Our Difficult Relationship with Power

Proper 25    Oct. 26, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor      

Mark 10:42-45    42So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

We are just 9 days away from the much-heralded mid-term elections though, if you are to believe the polls, most Americans still don't know that there is an election coming up.  I am reminded of the possibly questionable modern proverb that says:  Babies' diapers and politicians should both be changed regularly and basically for the same reasons.

We are going into this election with Congress' approval rating hitting record lows, sometimes coming in at no more than 9% which fundamentally makes me wonder what those 9 out of a hundred people are seeing that I am not seeing.  But even with such widespread disapproval, we are likely to see almost all incumbents returned to office.... Which speaks to ore moral ambivalence about most things.

But people often feel better about their own congressman than they feel about Congress in general because we have a sense that we sort of know them.  I'll confess that I did know our congressman when he was a talk radio host and I profusely disliked him then and my opinion has not been much improved with his move into the Congress. But a lot of politicians worked their way up into elected office through years of community service.  

Many were even living on the lower end of the middle-class income scale and they had a very sincere identity with their constituents.  But back to my analogy to babies' diapers, it generally doesn't seem to take much time in Washington before the qualities we once found attractive in them have disappeared.

Often times it is because they become impressed with their own importance and, for reasons that are generally very disappointing, they become very wealthy in office.  And that happens on both sides of the isle.  Observant Morman and majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, grew up in poverty and worked the night shift on Capital Hill as a policeman to work his way through law school, has become a multi-millionaire while serving in elected office.  He says that he did it by making good investments but they were not investments that would be available to you or to me... they are the kinds of favors given to people who are in power.

We have all seen exposes of famous preachers who find ways of justifying personally raking off a larger and larger portion of the cash flow through their multi-million dollar charities.  Even no less a person as Gandhi evidently suffered a shocking collapse of personal morality as an old man, taking sexual advantage of young women living in the Ashram he supervised.

It is not always true but it seems that not very many people are able to resist the seduction of power.  Very few professional athletes manage to retire with much of an estate intact.  Very few lottery winners find their lives much improved or manage to hold onto any of the wealth they win.
In some cases, it doesn't even seem to need to be very much power.  When I was the pastor of a medium sized denominational church, we spent between $500,000 and a $1 million dollars a year which is not a lot of money on the corporate scale of things but I have seen property and outreach chairmen evolve into third world dictators, demanding absolute fealty to their sometimes entirely irrational whims.

Even the constitution of our tiny little church demands that we change leadership on our board every three years because we want to avoid any unpleasant break downs in our community.

When I was still in graduate school, I was serving a church in a country seat town that became the location of one of the world's largest aluminum rolling plants in the world.  We were all pretty excited about the plant coming to our small town because it brought an economic boon that we really needed.

In the course of a year, the city inherited an entire class of comparatively very highly paid professionals, many of whom were very young men for whom their new jobs had quadrupled their incomes over-night.  What I did not know to anticipate is that in a relatively short period of time, this very stable and traditional rural Kentucky town turned into a veritable Peyton Place full of affairs, divorces, and very painful family crises.

I am inclined to think that any major promotion, election to office, or sudden change in status should be accompanied by a six week course in personal ethics and reminders emphatic reminders that you don't want to be simply "successful" or to win elections, you still want to be a good person.
Our small city has received some national attention over the past couple of years as one of our "power couples" was found to have attempted to hire hit men to break the legs of their daughter's ex-boyfriend.  I don't want to say too much about this because I actually have had a personal and professional relationship with this couple for more than two decades.  One was a campus minister in my former denomination and his wife was a quickly rising star in the financial world.  They moved out of middle-class obscurity into the world of multi-millionaires and, like so many in that position, they somewhere forgot that basic rules of morality still applied to them.

Fortunately, they were caught before they ruined a young man and his new girlfriend's lives, and, because of good political connections and great personal wealth, they have avoided prison... I'm not sure how I feel about that but I am not surprised.  As I published in my recent book, there is a legal system for poor people, and another one for rich people and another one that serves the lawyers and politicians' interests.

We don't really need Jesus to tell us how wrong this is but, according to Mark, he does anyway.  Our gospel lesson today quotes Jesus saying:  "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all."

I always meant to do it, but I let life get in the way for most of my career, but for the past several years I have made it a part of my personal and professional discipline to spend time with the unsheltered homeless every week...and generally two or three times a week.  It is not a perfect cure for arrogance but it is at least a regular dose of reality.  I have also tried to have regular meetings with a small group of advisors that I use as an accountability group because even an aging cleric in a small church can lose touch with reality.  I get email from our inter-net audience every week who often move from expressions of gratitude into nominations for sainthood.... None of you who actually know me share in that delusion but in the privacy of my study, I am not immune to that sentiment once expressed by Mark Twain who said, "I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel they have not said enough."

I tried to put it in my book, Progressive Faith and Practice, but my editors thought it was a little too rough but I will trust that you will allow me just a touch of profanity in the pulpit to share with you one of my own proverbs about power and psychology, and that is this:  Everyone will be just as much of an asshole as the people around them will allow them to be.

We all say that we want to be good people and none of us can do it alone.  Ego will almost always get the best of us unless we surround ourselves with people who are willing to be honest enough, loving enough, and sincere enough, to help us to be good people.

Most of the time the people who love you the most will try to assure you that anyone who has been critical of you, who has rejected you, or thrown you under the bus, are mean, crazy or self-centered.  This is almost never either true or helpful.  There is a tyrant who lives inside of all of us and it doesn't always take winning the lottery, a Congressional election, or a promotion to reveal the tyrant.  Sometimes, all it takes is the opportunity to be ant arrogant jerk.
As Jesus said, "It should not be so among you."

No one ever changes unless they feel safe.  No one ever welcomes criticism from someone who is only critical.  I'm going to make a blanket statement here, acknowledging that there are no absolutes but this probably comes pretty close:  Only in a healthy, loving, and supportive community, will any of us ever become all that we could be and no one who is impervious to criticism will ever become the hero that the world needs for you to be.  That's just my opinion, but I'm probably still right.

Last Words

Oct 19, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

"You must be your own lamps, be your own refuges. Take refuge in nothing outside yourselves. Hold firm to the truth as a lamp and a refuge, and do not look for refuge to anything besides yourselves."  Buddha

Most of us here remember and were likely a part of the turbulence of America in the 60's and 70's.  Walter Cronkite, looked into the family rooms of homes across America and told us "what was what" with the authority of a wise grandfather.  On Feb. 27, 1968 he told us that our national leaders had gotten us into an unwinnable quagmire in Vietnam, giving the rest of us permission to voice our opposition to that ill-conceived war.  Our confidence in the reliability of government continued to fall all apart as we moved into the televised Watergate Hearings when we found out just how corrupt, small and fallible the famous and the powerful could be.

We saw the dismantling of America's apartheid with its segregated schools, neighborhoods, public restrooms and drinking fountains.  In the midst of all of the upheaval and insecurity, most of us went to a church where we encountered the word of God, and we spoke with certainty about the Lord Jesus Christ... about our fear of hell and our hopes for heaven.

Even if we questioned these things, there was crowd pressure to pretend that we did not question.  The certainty of the solid institutions in the rest of the world might be crumbling.... The divorce rate climbed, women were empowered in the workplace and in government. We saw jobs that had been reserved for white men being given to women and minorities but the one exception was church where it was and is in 2014, still legal to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender, their sexual orientation, their race, and their age.
Religion has often offered a safe harbor from tempest tossed seas.  Americans enslaved black Africans, taking away their freedom, separating them from their tribes, their families, their property... but we gave them Jesus.  We made them slaves but we promised them heaven.

What white America did not expect, is that unlike all of the millions of Bibles given to college students by the Gideons over the decades, some of the sons and daughters of African slaves actually read the Bible.... They read about the slave revolt and escape recorded in Exodus.  They read about prophets who foresaw a time when those who built houses would get to own one, and that one-day the tenet farmers would own the farm.

Out of the black church, the civil rights movement emerged and the meaning of religion began to change.  We were less interested in heaven and more interested in justice... less concerned about personal piety and more aware of social sin and evil of an economic system that kept them in poverty. Religion, for us, is not what it once was.

For most of us here, that old evangelical certainty is entirely gone.  We have, as I have often said, given up false certainty for honest uncertainty.  We now know with certainty that our government can lie to us and manipulate us, that the marketplace does not have our best interests at heart, that corporations would use us for kindling in their fire places if they could.

And we know that we cannot simply open our Bibles to find certain answers to any of life's most important issues.  There is insight there.  We can find inspiration, we can dialogue with it....
But unlike an elementary math book, the answers are not in the back of the book.  We have to look for them, struggle for them.... And, more importantly, what we know with certainty one year is subject for debate the next year.... Truth becomes a moving target that no one can give to you and that you can never own.

We are still in the minority, I know.  We are surrounded in Springfield by a denomination most noted for their belief that God's Holy Spirit enables them to literally speak the language of angels.  America still leads the world in the percentage of the population that believes in angels.  Even in underdeveloped nations with almost no public education, people have been able to think through that little bit of that mythology but in the good ol USA, 55 to 80% of us still believe that angels are real.... More than the number of people who believe in global warming.

But in our area, a significant portion of the population not only believes that these invisible heavenly creatures exist, they think that by spewing consonant sounds out of their mouths that they are actually speaking the heavenly language of angels.

Uncomfortably, a retired Assemblies of God executive lives across the street from me and sometimes our under-paid federal employee who delivers our mail will put his mail in my mailbox.  I don't read it of course but I have seen that my neighbor actually subscribes to a magazine just for those people who speak the language of angels.....It is 2014.... Newspapers are going out of business because no one reads the news anymore but there are still enough people who think that they magically speak the language of non-existent imaginary beings that they still have their own print magazine.
And you wonder why I stay half-mad all of the time!  People, it is time for us to wake up and to try to wake up the community around us.

Tradition has it, that as the Buddha was dying at the age of 80, his few remaining followers gathered around him and he told them,  "You must be your own lamps, be your own refuges. Take refuge in nothing outside yourselves. Hold firm to the truth as a lamp and a refuge, and do not look for refuge to anything besides yourselves."

Buddhists have religious texts and doctrinal teachings but unlike Jews, Christians and Muslims, Buddhists never had 10 Commandments, their insights were more like suggestions.  More importantly, while the major religions of the west have focused on "salvation" eastern religions have not .... We have almost single mindedly focused on how we could secure our place in heaven.

For eastern religions, especially Buddhism, the goal was not to attain to heaven but rather to find enlightenment.  In fact, the name given to Prince Siddhartha, the "Buddha" means, "the awakened one." Just as "Christ" was not really Jesus' family name, "Buddha" is a description, not a name.

And as what happened to the historical Jesus, Buddha's name and memory were stolen and associated with elaborate myths, superstitions and religious peculiarities, but if we may take this death bed teaching as something that comes closer to his true message, his real character, he was telling his followers not to even take his teachings too seriously.
We love the core message of the historical Jesus but in this century, as we seek enlightenment, we have to recognize that it may be necessary for us to disagree, even with Jesus, with Buddha.... Maybe even Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders... as we seek what is true.

I'm not being a relativist.  Everyone has a right to their own opinions but they do not have a right to their own facts.  You cannot meaningfully talk about your own truths... truth is either true for everyone or it isn't true.  That's part of what I really love about science: it seeks to articulate what is true regardless of how popular the truths are, what public opinion about them might be, or even what the popular vote is.  Science is true regardless of who believes it.  Religion, real religion, in that sense, should be more like science.

And you know, you would not be using a hundred year old science book to teach a modern science class and for the same reason, we need to be very careful about we use ancient religious texts.  Where ancient scriptures inspire us to noble values and causes they are great, where they are used to pour concrete around harmful prejudices and superstitions, we need to move on.

In spite of the needs that face us in this decade, most of organized religion is still trying to engage itself in the belief that the church is a haven in a heartless world, a virtual Noah's ark, keeping the faithful safe from the storms that rage outside....for those of us who spent too much time at the bottom floor of that ark after a couple of months at sea, we know how uninviting the traditional church can be.
Setting aside the religion that is a distraction from reality, we turn to face what is with new courage.  When Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is among you, we progressives should have stood up and yelled "amen."  The Kingdom is not in the afterlife but it won't be in this life either if we fill our heads with superstition and magic.

Now, I said that when the Buddha was dying that the few followers who were still with him gathered around him.  Buddha had been popular and he died in obscurity.  It took a long time for people to realize how valuable his teachings were.

We have seen that in the modern era.  Had Martin Luther King, Jr. not died when he did, he also might have been lost in obscurity as his supporters were falling away and his associates were fighting with each other.

One of the great thinkers who created American democracy, Thomas Paine, who literally gave the United States its name, only had six people at his funeral because of his criticisms of traditional religion but time has validated his insights.

Truth is not subject to popular opinion.  Truth is true even when almost no one believes it.  Still, the good news is this, we can give birth to the Kingdom, through our own conscious choice.  We can solve the challenges of poverty and homelessness.  We can end wars.  We can give health care to the sick and lift the yoke of oppression and discrimination off of the shoulders of minorities.... the world is only waiting for the people of God to wake up.

There is a modern proverb that teaches that no one can do you harm without your help.  No one can really hurt you unless you are willing to pretend that you are asleep.

Tradition has it that people asked the Buddha if he was a god or a son of god, and he replied, "No."  And so they asked, "Who are you, why should we listen to you?"  He said, "I am awake."  That is my highest hope for myself, and my best hope for you.

The Buddha that is in me, honors the Buddha that is in you.

Sickness unto Death

October 12, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

Job 23:1-9, 16-17      
Then Job answered: 2"Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. 3Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! 4I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. 5I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. 6Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. 7There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.
8"If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him;9on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. 16God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; 17If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!

Returning from a ten-day trip to Europe, once I had cleared customs in New York City, I turned on my cell phone to see if I had missed any messages while I was in route from Athens.  There were five.  The first four were from a man I hardly knew whom we will call David.

David was an inactive member of my former church.  I had dutifully called on him over the years when he was in the hospital but he never darkened the door of the church.  In fact, he hardly left his home.  He was frequently hospitalized for digestive reasons.  When I saw him he always had the long hair and very long fingernails that reflected his hermit life.

His first message was a request that I call him.  With each successive he sounded more desperate, more urgent, and his last call was breathless and panicked.  The fifth message was from my secretary, telling me that David had been found dead in his apartment.

David had been the second son of a prominent Springfield businessman, a leader both in his church and in his political party.
His father had big plans for David and his older brother to follow in his footsteps and to carry on the family name. When, in their adolescence, he learned that both of his sons were gay, he disowned them both.  The older one moved to St. Louis where he became a full-time alcoholic.  David stayed in Springfield, becoming increasingly reclusive until a pastor he hardly knew was the only person he knew to call when he could no longer resist the urge to take his own life.

David is only one of the gay men I have known who committed suicide because they were cut off from society, from church, from employment, and, too often, from family.  He held the gun to his own head but society helped to pull the trigger.

There are about 40,000 suicides in America every year.  Most have been younger people who were said to be mentally ill.... Most of the ones I have known were not the ones who were ill.... Society was sick and society took away their humanity, insisted that they didn't fit in, that they were going to go to hell, that they had to change, to accommodate themselves to a mentally ill society and when the burden of either pretending or hiding became too much, they turn to a permanent escape from their pain.

But there are two segments of society that doesn't fit that description where the rate of suicide is dramatically increasing.  One is among the aging citizens who are discovering that they can neither find employment nor manage to live on their retirement income.  As pension funds become more rare and Social Security in no way provides a living income, more and more of the elderly poor are becoming their own "death panel."
And, of course, the other category, the one we hear about in the news, is among our returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq.  The suicide rate has tripled among the Armed Forces during the years that we have been involved in these two theaters.  More soldiers have died from suicide than have been killed in action in Afghanistan.

The military has recently spent more than $200 million on research into suicide prevention and yet the rate of suicide continues to climb.  I have an important solution to their problem that I will give to them at no cost at all.... Don't send young men and women to occupy foreign lands and expose them violence and death for which there is no believable justification.  I'm right, of course, but that's not the answer they are looking for.

There are people who commit suicide because they have a kind of organic depression... a painful mental illness that does not respond to medication or talk therapy.  These are sad cases... the people who really try, who do have access to health care and whose families love and support them.

Others take their own lives to avoid a more painful and humiliating death.  Robin Williams' widow offered this as the explanation for his suicide.... Though I fear that his long struggle with addiction may have played a role, she indicated that it was a Parkinson's disease diagnosis that he could not face.

Most of us have become aware of the sad case of Brittany Maynard who has very publicly and fearlessly discussed her plans to take her own life on November 1st.  Just six months ago it was discovered that this very athletic 23 year old woman has a malignant brain tumor.  Faced with no further medical options and only pain and suffering ahead of her, she has chosen the date of her own death.

Though there are people who would object even to this on the most cruel and irrational religious basis, I have only respect for her courageous decision not only to die with dignity but to talk about it in a way that can give others both comfort and courage.

Beyond the death with dignity and those whose brain chemistry refuses our best efforts, what remains, which are nearly all of the 40,000 suicides each year, are what we can call "preventable" suicides.

We too easily say that people who take their own lives are mentally ill... and in some cases that is absolutely true... in those cases, every kind of research into what medications, treatments and therapies might work is in order.

But I think that majority are not mentally ill.... Not in a very honest and painfully truthful way.  Many of them simply can't adjust to an insane society.  In lots of ways, that is our business.

WalMart just cut 30,000 of their employees off of health care to save money when the family that owns most of WalMart is the most wealthy family in the world.  Ironically, WalMart just announced plans to start a health insurance company and they will sell policies at their stores!  Most bankruptcies in America are caused by medical bills.

So you cut poor peoples wages and hours, take their health care away from them and then watch them be evicted and bankrupt when the get sick and we say that they are mentally ill when they decide to kill themselves?  No!  That's just not true.  That's a preventable suicide.... There is mental illness there but it is treatable.... It is treatable with a national health care program and a minimum wage that is a living wage!

We don't need to give more anti-depressants and counseling to poor people... we need to give them more justice... we need to restore dignity to work and livability to wages.  They aren't crazy but we make them think they are crazy because we expect them to adjust to a cruel, irrational, and mean employment and economic system that robs them of their humanity.

This is not at all unlike what I said about our brave sisters and brothers in uniform.  There was PTSD among WWII soldiers but most of those people felt that they were liberators, they were defenders of their homeland.  My father came back from WWII with battle fatigue and was hospitalized for a long time in a mental hospital.  He had seen too much death, too much violence, and he never got over it.

PTSD can happen in any war.... But he died believing that his fallen comrades where heroes who died in a noble cause.  He believed that he sacrificed to defend our nation from invasion.  The drug and alcohol abuse, the depression and suicidal thoughts of many of our veterans from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan may well be because they just can't get their heads into the myth of the wars' purposes.
I am shocked by the compliance of our media in beating the drums for a new Middle East war and by the passive acceptance of our public.  We have never yet gotten involved in tribal inspired civil wars in the Middle East and been able to effect a peaceful and just outcome.  The soldiers who have PTSD are much more likely to have the sane view of these wars than are the hysterical people in our media and our Congress who want to keep us in a perpetual state of war.

If we keep sending the poor of our depressed rural states and impoverished inner cities to go and kill and be killed by the poor of rural Muslim nations and the unemployed of their inner cities then we will see the same outcomes.  We need to put our foreign policy on Prozac and keep our young men and women here.

Finally, we have to admit that the largest share of madness that leads to suicide is born under our nation's steeples.... In our mosques and in our temples.  Suicide rates among gay men is estimated to be nearly tens times the suicide rate of the rest of society.

And that comes more from mentally ill religion than from any other source.  Like the man I mentioned earlier... what child can bear being rejected by their church, their parents, and, if they buy into it all, by God as well, and not wish that they were dead?  Many people, including my best friends, have often implored me to turn down the volume on my criticism of evangelical Christianity, traditional Roman Catholicism, and of conservative Judaism and Islam but when there is a casualty count lying all around their sick religion, I cannot be quiet.
I doubt that there is a liberal in this part of the world who has not had to struggle with serious depression at times because we do not fit in.  We are constantly experiencing rejection by our peers and our family members just because we have recognized that Fox News is a just pre-packaged hate masquerading as entertainment, masquerading as news.

I sometimes find it to be very nearly overwhelming.  It is not just the profit driven wars, the corporate control of Congress, it isn't just seeing the Mitch McConnell's, Rand Paul's and Billy Long's who populate our government.... It is the indifference of intelligent and good people who accommodate themselves to the insanity and who insist that I join them in crazy-town.

Evil people are a constant.  Evil people are not really the problem here.  It is the indifference of good people that we have to fight and as tempting as it is to give up, there is always another David, another soldier, another victim of a broken church, a sick government, and cruel economic system who is waiting for us to wake up.

Being personally enlightened is not enough.  Becoming liberated from the oppression of sick religion and being too old for military service doesn't give us permission to become indifferent to the deaths of others.  There have been eight people who died by their own hand since I started talking this morning.... We cannot afford not to care.

Either/Or

Proper  22      October 5, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, Pastor

Genesis 2:18-22  18Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner." 19So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.
21So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.22And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

Marriage scene from The Princess Bride

Thank you for indulging me that sixty seconds of classic video from the Princess Bride.  I'm almost certain that none of you can enjoy it quite as much as I do.  It has been my honor and sometimes it has been my challenging duty to preside over weddings since long before this now 27 year old film was first released.

Most countries now separate the civil contract of marriage from the religious ritual but here in the United States it is still most common to put the religious and legal together and often we try to see how much pomp and fabric and flowers can be pushed into a ceremony that the groom almost always begs me to make somehow magically short and the bride wants me to make it impossibly spectacular.  

But we presume that somehow God is a party to the marriage contract.  The traditional wedding language even insists that marriage was "instituted by God" and the officiant is to charge the couple and the witnesses to honor it and to keep it holy. Our government has passed any number of "defense of marriage" acts trying to make certain that it is always an institution in the hands of the God of early 20th Century Catholics and right wing Evangelicals.
At times in our history, we did not allow different races to marry and for the past several years we have debated whether or not same sex couples, who have lived a shared life for decades, should be afforded the legal benefits of marriage that are automatically extended to even a marriage that only lasted for 48 hours, such as one of the marriages of Britany Spears .... That holy and evidently intoxicated Las Vegas union that was dissolved in the light of day when everyone had sobered up.

Religious people have been protesting the steady march of progress towards marriage equality, insisting that same sex marriages will undermine their traditional heterosexual marriage.  But, of course, if the gay couple down the street getting married can undermine the marriage of Barbie and Ken, then, the simple fact is that either Barbie or Ken is gay and they have bigger things to discuss than the happy couple down the street.

I am pleased to be able to say today, that marriage equality has finally taken a giant step here in Missouri with Friday's decision by Judge J. Dale Youngs in Kansas City, ruling that our same sex marriage ban is not constitutional.

But we can give the traditionalists this much:  including same sex couples in legal marriage is a change in both our legal and religious presumptions about marriage.  But what traditionalists must finally accept is that there is no single Biblical or even legal understanding of marriage that has lasted for more than a few generations.

The preponderance of scripture supports polygamy and even concubinage.  And there are rules that were laid down in scripture to serve an ancient culture that we have found to be horrible for centuries.
In Deuteronomy 22, the Bible says that if a man rapes a young women who is engaged to be married, the rapist must pay a fine to the girl's father and then marry his victim. And if that sounds just crazy to you, you should know that this practice was just outlawed in Morocco in January of this year.

Religious rules and secular laws about who could marry, who could divorce, how many people you could marry at one time, have been constantly changing and the one thing that we can be certain of is that God didn't invent this institution.  We did, and as such, we have been tinkering with it, trying to get it right, for centuries.

The church should never be in the business of dictating specifics about such things but what we must not fail to do is to teach the kinds of ethics that apply to marriage and to child rearing, as well as to government, environment, and economics.

The church does not have the right to try to dictate who you can and who you cannot marry nor should we try to manage the gateway to divorce or re-marriage.  But we should meaningfully teach the kinds of character traits and principles that lead to successful marriage and family life.

Our wisdom reading this morning from Genesis poetically articulates, no so much a dictum as it is an observation.... The author of Genesis tells us that God observed the first person that God had created....now, to be completely honest, Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2 were written in entirely different time periods and places so I want to step a bit carefully into this observation, but, if you read the creation narrative in chapter 1 of Genesis, you see God creating and creating and after each act of creation, the writer of Genesis said, "and God saw that it was good."
God made the light and the dark and saw that it was good.  God separated the land from the seas and saw that it was good.  God made the sun and the moon and saw that they were good.  God made the birds of the air, the fish of the sea and the animals on the land and saw that they were good.

But if you will allow me to read from chapter one to chapter two, the first time that God looks at something and says that it is not good is in chapter 2, verse 18:
18Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone"
And that is a stand-alone observation that has echoed through the empty homes and lives of many of us who have just never found a life partner.  It is not good that the man should be alone.... Or the woman for that matter.

There are worse things than being alone.... Specifically, being with the wrong person comes quickly to mind.  If you have some very good friends, some dependable family connections, some real community, being alone can be ok.  No one should be made to feel inadequate or damaged because they are alone but no one who has spent decades alone, as I have, would put up much of a fight with the Biblical narrative that says... yeah, sunrise and sunset... that's good.... Going to the ocean... that's good... seeing the birds, the fish, the wild animals.... All that is good... but it is never as good when you are seeing it alone.

I was married for the first half of my adult life.  It was a pretty miserable marriage.  She wasn't a bad person but we sure were not right for each other.  We tried... we did lots of counseling.  I even changed my educational path from earning a Phd in New Testament to majoring in pastoral counseling because I was trying to understand marriage, trying to make it work.

For the sake of decorum, I don't want to say much more about that failure.  I think that virtually everyone is the hero of their own novel and in almost every case when someone talks about a divorce, they describe themselves as a victim and that is almost never entirely accurate.

I did not expect, when I divorced at the age of 38 that I would remain single for so long.  It was not my plan to remain single.  I tried but like about half of the people in my generation, it just never happened for me.

I have had the honor of sharing my life with a wonderful daughter.  I have had educational opportunities that I did not deserve and for which I am profoundly grateful.  I have traveled more and seen more of the world than I ever would have dreamed to have been possible for a lower middle class kid from rural Kentucky.  I have been blessed with many wonderful friends.... A few of whom have found it within their ability to remain as my friends for years at a time.... Which is, apparently, no small feat.

But, and forgive me if you have heard this personal account before, but for me it symbolizes that split between what it means to have a charmed single life or to live in close communion with a life partner......

The first time that I got to go to London, I went alone to the British Museum and within moments I found myself standing in front of the Rosetta Stone.... That singular archaeological find that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphics and made it possible for historians to finally probe the ancient history of Egypt.

I had known of its existence all of my life.  I knew why that it was important.  I had, however, formed an image in my mind of a kind of stone tablet..... which is not what the Rosetta Stone is.  The Rosetta Stone is a 1600 pound block of granite that stands nearly four feet tall.  When I saw it, I was stunned, amazed, and I turned to my left and to my right, wanting to say to someone, "Isn't this amazing?" but I was surrounded by a class of elementary students on a field trip and they were clearly bored with the stone and eager to press on to see the mummies in the next exhibit hall.

I have never felt more alone than I felt in that moment.  At our lowest points in life, having a committed life partner can dilute the pain and help us to bear up under great challenges.  But also, in moments of great joy, wonder, success, and discovery, when you don't have someone to share that moment with, then the event can be diminished or lost...... it is not good for the man to be alone.

I titled today's sermon "Either/Or" after the title of Soren Kierkegaard's book of the same name. It reflects Kierkegaard's tortured indecision about whether to marry and try to have a happy life, or to remain isolated and devote himself to the work of creating his life's great contribution of philosophical books.  In the end, he elected to remain single and, for the rest of his life, apparently suffered with the realization that he had made the wrong choice.

The second half of verse 18 in chapter 2 of Genesis, after God has made the observation that it is not good for the man to be alone, says, "I will make him a helper as his partner." A more literal and, I think, a better translation says, "Let us make a partner who is fit for him."

Finding the right match is, however, a potentially great deception as well.  As a single adult who is often called upon both to do pre-marital counseling and pre-divorce counseling, I have been an avid observer of marriage relationships.

I used to ask young couples who were preparing to take their wedding vows if they could tell me about a couple they know whose marriage they admire and would like to imitate.  I stopped asking that question about ten years ago when couples stopped being able to describe a single marriage that they thought was healthy in a way that they would like to imitate.

There are, I am convinced, no perfect marriages.  There are, however, happy couples.... But their happiness is not predicated on the perfection of their relationship.  They are happy, from my observation, because they have learned to be patient with their partner's sometimes very irritating quirks.

They are happy, not because their partner is innocent, but because they have chosen to be more forgiving than resentful.  They are happy, not because their partner is flawless but because they have chosen to give up on the illusion that is perfectionism.

There are things that can kill a marriage.... Infidelity, physical violence, addiction or mental illness, cruelty to children, and fiscal irresponsibility.... Beyond those five, I get pretty impatient with people who give up on their marriage too easily.  If people only knew how much rage I feel inside when they say it, they would stop coming to me and telling me, "I'm not happy."

If you married the accountant for security but you spend all of your life dreaming of the life-guard at the pool... then you need to grow up. Those of us who have longed for the opportunity to build a meaningful partnership with an appropriate life-partner can get pretty testy with the "I'm not happy" crowd.

It is not likely to come as a surprise to many of you that my status as a long term single man may now be on the seriously endangered list.  It is been my singular good fortune to meet a woman who is not only very sympathetic with my spiritual views but who is also a very educated progressive and a stunningly attractive person who seems, even more stunningly, to be willing to tolerate my sometimes inexcusably intense character flaws.

Heather is the most amazing person that I have ever met but as we have tried to pursue a meaningful relationship across the 400 miles that separate us, we have both discovered that neither one of us is perfect.  You don't get to be middle aged without earning a few battle scars and developing some sensitive hot buttons that make the journey from the first date to the jewelry store and the altar more of a winding road than a straight path.

More important than the slow discovery of one another's flaws has been the way in which being in love has pushed me to become aware of some of my own flaws that had not been evident to me when I was holed up alone in my man-cave.  I remember hearing Scott Peck say that the only real reason to get married is for the friction....he and was only half kidding.

Being in a relationship with a really smart, strong, and self-confident woman has meant that I have had to do some real self-discovery.

Once intimidation and condescension have been shown to no longer be effective, I've had to become a bit more vulnerable about some things!

It is, of course, not all about the friction.  I have very nearly made a fool out of myself trying to root through the old attic of memories about how a man is supposed to court a woman.... I've gone through gifts of jewelry, theater tickets, dinners out, flowers at work and sending greeting cards with the lyrics of pop love songs, along with daily phone calls and late night texts.... I've been such an adolescent about some of these things that I was afraid that I was going to start having acne problems again.

But beyond all of the thrill and excitement of a meaningful romance, more substantively, if I may borrow the phrasing of a popular movie, what I find in this prospect of once more trying to enter into a meaningful marriage is that I have found in Heather, I have found in our partnership, something that makes me want to be a better man.  And that is the kind of relationship I could wish for everyone to experience.

Hookers in Heaven

Proper 21   Sept 28, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Matthew 21:28-32
28"What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' 29He answered, 'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. 30The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir'; but he did not go. 31Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. 32For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.

I had our handicap accessible toilet replaced this week.  We've had the plumber out to work on that restroom several times and we finally decided that we just had a bad brand in there and needed to replace it with a better quality toilet.  I like our plumber, I trust him, so I just left the door unlocked and told him to take care of it.

When I went in to, as they say, inspect the plumbing, I was arrested by the brand name on the ceramic throne.  "Church."  Being a person who professionally deals in literary metaphor, I couldn't quite convince myself that this was mere coincidence.  It is an unpleasant association.... Church and flushing....religion and sewage.

It isn't what I remember.  That's not how I want to think about it.  When I was young, my religious education was certainly full of the kind of superstition and magical thinking that I want so much to flush away these days but regardless of what was in our Sunday School books that we hardly read, what I encountered in my church were people who were trying to be good people.  They were trying to be faithful to their spouses, good to their children, they valued honesty, hard work, study and they used words like "forgiveness," "mercy," and "love," no matter how far short they may have fallen from those noble ideas.

There is a saying in TV journalism that reminds us that airplanes that crash are in the news, the thousands of airplanes that take off and safely land are never mentioned.  If all you know about aviation is what you see on the 10 o'clock news, you would assume that most airplanes explode and kill everyone on board because those are the only ones we talk about.  However, nothing could be farther from the truth.

In religion, we talk about the priests who are pedophiles but it is rather less likely that you heard about Father Manuel Garcia Viejo who died Thursday afternoon.  He was the second Spanish priest who was a physician who died from Ebola in recent weeks.... Priests who were also physicians, living a life of poverty and serving the sick in Sierra Leone long after they were old enough to have retired.  They are the airplanes we don't hear about.

But it is still undeniable that there has been a lot of flush worthy news about religion lately.  Islam, as I studied it in graduate school, is not the Islam I am hearing about in Iraq and Syria these days.  The fact that ISIS even claims to be Islamic should inspire true Muslims everywhere to rise up and defend their noble faith.

Samira Saleh al-Naimi, a leading civil rights lawyer in Iraq, was known as a defender of the poor and she was an outspoken critic of ISIS.  She was taken from her home with her three children and her husband watching and she was tortured for several days and then publicly executed by firing squad in Mosul this week in response to something she had posted on Face Book that was critical of ISIS.

When Islam was born in the 5th century, Muslim women were afforded more equality, more freedom, more respect than where their Christian and Jewish contemporaries.  It deserves to be pointed out that these modern extremists that not only don't want women to be able to speak out do not want women to even be allowed to go to school and become literate would not have a Quran if they had been in charge in the time of the prophet Muhammad.  The prophet did not write the Quran... Muhammad was according to tradition, illiterate, but his wife was not.  It seems likely that the whole of the Muslim faith is dependent on the fact that there were literate and scholarly women in the family of Muhammad who not only wrote for him but who also instructed him in the stories of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

That so much of the Muslim world has taken a turn towards oppression of women, in spite of how arrogant it may be for a Western Christian to say this, is just not true Islam.  The religion of the Taliban, of ISIS, of al Qaeda is not Islam.  It is not the religion of Muhammad, it has more in common with what we flush into the sewer.

I hate to cave into any kind of ebullience about warfare but if you will give me just a little exception in my anti-war posture.  Among the few Arab nations that are joining us in the air attacks against ISIS is the United Arab Emirate.  One of their fighter pilots led the mission this week and that pilot was a woman:  I am sorry that the news has released her name because, much more than even Malala, this woman has now made herself a target for assassination.

But Maj. Mariam Al Mansouri wanted to be known.  She wanted the woman hating men of ISIS to know that a woman was fighting back.
I am frightened for her because the extremists have a long memory and she will not ever be safe again but I am proud of her and I could only wish to more like her.

Toxic religion is dangerous.  My objection to our rush to be baited into another war.... And we should all be clear about this, ISIS is releasing videos of beheadings because they want us to come and attack them and, since it is what they want, I am convinced that it is the last thing that we should do.  You can bomb people but you cannot bomb an ideology.  The only real answer to toxic religion is healthy religion.  The only meaningful response to mental illness is mental health.
The only way to correct ancient myths and superstitions is to consistently, loudly, emphatically, teach a science based, truth based approach to life and faith.

We were shocked by the news yesterday that a man in Oklahoma, a man with a criminal history and who was in the process of being fired from a Moore, OK food processing plant, claimed to be a convert to Islam and used that excuse to commit a gruesome murder of one women who worked with him and tried to kill another.... One he stabbed, and the other he beheaded.  It is, of course, no accident that women were the targets of his rage.

Though the news emphasizes the religion of terrorists and murderers when they claim to be Muslim and rarely mentions their religion when they are motivated by radical forms of Christianity we should not be deceived into believing that there are harmless forms of magical thinking and dangerous forms of magical thinking.  Magical thinking, superstition that denies knowable reality, fosters the belief that imagination and personal conviction is as good as actual facts and that is something we must resist wherever it shows up.

The religion that deserves to have a church, and the church that deserves to be flushed is, in my opinion, typically easily divided between the church that asks you to believe in non-sense and the church that asks you to behave with substantive character defined by personal sacrifice, not the sacrifice of others.... By forgiveness of those who have offended you, not by narcissistic claims of innocence.  We need a religion that teaches the facts about our planet and the narrow and fragile environment that allows for human life.  We need a faith that demands a higher and higher standard of friendship, community and love and not one that leads to compliance to cult-like militaristic obedience.

Jesus, in our scripture lesson today, makes the difference very plain.  A man told his two sons to go out and work on the farm.  One obediently said that he would go but he didn't.  The other stubbornly refused but then thought better of it and complied.  Real religion is not in your head.  It is in your hands and your feet.

Don't bother inviting Jesus into your heart if your heart is full of the sewage of misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia, moral indifference, and arrogance.  Jesus said that the sex workers and corrupt politicians are more likely to be friends of God than the people whose religion is all in their heads.

The real church is not one you sit on.... The real church will be out on the farm .... Changing the world.  That's the church I want to be a part of and I hope you do too.

Do You Do Well To Be Angry?

Proper 20    Sept. 21, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, Pastor

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
3The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2"Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." 3So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across. 4Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
5And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. 10When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

The story of Jonah is an Old Testament parable.  It is not intended to describe a historical event.  This short work doesn't tell us about a real person or a real city and, much to many folks disappointment, not even a real whale.  It struggles to tell us something about God and our anger, more specifically, our racism.  And like any well-crafted parable, it is full of irony, humor and dramatic action.

The story is set up this way: a Jewish man is called by God to go and preach in the capital city of Assyria.

It is set in a time when Assyria has destroyed Israel and pretty well messed up Judah and all of their neighbors.  Assyria was practicing that ancient form of warfare that built their national wealth by stealing everything of value from all of their neighbors and enslaving their population.  Assyria had never done anything good for any Jew and had done every outlandish, criminal, reprehensibly violent thing they could do to destroy the Jewish people.

So, this is a very tense set up.  God tells Jonah to go and preach to the people he hated the most.
Now, Biblical scholars agree that this story is not nearly old enough to have been written in those days of Assyrian rule.  It was written much later, two or three hundred years later.  It was written in a time when the tiny little remnant of Jews were trying to rebuilt a scrap of a nation on the ruins left behind after nearly a century of slavery in Babylon.  In those days of reconstruction there was just an awful lot of anger.... they had been bullied, robbed, burned out, sold into slavery and then finally dumped totally vulnerable in a nearly barren land in a city with no walls and very little to eat.

The person who sat down to write Jonah lived among a rag tag bunch of survivors who kept themselves alive by feeding on how much they hated Babylonians, Egyptians, Syrians and just about anyone who didn't look and sound Jewish.  And when people are so certain that their hatred is justified, when they know for a fact that their bloodthirsty prayers are heard by God it is very very difficult to offer an alternative position.

I found myself becoming very provoked a few days ago when I woke up to my usual diet of coffee and news programs and the news channel that I was watching had decided to replay, moment by moment, the original broadcast of their program on Sept. 11, 2001.  I totally understand the desire to remember, to memorialize, to honor those who lost their lives on that horrible day, but what we were being asked to relive was the terror, the confusion, the toxic blending of fear and rage that we all felt when the second plane hit the second tower and all speculations about an accident suddenly ended.  America was under attack.... A sneak attack, a terrorist attack.... Against unarmed civilians who posed no threat to anyone.
And watching that first hour again, that I still remembered very clearly from that Tuesday morning thirteen years ago, I realized that I wasn't really being asked to remember and honor, I was being asked to relive the fear and anger, the desire for revenge.

And I immediately wondered if TV stations in Bagdad replayed coverage from our bombing of Bagdad on March 18, 2003 every year and if they did, would they be memorializing the dead or reminding the people of Iraq that they need to still fear and hate Americans?  You remember where you were on 9-11-2001 but do you remember where you were on March 18, 2003?  Does that illegal and extremely lethal act of war strike you in anything like the same way?


Whoever wrote the book of Jonah wanted to ask that question that I just asked in a somewhat more diplomatic, more empathetic manner. Sometimes, when people are that mad, using a little slap stick humor is the only way to break the ice.  So the story starts with Jonah going the opposite direction from where God wants him to go.  And God causes a great storm to strike the ship at sea.  And even pagan gentiles are getting religion trying to beg God to help them.

They finally throw Jonah overboard into the raging sea and the sea calms down and a giant fish swallows Jonah and swims for three days to deliver him to the shores of Nineveh.


See, everyone in this story is totally obedient to God.... the weather, the sea, the fish, and even pagan sailors but one person is defiant of God's will..... the preacher! Cause, see, he has got a serious mad on.  It is not just that he thought Judaism was that much better than the religion of Assyria or that Judah was just all that much better than any other nation.... it was that he had seen the wreckage, the slaughter.... he knew people who had been killed, enslaved, raped and robbed.  His anger was a righteous anger that doesn't really believe that anyone who disagrees with him can be anything but stupid or evil and probably some of both.

We've recently had this whole debate about Syria going on in the news. Last year John McCain was mad at the president for not arming ISIS because they were fighting against President Assad in Syria.  Now McCain is mad at the president because he is not arming Assad so that he can fight ISIS better.  Which only leads me to wonder why news programs still interview Joh McCain?

There is an element of our government, of our population, that just doesn't want to learn about history, or facts or to see it from perspective other than their own sense of having been wronged.  They are frightened, xenophobic.... They want to feel safe and they want revenge.  That, men and women, is Jonah.

Jonah walks into the middle of this huge monstrous city and delivers a short and pretty sad attempt at a sermon.  He preached a one sentence sermon....One sentence predicting the immanent destruction of the city.  And against all credible odds, the entire city repents.
The storyteller wants us to believe that everyone from the King to the cattle in the field repented!  Best revival in the history of the world!

But, of course, that is part of the irony.  Jonah didn't want them to turn from their evil.  He wanted God to destroy them.  Isn't that God's business?  Destroying evil people?  Doesn't God see the injustice?  Doesn't God become outraged by the mass destruction?  Didn't God see the videos of people being beheaded?  Doesn't God want us to wipe out Nineveh and every city like it?

By the way, our drones also make video recordings.... We could be showing the videos of our execution of thousands of innocent civilians by our own killer flying robots but you never see those videos do you?

Jonah goes up on a ridge over looking the city to watch and see if they'll mess up.... maybe God will go ahead and bomb the city anyway.  You know, it gets hot when you don't have anything but your anger to keep you company.  Jonah is just sitting up there, waiting, watching, and hoping they'll mess up.

In Alcoholics Anonymous they say that anger is the dubious luxury of ordinary people.  It is a luxury because it is an emotion that some people can revel in but recovering alcoholics know that it is a luxury they can't afford.  If they get angry then it won't be long before they also get drunk.  But it is a dubious luxury because even people who don't get drunk don't seem to get much good out of it.  Anger doesn't seem to make people very smart.  It doesn't make them spiritual.
It doesn't make them compassionate or loving and a whole lot of the time it makes them do something really destructive, usually self-destructive. The Big Book of A.A. calls anger poison and it may well be.

But let me return to the Biblical story.  Jonah is sitting on the ridge watching the city and a vine grows up over the little shack where he is sitting and the vine is the only decent thing that has happened to Jonah.... at least the vine offers some shade from the hot sun.  However, just as the weather, the sea, the fish and the pagans are all obedient to God, now even a worm is sent to do God's will..... a worm eats through the vine and it dies and that, for Jonah, is the last straw.

He rants at God:
He said, "It is better for me to die than to live."
But God said to Jonah, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?"
And he said, "Yes, angry enough to die."
Then the LORD said, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left...?

When God asks Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry?"  Jonah doesn't even understand the question..... because, you see, anger can be its own logic.

Why wouldn't he be angry?

Angry at the Assyrians for their violent sins.  Angry at God for not destroying them.  Angry at the vine for dying and making him so uncomfortable..... angry enough to die.

You know the routine...... angry at illegal immigrants so that when you see signs in Spanish at the hardware store you are afraid that you are losing your country.  Angry at Muslims who raise terrorists and who have no remorse for their heinous deeds.  Angry at autoworkers for demanding salaries that put American businesses into bankruptcy.  Angry at bankers who helped to wreck the economy.  Angry at gay people for wanting the same rights as straight people.... How did our famous local defense attorney put it?  Dee Wampler said he was tired of these gay people shoving things down his throat..... is it possible that he can't hear himself?

It is not that Jonah and his people did not have a reason to be angry, ....it is not that Isis is not a terrorist army capable of sub-human acts of violence.  It is that our anger won't solve the problem.

The message of Jonah to the people who first read it was that their captivity in Babylon was over and it was time for them to stop hating and to accept the interracial marriages among them, the mixed blood Jews, the Jews who spoke other languages or who had family members who were of another religion.

We face those issues.  My father would never own a Japanese car because, for him, the score of Pearl Harbor wasn't over yet...... but if you take that perspective, it is never over.
The world isn't what it was and will never again be what it was.  There are more Muslims in the United States than there are Episcopalians or Presbyterians.  The economy of the Americas is blended and there will always be both English and Spanish speaking people in every state of the United States.... For ever!

Men and women, there are times when it is right to be angry.  But as Aristotle noted:
"Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy."

Our nation is trying to figure out how to untangle ourselves from a war which has already lasted longer than WWII.  And yet, we are still angry about and afraid of terrorists.

The book of Jonah asks, "Do you do well to be angry?".....  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left...?

In years past we have invaded Mexico and Canada.  We have gone to war with England, France, Germany and Japan, all of which are now close allies and trading partners..... OK, not France really but still..... think of the wine and cheese.  It is possible for old enemies to become allies.  It is possible to find a way around the anger to something much more healthy..... not out of fear but out of courage....

Not in ignorant naiveté but in powerful faith.

Anger is almost always rooted in fear.  My modest suggestion is that our anger has led us into an eye for an eye mentality that has made our nation morally blind. I think that it is time for those who live in the land of the free and the home of the brave to stop being such cowards.  We will not fight our way to peace.

About Tolerance and Transcending Opinion

Proper 19    Sept 14, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Romans 14:1-10a
Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. 2Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. 3Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. 4Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand. 5Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. 6Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God. 7We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. 8If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. 9For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. 10Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister?

Alexander Campbell, the Irish Presbyterian evangelist credited with being the brains of the Restoration movement in the 19th century.  Campbell's writing and preaching career gave birth to the Disciples of Christ, the Independent Christian Church and the Church of Christ.  He proclaimed an idealistic vision of Christian unity.  He said, "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."

Campbell believed that if only everyone would dispense with creeds, church doctrines and denominational affiliations, Christianity could be reunited..... Specifically, he thought that Christianity could be united once every rationally just agreed with his particular vision of what Christianity should be.  Predictably, he not only failed to unite the disparate sectarian divisions within Christianity, his movement managed to add three new deeply divided sects to the American religious landscape.

Still, his guiding principle is not a bad one:  In essential things, let's work towards agreement - In matters of personal opinion, let's be generous in allowing people the freedom to believe as they wish - and on both sides of that divide, let's be sure that nothing is more important that our decision to love one another.

It is a good principle, it is just that church folk had difficulty in agreeing on what was essential and what was a matter of opinion.  Before the movement had time to congeal into an easily recognized institution, the nation was divided by the cataclysmic Civil War, during which the Christian Church held their annual conferences just north of the Mason Dixon line in Cincinnati, OH.  At each of the war years' conferences, resolutions were passed asking God to damn the south.  At the meeting immediately following the end of the war, they passed a final resolution thanking God for having damned the south.

Religious history has some very embarrassing moments.....

In much more recent history, in the early 1990's, the Springfield Chamber of Commerce launched the fairly audacious project of enumerating community values to encourage churches and schools to teach to our citizens.  I was stunned that a club of local business owners could be so filled with self-importance that they would appoint themselves to assign sermon and lesson plan topics to both churches and schools but more than 20 years later, I have come to see such malignant narcissism as being rather more the status quo than shocking.

But, in the disheartening anthropology of ideas, a number of local churches managed to lower the moral bar by objecting to one of the values advocated by the Chamber of Commerce.... The word that tripped them up was:  tolerance.

Several local church leaders were afraid that "tolerance" was a code word for "no longer discriminating against homosexuals." Sadly, Chamber officials reassured them that they had no intentions of limiting their irrational prejudice against gay people but they were actually concerned about religious pluralism and racial prejudice..... which didn't really help matters.

I received a copy of a letter from the pastor of one of our large local Baptist Churches that informed me that if this list of words was accepted by our City Council that churches would then be forced to hire pedophiles to work in our church nurseries.  I was at a loss as to how to respond to such non-sense.... In the end, I corrected his spelling and grammar and just sent the letter back to him.  Surprisingly, I have not heard from him again.

Paul wrote to the church in Rome that they should all get along with one another and not try to force everyone else to agree with their personal opinions.  Evidently, Paul was not conscious of any possible hypocrisy involved in giving that advice.

I don't read Greek as well as Tarzan speaks English but if the English translation of his letter is true to the original, Paul wasn't even able to slightly disguise his own prejudice in a passage telling others not to be so opinionated.
Look at vs 1 in this pericope from Romans 14:  Welcome those who are "weak" in the faith....
Imagine a church that had several adult Sunday School classes.... On one door the class name reads:  for those who are weak in the faith.  On another there is a sign that says: for those who are strong in the faith.  You can bet that the class members in the "weak" class didn't pick their own name.  My college class in my home church named itself:  Lost and Found.... Which was accurate enough but even inside that class there would have been considerable disagreement about who was lost and who wasn't.

For Paul, the division was easy.  If you agreed with him, you were strong.  If you disagreed with him, you were weak.  Even still, he was saying that we should be nice about our prejudices....just as he gave us a perfect example of failing on that front in the way that he worded the passage.

Isaac Asimov, as a scientist, science fiction writer, and enthusiast for science education, received a lot of criticism from the religious world in the 60's and 70's and he was not reticent about pushing back.  He said:  "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"


With that Asimov gets to the big challenge of tolerance.  If people have a right to their own opinion then they also have a right to be wrong.  That doesn't mean that an informed opinion has the same value as an uninformed opinion.  And, realistically, we can't be tolerant of views, beliefs, ethics, that somehow protect things that hurt other people.

The NFL has had to come to terms with the basic right and wrong of domestic abuse around the Ray Rice elevator video in which he hit his fiancé so hard that she went unconscious.  The Ravens originally suspended him for just two games.  The attitude being, domestic violence does not directly affect football so they could be kind of indifferent about it.  On the other hand, a player found guilty of smoking marijuana might face a year's suspension but then the NFL makes a lot of its advertising money on beer and liquor commercials.

It can cut into NFL income if players are using substances that compete with their advertised commercial products but beating up your spouse doesn't affect the bottom line. There are times when tolerance comes at too high a price.  Still, we need some unity on essentials while preserving liberty in non-essentials but we cannot deny that there are things that are essential and it is coming up with that list that proves to be so difficult.

One of the few public meetings in which I publicly raised my voice was about a decade ago at our local state university.  It was not a matter of a debate between an informed view and an uninformed view.
My message was delivered through gritted teeth to none other than the then president of the university.... A very smart man who held very passionately to a traditional Roman Catholic faith.  The president was adamantly refusing to include homosexuals in the list of protected persons in the university's non-discrimination policy.

It was just one of those times when I could say that there is no more room for debate.  As the song that Barry and Sean are going to perform for us in a moment says:  "This is not an opinion, I am right and you are wrong." I assured him that history would convict him as having been guilty of protecting prejudice over freedom.  Eventually, he chose to retire rather than change and the next president quickly changed the university policy.

You might say, in that case, that the university president was "weak" in his faith but his weakness kept dozens, if not hundreds, of gay university employees from having the same pension and insurance benefits as the straight members of the university's staff.  Can you meaningfully maintain unity with those whose beliefs come at the expense of the health and welfare of others?

When this controversy about tolerance first arose in our city, I delivered an impassioned sermon arguing that, in fact, tolerance is a religious value.

A retired religion professor who was typically quite kind and complimentary of my sermons, waited around until the line at the door at the end of the service had dissipated.

He approached me privately and said, "I don't usually disagree with you but this time you are wrong.  Tolerance is not a Christian value.... That falls far short of our goal.... Love is a Christian value."  The uncomfortable truth is that you can be so right that you are wrong.  You can be right in a way that gives you a casualty count rather than transformed hearts and minds.

There are times that it is incumbent upon a prophetic faith community to announce that there are beliefs, values, laws, economic practices, and even military actions and federal budgets that are just wrong.... We just need to find a way to do it that doesn't lead to alienation... which means that we have to find a way to be even more loving than we are right.