opiate of the people . . . a religious narrative intended to keep the poor and enslaved quiet and cooperative. 

 

I know that many of my peers in the traditional church think that I am somewhat uniquely radical in my re-presenting of the Jesus narrative, but I will leave it to Thomas Jefferson, who, in a 1814 letter to Horatio Spafford, said it better than I ever could:  the priest has been hostile to liberty. he is always in alliance with the Despot abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. it is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them: and to effect this they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man, into mystery & jargon unintelligible to all mankind & therefore the safer engine for their purposes. 

 

Others have very magical beliefs about the promise of Easter but I think the best interpretation comes from the 20^th century Greek poet, Dinos Christianopoulos who wrote, “They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.” A government killed Jesus but that didn’t kill his teachings. Sadly, however, the church tried to bury his message in magic and superstition, and yet, thousands of years later, some still can hear him calling us to revolution. 

 

A government killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer and generations of seminary professors have tried to make his message tediously boring, but his death reminds the church that it is our job to stand up to fascism. 

 

Our government, working with a despot in El Salvador, killed archbishop Romero, assassins killed Gandhi, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. but ideas are bullet proof. They tried to sweep them under a rug. Since they were killed, governments have tried to silence their voices, tried to scare us with threats of violence and hunger; they buried them, they just didn’t know that they were seeds. 

 

We are not the keepers of a dead religion, encased in magical thinking and silly, childish promises of some kind of literal heaven or frightened with the fires of an imaginary hell. We are the one thing that governments and churches fear the most, we have an idea; and we have refused to be frightened, to be silenced or even to play dead. Because they know, all that stands between us and the end of fascism, what has kept us from real liberation, is that we were not united and aware. 

 

Whether our generation will awaken from its childish indifference or not remains to be seen but this much I know, the world is ripe for a revolution, a reformation, in economics, in government, and in religion. Whether it will happen in my lifetime or not, I cannot predict, I just know that it should.

 

 

Estrangement Among Family and Friends

Estrangement Among Family and Friends      April 6, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray 

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I was called to the home of an elderly widow in my church by the county sheriff. When I arrived, the house was surrounded by police cars and there was a line of law enforcement officers keeping a safe distance from the three German Shepherds growling and barking in the yard. It was a stand-off, and it wasn’t going to end well. This was back in the days before cell phones so I had to go back to my office to call the home to see if they would tie up the dogs and let me come in. "No,” was her answer. She was not going to let the police come in and take her boy.

 

Her boy, a man in his 50’s, was suspected of breaking into a suburban home, raping a little girl, and stealing several items from the house. His mother was not convinced of his innocence. He had, after all, done it before and had only recently been released from prison. The police were patient enough to wear everyone down and they were eventually able to make the arrest without anyone getting hurt. 

 

I did my pastoral duty and visited him in the county jail where he was being held pending trial. I was still in grad school but even then, it was not difficult to reach the conclusion that he was a malignant narcissist. He dismissed his history of pedophilia as mere social conventions and he said that when he robbed houses, the people he robbed came out ahead. He explained that he would take about $500 worth of jewelry and electronics and then look in the paper and see where they claimed to have lost thousands of dollars worth of stuff which they then claimed against their homeowner’s insurance. So, he explained to me, he was really doing them a favor because they came out way ahead on the transaction. 

 

The visit that has lived in my skull from that whole incident was the conversation I had with his mother. She knew that her son was a criminal. She knew that he did horrible things, but she insisted that there was a good man inside of him and that she would never give up on him. I, by profession and disposition, am always inclined to give a person a second, third, or fourth chance. If I don’t believe that people can change then, clearly, I am in the wrong profession. But I will tell you, I didn’t detect a good man hidden deep inside her son and I was perplexed by her loyalty to him.

 

She knew that he was a rapist, a thief, a liar, an addict, a con man, but she loved him and refused to give up on him. A few years earlier, in my own family, my eldest brother had reported to our parents that he and his wife of only two years were getting a divorce and that he was going to be marrying an employee in the retail store he managed who was carrying his child. My parents reacted to this news by taking me and my brother into our room and telling us that our brother, John, had humiliated the family and that we were never to speak to him or talk to anyone about him ever again. So far as they were concerned, John had died.

 

My parents did eventually relent and reconciled with my older brother, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how differently the mother of a rapist and criminal felt about her wayward son and the way that my parents reacted to a son who had made the moral mistake of having an affair. 

My brother went through a pretty rough patch, with the whole infidelity and remarriage thing. In a period of a very few years he was married to four different women without ever spending a day being single, and then, ironically, he became a Methodist minister. Life can take some odd turns . . . you would think he might have become a Mormon but, I stuck it out with him, insisting that my parents show grace to a son who was clearly hurting himself as well as others . . . until, as it turns out, he became an avid Trump supporter which, for me, was a bridge too far.

 

As a minister who has spent my life advocating for the rights of gay and lesbian people and as the father of a brown skinned immigrant, I could not rationalize my brother’s decision to support a homophobic, xenophobic, racist, misogynist for president. What is the price of estrangement? When does it make sense and when is it a moral travesty in its own right?

 

In the early part of my ministry, most of the cases of family estrangement that came to my office were instances of parents feeling morally obligated to reject their gay children. It was often very painful on both sides of the equation, but it was rooted in unhealthy religious devotion and ignorance of both psychology and biology. Still, I have to say that it shouldn’t have been that hard. Any theology that teaches you to reject your own child should be suspect in a prima facie way. Just as my parents who, for both religious and social shaming reasons, believed that divorce was equal to death in my brother’s case, if they had more heart and less irrational shame, they would have seen their way through it immediately. 

 

The Broadway classic, the Fiddler on the Roof, has a father with three daughters, each of whom chooses to marry in ways that rejected their Russian Jewish traditions of the day, but the father’s love managed to remain in a relationship with the first two, but the third one pushed the boundaries more than Tevya was able to accept. No matter how many times I have seen the play or the movie, I still tear up when Tevya rejects Chava (ha’va). It takes me back to the moment when my mother told me that my brother was now dead to us, it takes me back into my church study every time I sat with parents yelling at their son or daughter to just “stop being gay.” 

 

But folks, these clear-cut examples are not why I wanted to bring this topic up today. There are therapists who specialize in counseling with families struggling with estrangement for much more subtle and hard to define issues. None of us who watch that painful scene with Tevya and Chava agree with Tevya, but in context, the Tevya character could not allow himself to conceive of marrying a non-Jew.

 

I accept that there is a price tag on estrangement. There is no such thing as “unconditional love,” or, at least, there shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t tolerate abuse. We shouldn’t, by our actions, imply endorsement of grievous offenses. But our list of cardinal sins evolves, doesn’t it?

 

In the seventh century, Pope Gregory 1^st distilled the teachings of the Bible and the church down to seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. 

That is surely a pious list, but it doesn’t include things like murder, theft, dishonesty, rape, torture, or invading another country on false pretenses. I mean, if we are only going to name seven deadly sins, I don’t think that sloth gets to make the cut. And when it comes to something like lust, you know, St Jimmy Carter confessed to having feelings of lust but having lusty thoughts is not the same thing as having serial affairs, is it?

 

I accept that psychologically healthy able-bodied people have sex. How and with whom they have sex becomes a matter of nearly constant ethical re-evaluation. What is pedophilia in our day may have been a common arranged marriage in another age. Killing someone for being gay is still common in many nations but here, we are shocked when parents refuse to attend their son’s marriage to another man. Ethics is not easy. It requires not just thinking but it requires re-thinking, re-evaluation and change. 

 

In our time, people are spending more and more time alone. An increasingly large percentage of families have instances of estrangement that have nothing to do with the complexities of schedules and geography. Why? Why do we do it? Why do we allow it?

 

Over the holidays last fall, I was in regular contact with a young woman whom I have known since she was in high school. She was a very bright student and a very attractive person who evidently had some itches that she needed to scratch which made her difficult to deal with and a regular embarrassment to her parents. She went through her goth phase, her excessive drinking phase, her sexually acting out phase, and her phase of having constant excuses for not working, not applying herself, and generally not getting her stuff together.

 

Eventually, however, she managed to process whatever attention needs, or resentments had driven her to such difficult acting out, and she got a responsible professional position, started dating a responsible, professional guy, and seemed to get her life on the rails in more or less all of the ways that her parents had longed to see 15 years ago. But now the shoe is on the other foot. She wants to have a closer relationship with her parents. She wants to introduce her boyfriend who may soon be her husband to her parents, but they keep coming up with excuses for why they want to avoid her and emphatically avoid meeting her partner . . . . excuses which, in my professional opinion, would embarrass Charles Darwin . . . excuses that make Tevya’s rejection of Chava seem almost rational.

 

Perhaps we should not judge other people’s choices about such things but while I am not in the family and cannot presume to know everything they are feeling, I am close enough and have listened to everyone so much that I am confident in saying that this estrangement should not exist. Are the parents attempting to exact some kind of revenge for their daughter’s adolescent and young adult acting out? Are they so filled with hubris that nothing that their daughter can do is good enough, perfect enough, to melt the icy wall between them? 

 

Pastorally, I want to say that people in our day have simply become too disposable. 

Again, there is a point at which estrangement is the only logical and practical choice but that point is, I believe, very very rare, especially when judged against how often it happens. 

 

In the Atlantic’s January cover story, author Derek Thompson called this “The Anti-Social Century,” because we are all isolating more, we have fewer friends, fewer real social connections, and, people, we have fractured families that could be healed if people could manage to suspend judgement and resolve to stop trying to control the details of other people’s lives even the details of their thoughts.

 

I have a good friend who lives in rural Arkansas whose daughter is in a polyamorous, inter-racial marriage. And she babysits the grandkids and is lovingly accepting of all of the adults in this rather awkward group marriage. . . in rural Arkansas! My daughter is in an interracial relationship. I am in an interracial relationship, but I wouldn’t be too cheery about it if my daughter was going to marry a guy who was already married and who wanted to keep both wives. My friend has stretched to accept this, but I might be a tad Tevya on that issue. And I, as a joke, told my significant other that she was the only one for me, just her and Hallie Berry and that’s it. She didn’t think it was funny, and I hope she doesn’t listen to this talk, or I will have to go through another round of shaming for having said it the first time. Still, while I would not choose a polyamorous relationship, such relationships exist and, in the end, the fact that other people make that choice is none of my business. 

 

And while I may play racquetball with, have dinner with, even go to a movie and celebrate Thanksgiving with a supporter of a treasonous, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, criminal president, I certainly couldn’t marry one and I am not yet able to accept it in a sibling, but I am realizing that my brother and I are old enough that we may not physically survive Trump’s second term and it is time for us, and by “us”, I mean, “me,” to do better. 

 

If I am waiting for him to wake up and see Trump the way I see him, to repudiate his last three astonishingly stupid presidential votes, then I may be the one who is being unreasonable . . . not entirely unreasonable, but the net results are the same. Estrangement happens but it should be so rare that very few of us would ever feel compelled to choose it. We should love our friends and our family members to the highest degree that we can muster, and it may just be that hubris is the only thing standing in our way. 

 

 

 

 

“The Great Divorce”

“The Great Divorce”     

March 23, 2025        Dr. Roger Ray

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When C. S. Lewis published his novel, The Great Divorce, 80 years ago, he chose the title for his imaginative tale about people who took a bus ride from Hell to Heaven, across the vast chasm, or “divorce” between the two, to see some old friends. I am stealing the title for my message today because I belief the real gulf between heaven and hell is the huge divide between the rich and the poor. Our acceptance of this state of affairs is, in my opinion, the greatest moral failing of the modern world. 

 

I have just returned from spending two months with my significant other in Thailand. We are waiting for her visa application to be approved for her to join me in Florida, but the process takes a year or more, so I am trying to spend as much time with her as possible in her native country. The cost of living in Thailand is quite low and one might wonder why Hui and I don’t do what so many other American and Thai couples do, which is to live in a very nice gated community near the beach in Thailand.

 

And, it is tempting. I live on a very modest pastor’s pension and if I moved to Thailand, I could live in a much nicer and bigger house, drive a nicer car, avail myself of the services of household help, and enjoy virtually free healthcare, enjoying a standard of living far beyond what my income provides for me in Florida. In Thailand, we stayed in a very nice beach resort for about $40 a day where as that would cost ten times as much in Miami or Ft. Lauderdale.

 

I know that we could enjoy a much higher standard of living in Thailand, but have you ever wondered why the standard of living in places like Thailand, or Mexico, or Belize is so much lower? Making a car or a computer to clothing costs about the same all over the world if you just look at material costs. What makes some places have a low cost of living is because wages are so low and working conditions are cruel. 

 

You can go to a Starbucks in Thailand, and it typically is larger and nicer than any Starbucks near me in Florida. The uniforms look the same. The menu is the same. But while the barista in the USA isn’t getting rich, the young man who does the same job in Thailand works 10 to 12 hours a day and is paid less than 400 BHAT, about $10. So, if living an opulent lifestyle on a retired pastor’s income comes at the price of a hundred Thai people living in crushing poverty then I’m not going to enjoy my cappuccino or my view of the beach. 

Sure, you can get an hour massage in Thailand for $10, but should you? If you pay $70 or $100 for a massage in the USA, why wouldn’t you give the Thai woman the same amount for an arguably better massage? At the end of your massage, you are obligated to pay her $10 and you may even feel obligated to tip her another $5 but if you don’t give her $50 or $75 then you are making that decision. You are choosing to support an economic system that exploits the poor. If you saw where she lived, I don’t think you would give her $10 and thank her and walk away all relaxed and happy….. though many Americans, Germans, Russians, and Aussies do just that, but, if I am honest, I don’t like those people. 

The Brazilian archbishop, Dom Hélder Câmara, is famous for having said, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” It is true enough that governments and corporations love to see charities filling the gaps of the social safety net, but they never like it when charities start to demand that the society become more fair. 

 

A moral pillar for Christians, Jews, and Muslims is charity. Giving to the poor is an inherent dimension of any sincere spirituality. Most of you will remember the Moral Majority’s attack on government social services in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was insisting that the government get out of the business of caring for the poor to allow churches to do what churches have always done, which, he assumed, was to dole out charity.

 

Of course, Ronald Reagan didn’t attend church, nor did he financially donate more than a pittance to charity but that is the conservative mindset. My money is my money but you tree-hugging do-gooders out there need some place to put your money so why don’t you form the social safety net to protect people who are being impoverished by the marketplace.

 

Who am I to correct Archbishop Camara, but I would restate his famous quote slightly differently because the real question is not so much, “why are the poor hungry.” They real question is why are there so many poor people? Poverty, in the presence of abundance, is inexcusable. 

The only reason why we still have poor people in the world is because our economic system allows a tiny fraction of people to hoard the majority of the resources. 

 

You have heard the saying that possession is 9/10 of the law but that should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows who writes the laws. There are lobbyists for the corporations that make military hardware, for pharmaceutical companies, for oil and gas companies, but there are no lobbyists for the minimum wage workers at McDonalds, or for the aids caring for our aging relatives in nursing homes. 

 

In fact, no one less than the Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, said: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." The obvious irony is that there is no moral justification for the levels of greed that exist in our society when there is no real reason for poverty except for the fact that the rich control the government and the police.

 

Ever since the ancient Phoenicians invented money, we have had a way of distributing wealth but the way that we have inherited in our day, and mind you, our economic system is always evolving … economics today is not what it was even 50 years ago… our present system is dramatically skewed towards giving more and more to the wealthy and less and less to those who produce wealth.

It has been broadly reported that: The three richest Americans have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the U.S. population. And 82% of the global wealth generated last year went to just 1% of the world's population.

(https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/22/vast-majority-new-wealth-last-year-went-top-1/1051947001/)

There is no plausible defense for that kind of distribution of wealth. It is a moral crisis! 

 

Taxation is a form of redistribution of wealth. The super wealthy could have their own water and power sources, in fact, until a century ago, they did. Taxes build roads, bridges, water systems, schools, and municipal services of police, fire departments, highway maintenance, and medical services.

 

But cutting taxes is always a popular political idea and it is sold to the poor as if  that was going to somehow help them. The truth is, as in the original Trump major tax cut, the cuts put more money in the hands of the already rich and it took services away from the poor and middle class.

 

I was still full time with the church when Trump first cut taxes. My own income is on the lower side of middle-class incomes and the Trump tax cut resulted in a $1000 increase in my Federal Taxes and cuts to Affordable Healthcare subsidies  added between $2000 and $3000 to my premiums. So, the much heralded middle class tax cut cost me $3000 or $4000 and if it hit me that hard then it must have hit most others in my income level about the same way. 

People are seduced by the sound of promised tax cuts but, as much as we hate paying taxes, we must soberly remember that taxes fund the things that it takes for us to have a civilization. 

 

You may remember when Obama got in trouble for saying in a campaign speech in 2012 that successful small business owners didn’t build their wealth all on their own. Many people were deeply offended by this but what Obama was talking about was and is 100% true. You can’t use your own money to open a coffee shop and run a successful business unless there is a social structure that makes it possible…. There have to be roads and sewers, electricity and clean water. You will need to hire employees who can read and write and you will need the protection of a police and fire department. 

 

You may have a wildly successful coffee shop for which you deserve a lot of credit but, factually, you couldn’t have done it without the services provided by tax dollars. So, when you want to cut taxes, what are you going to cut? Most federal tax dollars go to the military, social security, Medicare, and the debt service on our federal debt. Most municipal taxes go to schools, street maintenance, utilities, police and fire services, and trash hauling. So what do you want less of? What do you want to cut?

 

I have always suggested that we cut our military spending by 80% but given the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the threat of war in Taiwan and Syria, even I couldn’t give full-throated support to be a big cut in military spending. 

Schools are already dramatically underfunded, and a lot of our infrastructure is showing signs of horrible neglect. I wish you could have seen the airports that I have seen in the past week, starting in Bangkok, going to Doha, and then Miami. Based on the Miami airport, you would think that the USA is the third world country compared with the amazing and beautiful airports in much of the rest of the world. Ride a subway in Paris and then use the subway system in New York. 

 

I’m telling you, Americans are not overtaxed and in many ways, it is evident that we are not taxed enough. We have invented an economic system in which it is possible for a person to become very wealthy, sometimes obscenely wealthy, while the services that make civilization possible are often so dramatically under funded that they are falling apart. This not only creates poverty but it undermines the support structure that makes it possible for capitalism to be successful. 

The greatest American advocate for the poor in the 20^th century had to be Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. A reporter caught her in an unguarded moment when she expressed herself rather succinctly: Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system. What is somewhat ironic is that she said that in the 1950’s when, while she certainly wasn’t wrong, the system was not yet as filthy and rotten as it would become over the next half century.

 

When Dorothy Day described our economic system as being filthy and rotten, the tax structure was such that a single laborer could earn enough in a manufacturing job to buy a house and a car, support a spouse and children, and to retire with modest comfort. Little by little, however, the tax structure that created the middle class and made America the greatest nation in the world, has been eroded, shifting more and more of the wealth of our nation into the hands of fewer and fewer people and making it almost impossible for unskilled labor to make a decent living. 

I have traveled a lot in very poor countries. I have personally witnessed what huge income and capital disparity does to nations like Nicaragua, Mexico, Belize, Jordan, Egypt, and Thailand. And I can see how the USA is headed in that direction. The irony here is that we have somehow persuaded the poor to vote for the tax policies that keep them poor. 

 

 

It has now been more than 25 years since Thomas Frank published this excellent book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, describing in detail how states that were formerly quite progressive were, over a century, seduced into consistently voting against their own interests. It is almost amazing to see how stakes like Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which are largely populated with lower income people, can be duped into voting the cut taxes on the wealthy and thereby, cut their own throats by having their necessary services taken from them. 

 

In Oklahoma, the teachers went on strike only when the state, unwilling to pay them more, cut the school week down to 4 days, sacrificing their own children’s education to keep taxes lower. 

I don’t want to throw shade on Oklahoma this morning, but I have had reason to be in Oklahoma quite a bit over the past few years and I don’t see any problems there that less education would help…. If you catch my drift. 

 

But for some reason, the poor and the middle class just keep going along with totally absurd tax structures until things get to these absolutely desperate circumstances. 

A few years ago the French economist, Thomas Piketty, published this book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It was on the New York Times best seller list because it is a terribly important book but it set records for being one of the most often purchased and least often read because it is about a million pages long and impossibly dull to read. 

I read enough to summarize it for you this way:  First, you must understand that there is a huge difference between income and capital. Income is what we worry about the most in terms of a minimum wage or a living wage or even a guaranteed basic income, but Piketty wants us to think in terms of capital, what you own. The equity in your home, the value of your stocks, savings, and pension funds, or any land you may own, that is capital. 

 

The second thing to know about Piketty’s book is that he says that way too few people own way too much of the capital in the world and if we don’t redistribute it we’ll never defeat poverty by just tinkering around with income. He also acknowledges that even though the future of civilization depends upon a redistribution of capital that probably no nation will actually do it. Rich people put up a lot of resistance to the idea of sharing their wealth.

 

As President John Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” 

 

What I want to leave you with today is the contrast between the ideal community we have all imagined where there is no poverty and where people share resources equally, and the reality we now live in where the ranks of the poor are growing rapidly because of a radical shift of capital into the hands of the already rich. I do, in large part, blame the rich and the powerful for creating and defending an economic system that creates so much suffering and poverty and hunger. But even more I blame the indifferent masses who have apathetically allowed it to happen.

 

As Dorothy Day said, we have accepted a filthy, rotten, system and we never should have. If you, like me, do not want to see a violent revolution take place either in our country or in other democracies, then we have to stop playing along with things like ending inheritance taxes that allow capital to keep flowing into the hands of a few super wealthy people. We have to stop quietly acquiescing to cutting healthcare, education, and pension benefits to the majority of the population. 

 

And, folks, I would remind you that the crucial point of most of the Civil Rights movement had to do with voter registration and participation. The one thing we must do is vote, and, frankly, I believe that registering voters might be the one thing that progressive churches should get involved with in a very big way, along with making voting count more by fighting against Gerrymandering and voter suppression whether that comes in the form of fewer voting places or higher demands of photo IDs for voting. 

 

We need to help people to get involved in voting and what we want to do every week, is to help to inform people of how they have been tricked in the past into voting against their own best interests. I am not ready to give up on democracy yet but if we are not going to give up on it, we really must figure out how to make it work for the good of all of the people. 

 

 

Compassion is the Key

Compassion is the Key    March 9, 2025 

Dr. Roger Ray

Click here to see the video

I began teaching at Drury University about 25 years ago under their old curriculum when they were still, at least marginally, a church related college that had at least one required class in religion. The title of that class was the rather pretentious sounding: Life and Teachings of Jesus. When I took on the task of teaching this class, I didn’t want to talk about what the church said about Jesus, I wanted to try to drill down into what Jesus said and what made his teachings unique.

For those of you who have Christian faith roots, what would you say was the unique thing that defined the life and teachings of Jesus? What sets Jesus apart from other early common era preachers?

If you turn to the gospels and you ask, well, “what did he do?” The first answer isn’t very satisfying because he started off by exorcising demons but, you know, he wasn’t the only demon exorcist running around Palestine at that time. Exorcisms feature prominently in the gospels but they are mostly a bit embarrassing in the modern church. Not many of us ever identified with the cult of the holy exorcism. Exorcism might get you movie rights in our day but back then, exorcism was as common as chiropractors and with similarly controversial reputations among other professionals.

 

I’m not saying that casting out a demon or adjusting your spine has about the same amount of science behind it, unless, of course, that is exactly what I’m saying.

But I digress . . .
Jesus did exorcisms, and so did a lot of other people. Jesus did miraculous feedings. Stories of miraculous feedings were abundant in that era as well as in the Hebrew bible. He was said to have had a miraculous birth, that certain miracles were attributed to him, he was even described as being the son of God . . . none of which, I am afraid to say, was uncommon in the first century. After meeting my rather puritanical mother, an old girlfriend of mine concluded, “I don’t care how many children that woman has, I don’t believe that she has ever had sex.” So, at least in her eyes, I and my three siblings were also virgin births . . . which is sort of how these myths get started.

A careful reading of the Jewish Histories written by Josephus in the late first century can yield the names of about 50 Jewish messiahs with various claims to the sort of things we find attributed to Jesus. So, I ask again, what is the unique aspect of what Jesus did that gives him a job description that is different from all other messianic characters of the time?

When I went to seminary in 1980, I was sure that I knew, as most of us who grew up in more evangelical, or Orthodox, or Catholic settings, were sure that we knew: Jesus died on the cross for our redemption, becoming our savior from a richly deserved eternal sentence in hell, giving us the hope of attaining to heaven.

And I understand that would still be the answer for a whole lot of people and I don’t want to be the one who goes around to Kindergarten classes telling 5-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and there is not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

People generally come to these realizations as they are intellectually and emotionally prepared to allow themselves to figure out the difference between imagination and reality.

In grad school, when you are forced to put your Kindergarten faith under the microscope, you begin to realize that the biblical gospels were ancient religious narratives that had very little to do with the actual historical Jesus. Gospel writers recorded events of Jesus healing and even raising the dead, to connect him to certain Hebrew fables about Elijah and Elisha. That stories about Jesus feeding the multitudes and walking on water were simply derivations of the stories about Moses providing manna in the wilderness and dividing the waters of the Red Sea.

And if all of that wasn’t obvious enough, the gospel writers even invented this transfiguration story in which Jesus was standing on a mountain top talking with Moses and Elijah. It is a literary technique, similar to Obi Wan appearing to Luke in movies after the first Star Wars movie in which we saw Obi Wan killed. It is literature, it isn’t a historical account.

I know that I make people mad when I say that sometimes because it is not what you were told in years and years and years of church going but before you send me hate mail, let me ask you this: Who you should you be mad at, the people who filled your head with fairy tales and lies for years or the guy who is finally telling you the truth? You might want to think that I making this up or exaggerating but I assure you that there is nearly 200 years of the best of biblical scholarship behind
what I am saying to you and some amazing historical examples of insightful philosophers and historians through the centuries.

There is a core to the historical Jesus tradition which is profound and unique and later generations attempted to fatten up his resume by heaping up claims and titles on him that they took from other religious and political figures of their time.


Roman coins of the era called the Caesar “Lord,” and “Savior,” and tradition had it that he was a son of god, born to a virgin. The early enthusiasts for the Jesus tradition didn’t want him to be second to any Old Testament prophet or current ruler and they put him up on a literary pedestal above all others. But what a real scholar, an honest seeker wants to know is “why?” What was so unique about Jesus to inspire this kind of adoration?

I am grateful to the late author, Marcus Borg, who so conviincingly articulated an understanding of the historical Jesus that gives back to the name of Jesus some of the credibility it loses with all of the magical and superstitious attributions that have been heaped up on him for most of the past two thousand years. When you look past the later myths, the exaggerations and the obvious additions of later church leaders . . . when you look at what may be actual quotes from Jesus, or at least the echoes of what he taught, you do find a unique message. Borg says that the job description that Jesus filled was just this: he was a teacher of radical compassion.

In fact, if you look at the conclusions of the hundreds of scholars involved in the Jesus Seminar over the past two generations, the one statement in the gospels that almost every agrees actually came from Jesus, the one verse you can imbue with some real academic certainty is a fragment of this verse from Luke, chapter 6, verse 27: Love your enemies.
Luke sets it in a narration, “But I will tell those who will listen; love your enemies. Do good to those who harm you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.” Jesus may have just said, “Love your enemies,” but Luke wants to drive the point home. . . love your enemies, do good for people who have hurt you, bless those who cuss you out, and have good thoughts about the people who have abused you.

Before the empire prostituted the name of Jesus to be a salvation cult that kept
slaves obedient and hard at work so they could go to heaven when they died, before the gospel writers buried the message of Jesus in silly miracle stories and magic carnival shows, he was the teacher of radical compassion and by radical, I mean, undeserved, counter intuitive, maybe even bordering on neurotically excessive . . . forgiveness, generosity, kindness.

Am I the only one here who kinda wishes he hadn’t said that? When my father died 15 years ago my older brother, John, asked me, “Do you want any of dad’s guns.” And I immediately answered him, “I don’t want to own a gun because I know too many people who deserve to be shot.” I don’t think I would ever do it, even if I owned a hundred guns. But I don’t want to spend any time fantasizing
about revenge against liars, users, socio-paths, child molesters, wife beaters, or murderers.

We are a people who believe in revenge. After 9-11, we bombed out almost every structure that was in the country where Al Qaida had hidden training camps and when decimating Afghanistan didn’t satisfy us, we attacked a whole other country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with it at all. We are big on revenge.

There may be countries where the penal system is designed to reform criminals but

ours isn’t. Our prison system is designed to make criminals “pay a debt to society,” and by that they mean exacting an eye for an eye. Our jails and prisons are set up to make inmates feel that they are subhuman and that we have a right to treat them like garbage. In this sense, our institutions are a reflection of what is in us, collectively, as a community of individuals.

We prefer revenge to reform. We would rather get even than to choose to forgive. What made Jesus stand out from almost every other religious and political voice of the day; what made him unforgettable, even when you honestly would kinda like to
forget him, was that he insisted that we love our enemies, that we pray for our abusers, that we return kindness in response to hurt.

Jesus introduced the radical idea that revenge doesn’t work, that evil doesn’t end evil. . . what the modern twist of Old Testament ethics says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leads to a blind and toothless society.” As Martin Luther King said, “Darkness doesn’t drive out darkness, only light does that.”

A rather witty social media meme asks the question: Why insist on teaching the Bible in schools when teaching the Bible in church doesn’t seem to make people any better? I can even confess that I had read every page of the Bible years before I understood any of it because I was reading it looking for some kind of superstitious salvation. It is sort of like one of those “where’s Waldo” puzzels. Once you have seen Waldo in one of those busy pictures, every time you look at the picture, your eye goes straight to Waldo.

 

Once you realize that what is unique and important about Jesus is that he was a teacher of radical compassion, then, when you read the gospels, it is impossible not to see it. But, sadly, religion, on the whole, has gone off the rails. Traditional Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have lost their way, expressing their faith in excesses of militarism and a preference for a fascism all over the globe.

Richard Neibuhr made the observation that “religion makes good people better and makes bad people worse.” It is true. Healthy religion inspired spiritual people to start hospitals, homeless shelters, domestic abuse shelters, emergency food and medical services. It is a healthy spirituality that gives us relief agencies like Doctors without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, and countless congregations who care for their own elderly, infirm, and troubled individuals, who encourage healthy marriage, loving and stable families, and ethical behavior.

But you can’t say that without being aware that there is unhealthy religion, often sharing the same pews with healthy religion. There are people who, in the name of Jesus, teach their own gay and lesbian children to loath themselves to such a degree that they have become the largest single reason for teen suicides. They
teach the kind of misogyny that keeps our spouse abuse shelters filled with the victims of domestic violence. And they foster the kind of paranoid exclusivism that makes them turn away Muslim, Mexican, and other brown refugees who come to us seeking our aid. Unhealthy religion denies reality, preferring instead a magical and superstitious world view that is leading to a too slow response to pollution, climate change, and destruction of our eco-system and the extinction of many forms of life on our planet.

The good that is done in the name of religion does not obliterate the bad that is done by unhealthy religion. We cannot, in the name of tolerance, simply avert our eyes and pretend that whatever someone else chooses to believe is their business any more than we would ignore it if Campbells started putting a lethal dose of cyanide in their tomato soup. We know the difference between healthy faith and toxic faith, and it is our obligation to teach the former and extinguish the later.

As Karen Armstrong wrote: The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.

The mainstream church is still refusing to give up on the “die and go to heaven in Jesus’ name” scam. And we have to keep trying to find another way to say it, to be more persuasive, to be more insistent. . . beyond your fear of hell and lust for heaven is a real faith, a faith in a man who was not just a man, because he was a man who was willing to say what no one else would say and most of us didn’t want to hear: love your enemies. None of us will ever find any semblance of salvation until we can do just that.