Fear and Trembling

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
June 26, 2011



The text before us today is familiar to most of us.  We heard the story in Sunday school about how faithful Abraham was for being willing to sacrifice his only son because God had told him to.  I have endured classes in which we were told about how, in the ancient world, having a son is the only way to provide for your own retirement.  Your sons preserve your family, your clan, your property and they provide for you when you cannot provide for yourself..... and for all of those reasons, Abraham was really a very obedient and faithful man.

The apostle Paul even waxes eloquently about Abraham as does the author of Hebrews.  But still, my friends, this is a story about a guy who heard voices telling him to kill his son and he very nearly did it.  I wouldn't read this story in church because, even though this one ends well.... Assuming that Isaac was ever able to sleep at night again, we all know that this story doesn't always end well.

Genesis has this story of Abraham coming right up to the point of killing Isaac and not going through with it, but if you kept going to Bible study until you got to the book of Judges and you find the story of Jephtha, who made a pledge to sacrifice a member of his own household if God would give him victory in battle and so, having defeated his enemy, Jephtha goes home and sacrifices his daughter and we're supposed to see that as a sign of faithfulness.

Call me a rebel, but I don't think that any voices you hear or any religious vow you take which involves killing your children really deserves our serious consideration.

I would dismiss the story of Abraham and Isaac from our lectionary readings except for one thing, or, more accurately, except for one person.  In the hands and mind of that great Danish philosopher, the story of Abraham becomes the inspiration behind Kierkegaard's greatest work, "Fear and Trembling," in which he articulates the only phrase most people ever hear about Kierkegaard which is his famous "leap of faith."

Of course, reading Kierkegaard with some knowledge of his personal life, I am inclined to assume that he uses the story of Abraham as a metaphor for the great sacrifice he had made in his own life.

Kierkegaard had fallen in love with the beautiful young Danish woman, Regine Olson.  Though Kierkegaard was never much to look at, he applied his giant brain to the task of studying Regine's every aspect, every like and dislike so that when he approached her he knew how to make himself irresistible to her.

He loved her and she loved him and they were engaged to be married when Kierkegaard began to wonder if he should go through with the plan to marry and become a parish pastor.  He was disgusted by the shallowness of the church of his day.


He was profoundly disappointed with how people in general were always willing to just go along with the majority opinion, lacking either the courage or integrity to think for themselves and to be willing to suffer the consequences of being devoted to the truth.

He became convinced that it was his true calling to be a writer, a philosophical gadfly, who challenged the whole of society and not just a small parish.  He was willing to make himself into a social pariah in order to push the world to dismiss the shallow ways of an entirely conformist religion but he was not willing to make Regine suffer along with him.

Kierkegaard never had a son to sacrifice but he sacrificed his love for Regine, breaking off the engagement with her in order to protect her from the public derision and hostility that he felt that he had to embrace.  It was a decision about which he would never be entirely sure.  He wrote books about his indecision and, in fact, later thought that he made a terrible mistake and returned to Copenhagen to ask her to forgive him and to marry him, only to discover that she had married someone else.

The loss of Regine became the life obsession of one of the modern world's greatest intellects, locking him into a dark depression that both fueled his incredibly prolific life of writing and brought about a very early death, dying at the age of 43.




Some folks have, through the years, been tricked by hearing pithy Kierkegaard quotes in sermons and they have actually gone out and bought one of his books only to discover that he is nearly impossible to understand.  He combines a nearly comprehensive knowledge of Bible, history and literature with social commentary from the late 19th century Western newspapers in such a way that without professional help, most of us would do about as well trying to read a phone book in Chinese as to read Kierkegaard in English.

But I have stuck with him, slowly working my way through the parts that I can grasp and I have done so for one reason and that is because of his relentless criticism of the church coupled with his completely unattainable demand that we be better Christians.

I have known, I have felt it in my gut, from the time that I was a teenager, that the church was not was it was supposed to be.  I struggled during my teen years with the expectation that I would have to register for the draft and fight in Vietnam and I knew that there was just something morally wrong with our country's involvement in that war.  I went to church every week, usually two or three times a week, and I never heard anything mentioned about national morality and the war.

But I read collections of letters from prison of war protesters, the people who refused to serve in a war that they believed to be immoral.  What they said looked like what I was reading in the Bible a whole lot more than what I was hearing in our worship services and Bible studies.

I knew that the people who were killed during a peaceful protest at Kent State were right, and the people who shot them were wrong but it was never mentioned in my church.  I knew that our segregated little town in Kentucky was filled with racism and I knew when Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered that it was wrong, but the only think I heard about it in church was jocular congratulations based on the speculation that James Earl Ray was one of my cousins.

My disappointment deepened as I became a young pastor and discovered the seamy underbelly of trivial church turf battles... the petty, humiliating competition for power and recognition all in denial of the stated goal of actually somehow becoming heroes, or, as Kierkegaard described it, a knight of faith.

Kierkegaard writes:

"This has to be said; so let it now be said. Whoever you are, whatever in other respects your life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool... the official worship of God...is, ..., a counterfeit, a forgery."

We joyfully celebrate here, in our little church, the fact that we have been liberated from the irrational and sometimes mental persecution of evangelical religion.  We have rejected magic and superstition along with dogma, neurotic guilt and manipulation by fear.

But I am concerned, in our escape from guilt, fear and superstition, that we sometimes give ourselves permission to assume that we are now connoisseurs or philosophers of faith.  Our religion is no longer a life commitment but it is something that is complimentary.  Our church is life enhancing more than it is life changing.

And that drives me back into reading Kierkegaard.  We are not a progressive church because we have less faith but because we have more faith.  We have not set aside doctrinal religion with its guilt and fear so that we could become a bunch of atheists with rituals.

The leap of faith that Kierkegaard talks about is not an abandonment of reason in order to believe that which is inherently unworthy of belief.  The leap is to abandon all reservations, to let go of the rope and to dive into the life of faith, no matter what it costs you..... a beloved son, or your beloved Regine.

From time to time I get a call from a church member who wants me to take them to the emergency room.  Two or three nights a year, I sit in the waiting room at one of our grand hospitals and wait, with someone who thinks their child's arm may be broken.... With a man who is afraid that he may have poisoned himself.... With someone whose chest pains have become breathtaking.... And we wait.... Quietly, patiently... at first.  Families pile up in the chairs, children become restless... there is always quiet weeping of the suffering and the afraid.

Many people give up and go home.  Preferring to suffer in the privacy of their home rather than suffer the indignity of being looked at by the empty and indifferent eyes of an over worked nurse who tells you again that the doctor will get to you.

Why are the emergency rooms the slowest form of medical care on earth?  Why are they chronically understaffed?  Why do the many sit in agony and silence, trapped in the indifference of a health care delivery system that knows very well that this scenario will be repeated again tonight, and tomorrow night and the next night?  Why?  Because the patients are afraid to complain and the people who are not in the waiting room do not care about the people who are.

That scenario has become a metaphor for our modern society.  Those who are in pain are afraid to speak up for themselves and those who are not in pain don't care.  That is what Kierkegaard saw when he looked at the church... a gathering of people in fear and trembling, sitting in a hospital emergency room waiting area.

For most of us, to be believers in a radical spirituality which advocates for both peace and justice, for bread for the hungry and a change in the economic system which creates a few wealthy by keeping the many without bread.... To be the prophets in a society that cannot seem to control its own appetite for violence, prejudice and exploitation.... Then we have to be willing to take a leap out of safety and obscurity and into the light.... A light in the darkness that is sometimes lit by burning martyrs rather than a spotlight on a stage.

We can choose to keep silence out of fear of the consequences or we can choose to live as though the truth were more important than any possible consequences.

What would you do, what would you say, who would you be if you were no longer afraid of what people would say.... About what your mother would think.... What would your faith lead you to stand up for if you were not concerned about how the neighbors would talk about you?

My suggestion is that we give up being afraid.  I just don't think that we can stand idly by anymore.

The Second Creation Story

Community Christian Church

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

June 19, 2011    Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
3Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
6And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." 7So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
9And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
14And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. 16God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night--and the stars. 17God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
20And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky." 21So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 22God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." 23And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
24And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." And it was so. 25God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
26Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." 27So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
29God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.
31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
4These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 

           
I must beg forgiveness for even bringing this up on a weekend when my friend, Jeanmarie, is in town, but I have to tell you a quick story about a bad dating experience I had many years ago, fifteen years....twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred years ago.

Honestly, my daughter was very young and I went out a couple of times with a woman who was also a single parent with a young child.  On our second date she brought up the subject of marriage.... She brought the subject up in a way that made it very clear that it was not a hypothetical conversation.

This is one of those moments when the very evolutionary forces of "fight or flight" kick in for a man and I began listing all of the reasons why I believed that we would not be getting married.  She replied, "Oh no, we will be getting married and we'll have two children together."

Further conversation revealed that she had come upon this very important piece of information through the services of a psychic whom she had employed to investigate our relationship.

Now, that sounds funny when you just say it like that here in this place filled with generally cynical intellectual types but in her world view, a psychic is a perfectly reliable source of useful information.  So, though I know that preachers should always be careful about telling personal stories in public, I mention this one as an illustration of how people can have a communication problem.  In this instance, I was approaching our relationship from a rational and analytical perspective and she was totally crazy.... You see how that can be a problem.

We were two people, seated together at the old Clary's restaurant, on a particular night, many years ago, but we saw and interpreted that objective reality in totally different ways.

And that, I would offer, is why getting people of different religious traditions to agree on a single interpretation of any passage of scripture remains very difficult.  If you read scripture analytically, it reveals a particular world view and if you read as if it is a book of magic, it seems to mean something else altogether.

The first book in the Bible, Genesis, contains two creation stories.  They are very different in nature.  One is a sort of theological poem and the other comes in the form of a narrative replete with anthropomorphic images of God waiting until the cool of the evening to take a walk, a conversation with a snake and trees with magical powers.  That the two stories are very different is not surprising when you realize that even though they are pressed up against one another in chapter 1 and chapter 2 of the same book, they were written in different countries and in different times.  There is as much difference between the creation narrative we read today and the Garden of Eden text which follows as there is between this morning's edition of the NewsLeader and the works of William Shakespeare.... Shakespeare wrote plays in another country 400 years ago and the Garden of Eden story which follows the creation narrative we read today was about 400 years older than Genesis 1.

Though the two accounts differ in almost every way, from the order in which the world came into being and the ways the accounts are told what they share in common is that neither was ever intended to be an account of either history or science.  If you read this narrative at face value and construct a world view based on creation as it is described here, what you see looks something like this:

http://biologos.org/uploads/static-content/OTcosmos.jpg

As people in the 5th century BCE believed, Genesis describes the creation of a flat earth which rests upon pillars which hold the earth up out of the waters of the deep.... Don't ask what those pillars are resting on because the only answer from the ancient world was something like the back of a giant sea turtle..... very unsatisfactory.

You heard Jill reading about a firmament in the heavens which is like a large solid mixing bowl turned upside down over the flat earth.  Windows in the firmament sometimes allowed water to flow through as rain.  The sun, stars and moon were affixed to the firmament and they moved through the heavens as the bowl was moved by the hand of God.

Bill Maher is fond of saying that the Bible was written by ancient dessert dwelling nomads who didn't know where the sun goes at night.  As rude as that sounds, what we have to acknowledge is that this account was written by ancient Jewish slaves in Babylon who, did not know where the sun goes at night.

Jeanmarie teaches cellular biology in a university in Oklahoma where she is surrounded by people who are desperately afraid that she might try to convince her Phd science students to believe in evolution and not in a literal interpretation of this description of a flat earth covered by a solid dome..... which is part of why scientists in Oklahoma can often be found driving great distances to date someone who is not from Oklahoma.... But I digress.

It is difficult to imagine that anytime since Columbus sailed from Spain to the new world that anyone would try to take the Genesis account literally.

And yet the debate, to call it that, rages on.  But it is something like trying to reason with someone who thinks that a psychic is a good source of information.  There is no real conversation taking place between these two opposing world views which often feel like trying to reason with a crazy person.

There are times when we simply have to accept that we are not speaking the same language as some of our religious peers.  There is no science in the Bible for exactly the same reason that there are no phone numbers in the Bible.... It wasn't written for that purpose and so there is no reasonable Biblical debate about evolution or creationism, we just don't need to try to reason with the flat earth society.  

So, when we have jete'd back from the edge of the cliff over looking crazy town, and we come back to this account written by Jewish slaves living in antiquity in Babylon, what does it actually have to say?

On the face of it, Genesis gives us an account of God entering the chaos of the universe and bringing order into it and blessing each aspect of it, calling the day and the night, the earth and the sky, the waters and all of earth's inhabitants "good."  And that, as it stands, is an assuring testimony.  Not that Mecca and Jerusalem are the holy land but all of the earth is holy and precious to God.  Not that one religion is better than another but all people are made in God's image.

But I would like to go a bit further with this text and suggest that what we have here is like hearing one side of a conversation, like listening to a person seated at the table next to you talking on their cell phone.

For many years Old Testament scholars have been convinced that the creation account in Genesis 1 is a Hebrew response or, you could say, a correction of the Babylonian creation myth that is known as the Enuma Elis.

The two accounts have a lot of similarities in their assumptions about a flat earth, a firmament and the pillars in the waters of the deep but they have a fundamental theological difference.  The Babylonian account says that the earth was formed, not by a single God who created and blessed the creation in the process, but rather the Enuma Elis tells us about a violent creation coming about through a battle among the gods.

The earth, according to the Babylonians, was formed from the slain body of the evil and chaotic dragon, Tiamat, and that human beings were formed from the blood of Tiamat.  Now, if you were to believe that people were made from the blood of an evil dragon, that would explain a lot of human characteristics which we don't like to talk about.  The Babylonians were realistic and practical in their theology.... The world is full of suffering and evil and people produce a lot of that suffering and evil so the body and blood of a dragon theory explains a lot about why life is so hard.

But even as slaves in a foreign land, the Jews produced a version of the creation that contradicted those dire beliefs.  They affirmed that the universe was chaotic, a void, without form or shape.
The Hebrew word for this chaos, "tehom" even sounds like that Babylonian name for the dragon, "Tiamat." But rather than a battle with the dragon, the Hebrew story tells us that God.... Literally, God's breath.... The ruach elohim, entered the chaos and brought about a good earth, and good animals and good people.... Which, if you think about it, accounts for a lot of what we experience in life... because just like we can see the world through the eyes of the Babylonians because life can be ridiculously hard and people can be just awful, we can also affirm this Hebrew account because the world can be beautiful and magical and people can be loving and forgiving and generous and wonderful.

The two accounts remind me of an image which is much older than either the Babylonian or the Hebrew creation narrative.  The psychology scholar, Karl Jung, noted that virtually every civilization on earth has an image of a dragon even though no such creature has ever existed.

Jung suggested that the dragon is a creation of the human psyche... a kind of symbol of human potential.  A dragon is a worm that can fly.  Deep within each of us there is an awareness that we can be a real snake in the grass and we are simultaneously aware that, if we try, we can rise above our base instincts and we can soar.  That the image of the dragon is so prevalent both in ancient societies and in the tattoo parlors of the present day is a point of significant importance.  At the deepest level of our primeval awareness we know that we could be absolute monsters or we could become angels.

I know from my old homiletics professors that really great sermons only have one unavoidable point but I've broken several homiletical rules today, so I'm going to run with it.  I have two points I really want you to leave with here today:  The first is that the bible and no other holy text is or was ever intended to be a science text book and anyone who tries to insist otherwise is doing a violence to scripture and to science.

My second point is that the creation narrative in Genesis is a spiritual story, a story best understood when read along side the other creation narratives of the ancient world.  Taken together they form the yen and yang of our spiritual self-understanding.  Lots of religious voices want you to feel like a worm, like a hopeless sinner and this text wants you to understand that the earth you walk on is a good earth, the air you breath is good, as is the sun and moon which warm you and light your way.  And you..... you..... you are made in the image of almighty God.  The earth is good and you either are or could be holy, the choice is yours.

For the Common Good

Community Christian Church      
Roger Ray, Pastor        
June 12, 2011    Pentecost

1 Corinthians 12:4-13            
4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

I had a friend in my church in Louisville who married a beautiful young woman who, after visiting a few Sundays, decided that she preferred going to the Catholic Church, which, seemed to me was pretty much her business.  But my friend hated the Catholic Church and couldn't stop talking about it.  They are the only couple I have ever known about whom it can be fairly said that they divorced because of religious differences.

What made him hate the Catholic Church so much was not really a theological issue though he tried and tried to make it sound like one.  My parishioner was a capitalist in meanest sense of the word.  He liked his nice house and his luxury car.  He wore more jewelry than any man I have ever seen other than Mr. T and he obsessed about making money.

However, he believed that the church should be poor. 

His wife attended one of those old European styled cathedrals with heavy marble pillars and gold plated altar ware.  It drove him crazy that the Catholic Church had amassed so much wealth and, he would say, their members are often so very poor.

Of course, if he were really very concerned about the poor he could have done quite a bit himself by restraining his own spending and being a bit more generous but, over the years, what I realized was not that he was so offended that there was gold on the altar of his wife's church but that the gold was not on his wrist or fingers.

You hear this kind of complaint from Americans a lot when they travel in Central America or in the more impoverished areas of Europe.  In America, we tend to believe that personal wealth is a goal but public wealth is just a waste of money.

I have a friend in Paris who is a physician.  She does not own a car and she lives in a fairly small, one bedroom apartment and she has no desire to move her practice to the United States where she could own several cars and live in a big house.  You can look out her living room window and see a part of the Eifel Tower.  She can walk or ride her bike past some of the most beautiful bridges, towers, statues and fountains in the whole world.  For her, and for a lot of Europeans and Latin Americans, the obscenity is in hoarding great personal wealth while letting the public live without the blessing of great art and beauty.

If the Mona Lisa was owned by a private collector it might be seen by a dozen people a year.  Where it stands in the Louvre it is available to people from all over the world to come and to enjoy..... and, perhaps the word "enjoy" is not at all the right word to use here.  We are inspired by great art.... Our lives are changed when we are exposed to beauty, our souls can be filled with awe and we can then become better and more capable people as a result.

If Barry Stacy took all of his talent and went home and played keyboards, drums, accordions and flutes in a house all by himself, the quality of the music might be the same but the qualitative affect on the world would be reduced to nearly nothing.  When Sean and Barry have finished some of the pieces they do, I often feel remorse that we did not have a thousand people here to hear it.... It seems a shame that only 70 or 80 people were here to experience something so beautiful, so profound, so inspiring but still, don't you see how enriched our lives are by the fact that they are here and they work so hard to find meaningful music to present in our community?

Today is Pentecost in the western Christian calendar.  This is the day in which we celebrate the birth of the Christian Church by the miraculous events described in the second chapter of Acts about how the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples who were in hiding in Jerusalem.

A companion reading to that text is Acts is this lesson we read today from 1st Corinthians in which Paul is trying to explain the nature of the Holy Spirit to a church he had founded but which has, apparently, begun to stray from Paul's teachings.

Paul moves along at a pretty good clip in this letter.  We can assume that most of the contents of the letter would be a reminder to the Corinthian church folk of things which Paul had said in greater detail when he lived among them.  For us, it might move along a little too fast.  There is a lot of material in that paragraph to talk about but I want to pay particular attention to verse seven.

Paul is telling this church that every one of them.... Male or female, Jew or Greek, have been given a gift by the Holy Spirit.  That is affirming in and of itself.  No one should feel that they are worthless.  No one should assume that the work of the church is for more talented people, more educated people, better, more saintly people.  Everyone has been given a gift, the apostle says.  But it is that qualifier at the end of verse seven which catches my attention.....the apostle says that every one of us has been given a talent, a gift, a manifestation of the Spirit.... For the common good.

We had a Catholic bishop in Kentucky whom I once heard speaking while I was on retreat at the Gethsemane Monastery.  He was talking about a time when he was working in a leper colony in Viet Nam.  He was the priest for about 200 people who lived in a village where everyone was afflicted with the horrible distorting disease of leprosy.  Many had simply been dropped off there as children by family members who were afraid of them and who could not bear to look at their faces which were often bereft of noses, ears and lips.

The bishop talked about being on a flight back to the United States when his work in Vietnam was finished.  During the long flight a remarkably beautiful young flight attendant eventually came and sat next to him.  She introduced herself as being a lapsed Catholic but she said that she was getting tired of just flying around the world and wanted to settle down to do something meaningful with her life.  She said that she had not gone to college and didn't really have any job skills so and she wondered if the priest might have any suggestions.

He told her that of all of the gifts that God gives to people, that God gets less return from the gift of beauty than from any other.  God gives some few people amazing beautiful faces and all God gets back is a wrinkled up memory.  The flight attendant was simultaneously intrigued and insulted but she asked the priest, "What would God have me do with my beauty."

And the priest said, "I work among a people who never see beauty.  They are trapped and isolated by a disfiguring disease that is so horrible that they never even see the faces of their own family members."  He said, "If you are willing, I can send you there to work in my old village where just the sight of your smile will lift the burden in the lives of many people."

It was a huge idea, too much to swallow all at once but she asked for the priest's name and number in the states and she promised to think about what he had said.

A couple of years later, long after he had forgotten about the conversation, he did get a call and the young woman said, "If your offer still stands, I think that I am ready now."  He made the arrangements and a few weeks later the flight attendant was living in the leper colony as a teacher.

More than a year passed before the priest was able to go back to Viet Nam but when he did he found his old acquaintance there surrounded by adoring children.  And she told the priest, "I don't know what they see when they look at me, but I know that I have seen the face of God in their faces and I don't know how to thank you for helping me to find my way here."

Now, with that in mind, let's look again at the first three verses of this pericope we have from Paul's letter today:

4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

You may recall an article I published in the newspaper a month or so ago in which I brought up this matter of being a good person.  If you think that you are a good person, shouldn't you be able to tell us what you are good for?

I don't know if Paul is right about this but he is published in the Bible and that beats any publication you or I have ever made it into.

He says that every single one of us has been given a gift which is not for our own pleasure or profit but that we each have been given a gift which we are suppose to use for the common good.  You have something in you which you owe to everyone else, a debt to be paid, an obligation to be fulfilled.  You have a talent, a skill, an ability to do something for other people which, if you take the apostle at face value, you have no right to keep to yourself.

Your spirituality may be personal but it cannot be private.  If you don't know what your gift is, then I can only implore you to try to get it figured out because we all have a leper colony somewhere waiting to be enriched by your smile.

Does God Control the Wind?

Community Christian Church
June 5, 2011



Dr. Charles Hedrick:
The answer given by the Bible and orthodox Christian theology is an unequivocal, yes!  God directs the affairs of human history and regulates the course of the natural world--although Jesus did once say that the "the wind blows where it wants to" (John 3:7)--suggesting that there is no control over the natural order.  In the light of the devastating tornado in Joplin, this question about the wind is really about "theodicy," or in the language of faith: why does God do what s/he does?  Or, how is God evidenced, if at all, in the natural world?  Here is the question simply stated: was the tornado in Joplin "an act of God" or a "natural disaster"?  Who destroyed 25% of Joplin, killed 132 people, and caused millions of dollars in property damage, God or Mother Nature?  


Those of us who consider ourselves people of faith and at the same time post-enlightenment human beings, who tend to think of the world in scientific categories rather than theological categories, simply reject out of hand the notion that God is responsible for the disaster in Joplin.  But, quite frankly, we have difficulty explaining how God is related, if at all, to the natural world.  


This difficulty is caused by the excesses of nature--of which the Force 5 winds in Joplin are but one instance.  Nature is both benign and deadly.  On the one hand, it blesses us with its bounties of field and orchard, but on the other hand, it is "red in tooth and claw."  Nature has always been dangerous, capricious, and ethically blind.  In recent memory Mother Nature, or God, destroyed New Orleans by flood, caused massive loss of life in Indonesia and Japan by earthquake and tsunami, and massive loss of life by earthquakes in Russia, China, Haiti, and by tornados and winds in Alabama, and Georgia--and now in Joplin, Missouri.  It is not possible in a single sentence to enumerate all the "natural disasters," or "acts of God," occurring in recent memory.  


Nature does not reflect the character of a God I would care to associate myself with--assuming it is true that God controls nature.


Such aberrations in the regularly occurring benign cycles of nature pose the greatest challenge to both the traditional understanding of God and to the traditional Christian and Jewish belief that God personally regulates nature.  Such disasters have always played the Devil (so to speak) with the belief that the Judeo Christian God, who by most accounts is gracious, controls nature.  If God controls nature and such unconscionable disasters occur, how can God be considered "good"?  On the other hand, if Mother Nature regulates the world, disasters make better sense.  Mother Nature is ethically blind, and in a natural disaster the righteous suffering along with the wicked is understandable.  Mother Nature is the real culprit here.  But this solution leaves unanswered how God is related to the world.  Traditional answers are simply inadequate.

Dr. Roger Ray:
One of my daughter's friends recently posted on FaceBook page that she was "not lucky" but rather, she is "blessed."  This fairly common and seemingly benign religious sentiment prompted me to try to exploit it as a teachable moment.  I asked her why God loved her so much that He made her smart and beautiful, healthy and relatively wealthy and why then God hates most of the other young people in the world in our cities' crumbling ghettoes, in Africa and South America and most of Asia.

She took the question as being a huge insult and insisted that she was only wanting to give credit where credit is due but she totally rejected the other side of that coin, which is what, I believe, you are asking us to come clean on.... That if God blesses some with good fortune, doesn't God similarly curse many others?  How can we applaud God for the healing of one cancer patient and not decry the death of another?  Or, in our own neighboring community's recent disaster, how do we pray in thanksgiving for those who were spared without demanding an explanation for those who were killed?

This is, as you know Dr. Hedrick, the central question in the book of Job.  If God is good, why is there so much suffering?  The question is asked through 48 chapters but never really answered.  I hope you are more satisfied by my responses today!

As one who has now twice toured the destruction in Joplin and as one who has seen, up close, the disastrous consequences of Hurricane Katrina in the USA and Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua, and I have seen the violent poverty of Palestine, Africa, Central and South America and our own American urban blight and in Appalachia, I can only conclude that God is not in charge of either nature or human history.
I would be remiss in this exchange not to recount the story Ellie Wiesel recorded of a rabbinic trial held in Auschwitz.  Three rabbis formed the judiciary and they brought charges against God for not showing up to end the holocaust against the Jews.  The trial went on for several days and everyone was allowed to speak to the charges.  Wiesel noted that not a single prisoner spoke in defense of God and, in the end; the presiding rabbi pronounced that God was guilty of crimes against nature and against humanity.  Following the pronouncement there was a long silence and then the same rabbi called everyone to join him in evening prayers.

I will not defend the classic monotheistic paradox of thanking God for good fortune and exonerating God for calamities of nature and of human will.  And yet, like the rabbis at Auschwitz, I am still compelled to worship and to seek out a relationship with God.  Not so much because I believe that speaking to God will change any specific aspect of human history but because drawing near to the God to whom we ascribe goodness, compassion, life and generosity changes me, and us, and we change the world.

Dr. Hedrick:
I think we agree. For some reason God has abandoned the world of nature to itself.  Things pretty much run themselves without oversight by powers higher than the natural order of the universe.  In many ways the thought is frightening, but nonetheless if we are honest, it appears to accord with our experience.  We must make our way in the universe with no help except from ourselves.  If we insist that God is good, then we must logically conclude that for some reason the natural world is, or has become, impervious to God.  The one area of our experience that seems to be pervious to divine initiatives is our human state--as flawed as it may be.


The Bible is the one ancient collection of writings that has most influenced our Judeo-Christian culture.  It reflects many religious ideas of questionable value, but in the ancient Book entitled First Kings is found an idea that may have some relevance for our exchange.  The prophet Elijah had fled from Queen Jezebel, who wanted to take his life.  For 40 days and 40 nights he put as much space between him and Jezebel as he could, and finally took refuge in a cave on Mount Horeb.


The word of the Lord came to him!  In those days people apparently believed that God communicated audibly.  In our day, however, the audible voice of God has fallen silent, and usually we institutionalize people who claim to hear audible voices coming from out of nowhere.  God asked, "What are you doing in this cave, Elijah?"  Elijah complained that he was the only faithful Israelite left in the land, and now his life was threatened.  So God told him to go to the front of the cave:

And behold the Lord passed by!  A great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord--but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake--but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire--but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire came a still, small voice. (1 Kings 19:12)    

God was not in the forces of nature, but apparently was in the still, small voice.


The human species has shown itself throughout its existence to be incurably religious.  The question is: will we grow out of our religious attitudes as our species matures, or is our propensity to religion of some sort indelibly imprinted in our genes?  I do not know!  But there is no question that the human psyche has demonstrated itself to be pervious to divine initiatives, which we think come from outside ourselves.  For good or ill, we claim to experience divinity.  Often the divine communication, if such it be, is clearly garbled.  Here is the difficulty: there is as much of us as there is of the divine in the communication.


Our problem is the sorting of the wheat and the chaff.

Dr. Ray:
This may be the point at which I must respectfully disagree though I do so with more than a little self-doubt.  I would not say that God has abandoned the universe to the mere forces of nature.  The larger question the two us seem to try to wrestle to the ground fairly regularly is more about the nature of God.  Does the God whom we confess to believe exists, exist in the form of a self conscious intellect with a particular will or do we tend to think of God in a more Buddhist sense of a collective good will so that a little of god is in each of us but nowhere is there a whole and intact entity that decides that it would be good to make it rain in Missouri and make the sun shine in California today.

Clearly, the world is not universally "good" and so I do not believe that God is a sentient entity possessing both omniscience and omnipotence.  But it is not enough for me to say that god is a concept under which we gather good and loving concepts.  With some fear and trepidation of stepping a bit too closely in the direction of the "intelligent design" folks, I am unwilling to give up on the notion of God existing with both self-awareness and creative power so that God may enter into history and affect the outcomes of events.  Where I draw the line is when any mere mortal pretends to be able to either dictate or influence God's entry into human events or even to assume that they can point and say accurately that "God did this" or "Didn't do that."

Two people are diagnosed with terminal cases of cancer, one dies quickly and the other survives for many years.  Is that God?  Is that nature?  Is that medicine?  I plead with spiritual people to take a humble position on these things and accept that we cannot trace God's footprints through history but I would not philosophically deny God the right or the ability to mix it up with us at will.

I do not wish to belittle the tragic natural disaster in Joplin by discussing the event in any flippant way.  With all respect, I would argue that it is impossible to believe that God caused the tornado to smite Joplin.  If, however, I may speak meaningfully of an act of God, I would say that the thousands of well meaning people flowing into Joplin to give aid to the victims and survivors is a godly act, acts inspired by a loving, compassionate and generous Deity.

The fact that we must live with uncertainty and that we must always question our too comfortable beliefs, always, as you say, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, is why religious communities will continue to exist.  We gather in faith communities to learn, challenge, correct and encourage one another to live out the values which we believe to be near to the heart of God.

Dr. Hedrick:
There is still an elephant in the room!  Let me rephrase: "God has abandoned direct hands-on management of the natural world.  It runs itself with no direct divine oversight."  One must affirm something like that to avoid making God responsible for Nature's disastrous excesses.  People of faith usually separate the problem of Nature's excess from the idea that a benevolent God is running the world in two ways.  One way is to avoid calling them "acts of God" but rather "natural disasters," which is a way of affirming that God is not responsible--but without bothering to address the nature of God directly.  The other way is to appeal to human finitude: "The ways of God are beyond human comprehension," which is a way of admitting that God was responsible for the disaster but appealing to the idea that somehow the disaster fits into a divine plan.


I do not think the idea that God is integral to human existence is easily separated from the idea of God's relationship to the universe.  If God is related in some way to us, we must also acknowledge that God in some way is related to the natural world.  If we describe how God is related to one, we must also be willing to describe how God is related to the other--in order to be intellectually honest.


You use the word "exist" to describe God, which is a way of bringing God into the world of time and space.  I have given up the use of that expression and simply say "God is."  To claim that God "exists" in a world of time and space is to attribute "creatureliness" to God.  To say God "exists" raises the question: Where?  Converting God into Creature-Who-Wills makes God pervious to the same ailments that afflict us:  mutability and decay.  Rather, God is outside, over, and around the world of human decay and renewal.  God does not exist like we do!


However, God is clearly within the world of time and space in our human consciousness, or, to put it another way, in the fertile concept "God"--a concept that seems to endemic to the human condition.  If I may use your word, our concepts of God "inspire" human beings to sacrificial humanitarian acts, but also to acts most would regard as unconscionable--both done in God's name!  


I respectfully disagree:  "the thousands of well-meaning people flowing into Joplin to give aid to the victims and survivors" is not an "act of God," but an act of average people "inspired" by a particular concept of God.  Construing their acts as "godly" is your hermeneutic--the Westboro Baptist Church folk regard their acts as "godly," as do all folk who name God as sanction for their behavior.  As I said: our problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff.


Without a spin, Mother Nature's--or God's, destructive footprints in history are easily seen.  What the concept "God" inspires in us positively, however, is more difficult to see.  Those things are mostly personal, unknown, and usually unsung.

Dr. Ray:
I appreciate the distinction you are making between saying that "God exists" and that "God is."  But, with all due respect to our former president, it does rather depend on what the definition of "is" is.  If we ask, "Does the color blue exist?"  Then we can certainly say that we have seen blue in the sky, in the ocean, in a corpulent cleric's eyes and elsewhere but we would not claim that there is a singular being which is, by character and nature, THE blue.  When we say that "God is" it remains to be said whether or not the word "God" is used to describe our concept of ethical values, good intentions and the places, things and experiences that we regard to be most dear to us or does the word "God" describe an entity which might actually prefer good over evil or perhaps even might prefer red carpet in here over our current purple and pink carpets.

I realize that we have come to the end of our public conversation but it seems to me that when you say that both thousands of volunteers streaming into to aid victims in Joplin and the Westborough Baptist Church members coming to condemn Joplin might be seen as "acts of God" from different perspectives, it leaves me to suspect that your view of God's "is-ness" is as a term under which we gather those things and ideas which we personally hold to be sacred but that there is not a sentient entity who prefers love and charity to judgment and hostility.  And this may be where we continue to disagree.

While I dismiss any anthropomorphic or sectarian descriptions of God, i.e., God is neither male nor female, nor is there a Jewish deity, a Muslim god or a Buddhist god, but that we are all striving to describe our sense of the "Thou."  And saying that, I would like to add that while I agree that you cannot defend a notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing and simultaneously all-loving and good deity because the world contains a lot of undisputed evil.  What seems to be absolutely necessary to sacrifice from this trinity is the notion of being all-powerful.  That's disturbing to many religious folks but it is basically the answer offered by Rabbi Kushner and others who prefer to say that God weeps with us in our sorrows but does not cause them and cannot always prevent them.  In many ways I think our essential problem here is monotheism.

The ancient polytheistic religions did a better job of accounting for both good and bad in the universe by describing both good and bad gods.

However, the other side of your argument about the limitations of human understanding is not quite so easy to dismiss.

I regularly affirm the comedian, Bill Maher's, observation that "I believe in God and yet I don't think that anyone on earth knows as much about God as my dog knows about how I balance my checkbook."  It could be, as you have suggested, that humans are simply "hard wired" for religion but both through a priori awareness and personal experience, the existence of the Holy who is both external and yet eminent seems to be persistently persuasive.  We cannot know, we cannot prove, we cannot accurately describe, manipulate or control and yet neither can we persuasively deny and therefore, we continue to have faith.

The Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room

Community Christian Church  
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
May 29, 2011   Easter 6  

Acts 17:22-31

22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, 'Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, "To an unknown god." What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28For "In him we live and move and have our being"; as even some of your own poets have said,
"For we too are his offspring." 
29Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.'

30 NRSV Bibles arrived at our church this week from the American Bible Society, compliments of our own member of the American Bible Society board, Dr. David Trobisch.  David grew up in a missionary family of rather biblically focused Lutherans and has spent most of the past two decades teaching in a seminary.

And so, when he comes here to teach a Bible study and discovers that not a one of you brought a Bible and several of you are under suspicion of not owning one, or at least not one bearing the signs of translation since the invention of such things as the English dictionary.... It has nearly caused a cranial explosion in the mind of our resident Biblical scholar.

The American Bible Society came into existence nearly 200 years ago for the express purpose of printing and distributing Bibles to everyone, everywhere and in every imaginable language.  They are now grappling with the fact that it absolutely cannot be argued that there is a Bible shortage anywhere in the world.  There is, however, a growing shortage of people who want one and an even more alarming crisis of people who already have one being uninterested in reading it.

I can honestly say that I was one of those uncommon young people who, when ceremoniously presented with a Bible following my baptism on Easter morning, of my 12th year which was 1968, that I actually read it.

In 1968 there were no computers, no video games and there was only one black and white TV in the house and it only got 2 channels and the choice between those two channels was made by my father who, if you could made a dull choice between two channels, managed to do it every time.

But when the minister at 1st Christian Church in Glasgow, KY gave each of us our first whole Bible, he told us that it was God's word and that we should study it diligently.  Now, I suppose that is the kind of thing you say to children in church assuming that no one will do it but, for lack of a better option, I read it.  I memorized portions of it.  I wrote in the margins.

I made comments, put question marks by the parts that didn't make sense to me and drew underlines and stars around the passages which excited me.  I read from my Bible every day, at least a chapter but usually a good deal more.  I began to notice, however, that no one wanted to talk about it.  My parents asked me to go to my room to read it because it made them uncomfortable when I would read a passage out loud or ask questions about what I was reading.

Before long, I realized that my Sunday School teacher had never read it and that our pastor seemed to fumble with it at best.

The disconnect was maddening to me.  They told me that it was a book virtually written by the God who created the universe and would one day send us all either to heaven or hell and yet hardly anyone had anymore than a passing interest in it.

I grew up in a family that never missed church and when I say "never" I mean "never."  We went in bad weather.  We went when we were sick.  We went when we were on vacation.  I went in my prom clothes one Sunday as I was coming home from my Senior Prom at 9 a.m. after being out all night and my dad said, "Don't take off your tie son, if you are man enough to stay out all night, you are man enough to sit up straight in church for an hour."

We never missed, but the other part of that was the strange part.... Even though we never missed a service, we never discussed it at any other time.  No meal time prayers were said unless I said them.  Clearly, while the ritual of going to church could not be ignored, it was my family's intent to otherwise live lives as free of religious language and influence as possible.

I discovered that every other family I knew of was essentially the same.  Everyone was willing to parrot the claims that the Bible was the holy word of God and that God had several rather far reaching expectations of each of us lest He be forced to fry us up like a piece of bacon for all eternity but absolutely no one lived like they believed that it was true..... they were, in all honestly, a little bit afraid that it might be true and so they were willing to go through the motions of some kind of spiritual assent but just barely.

Most people, it seems, are basically atheists.... Skeptics at least, but they are hedging their bet with some religion in case it is all true.

It wasn't until I was in college studying philosophy that I had a name for this phenomenon based on the personal musings of the 17th century French philosopher and scientist, Blaise Pascal.  It is called, "Pascal's Wager," based on an entry in his notebook in which he frankly admitted that no one could prove that God exists but one should live their lives in a way to satisfy the expectations of the Christian faith in case it is true.  If it is true, then you gain heaven and avoid the punishment of hell, if it is not true, then you have led a good life and that is not a real loss..... you may miss some great concerts and parties but, all in all, it is a good wager to make.

Of course, to make that wager really work, you have to assume that God is pretty easy to trick.  It is difficult for me to conjure up a notion of an all powerful but intellectually limited God though such paradoxes do exist.

Similarly, I was not surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger had an affair with his maid.  What surprised me was that he was able to keep the love child secret from Maria Shriver for ten years because doing that actually required acting skills which is not something I would have accused Arnold of having.
When Paul went to Athens, the heart of Greek culture and philosophy, we are told that he had a public conversation with some of the philosophers gathered on Mars Hill.  In a way he is gently making fun of their polytheism but he knows that they largely didn't take it all that seriously either.

Plato had written his works four hundred years before Paul stumbled into town and everyone had read Plato's rather mater of fact assessment of religion.... That the gods were useful in keeping the uneducated masses in line.... Religion was good for the state, it kept people honest, persuaded soldiers to fight in battle unafraid of death and generally supported the rulers.

The Athenians had public art which was, in many ways, just that, art, but the subject of art was generally religious in some way and so the art served the double purpose of also being places to pray or make oblations before a god of war, or agriculture, or fertility or commerce and, in this case, even to an unknown god in case we missed any.

The Athenians didn't know Pascal but they understood the wager.  As we all have, consciously or unconsciously, understood the wager.  But if you are here you have abandoned traditional religious views and all of its magic and superstition.  We're more like Joe Friday on an old black and white Dragnet show.... We want the facts, not the superstitious interpretations and wagers.

Luke does not even claim to have been in Athens with Paul so this is a second hand, Cliff Notes version of what Paul would have said in that civil trial.  Unlike when Paul spoke in synagogues and among Jews and Jewish converts, Paul does not quote scripture or mount a doctrinal argument.

He speaks to them in the images of poets and calls their attention to the natural world around them.  I think that is honest.  That is something we can respect.

When I was a young college student, we said that in the philosophy department we were seeking truth but that search was like looking for a black cat in a dark room.  When I went to seminary, I heard one student say that the difference between philosophy and theology is that in seminary we are looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there.

That was too cynical for me then and it is still too cynical for me now.  I have grown out of both belief and patience with a lot of the idolatry that disguises itself as Christian faith in our age but I have not grown out of faith.  To say that there is no God doesn't ring true with what I see when I look at the night sky... it doesn't ring true with what I observe when I take a walk at the nature center.... It doesn't square with what my heart tells me when I am confronted with suffering or injustice.

I believe in God but I believe that any time you try to nail God down to a set of dogmas in any religion, that you turn faith into an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.

My family and probably your family and every family you have ever known, felt something of the divine presence and they were told to take that feeling and shove it into the straight jacket of being Catholic or Pentecostal or Lutheran or Baptist when, in fact, God is none of those things and all of those things and too big to be contained by any of them.

And acknowledging that fact allows us to come back to the Bible and read it, not as a book written by God but as a book written by our ancestors in the faith who have also been looking for a black cat in a dark room.  Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong.  The Bible contains brilliant revelations and really embarrassing and sick stuff, side by side.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is not God's word, but God's word is in it, if we can find it.  Just as God is in the tiniest quark and atom as well as in nature and the cosmos, if only we can find her.
For the most part, the nature of God remains shrouded in mystery.  We can stand in awe but we cannot know.  We can worship but we cannot describe or control God.

And so we come here, not to participate in secret rituals which get us into God's favor while most of the world is in danger of punishment nor are we willing to play the childish game of trying to be barely religious enough to keep a demonic god off our backs.  We come to encourage one another to be more like the one who has taught us to show compassion and mercy, to forgive and to love, to be peaceful and generous.

There is a lot we will never know in our mortal lives but what we do know is that good can conquer evil and we can bring light into darkness and that love can heal hate.  We will not be dogmatic about what cannot be known but we are devoted to what is obviously true and so we are willing to sacrifice to give birth to the good and in so doing, we draw near to God.

Once You Were Not A People

Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
May 22, 2011  Easter 5

1 Peter 2:2-10 2Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation-- 3if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and 5like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6For it stands in scripture:
'See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
   a cornerstone chosen and precious;
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.'
7To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe,
'The stone that the builders rejected
   has become the very head of the corner',
8and
'A stone that makes them stumble,
   and a rock that makes them fall.'
They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people;
once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

In my very small hometown there was a country club.  My family didn't belong to it but I never thought much about that until one of my friends from church asked me to go to the pool with him.  In those days before air conditioning, going to the swimming pool was the best thing going on in town during the hot days of summer.

My brothers and I went to the large public pool.  We had friends from school and from church there every day and it was not uncommon for us to spend the entire day there, every day, during the worst part of the summer.  But one day I had agreed to meet a friend at the park to play tennis and then we were going to go swim, and at his invitation, I rode my bike with him to the country club.

It was a small town and so, once there, I recognized people that I knew from school, from church and some of the families from the Electric Coop where my father worked.  After about 30 minutes, a life guard came over to me, a young woman who was actually a Sunday School teacher at my church, and she told me that I would have to leave because my family did not belong to the Country Club.

Small towns being the way that they are, word got to my father that I had been at the Country Club and when he came home from work he scolded me and told me never to go there again because it had embarrassed him for me to be told to leave.

I thought that my embarrassment was enough but he was embarrassed because, even though we had cousins at the Country Club.  We had fellow church members and he had work associates there, still, we were a blue collar family and the Country Club was structured and priced in such a way as to make sure that it was a reserved only to the white collar or blue blood families in our little town.

These were still the days of segregation in the south so I can only imagine how it must have felt to have been black in Glasgow, KY.  Even after segregation, there were neighborhoods where black folks lived and other neighborhoods where white folk lived and if a black person was in a white neighborhood, it had better be to come and mop someone else's floors.

Over the past decades we have done a lot to break down some of the clear divisions of the various "in" and "out" clubs of life.  Jobs which were once male only can now be made open to women.  Schools are integrated in the classroom even if they are still self segregated in the lunch room.
Neighborhood covenants which once restricted ownership to white Christians are now a historical embarrassment.  And yet, after all of this progress, our nation is more divided than it ever was before, at least in my lifetime.

The political divide is a part of our daily bread now, being fed to us in the newspapers, on the radio as we drive to and from work and on TV news all night.  It strikes me that we are in a terrible rush to re-establish a dark ages European economy in which the population is starkly divided between lords and peasants.  

And it is not simply the people at the country club making certain that the Jews, blacks and blue collar folks can't get it..... it is often the poor who are fighting to make certain that they become more poor.... Insisting that we make it nearly impossible for labor unions to survive, working to un-do even modest progress in health care reform and championing legislators who consistently give billions in subsidies to big oil companies, military manufacturers and Wall Street bankers, all of whom are making record profits, while unemployment continues to rise, salaries fall and things such as home ownership and health care become unattainable to more and more people.

We need to be rebuilding the power grid so that we can build wind farms in Wyoming and solar collection farms in Arizona and move the power around the country.  We need to be creating good paying jobs for Americans but what we are doing is creating a few billionaires and a few hundred million peasants.

I am mystified by why the poor and the middle class so consistently vote and act for their own demise but I think that at least a part of the problem is having had any self worth, self respect, or dignity beaten out of them by religion.

I sometimes make jokes about the use of guilt and fear to get things done around here.  But as is often the case with humor, if there were not a substantially real side to it, it wouldn't be funny.  Almost everyone in the modern west has been reared with a certain amount of religiously produced anxiety.

Parents take their kids to church, at least in part, to socialize them and get them to become a part of a moral, productive and decent society.  However, the messages used to keep kids from being immoral, indecent or slovenly are often on the level of telling children that there are monsters under their beds who will kill and eat them the moment they fall asleep.

We tell them that their mortal lives are short and that at the end of this brief time of testing, they will either go to heaven for all eternity or they will be sent to a place of eternal painful punishment.  We don't want them to be sexually immoral but religion often makes them fear their own bodies, assuring them that to even think about sex comes with it an eternity in the flames of hell.  Unable to become something other than a human being, most become uncomfortably resigned to the fact that they are probably not going to ever see the pearly gates.

We want them to be honest and so we tell them crazy lies about how worthless they are, how evil, how corrupt and that their basic urges to eat, drink, sleep and have friendships all somehow lead them into paths of condemnation.  It is amazing how the message of love and justice gets so perverted into a religion of guilt and fear.

I have often thought that one of the most important gifts the Jewish faith gave to the world three thousand years ago was the concept of the worth and dignity of every person.  Whereas most ancient religions affirmed the royalty and insisted that the royal family was at least partially divine, while the peasants were made for meaner fair, the Jews insist in their scripture that we are all made in the image of God and the mere fact that we have breath is a sign of the spirit of God living in us.

The ruling class, whether it is in ancient Egypt, medieval Germany or modern day America, the ruling class uses religion to beat down the peasants into a subservient attitude in which they do not believe that they deserve to live well.... They don't really deserve good health care, a safe working environment, time off or prospects for a dignified retirement.  The few use religion to control the many but if that were the only kind of spirituality on the menu, you sure wouldn't find me wearing a big black dress in public.

At the heart of the Jewish faith, the Muslim faith, for that matter, at the heart of the Christian scriptures is a sense of the dignity of every person.  Peter says in our scripture lesson today, "once you were not a people,"..... you didn't have value.  You were taught that you were born to wash someone else's dishes, mop someone else's floors and do the world the favor of dying as soon as you couldn't do hard labor anymore...... "once you were not a people, but now you are God's own people."

Healthy spirituality should elevate the human spirit.  If our religion does not liberate us, inspire us, encourage us, then it might be time to go church shopping.
At least a part of why we Americans are willing to tolerate the growing disparity between the haves and the have nots is that a sick spirituality has taught us to accept being treated like dogs.

I think an honest reading of our Judeo-Christian faith tradition elevates our status.  I remember reading a quote from an English Pet Cemetery gravestone set over the final resting place of a bulldog.  It read, "Major: born a dog, died a gentleman."  Do you hear that?  Once you were not a people, now you are God's own family.

I love the old Spanish novel about Don Quixote de la Mancha.  We most often mention Don Quixote in reference to foolishness, insanity or meaningless crusades.  We say that someone is "tilting at windmills" to mean that they are all excited about something which is nothing.... Or we say that something is "Quixotic" to mean that it sounds noble but is, in fact, unattainable.

The character, Don Quixote, is, obviously, more that a little out of touch with reality but there are ways in which his unreality is better than the reality which has entrapped the minds of nearly everyone else in the novel.  Quixote imagines himself to be a noble knight, and, like all true knights, his courage must spring from a passionate adoration of a worthy princess.

Quixote fixes his attention on a singularly unattractive scullery made who is a part-time prostitute, Aldonza.  Don't let the fact that the part of Aldonza was played by Sophia Loren in the movie fool you.  In the novel, Aldonza is described as being very unattractive, even stupid.  But in the eyes of Quixote, she is not Aldonza, the unsuccessful prostitute.... She is Dulcinea del Toboso, the beautiful and elegant princess.

She rejects Quixote's adoration, telling him to see what everyone else sees in her, a fat, ugly sweaty prostitute whom men use and promptly forget.  But on his deathbed, Quixote is visited by a beautiful lady and he asks her for her name and she says, "I am Dulcenia."  Her transformation was complete, not because the world gave her the permission to rise above her former low estate but because Quixote had seen in her something which only required faith to reveal.

We have said in our vision statement that we want to give this church to Springfield as an example of a healthy spiritual community.  What we didn't say specifically but which is an underlying assumption is that our community is abundantly supplied with unhealthy spiritual communities in which people are taught to despise themselves for their sexuality and mistakes in life.  We are over supplied with churches that tie up burdens of guilt and fear on our shoulders.

A healthy spiritual community is a place of liberation, of forgiveness and healing.  A healthy spiritual community is a place where you can be safe to dream of yourself becoming more than you have ever been, more than what others call you, more than how you have been treated.

This should be the place where all of us who have been told that we should be the Aldonza's of life are given the awareness that we are called to be Dulcinea.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God's own people.... The most powerful, creative, intelligent and important people who have ever lived.  Don't let anyone ever tell you differently.

Investing in Community

Community Christian Church    
Roger Ray, pastor  
May 15, 2011    Easter 4

Acts 2:42-47
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common;
45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

By being here today you have clearly chosen not to attend the "Get Prepared" conference which is going on this weekend at the expo center downtown.  Playing on public paranoia, combined with the political organization of our local Tea Party members, the conference organizers promise to teach people how to grow and preserve their own food.  How to convert all of their assets into gold and silver so that they can survive the melt down of society which is sure to come, either by global warming, terrorist activity or the simple fact that we have elected a black, Muslim,  socialist to be our president.

If he were alive today, we could take Charles Darwin down to the Expo center and prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that human kind did not evolve from apes because, clearly, apes are much too smart to attend a conference of this sort.  But this shameless celebration of crippling paranoia is a reminder of when this kind of insanity was more broadly expressed in our society with our Civil Defense system.

My former church actually had those stickers in the windows from the 1950's declaring the church's boiler room to be a shelter for the neighborhood in the event of a nuclear disaster.

My generation grew up watching the civil defense films that taught us how to survive in a basement for two or three years while the radiation from a nuclear war dissipated.  I still remember the day in jr. high school when my friend, Pryor Johnson, just fainted and fell off the gym bench when they were showing us the film about how to deliver a baby while living underground.  

Other films dealt with how to ration food and water, how to seal and contain human waste in drums and how to set broken bones and stitch up gaping wounds.  The absurdity of the whole proposition of sending Americans underground to huddle together in basements that would no more protect you from nuclear fallout than the plastic sheets and duct tape suggested by the Bush administration would protect us from airborne anthrax never seemed to occur to the teachers who made us endure these ridiculous anxiety producing films.

Our church doesn't have a basement but, for the moment, let's pretend that it did and that our imaginary basement were supplied with sufficient water, dried foods, candles and potties so that we could all survive down there, far away from the purple rain or whatever it was which scared us into hiding.

Thankfully we are well supplied with doctors and nurses cause, "I don't know nothing bout birthin no babies, Ms. Scarlet."  I'll bless them but until that day, I'm not much help.  But, as much as I love every last one of you..... even when you are texting me at 11 p.m. or calling me at 6 a.m. to tell me something which could have perfectly well waited until office hours..... I love ya, but 24 hours together in a confined space..... 2 days, a week, a month.... Without scope or right guard???

What they never discussed in the civil defense films was how we are to keep from killing one another.  Just imagine if we barred the doors down at the expo center this morning and locked all of those paranoid survivalists in together over night.... How long would it be before all of those "concealed weapons" began to come out of their secret holsters?  I can't prove it but I would suppose that the shoot out at the OK Hammons Corral would take place before the donuts arrived the next morning.

In all seriousness, building community is phenomenally difficult even among the most sane and the most decent sort of folks.  It is a peculiar irony to me that solitary confinement is the most severe of punishment.  Criminals tremendously prefer the company of other criminals over being isolated but then we do even worse when we cannot have isolation at all.

We crave human contact so much that we have gone to great lengths to create a postal system, telegraph and telephone, e-mail and texting and now we finally have the two-way video conversations on our cell phones and lap tops which used to be only on Dick Tracy's wrist in the comics.  But with each step of technology that connects us to other human beings more easily, we become a little less connected in fact.

As our population grows, fewer people join civic clubs.  Sociologists have commented on the fact that more and more people go bowling but there are fewer and fewer bowling leagues.  And even though, here in the Midwest, we have this phenomenon of mega-churches, fewer and fewer people go to church and the mega-church allows you to remain perpetually lost in the crowd for years, sitting in pews surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people without ever meeting any of them.

I'm the pastor of a church that I helped to named "Community" because it is my goal to create community among us but I don't know my neighbor's name.  I have never met the two men who mow my yard.  I have no idea who delivers the mail or collects the garbage.  I have hundreds of friends on the Book of Faces, many of whom I have never met.

We like to look at people.  We like to be around people.  But when we are forced into close proximity with one another we have real difficulty in getting along.  We often find most noticeable about one another the things that irritate us rather than the things that attract us to one another.

In rural Nicaragua there is a saying for this, when you catch two people gossiping with one another, the question roughly translates, "Are you eating your neighbors at the fence?"

The one real exception to this is when there has been a life altering crisis, either a good one or a bad one.  The immediate reaction to the news of the 9-11 attacks a decade ago was seen as lines formed at gas stations and grocery store shelves where emptied...... the latent paranoid mentality that makes some people go to a survivalist conference came out in a huge portion of the society, even in an isolated place like Springfield which just isn't going to rank very high on a terrorist priority list.... But within hours partisan divisions began to evaporate.

Public servants, whom we rarely thought about, firemen, became national heroes.  People who normally couldn't care less if the east coast just boarded ships and went back to Europe were willing to immediately send the shirt off their backs to strangers in New York City.   Even I stopped publicly criticizing George W. Bush.... For several days.

And that is the problem.  A crisis can create community for a few moments.  When there is a common enemy, even people who naturally dislike one another can become allies.  It just doesn't last long.  The day Osama bin Laden was killed, the right wing could hardly find anything to talk about.  Newt Gingrich was so momentarily confused that he even reportedly made a pass at his current wife!..... I kid Newt!

Finding Osama after a decade long hunt for the world's most wanted man did not lead to a sustained sense of community.  The bad news for the 24 hour media is that you can only kill a terrorist once.  If he had been captured and put on trial it would have given them months of stuff to talk about but once the news was broken that Osama was dead, the best they had to talk about was whether or not President Obama would release gruesome photographs of the body.  I hope that the Tea Party doesn't keep up the drum beat to see the pictures as long as they kept up the demand to see the president's birth certificate.... There's only so much I can take before I am in danger of becoming cynical about their sincerity.

Our scripture lesson from Acts today describes a profound coalescing into community resulting from a different kind of crisis.  Luke gives us the only account of the events following the first Easter.  And Luke wasn't there so we are getting a potentially heavily polished apple but the basic story is believable to me.
The early church community had witnessed the brutal death of their leader whom they had hoped would become their king after he had led a successful revolt, running the Romans out of Israel.  Jesus was dead.  The Romans were still there.  Everything was the same, only worse, except for the fact that they had realized that in some very profound way, Jesus wasn't dead and the movement wasn't over.

I would not pretend to know exactly what that early community had experienced, not in such specificity as to try to put it into concrete terms, but they had experienced Jesus as Christ beyond the tomb.

After 9-11, I developed the bad habit of sleeping with CNN on all night.... To the point that when I am traveling I can hardly go to sleep in a silent room.  More importantly, I found that every sermon I had written prior to 9-11 seemed to look silly to my own eyes when I would open a file to look at how I had treated certain Biblical texts in the past.  The world had become instantaneously smaller and more dangerous and things that had once seemed important to me became venial.

 In the early weeks of the church, as Luke described it, the people's world had changed in such a way that the value of things changed.  What became important to them was their connection to one another.  Valuable possessions that they had once hoarded to insure their own security became unimportant and people willingly sold what they had so that they could share with their brothers and sisters with whom they were now knit together in an intense community experience.

I don't know how long it lasted but it lasted at least long enough to give them a name.  Church, in Greek, "ecclesia," means "called out group."
They came to be called a church because they did become a community that looked out for one another, shared with one another, loved one another.
I have often observed that Jesus preached about the coming Kingdom of God but rather than the Kingdom of God, he got the church and one is forced to wonder how he feels about that deal?

Heaven didn't come through a divine invasion of the world of space and time.  Evidently, heaven only comes when we find people to be of greater value than things.  When we can, with or without a crisis, create a community out of people who could just as easily eat one another at the fence but who choose instead to learn to accept, work with, share ideas with and eventually love one another.

There were several attempts at creating utopian societies in the early settlement of the British colonies.  The Spanish had come here a century before looking for gold and silver they could steal from Indians.  The French came looking for furs and tobacco.  But my people, the British, came trying to get away from other British people.  That's an over simplification but it gives me some satisfaction to sum it up that way.

When King Charles had had about enough of Puritan religious snobbery, Puritans began to immigrate to what became the Boston area of Massachusetts.  Most famous among the colonizers was Jonathan Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan who hoped that if only they could get away from the Catholics and the Anglicans, that some real Christian people could come here and establish a sort of heaven on earth.  He told them: We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ......community.... as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace,
None of the utopian experiments were especially successful and some, evidently, resorted to eating their neighbors at the fence in an alarmingly literal manner.

Our church, our community, our ecclesial called out group came into existence in a sort of a crisis.  My personal crisis came as I realized that when I was no longer either a pastor or a Disciple that I couldn't find a church that I could stand to go to.  I gave it some tries and ended up reading my e-mail and sending text messages and praying for it all to end.  I honestly wish that I had found some place that didn't strike me as being totally irrelevant.

Many of you have reported similar experiences.  Some of you were excluded from your mother church because of your sexual orientation.  Others couldn't be comfortable in a church where your son or daughter, or your friend would have been rejected because of who they love.

Others had more complex ideological reasons for being among the church alumni association.  You got to a point where you just couldn't buy into the superstitious stuff anymore.... You just weren't going to be manipulated by guilt and fear anymore.... Or, as I remember very distinctly my friend Mel Miller telling me, he just got to where he couldn't go to a church where there was no mention of the fact that our nation was engaged in a deadly and questionable war and that we lived in a city surrounded by serious poverty and addiction.

We became refugees through doctrinal torture and religious boredom.  But creating community is not automatic for us.  Victims have a nasty habit of becoming victimizers.  We too can eat our neighbors at the fence.

If we are to become a community in a lasting sense then we have to decide that what brought us together is more important than any of the annoying things that might tear us apart.  We are not a community because everyone agrees with everything I say in a sermon or everything I publish in the NewsLeader.  Some of you wish you could hear some more traditional theology.  Some of you wish I would be less controversial.  And some of you are probably wishing that I would tell some more jokes about Newt Gingrich.... Shame on you!

We're coming up on our third anniversary.  The crisis of isolation that first caused us to meet together in funeral home chapel is becoming a distant memory.  You can forget that we have not formed a new church out here simply out of choice but more because we had no other choice.  Most of us would have gone to another church if there had been one to go to that did not insult our character, our intellect or our conscience.

One of the early symbols of the church was a line drawing of a boat.  Some historians speculate that the church used the boat image as a way to disguise the cross.... You could mark your home with a cross on the door, letting Christians know where they could come worship by simply drawing a boat at the bottom of the cross, making the cross look like the mast of a ship.

I'm not so sure that was it.  I think that it is just as possible that the early Christian communities saw themselves as being in a boat with one another.....like a life boat in which everyone's survival depended upon being able to cooperate and share with one another.... Like being trapped in a church basement together with nothing but communion bread and grape juice to live on for a couple of years.

Our mission statement says that we have formed this church because we want to work together for social justice and boy do we have our work cut out for us.

Do you know that the military budget in the United States has doubled since 9-11 and that's not even counting the costs of three Middle Eastern conflicts?  Military spending is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  Why are there no decent jobs?  Why do so many families live in danger of eviction, hunger and illness?  Because all of our resources are going to a military machine.  We have a mission to witness for peace, for economic justice, for an end to oppression, liberation of the unjustly incarcerated and an end of violence.

But we won't have a voice for long unless we love one another.  The Peace Network of the Ozarks sprang up in the midst of the crisis of the war against Iraq but it soon fell apart and the war goes on.  The interfaith aids network came together in Springfield in the presence of violence and oppression against gays and lesbians but the interfaith groups couldn't get along with one another and that coalition went away and the prejudice remains.

For us to make a difference, for our community to really matter, we have to fulfill that vision part of our mission statement that says that we want to be a healthy community.  This means that we decide to be tolerant, even when we feel irritated.  It means that we will decide to be agreeable, even when we don't always agree.  It means that even when a person seems to be just too full of themselves to be contained in a small sanctuary, that we choose not to burst that bubble.

We strive to be a prophetic voice of social justice for this community and to have the credibility to do that, the first gift we must give to Springfield is the example of a healthy spiritual community.

In spite of our political, doctrinal and personal disagreements.... What we agree on is that we love one another, respect one another and we are resolved to take care of one another both in crisis and in calm times.   By learning to show forgiveness and tolerance to the people we do know, we will become capable of showing forgiveness and tolerance to the people of other nations and religions whom we do not know.  An old commandment I give to you, that you love one another.