Loving the Broken

Community Christian Church of Springfield
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 20     Sept. 22, 2013

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1        
18 My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.
19 Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land:
'Is the Lord not in Zion?  Is her King not in her?'
('Why have they provoked me to anger with their images,
   with their foreign idols?')
20 'The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.'
21 For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
   I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

22 Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!

Just before we learned that the United States Congress voted to cut $40 billion dollars out of the nation's food stamp program, the Executive Editor of our Springfield News-Leader, David Stoeffler, announced that he was  taking part in the "SNAP Challenge," attempting to eat only what he could eat if he were living on Food Stamps which works out to be about $4.50 a day.  I look forward to getting updates on David's experience though, as courageous as it is to do this, it is still not exactly the same as sharing in the plight of the poor in most cases.

If I had to live on $4.50 a day of food, then I would get very serious about vegetable gardening in the backyard of my home, something the poor cannot typically do.  I would also get serious about canning and freezing, buying food in bulk, and working to balance my diet by using a lot of dried beans and grain..... because I have a fully equipped kitchen, storage space and access to the right know-how to do it..... also not typically the case for the hungry poor.

Still, in my case, there would be other complications..... I'm on a pretty rigorous diet and I'm trying to eat locally produced farm goods both for my own health and to support local farmers.  But if you take $4.50 down to any of our local Farmers Markets, you are not going to get much to eat.

In fact, by and large, the most affordable foods at the grocery store are the ones that are making us obese.  There is a huge upsurge in diabetes and other obesity related illnesses among the poor because of the kinds of foods that we give away at food pantries and that we make available in large quantities at low prices.

It is not just about hunger, or having to deny your kids the kinds of restaurant or highly advertised foods that their friends eat.  And it isn't about having to just not go to the coffee shop with coworkers and friends for a $4 cup of coffee the way most of us do, it is about relegating the poor to a diet that shortens their lives and makes them sick.

All the while, the members of Congress who voted to cut 30 million people off from getting any food assistance at all, treat themselves to free meals at the most expensive restaurants in Europe and Asia at tax payer expense while traveling on tax payer provided junkets.  Yes, it is hypocritical and, yes, it makes me angry and it should make us all angry but the disconnect is as common as dirt.

Most of us here in the Midwest rarely have to spend an hour on a crowded subway train where the homeless hide out to avoid the weather.  We don't commute on crowded city buses, on the look out for pick pockets while avoiding eye contact with the pan handlers.  Even those of us who regularly serve food in our homeless shelters where we know the names of many of the chronically poor, we don't know where they live, or camp, or park the car they sleep in at night.

Even when you try, you don't get to share in the experience of the poor but our faith requires of us that try to feel with them.  That is what real compassion is.... That is empathy.... To allow ourselves to let down our defenses and to have the courage to identify with someone who is in a really bad place in life..... even if they got there due to their own bad choices.

Our scripture lesson today is an excellent example of a compassionate lament from the 8th chapter of Jeremiah.  He is weeping because he sees the field workers at the end of the fall harvest and they are still hungry.... When the store houses and granaries are full.  It was at the time of year when there was plenty of food and still there were people going hungry and the gross injustice of this was physically painful to Jeremiah and that ability to empathize, to feel it in our own gut is what is missing in our Congress and often in our churches.

There is this attitude of wanting to shame and punish the poor for being poor.  Barbara Ehrenreich, who became famous for her book about her experiences of trying to live on the minimum wage, Nickled and Dimed, has recently been speaking about the ways in which we are literally taxing the poor for being poor.

Ten million people are charged with misdemeanors every year and the fines and jail time associated with these, while an inconvenience to many are insurmountable to the struggling poor.  And many of those misdemeanor charges are for things like your teenager's truancy from school.... And they may have simply been late because the city bus they take to school was late.  Some are even made to pay for the cost of their incarceration when they are put in jail.

Many have to go to jail because they can't pay a fine and then they lose their job because they were in jail.  And then they cannot get another job because they have a criminal record.  All of which starts to add up to a situation that sounds like it comes right out of a Charles Dickens novel from two hundred years ago.

We live in a place where the estimated living wage.... What it takes for basic survival, is about $17 an hour and the minimum wage is just over $7 an hour and so we put a huge portion of our society into an absolutely no-win situation and then we tell them not to drink, use drugs, steal or commit petty crimes or we'll take a few hundred dollars from them.

Then when I bring up the subject of raising the minimum wage the immediate response from readers is that raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy and I always want to shout back, "Whose economy will it hurt?"  Because if you are trying to live on the minimum wage, your economy can't get much worse.

But among those who have vociferously argued for cutting money out of the SNAP program are several members of Congress who own land in their home districts who receive generous farm subsidies out of the tax payers coffers.  Stephen Fincher of Tennessee who voted to cut the SNAP program to the bone has received $3.5 million dollars of tax payer agricultural subsidies in the last eight years.

I understand subsidies that keep family farms in operation to feed the nation.... I don't understand making someone a millionaire because they happen to have land while taking food away from the next generation of citizens because, we tell ourselves, they don't deserve it.

I would like to tell Stephen Fisher what I think that he deserves but my comments are currently being recorded.

We give $4 billion a year in subsidies to oil companies at a time when they are making record profits.  We spend hundreds of billions to maintain dozens of foreign military bases whose sole purpose was the prosecution of WW II which has been over for 70 years now but we cannot afford to allow our children and our citizens to eat?

You know, I don't believe that there is such a thing as hell but I entirely understand why the Zoroastrians came up with the concept.  There isn't one, but sometimes it seems like there ought to be one!

Robert Reich just released a new documentary this week which none of us here will get to see because no theater in the Ozarks is going to show it but those of you who don't live here in this MENSA Club bastion should try to get out and see "Inequality for All."  Reich points out how the growing income disparity in our nation has now reach a point it has only seen once before in our history..... just before the world economy fell into the great depression.

It is no exaggeration to say that if we cannot recover a sense of decency, fairness, compassion, empathy in this nation that we not only are headed for an unparalleled economic collapse but, if you take Jeremiah seriously, if we don't change our course, we deserve to have an entire social collapse.
The day may come when there will be no more churches in our country.  The public increasingly finds no need for church and the academy increasingly believes that we do more harm than good.
And so, the prophetic voice of faith may one day be silenced.... But this is not that day.  As long as there is breath in us, we must take up the cry of the needy.  We must speak in the halls of government where the poor are not often heard. We will continue to take healthy food to the hungry every week but we must also work to make it possible for them to get a decent job with a living wage so that one day they will no longer need us to show up at the homeless shelters.

There may not be a place of eternal burning torment but that doesn't mean that we can't give the people who persecute the poor enough hell to make em change their ways.

A Radically Inclusive Community

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 19  September 15, 2013

Luke 15:1-10        
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." 3So he told them this parable: 4"Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' 7Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 8"Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' 10Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

A very friendly waitress at my favorite restaurant stopped by my table this week to ask me about the President's speech on Syria.  I realized too late that she was just being polite and that she had stopped listening before I finished my first sentence.

There is no short explanation of what is afoot in this part of the Arab world.  Syria shares borders with Israel, and Arab neighbors:  Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon and their more complicated non-Arab neighbor to the north, Turkey.  Syria has chemical weapons because Israel has nuclear weapons. Syria has held this dangerous card in their military hand to give them something to offset that nuclear threat.

But the existence of Israel in an unfriendly neighborhood is not the only thing that twists internal relationships in the region.  I'm not a historian so I'm going to hit this pretty fast before I say more than I know, but none of the modern boundaries in the Middle East developed naturally.

When Great Britain ruled the former Turkish Empire, they intentionally divided up the countries we know in the Middle East so that there is not a remnant of a Ottoman Empire, a Kurdish nation, a Persian nation, a specifically Sunni or Sh'ia nation.  Syria was a part of the Ottoman Empire until after WW I and only became a self-governing nation in 1946.  It has never enjoyed majority rule or anything that anyone here would call "democracy."

The Brits made sure that these larger populations that might have united and defied the west were sufficiently divided up in ways that make them fight with each other for national self-control rather than giving us any serious competition.  It is a plan that might have worked if we had not stolen some symbolically treasured real estate on the Mediterranean coast to establish a Jewish homeland and if we had discovered our vast domestic supplies of natural gas before we created these insanely wealthy crude oil states.

Syria is about 60% Sunni's and it is they who are understandably making up the opposition to Assad's government.  But there are significant populations of Kurds, Christians and a couple of minority Muslim sects you would likely have never heard of.

The Assad government comes from a minority that is less than 1/5th of Syria's population, an off-brand of Sh'ias called the Alawites. If you are still with me, you are already way ahead of my young waitress at Touch.

There were similar divisions inside of Iraq that played no small role in why Saddam Hussein's government was as violent as it was.  When we took over the nation we found out that we couldn't rule them without violence either.  We talk about Afghanistan being "tribal" and that keeps us from being able to have a meaningful central government there but it seems to me that you could say more or less the same for Syria and many other Middle Eastern states.

Our own nation has more than just a historical taste of this kind of strained diversity.  Cowboys and Indians didn't play well together and we resolved that issue primarily by killing off almost all of the Indians.  Blacks and Whites were not natural neighbors and even a hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery, we still find ways to keep blacks and whites from learning how to live together peacefully.

I'm not going to go too far down this path but let me give you one example:  Our nation still maintains that growing, owning, selling or using marijuana is illegal.  Ironically, the use of marijuana is one of the few things that you can say is very nearly equal between blacks and whites..... there are about the same number of white marijuana smokers as there are black users.

However, when you look at arrest and incarceration records, a black marijuana user is four times more likely to be arrested and jailed than is a white person.  That is not an accident of history.... It may be largely unconscious on the part of our law enforcement and judicial system but if we ever act like the feuding between the Sunnis and the Alawites of Syria looks absurd then we should look in the mirror and ask ourselves, with more than a century to get this stuff figured out, why is it that keeping blacks poor and in prison appears to be the best alternative that we have come up with to open civil war?

When I entered the ministry 35 years ago, even liberal churches were still debating whether women could speak in church services and if they did, could they wear a pants suit while doing it?  Real integration, outside of the school system, was nowhere to be seen.  If there were illegal immigrants in the nation they were not seen in churches and they were not mentioned in pulpits.

Nervously, white churches helped to start Hispanic ministries, Korean churches and Chinese ministries but were not much interested in genuine integration.  The more insidious problem for modern mainstream churches was the dawning realization that they all had a minority group hiding among their pews whom they couldn't identify just by looking.  For twenty years the church was sharply divided between their gay and straight members.

The white protestant mainstream has tried every imaginable means of addressing this division.  As Winston Churchill once said of us, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possible option."  We tried denying their existence.  We tried converting them.

We even tried the Hispanic/Korean/Chinese thing and tried to start separate congregations for gay Christians but they just kept showing up in every flavor of church choir and even in the pulpits of some of the most radically anti-gay churches in the country.  We are no longer shocked when conservative evangelical preachers who have ranted against homosexuality for years are found in same sex affairs.

One by one, our ancient prejudices have been shown to be rooted in irrational fear and far from providing meaningful protections, these prejudices have a laundry list of human suffering to their credit, from causing wars and domestic violence to unjust incarcerations, even to unemployment and suicide.

From a distance of years we can feel regret for African slavery, the slaughter of the American Indians, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, for segregated schools, gender discrimination and discrimination against the gay community.  One of the things we have discovered in America is that the more diverse our communities, universities and businesses become, the more interesting, productive, inventive, safe and even profitable they can become.

What lies ahead is for us to be able to do with religion what we have begun to do with race, gender, orientation and language.  Americans as well as Russians have reason to fear chemical weapons passing into the hands of Islamic radicals.  Ironically, western European powers, the USA and Russia all fear how either nuclear or chemical weapons might be used in the hands of extremists..... of course, the question none of us seem to want to consider is just exactly why these people hate us so much..... and no, it is not because of our "freedom."

Nothing happens in a vacuum.  Over the centuries, empires rise and empires fall.  There are instances of ethnic cleanings, expulsions, immigration and migration, enslavement, and exploitation of every kind.  The western domination of the politics and economy of the Middle East is a fresh memory for them and something we have been blissfully unaware of since gasoline was 20 cents a gallon.

They are not crazy.  They are not just religious lunatics bent on blowing up the world.  But still, it comes down to a choice of whether you want to look for reasons to be angry or if you want to look for ways to survive together on a very small planet.

Our scripture lesson today began with this sentence from Luke:  "All of the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him."  And that was followed by, "And the religious professionals were complaining, 'this guy keeps company with our enemies.'"

Two thousand years later, we are still talking about Jesus because he was somehow able to attract people to him who might naturally have tried to avoid a religious teacher at all costs.

He was able, in the midst of a violently divided, religiously prejudiced, puritanical, homophobic, racist, society to sit down and break bread with the people no self-respecting Jew would have talked with.

How did he do that?

I'm not sure that I'm the person who can say for sure how he did it but I know what he didn't do..... he didn't tell them why they were bad people.  He didn't try to explain to them why he and his family were the good guys and they were all the bad guys.  He didn't recount the sad tale of Jewish persecution or try to get the tax collectors to give up their jobs or tell the prostitutes that they were going to hell.

Even though what they were doing was immoral and bad for the society.  Still, he didn't launch a limited missile strike in their neighborhood because, well, what kind of idiot would do that if he were trying to get people to get along with one another?

This Generation's Radicals

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 18        Sept. 8, 2013

Luke 14:25-33
25Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' 31Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Having run completely out of plausible excuses for putting it off any longer, as soon as my Labor Day cook out was over, my new diet and exercise resolutions went into force.  I'm back at the gym, working with a trainer who only need to add a thick German accent to be a character in a WWII movie and I'm eating things that look and taste like they grew in the back yard.

And here is the thing, you completely change your life and your schedule.  You go to bed with aching muscles and you wake up with stiff joints and then you look in the mirror and there is no change. You step on the scales and you might have even gained weight.  If I were a supernatural theist, I might assume that God hates me.

Ah, but folks, here is the bitter pill:  a meaningful transformation of personal health requires a change of life..... it demands that you live in a different way, if not every day then virtually every day.

If you are an alcoholic and you want to save your marriage, your career and your health, stopping drinking on Mondays will not accomplish your goal..... it will just make Monday's more detestable than normal.
Now, I'm just two minutes into this sermon and I've already lost half of the audience because most of you are just thinking about what advice you are going to give to me about how to lose weight.  This is the most amazing phenomenon.... You can publicly state:  I have a trainer and a nutritionist and I am on a program of exercise and weight loss and I promise that I will hate anyone who tries to give me any advice about how to do this until the day I die..... and I very nearly mean that.... And you watch.... There will be a couple of folks here who still cannot resist.

Now, what would actually help?  Someone offering to come walk with me, or ride a bike with me..... but you see, liberals, progressives, intellectuals..... we fall prey to the belief that having an opinion, writing a column, talking about something is tantamount to having done something.  And I'm going to be the last one to say that public testimony is nothing..... it is a whole lot of what I do.  But honestly, several of you have been in the hospital or have been seriously ill..... which was better, when I came by the hospital and visited you or when Mark Kapustka showed up at your door with her homemade chicken pot pie?

I'm with ya.  I really do care.  I really do want for you to feel better and to recover your health.  Jim and Debby Baugh will bring you a casserole.

It's like this very tense build up to a new war with Syria:  I've published a column against military strikes in Syria in the Springfield NewsLeader.  I've posted opinions about it on line.  I've even stood on a street corner holding a protest sign.  And I would do all of those things over again..... bearing witness to social justice is an important part of our prophetic role in the world.  However, doing social justice makes bearing witness have some gravitas.
Four of the most unpopular words you can say around liberals are:  We are raising money.  We want to be self-congratulatory for having informed opinions.  We want to pat ourselves on the back for not being like those ignorant war mongering hawks who just don't understand the implications of international conflict.  But I propose that also make donations to help give aid to the war refugees.

There are currently two million Syrians who are fleeing from the violence of the Syrian civil war and most of those two million Syrians are children.  Don't just be informed.  Do something.  Don't just be mad.  Make a difference.

Our viewers and listeners who are still connected to a denomination, I can tell you that for all of the things that main stream churches do wrong, a lot of their relief agencies are still really trustworthy organizations.  Lutheran, Methodist, UCC, Disciple, Catholic, Church World Service and others, all do excellent work in getting resources to the people who need them.

We are not connected to a larger church body and so we will give our aid through the United Nations fund for Refugees.  I wish that I could make dinner for a bunch of refugee families myself but I can't, so I am going to host a $25 a plate dinner at my house tonight for some friends and I'll send that money to refugee relief so that someone else can feed the refugees.  There are very few of you who could not do something similar.  It is not enough to wish for peace, to believe in justice or to hope for mercy..... we are moral actors on the stage of life and we must not stand idly by.

We recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington for Jobs and Justice.
What made that event so effective a half a century ago was not just Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech.  He had delivered most of the parts of that speech in a dozen other locations.  What made that one different was that he delivered the speech in front of a half a million marchers on Capitol Hill.  There were enough people visibly standing together in front of the halls of government demanding that they be heard.

That march did finally get the ball of great social change rolling but it was preceded by dozens of less successful marches.  Some, I'm sure, were failures.  The single largest reason that our government seems to ignore what the majority of people believe and want about attacking Syria, about gun control, about domestic spending, food labeling, higher education costs and even the tax code is because we do not stand together, speak together, demonstrate..... we are, and this is a hundred times more true of liberals, we are ferocious individualists and individuals are very very very easy to ignore.

Some of us went out and stood on a busy street corner yesterday holding signs expressing our opposition to bombing Syria.  There were just a few of us.  I'm certain that there were demonstrations all over America but the numbers are not large enough to make many legislators believe that this issue might affect their re-election.

There are two kinds of capital in politics:  votes and donations.  Liberals will never win on the donations front and that is more true today than ever before.  Let me tell you something..... you remember the famous trial of Jack Abramoff who was sentenced to prison for illegal political fund raising.
Well, now, with the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision, everything Abramoff did that sent him to prison is now legal.  The deck of government influence is stacked in favor of the people who can make six and seven figure political donations.  All most of us have to influence government is our vote and if you are never seen to be a voting block then your vote is very nearly meaningless.

Among those of us who see how the system is rigged against the poor and the middle class, cynicism becomes almost our only holy sacrament.  We can hole up in a book store or a bar and feed one another on the hopelessness of our times..... corporations control the government and between the two of them our food is being poisoned, our environment is becoming toxic, higher education is unaffordable and health care costs and impossible.

What I can tell you is that none of that would be true if we would lay down our instincts to judge one another and reject everyone who disagrees with us on any one point.  None of these things would continue to be true if we applied the principles of labor unions to the entirety of our lives.  If we organize, cooperate, support one another, work with one another, then Monsanto doesn't get to own the food supply, GE and General Dynamics don't get to own the Pentagon, and conservative state legislators don't get to take the right to vote away from the poor and women don't have to be subjected to humiliating and unnecessary procedures in the management of reproductive lives.

There has been nothing like the famous Jobs and Freedom march on Washington, not simply because we have not had a Martin Luther King, Jr. to help us dream but because we simply have not been willing to take our convictions to the point of action.
There have been hopeful signs.  The Occupy Wall Street movement last year showed some hope.... Not much came of it but it did show that some young people were waking up to realize just how much the system is being stacked against them.

It has not received the news coverage that it deserves, but pastors and the NAACP in North Carolina have been organizing protests every Monday for the past several months with a couple of thousand people every week, showing up to protest the changes in voter restrictions that are blatant attempts to keep hundreds of thousands of poor minorities from voting in North Carolina.  They have not effected a change in the legislature just yet but I think that they have a chance.

A couple of months ago, when Texas legislator, Wendy Davis, stood on her feet for an entire day in a filibuster to protect Planned Parenthood in Texas, the capitol was filled with thousands of supporters who cheered her on and who made it impossible for the conservatives who were trying to take freedom and rights away from Texas women to successfully mount an effective challenge.

Of course, they still got their way in the next legislative session but they made a hero of Wendy Davis and we have not heard the last of her.  This week, in Illinois, Democratic legislator, Joseph Lyons, proposed a bill that would require all women to have and watch an ultrasound before receiving an abortion.  Fellow Democrat, Kelly Cassidy, proposed an amendment saying that, in the interest of gender equality, all men should have to have an ultrasound prior to getting a prescription for Viagra or Cialis..... because a hand held ultrasound wand looks pretty different depending upon who is holding the handle and who is about to get it inserted.


Kelly Cassidy will only be successful in Illinois if the people of Illinois stand with her for women's rights.  No one brilliant speech, no clever amendment, no one day of protest will accomplish any change in the things we complain about when we are feeding our cynicism.  Only self-sacrifice, cooperation, unity, and consistency can win.  Now you have to decide how badly you want it.

There Can Be No Moral 'Minimum' below 'Living'

Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Labor Day   Sept. 1, 2013

Leviticus 19:13        13You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.
Deuteronomy 24:14-15      14You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. 15You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.  

Isaiah 58:3b-7       Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. 4Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. 5Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? 6Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Jeremiah 22:13                                                                                                      
13Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages;

The great Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, said, "There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."

You might say that religion is especially adept at getting people to believe what isn't true.... Priests and pastors pepper their sermons with references to things may well be matters of pure ancient imagination for which there is not a scrap of evidence. We can only hope that this ancient snake oil practice is finally on its way out, to be replaced with an evidence based approach to faith.

But if religion has taught people to believe in what is not true, you have to still take you hat off to politicians who have constantly managed to accomplish the more difficult task of persuading people to refuse to believe what is true.
Politicians are masters of double speak, holding firmly to the great American philosopher, Mark Twain, who said that "A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth."

As television coverage of armed conflicts became common, the military started changing the nomenclature of their weapons.  A battlefield missile used only in warfare is no longer called "hell bender" or "widow maker" but is named "the Patriot" as if high tech warfare is patriotic.  Or more ironically, "the Peace Keeper" which is the exact opposite of what it does.  Or a "Smart Bomb" euphemistically given to a device that misses its indented target twice as often as it hits what it was aimed at.

And parents who are both frightened for their children and proud of their service will plaster their cars with signs that say that "My son is fighting for your freedom," without ever stopping to wonder how any military action we're engaged in has anything to do with protecting our freedom..... we have deployed occupation forces.... We're busy taking freedom away from people... not protecting freedom.  That is, in no way, to diminish the honor of being willing to serve your country and to place yourself in the way of mortal risk in military service but even people in uniform need to avoid the deceptive language of politicians who are forever white washing tombs.

There are two ways to be fooled.... One is to believe what is not true and the other is to refuse to believe what is true.  Our federal government has shown no shame when it is discovered, after the fact, that the given reasons for going to war in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq and Afghanistan were lies.
We are about to launch strikes on Syria allegedly because we just cannot allow a state to use chemical weapons of war though nothing at all was said about this when Israel used chemical weapons in 2008.  Chemical weapons are heinous, immoral, horrible..... and so are explosive bombs and bullets.  We just need to wake up and get oriented to reality.

When those white, male, slave owners met in Philadelphia to write our constitution, they reached for ideals that they had not yet seen or even personally embodied.  They said:  We the people of the United States, in order to form a classed society just like we left in Europe, to oppress minorities, keep the poor politically disenfranchised, create international hostilities that promote the wealth of our aristocracy, and to insure the success of our corporations and banks, do ordain and establish this Constitution.

Well, that's not what they actually said.... But it is starting to look like that is our functioning constitution.  What the preamble to our constitution actually says is:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A government exists to make it possible for people to live together with as little crime as possible, within secure borders, and to promote the general welfare!
It has taken me too long to get to it, but here is the lie that I came here to talk about today.  Our government has been jumping through every deregulation and tax loop hole hoop to advantage the economic top two percent of this nation under the rubric of benefiting "job creators."

The lie that this unholy union between corporations and government keeps repeating until they get their brain dead zombie army, otherwise known as the Tea Party, to repeat it is that we have to rig the economic system to benefit the super rich so that they will create more jobs.

Consider that sweet deep fried treat you enjoy with your coffee here every Sunday morning..... yes, I'm talking about donut holes.  These are not just any donut holes..... this is our approximation of a sacramental meal..... these are St. George's donut holes that give common church members the strength to go out and fight dragons.... If there were such things as dragons we sure are ready to fight them aren't we?

Now, what would make St George's hire more donut makers?  Would a tax cut make them hire more people?  No, not if they had enough employees to make all of the donuts they can sell.  So what makes a donut shop hire more donut makers?  Demand.  Economics doesn't get any more simple than this.

If they start selling out early in the day and they see that they can make more money by making more donuts, then they will hire to meet demand.

In a capitalist economy, who are the job creators?  Consumers.  Consumers create demand and therefore create jobs.
If there is a job shortage in America it is not because the rich are not rich enough it is because the consumers don't have enough money to buy any more stuff.  And when demand gets tight, the super rich will invest their money in foreign nations or shift their production out of America to cheaper labor sources abroad.

Impoverishing the working class is what makes us lose jobs.  If you give someone who makes $10 million dollar a year a $1 million dollar bonus, that will not affect the number of donuts that they buy, or whether their kids get new shoes that fit their growing feet or if they get to send their kids to college.

This weekend, fast food workers are striking all across our nation, asking for a living wage.  We have often been sold the myth that minimum wage workers are all just high school students who work a few hours a week for spending money.  And a lot of us did exactly that when we were students.

The truth is that nearly 90% of minimum wage earners are over 20 years old.  The majority are women.  Nearly half of them are over 40 years old and one in every four of them are raising young children in poverty.

The Walmarts and the McDonalds of this nation employee people so far below what it takes for them to live that their employees have to seek public assistance in food stamps, Medicaid and public housing, in which case, their products are not really as cheap as we are made to believe.


These corporations shift their moral payroll obligations onto government agencies and charities when the simple, obvious, moral answer is to pay everyone who works a salary that allows them to live.  Any American who works a full-time job and cannot have housing, utilities, health care, food and transportation is a victim of something that can easily be seen as being more immoral than slavery because even slave owners had to feed, house and care for their slaves.

The legislatures in Texas and North Carolina are trying to disenfranchise poor voters.  The governor in Wisconsin tried to break the back of the state's labor unions and now we're doing much the same in Missouri, laying off the employees who serve the poor both to make it harder for poor people to access food stamps and public assistance and to cut the state's budget without having to tax the rich.

Conservatives don't like the Affordable Healthcare Act and have pretended to try to repeal it 40 times in Congressional votes.  But in truth they would not touch it.  I don't like the Affordable Healthcare Act because it is legislation written by the insurance industry for the profit of the insurance industry.

We could cut our health care costs by more than a third while giving every American health care if only we instituted a universal health care system just like the one we set up in Iraq when we took over their country?  Why did we do it there?  Because it is the most logical and economical way to provide health care, DUH!

But we're told that the government can't manage health care when, in fact, the government already provides more than half of the health care in America and they do it for less than 1/4 of the overhead charged by insurance companies.  Everyone in Congress knows this is true but they don't want for you to believe what is true..... and yet Detroit is turning into a ghost town, in part because every American made car carries with it a huge burden of health care provided to retired workers.

Universal health care would dramatically lower the cost of American made products, bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs back to America.... Good paying, union jobs, but the Insurance industries and their congressional lap dogs won't let us do what every other industrialized nation in the world has already done.

I don't know why Americans are so eager to believe what is not true and to refuse to believe what is true.  I don't know why every other western nation was able to end slavery without a civil war but we had to kill off a huge percentage of our own kin to end slavery here.

I don't know why Americans who ostensibly rebelled against the classed society of Europe to create a truly free nation where everyone was equal, will now bow down to the super rich while showing contempt for the people who cook our food, build our homes, repair our cars, pave our roads, who bring us electricity, gas and water, who teach our children, who care for our grandparents, who fight our fires and protect our streets.


Why do we so willingly cast blame on the pension funds of teachers and fire fighters for our budget woes..... do you think that those people got rich off of the salaries we paid them while they were working?  Don't you know that they get a pension specifically because they served the public interests at low salaries, some risking their lives for the common good?

What you are hearing me say today is why so many people in corporate and political leadership keep saying that they don't want religion in politics.  And I am sure that the business and government leaders in the days of Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea and Jesus didn't want them commenting on their abuse of workers either but I have already decided whose side I'm on and they have no way of buying me off.

You don't hear many unvarnished speeches about the abuse of workers.  Preachers can do it because we are not usually running for elected office, we do not sell a product to the government and we have no tax interests to protect.  And if you are not aware that the government grant money given to faith based organizations in this century is just an attempt at silencing the churches that do advocate for the poor then let me shine a little light on that situation for you.

No church gets those grants renewed if they are publicly saying the things you have heard me say today..... it is hush money and you won't see us take any of it.... Ever.  I implore you, as a people who have taken compassion to be a core value, people who are committed to justice and to mercy, to recognize that being a patriotic American means to work for the common good.
The church and the state can work hand in hand as long as the state is not trying to lie to, exploit, oppress and then recruit Americans to go and die needlessly in foreign wars.  We can work together for the common good.

So, show me a government that wants to make sure that every American child gets a good education in a safe neighborhood, and has access to health care and higher education.... Show me a government that will establish a living wage as the minimum wage, and supports a decent, respectful and honorable retirement for all working people.  Show me a government that is respectful of the alien and an advocate for the poor, that guarantees life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone in both equality and freedom and I guarantee you, when I see that government, you sill see me become the most ardent patriot that has ever lived..... but until I see that government, then I'm going to keep preaching.

The Unburdened Soul (Antoinette Tuff and the Atlanta School Shooter)

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 16  August 25, 2013

Isaiah 58:9b-10                      
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

It happened again this week.... A scene made all too familiar by recent history in the United States.  An angry young white man who had serious emotional problems brought an assault rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition into an elementary school.  The media seems to have assiduously avoided mentioning the fact that the McNair Discovery Learning Academy, just outside of Atlanta, is a  predominantly black school.  I don't want to imply racial motivation where there is none and the shooter had recently threatened to kill his own brother, I'm just saying that when a crazy white man takes a military styled weapon into a black school, there is reasons to suspect racism.

The now infamous weapon, the AK-47 assault rifle, should not be in the private possession of any citizen, ex-military, police or sportsman.  It is not a recreational toy, it is a weapon of war and for the same reason that no one is allowed to keep hand grenades or cannon in their homes, no one should have a gun that makes it so easy to kill dozens of people in a single minute.

And yet, thanks to the NRA and donation addicted cowardly, irresponsible elected officials, even a crazy man like this shooter in Georgia has access to military styled weapons.  I'm not going to say the shooter's name and I wish the media wouldn't either.  People don't deserve their 15 minutes of fame for crimes like this.  No one should think that they can get their face on TV or have themselves talked about around the world by committing a crime of this sort.

Besides, there is not much to be gained in conversation about the motivations of the insane.  I am, once again, ready to reinstitute Great Britain's old plan of shipping their problems off to a distant island.... I would love to be able to put all of the NRA executives, their gun manufacturer puppet masters and their lap dog Congress members on a deserted island and see how long it would take for them to become cannibals.  If I have not been clear enough in the past let me spell this out:  The gun manufacturing business with their lackey NRA spokespersons and bought and paid for legislators are more dangerous to the citizens of this nation than is Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization.  They are enemies of the safety of Americans and what is worst, unlike terrorist who wreak mayhem in the name of an ideal, they are doing it for money which is a thousand times more disgusting than terrorists who at least mistakenly think that they are serving a noble cause.

These people kill 30,000 Americans every year for money.  You cannot get lower than that on the evolutionary scale.  No excuse about hunting, home protection or sports can justify the carnage caused by this out of control for-profit business that has turned homes and schools into battle grounds.

But we have this text.... This ancient biblical bit of prophetic wisdom, assigned, virtually randomly, to be read aloud in churches this week.  Isaiah says:  If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

..... if you will remove the pointing of the finger..... if you will stop fighting over resources and actually share your food with the hungry..... then your anger can be lifted..... the gloom will turn into bright sunlight.

On this 50th anniversary of the famous civil rights march on Washington DC, we have been reminded many times of how President Kennedy did not want the march to happen because he was certain that a half a million black people who had suffered the violence of both discrimination and poverty, if brought together into one place on a hot summer day in the Capitol that there would be violence.

It is not an unreasonable expectation that in force of numbers that an army of black people on the Washington mall might treat their oppressors with the same violent disregard with which they had been treated.  But it was a non-violent gathering, led by this nation's most ardent symbol of non-violent social change, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, historically speaking, it must be said that King's wasn't the only voice crying out against white oppression.  There was, on that day, also Malcom X and it should never been forgotten that white America was not realistically presented with the choice of the status quo.... Things were going to change and they were either going to change in the non-violent way that Martin Luther King advocated or someone like Malcom X was going to lead to liberation in a likely more violent way.

King called for change through forgiveness and love.... By acceptance and by working together.  Malcom X, for most of his public career, called for isolation, radical segregation and transformation through retaliation and force.  White America may have deserved Malcom X's plan, but by grace, they were given Martin Luther King's dream of loving reconciliation.

And we saw an echo of that grace this week when, yet again, an angry white young crazy man went into a school with heavy weaponry and a taste for violence.

No one died at the Georgia school this week.  No one was injured.  You don't need for me to tell you that it was the NRA's executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, who said after the Sandy Hook shootings, "The only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good person with a gun."  The school's bookkeeper, Antoinette Tuff, showed just how wrong Mr. LaPierre was.

Armed with kindness, acceptance and even a willingness to be personally vulnerable, not just to the possibility of being shot, but to the extent of talking to the crazed gunman.... Sharing her own life's struggles with man..... she identified with him.... She let him know that her own life had been painful.... She talked about a sad and unwanted divorce after thirty years of marriage.... She opened her heart to him and, at one point, she even told him that she loved him.

She offered to walk out with him so that he would not be shot by the police.  She assured him that she would help him to end this crisis without anyone having to die.

.... If you will set aside the yoke of your anger, your resentment, your need for revenge..... if you can refrain from the pointing of the finger, just don't speak evil of the people who have hurt you,..... if you offer something of yourself, if you ar willing to try to see how much you have in common with your enemy.... If you will share your food with the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.... And nobody has to die.
Albert Einstein allegedly said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."  There is a certain macho appeal to revenge, to fighting back, to giving our enemies a taste of their own medicine.  But you can never solve the world's problems using the same techniques and intelligence that got us into trouble in the first place.

A good guy with a gun is just a bad guy with a gun who has a noble view of himself.  If someone in that Georgia school had pulled a handgun out of their belt to confront this crazy young man with an assault rifle, there is a good chance that a hundred people might have died in the ensuing gun battle.

What Antoinette Tuff did that day may well be called miraculous but it wasn't accidental.  She had training in crisis management.  She had been through training to put herself in that situation and had thought out in advance how to talk a gunman down.  And that is not training that you go to one time during a summer in-service and you are done.  To be the kind of person who practices patient, loving kindness, compassion and empathy, you have to take a lot of refresher courses.

When we have our Sunday School kids make sandwiches that we take down to the homeless Veterans center, we're not solving the problem of hunger.  When we take a hot meal to two hundred people every week who are living in their cars and in abandoned buildings along the Commercial St rail road tracks, we are not solving poverty..... but we are exercising compassion.

We are teaching our children to think about those who are in need. We are meeting people at Bill's Place and learning to see them as human beings.
The point is not the sandwiches the kids make or the meals we serve..... the point is to be changed.  We are in training.  We come in here and read these ancient texts and we sing songs about justice and fairness.  We pray in hope of a new beginning, we symbolically share in a meal that represents that vision of a time when everyone has a place at the table.

As many of you know, my metal was tested in this arena early on.  I was still in seminary when I was called to the home of a parishioner who was in the midst of a violent dispute.  By the time I arrived, it had become a hostage situation.  The very inebriated man held me, his estranged wife and his mother and brother hostage for five hours at the end of a shotgun.

He was wearing ammunition belts crisscrossed on his chest and his plan was to wait for the police, have a shoot-out and in the end, kill us and finally himself.  Fortunately, the police were not called and they did not come.  I managed to talk him down, get him to lay down his gun and allow us all to leave.

The day ended well.... In a way.... But there was a price to pay for all of us.  I personally didn't sleep all of the way through night for the next two or three years.  I doubt that Antoinette Tuff is sleeping very well these days either.

The leaders of the famous march on Washington D.C. fifty years ago went through extensive training in non-violent resistance.  They were prepared to be beaten with the police Billy clubs, to have vicious dogs turned loose on them, they knew that fire hoses and tear gas were likely and that bombs and bullets would take some of them.

I believe that it was Daniel Berrigan who said that we must often bait the trap for evil using our own flesh.  There is risk involved in being a peace maker.  There has to be a willingness to make personal sacrifices if you are going to change the world for the better.

You have to decide that forgiveness is preferable to revenge.  That acceptance is better than judgment.  You have to choose to extend love even to people who have chosen to try to hurt you.  You have to willingly put your pointing finger back in your pocket and expose your own failings, your own hurts, your own heart to empathize with those who are still bleeding.

Today we give thanks that the incident in Atlanta did not turn out the way that Sandy Hook did nine months ago.  And we resolve, all of us, here together, that we will prepare our hearts and minds to play the role of Antoinette Tuff should we ever have the opportunity to be the one who uses acceptance and love in place of fists and bullets.

Education is Food for the Soul

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
August 18, 2013

Elie Wiesel was asked, "What is it that you know for sure, that you have no doubt about?"  Here is the response:
"I have no doubt that we are here for a purpose. I have no doubt that the purpose is not only to bring God closer to his creations, but to bring his creations closer to one another. I have no doubt that a human being is human simply because he or she is human--and we have no right to say that a poor person is of less value to society than someone who is rich.
I have no doubt that education is good for the soul, not only for the mind. I have no doubt that questions have their own magic, their own charm and their own immortality. I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option.  I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And, of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person outweighs them all

For all of us who are involved in education, this week is when they may as well drain the pool and roll up all of the beaches because we are back in the classroom and as my daughter always said of this month, "life as we have known it is now officially over."

But if you are a college student there is at least one bit of good news.  This Congress has not been able to do much but with a lot of pressure from the White House, they were able to pass a bill lowering interest rates on federally insured student loans.  It was an amazingly hard fought bill because there was considerable political pressure to double interest rates on student loans under the banner of fiscal responsibility.  Republicans complained that it was costing the government too much money.

Never one to sit in the back of math class, my new heart throb, Elizabeth Warren, fired back that the government was making over $50 billion a year in profit on the loan program.
Not that is likely that many members of congress actually believed their own rhetoric.  They had a larger reason for wanting to continue to make higher education unavailable to the public.  Conservative politics depends for its future on an unquestioning, compliant, uneducated population.

Not that I want to make too fine a point here, but how many of you were encouraged by the pastor of the church you grew up in to take classes in religion in college?  The priest and the preacher, along with the politician and the captains corporate industry, prefer an uninformed public.

You may think that is unnecessarily cynical of me but let me go to the lowest common denominator to make my point, and by the lowest common denominator, you know I can only be referring to the diva of talk radio, Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck, who tumbled from grace being fired first by CNN and later by Fox because, frankly, Beck is even too crazy for Fox, has landed in a radio program where Forbes estimates that he is earning about $80 million a year..... proving the old adage that there is a sucker born every minute.

Beck keeps himself in the news by entertaining his largely paranoid and racist following with one outrageous statement after another.  A couple of days ago he told Oprah Winfrey that she disgusted him..... I have not been an Oprah fan since the Color Purple but even I know when it is not safe to shoot your mouth off.

But recently Beck was on a tear about higher education, vowing to his audience that he would never send another of his children to be indoctrinated by university professors.  He would prefer, he insisted, that his children just be auto mechanics, even bad auto mechanics working at a gas station where no one ever goes to allowing them to go and be tainted by higher education.

Now, two things about that..... obviously, nothing puts distance between Glenn Beck and another person, whether it is a listener or one of his kids, as much as being exposed to accurate information.  But the larger issue is that it is all a ruse...... Beck is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  His kids will never have to work nor will his grandchildren or great-grandchildren.  On the strength of a very gullible audience, the Beck family has crossed the Rubicon that you and I will never see.

So what he is really saying is not that he is willing to see his kids working as an inept, uneducated mechanic leading an impoverished and unfulfilling life.... He is, however, willing to see your children and your grandchildren leading an impoverished and unfulfilled life.

A retired friend of mine told me that he planned to audit one of my religion classes at Drury University where I teach but when he called and found out what it would cost him, he decided that I couldn't possibly know anything that valuable.  The rise in the costs of higher education, even in state universities, is rising so fast that it is becoming entirely out of the reach of more and more people.

When the Great Depression and World War II had brought our nation to its knees, the government went to great lengths to make university education accessible to anyone who had the discipline and intelligence to go get it.

When I started in college 40 years ago, the tuition for a 4 year state university degree did not cost as much as the tuition charged for one of my classes at Drury.  More importantly, it was possible for me to work a low paying restaurant job and still put myself through school.  The buying power of entry level salaries has gone down and college costs have gone up.

Not very many years ago, there were states that made sure that there was no tuition charged to state residents because it is good for the economy, good for advances in technology, good for government, the environment and even for the military for our population to have a better education.... The only thing that education is bad for is conservative politics and traditional religion.

Elie Wiesel said that education is good for the soul as well as for the mind.  Questions afford their own path to purify the soul.  I remember hearing Scott Peck say that anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.  And so we question everything.  We question our own religious tradition and the kind of unquestioning patriotism we were taught as compliant citizens and obedient warriors.

One of my heroes, Howard Zinn, said, "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.  Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

Some of you saints have actually suffered through reading my book that was a rewrite of my doctoral dissertation.  Though I would not recommend that anyone suffer through it, the topic is important.  My research was on the spiritual practices of monastic communities.  I wanted to try to speak clearly about the goal of the spiritual life.

What I discovered in my research is that for very many centuries monastic leaders understood that the spiritual journey had three specific stages:  purgation, illumination and union.  Purgation had to do with making confession, separating yourself from the carnal desires of the world, disciplining yourself to live a life of self denial, prayer and peace.

The second stage, called illuminative, was about learning, study, becoming informed and illuminated.  The third step, the more mystical union with God was, it was said, not possible without the other two.  Interestingly there was no particular curriculum prescribed by any of the major authors.  It wasn't that they expected everyone in the monastery to become a Biblical scholar or to be schooled in philosophy, but they did expect them to become informed.... To work at it, to think, to read, to understand.

They chanted the Psalms for hours every day.  They sat in "chapter room" while the Abbot read to them from their book of order.  They ate in silence while one monk, a lector, was assigned to read to the community from some spiritually edifying book.

I spent seven years visiting monasteries, staying for days or weeks at a time.  Worshipping with them, listening to instruction, studying and though many of them maintained a religion that I just don't identify with, they also often had a vocabulary that would send you to the dictionary anytime you were alone.

Those years of my life affected me and it has influenced how I am a pastor among you.  We have more guest lectures from college professors in this church than any other church I have ever known of.  We do book studies, hold conferences and stay in the literature because, I am convinced, the only spiritual life that is not entirely self serving is an informed life.

Though being informed is sometimes painful and sometimes it can lead to cynicism, I believe that education is the only way out of either political or spiritual tyranny.

When I look at what separates most of us from the way old politics, old religion and old business runs the world is sort of like farming.  If you asked a farmer if he was in favor of planting or in favor of harvest, he or she would look at you like you are crazy.

And you would be crazy..... no one can be enthusiastic about harvest if they are not equally invested in planting and you would have to be nuts to plant but never harvest.

I believe that our current congress, our current Supreme Court, our major corporations and our military industrial complex look at the world only as a point of harvest.  They want power and money and they want it now.  And if we let them take it all there will be a very small ruling class in this nation, surrounded by a class of permanent peasants.

We plant by educating the next generation of inventors, physicians, researchers, designers, architects, builders, teachers, statesmen and writers.  Every time we cut funding to schools, raise tuitions, force students to go deep into debt to get an education, we are deciding to harvest without planting and when we do that, the harvest has to get smaller and smaller and we all become the more poor for it.

We began this sermon with a reading of what Elie Wiesel said that he knew for certain, about which he had no doubt.  I will conclude with a bit of the same:

A university education should be free to any American who has the ability and the discipline to obtain an education.  The interest our government charges students should not be one bit more than they interest they charge to banks because the investment we make in students is more vital to our nation's health than anything banks will ever do for us.  And you, my friends, both seated here and viewing us on line.... You should question everything.... Question authority, question the government, question the church, question me, examine your own closely held beliefs... think critically and never stop seeking to learn, be informed and to understand the world around you and own heart.

The Only 'Beliefs' that Matter are the Ones We Can See

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 15    August 11, 2013

Isaiah 1:11- 17
11What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. 12When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; 13bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation-- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. 14Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. 15When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
16Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

A gay couple I knew very well here in town were forced to spit up by the Federal government.  Now, they wouldn't see it that way but that was the net effect of their actions.  One of the men was from Springfield and had a job in Kansas City.  The other had been an international student from Ecuador and when his student visa ran out, in spite of many attempts, he could not get a green card to stay here and work.

If he had been a she, and the two could have been legally married, this would not have been an issue.  At that time the federal government did not recognize same sex marriages because of the Defense of Marriage Act.  Now that DOMA has been over turned, most instances in which gay couples living in the United States look for our government to smile on them have been resolved..... but not in matters of immigration.

Yes, the American probably could have gone to Ecuador where he did not know the language and would have little prospect of employment but that is not a relationship stress placed on straight couples is it?

A huge part of the push for immigration reform is to make it possible for families to live together who have been forced by economic circumstances to live in different nations.  And when you are already poor, when your housing, food and medical care are already pretty dubious, you don't get to spend a lot of time traveling internationally to visit.

Now, honestly, I'm anything but confident that any real immigration reform is going to happen this year since our Congress is still paralyzed in partisan bickering, but there was some impetus from both sides of the isle to do something about this and even if the motivation may have been little more than desperation to curry Latino votes, still, letting families live together is a good thing.

But the delicate coalition began to break down around the familiar battle line of the definition of who is a family.  Conservatives both want to recruit more Latino voters and hold onto their traditional right wing religious base which means they are threatening to pull out of the immigration reform coalition if gay families get to be reunited at the same time as straight families.

This is obviously irritating to those of us who are tired of this antiquated prejudice rearing its ugly head once more on its way to the graveyard of indefensible discrimination.  But one of the things that has disappointed me is seeing how some religious leaders who had been warming up to being advocates for gay rights now quickly turning to throw the gay population under the bus.

I don't want to use the pulpit as a club to beat specific people over the head..... it is much better form for me to club bad ideas than it is for me to identify any people as being bad people.
And I hope I can make a little space for myself here when I say that I fully accept that a lot of people with whom I have sharp disagreements also do a lot of good and very praiseworthy things and some of the people with whom I identify theologically are useful for little more than shade or as a paper weight.

I have followed the work of Jim Wallis for 30 years. I have read his books.  I subscribed to Sojourners magazine.  I took a course with him at Harvard. And during that fall in 2004 I ended up taking him out to eat and driving him around to various media meetings where he was being interviewed about the presidential election

But Jim was out of place at Harvard.  He insisted and still insists on a very evangelical theology.  He holds to the traditional view that God is a person like we are persons who is "out there" somewhere and God sired a man child who died for our sins and was literally raised from the dead.

I heard a couple of professors try to reason with him, as I certainly did, but he kept insisting that without that dogged devotion to supernatural theology that no one can maintain commitment to a life of fighting injustice.

A claim that is, on the very face of it, simultaneously insulting and preposterous.  No one around him at the time he was insisting on these ancient creedal beliefs agreed with him and I suspect that most of us felt pretty committed to our convictions regarding liberation and social justice......

And I know that a lot of you would counsel me that everyone has a right to believe whatever they want to believe and what harm can it do if Jim Wallis still believes in a literal heaven and hell, a divine murder to atone for our undefined sins and a literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative?  But my contention is just this:  if you can get someone to believe something for which there is absolutely no evidence, no reason for believing it other than that I just want to believe it or because of some grand personal claim of having heard voices or seen visions..... once reality becomes a matter of personal preference, then your moral compass can never be reliable.

This week, Jim Wallis, who about 20 years after the rest of us concluded that gay rights are civil rights, quickly threw gay families under the bus saying "this is not the time,"..... this is not the time to worry about the rights of one of the most discriminated against minorities in the world..... it is not the time because Jim Wallis is willing to sacrifice their rights if that can advance the cause of straight immigrant families.

And when someone has already told you that rational thought, critical thinking, evidence, reality orientation are not important to them.... That they believe what they want to believe even though there is no way to check those beliefs out or even to rationally criticize them then when they decide to throw a few million people under the bus in order to achieve a personal objective there is also no way to rationally argue the point.

Jim has often absolutely been on the side of the poor, of immigrants and of women, as long as those women were willing to sacrifice self-determination over their reproductive lives and lately he has been a very tardy and reluctantly evolving supporter of the gay community but that house of cards fell apart this week.

I believe there is a connection.  None of us who are straight here today were reared to be open and affirming..... we thought our way into a progressive set of conclusions because we valued evidence, rational thought and a clear orientation to reality even in, nay, especially in matters of faith.

Sloppy thinking can lead to entirely irrational and undependable results. Rational progressives don't always get it right but we are not arbitrarily picking our truths out of thin air and when presented with evidence to the contrary, when we are being honest, we are willing to quickly change.

Irrational religious convictions have, through the centuries, caused many parents to disown their own children for being gay, or for not being virgins, or even for getting a divorce.  Irrational religious fervor has justified oppressing races, women and gays and it is not an unfamiliar part of our hostility towards immigrants.

But I am not saying that everyone needs to be a trained theologian, philosopher or Biblical scholar because the most obvious of spiritual truths don't come from deep within your gray matter.  The prophet Isaiah says in our reading today that what God wants from you is not a lot of religious rituals and doctrines but, as we see in verses 16 and 17, right at the end of today's reading: cease to do evil, 17learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Check your own hearts.... You didn't take your kids to Sunday school just so they could rattle off the names of the 27 books of the New Testament.... You hoped that somehow they would learn to do unto others what they would like for others to do unto them.

No one can be very wrong about their theology if they are doing good to other people and no one can be right enough about their theology if they are not doing good things for other people.

There is a form of the golden rule in every religion of the world..... sometimes you have to look past a lot of silly rituals and a good deal of prejudice, misogyny and homophobia to find it, but it is there.

Being frightened of people who are different from us is a purely natural reaction.  Straight people are naturally uneasy about homosexuality.  Europeans are uneasy about Arab immigrants, North Americans are frightened by Latino immigrants, apparently Republicans are frightened by intelligent women..... I kid Republicans.... Even if it is true.

Many critics of progressive Christianity say that by rejecting what cannot be known that we are rejecting faith.  I think that is a gross misunderstanding of what faith means.  I don't believe that faith has anything to do with irrationally making yourself believe in something that either cannot be known or is obviously false.

Faith is more like being faithful, committed.  When you ask your spouse if they have faith in you, you are not asking them if they believe that you exist.  You are asking them if they are with you, if they support you, if they are committed to you.... If they have the courage to stand with you against your critics.

The New Testament Greek word, "pistis" that we translate as "faith" is almost always used to denote courageous, committed faithfulness.  My faith has nothing to do with ancient claims about spirits, demons, angels or the heaven and hell where there are said to live.

For me, faith is about looking at the examples of the prophets, of Jesus, the apostles and saints and trying to find in them the inspiration to have the courage to do the same things.... The courage to overcome our prejudices about people who are different from us or even our willingness to abandon our ethics, throw a minority under the bus, in order to gain the support of the majority.

Before Christians were called "Christians" they were called "followers of the way."  I believe that before Christianity ever became a set of creedal beliefs, it was first and foremost a way of living.  That's what we're trying to recover.  I have a degree in philosophy and two degrees in religion.  I am fascinated by Biblical studies and enamored with theological debate but love is my religion and radical compassion is my true worship.

And if you agree with me you shouldn't leave Rev Mel hanging out there on his own when he says:  Amen.