Wisdom and (or is it 'vs'?) Religion

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
"Trinity" Sunday   May 26, 2013

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31        
Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
2On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand;
3beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
4"To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
22The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.
23Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
24When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
25Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth--
26when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil.
27When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep,
29when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth, 30then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, 31rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

It never got much traction but last year there was a fairly feeble attempt at getting people all worked up about the Mayan calendar foretelling the end of the world sometime in December.  Somehow, people just couldn't get all that worked up about it since a civilization that had not managed to forestall their own demise five hundred years ago didn't have much credibility in our day.

Mayans are not much interesting to me as prophets of the distant future but I have found historical musings about their demise to be very interesting.  The current speculation is that there was a theocratic government in which priests were the educated class who kept records of agricultural sciences and they told the rest of the population what to do.

At some point, there appears to have been a peasant uprising in which the laborers killed off the priestly class and with them went their ability to organize, plant, tend and harvest crops.
The Mayans didn't entirely cease to exist but their civilization broke down and their numbers dramatically decreased as the survivors returned to a more primitive hunter-gatherer society.

Ancient religions were all mixed up in agricultural cycles and practical wisdom.  In fact, Islam is arguably the first world religion that is not tied to agricultural seasons.  Most of our Old Testament is full of what was, at the time of its writing, wisdom teachings about agriculture, economics, government and family life.  As such, scripture was a source, not so much of mythology, but of helpful information.

In our lifetimes there has been a lot of conversation about the conflict between science and religion and though there have certainly been some high profile and laughable historical examples of this conflict, it wasn't until the modern era that the two universes of knowledge appeared to draw a line in the sand to fight one another.

Michael Dowd, the noted author of "Thank God for Evolution" has argued that the new scripture for our generation should be scientific evidence.  He says that we need to give up our obsession with ancient texts and to focus on what can be rationally known through empirical science.

By the way, Michael and his wife are planning to come here and live in the lower floor of our Annex next spring for four months while Michael and I see if we can co-author an alternative lectionary for progressive churches so you will be hearing more about his work in the next few months.

As you see in this reading from Proverbs this morning, the ancient Jews revered wisdom but in our age, religion often seems to revere ignorance.  This is one of the most crucial aspects of progressive Christianity, this is what made me come back to parish life after giving up on the church entirely..... we have rejected all forms of magic and superstition in favor of a fact based approach to spirituality.

We are unwilling to make grand truth claims about things that cannot be known..... there are, undoubtedly, a lot of things that are true that we know nothing about, but just because a religious claim cannot be shown to be either true or false doesn't mean that we have to act like we believe the wild assertions people make about things that have never been seen and cannot be seen..... like heaven and hell, angels and demons, souls, spirits, incarnation, the Trinity or even a really good haggis.

Many in our era have abandoned the church and given up on religion because it seems to confuse facts with imaginary beliefs but I'm telling you that I have come back to church, come back to religion, because, in my observations, our culture is combining facts with imagination.

The major western religions were all, in one way or another, something akin to the Mayan revolt against the ruling class.  Judaism began among escaped slaves from Egypt.  Zoroastrianism was a challenge to the inequality between the peasants and the ruling class of Persians.  Christianity took root among an occupied and oppressed peoples who were impoverished by a ruthless empire.  Even Islam began as a reform movement that sought to elevate the poor and the oppressed, ironically, even challenging the traditional Jewish and Christian oppression of women.

The church of the future must once again fall in love with wisdom.
We must be the protectors and proponents of what is true.  I don't want to sound paranoid to you but I have to tell you, while people have good reason to look askance at the reliability of religion as a source of true information, you should not rationally assume that either your government, or corporations or the media are going to be devoted to the truth if we don't maintain a church that is devoted to reality.

Allow me to illustrate:

When BP tells you that they are cleaning up an oil spill in the gulf, that "clean up" involves spraying oil with a chemical dispersant that does not either "clean up" or "disperse" oil.  It just makes it clump together and sink so that you cannot see it on the surface of the water but it really is adding one dangerous chemical to another dangerous substance and sinking it to the ocean floor where it continues to poison marine life.

Over 40 years ago, it was Republican President, Richard Nixon, who set up the Environmental Protection Agency after a huge oil spill off the coast of California.  But since this agency was set up to protect our environment, Congress has passed legislation to exclude 70,000 different chemicals from regulation..... not because those chemicals are not dangerous but because some lobbyist got an exclusion for a chemical that they make a profit on so the agency that is supposed to protect you from pollution cannot even investigate the damage done by more than 70,000 chemicals in use in our nation.

We set up the Center for Disease Control at the end of WWII, largely to investigate ways to fight malaria but also to keep a watch on communicable diseases, poisons and injury causing devices.

However, the gun lobby has gotten legislation passed that makes it illegal to investigate injuries from guns.  So, in the gun control debate, you will hear people saying, "We have no evidence that gun control legislation is effective," and they are telling the truth...... because they have made it illegal to keep records!

Teddy Roosevelt set up the Food and Drug Agency to protect the public from foods or medications that had been, in his words, "adulterated."  But now, our current president has appointed a Vice President of the world's leading food adulterator, Monsanto, to be the advisor to the FDA.  Many nations are now banning all Genetically Modified Organisms from their food supply, others make food labeling mandatory..... shoot, even China mandates labeling of GMO's on all food products and these are the people who paint children's' toys with lead and use anti-freeze to sweeten toothpaste.

Our FDA does not allow us to label foods as being GMO-free.....this from the agency that spent two generations saying that the facts were insufficient to conclude that tobacco poses a health risk..... you can't make this stuff up.

And it is not always just covering up truthful information, sometimes it is intentional misinformation.  In our neighboring state, Kansas, their legislature is currently considering a bill to mandate that teachers misinform students regarding global climate change, intentionally teaching children to reject climate science.

Though, some of the crazy thinking in government is still traceable to the remaining vestiges of religious views that should have been set aside since the enlightenment.  Recent polls indicate that 76% of Republicans believe that Jesus will return and bring about the final judgment which accounts for their indifference to pollution and climate change.

Illinois congressman, John Schimkus, who is the chair of the committee on the environment and the economy, said:  "The earth will end only when God declares it to be over."  A guy who couldn't pass a sixth grade earth science test is in charge of the subcommittee on the environment.  I don't want to say that his religion is ridiculous but I do wish that he could be reassigned to the committee on leprechauns and tree fairies.

This past month, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million which is a level our planet has not seen in 3 million years.  We are at a tipping point and yet you don't hear anything about this in the corporate media because the truth could harm business and in our civilization, profit is the real religion and no one can question it without being labeled a heretic.

The ancient Hebrews portrayed wisdom as a woman who stood in the marketplace calling out to those who would listen to turn away from foolishness and to embrace the gift of wisdom, truth, understanding..... shoot, just accurate information.  That is the call we must answer.  We can no longer be held hostage to ancient superstitions that make us deny reality.  Our greatest sacrament is the truth and facts are our scriptures.

We will teach our children to think critically with real analytical skills and we will not bow before a majority, no matter how large, that insist that we pretend to believe either what cannot be known or that is clearly false.

I am convinced that if you can get people to pretend to believe enough preposterous things that you can get them to do almost any preposterous thing.... like invade a country for no good reason, poison your own land, water and air or even eat some kind of toxic frankenfood.  But, if you can eschew lies, magic and superstition then..... well, let it be said clearly:  One person armed with the truth becomes a majority.

We may not have access to all of the information, we don't have the truth about everything, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and it is our goal in this church to head into the future with both of our eyes open.

Gitmo and the Tower of Babel: Power Run Amok

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
May 19, 2013    Pentecost

Genesis 11:1-9
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." 5The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." 8So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The way that a classic song, movie or book becomes a classic is not that they were written in a classical style but actually it is just because they won the popularity contest.  The very first record that I ever bought was a 45 entitled, "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've God Love in my Tummy"  That song did not become a classic.  The first album I ever bought was the Beatles "White Album" and though the vinyl is long gone, the music is still on my phone and I listen to it regularly.

A classic is a work that has a life beyond its immediate origins.  Sometimes that is a function of quality and sometimes it is for more unconscious reasons.  There are classic children's stories that we repeat for hundreds of years, not because they are such great stories but because they somehow speak to us at a deep and powerful level..... to children, all adults are like giants and so when a witless child out smarts adults and slays a giant, a child feels an unconscious reassurance that gives Jack a life on multiple continents and in many generations.

Similarly, a lot of the anthropomorphic Greek narratives about the gods remain in use because they speak to profound psychological truths.  So much so that we often name certain mental illnesses or complexes after the Greek gods, such as Narcissus, Oedipus and Electra.

A lot of ancient stories collected in our scriptures have been preserved for the same reasons.  Sometimes, the stories function at several levels, some of which may be conscious and some are unconscious.

The Genesis narrative about the Tower of Babel is one of those.  Many of these ancient Hebrew stories serve as what we call "etiologies," that is, they tell us why things are the way that they are.  On the surface of it, the Babel story tells us why there are so many languages among neighboring peoples but at a deeper level there is a profound anti-empire message.

The story is based on a much more ancient Sumerian myth but the name was changed to Babel as a commentary on the pride and arrogance of the great Babylonian empire that enslaved the Jews to help build their capital city with its famous ziggurat.

The Jew's crowning architectural achievement had been their temple which the Babylonians destroyed and carried them away to Babylon where everything was much bigger and much more intimidating than anything they had ever seen.  But even though the Babylonian empire was huge, powerful and seemingly suffered no fear of even the gods, they were destroyed by another empire and Alexander the Great had their ziggurat torn down the way that they had previously destroyed the Jewish temple.
So, subtly, perhaps even below the conscious level, this story of the tower of Babel is repeated as a warning against the hubris of empire.  There are even "between the lines" insults in the way the story is told.

The proud empire decided that they could do anything, so they would build a tower so tall that they could challenge even the gods.  Note in verse 5 that they thought they were building a tower up into heaven but God had to actually come down to even be able to see it.  Nations are not very good at seeing their relative importance in the world, often imagining themselves to be much more than they really are.

When you are the king of the hill it is difficult to imagine ever not being the king of the hill.  Like the Hebrews, when our nation began we had a very fresh memory of having been bullied by an empire.  We sought to create a nation whose moral force was larger than the military force of the empire we had escaped.

We wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that were intended to protect the rights of every person and though our founders had all kinds of racial and gender biases I think that we have to recognize that given the culture in which our founding documents were written, there was a kind of nobility there we would be foolish not to applaud.

Even our art and monuments spoke of blind justice in which everyone, without regard to class or station in life, would be treated equally under the law.  We wrote into our constitution that upon arrest anyone had to be charged within 48 hours.  We described a legal system that protected the weak and the powerless from the abuses of an arrogant government or ruler who might have otherwise executed or permanently imprisoned you for disagreeing with them or holding differing religious values.

We were the envy of the world.  The French celebrated our ideals by giving us the statue of Liberty that boldly proclaims a poetic denunciation of the abuses of aristocracy and empire and insists upon respect for human dignity and compassion for the poor.  The inscription reads:

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,
Mother of Exiles. .......
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

It is not hard to see then why many 19th century Christians came to see America as the new promised land, to claim for ourselves the idea that we were now God's chosen people who would take in the homeless poor and open to them a golden door of liberty, equality, justice and opportunity with religious freedom and racial diversity.

We may never have done it perfectly but this is how we long to see ourselves, this is who we want to be.
The Bill of Rights was written when our survival was anything but certain.  The poem inscribed on the base of Lady Liberty was written when the nation was still reeling from the wretched destruction and death of the Civil War and this is who we said we wanted to be, against all odds, against all the arrogance and pomposity of powerful nations and kings.

These are not the values of cowards.  Liberty, justice, freedom, these are not values one simply decides upon and then you turn your attention to other things.  It is easy to have a very clear vision of liberty, justice and freedom when you are being crushed under the heel of a great empire but when you have won your freedom, prospered under liberty and enjoyed the advantages of equal justice under the law, you can become the very thing that you once hated.

For reasons too complicated to go into now, our nation has maintained a military base in Cuba.  That base in Guantanamo Bay has been used since 9-11 as a prison called Gitmo.  In the fearful days after 9-11 things happened that should not have happened.  Because of the disgrace of hundreds of incidents of torture of prisoners, President Obama promised to close Gitmo as soon as he took office.  He did not.

There are 166 prisoners in Gitmo.  More than half of them have been cleared of all wrong doing but they are being detained because, even though they may not have been guilty of a crime before being arrested, now they are so angry about having been held for ten years in prison without being charged that they are now so resentful for what has been done to them that they may well join the battlefield.....

They are not guilty but we are keeping them in prison because they might become militant due to our unethical imprisonment.
A hundred of them are on a hunger strike.  Twenty are being force fed and several are in danger of dying.  More than 50 are presently being held permanently because we don't have enough evidence to put them on trial but we believe that they are dangerous.  Obama wanted to transfer them to a high security prison in Illinois but at least one of the problems with doing that is that our prisons are for people who have actually been found guilty of committing a crime.

Now, there are a lot of ways to consider the lack of justice in our justice system, about challenges to the bill of rights, our privacy, our food supply, our environment.... we know that the justice system for the rich is not like the justice system for the poor.  The disproportionate ratio of blacks put in prisons compared to whites is not just racism, though that is a part of it.... it is mostly an issue of poverty.  As Howard Zinn said, our justice system does not so much determine what is right and what is wrong, it just determines who can pay their attorney the longest.

In my own experience, I have learned that decisions are made more on the strength of the good ol boy system among judges and lawyers than on the merits of any case.

But the real litmus test of any civilization is in how they treat their most vulnerable members.  So, sure, the abuse of poor workers, the neglect of children in health care and education, all of these things are telling.  But when you look at this group of Muslim Arabs who were picked up in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly because they were turned over to get a bounty from our overly aggressive CIA.  In most cases, there is no evidence of any wrong doing and yet they have been in prison for 10 years.... many of whom where children when they were arrested.

I don't criticize our government because I hate it, I talk about these values because I love who we say we want to be and I refuse to be silent when I see these values being trashed.  The arrogance of empire that says that once we have climbed to the top of the hill that we can crush under our heel anyone who is beneath us just begs for someone to topple the tower of Babel all over again.

In the end, our military and our economy will not determine how great a nation we are..... our greatness will be determined by how much we cherish liberty and justice for all.

We don't get to see them, we don't get to vote on it, but we should never forget the most vulnerable prisoners being held by our government and we should never afford this atrocity the tacit approval of our silence.  I say to our president and our congress: set the innocent free.  Close Gitmo now.

Behold the Profit that Hides the Sins of the World

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Dr. Ray
May 12, 2013    Easter 6

Acts 16:16-2416
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation." 18She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. 19But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. 20When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe." 22The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. 23After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. 24Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. 

Two horrible incidents took place in Boston on April 15th when three people were killed and dozens were wounded in a bombing incident.  The subsequent chase of the bombers resulted in the shooting death of a fourth victim who was a university security officer.

The second incident took place two days later in a small Texas community called West.  There was an explosion in a fertilizer plant that killed 15 people and injured nearly 200.  More than 150 houses and buildings where totally blown apart or destroyed.

Two events in one week in April:  What do you know about the Boston bombers?  You know the names of the two brothers (djoh-khar tsahr-ny-ef, ta-mər-lahn) Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  Immediately after they were identified, reporters were sent to Russia and hounded their mother and father for details of their lives.
Tamerlan was killed in a gun battle with the police.  Dzhokhar was injured and hospitalized under arrest.  Reporters filled hours of broadcast time with very few details to give us.  We know that they used two pressure cookers to make the bombs. We know that they put nails and metal balls into the pressure cookers. We have seen dozens of photos of them walking through the streets of Boston carrying the bombs in back packs wearing ball caps and appearing satisfied with the mayhem they created.

We have gone through hours of hand wringing about which Mosques they attended.  What websites they visited.  We have heard interviews with their college roommates, we know about Tamerlan's ex wife and Dzhokhar's penchant for smoking pot.  And we have all listened to debates about whether this was domestic or foreign terrorism, or if it was just two crazy people creating mayhem and we've heard endless speculation about how they were radicalized.  Should Dzhokhar get the death penalty?  What help did they get from other family members or friends?

It was a horrible event and it was indisputably newsworthy.  But if what these two deranged young men wanted was to cause disruption and draw attention to themselves then they have received their desired reward many times over.

Now, you know where I am going with this...... what do you know about the explosion in West, Texas where five times as many people were injured or killed and many more homes and businesses were destroyed?  Who owned that fertilizer plant?  Where did he or she go to church?  What chemicals exploded and why?
Now, some of you are thinking, "Boston was intentional murder and West, Texas was an accident," and you are right.  However, let me tell you about the accident.

The fertilizer plant was operating in a residential area which is dangerous on the face of it so you would expect some extra precautions, right?  However, this plant had not had a safety inspection since 1985.... Nearly 30 years ago.  At the time of that inspection, they were fined $30 for improperly storing anhydrous ammonia, which is a key ingredient in the manufacture of methamphetamine.

The plant was licensed to store no more than 24 tons of anhydrous ammonia but at the time of the explosion they had more than twice that amount.  They also had ammonia nitrate, which is very explosive.  So much so that if you have as much as one ton if it you have to register its location with the Department of Homeland Securities.  But the plant didn't have a ton of ammonia nitrate, they had 270 tons and had not reported that fact nor had they installed security cameras, guards or even filed an emergency fire plan.

The people who died in that blast were volunteer firemen who went running into what amounted to being a bomb factory without the owners saying a word of warning about what was likely to happen if a fire broke out around 300 tons of ammonia.

Yes, the Boston bombers were crazy, murdering psychopaths whose profile and motivations are endlessly interesting as we try to understand that horrible event.  But why is the media silent about the West, Texas tragedy?  Was it really an "accident"?  Why do the owners of that plant get a pass in our collective awareness?

We have a kind of funny story before us from the Book of Acts today in which Paul and Silas are on a preaching tour and they are being bothered by a young slave girl whom the text says was possessed by a demon.  The narrative doesn't read in a very complimentary way to Paul because it doesn't say that he took sympathy on the slave girl and did her a favor.  It says that the girl was annoying him and so he cast out the demon.

What interests me about this story is not the demon part but the fact that Paul and Silas were unmolested as long as they were just preaching about believing in Jesus.  But, the text explains, this girl was owned by some men who used her in a profit making scam and when Paul somehow took away this girl's unique ability to speak under the influence of a spirit, then the owner's lost profit.

Religion is one thing, but when it interferes with business then that is something else altogether.  In fact, when Paul disturbed the marketplace.... When he cut into their despicable money making scheme, they dragged them into court, stripped them and beat them.  Then, by court order they were flogged and thrown in prison.
Trying to convert people is not interesting.  Religion for religion's sake..... not all that interesting.  But what is really sacred is not ideology, it is money.  They were willing to flog the hide off of Paul and Silas for getting in the way of making money because profit can cover a multitude of sins.

You have all heard the saying about the media that, "if it bleeds, it leads."  We tend to follow news in the way that people stare at a car wreck.  So why did the media obsess about a story in which four people died and nearly ignored a story about an explosion where 15 people died?  Part of it is, undoubtedly, the deference shown to east coast events over southern events.  But it is more than that..... one was ideological and the other was an accident that happened in the midst of the process of making money..... now, it was making money in a way that the people involved knew was extremely dangerous for the people who lived around the plant, the people who worked there and even for the meth heads who came in every night to steal enough anhydrous ammonia to make a batch of meth.

But our corporate owned media doesn't like to talk about the casualty count that comes from greed, from capitalism run amok.  The American public has been given so little information about this incident that most of us don't even have an opinion about it.



And our government is seriously discussing not giving student visas to students coming here from Muslim countries but they are not discussing how their deregulation and cut backs of industrial safety inspectors made this disaster in Texas possible.

It is sadly true that in our present day, most terrorists are Muslims, unless, of course, you count what is done by formal armies against civilian populations as terrorism ..... if killing innocent civilians through military force counts as terrorism then the focus shifts from Muslim fundamentalists in the direction of Israel and the United States..... so we are not likely to call that terrorism anytime soon..... and you can't ask the victims of drone strikes what they think because, well, no one at the morgue is giving interviews.

The media ought to be talking about what happened in the Exxon oil spill in Arkansas.  The media ought to be talking about this absurd Monsanto protection bill that President Obama signed to absolve Monstanto in advance for any injuries caused by their Frankenfoods.  And the media ought to be talking about how deregulation has left even the businesses that handle the stuff that dangerous drugs and bombs are made of completely out of any accountability at all..... flooding our southern states with cheap methamphetamine and sometimes blowing up small towns.  The corporate media won't touch those stories because they are a part of the same profit chain as the abusive corporations.

For what it is worth, I learned more about the Texas explosion from Russian media than I did from American media.  But more importantly is that the mainstream church is no different than the corporate media.  The church, that has hidden pedophiles and embezzlers to protect their income stream does not take on the issues that affect the marketplace because they are all part of the same fabric of money based ethics.

And if we don't want to be just like them, then we have to be willing to keep casting demons out of the marketplace knowing all the while that doing that will keep us in a certain amount of trouble.

I don't have a convenient passage of scripture to quote about that but I will quote that great American philosopher, Mark Twain, who said that "Sometimes the highest compliment a man can be paid is by being hated by the right people."

If the institutions that create poverty, endanger their workers and the people around them and try to make people disposable and profits sacred want to drag us into the public square and flog us then I am willing to suffer the compliment of being despised by their ilk because I sure don't want them to think that they can buy my silence or count me as being one of their friends.

We have decided to follow Jesus rather than the church and we will always be found among the poor, the powerless and the people who generally die in silence.

When the Rules are Wrong

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, Pastor
Easter 6   May 5, 2013

John 5:1-9                          
After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2 Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. 3In these lay many invalids--blind, lame, and paralyzed. 5 One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, 'Do you want to be made well?' 7 The sick man answered him, 'Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.' 8 Jesus said to him, 'Stand up, take your mat and walk.' 9 At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
Now that day was a Sabbath.

A very important event took place not too far from here, just to the south of us in Arkansas. Environmentalists are still trying to persuade President Obama not to approve of the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline across important aquifers in the United States.  It is a bad idea in lots of ways, not the least of which is that the demand for oil will go down as more natural gas becomes available but also, this is the most polluting form of oil in the world.  Still, oil companies can make a fortune exporting oil from our gulf coast to markets in Europe while placing our agriculture and drinking water at risk.  But in the midst of all of this, another already existing pipeline in Arkansas burst spilling unknown amounts of this same tar sands on the ground.

Tar sands, much more toxic and dangerous than crude oil, is not regulated or taxed as oil but rather as shale or coal slurry.  It is much more dangerous than oil but is not required to be regulated in the same way as oil.  So, given that we have been assured that even though Exxon brought us the spill in the gulf a couple of years ago, another spill in Alaska a few years ago, when they tell us that they are really quite responsible and nothing would ever happen to the Keystone pipeline if it were allowed to be built.....when we see this spill in Arkansas, any reasonable person must be skeptical.
We see in this spill in Mayflower, Arkansas that Exxon had no detection equipment to indicate that their oil was running out into a residential area until a guy getting ready for his daughter's birthday party called 911 to say that there was a river of black crud flowing down the street towards his house.

You have not heard much about this because Exxon hired the off duty sheriff's deputies to guard the site and they are not allowing reporters in.  Sounds like typical Arkansas bribe based politics until you find out that the reason why networks have not at least flown over the area in news helicopters is because the FAA declared it to be a no-fly zone, just as they did over the Exxon oil spill in the gulf.

The federal government is assisting the oil industry in suppressing media coverage of the affected site.  Now, I have watched enough Law and Order episodes to know that it is a very rare thing for a criminal to be given control of their own crime scene.  Reporters who have tried to get on the site have been told by police that they will be arrested and jailed on the charge of criminal trespass.  I will tell you honestly, my friends, I never dreamed that this could happen in America.

You have heard it said that "possession is nine tenths of the law."  People used to say that to stress the sanctity of personal ownership but what I realize is that it is true, possession is nine tenths of the law because the people who write the laws already own everything and they want to make sure that they keep it that way.

The rules are written to serve the wealthy and powerful.  If you went into a city park and poured a quart of oil on the grass you would be in big trouble.

If you are an oil company and you spill a hundred million gallons of toxic tar sands on the ground then you are likely to get a tax break and federal subsidies to go out and find some more tar sands.  I'm just a preacher.... I'm not a government expert or an environmental engineer or even an economist but in the prophetic tradition of our faith heritage, I'm willing to call foul.

Being prophetic, of course, has nothing to do with predicting the distant future.  The prophets spoke truth to power because power will almost always exploit the weak for economic gain.  We have, for years, made fun of the Soviets and the Chinese for their bureaucratic governments that are so rife with corruption.  We have objected to aid to Central American countries because the governments are so corrupt.

What I have learned about government corruption is the same thing I learned about petty criminals.  What is robbing a bank, after all, compared with owning one?  You look at what Payday Loan operations do in our state, charging the poor 400% to 2000% on loans and they do this legally.  Organized crime generally charges about a fourth as much so, in this case, the banks write the laws and then create these little hubs where they fleece the poor.

Sometimes, men and women, the laws are bad.  Sometimes the rules are written for bad reasons to serve greedy people.  Capitalism is, in a way, its own religion.... It is a religion that requires that you have enough faith to believe that if left unregulated, the most greedy and powerful people in the world will eventually do the right thing for the most weak and impoverished people in the world..... and in that light, it is a religion that requires a lot more faith than I have ever been able to muster.
Our scripture lesson today is a familiar miracle story from the gospel of John.  It is a story that, read literally, presumes that you accept a number of magical assumptions.  There was a pool of water that from time to time was disturbed for no visible reason, presumably because it had a source from beneath that would sometimes move enough water to disturb the surface of the pool but the myth around it was that an angel would come down and stir in a little magic and then the popular belief was that the first person in the water would be healed.

Some poor guy who couldn't walk was lying by the pool all of the time hoping to be the one who was first in when the magic was still hot but since he couldn't walk someone else always got in first..... some kid with acne, some husband would throw in his wife that always seemed to have a headache.... And this poor guy never gets to test the miracle for himself.

Jesus walks in on the scene, sees the lame man and heals him.

Now, if you are inclined to read John the way they taught us in Sunday School, you are supposed to say, "Oooooo, aaaaaaah" Jesus must be divine if he can heal people like that.  And, of course, since you didn't see it yourself, as soon as you are in sunlight again when you leave Sunday School, it doesn't mean anything to you at all.

But, if you are willing to read these accounts as being what John said that they are.... That they are signs.... Perhaps not to be taken literally but to be read for meaning..... what does this mean?  If it is a metaphor, what is the point?

And here we have a mythical source of healing.  Let's call it a "hospital."
And you have a poor guy who needs to get in but he doesn't get in because he is being beaten out by a system that doesn't let the sickest guy in.  You may have heard about this....if you are sick you can't get a job so you don't have any money and if you have a chronic condition then you can't get any insurance.  Who ever wrote the rules to the system is not interested in unemployed, uninsured sick people.

And that is why, in America, more money is spent on breast implants than is spent on Alzheimer's research. The people who wrote the rules for us manage to charge a million dollars for a round of chemo treatments that would cost a couple of thousand dollars in India and, ironically, you would have a doctor trained in the same Indian medical school in either nation.  Go figure.

So, if you look at this healing by the hospital, I mean, the pool as a metaphor, then what we see is a prophetic figure who, in the name of God, is not willing for the most sick person in the waiting room to go without treatment while others get botox injections in their wrinkled faces and stomach staple surgery because they just can't stay away from the all you can eat cashew chicken buffet line.

You can read this miracle account as a sign of the way things are supposed to be or you can read it as a story about how in a country far far away, a long time ago, there was magic.

If I were a great preacher I would shut up and sit down right now and let you stew on how you want to read this story but I never wanted to be a great success in a field filled with mediocrity so I'll just go a step farther and tell you how I read this account.
I see this as a sign of the way the followers of the teachings of Jesus are to break the chains forged by the powerful that keep sick people from getting medical treatment.  I see this as a sign of how we are to prophetically challenge the system that continues to favor banks over home owners, that favors coal and oil industries over the people who have to break air and drink water to survive, and to challenge a government that is willing to place air and water at risk for a temporary profit or even to give law suit immunity to Monsanto to experiment with such staples as rice, wheat, soy beans and corn without regard for how many people they might kill.

And that, my friends, is what I believe Biblical preaching is all about.  Reading the Bible for magical miracle stories is like going to a restaurant and eating the menu.  There is power in our faith tradition if we would quit trying to dress up the lions in organ grinder monkey suits and making them look silly.

I understand that to read the Bible the way I'm suggesting might lead a lot of people to not accept the social norms and laws that run our nation..... well, that's at least what I am hoping for.

Friendship, Marriage, Union, Love and Loyalty

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
April 28, 2013    Easter 5

John 13:34-34                              
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Normally, I am long suffering and an absolute paragon of patience.... Don't test me, but I have reached a point where I don't even try to be patient in some of the most basic matters of social ethics. I spent two decades speaking in college classrooms, in church basements and from pulpits trying to explain why, biblically, psychologically, philosophically, medically and socially that we should not be prejudiced against gay people and to be willing to celebrate same sex relationships with the same joy and respect that we afford to heterosexual relationships.

But I am no longer willing to pretend that there is anyone who needs more information or a chance to process all of this.  Any remaining prejudice is, in my eyes, just that, prejudice.... It is not respectable, it is not understandable, it is not a matter of opinion any more than we would, in the 21st century, afford such issues as slavery and child labor the luxury of being just a matter of personal opinion.  There may have been a time when we needed to be patient with those who needed some time to catch up with reality but that time is surely past.  You can choose to remain in ignorant prejudice, that is your individual right, but we don't have to pretend that ignorant prejudice is not ignorant prejudice.

I am not far from the same point about the scourge of gun violence in America.
The recent failure of a watered down gun bill that at least offered some background checks to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists and criminals has shown me that rational thought is no longer a part of the legislative process in our nation.

John Spong has said that it is no longer our responsibility to explain to conservatives why we are not prejudiced against gay people, it is up to them to explain to us why they think they have a right to hold onto their prejudice..... an exercise we recently watched in Supreme Court hearings demonstrating just how vacuous that line of thinking is.

I now feel that rather than engaging in debate about 2nd amendment rights or America's tradition of gun ownership, the burden of proof now should be placed at the feet of gun owners to tell us what they are going to do to dramatically and quickly reduce the gun violence death toll which remains at more than 30,000 deaths per year in the USA.

One guy tried unsuccessfully to blow up an airplane with fewer than 200 people on board by putting a bomb in his shoes and for the past 12 years, millions of people all over the globe have had to take off their shoes every day to be scanned by tax payer supported security guards at airports...... no one died.... There was a threat of death but in the name of security, an army of TSA agents are employed to, in part, xray our shoes.

Since that failed Christmas shoe bomber in 2001, nearly a half a million  Americans have died from gunfire, and more than one and a quarter of million more have been wounded and yet our legislators say that there is nothing that can be done and that, to put it in Baskin Robbins terms, is "32 flavors" of stupid.  Billions spent to protect us from a shoe bomb that never killed anyone..... nothing to address gun violence that has killed millions...... I'm all out of patience.

I believe in a very rational form of Christianity.  I rarely move out of typically secular language to say that something is a spiritual issue but when I mention that there are 30,000 gun deaths every year and a gun advocate gives me that blank "so what" look, I start to wonder if that person has a soul.  How can you be a human being and be indifferent about that level of carnage?

I am waiting for the media to tell us where the Boston Marathon bombers got the semi-automatic hand gun they used to murder one policeman and conduct a lengthy shootout with others. No matter what the answer is, however, we would all agree that these two murderers shouldn't have been able to acquire the hand gun they had but before any meaningful regulatory changes can be made, someone has to care, someone has to have a soul, someone has to have a heart......and that does, in fact, make it a spiritual problem.

John tells us that Jesus made love the single defining aspect of what it meant to be a Christian, to be a religious, a spiritual person.  Love, not the feeling of being thrilled or smitten.... Not the urges of sexual appetite.... Not even the more mysterious love we have for our infant children that makes it possible for us to perpetuate our species.

The love we see in this context is the spiritual dimension that makes us care about children in Nicaragua who have no shoes, that makes it possible for us to be concerned about 15,000 of those gun deaths that are suicides and all the thousands that are the result of domestic disputes or stupid accidents.  Others may be able to write off people who stay in bad relationships, or who abuse drugs, alcohol or who are addicted to violence.  We care about them, not because they are members of our family but because they are humans.

It is not an easy message for people to take in.  Think about who in modern history has tried to get people to live together in peace, to end violence and prejudice and discrimination... President Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Medger Evers, MalcolmX, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Oscar Romero....all tried to heal the division of the north and the south, Hindus and Muslims, Blacks and Whites, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. It might also be worth noting how the world reacted to each of these great leaders..... they were all shot and killed with a gun...... how might history have been different if guns had not been available to those murderers?

For the past 35 years I have heard religious people asking, "Who is the Martin Luther King of this generation?"  No one has ever had a good answer for that question but I have to wonder if this generation's Martin Luther King just got shot before he or she got to start preaching.  King was only 39 years old when he was murdered by James Earl Ray.  39!  What were you doing when you were 39?  I was still trying to figure life out..... I hadn't even hit my stride as a preacher until I was a decade older than King lived to be.
What if one of those children shot at Sandy Hook Elementary was our next great leader?  What if that little girl who went to hear Gabby Gifford speaking in a grocery store parking lot in Arizona, 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green..... what if she was going to be our next great leader before she was shot and killed?  Or what if it might have been Veronica Mosier, killed at age 6 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado last summer?

Against this backdrop, in this special place, set aside for our community gatherings to hear the ancient words of our sacred texts, the voice of Jesus says, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.  This is how the world will know that you are my followers, when they see how you love one another."

I'm just saying that there is not enough love going on..... not enough of the real thing..... the kind of love that cares about the stranger, that values human life, that sacrifices to make the world less violent, more safe, more sane.

The drum beat of selfishness and violence in our world can cause us to become so cynical that we quit caring, so defeated that we stop trying, so disgusted that we just give up, circle the wagons, protect ourselves, seek diversion in entertainment, food and alcohol...... we can become more inclined to quietly take our anti-depressants than to keep fighting for change.

I don't know if John can ever be taken literally but I can understand why he says this in language that is not intended to persuade or invite or simply encourage...... A new commandment I give to you..... that's strong..... liberals don't like to be told what to do..... we don't use imperial language in our church..... we don't call Jesus "Lord," we don't celebrate "Christ the King".... We don't much go in for the language of dominance or obedience so I think we should pay attention when the language of the text steps across the line a bit....

A new commandment I give to you, that you love.... And you don't stop loving.... You don't let cynicism paralyze your noble loving hearts.... You don't let the repeated victories of dark oppression and violence make you retreat..... I command that you love.... Love the stranger.... Love the person you have never met..... those people on Face Book.... They are not really your "friends" unless you are willing to put your flesh into the bargain.

I know how many people have "liked" our church's face book page but no one is going to take that seriously if they don't see how we love one another.

Lord deliver us from shallow religion.... From using the language of friendship and love too easily.... Save us from a self-protecting and facile society that acquiesces to silence in the face of prejudice and violence.

We are lovers in a dangerous time and that is why I add my voice to the voice of the poet who calls us to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.  Violence and prejudice is strong and it can be lethal and frightening but in the end, the best lover always wins.

Birth and Death, Marriage and Divorce, Life and Disease, Vitality and Old Age, Ebullience and Depression

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
April 14, 2013   Easter 3

Psalm 30
Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness
1 I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up, and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
2 O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.
3 O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.*
4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name.
5 For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
6 As for me, I said in my prosperity, 'I shall never be moved.'
7 By your favor, O Lord, you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face; I was dismayed.
8 To you, O Lord, I cried, and to the Lord I made supplication:
9 'What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?   Will it tell of your faithfulness?
10 Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me! O Lord, be my helper!'
11 You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul* may praise you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

Human beings invented religion when they became sufficiently self aware to realize that they were going to die one day.  Bishop John Spong argues persuasively in his book, A New Christianity for a New Age, that humans needed to invent supernatural deities in the heavens governing over an unseen after life in order to cope with the existential awareness that like birds and trees, fish and flowers, we have only a few short years to live under the sun.

And it is true enough that an awful of the sillier parts of religious life amount to little more than a kind of existential whistling in the grave yard, assuring ourselves that we should not fear being snuffed out of existence because our imaginary friends in the clouds are going to take us to eternal reward when we die.

But that is not the better part of even very ancient religions.  Even among the poems and philosophical musings that echo down from the dawn of human civilization are insights that are helpful far beyond any opium for the anxiety caused by mortality.

I was privileged a few years ago to hear the famous Old Testament professor, Walter Brueggemann talking about the importance of the Biblical lament.  If you took every passage of the Bible about heaven or hell or your soul or any afterlife reference and printed it together, you would have about a dozen pages.  A great deal of the Hebrew Bible is devoted to human self expression of fear, depression, anxiety, confusion along with supplications for hope, health, and even meaning.

Much of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament is not written as if it is God speaking to us, it is written in the voice of us asking God why?  Why do we suffer?  Who do bad people seem to prosper and good people  seem to fail?

Most of us grew up in churches where the word "salvation" always had to do with going to heaven when you die but that's not how it is generally used in the Bible.  When, in that walking on the water story in Matthew (14:30), Peter decides that it would be a good idea to walk out on the water to meet Jesus and Peter quickly sinks under the waves and is drowning.  Matthew says that Peter cried out, "Lord, save me."

Now, who among us, if you were to take this account on its face, believes that Peter, as he was drowning, was saying to Jesus, "Please die for my sins on the cross so that I can go to heaven after out drown in this lake?"  Clearly, the only salvation Peter was looking for was a hand back into the boat.
When we read in the Psalms where David is saying, "my enemies are encamped all around me, my strength is run out," when he says "save me," he has a very specific agenda in mind..... something to the tune of, "Dear God, please let me live to wake up in my own bed tomorrow."

The real meaning of the word, "salvation" is "to be made whole."  If your life is broken by health issues, then being healed is salvation to you.  If your life is broken by mental illness, disturbed relationships or even grievous sin then salvation  comes in the form of being empowered to get your life back on track.

I was sorry to learn this week of the suicide death of the adult son of  the famous evangelical pastor, Rick Warren.  I was certainly one of the people who published sharp criticisms of President Obama for inviting Rick Warren, an outspoken anti-gay evangelical, to take part in the first Obama inauguration.  I don't like the body of Warren's work and it would be hypocritical of me not to confirm that now but I am proud of the fact that when his son, Matthew, took his own life, Warren did not fall prey to the culture of shame and denial so often associated with religion.

Being a religious person does not alter the course of events in this capricious universe in which we live.  Mental illness, cancer, diseases as well as car accidents, addiction and freaks of nature, plague people of faith just as much as they do anyone else in the world.  I have no idea what the nature of Matthew Warren's mental illness was.  I will not speculate about what caused his depression and why he chose to end his own life but because I have lost close friends in the same way, I simply acknowledge the loss of a young man's life and the hole left in a family and a congregation as a result.

A few months ago I received a call from a doctor's office asking me to come pick up an elderly woman whom the doctor believed should not be trusted to drive herself home.  The woman was in distress.  Because of deep grief, she had not been able to sleep or eat and she was run down and at the breaking point.  Before I took her home, the physician's assistant called me back into a consulting room and said, "Dr. Ray, I know that you'll agree with me that the real problem with this patient is that she is not close enough to Jesus Christ."

I will not repeat what I said to that outrageously inappropriate and condescending unprofessional statement because I would like for at least our internet audience to enjoy the illusion that I can be a nice person in stressful situations and yet, no matter how ignorant and uninformed this medical professional's dismissal of a beautiful grieving widow's spiritual condition was, it is not far from the kind of magical self delusion common among religious people.

Had I been inclined to be instructive in that moment, much of what I would like to say to pious Christians is wrapped up in the quote you have heard me repeat from Soren Kierkegaard in the past, that is that "prayer does not change the one to whom we pray but it changes the one who prays."

That is, our silent, internal prayers do not then change the mind of God and cause divine intervention.  Lots of people tell themselves that "God answers prayers," in a magical manner but Matthew Warren didn't die because Rick Warren didn't pray hard enough.

The mortality rate in our liberal, post supernatural theist church is exactly the same as the mortality rate down at Six Flags Over Jesus or at Warren's Saddleback church.  It is 100%.  Pray all you want, everybody dies.

So what is the benefit of being in a spiritual community?  Why pray?  It is this.... two years ago when the most powerful tornado in recorded history wiped out a huge swath of Joplin, MO, in insurance jargon, those hundreds of people who lost their lives and thousands of homes that were destroyed were lost in what is sometimes call an "act of God."  I say that's bologna.  A tornado is not an act of God, it is simply a part of a capricious universe.

When we loaded up pick up trucks and went over to Joplin with food, tarps to cover houses, chain saws to clear roads and trash bags to help survivors to clean up their yards and homes.... that was an act of God. That was a sign of the compassion that is born of sitting in this room, singing hymns, studying religious texts, taking communion and passing the peace.

Our spirituality does not change how God acts in human history but it changes how we act in human history.  My faith won't keep me from being depressed or getting cancer but I hope that it changes how I react to those painful aspects of the human condition.  We pray, as they say in the AA program, to increase our conscious connection to God and to one another.  When I pray for you when you are in the hospital, I don't think that I am sending your magical energy beams that knits your bones back together and seals your surgical wounds..... I am pausing for a moment to love you, to feel my concern for you and to compose my own heart into action.....
which in Ron Hertenstein's case this week, amounted to getting up and taking him some Andy's frozen custard after doctors used a circular saw to install a new knee in his right leg.

Now, you tell me, when you have been through some trauma, would you rather have some evangelical church put you on their prayer list or would you rather have someone bring you an Andy's Frozen Custard?  See, you are all becoming theologically discerning here.

Our funeral services do not give some soul a boost on their way to heaven.... they give us a chance to express our grief and to console one another in our losses.  Our worship services are not intended to satisfy the ego needs of a twisted deity that needs to be praised by his subjects.... our services are intended to strengthen our community in which we show love to one another when we are hurting and we challenge one another to rise up and work harder to live lives of love adorned by good deeds.

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable is not a platitude, it is literally what we do here.  Your personal spirituality may certainly have ineffably mystical dimensions.... mine certainly does, but our corporate religious life is rooted in reality.  There may be some kind of afterlife where souls reside in eternity but what I know for certain is that neither I nor anyone else knows anything at all about that existence and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or crazy.

What I do know is that we live in a world in which love relationships that were supposed to be permanent sometimes come to an end.  We inhabit bodies that sometimes turn on us such that good people die far too young.

I know that sometimes because of human evil or human indifference or human ignorance that people die in accidents, get sick, get left out of meaningful work, education or housing but that because of the human desire to be spiritual people that we can kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

There was a Russian poet who wrote that every morning he takes a razor in his right hand, looks into the mirror and makes the decision of whether he is going to shave or cut his throat.  I've been at that point and I bet Rick Warren has too and I suspect that most of you have as well.

So what makes you decide to shave again rather than cut your throat?  Most of the time, for me, it was because of my connections to people who cared about which decision I made.  My spirituality doesn't make life perfect but it makes it clear that the world expects something of me.... that my daughter expects something of me, my friends expect something of me, you expect something of me.

On Thursday there will be a hundred homeless people lining up at Bill's Place expecting us to show up to pray with them..... I mean, bring them a hot meal..... I'll pray with them too but mostly we'll pray by ladling some hot stew into a bowl against the violence of the cold wind on the sidewalk.

There is an African proverb that teaches, "When you pray, move your feet."  Because that is the only kind of prayer that really makes a difference.

Not Going to Play Dead for You

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
April 7, 2013   Easter 2

Acts 5:27-32  27 When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them,
28 saying, "We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man's blood on us."
29 But Peter and the apostles answered, "We must obey God rather than any human authority.
30 The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.
31 God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.
32 And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him."

American history was never a subject that captured my attention.  As a Biblical student, my attention was always focused on the Ancient Near East and American history seemed like a matter of modern interests.  But during my time in the Boston area when I was a fellow at Harvard, I took some free afternoons to ride my bike over parts of the route where Paul Revere rode a horse.  I visited Bunker Hill and Beacon Hill and walked the Freedom Trail.

In that small area around the bay where the Boston Tea Party started the Revolutionary War, I listened in on tour guides speeches who were not always fawning nationalists.  It turns out that while there was a lot of general unhappiness with the British rule of the colonies, what it took to actually get settlers, merchants and farmers to show up and fight and die to liberate the colonies from British rule was not all that noble.

That is to say, as frustrated as most of us are at the lies that were told to the American public to get us into a war with Iraq, those lies were nothing compared to the whole cloth fabrications told to American settlers to get them to come out and muster to fight the British.
Samuel Adams turned out to be such an outrageous propagandist and character assassin that I have never again been able to enjoy the modern product that bears his name. Crazy, stupid lies were told to the people in order to get them sufficiently angry or afraid or both in order to do what, eventually, turned out to be in their best interests.

I'm not historian enough to argue whether we should have revolted against British rule or not.... Let's just assume for the sake of argument that it was manifestly the best thing to do.  For good or for ill, evidently, the colonists were not motivated to fight in sufficient numbers until they were tricked, lied to and manipulated into responding with some force.

I suspect that we could go through the historical record and find no small amount of that sort of deceptive propaganda in every great military battle.  We sometimes like to remember WWII as being the "great war" or the "good war" because in it we were fighting against evil nationalistic forces in order to liberate the Jews from concentration camps.  Sadly, stopping the holocaust was more of a by-product than a motivation for entering the European war.

The truth is that the American government turned away boatloads of Jews seeking refuge in America and even sent out the Coast Guard to make sure that no one jumped off those boats and tried to swim to shore.  I wish that it had been different but it wasn't.

A hundred years passed from the end of the Civil War in America before the Civil Rights movement began in our nation.  Blacks were oppressed in ways that may have been more cruel even than slavery for generations.
In many ways, it was the employment opportunities created by manufacturing during WWII that created a black middle class that then pushed up leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. who made Civil Rights a successful cause.  The subsequent impoverishing of the black population in the past two generations is the best reason why there has not been another Martin Luther King to arise in this generation.

When people are beaten, impoverished, oppressed, it is very difficult to persuade them to find the courage, the energy, the nobility to organize, to fight back, to stand up to their oppressors.  People will stand by and watch horrible tragedy until they are prompted by self-preservation or personal profit to roll up their sleeves and get involved.  The single most disappointing aspect of church life to me, during my years of serving denominational churches was that no matter how hard you worked, how much you did to serve a congregation, that when someone tried to wring me out in a public meeting, in almost every case, the board would sit and watch like sheep watching one another eat grass.

The author of the book of Acts tells stories of heroism among the earliest disciples in order to inspire similar devotion to the cause among later generations.  We have good reason to read Acts with a great deal of skepticism about its historical veracity but, assuming that it is a product of the early second century, it is written after the persecutions of Christians had become very violent in certain parts of the empire.

One of the few evidences of the spread of the church from antiquity is found in a letter written by a Roman governor, Pliny, to Emperor Trajen asking for clarification of his orders to persecute Christians.
He asks the Cesar, "but do your instructions apply also to those who are no longer Christians, for many of them say that they have not been Christian for years."  Being a Christian when it meant being a part of a loving community that liberally shared its food and thumbed its nose at the empire was one thing, but when the empire began to grind the young church under its heel, many were all too willing to resume their former more pluralistic lives.

A great deal of the New Testament is written in a way to encourage readers to have the courage to face martyrdom, torture, threats and oppression.  Because, men and women, then and now, the reflex reaction of almost everyone in the world is to grumble quietly but do nothing to fight an oppressive government, employer, spouse, parent or church.  We just watch and even if we are mad about it, we do nothing.

The Nobel prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, explained in his acceptance speech that the holocaust only happened because the world was willing to sit back and watch.  He told his audience that they must choose to take sides in matters of ethical importance because neutrality always serves the oppressor and never serves the interests of the oppressed.  By turning away refugees, Americans and Europeans were not morally different from the Nazis who imprisoned and killed the Jews.

He said that you could distill the ethical teachings of all of the Bible down to a single sentence, "Thou shalt not stand idly by."  We took that simple statement of truth and put it on this worship banner when we started our church.

The winged lion is typically the symbol of the gospel of Mark but we adapted it to stand over this central truth for our church.... A solemn pledge that we would not stand idly by.

The church in our age is facing extinction.  The cathedrals of Europe have been turned into warehouses, office complexes and shopping malls.  Those that remain open as church have tiny gatherings comprised largely of tourists.  On the east and west coasts of the United States, other than a few mega churches that offer a cultural religion entirely unrecognizable to those who are actually interested in the teachings of Jesus still exist.

Among main stream churches in the United States, the average Sunday attendance is fewer than 40 as aging congregations try to keep the lights on long enough for the church doors to remain open for their own funeral.  And, honestly, for the most part, I can say, "good riddance."
The church that stood silently by while women had to fight for the right to govern their own bodies and to fight for equal pay for equal work.....
the church that stood idly by and watched as black Americans were set upon by racist police, dogs, water cannon and tear gas.....
The church that remained silent in Argentina during the "Dirty War" and in Guatemala during the time of the disappeared and in Nicaragua during the Contra war.....
the church that encouraged discrimination against gays and lesbians while hiding sick pedophilia in their own ranks....
The church that abandoned their inner city, turned their backs on the poor and used their resources to build obscene monuments to the pretense of their own importance....
The church that sat in silence while the income gap between the poor and the rich grew wider....
The church that virtually applauded the recruitment of our nation's poor sons and daughters to be put in uniforms and sent to kill the poor sons and daughters of Iraq and Afghanistan......
the church that has patiently and silently sat on the sidelines and watched our environment being spoiled, our schools crumbling and our black young men being imprisoned while our gay sons were literally pushed into suicide....
That church can go to hell.

The church with the government, the two great guardians of the status quo.... The apologists for corruption in the economy, the military, religion and education, flogged the apostles and told them to keep quiet and, I must beg you to forgive me for saying it twice, the apostles told the authorities to go to hell.... They said it lovingly, I'm sure

We will not always be right.... But we will not be silent out of fear of being wrong.  We will not often have our way in matters of public debate and ethics but we will not be a silent co-conspirator with oppressors.  We are not many in number but we will not be intimidated into silence.  We are not rich, we are not powerful, we are not located on a major highway nor do our pageants require TV news coverage but I don't have to wear a clergy collar when I go to a city council meeting because of who we are, I stand out like Ralph Nader in an automobile plant.

The church that deserves to survive the rapid changes in religion is the church that has a meaningful voice.... It is the church that opposes war and works for peace....
It is the church that doesn't just use the poor as a backdrop for a foot washing ceremony but that actually works for justice, fair wages and access to health care, education and housing.
It is the church that defends the environment and is unafraid to demand alternative energy sources and protection of our air, water and soil.
It is the church that is willing to tell the truth about government protection of Monsanto and their Frankenfoods, the abuses of the oil and coal industries and the sociopathic insanity of the NRA.

Because we know from experience that if we don't do it that the whole world will be silent and we know that it is our calling to never stand idly by.

I am proud to be counted among your number.