Catching a Prophetic Vision of Peace

Community Christian Church

November 28, 2010   Advent 1

Roger Ray, Pastor                

Isaiah 2:1-5 

1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. 2 In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. 3 Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 

5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!

There have been three events on my mind this week beyond our family and church observances of Thanksgiving.  Two are from the news and the third is more personal to our congregation. 

The first is simply a statistic, albeit a sobering one.  This week our war in Afghanistan marked 9 years and 50 days which is the length of time that the Soviet Union was involved in their last war in Afghanistan between their invasion and eventual unsuccessful withdrawal.  Their reasons for invading and their very lethal tactics were very different from ours and yet the length and expense of their war and ours, both in human lives and in resources is just a sobering moment.

The second event in the news was the bombing of an island off the coast of Korea by the North Korean army.  This was more than the usual saber rattling.  This time there were casualties in what looks like an attempt at provoking hostilities. 

It seems crazy to try to start a war on the Korean peninsula but the USA stands behind South Korea and China behind North Korea and so the stakes are remarkably high…. Frankly, about as high as they can get in the 21st century.

I am certainly not a military historian and I do not aspire to become one but I have heard historians make the claim that there has never been a nation which invested heavily in military hardware that they never used.  The sole exception may be the nuclear arsenals amassed in the past two generations which, while used as a deterrent to war, have not yet been detonated.  The North Korean government seems to be all too eager to push that envelope. 

The third event is more personal to us.  Though we cannot claim the Trobisch family to be exclusively our own, we certainly feel a kinship with them and they with us.  David Trobisch delivered a lecture here on Matthew’s gospel two weeks ago and then left to join his wife, Vera, in Germany where Vera’s mother’s life was coming to an end.

On Friday, I received this note from David:

 “At 2 AM this morning Vera's mother, Luise Hoch Braun, passed away. Born in 1917, she never knew her father, who died as a soldier in WWI. Her mother was killed by the French occupying forces, when her little village in the Black Forest was taken during the last days of WWII. Her husband Christian Braun, who preceded her in death eleven years ago, had lost both parents in WWI as well, so Vera never knew grandparents. Christian returned from a Russian prison camp with a severe head injury and never fully recovered from the physical and emotional trauma of the war. In all this Luise and Christian represent very typical German biographies of their generation. Luise Hoch Braun died of natural causes. She was 93. I feel blessed to have known her.”

Not to over simplify terribly complex international events but there are just three observations that I would like to make in response to these three pieces of news.  The first is that sometimes wars are just silly….. war can be ridiculous, absurd, stupid.  Two of the elements of St. Augustine’s just war theory are that for a war to be justified there must be an achievable goal and you must have a reasonable chance of obtaining that goal with less bloodshed in war than by any other method.

Invading a country which is already living in abject poverty with almost no infrastructure is a pretty long shot of meeting St. Augustine’s moral yard stick.  The Russians spent lives and precious resources and had almost nothing to show for it when they retreated from Afghanistan and the more I hear about the circumstances on the ground in Afghanistan after a decade of American occupation, I am, to say the least, not encouraged. 

Secondly, I would like to observe that wars are often started by the heinous actions of deranged or desperate people.  The phenomenally dark ages style leadership of North Korea has invested so much of that nation’s resources in military hardware, to the point that most of the nation is totally black at night because there is no electricity and hunger to the point of starvation is common, that it becomes increasingly likely that using their military might is the only option they may believe that they have. 

But from half a world away, we hope that South Korea and Japan and China are carefully considering measured responses.  If, for example, Cuba had bombed islands in the Florida Keys, how likely would we be to make calm, level headed, measured responses?  We expect Israel to respond to attacks very carefully. We pray for South Korea to be both strong and very very measured in how they handle North Korea but we don’t have a very good record of calmly trying to meaningfully respond to provocation

And the third thing I want to observe about these events is that war can be catastrophically personal.  David Trobisch’s brief account of Vera’s family in which some never met their grandparents, some never met their parents, and everyone lived daily with losses of family members and their own health as a result of a modern war which seemed to have no way of stopping the bloodletting once it had begun. 

Sadly, our experiences of war in the past two decades have largely been at a distance.  In an all-volunteer army, it is mostly the very poor who fight the wars and in a strange economic twist, Americans received a tax cut as war spending spun out of control.  This was an ill-advised policy that kept Americans from feeling personal loss while we ravaged two other nations.  It seems to me that if a nation comes to the painful conclusion that a war must be fought that we all should make sacrifices to support the effort so that we will consider the real costs more personally.

Regardless of whether or not a member of your family was going to have to don a uniform and be deployed to the battlefield, if we had asked Americans if they were willing to pay for an invasion of Iraq, if rather than a tax cut, if the average family four was asked if they were willing to pay an additional $20,000 in taxes to effect regime change in Iraq we might have gotten a more clear picture of how important that war was to Americans.

That’s ultimately what the image of beating a sword into a plowshare in our scripture lesson from Isaiah is about.  When I was first introduced to the study of economics, we used a graph which contrasted “guns and butter.”  “Guns” represented not just military hardware but all rather it represents all long term hardware investments such as bridges and houses.  “Butter” was used to represent everything which was intended for immediate use, like clean water, electricity, food, or clothing.

In the ancient world, when metal is very scarce, a sword literally is beaten into a plowshare when the need for a sword is over.  Conversely, plowshares are taken to make swords when a nation goes to war.  We saw this in our own country right up to the time of the Civil War.  Part of the post war hunger in the south was caused by the fact that all of their farm equipment had been melted down to make cannons and cannon balls. 

We don’t see it or feel it as directly as people did in generations past.  In Gone with the Wind you see the dramatic image of a huge party where those in attendance were asked to donate their jewelry to pay for the war effort.  Now the IRS does that by making certain that you never can afford to buy jewelry n the first place…. It cuts out the middle man and makes war funding more predictable. 

I suppose that no sermon on Peace can ever be complete without that familiar quote from President Eisenhower about every war ship being launched is tantamount to a theft from the poor.  I suppose we turn to him because he was, after all, a war time military general, so his cautions against the military industrial complex come from a highly informed and first hand perspective.  A more complete quote of the Presidents speech delivered in 1953 to an assembly of journalists goes like this:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.”

Now, prices have gone up a good deal since Eisenhower delivered that speech 57 years ago.  But we still turn to him because he certainly wasn’t soft on defense.  He was not a religious pacifist nor was he a tree hugging, dirt loving hippy.  He was experienced in both the battlefield and the White House and he understood the dangers inherent both in international relations and in the threat posed by the violence of poverty domestically. 

An intelligent politician has to balance the guns and butter priorities of a nation….. not creating poverty at home in order to strengthen global defenses nor irresponsibly consuming locally while leaving ourselves in danger.  That’s the politician’s task.  Our task is rather different.

Spiritual communities have a natural predisposition to be advocates of peace for a list of reasons which really should not require enumeration but in light of the fact that in most cases, and in most nations, when politicians hold a sword over their heads and call for war, most churches act like middle school cheerleaders at a homecoming football game. 

While St. Augustine influenced the early church to test any proposal of war with a litmus test of questions, demanding that war be the last option and not the first and that it must have a goal worthy of the costs and that the war will be plausibly winnable, few religious communities seem to be willing to take the time to ask those questions before rushing out to bless the tanks and bombs.  In our world, it may be that St. Augustine’s just war theory does not go far enough.

What is clearly true, is that our churches are not having a sufficient influence on our population to inculcate into our culture a passion for peace.  There are military academies, military scientists and strategists, scientists, manufacturers and statesmen lending all of their genius to being able to win a war and only some feeble preachers mumbling about peace.

Albert Einstein said that it is impossible to simultaneously prepare for both war and peace. 

If we put anything like the same effort into the science of peace making…. If we invested as much money in to doing the things which stabilize the peace as we put into our capability of winning a war, then I think that it is possible for our world to outgrow war altogether.  Though Einstein was crucial to winning the war effort in WWII, he later emphatically said that “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”

If the church of the future is to have any value at all it must not continue in the way of being a rubber stamp of whatever government is in charge of the nation where it meets, whether that is the German church in Nazi Germany or the British Church of the old empire or the American churches in this American empire.  If we are not devoted to honest reflection and the search for truth then what are we? 

When we fight poverty and hunger, we are working for peace.  When we advocate for the environment, we are working for peace.  When we challenge the prejudices which condemn other religions, other races, other sexual orientations then we are, in effect, working for peace. 

We are religious people and so, yes, we pray, we pray for peace but we pray in harmony with the old African proverb which says, “When you pray, move your feet.”  There could be a time of real peace in the world and that time will come when people of faith first decide that they are willing to work for justice.

The Problem with Corporate Shepherds

Community Christian Church  

Nov. 21, 2010   Christ the King

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Jeremiah 23:1-6            

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. 2Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. 3Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.

5 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’

Several weeks ago our small band of Wednesday evening book study folks took up a book by Jesus Seminar scholar, John Shelby Spong.  My copy of the book had turned slightly yellow around the edges because it has been on my shelf for nearly a decade.  When I first bought it I couldn’t make myself read it because, it seemed to me that Spong was too cynical about the church, too dismissive of traditional faith, that he went too far in his prescription for how the church of the future must be different if it is to be relevant in the modern world.

Like most of you, I grew up in the church.  In the days before computers, when TV was mostly vacuous sit coms and public schools were more indoctrination than education, church was the only place where I rubbed elbows with people who could show me a more broad view of the world.  My parents were very blue collar folks who were not readers and not much concerned with the events of the world.  But my Sunday School teacher was a lawyer who became a judge who often, just between the lines of a simple lesson, would dare to mention the serious matters of life.  One of our elders was a prominent attorney who became the state’s governor when I was a young teenager.  He sat in the pew in front of my family, State Police stood at the doors keeping guard against an assassination attempt….. the prospect of a gun battle in church helped me to endure otherwise pretty dull sermons and music.

When I was very young, my church went through a huge controversy when our pastor helped to organize a labor union in a local sewing factory because the owners, who were church members, were mistreating their employees.  Our church fired Brother Duncan.  My father called him a communist.  Of course, my dad thought that the writers of the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, were communists.  There were apparently a lot of communists in Glasgow, KY back in the 60’s. 

No one in my family ever traveled any farther away than the mountains of Appalachia where our relatives lived but in church we were visited by missionaries who lived in Africa, India, New Zealand.  The irrelevant, corrupt and ignorant church which Spong described in his book was not the church of my memory which was filled with people that I did look up to.

I was inspired by, shaped by, empowered by the church that I remembered.  What I found impossible to accept when I first tried to read Spong’s book was that the church I remembered no longer existed. 

Now, you might argue that the church I remembered never existed.  It’s not like the church was a gallon of fresh milk that just soured over time.  Ours has always been the church that stoned the prophets and not just in the ancient world.  Spong mentions the case of Giordano Bruno, a 16th century astronomer who was the first to realize that the earth rotates around the Sun and not the other way around. 

Bruno was burned at the stake on February 17, 1600 under orders of church officials.  While the Catholic Church has found the conscience to admit wrong doing in the execution of other early scientists, they have yet to apologize for murdering Bruno.

By the 19th century the church had lost the authority to burn free thinkers at the stake but when David Friedrich Strauss, the great German New Testament Scholar, published a ground breaking critical look at the historical life of Jesus, a book which would be considered rather tame and even conservative in our day, the church did have the power to not only fire him but to make certain that no one else would hire him and so Strauss simply died quietly in poverty and obscurity rather than sparks and smoke.

Which is similar to what happened to my first pastor.  After being fired and labeled a “communist” it was not easy for him to find any more work and he shortly had a heart attack and died.  Still, during the early years of my ministry, I had professors and regional ministers and denominational leaders who were persons of great faith and great intellect.  Martin Luther King wasn’t the only preacher fighting for civil rights in America.  Gandhi wasn’t the only religious thinker who worked for peace and liberation. 

It wasn’t just Dorothy Day who saw the violence and injustice of poverty.  I knew men and women who inspired me to study, to strive to be a better man, who gave me the courage to stand up to institutions and governments knowing that a rural boy with Appalachian roots could, when armed with the truth, stand up to Senators and corporate bosses and still win.

But several years ago some of those giants of the church began to retire and as I had grown older, I was being called into positions of leadership which allowed me to peer into the inner workings of my own denomination.  I found that we had been guilty of covering up serious sex crimes and of protecting people who had embezzled, plagiarized, and manipulated the church in order to make themselves wealthy.  I found people coming into positions of leadership who were intellectual dullards and whose work habits reeked of incompetence and sloth.  I was not good at hiding my feelings or expressing myself in politically correct language.  I became a thorn in the side of my former denomination and though it took them several years to do it, they finally found the means to remove me from their ranks and to protect years of their own illegal and immoral ethics violations from ever coming to light.

They tried to do to me what the Catholic Church had successfully done to David Strauss and they would have succeeded except for the fact that you people have had the courage to come together as a church and have bestowed upon me the honor of being called your pastor. 

So I know what fire Jeremiah had in his stomach when he looked back on the faith community he remembered and saw how corrupt and irrelevant it had become.  I understand what made Jeremiah stand outside of the temple and shout at the priests, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! Says the Lord.”  When Jeremiah preached about God raising up a new leader from the house of David, he called it, there in verse 5, “a righteous Branch.”  Jeremiah didn’t say that there would be some change and hope.  This was not a course correction.  There was to be no more rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.  What we remembered cannot be dusted and repainted and kept alive.

Jeremiah speaks of a radical new beginning.  He says that God will raise up new leadership which will, he says, “deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness.”  Righteousness is a church word that we don’t use very often anymore.  We associate it immediately with negative things like “self-righteous” or something worse.  But let me remind you that “righteous” is the opposite of things like using church money to both pay for prostitutes and then paying them to keep quiet as was done in National City Christian Church.  Righteousness is the opposite of raising money from the churches to start a congregation for poor Latino immigrants and then taking the money to pay the salary of a white Area Minister whose only familiarity with Latino culture comes from his addiction to Taco Bell. 

A few years ago I picked up a guest lecturer for Drury University at the airport.  As we drove towards the south east location where we were going to dinner, she looked out my car window and sighed….. “Springfield sure does have a lot of strip clubs…… and churches.”  Steeples and strippers…. There is a title for a good mid-western novel. 

And, honestly, from my perspective, a strip club is much less a sign of moral decay than a Payday Loan business.  The former takes money from gullible stupid men, and the later takes millions of dollars from desperately poor families who are the most vulnerable people in our city. 

This song by Sting which I asked Sean to sing before I began this sermon today first came to my attention about 15 years ago.  It was a popular song being played on the radio and its images seemed to me to be describing a kind of cultural collapse…. An embrace of nihilism. 

“You could say I’ve lost my faith in science and progress…

You could say I lost my belief in the holy church…

You could say I lost my sense of direction….

You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV,

You could say I’d lost my belief in our politicians…

I never saw no miracle of science that didn’t go from a blessing to a curse,

I never say no military solution that didn’t always end up as something worse…

The refrain of a song seems to hang all of the singer’s hope on faith in one person whom he loves…. I’m not sure how that’s worked out for him but in my experience romance is more fickle than science, the military, politics or even the church.  I choose to re-interpret the song’s refrain to be talking about the message of Jesus, or of the righteousness we have seen in the real spiritual leaders both of our own memory and of history. 

The church of my childhood and young adult years no longer exists…. It is gone…. But my faith was never in the institution.  My faith is not gone. 

I have faith in the message of Jesus…. I believe in justice, in compassion, in mercy and forgiveness.  I have faith in the ability of human beings, through prayer, worship, study and practice, to leave behind the unrighteousness of greed, exploitation, violence and prejudice and to become better people, spiritual people, people who can heal the brokenness of the world. 

I believe in God and I believe, with St. Theresa of Avila, that God has no hands but your hands, no feet but your feet.  I believe that you are the agents of God’s mercy, God’s justice, God’s righteousness.  And so, I believe in you…. I have faith in you… and I hope that you believe in yourselves and the faith that we share.

The Kingdom We Have Not Yet Seen

Community Christian Church 

Nov. 14 2010    Proper
Roger Ray, Pastor          

Isaiah 65:17-25       

17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; 

the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. 

18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;

for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. 

19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people;

no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. 

20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days,

   or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;

for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,

   and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. 

21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;

   they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 

22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat;

for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,

   and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. 

23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—

   and their descendants as well. 

24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. 

25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,

   the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust!

They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

2 Thessalonians 3:13

 Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.

The early church quoted the Hebrew Bible when it served their purposes and it became quickly obvious that the book of the Old Testament which spoke the most directly to the hearts of the early Christians was the book of the prophet Isaiah.  Isaiah’s visionary statements about a new age, about building a new kingdom in which there would be justice and peace….A kingdom in which the poor would not be taken advantage of.  Where everyone had enough to eat, and no one died prematurely.  Isaiah speaks of a community of faith in which the broken are healed and no one even has a reason to cry anymore.

The early church found themselves living in a hostile world in which the government was determined to wipe them out, they were no longer welcome to practice their faith in synagogues, and they were often an embarrassment to their family members.  They were, like the remnant of the faithful to whom Isaiah had spoken 500 years earlier, a tiny group of people facing very possible extinction but whose hearts were filled with hope for a kingdom which they had never yet seen but of which they dreamed.

You need to try to understand Isaiah in context. The part which most drew the imagination of the early church is this portion which includes the prophet’s preaching to the remnant of Jewish slaves in Babylon who were being set free.  Of course, being set free sounds a lot better than it might be in actual fact.

Like the end of slavery in the United States, the African slaves were liberated and their former masters said, “Well, you are free now…. So get out of my house and get off of my land.”

Being a slave is a cruel form of existence.  The Babylonians had allowed the Jews to live together in a ghetto.  They could marry, have a family, even grow gardens for their own use but they were still slaves.  They worked full time without compensation and they were the poor under class of that civilization.  Almost every nation in every century as a cast system whether we wear colored dots on our foreheads or not.

For every Los Angeles there is a Tijuana.  Drugs and prostitution are illegal in LA but Tijuana is a short drive away and if you need to abuse someone, or take advantage of someone and get away with it, that’s where you go.

And LA residents are always shocked when Latinos commit violent crimes, as if to say, “What do they have to be mad about?”

In our own city, land locked in the middle of a huge nation, our abused lower casts are often brought to us…. They are illegal immigrants without whom our economy and food supply system would not work but to whom we refuse to grant fully human status.

There are day spas and exercise facilities all over town where you can get a massage but everyone knows that if that spa has any oriental or Asian sounding name in its title that it is really just a brothel.  The women who work in these locations are immigrants…. Some the abandoned brides of service men, some the imported peasants from Asia who hoped to have a better life here.

If a bunch of white women from Springfield and Nixa and Ozark set up a brothel on a main street of town and put a flashing neon sign out front they would be closed down immediately because we see prostitution among the natives differently than when it is practiced by the under class.  I’ve lived in Springfield for 20 years and the same Oriental brothels have been in continuous operation as long as I have been here.  The women who work there are moved regularly from state to state as a part of a nation wide network of sex slavery in America and it is tolerated only because they are not American. 

The same thing happens in Western Europe except that the sex slaves are usually Eastern European.  It happens in Japan and the sex slaves are usually racially mixed or from the main land.

What I’m trying to say here is that the people that Isaiah was preaching to were victims.  Their people had been victims of economic exploitation, with all that that means, for two, three or four generations.  Finally, they were being given a chance to be free….. sort of….. OK, you are not my slave anymore but if you don’t want to work here and be treated badly then get out of my country.

Understandably, the majority of the Hebrew slaves were willing to accept the second class status they had always known rather than to strike off through the wilderness to a virtually uninhabited and pretty much uninhabitable land they had never seen before to build a new life for themselves.

When the Civil War ended the slave trade in the United States, all of those slave ships and their crews, facing unemployment, shifted their business practice from Africa to Asia.  The phrase, “to be Shanghaied” comes from that time period when ship’s captains would pull into a rural port of  the China coast and offer jobs to the poor peasants.  They told them that they would take them a little way down the coast where they could work, earn some money and then come home.  Once on board they were taken to America where the only employment available to them was in building rail road lines, a job where they would never earn enough to buy a passage back to the poverty of their homeland.

Isaiah was, well, to be honest, trying to fill the Babylonian slaves with the dream of a better live on the other side of the wilderness.  It wasn’t exactly like being Shanghaied but none of his sermons seemed to contain the objective truth that they were being invited to go back to a spoiled land with no established farms, economy, houses or protective walls.  If they followed Isaiah they were going on what amounted to a life long survival camping trip….. which is not at like going back to a land where there is no illness, no premature death, no reason to ever weep.

No one would have left the bondage of slavery in Babylon for what was really waiting for them in Judah unless they could have a vision of what Judah could become.  They had only known life in a nation of masters and slaves, but they could build a nation in which there was no longer a cast system.  They had only lived in a world where they tended the fields and built the houses that people who were of another class would enjoy.  Isaiah wanted them to believe, not only in liberation but also in justice, in mercy, in fairness and compassion.

And 500 years later, that vision found fertile soil in the hearts of the early church because they too were living as victims…. Outcasts, second class citizens.  They were few in number and their existence was uncertain.

The first Christians read the visionary statements of Isaiah and saw in them the kind of values which they had found at the heart of the teachings of Jesus and so they found it irresistible, whenever they talked about Jesus to lace the conversation with quotes from the book of Isaiah.

And even though there are two ways to read these passages….. one way is to see it as a hope for a kingdom which is not of this world…. A heavenly existence in which there is no more need for either homeless shelters or hospitals…. No more sorrow, no more tears.  But, of course, Isaiah never mentions heaven and I doubt seriously that Jesus said much of anything about it either.

The real vision of our faith is not to sit in slavery hoping for pie in the sky by and by.  The real power of the vision is in its ability to create that kingdom now, in this world, in our life times.

And here is where this gets very real for me.  When I read this passage from Isaiah these days, I see myself in it more than ever before.  We too are a remnant…. Refugees…. Liberated to be sure but many of us liberated with the equivalent of having been told, “You are free now so get out of my house and stay off of my land.” 

There is, for us, an over hanging memory of having been victims.  Some of us liberated ourselves from an oppressive religious system in which women were made to be second class just because they were women.  Or gay people had to keep their lives and their loves secret or face abuse on the level of torture. 

Some of us found ourselves at odds with our former faith community for nothing more than having suffered a personal tragedy such as divorce or illness…. Or for daring to question the doctrines or leadership …. Or for drinking a beer or going to a dance.

There is a reason why we are not all in one of the other 400 congregations in this city…. Many of which offer fabulous amenities and perks of which we can only imagine.  We are not there either because we are not wanted there or we can no longer make our minds narrow enough to fit through the doorway of their conservative beliefs.

But coming here is not like deciding to go to Taco Bell rather than McDonalds.  We left our former denominations and churches without a steeple, a pew or a hymnal.  Empty handed we went out into the wilderness to see if we could build a community of faith which can succeed in leaving behind classism, prejudice, oppression, magical thinking, superstition and any reason to ever make one another weep.

But when you look beyond the visions of Isaiah to the historical record we see that it was not like just leaving Babylon and moving to Utopia.  In the first place, most of the Hebrew slaves decided to stay in the slave ghettos of Babylon.  Just as we all left people we really love behind in churches which we believe to be filled with injustice and malice.

And, along the way, many among the remnant decided to turn back.

I was talking recently with a friend of mine who now goes to a new and very popular Assemblies of God church on the north side of town.

I had always hoped that she would end up here because we had worked together in several gay rights events through the years and I had known her to be a passionate woman who had escaped the judgment of her Catholic family who refused to accept her lesbian life.

And so I asked her, “Is Northpoint open and affirming?”  And she blushed at the question….. “Well, no, but I am more than my sexuality and I love the music and a lot of my friends go there.”  Five years ago she had nothing but contempt for her sisters who were afraid to come out of the closet….. now she has gone back into the closet because it is more comfortable there…. And they have a great band. 

Freedom isn’t free and sometimes the price is more than some folks are willing to pay.

The other thing we see from the historical record of both the early church and the remnant of Hebrew slaves is that they did not always get along very well.  There is a very insightful proverb which I learned from A.A.:  “Hurt people hurt people.”  I always compare this to a childhood memory of when my neighbor’s dog got hit by a car.  We ran over to help his beloved pet who was lying in the ditch with a broken back but when we would reach down to try to pick him up he snarled, bared his teeth and snapped at us.  He was hurt… he was dying… but he wouldn’t let us help him.

Hurt people will very often find some way to take out their pain on someone else.  Virtually every child molester was molested as a child.  Virtually every wife beater grew up either being beaten or watching his own mother be beaten.  You would logically think that someone who had endured that kind of pain and humiliation would do everything humanly possible to make certain that it never happened to another person but it doesn’t usually work that way.

One of the most painful memories of my home life happened when my oldest brother was getting a divorce.  I was only about 12.  John had dropped out of college so that he could get a job and marry his high school sweet heart against the wishes of our parents.  Two years later, when the marriage was coming to a humiliating end, my father told John, “I told you so,” and turned his back on him intending to never speak to him again.

My mother and father sat my other brother and I down and told us that John was dead to us.  That we were not to speak to him or about him that he was no longer a member of our family. Now, I want you to hear me say very clearly that my parents were not monsters.  They fed us, clothed us, housed us, took us to school and music lessons and they took us to church…. A church which they believed taught that divorce was a sin for which there was no forgiveness, only eternal condemnation.

Thankfully, they were eventually capable of thinking their way through that prejudice and many other prejudices, but, for me, the lesson was clear.  Family is not a guaranteed relationship.  It is a relationship predicated on not embarrassing or disappointing your parents.  It not only was possible to be ejected from the family, I had seen it done.

There is a saying in real estate that a house is worth whatever someone will pay for it.  It is non-sense to say that a house is worth $1,000,000 if you can only sell it for $200,000.

It is equally non-sense to talk about unconditional love when, in fact, there are lots of spoken and unspoken conditions.  We would like to believe that families are always mutually supportive, loving, forgiving and healing environments but they are not, in fact, they usually are not.  It is what we hope for but the ideal family is usually something we dream of but rarely see.

The painful fact is that you can judge the value of a family, or a marriage or a friendship by what it takes to break it up.  If someone leaves our church because they don’t like the hymns or because we don’t have a gymnasium then they didn’t understand what we were trying to do in the first place.  If someone can cut off their friendship with me because of something I believe or have said or published then they are telling me what value they placed on our friendship but they are not telling me what my value as a human being is…. They don’t get to do that.

One of the most real and most painful challenges for us is that while we have been set free and we have been drawn together by a vision of a just and compassionate way of being a community of faith, we are still a small and endangered gathering of people, many of whom, cannot quite break free of the need to bite someone.

If given a choice between being punched in the face or having someone ask me, “What happened to so-and-so who left our church,” I would always choose the punch in the face because it would hurt so much less.  It is tough being rejected by someone you have loved…. Someone you thought was your friend, your brother or sister, someone you have helped and sacrificed for.

But you can move heaven and earth to get someone out of prison but they can still stab you in the back.  You can rescue a woman from a violent marriage and a nearly successful suicide attempt and still have them turn their back on you.  You can show acceptance and love to someone who has been rejected by their family, their church, their employer and their neighbors and still find a dagger with their finger prints on it shoved straight in your heart.  Hurt people hurt people.  Some people find bondage just to be a lot easier than freedom.  Some people have an emotional itch that they need scratched so badly that they will do anything to anyone to feel a little better for a little while.

And if we give our emotional energy and time to focusing on the people who don’t want to be a part of our community then there is no energy or time left for the people who do want to be in our community.  No one will leave our church saying, “I’m making a grand exit because I feel like acting like a spoiled child.”  They will not say, “The church voted to buy this building even though I didn’t want to.”  They will not say, “I got caught stealing and was made to give the money back.”

And some people just aren’t ready to take a progressive approach to faith.  One friend left our church because he was furious about a newspaper column I had written condemning the torture of prisoners of war.  I asked him, “So you want to go to a church which favors torture?”  Of course, there was no response to that question but we all know what the ipso facto answer is….. you can go to almost any church in town and the subject of torture will never be brought up…. Nor will the subject of war…. Or racial prejudice, nor discrimination against gays and lesbians, nor the injustice of capital punishment or the violence of poverty and the pain of unemployment.  Most churches will talk about going to heaven when you die and joining the church softball team until that time comes and if that kind of bondage feels less threatening to you then you are also free to return to Babylon.

Some will say that they don’t like the music, or there are not enough programs, or another church has a better location, or that our pastor is the spawn of Satan or something like that.  Hurt people hurt people.  So, punch me in the face or ask me to explain for the hundredth time why someone chose not to continue trying to build this community of justice and compassion but it still comes down to the same thing.  Do you believe in the vision or not?  Is it worth it to you to work to establish something that you have never yet seen?  Do churches always have to be mired in gossip and divided by cliques or can we do church in a different way?  Can we work for justice and liberation and have a good time doing it, becoming friends and learning to love one another as we share this work together?

Anyone, at any time, can pick up their toys and leave, but what they cannot do is take my joy along with them.  Look at the text of Isaiah in your bulletin and see how often the words “joy” and “rejoicing” are repeated in the vision of the new kingdom.  This is hard work but it should be filled with joy.  I like feeding the homeless. I like challenging the abusive power of banks, corporations and governments.  I enjoy being the one who thumbs his nose at public prejudice and oppression.  Say whatever you want to but I get to choose how I feel about being who I have chosen to be and believing what I have come to believe.

Whenever someone decides that they no longer want to be a part of this experiment in progressive Christianity it is painful to me to see them go but I can tell you this….. I am not sorry that I helped someone in danger of suicide to get the help that she needed.  I am not sorry for what I did to win early release of an unjustly incarcerated prisoner.  I am not sorry for what I have done to fight for fair and equal treatment of the gay community even when many of those people have since turned their backs on me or on us.

The author of 2 Thessalonians writes to the beleaguered little church, “Don’t grow weary in doing what is right,”…. Don’t get tired of being the one who decides to do the good thing, the right thing…. Even when you are sometimes rewarded with a stab in the back or a kick in the teeth…. Don’t give up on the vision…. Don’t get tired and just quit…. Don’t thrown in the towel on justice or compassion and never let yourself regret the sacrifices you have made to show someone love and compassion even though they may never feel any gratitude or show you love and compassion in return.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “it is always the right time to do the right thing.”

I would like to close by reciting again a poem with which many of us have become very familiar in recent years.  She didn’t write it but Mother Theresa is said to have kept a copy of it on display where she and others served the poor of Calcutta because she too was beset by the coming and going of critics and the faint of heart.  It says:

 People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered;

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;

Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;

Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you've got anyway.

And so, like Martin Luther, I have chosen.  Here I stand.  I can do naught else.  May God help me.

The Echoes of the Thomas Community

Community Christian Church    

November 7, 2010    Roger Ray, Pastor

It should not surprise anyone from this part of the country, whether you are in Sunday School or a used car lot or in line at the grocery store, to be asked by a total stranger, “Do you know Jesus?”  And you know, when you hear that question that the person asking you is not just taking a survey or needing directions to Jesus’ house.  You know immediately that the questioner believes deeply that he or she does, in fact, not only know Jesus but they want you to know exactly what they think they know and nothing else will satisfy their evangelical lust for souls.

Such people always remind me of that Mark Twain saying about evangelical Christians, “It’s not what they don’t know that troubles me, it is what they are absolutely certain of that worries me.” 

With 400 congregations meeting around Springfield this morning, all ostensibly gathered in Jesus’ name, isn’t it fair to ask what any of us actually know about Jesus?

Like many of you, I was presented with a King James Version of the Bible as soon as I was old enough to barely read it.  Unlike most of my peers, I actually did read it, reading at least a chapter every day from the time I was 10 years old until I had read it through enough times that I was as familiar with its contents as any student entering seminary could be.  I knew enough, at that time, to take a fairly critical view of the contents. 

No one had to tell me that the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke were not written to be historical accounts.  It was obvious to me that the Jesus in John’s gospel was not the same guy as was described in Matthew, Mark and Luke and I knew that every letter in the New Testament which bore the signature of Paul had not, in fact, been written by the same guy who wrote Romans, Corinthians and Galatians.

But it wasn’t until I sat under real Biblical scholars that I began to understand how the writers of the New Testament were not giving me the straight skinny on the man from Nazareth.  They were, in fact, giving me a polished, gold plated, three generations later version of Jesus and that if I really wanted to know the real Jesus that I was going to have to unlearn most of what I had been taught in church and be willing to dig in to some books that were going to shake me to the roots of my toe nails.

As I have often said to you, it is much easier to worship Jesus than it is to follow his teachings but we have given up on the gold plated Jesus in favor of the more difficult task of trying to discover the Jesus who inspired people, changed their lives, in fact, changed history, and made them want to inspire others so much that they lost touch with reality in the titles and attributions they heaped upon the real message of Jesus.    

What do we know about Jesus?  Well, we know that he never met Paul and that we are not going to learn much about the unvarnished Jesus from the highly published apostle.  And we know that the four gospels in the New Testament are finished theological products, all of which draw on sources much older than their final drafts.

The shortest and doubtlessly the oldest of the four is Mark which contains no birth narrative and no sightings of a bodily resurrected Jesus.  Matthew and Luke obviously use Mark’s material and time line to craft their gospels and, because Matthew and Luke have some material in common, we conclude that they both were also copying from a shared source which scholars have named the “Q” document….. “Q” being the first letter of the German would for “source.” 

Biblical scholars conclude that if we read only these passages found both in Matthew and Luke that we are looking at the edited contents of a sayings source which is much older than any of the four New Testament gospels.

When we read only these quotes from Q recorded in Matthew and Luke we encounter a Jesus who calls himself the “son of man” and not the “son of God.”  We meet a Jesus who does not perform miracles but rather chides the public for demanding such signs.  We get to know a Jesus who teaches radical compassion and a deep desire to be separated from the values of the world and to be devoted to the rule of God, translated variously as “the Kingdom of God” or “the Imperial rule.” 

Long after Biblical scholars had hypothesized that the first writings about Jesus were probably simple collections of sayings of Jesus, much like Q or like the collected sayings of Confucius or Buddha, archaeologists found an ancient library buried in the sands of northern Africa in Egypt, was discovered.  The Nag Hammadi collection included a Jesus sayings source which was attributed to Thomas. 

This find in 1945 confirmed scholarly speculations that such sources existed and that they might help us to get to know the real Jesus much better.  We’ve been fortunate to have one of the world’s preeminent Nag Hammadi scholars to lecture our little congregation on the contents of the Gospel of Thomas and so I have wanted to take some time for us to try to get to know the Jesus found in this text.

Of course,  the sayings recorded in Thomas are not a scribe’s dictation recorded straight from the mouth of Jesus but scholars find some of the sayings to be very true to what they believe the character of Jesus to have been and so, as if listening to echoes in a canyon, these sayings get us a little closer to the person who most changed the world and pointed us all to a more spiritual way of living.

Saying #8, the first one printed in your bulletin, is the saying most scholars believe to be a direct quote from Jesus:    

#8  Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the imperial rule.

Anyone who has been outside on a cold night near a camp fire knows exactly what is symbolized in this metaphor.  Fire is a source of both light and heat…. Away from the fire is darkness and cold.  Jesus invites people into the light… the truth… understanding…. Into the warmth of life and away from the darkness of ignorance and the cold of death.

But anyone who has huddles by a camp fire also knows that the closer you get to the fire the greater your risk of being burned. 

Paradoxically, Jesus is simultaneously calling his followers into the light of truth and closer to the danger of being rejected by the world which loves darkness.  There is both invitation and risk involved in being a follower of Jesus and so the faith community which preserved this saying understood itself to have a passion for the truth which often put them at odds with the rest of the world.

The next saying gives us some insight into Jesus’ view of institutional religion:

#53  His disciples asked him, “Is circumcision beneficial or not?”

He replied, “If it were beneficial, their father would generate circumcised children from their mother.  True circumcision is a matter of the spirit, and it is completely beneficial.”

Circumcision represents all of the ways in which Jews were distinguished from gentiles, and, apparently, the most important of their traditions judging from the Acts account of Paul haphazardly taking Timothy, an uncircumcised gentile, into the Temple courts. 

Consistent with the Jesus of the gospels, the Jesus of Thomas has no respect for religious rules that are used to divide people.  The Thomas community cherished a Jesus who united Jews and gentiles, united men and women, united the rich with the poor and who refused to people as been cast off from the community.  Sadly, later generations used Jesus to divide people the way Jews had used circumcision.  By the end of the first century rules had been developed about who could administer communion, how a person was to be baptized and how sinners were to be excommunicated from the church.

The real Jesus was always in opposition to the religious rules which cause us to separate ourselves…. There is no apartheid in the Kingdom of God, no division of white and black, male and female, north side or east side, Latino or Asian.  Through a journey which includes forgiveness, tolerance and even love, the Jesus community always strives to unite and to work against being divided. 

The next saying I’ve selected is painfully graphic: 

#60 He saw a Samaritan carrying a lamb as he was entering Judea.  He said to his disciples, “Why does that fellow carry around the lamb?”

They replied, “in order to kill and eat it.”

He replied, “While it is alive, he will not eat it, but only if he kills it and it becomes a carcass.”

They said, “He would not do otherwise.”

He said, “you should seek a place for yourselves in repose, lest you become a corpse and be eaten.”

Even those of us who are fond of rare meat and raw fish would not take a bite out either surf or turf while it was still living and breathing.  In this saying Jesus makes it very clear….. if you don’t want to be eaten, act like you are alive, because when you do nothing, say nothing, when you appear to be a bump on a log, then the world has only one word to describe you:  dinner.

I would be tempted to go off on a string of quotes from Søren Kierkegaard about the irrelevance and deadness of the church of his day but I think that everyone here could express similar thoughts without quoting the Great Dane. 

We have sat through long sermons which took the challenging, almost threatening demands of the teachings of Jesus and turned them into such boring tedium that would make watching paint dry make more sense than listening to Jesus.  I am guilty of sitting in church and reading e-mail on my phone, balancing my checkbook and dreaming of being somewhere else, anywhere else.  But the rest of the world tries to push every church into that kind of death.  The gravitational pull of the grave is strong.  The world doesn’t want us to sing songs of rebellion; they want us to sing good old hymns of narcissistic nostalgia.  A proverb which I learned early in the ministry teaches:  People really only love a nominal Christian.  It is not until you have pulled the teeth out of the words of Jesus and accepted a religion of just being a nice, quiet, passive person that anyone will admire your faith. 

I have regularly brought conversations to an end when I point out to an ardent critic that they are laboring under the serious misconception that I am somehow constrained to be nice.  There is nothing about our faith which suggests that we should play dead so that our critics can eat us.  I have often said that I don’t have ulcers but I take as a personal challenge to cause ulcers in other people. 

The government, the insurance companies, corporations which exploit the poor and destroy the environment all want the church to play dead…. Maybe feed some hungry people and make casseroles for some sick folks but don’t you dare question a decision to go to war, or to raise rates so that the poor have no health care, or to try to protect the planet rather than corporate profits. 

We are not called to death…. We are not dinner for governments or corporations…. We are the conscience, the prophetic voice.  They will call us arrogant, obstructionist, socialist and un-American but that’s fine with me as long as they don’t get to assume that we’re dead. 

It is a hard saying, but we hear the echoes of the voice of the real Jesus where Thomas writes paradoxically:

#68a You are favored when hated and persecuted.

Any faith community which is genuinely founded on the teachings of Jesus is going to be at tension with the culture which worships war and profit.  If your goal is to be liked by everyone then Jesus is not for you.  If you fight to liberate slaves you make slave owners your enemy.  If you fight to give women equal rights then you make insecure men the world over hate you.  And if you work for the liberation and civil rights of gays and lesbians then deeply closeted homophobic religious people will hate you and write letters to the editor about you….. which I typically read as being proof of my point….. but I digress.

Finally, the Thomas community also knew Jesus to be a teacher of radical compassion.  When those miners were trapped under ground for months in Chile, to survive they had to initially discipline themselves to be hungry so that they could all live.  No one would have been surprised if a fight had broken out among the survivors to kill off the weak so that the strong could have the lion’s share of the food.  But in this wonderful example of compassion, the strong went hungry so that the weak could eat.

Fasting, self denial, even self imposed suffering has been extolled as a spiritual virtue, especially among monastic communities.  Sadly, such religious practices quickly forget that you were being called to be hungry in order to have food to share with the poor.

When I was in seminary, a group of students were discussing what we intended to give up for Lent.  One young pastor volunteered that he was giving up red meat and white bread during Lent so that he could lose weight and look better in his wedding photos in May.  I pointed out to him that Lenten sacrifices were supposed to help us to get closer to God, not so that we will enjoy our image in the mirror even more….. and that is one more Methodist pastor from whom I no longer receive Christmas cards. 

The Jesus of the Thomas community says very plainly:

#69b Those who go hungry to fill the starving belly of another are favored.

There have been some rare instances when I have literally given my meal to a hungry person and gone without myself but I don’t think the real point of this saying is that we need to go hungry….. the real issue of compassion is that we should not tolerate hunger in other people. 

It does not help our friends who gather at Bill’s Place on Thursday if I stop eating altogether.  What helps them is when we gather up some food to take down there and share with them. 

No one at Bill’s Place ever asks me what I had for breakfast but they always ask me what we are bringing them for lunch!

So, it is fair to ask ourselves, “do we know Jesus?”  And I think that a fair answer is that we don’t know him very well but we are trying to get to know him, by leaving the darkness of religion and stepping closer to the fire of justice and compassion.  We can’t sit at his feet and hear his words but we can get on our own feet and act like we are alive, going to bring liberation, and hope, and a bowl of stew to the people whose company Jesus always seemed to prefer…. And the more we do that, the better we get to know him.

By way of conclusion of this sermon which I readily admit has been more of a lecture, I would like to tell you about some plans which have been evolving among us this week.  Thanksgiving is on a Thursday this year….. I’m sorry if that’s news to any of you.  Since Thursday is our normal day to take lunch to Bill’s Place and Bill’s Place is closed on holidays, a few of us have decided that before we set our table at home to share the annual feast with our families, that we are going to prepare and share a Thanksgiving dinner with the homeless people who hang out along Commercial St. and who live in the stairwells and under the bridges of downtown Springfield. 

I’m looking forward to this Thanksgiving more than I have in any previous year.  For those who volunteer to cook and serve that morning, I’m sure that when they sit down in their own homes with family and friends that they won’t just be talking about football and politics.  Having first met Jesus, as Mother Theresa used to say, in his most distressing disguise…. Our minds will be filled with the images of the poor with whom we spent the morning.

It is impossible, in the 21st century, to claim that you actually know Jesus, but I believe that if we follow in his footsteps that we will get close enough, here and there, now and then, to catch a glimpse, maybe a whiff, maybe even to feel the warmth left in a footprint of the one who always stays a bit ahead of us in the pathways which lead to justice and compassion.  

All Saints Day

Community Christian Church  

Roger Ray, Pastor      

Oct. 31, 2010

Hebrews 11:23-38, 12:1

23 By faith Moses was hidden by his parents for three months after his birth, because they saw that the child was beautiful; and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.* 24By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called a son of Pharaoh’s daughter, 25choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26He considered abuse suffered for the Christ* to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking ahead to the reward. 27By faith he left Egypt, unafraid of the king’s anger; for he persevered as though* he saw him who is invisible. 28By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel.*

29 By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land, but when the Egyptians attempted to do so they were drowned. 30By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days. 31By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient,* because she had received the spies in peace.

32 And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— 33who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34quenched raging fire , escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. 35Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. 36Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two,* they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— 38of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,* and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us

In the early days of the Billy Graham crusades it was not uncommon for the famous evangelist to tell the massive audiences gathered in sports arenas to hear him, that within the next ten years, one out of every four people there would be dead.  Given the average age of the audience, it was a statement of basic actuarial fact and yet it was said in a way to bring the reality of their mortality home to them in such a way that they would want to leave the stadium that day with some guarantee that when they die they would not go to hell but would, in fact, get a ticket on the glory train to eternal bliss. 

It is not like Billy Graham invented this fear of hell and lust for heaven motivation.  He exploited it more effectively than most, but it wasn’t new to him.

One way to define what a religion is would be to say it is a culture’s collection of answers to the great questions of life…. How do I know what is right and what is wrong?  Where do babies come from?  Does life have meaning?  Will we survive nature’s onslaughts?  Why is the World Series being played in November? 

The finality of death is the shock and fear which every generation of humans has had to confront and the various world religions have shared their ideas and influenced one another’s view on the matter. 

When I teach courses in World Religions it becomes very obvious how one culture suggests an answer and a neighboring tribe or nation picks up on it, makes it their own and passes it along.  The Jews emerged from religious milieu of Egypt with its flirtation with monotheism and a host of nature deities. 

What has always struck me about that is the fact that the Egyptian religion seemed to focus primarily on life after death mythology but the runaway Hebrew slaves seemed to say nothing about life after death at all for the next 1500 years.  That may be partially explained by the fact that the Egyptians taught that the royal family was divine and they were the ones who would live forever….. not so much the help. 

The early Hebrews developed a religion for slaves and their view of eternity had more to do with having children.  They did not believe that we men and women have souls which survived us after death.  They had a concept of what, in Hebrew, is called the “nephesh,” which had more to do with a life force.  Your nephesh diminished when you were ill and could recover but became weaker and, when a person died, became like a shadow.

The Hebrew notion of “Sheol” does not translate into Christian conception of hell.  Sheol was simply a pit or a hole in the ground…. A place under the earth in which the final gasp of the nephesh decended.  The more common euphemism in the Old Testament for death was so that that a person had been “gathered until his fathers,” or “fathers and mothers” in a more politically astute way of saying it.  Which is basically to say, “his bones now rest up there in the family cemetery with his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.”

It was not until the Jews had been taken into slavery for a second time, in Babylon, that they encountered the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism which introduced them to images of winged angels repeat with a heaven and an alternative place of punishment which was described as a lake of fire. 

In spite of the fact that there is no empirical evidence, no way to really know, virtually all cultures have at least suggested that there is some form of eternal life because we need to believe that it is true.  Hope of heaven quiets our painful grief when someone we have loved deeply dies…. It stills our fear when we become aware of our own mortality…. And it gives us some ability to cope with our experiences of great injustice in this world by allowing us to trust that God will settle scores in the end which we cannot manage to settle for ourselves. 

Any honest treatment of the matter comes back to an awareness that while we have an anthropological reason to need to believe in life after death…. We want to believe it and some of us would probably even say that we believe in believing it…. But we do not and we cannot know. 

Those of us who hold to a progressive form of spirituality have accepted with we prefer honest uncertainty to dishonest certainty….. we would rather live with an honest and human hope than to be drawn into the magical and superstitious world of training ourselves to disengage from reality.

There may well be a form of life after death…. I prefer to think that there is but as Soren Kierkegaard cautioned the church long ago:  there are things which are true when they are whispered which become false when they are shouted.  I believe that honesty requires us to whisper about any after life hope and to save our shouting for things which we can know more about.

Still, to come back Billy Graham’s assertion where I began today, whether his offer of giving you certainty of heaven and fire insurance against hell has anything to recommend it….. it is still approximately true that one out of every four of us here today will not be here in 2020. 

One of the very first services we held in this building was the memorial service of my dear friend, Rev. Nelson Parnell.  The rest of this year has been punctuated for me with the multiple surgeries and mishaps as my own father’s nephesh grew weaker and he was, in late summer, gathered unto his ancestors. 

And, if I may carefully and compassionately observe that we are all regularly reminded of both church members and family members who are battling illnesses which threaten their survival….. we live in constant awareness that none of us have been put on this earth to stay forever.  The mortality rate is still what it always has been, 100% and no miracle of science or medicine will ever change that.

Healthy spirituality does not ask us to deny reality but it can give us the strength to live, not with simple resignation but with a kind of healthy defiance.  Compassion is the language of faith and so we show our compassion by caring for those who are ill…. Fighting for greater access to needed health care…. And sometimes we just take love in the form of a steaming casserole to strengthen the nephesh of another because we cannot personally cure cancer, stop a heart attack or raise the dead but we do not avert our eyes in fear…… we open one can of cream of mushroom soup, get out the chicken and the grated cheese and we start cooking. 

While the writers of the New Testament often appeared to be afflicted with what Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote into the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, having a bit “too much heaven on their minds,” this text we read this morning from the theologically heavy and thick letter to the Hebrews, seems to throw its arms open wide to embrace our family, the living and the dead, the famous and the infamous.

He mentions the heroes of our family tree:  Samson, Moses, David, Samuel but he also mentions the horse thieves and black sheep:  Rahab the prostitute….. and he says it just like that as if “prostitute” was her last name…. and Jephthah who sacrificed his own daughter. He asks the church to remember and to celebrate all of the saints who gave us life, protected us and cared for us and passed along to us the beginning building blocks of our faith…… realizing that none of them were perfect yet all of them did their part to carry the ball of faith, justice, life itself down the field during their years under the sun and have handed onto us the responsibility to care for the earth, to refine a sense of conscience, to teach justice and hope to our children and to walk confidently towards that day when we too will be gathered unto our mothers and fathers.  

We do not know the number of our days but we know that we have today…. We have this day as an opportunity in which to live a life which brings meaning, hope, compassion, forgiveness, love and reason into the world so that the fact of our mortality is not something which we must fear but a fact which inspires us to live well for as long as we have breath and whatever comes after that, we entrust to God. We too are a part of a great cloud of witnesses which include the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and Mother Theresa, as well as Jesse James and our sister, Paris Hilton….. but we have a place in this cloud of witnesses in which we seek to add meaning and content to life and to the living while we certainly grieve and revere those who have gone before us.  

Roger L. Ray, D.Min.

Pastor

Community Christian Church

4806 E. Cherry

Springfield, MO 65809

417-877-7821  

www.spfccc.org  

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. (Martin Luther King, Jr. - Nobel Speech)

Older Sermons

Links to Older Sermons:

• The Pitfalls of Superior Religion Oct. 24, 2010
• Wrestling With Ourselves Oct. 17, 2010
• The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Am Oct. 10, 2010
• The Healing of Lament Oct. 3, 2010
• Hope In Spite of the Evidence Can Change the Evidence Sept. 26, 2010
• God's Broken Heart Sept. 19, 2010
• The Forgiveness Transaction Sept. 12, 2010
• Who and What You Own Sept. 5, 2010
• Faith in a Cracked Cistern Aug. 28, 2010
• Living in Harmony with God and the Universe Aug. 22, 2010
• Lamb of God? Prince of Peace?  Aug. 15, 2010
• Social Justice, I Read About it in a Good Book Aug. 8, 2010
• Finding Our Way Home Aug. 1, 2010
• Can You Name Ten Who Are Righteous? July 25, 2010
• Society on the Edge of Collapse July 18, 2010
• Inheriting Eternal Life July 11, 2010
• Don't Give Up Your Freedom July 4, 2010
• Reconciling Grace and Justice (with piety) June 27, 2010
• Zealous Cowards June 20, 2010
  
• Biblical Images of Government June 13, 2010
• What is a Son to a Widow June 6, 2010
• Thoughts on Seduction May 30, 2010
• Church Out of the Closet May 23, 2010
• Being Set Free May 16, 2010
• No Locked Doors May 9, 2010
• Passing the Love Test May 2, 2010
• The Shepherd’s Psalm April 25, 2010
• Are You So Sure? April 18, 2010
• Our Primary Obligation April 11, 2010
• What They Could Not Kill April 4, 2010
• Shallow Pond March 28, 2010
• Yeah It Stinketh March 21, 2010
• Absurdly Generous Father March 14, 2010
• Live on Diet Coke March 7, 2010
• The Fountain of Romance Feb. 14, 2010
• People of Unclean Lip Feb. 7, 2010
• Speaking the Truth Jan. 31, 2010
• A Raison D’etra Jan. 24, 2010
• The Gift You Receive Jan. 17, 2010
• God’s Kind of King Jan. 10, 2010
• Wisdom in the World Jan. 3, 2010