Can You Name 10 Good People?

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper     July 28, 2013

Genesis 18:20-23, 31-32          
20Then the Lord said, "How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! 21I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know." 22So the men turned from there, and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord.
23Then Abraham came near and said, "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? .....31He said, "Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there." He answered, "For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it." 32Then he said, "Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there." He answered, "For the sake of ten I will not destroy it."

No one, including Osama Bin Laden, thought that the World Trade Towers in New York would completely collapse when struck by airplanes, until, of course, they did. That does not diminish the courage of the firemen who rushed into the burning towers to help evacuate people who consequently lost their lives in the line of duty.  A decade later there was a crisis in Japan.

An earthquake and the tsunami crashed into Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, making a crisis of nature combined with a human mistake of putting a power plant on a coast, resulting in one of the most dangerous situations faced in Asia since World War II.  The potential of deaths from radiation was almost impossible to calculate but the radiation leaking inside the plant made it virtually impossible for anyone to go inside to take action to contain the danger.

 The 800 employees who worked at the Fukushima plant were immediately evacuated while robots were sent in with cameras and detectors only to confirm their fears that a major radiation leak was unavoidable.  At that point, 50 specialists and firemen volunteered to go in.  The Asian media called them the Fukushima 50.  Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, frankly, the workers were "prepared for death." Which was a good thing because many of them did and you have to assume that all of them have dramatically shortened their life expectancy. I doubt that anyone volunteering for military service or any other form of public service could have been as certain of stepping into personal sacrifice as did these workers.  Their number started out at 50 and grew.


It wasn't like a super hero movie or a Die Hard, Red or G I Joe movie in which people heroically save the world and the heroes all live.  The Fukushima 50 didn't even fix the broken reactor.... It is still leaking radioactive waste into the ocean.  They just make a horrible situation better and saved a lot of people in the process of shortening their own lives.

Two years have past.... Do you remember hearing about the Fukushima 50?  There was some media coverage of their heroism and personal sacrifices at the time but not one percent as much as we have heard about the British royal baby or even Anthony Weiner's junk shots.

We read portions of the Old Testament story about the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Please, let me say clearly, this is not history. This is a story.  A lot of the myths of the Old Testament are built around an oral accounting of why something in their region of the world is the way that it is.  There may have been some villages burned up in volcanic activity or some natural disaster that was then interpreted as being the activity of God but let's be very very very clear about the fact that God doesn't go around burning up cities because of the sinfulness of the city.


If you don't believe me, just go to Washington, D.C. and see that it is still there which is proof enough that God doesn't destroy cities because of the sin of the people who work on Capitol Hill.

The charred remains of an ancient village may have given Jews a reason to create a narrative but the point of the narrative is what gives the account gravity in scripture.  What we look at today is a case of pleading between Abraham and the Almighty, which is not unlike other prophetic pleadings with God in Hebrew scripture.

God has told Abraham to get his family out of harm's way while he burns up a sinful city and Abraham tries to bargain with God.... "But what if there are 50 good people still in town?"  "What if there are 20?"  Finally, "What about 10, if there are 10 good people, could you really burn up 10 good people because there are ten thousand others who really deserve to be fried?"

God relents and gives Abraham the opportunity to name 10 good people in his village and he couldn't do it.  Could you?  Seriously, could you?

What I find interesting about the martyrs of our memory is that they are almost all dead.  When I took a course in religious biography at Harvard, we studied the lives of some of modern history's most remarkable people:  Gandhi, King, Day, Romero, Niebuhr, and even though my professor, Dr. Harvey Cox, had known most of them as personal friends, they were all, to we students, dead people.


When we bought this building, I put up framed images of some of faith's great modern examples which included the people I just mentioned along with Black Elk and many others but the only one on display here who is still alive, and I'm not even sure about that, is Wang Weilin, who may have been the unknown protester who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

So, if we were to personalize this text..... if you were standing in Abraham's shoes and God had told you to go to the lake for the weekend because Springfield had pushed God just a little too far..... could you name 10 people from among your peers to save Springfield from having fire rained down on it from heaven?

Could you name the mayor?  The superintendant of schools?  The city manager?  What about the director of the United Way?  What about the Catholic Bishop?  Or the President of the Assemblies of God?  How about the people who are sitting around you here in church?  Are you up to 10 yet?

At everyone's funeral, you are always talking about a good person but the sobering fact is that you may not have ever thought of them as having been a good person until shortly after they had died.  Abraham was asked to quickly come up with the names of 10 good people who were alive, who were his neighbors and he couldn't do it and I suspect that for the most part, we couldn't either.

I can't name a single one of the Fukushima 50, you may not know the names of more than one or two of the community leaders I just mentioned and I bet you couldn't repeat the name of the guy standing in front of that tank in Tiananmen Square and I just told you what it was...... I'm pretty sure it was Wang Weilin.

But if I asked you to name the New York governor who resigned because of his relationship with prostitutes, or which New York mayor candidate sends naked pictures of himself to young women, or which governor got his house keeper pregnant or which governor disappeared while visiting his mistress in Argentina..... you can name all of them.

Some of that is because we are trained to think about people's failings and whenever someone sticks their head up above the crowd, the majority instinct is to try to find some plausible reason to cut their head off.

Our government is starved for leadership but no one wants to lead because as soon as you step out in front of the line, a hundred people want to stab you in the back.  The progressive church is simply not making much progress in the world because progressives do not champion one another.... We are much more likely to cut one another down than to build one another up.

We are afraid to praise anyone these days because we are afraid that we'll find out something about them that will disappoint us.  John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, no one that we now confidently name as great leaders would have withstood the scrutiny of the current media's neo-puritan witch hunts.

The only reason we can name anyone from the past century as a hero is because the 24 hour news media didn't come into existence until the end of the 20th century.

So, I have two things to say about this.  The first is that we all need to decide, right now, right here, that we are going to stop be lead around by the nose by gossip.  We need to be much more concerned about what a person has done right, what they have accomplished, what they can do than by how many black marks we can put on their moral score sheet.  Capable, wonderful, intelligent, talented people make mistakes.  Now, Anthony Weiner is just crazy.... That's different..... but I'm saying, get your head out of the sheets and look at the world in a more balanced way.

Besides, you know, lions don't spend much time worrying about the opinions of sheep.  Don't think like you were just a part of the herd of sheep.

The second thing is that I want to suggest to you is that try your best to live in a way that earns you a place on that list of good people.  Sure, if you try to stick your neck out, someone will try to cut your throat.  But as that famous poem that was mistakenly attributed to Mother Theresa goes:

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;

Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
    Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;

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

Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you've got anyway.

The only proverb that I can claim as my own comes from years of experience in ministry.  My proverb says:  If you light a candle in a dark place, you will draw bugs.  I realized this after years of trying to do really good things in ministry and always being confronted by irrational, jealous, hyper-critical and sometimes plain old stupid opposition.  No good deed goes unpunished but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be the one who is ready to be inconvenienced, or have to sacrifice for doing some good things.

You may not ever be called upon to run into a nuclear reactor filling with radiation but aren't you glad that there are some people who have that kind of character?  And really, wouldn't you like to have that kind of character whether you were ever called upon to do it or not?

Leon Bloy said that anyone who is a Christian who is not a hero is a pig.  Now, I know you don't want to be pigs so, if Bloy is right then you know what you need to do.  Don't be shy, don't be timid, don't be swayed by gossip or fear of judgment.... Be a hero.

Peace without Justice is Surrender

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 12   July 21, 2013

Luke 10:38-42
38Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. 40But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." 41But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

Though I was inspired by their passion, dedication and courage, I was not one of the people who watched the protests during the Arab Spring with much hope.  My one week in Egypt nearly 20 years ago hardly qualifies me as an expert, but I was pretty sure that the massive public protests bent on ousting the secular military government of Hosni Mubarak would not necessarily lead to anything much better.  Angry people tend to over correct.... If they are mad at one kind of government leadership, they will often race to embrace it's opposite only to discover that they despise that even more.

The strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood looked like the cure to the excesses of Hosni Mubarak when the protesters in the public square but what they needed was a more sane middle path.  As I had feared, the excess of the first democratically elected president in Egypt in its 5000 year history, Mohamed Morsi, infuriated Egyptians.

Democracy is not an easy thing.  Democracy must mean more than the tyranny of a 51% vote.  The Muslim Brotherhood, long denied a fair place at the table of power in Egypt, once they were able to muster a tiny majority in the polls, decided that they then had absolute power and could jail, torture and murder their political opponents.

We have more than two centuries of experience in democracy and, though we tend to be a bit more subtle about it, we're not very good at it either.  In 2013 we are in possession of two houses of Congress that are more ineffective and more paralyzed than in any time in modern American history.  Democrats control the White House and the Senate, Republicans control the Congress and, as sad as it is to say it, even our constitutionally non-partisan Supreme Court is controlled by the Republican Party.

When I see Mitch McConnell talking about anything President Obama wants to do, I get the distinct sense that McConnell just doesn't believe that our freely elected president has the right to be the president.  There is a level of contempt there that makes you think that McConnell just feels that Obama is beneath him and his mere presence in the White House is a personal insult.

And, like many of my fellow liberals, I am generally inclined to return the favor and feel the same way about McConnell but it is exactly that kind of mutual contempt that has set Egypt and Syria on fire.  There has to be a better way.

Still, there is clearly some point at which gridlock becomes something more than mere obstructionism. At some point it surely becomes such a challenge to the health of the nation that it begins to look like treason.

As Ron and June Hertenstein leave us this week to move to Florida, among their stated reasons for leaving behind the privilege it is to live in the Ozarks, is to devote more time to an organization called, "No Labels."  No Labels is striving to create a problem solving conversation among politicians who are able to see beyond the partisan divide enough to actually work on solutions.  Though I hate to see them leave, I wish them Godspeed in trying to find ways to get our elected officials to act like intelligent grown ups..... recognizing that in many cases it could never be much more than an act.

I am sincerely cynical about the prospects for success in getting our currently elected members of Congress to participate in a sane middle path but I would love to be wrong about that.

As I have watched the coups in Egypt with interest this week, I have marveled at how little influence America seems to have on Egyptian politics even though we give them $1.6 billion dollars a year in aid.  Now, to be clear, this is not because we have a warm place in our hearts for the struggling poor in Egypt.... We basically pay them a huge annual bribe to keep them from attacking Israel.

I don't want to diminish the diplomatic success that is known as the Camp David Accords but when I gave my lunch money to the bullies in the boys room in elementary school so that they wouldn't beat me up, I didn't walk out into the hallway declaring diplomatic success.

Now that there has been a military coups, we can't give them their usual bribe money because there is no longer a legitimate government in Egypt.
So, Ron and June, if I may pass along a suggestion to the "No Labels" solution seeking committee, why don't we use our Middle Eastern bribe money to fund democratic elections in America.....because, with the corporate and billionaire money in our elections, they are not really free and fair democratic elections, are they?   If we can get genuine campaign finance reform in American politics then we could let the people freely elect a government that actually represents our interests.

Without NRA political donations buying politicians we could get sensible gun laws and without Insurance and Pharmaceutical money we could get a national health care program and without a bloated military budget we could actually create a globally competitive education system and an environmentally friendly power grid.  How's that for a workable solution?

And especially since you are moving to Florida where the "for profit prison industry" is in full swing you might want to spend some time on that issue. The state of Florida is becoming famous for their school to prison pipe-line.... By cutting funding of public schools, you create more crime and then you need more prisons.  Housing a prisoner costs more than educating a kid but this is not a math problem, this is a for-profit-prison and political contribution problem.

And I can't really blame the public for not being more outraged about this because there just isn't much about it in the news.  Here is my weekly rant about the media:
It is the job of a good journalist to make things that are important interesting.
They have to investigate it and be skillful enough in their trade to write about it in a way that informs us, that makes us take an interest in the things that matter.
But what we are getting in the media is entertainment.  They are not making important things interesting, they are, in stead, choosing things that are interesting and by reporting on them they make them important.

The media will focus on a story about a missing white girl, or a political sex scandal or some recent revelation about a Hollywood divorce, a baseball player on steroids or the release of a new super hero movie but they don't tell us much about why 90,000 Syrian civilians have been killed in a civil war or even about the civil war raging on our southern border in Mexico that we are fueling with our drug money.  You aren't being told which corporations are funding the political campaigns of your senator or members of congress or why your grocery store won't tell you what is in the food you buy.

Journalists are supposed to do the hard work of making what is important interesting enough for us to pay attention but in stead they are taking what we are interested in at a very juvenile level and making it seem like sex scandals and athlete juicing is important.

The gospel text today places two sisters in juxtaposition.  One is focused on the task at hand.... Feeding a house full of guests, the other is seizing on what may have been, for her, a once in a lifetime chance to listen to the teachings of Jesus.
Now I clearly bear the marks of a man who has not missed many meals and I love Martha's devotion to getting dinner ready but we all know that Mary is making the better choice.

The media knows we are always interested in the smell of cookies in the oven.... We've all been to the movie theater when the popcorn was the most memorable part of the trip but we also know that is not how it is supposed to be.

Martha represents the responsible though unimaginative aspect of living..... of getting the leaves out of the gutter and the dishes out of the sink.... Of making sure we have our retirement fully funded before going on a trip to New Zealand.  And Mary is probably also planning to eat dinner again.... If not that day, surely by the next day..... but she is able to discern what is the most important at the moment without getting into a fight with her sister about the mundane.

Martha wanted to start a fight.  Martha wanted Mary to be more like Martha, which in Martha's mind, was the only decent way to be.  Liberals think Conservatives are stupid and Conservatives think that Liberals are lazy and unrealistic.  Democrats want to run the government and Republicans seem to think that they are the only ones who should ever be in power, regardless of who has been elected.

Somewhere between the ignorantly unaware and the angry arsonist, there is an intelligent middle way.

I accept that in my 20 years as an opinion writer in the NewsLeader, that I have come to be something of a cartoon character.  It is my job to write columns that are sufficiently provocative for people to pause during their morning routine to read my 500 word screed but I know that if I tried to talk to my friends in that same tone that I wouldn't have any friends.

Here, in the still, contemplative environment of our church gatherings we want to find the truth.  We never want to fail to speak or act due to lack of courage.  We do not want to settle for peace without justice but we do not want to let our anger or our passion for justice to lead us to such extremes that we cut off conversation with those with whom we disagree.

I'm not a moderate and I'm not encouraging you to be either.  There is a difference between what we call "the middle of the road" and what the Buddha called "the middle path."  We have to remember that Jesus wasn't crucified for being a moderate.

Please remember this important truth:  Peace without Justice is just Surrender.  No one here is enamored with surrender.

We are interested in justice but we should not interested in revenge.  We are interested in justice but we do not need to set the church, the government or even the banks on fire.  We are interested in justice and we want to get there as sane, intelligent people of character and when we get there, even our opponents should still be able to speak well of us.

Trayvon is Dead and None of Us are 'Not Guilty'

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
July 14, 2013    Proper 10

Luke 10:25-37
25Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 26He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" 27He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." 28And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live." 29But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" 37He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

We stood out on the church lawn yesterday and some of us speculated about the jury's verdict in the Zimmerman trial.  I was confident that though there was not a premeditated murder here there was at least a manslaughter conviction that seemed to me to be inescapable.  No one in America was more surprised than I was at the announced "not guilty" verdict.  What is perhaps more sad is how many African Americans who were not surprised, for whom this verdict looked more like "business as usual."

In 1852, in a speech entitled, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro," freed slave, Fredrick Douglass, said:

"At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."

It is that quickening of conscience that I am looking for this morning.  This is not a time for wit or irony.... It is time for us to expose the hypocrisy of our nation's racial failures.  It may be that the facts of the February 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin left the jury unable to move beyond reasonable doubt but had the roles been reversed.... Had a seventeen year old black teenager followed an unarmed white man through a dark neighborhood and, in the midst of a confrontation, had shot and killed the white homeowner.... Then that young man certainly wouldn't have gone home and slept in his own bed after the police were called and he would not have come away from the trial with a "not guilty" conviction or even a manslaughter conviction.  Had Trayvon Martin shot George Zimmerman he would have been lucky to avoid the death penalty.

Race was surely an issue in this case as was class.  There is no way to prove it but I am personally convinced that had O J Simpson not been a famous rich person, he would not have been found not guilty in the murder of his former wife and her friend.  Race is a huge factor in our judicial system, second only in unfair rulings to the presence of money.  It is very uncommon for an impoverished David to ever win in court against an economic Goliath.

The jury, charged with the difficult task of rendering a decision in this case, decided that Zimmerman was not guilty which is a long way from saying that he was innocent.  But I would say in this incident that Trayvon Martin is dead and not a one of us here is "not guilty."

We are all a part of the society that has made it unsafe to walk down the street while being black.

There are 30,000 gun deaths in America every year, more than 10,000 of which are homicides and young black men figure in that number at a disproportionate rate.  So, there are several thousand young black men gunned down every year in the United States.  This one case has risen to national attention because the circumstances around seem to perfectly symbolize our American angst.

Things are better than they used to be but none of us should pretend that racism is a thing of the past.  Nor should we be silly about switching from one kind of prejudice to just another kind of denial of reality.  He has been quoted so often now that he probably regrets having ever said it but the Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked that nothing makes him more uncomfortable that hearing footsteps behind him on a city street and turning and being relieved when it is a white person.

Crime among angry young black men is not an urban myth.  It is real.  Of course, poverty causes crime regardless of race.  Bad schools, lack of decent and safe public housing causes crime.  Broken down family relationships and addiction causes crime..... crime is not a race issue and, besides, when you take the long view of history, no one has killed more people, enslaved more people, tortured more people and stolen land and property from more people than white men..... in that sordid race, my peeps are still undefeated.

What we saw in the Zimmerman stand off with Martin was an employed homeowner in a neighborhood with a crime problem and a black young man who was visiting in the neighborhood with his father's girlfriend.

Trayvon Martin fit the profile of the kind of person Zimmerman didn't trust and Zimmerman fit the profile of what made Trayvon Martin angry...... if it takes anything to make teenagers angry. The inequality here is that the creepy cracker was able to get a conceal and carry license and this morning he can legally be back out in his neighborhood with a firearm, loaded, round in the chamber with no safety on, just like he was that night last February.  Applause for the NRA!

We are all aware of this trial because of what it represents which is all about race, class and stage of life.  In the dark, in a high crime neighborhood of Florida, these two met one another and only one walked away.

Now, if I can ask you to make a great leap in time backwards, four, maybe five minutes ago, Patrick read to you the familiar passage from Luke that we know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  Most of you have had this story interpreted to you by preachers and Sunday School teachers since before you could take the training wheels off of your bicycle.  In spite of how familiar it is to you, I would like to ask you today to picture the scene in your minds again, only this time I want to ask you to see it as an encounter, not of a Samaritan and a Jew, but as Travon Martin and George Zimmerman.

And really, it could go either way, Trayvon is walking back to his father's girl friend's house with a bottle of tea and a bag of Skittles, talking to a friend on his cell phone when he sees George Zimmerman lying in the street, robbed, beaten and half dead.  Or you could see it the other way around.... Zimmerman is out on his neighborhood watch, looking for some of those...... who always get away, and he happens on the hoody wearing skinny form of Trayvon, lying wounded in the street.
Look at it either way because these are two guys who are not going to like each other in any setting.  They have been trained by very real an often repeated bad experience to despise one another.  Either one could have found the other one lying in the street and had a very private moment of satisfaction..... this time the creepy cracker got it.... Or this time the thug got it.

What I'm asking you to consider about this biblical parable is that the guy we call the Good Samaritan may have found this beaten, half dead Jew and even though he stopped, picked him up, took him to get help and even paid for it out of his pocket, he may very well have still hated that man and everything he represented.

The text didn't say that this was the one Samaritan in the region who happened to be such a good guy that he was free of prejudice and that he had entirely forgiven the Jews for what they had done to the Samaritans..... or the other way around.

The choice that the Samaritan had to make in this parable was, when confronted by a person he undoubtedly saw as an enemy, he didn't have to decide about what he thought about Jews, he had to decide who he wanted to be.

When George Zimmerman called 911 to report a suspicious looking person in his neighborhood, it was not the first time he had called 911 to make such a report.  It wasn't the 10th time or the 20th time.  Over the eight or nine years that Zimmerman had been on the neighborhood watch, he had place 46 calls to 911 all to report suspicious looking people walking through his neighborhood.

When asked to describe the suspicious looking people, would you believe that all 46 of them were black young men.

I'm not saying that there is a pattern here.... Oh the heck I'm not..... George Zimmerman profiled black young men and there is good reason to believe that black young men had perpetrated some of the crime in Zimmerman's neighborhood.

It is also true that neighborhood watch volunteers are not suppose to follow suspects or go out with a lethal weapon.  Even if he fired in self defense, this is not an innocent incident..... there were a number of bad decisions that led up to the very sad and very wrong death of Trayvon Martin.  But no one here should pretend that there is not someone in this world that you are afraid of.... Someone you distrust from the very sight of them.

In the Ozarks we tend to think that everyone who speaks with a Spanish accent is from Mexico but I can tell you that they are not and that in Central America, Mexicans tend to look down on Cubans and Costa Ricans tend to look down on Nicaraguans and in Ecuador the white European Spanish descendants look down on the indigenous Quechua and, my friends, religious fundamentalists don't often get to be the heroes of the stories we tell in this room, do they?

Yes, yes, yes, many of you have been victimized by fundamentalists, evangelicals, magical Catholics and crazy Pentecostals but right now I'm not talking about who they are, am asking you to think about who you want to be.

If you got George Zimmerman alone in a safe place and asked him about his history with young black men, he might be able to convince you that he had plausible reason for his prejudice.... I'm saying "might"..... for some of us, you have to suspend reality here for just a minute..... but even if he had plausible reason, he had a choice to do something about the problem..... like volunteer to mentor a kid in foster care, or be a reading buddy at the local elementary school.  He didn't have to put a gun in his belt and go out roaming the neighborhood at night.

I'm not telling you that there is no reason to be afraid, that there is no reason to be prejudiced, or that I have no sympathy for those who are tired of being victimized.  I'm just asking you now, here in the clear light of a sunny Sunday morning to decide who you want to be.  Do you want revenge or do you want to grow your spirit to the point of being able to forgive?  Do you want to feel safe and empowered and aggressive, or do you want to choose to be vulnerable enough to love an enemy and to show kindness to someone who doesn't deserve it?

Jesus told a story about a man who chose to be bigger than his fear, his anger, his need for safety or revenge.  It was just a story.  However, you are not just a story.  You are real and you have real choices to make.

Please don't assume that I'm neutral here..... that's the job of those other preachers.  I'm here to tell you that I believe that the Good Samaritan made the right choice and George Zimmerman made the wrong choice.  I want you to make the right choice..... and until it is safe to walk while being black in America all of us need to keep exposing the hypocrisy that is alive an well in our nation.

A Government for the People

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Thoughts on Independence Day    July 7, 2013

Isaiah 10:1-4                                              
Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, 2to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey! 3What will you do on the day of punishment, in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, 4so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain? For all this his anger has not turned away; his hand is stretched out still.

An important educational value for those of us who were in public schools during the Cold War was to be thoroughly convinced that we were right and the communists were wrong, evil, bad, dangerous and that they had bad weather, couldn't dance or sing and that they had bad breath.  I suppose that it is fortunate for us that students in China were now subjected to the same education during that time since we are not dependent upon that communist economy to keep loaning us enough money to keep our nation afloat...... but I digress.

An important building block in our anti-communist education was the reading of George Orwell's "Animal Farm."  As you recall, in Orwell's allegorical tale, the animals on a farm revolt against the farmers and take over, saying that they want to create an egalitarian utopia in which everyone shares equally in both the work and the resources.

Of course, the experiment in self-rule fails.  Some animals, especially the cat, managed to scam the system.... Eating but not working.  Others, the pigs, claiming superiority, take over control of the farm and eventually evolve into being just as like the farmers.  Which says something of the hopelessness of the communist ideal but it doesn't say anything all that great about capitalism and democracy either.  The working poor lose in both scenarios.
Still, I find that thinking about role of government in creating a good society is easier when you think about it on a small scale..... Orwell used a single farm, I like to think about an island with a hundred people on it.

If we wanted to create the most fair and just society possible on an island where everyone knows everyone we would divide labor on the island in a way that served the greatest good.  We wouldn't all be farmers, we wouldn't all be dentists and we wouldn't all be mayor of the island.

We wouldn't let just one person own all of the housing or all of the farmland.  We wouldn't built a mansion for one family and let ten other people remain homeless.  That's not to say that the more productive or even the ones who provided a more vital service might not fair a bit better than the rest but the difference would be a matter of degree and not a matter of multiples.... Right?

Assuming that there would be some who were elderly or infirm and some who were dependent children, we would have to support some of our 100 islanders while they cared for children and the ill.  Hopefully you would still want to support a pastor but I bet I would need to learn how to make furniture or something equally useful.

If we ask the question, "Does the state have an obligation to take care of the poor?"  The answer is a lot easier to see if you are thinking about a state that is comprised of a hundred people in a small space.  And in this place we can add a corollary question, "Is there a spiritual obligation to care for the poor," and even parse that between the corporate state responsibility and individual responsibility.

In the current political debate, we often hear conservatives arguing that the Christian value of compassion towards the poor is an individual obligation and not a state obligation.  There are not many times when you can say that one religious view is right and the opposite view is wrong but this is one where we can be absolutely clear.

In spite of how often evangelical Christianity uses the word "personal" as in "I have a personal relationship with God" or "I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior," if you take scripture seriously you have to immediately acknowledge that the word "personal" is not in the Bible.  It is not in the Hebrew Bible and it is not in the Christian New Testament, nowhere, not once, nada, it is not there.

American emphasis on a "personal" relationship was based on a very poor reading of John Calvin and, it should be noted, John Calvin was not born until quite some time had passed after the writing of both the Old and New Testaments.  In Jewish faith, both reward and punishment was primarily seen in the entire nation.  Scriptures describe a corporate ethic that was never just personal, it always had to do with the entire community taking care of the poor, the sick, the elderly, widows, orphans, foreigners and all of the most vulnerable members of society.

Modern politicians may not want to do that but they cannot in any honest way point to the traditions of Moses and claim that the government can take a pass on caring for the poor.

The New Testament was composed when Israel did not rule itself.   It was an occupied nation and none of the material that forms the Christian part of the Bible was written to a government and yet all through it was a deep community concern that finds expression in the stories from Acts about the new church members  selling everything they had to share with those who were in need. Far beyond the leather binding of the New Testament, we have letters and sermons of the early church that are often concerned with managing the appropriate distribution of food and resources.

Sure, it is easier when you think of an island of 100 people than a nation of over 300 million.  On that island you would know who really needed help and who was just taking advantage of your compassion.  There are always complexities that arise in scale.  It is more efficient to have one water system for the city than it would be for all of us to keep a well and a cistern at our homes.  It is generally better for school systems, police and fire departments to embrace a fairly large population rather than dividing such things up into islands or neighborhoods of a few dozen but large-scale bureaucracy invites abuse and inefficiency as well.

The real deception that has been fostered by both conservative politicians and right wing evangelicals is that the poor are to blame for the hardships experienced by small business owners and those on the lower end of the economic scale.  It is not true.  It is true that small businesses and lower income families are struggling now and have been for several years, but the large corporations and right wing politicians have tried to convince them that their suffering is because the government takes their money from them and gives it to the lazy, indifferent and chronically poor.

Those of us who get up and go to work six and seven days a week and do everything we can to be successful while still struggling to get by can feel the injustice in our physical exhaustion, our lack of savings and our dim prospects for retirement.  So people are angry, I get that.  And people want their religious values to answer the anger but the answer they think they want cannot be found in the pages of the Bible.

Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, recently wrote about this myth of blaming the poor for the hardships of low income families.  The real reason, according to Reich, is this radical shift of resources from the lower and middle class into the hands of the super rich.  American workers are more productive than ever before but they get to keep a smaller and smaller slice of the wealth that they create.

If wages had kept pace with productivity, middle class families that were earning $50,000 a year twenty years ago would be earning over $90,000 now but the fact of their existence is that their income has grown only a few percentage points while the people at the top of the income ladder are doing so well that you cannot read the Biblical prophets who railed against the wealthy and the ruling class for their oppression of the poor without seeing our wealthy and ruling classes as being the ones to whom these prophets shout their warnings.

We pay lip service to competition and capitalism in the United States but in the socialist democracies in Western Europe, we often see a much more healthy capitalism.  In the United States, we have allowed businesses to become monopolies so that things like our monthly cell phone bills are more than three times higher than the same service in France or Spain where in stead of two big cell providers like we have here, they have five or six competing companies.

This past week, Congress failed to pass the farm bill that will gut the SNAP program, what we now call our old "food stamp" program as if our economic challenge in America is that people eat.  Interest rates on student loans were doubled, even though at the lower interest rate the Federal government was making billions of dollars of profits.

On our island of 100 people, we would make sure that all of the young people had equal access to education, not just because that is fair or Christian but because the entire island nation is better off with higher levels of education.  The same is true for our island of 300 million but we are making phenomenally stupid moves to limit the access of the poor and middle class to higher education, fostering the creation of a permanent aristocracy and a permanent peasant class which will destroy America as we have known it.  That's a strong statement and I don't make it lightly.

When a nation makes the decision to deny education to the young, retirement to the elderly, health care to the sick, housing to the homeless and jobs to the unemployed then that is not just a moral failure, it is an economic failure.... It is sacrificing the future for a very brief increase in profits.  It is the equivalent of not paying your utility bill in order to save money when, obviously, it is going to end up meaning that your water and electricity service will be turned off in a month or so.

The ethical values expressed in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament are not arbitrary.  It is not like there is a God sitting enthroned in the clouds who makes up rules just to see if we will obey them.

The ethics we find in the Bible are there specifically because these values of compassion and mercy promote the health of the whole nation. Anyone, in political office, in the corporate board room or on an island of a hundred citizens who claims that they have a God given right to own so much of the island that other people are in danger of starvation, homelessness or illness is not expressing a Christian value.... They are just greedy jerks looking for a divine right to exploit the weak and it was just those sorts of folks who inspired the Persians to come up with the concept of an eternal lake of fire that the New Testament authors called "hell."  And if there is anyone listening who is working on Wall Street or in Washington, D.C., open your office window and take a deep breath..... that just might be brimstone you are smelling.

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.