Choosing to Produce Good Fruit (and reject cannibalism)

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 8  June 30 , 2013

Galatians 5:1, 13-23
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
13For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 15If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. 16Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. 18But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. 19Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

There's been a lot going on this week.  Of particular interest to me was the AMA decision to diagnose people who are as over weight as I am as having a disease.... which seems a tad strong to me.  I've always looked as my extra weight as being insurance against abduction.  I have a lot of very devoted critics in town but it is hard to take someone my size hostage and nearly impossible to hide the body so the AMA may have to back off a bit.

The more interesting news has come at last from the Supreme Court.  I don't want to go all Nostradamus on you guys but I did finally make an accurate prediction on the Supreme Court's decisions.  It seemed inevitable to me that they would have to rule against California's Prop 8 challenge and on DOMA because there was just no way around this obvious march of history.  In fact there were not even many protestors outside of the Supreme Court on Wednesday because all but the most hard core conservatives have accepted the inevitability of marriage equality.

Of course, there were a few politicians and one prominent Baptist ethics professor who immediately objected that this means that now we will have to make it legal for people to marry their dog.
I don't know about you but I'm increasingly nervous about how often right wing politicians and preachers bring up bestiality. Every time we make progress in the arena of gay rights, they talk about people wanting to marry their pets.  I don't have any inside information here but I would encourage you not to sell any dogs or cats to right wing politicians or preachers.

I had predicted that the Supreme Court would strike down DOMA and I believed that they would use that decision to leverage a more insidious decision about the Voting Rights Act that has protected southern poor and minority voters for two generations.  The Supreme Court defended removing its important protections by saying that things have dramatically changed in the south and that such anti-racist provisions are no longer needed....An ironic observation to make during a week when we cannot avoid daily installments of Paula Dean revelations about fresh southern racism served with butter and sugar.

But of much greater relevance than and specific person's racial views is the fact that the Voting Rights Act has been used many times in recent history to keep states from creating barriers to poor and minority voters.  Texas legislators announced their intention to enact voter ID requirements that they had previously been blocked from doing the very day that the Supreme Court removed this legal barrier to discrimination.

As demographics in the USA is shifting away from the descendants of white Europeans we will see a lot of these sorts of political dirty tricks to repress voting by the poor and by minorities but all these efforts are destined to only be effective for a very short time.

What has to happen is not a change in the machinery and methods of voting but a much more substantive change to the political landscape that allows minorities and the poor a greater share in our government and in our economy.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg referenced Martin Luther King's famous statement that the "arc of time is long but it bends towards justice" and said that with this decision they had contradicted that course of history, setting the clock back towards injustice.  We would like to think that justice, liberty, freedom are such desirable aspects of life that we would always march towards those goals in an ever more perfect world.

Sadly, however, we are often like a dog that works tirelessly to dig his way under the fence in the back yard, only to run to the front door and beg to be let back in.  An indescribably cute characteristic of many Spaniels though you shouldn't let that make you want to marry one..... I'm just sayin....
It appears to be likely that the Apostle Paul started his career of letter writing when he caught wind that a church in which he had made a considerable personal investment was evidently abandoning the liberating message he had taught them and that they were mixing Paul's version of Christianity with all sorts of other religious practices and observances that were likely rather more traditional to them and comfortable for them.

Our scripture lesson today begins with verse 1 of chapter 5 of Paul's letter to the church in Galatia.  There are not many seminary lectures that I can clearly remember now more than 30 years after my classroom time at Vanderbilt but I can never read this passage without hearing the voice of my New Testament professor, Dr. Daniel Patte, literally yelling the line, "It is for freedom that Christ has set you free, do not then return to bondage."

It should be obvious but it is not.  All of us who have worked in mental health have had women in counseling with whom we worked to get them out of a violently abusive relationship only to watch them go right back.... I believe the average now is 7 times that a woman will reconcile with an abuser before succeeding in getting away alive.

Who doesn't have a gay or lesbian friend who just keeps going back to Baptist or Assemblies of God churches and are shocked, time after time, that they are abused or at least not accepted.

Senator John McCain, after a decade of unsuccessful military involvement in two Middle Eastern nations is now just apoplectic about getting us to get involved in Syria's civil war and to attack Iran.
I've even known people who have gone to see a Seth Rogen movie and still went back later to see another one!  I mean really, after Pineapple Express and the Green Hornet someone put up money for him to make "This is the End"?  This may be the apocalypse!  But I digress..

Paul is quite literally shouting off of the page in his letter to Galatia..... once you have been set free, do not get lazy and just slouch back into bondage.  Don't get scared and allow yourself to be drawn back into sick theology or a bad relationship or a bad war just because that is what you have always known.
You have heard me say it before and you will likely hear it again.... There are two essential sins to slavery.  The first is in wanting to own a slave and the second is the willingness to be enslaved.  Spiritual communities must emphatically refuse to be oppressors but we must equally refuse to allow ourselves to be oppressed.

Hanging back, suffering in silence, avoiding confrontation doesn't help the world to change.... That doesn't liberate anyone.  If the victims of apartheid in South Africa or segregation in America had not spoken up, organized, protested, demonstrated, sacrificed do you think white people in South Africa or in the United States ever would have just volunteered to give up their privileged station in life?
People fight against labor unions and collective bargaining now in some kind of idealistic notion that the free market will take care of workers when we all know that slavery and child labor were the creations of the free market.... Safe working conditions, living wages, health care benefits, retirement and the two day weekend were the creations of labor unions and those things will not last in the absence of united workers any more than we can expect southern states to protect the voting rights of minorities without legal mandates that they do so.

We will not just coast into a more just society.  Our children will not learn compassion and justice from video games.  We will not have successful relationships by watching sit coms.... Those couples are paid to get along and they have a staff of writers!

A Texas legislator stepped out of the shadows this week to swim against the stream of Texas politics by conducting a one-person filibuster in the state senate.  Senator Wendy Davis stood up for more than 12 hours to defend Texas women's access to reproductive choice.  The rules in Texas are especially difficult.  Davis had to stand on her feet the whole time without so much as leaning on the podium or taking a potty break.

Much as been made of the tennis shoes she wore and there is little doubt that she was wearing depends underneath her loose fitting clothing but still, her feat was absolutely athletic..... I couldn't have done it for a third of that length of time.

But, of course, the physical challenge of the filibuster was not the real issue.... The issue quickly became the ridicule that would come from her critics, even the governor of Texas.  Her personal life was put up immediately, telling the world that this attractive blond representative was the product of a single mother and that she had been a teen mother herself....of course, failing to mention that in spite of these limitations, she had graduated from Harvard Law School.

That's the real threat to progress.  No one wants to stick their neck out.... No one wants to be subjected to ridicule.  No one want to be publicly put back in their place.... Who are you, with all of your mistakes, flaws, personal life issues, to stand up to the powers who want to take away women's rights, keep gay people in the closet, bar the doors of universities to minorities and the poor and keep people of color home on election day?

Wendy Davis pulled on her red tennis shoes and absorbent unmentionables and stood up to the cameras, a room full of angry men and a dangerously mean governor.  Did she win?  Well, maybe not much.... They can call a special session... they can still take away women's rights in Texas if Wendy Davis is the only one who tries to stand up to them.  What we can hope for is that thousands of others will remember that it was for freedom that they were set free.

The arc of time does bend toward justice but only if you will come out of your comfort zone, grab it with both hands and use all of your strength to bend it.  And if you are willing to hide, if you are willing to be enslaved....then I guarantee you, you will be.

I will add my voice to the voice of the apostle and implore you, "stand firm then and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery."

Can We All Get Along?

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
June 23, 2013     Proper 8

Galatians 3:23-28
23Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 5:1, 13-23

For the benefit of our musicians, I try to outline my sermons a couple of months in advance.  You may wonder how I can know two months in advance what I am going to be angry about on any particular Sunday and all I can say is, "it's a gift" but I'm a professional kids, you shouldn't try this at home.

But back in April, when I was thinking about sermons in June, I had reasonable confidence that we would have Supreme Court decisions by now about same sex marriage.  Reporters even crowded into Supreme Court chambers last week expecting to hear Justice Roberts reveal these decisions only to get a head fake as he nervously fiddled with papers and appeared to be about to make a momentous announcement and then talked about a decision so innocuous that even the reporters couldn't remember what it was long enough to write it down.

But the defensive walls of prejudice continue to crumble even as we wait to see if the Supreme Court is going to be on the right side of history or not.  This week we did get a long overdue admission from the most public organization that took a lot of money from gullible and desperate people for what has been called conversion therapy.
Exodus ministries closed down with week along with an apology from their president, Alan Chambers, admitting that there is not and never has been a way to turn a gay person straight and that their judgment and guilt that they have heaped up on gay people has been very hurtful and has even caused many suicides.

I am not personally satisfied with their statements because they still want to say that homosexuality is a sin but I don't want to let my desire for a better statement to overshadow the fact that they have at least admitted that they were frauds and that they were wrong.  Deep seated prejudices do not change easily and they usually don't change all at once.

Liberation is usually more of an evolution than it is a singular event.  Not to imply that many of them are deeply repressed in their own sexual orientation but you could say that fundamentalists are sort of skipping towards reality.

As we prepare for Bishop John Shelby Spong's visit to our church in August, we've been studying several of his recent books.  In his book, "Jesus for the Non-Religious" he speaks at length about the way early humans tended to divide into tribes.  Much like dogs, early humans realized that their chances of survival depended upon their ability to cooperate in packs or tribes to more successfully hunt, protect themselves and compete for resources and land.

The tribalism that gave us the ability to survive in the ancient world expresses itself in modern culture in sometimes benign ways..... like all of you who actually believe that there is some kind of substantive difference between being a Yankees or a Red Sox fan when we all know that anyone with an enlightened world view is a Cardinals fan.  England, Spain, France and Germany used to whip up a good war against one another every few years and even though they seem to have gotten over that they still express their tribal rivalry in regularly violent sporting events that they mistakenly call "foot ball."....which only proves how silly tribalism can be.

As much as it is likely to offend many of our viewers for me to say it, the fierce competition between Muslims and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, and between Baptists and most of the rest of the world is little more than misplaced tribalism.  In some ways, monotheistic theology is to blame for some of this.....because if my religion is the only true religion then yours must be wrong.

Ancient humans worked to resolve their anxiety about being attacked or about starving by forming tribes that worked together to have food and security.  Once we were aware that we would one day die and we wanted to believe that there was a great chief in the clouds who would give us eternal life, we developed tribal religions and we fight over who owns heaven with greater ferocity than a pack of hyenas fighting over access to a water hole in the savannah.

God is not Muslim, Jewish or Christian and anyone who can't see that just needs to go take a seat in Darwin's waiting room and be quiet until they grow up.  I'm sure I could say that in a more polite way but why would I?

Tribalism was necessary to our survival two million years ago.  With each passing year, it becomes less necessary and, in fact, our ability to overcome tribalism becomes more necessary to our survival.

When our nation began, our founding fathers, and that is no accident of language.... It was a white boys' club, was drawn to the idealism of John Lock.  They talked about liberty, equality, justice and indigenous human rights.  But they didn't invite their wives to their meetings.... They also did not invite their African slaves to the meetings.  No less a democratic genius than Thomas Jefferson suggested that voting rights should be limited to land owning white men.

But the seeds of liberty and equality, once planted, cannot be restricted to the white rich boys' club.  It took nearly a century for Americans to end slavery and another century for us be willing to share our neighborhoods, schools and lunch counters with the descendants of slaves.  We have only allowed women to vote in this free democracy since 1920.

The rights of gays and lesbians stayed under the radar for most of modern history until the televised Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 when there was a public demonstration that was the first time many of us even knew what homosexuality was.  That was a wild and violent convention though for lots of other reasons.  It was the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated and the whole of the Civil Rights Movement still focused on racial issues.

It wasn't until the AIDS epidemic that the presence of a gay community pushed itself into global conversation and for the first twenty years the religious right used fear of homosexuality to fuel their take over of politics and society but the politics of fear and hate could not forever keep liberty and equality in the closet.

In many ways, the vociferous hatred of religious fundamentalists is what has helped to make it increasingly obvious to the majority of the straight world that their prejudice against homosexuals was embarrassingly stupid.  There are times when humiliation is more instructive than simple information.  When it comes to discrimination against blacks, women, illegal immigrants and homosexuals, the church has a lot of reasons to blush.

And most of us have some bazaar elements of hypocrisy when it comes to prejudice.  The black church was the moral engine of the civil rights movement but with all the energy they brought to equality for black men, the black church was often just as passionate in their discrimination against women and homosexuals.

The Catholic Church has done more in charity work for the poor than any other organization in the world, while adamantly maintaining prejudice against women into the 21st century and, incredibly, continuing to condemn homosexuality through the sermons of a priesthood that is populated by a probable majority of gay priests.....I could be wrong about that but you would have a hard time proving it.

Americans need to get congruent with our espoused values of liberty and equality and stop discriminating against any minority.  No matter what the Supreme Court decides on DOMA, America will soon be free of any legal discrimination against gay couples because an awakened population will stand for nothing less.  Religious people need to stop using their religion to excuse ignorant prejudice and start practicing that love and grace they talk about all of the time.

Our Kansas City church member, Carol Hattrup, sent me a picture of a very jubilant young man wearing a t-shirt that read, "I met my boyfriend on Christian Mingle."  I look forward to the day when Christian Mingle will be proud of that fact.

The Sane Limits of Executive Power

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
June 16, 2013   Proper 6

1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a
Later the following events took place: Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard in Jezreel, beside the palace of King Ahab of Samaria. 2And Ahab said to Naboth, "Give me your vineyard, so that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near my house; I will give you a better vineyard for it; or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its value in money." 3But Naboth said to Ahab, "The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance." 4Ahab went home resentful and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him; for he had said, "I will not give you my ancestral inheritance." He lay down on his bed, turned away his face, and would not eat.
5His wife Jezebel came to him and said, "Why are you so depressed that you will not eat?" 6He said to her, "Because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite and said to him, 'Give me your vineyard for money; or else, if you prefer, I will give you another vineyard for it'; but he answered, 'I will not give you my vineyard.'" 7His wife Jezebel said to him, "Do you now govern Israel? Get up, eat some food, and be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite." 8So she wrote letters in Ahab's name and sealed them with his seal; she sent the letters to the elders and the nobles who lived with Naboth in his city. 9She wrote in the letters, "Proclaim a fast, and seat Naboth at the head of the assembly; 10seat two scoundrels opposite him, and have them bring a charge against him, saying, 'You have cursed God and the king.' Then take him out, and stone him to death." 15As soon as Jezebel heard that Naboth had been stoned and was dead, Jezebel said to Ahab, "Go, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give you for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead." 16As soon as Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, Ahab set out to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, to take possession of it.
17Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying: 18Go down to meet King Ahab of Israel, who rules in Samaria; he is now in the vineyard of Naboth, where he has gone to take possession. 19You shall say to him, "Thus says the Lord: Have you killed, and also taken possession?" You shall say to him, "Thus says the Lord: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood." 20Ahab said to Elijah, "Have you found me, O my enemy?" He answered, "I have found you. Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, 21I will bring disaster on you; I will consume you, and will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel;

We changed internet service providers a few months ago and when we did I had to give our wireless network a name.  Never wanting to waste an opportunity to kind of mess with the neighbors, I named it, "FBI Surveillance Van."  Which, given my rather non-conformist reputation around here, was not immediately interpreted as a joke by some church members who were looking for an internet connection on their cell phones when things got a little slow in a service here one morning...... I'm confident that I was not preaching at the time.

But what seemed kind of funny to me back in February has taken a rather more serious turn in recent weeks.  It turns out that our government has been spying, not just on me or this church, but on the entire nation and a big part of the world.  Beyond spy satellites and drones with cameras coupled with cameras on intersections, bus and train stations, banks and retail stores, we have discovered that our government has the ability to keep all of our phone records, record conversations at will and read our email.

In the not too distant past, we understood that our guaranteed constitutional rights protected us from unwarranted searches.  We understood that our mail was sacred and that our phones could only be tapped by court order with probable cause being presented to a judge.  As technology has changed the way we communicate has become digital and wireless and the government's technological ability to spy on us has become unimaginable and they have implemented it.

The 4th amendment to the constitution assures us that the government has to present a darn good reason to stick its nose into our business but the Patriot Act gutted our legal privacy and long after the 9-11 hysteria that pushed the Patriot Act through congress in the first place was passed, the congress has renewed and strengthened the Patriot Act so that this outrageous and indefensible invasion of privacy may have actually not broken any laws...... which demonstrates what a bad bit of legislation the Patriot Act really is.

Now, it must be said that our various intelligence agencies have had some laudable success in catching terrorists before they can strike.  I don't want to fail to applaud those important victories, but playing around in the back of my mind is that famous bit of wisdom from Ben Franklin who said that those who will give up essential liberty in exchange for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor security and will lose both.

As soon as there are enough people living close enough to one another to compete for food, shelter and water, there is a need for a government to help us to live successfully together.  But from the beginning of time, there has been in our genes a tendency towards stratifying our society so that some of us become more important than the rest of us, claiming more and more of the food, housing and water for ourselves, even to the point of having much more than we can use while leaving others without enough to survive.

You can say this is a matter of politics or you can say it is a matter of religion though it seems to me that it is necessarily both.  Our scripture lesson this morning describes an ancient and seminal exchange between a monarch and a citizen.  Naboth had a small family vineyard that was near the palace of King Ahab and Ahab wanted it for his own use.  But Naboth believed that even though it was a king who was asking to buy it, he had the right to say "no."

The king became depressed about this limit to his power and his wife offered the perfect solution.... They didn't have drones back then so she hatched a plot to have him falsely accused and murdered so that the king could take his land.

The Hebrew Bible has many such examples of warnings about abuse of state power and the limitations on that power necessary to maintain the sacred value of every human's life.  It is safe to say that it is a theme in all of western religions, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam that there is a deep and passionate concern for protecting the equal value of all people.
Anytime we lose sight of that value then our religion starts to move from being a meaningful faith and starts to become a meaningless superstition.

I wish that it were not so but power is always in need of being held in check lest those in control begin to decide that certain groups of people are expendable.... Whether they are the poor, blacks, Jews, gays, immigrants or the middle class.  We have been assure by the likes of Lindsay Graham, senator from South Carolina, that as long as we are not doing anything wrong that we have nothing to fear from this governmental invasion of privacy.  If Graham had been aware that the Nazi propaganda director, Joseph Goebbels, had said essentially the same thing about Nazi information gathering on German citizens he would probably have said it differently but it is the fact that he and his ilk are not aware of the historical precedents that should motivate the rest of us to protest.

I think that the IRS scandal is over blown.  If you are starting a group that you name after a historical tax protest, the Tea Party, and then you apply for special tax-exempt status then I think you are begging for additional scrutiny.  I don't think our local police should use profiling in determining who they are going to pull over but if you, like one of our local residents has done, have a vanity tag that says "Zig Zag" the brand name of popular marijuana rolling papers, then I think you can expect some special scrutiny.

But this NSA thing is big.  I don't believe that they will only look for people who are hatching terrorist plots.  I think that our government has a long history of using personal information to control opposition and ruin the credibility of their critics.  The CIA kept records on Martin Luther King, and several prominent religious war protesters such as Thomas Merton and the Berrigan brothers.
When you consider the case of someone like New York governor, Elliot Spitzer, who was forced to resign in 2008 in a sex scandal, you see how information like this is often used.  Spitzer had been known as the "sheriff of Wall Street" because he understood complex financial instruments and he helped to safeguard the public interests from the abuses of investment bankers and stock traders.  When it was discovered that he was a regular customer of a high end prostitution service he was removed from office.

I have two observations to make about that...... Wall Street, without an aggressive sheriff, went wild and plundered the retirement savings of millions, trashed the world economy and caused massive unemployment, home foreclosures, made it impossible for many to retire or for others to find jobs.... It left many in the middle class no longer able to send their kids to college or to own their own home.

Spitzer really should not have paid that young woman to have sex with him.  That was a bad thing and his wife should divorce him and his kids should not send him a father's day card for years.  However, a victimless crime contrasted with what he was doing to protect millions of people?  Really, are we such simple-minded gossips and Puritans that we would consciously make this kind of decision?

And how was Spitzer discovered?  Well, you know, if you have transactions of over $10,000 at a time in your bank account, those transactions can be subject to review.  That's how we were told that Spitzer's illegal conduct was discovered.  That is not, however, true.  None of his transactions amounted to even half of the amount that should have triggered an investigation.  They went deeper, into smaller transactions, because the banking industry was looking for something to use against him.
I am afraid that much that same may have happened to Julian Assange, the Australian founder of Wikileaks who has defied the American military and intelligence agencies by leading classified information but our government is trying to build a case against him on a rape charge that may be little more than a fabrication to get their hands on him.

Again, I have every reason to assume that Assange's personal morals would disqualify him for a role in the clergy but that would be true of most people, including most members of clergy.  There are not many people who would survive the NSA's "white glove" test if they are allowed to dig into absolutely everything about our lives.

The public has been manipulated by the dumbing down effect of these neo-Puritanical sexual witch-hunts.  If we really are capable of analytical thought that is higher than the watermark set in the Jr High boy's restroom then we really need to refuse to just keep piling effective people on the trash heap of "you would have embarrassed my mother's Sunday School class."

Religious people have been sold a bill of goods in having been told that the Lord God Almighty is as obsessed with people's bedroom lives as is the tabloid media.  We are being manipulated by a government use of fear of terrorism so that we will not object to their ever-increasing invasion into our privacy for reasons that look pretty dubious to me.

Did you know that more Americans have been killed by gun wielding toddlers this year than have been killed by terrorists?  Should the NSA start spying on pre-schoolers?  After all, guns don't kill people..... toddlers kill people.
Thankfully, no one told the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, not to mix politics and religion.  Elijah didn't just preach about out the sane limits of political power, he went into the King's house and confronted him to his face, assuring him that dogs would lick up his blood in the same place where the blood of the innocent citizen he had murdered was spilled.

The progressive church now wears the prophet's mantle.  We must stand up to the monarchs of our day, fearlessly, consistently, refusing to be distracted with their use of sex and fear to manipulate us.....
We don't want to turn our food supply over to a handful of corporations.
We will not allow our planet's resources to be used up and we will not allow our air, water and land to be polluted for profit.
We will not favor banks over homeowners or sit idly by while the poor are kept out of colleges, hospitals and houses.
We will not tolerate forcing our elderly to work until they drop dead wishing people a happy shopping experience at Walmart.
We will not tacitly accept the imprisoning of a generation of black young men who have been kept out of meaningful employment by inadequate education.
We will not passively watch as our gay sisters and brothers are marginalized, our Latino neighbors are first enslaved and then deported.
And we will not give our sons and daughters for your military adventures ginned up by lies to hide your profit motives.
And I don't care who is sleeping with whom as long as my government is continually found in bed with corporate interests..... they are the only whores I'm worried about.
And if the NSA missed any part of this message the manuscript will be posted on our website by 5 this evening.  I don't want for you to miss a word of this.

The Wisdom of the World

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Inter-Faith Sunday   June 2, 2013

Christian   In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets      Matthew 7:12
Confucianism  Do not do to others what you would not like yourself. Then there will be no resentment against you, either in the family or in the state.      Analects 12:2
Buddhism  Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.      Udana-Varga 5,1
Hinduism This is the sum of duty; do naught onto others what you would not have them do unto you.      Mahabharata 5,1517
Islam  No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.      Sunnah
Judaism   What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.      Talmud, Shabbat 3id
Taoism  Regard your neighbor's gain as your gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss.      Tai Shang Kan Yin P'ien
Zoroastrianism  That nature alone is good which refrains from doing another whatsoever is not good for itself.      Dadisten-I-dinik, 94,5

For most of my life I have heard people trying to level the religious playing field by saying, "Everyone in every religion is after the same goal."  And by that, they mean, "we are all just trying to get to heaven."  And while I appreciate the fact that the people who say that may be trying defuse religious rivalry, the truth is that not all people in all religions are trying to get to heaven or even believe in heaven as traditional western Christians have conceived of it.

I don't want to be crass about this..... no matter how much many of you enjoy it when I am a bit crass....
Still, forgive me for saying it just this way, but embracing a religious faith so that you can go to heaven is not terribly different from getting married for all of the free sex.  I hope that most married people do have a happy and fulfilling sex life but my best guess is that one of the most absolutely certain ways to make sure that you don't have a successful sex life in marriage, is to get married for all of the free sex.  I'm not expert on these things, but I suspect that once that motivation becomes clear that there are going to be a lot of nights alone on the sofa in that marriage.

I resist ascribing anthropomorphic motivations to God, but I suspect that anyone who approached religion for the entirely self-serving potential heavenly reward might be met by the Lord at the Pearly Gates and be handed a blanket and a pillow and be told to go away and sleep on a sofa somewhere else, perhaps in a place where the air-conditioning hasn't worked in, well, forever.

What has often been disturbing to the mainstream Christian west, whose only motivation to be religious at all is the hope of eternal life in heaven, is the realization that there is no mention of eternal life or heaven in the Hebrew Bible at all.... And for the most part, no such concept exists in reformed Judaism today nor is it a motivating notion in Buddhism or Confucianism and there is nothing like heaven in Hinduism that a western Christian would recognize.

As much as it may disappoint many of our local religious peers, I find it to be very doubtful that the historical Jesus ever said a word or wasted a moment thinking about any life other than the one we are experiencing right now.  To quote the musician, Tim Minchin, "Isn't THIS enough?
 Just.. this.. world?
 Just this.. beautiful, complex
 Wonderfully unfathomable.. natural.. world?
 How does it so fail to hold our attention
 That we have to diminish it with the invention
 Of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?"

When religion had gone so dormant as to be almost extinct in early colonial America, there came a revival remembered now as "the Second Great Awakening" in which Methodist and Presbyterian evangelists rode their horses into the west preaching a message of fear of hell and lust for heaven and the memory of that evangelical push has haunted modern Christians, asking us to ignore what we see, feel and know in favor of the product of over active imaginations cursed by neurotic feelings of guilt.

Take away the manipulations of guilt and fear, both the threats and the unsubstantiated promises of pie in the sky in the bye and bye and what is left of religion?  People who have been, for generations, held by the throat by churches that had nothing to offer but self interest and neurotic guilt are inclined to whisper, "nothing, nothing at all."  It is an understandable first response considering the conditioning we've been put through.

But if you ask a couple who has been married for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years if it is their sex life that makes them stay together now, you would be lucky to walk away with your dental work intact.... It would be an insulting, obscene, and stupid question...... which is the reaction you would get from a spiritual leader in almost any of the world's religions if you asked them if going to heaven was their goal.
I had been preaching for 15 years when Drury University's religion department first asked me to teach a course entitled, "The Life and Teachings of Jesus."  Preaching involves taking short passages of scripture and trying to apply that to current events and life but I am ashamed to say that prior to trying to write my first course syllabus for that class 15 years ago that I had never tried to look at the body of the teachings of Jesus as a whole.

What was the central message of Jesus?  What was he about?  What motivated him?  What was he trying to teach?  Or, perhaps, what was he trying to correct?

I am indebted to the early work of Marcus Borg for showing me first how to read the gospels by looking at the primary conflict in the gospels.  Borg showed me that the teachings of Jesus were generally presented in contrast to a prevailing religious system of piety.  Jesus was offering an alternative to a religion based on appeasement of God by living pure lives.  Jesus, Borg says, was the teacher of radical compassion.

Piety is basically self-centered.  It is a religion based on the question, "What do I have to do to keep God from punishing me and to earn divine rewards?"  Compassion is other centered.  Compassion asks us to feel what others feel, to understand, appreciate, sympathize, and empathize with the plight of those who hunger, who suffer violence, who are in need.

Once you understand Jesus as being the teacher, not simply of compassion as an alternative to piety, but as a teacher of a kind of radical compassion.... A sell all you own and give it to the poor kind of radical teacher.... A teacher who was willing to stand up to both a violently oppressive dominant religion and a violently occupying empire, unafraid even to die if that it what it took to both demonstrate and teach radical compassion then you become liberated from all of the dogma, creeds, beliefs and theological gymnastics that never really made any sense in the first place.

One of the books I use in my college class on Western Religions is by a Muslim scholar, Reza Aslan, who says that monotheism is the root cause of all religious conflict and wars.  Once any religion decides that there can be only one God then their way of understanding that God cannot bear any rivals. Extremists then feel motivated to fight, even to kill, to defend their true religion.

He didn't get to live long enough to really flesh out where he was going, but from his Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonheoffer began to dream of Christianity without religion.... Without dogma, creeds, beliefs or theology.... He spoke of being Christian as a way of living.

Thomas Merton, who began his writing career as one of the most Roman Catholic of all Roman Catholic writers, progressed through his life into the realization that the life Jesus taught was all that mattered, and that the beliefs of his church and all religions needed to meet on the marvelous higher ground of the good life, the life of loving compassion.

No religion was invented by God.  No religious text was written by or even inspired by God.
All of our religions, all of our sacred texts, reflect human efforts to express our highest thoughts, our greatest dreams, our most profound longings and hopes.  Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it frightening wrong.

There are great moral insights in all of the world's religions and each also contains reflections of our most evil and dark characteristics.  It would be nice if one was right and the others were wrong so that we could just consume one entirely and never have to think again but that is not the world we live in.  We have to think, struggle, grow..... we have to reject some of our old beliefs in order to make space for new insights and we have to be willing to both admit that we have been wrong and to change.

In the end, it becomes increasingly obvious that it was never about beliefs in the first place.... It was always about the life.... The life of loving generously, consciously forgiving and in showing radical compassion.

And when we look at virtually all of the religions of the world, as we see in our readings today from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism and Taoism... the heart of the Golden Rule is there.  The inability to see the inherent value of other people, to feel their pain, to desire to make the world better for those who suffer..... that is hell enough isn't it?

To embrace a religion that is love and to live a life defined by compassion in a fabulous, mysterious, beautiful and complex universe, that is heaven enough for me.

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.