While Ferguson Still Burns

November 30, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

(an excerpt from an Independence Day speech delivered by the former slave, Fredrick Douglass, in the presence of President Millard Fillmore in 1852)

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. 

There is a Buddhist parable about a group of monks who were traveling with their abbot when they came upon an uprising in which a group of peasants were fighting against government soldiers.  The abbot said to his disciples, "We must join the conflict."  Confused and surprised by this uncharacteristic demand, they asked, "Master, on which side should we fight?"

"Both," the abbot replied.  "The government must learn to care for the poor and not to mistreat them, and the poor must learn to respect the powers that bring order to our society."

I'm not typically indecisive.  In fact, I'm sure that most of you would readily assure me that I am more inclined to be decisive when I should hang back and think about things a little longer.

In May I drove a thousand miles to participate in a Moral Monday March in North Carolina where the state legislature has been taking very deliberate steps to keep black citizens from voting.

I have not, however, driven the 200 miles between Springfield and Ferguson, Missouri to participate in demonstrations there since the August shooting of Michael Brown.  The right wing politicians and much of the media in North Carolina bemoaned the fact that there were "out of state agitators" swelling the numbers of the Moral Monday Marches in their state.  If only I had known how vociferously they were going to object, I would have had a t-shirt made that said, "Out of State Agitator."  "Agitator," is, in fact, one of the more flattering things that I have been called.

But when the Prosecuting Attorney in St Louis County, Robert McCulloch, finally announced on Monday evening that there would be no indictment against officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, there was a predictable outburst of looting and burning on the part of a small minority of those involved in the demonstrations that have been ongoing in Ferguson since Brown was killed in Mid-August.

Tuesday morning, the Ferguson Police Chief, Tom Jackson, was angry that the clergy had not shown up to do more to prevent this from happening.  You know that I often complain about pastors not taking to the streets often enough but I have not participated in the Ferguson demonstrations.  In part, I have stayed away because I don't think that I need to help clean up the mess that Ferguson's city government and police department created through years of racial discrimination and over policing of the black community.

 I don't agree with those who set fire to buildings in Ferguson, or who looted stores, or who fired shots or threw stones at Ferguson policemen..... but, I understand why they are angry and why it is coming out this way.

And I want for you to know, if you have not heard it in the news already, that it was not just black protesters who were setting buildings on fire.  Michael Brown's family's church in Ferguson, the Flood Christian Church, was burned to the ground that night after having received more than 70 threats from white supremacist groups. Our corporate media keeps an audience by making white people feel superior to and somewhat afraid of black people.... They appear to have no incentive to even report on white criminal violence against the black community.

But, still, I didn't go because I couldn't get comfortable with the push to portray Michael Brown as a martyr that represents the plight of young black men in America.  And I don't think that Officer Wilson is the incarnation of evil that we want to fight.... Still, I understand those who think differently.

Michael Brown was a kid but he evidently used his size and his ability to intimidate others to push boundaries that he, if he actually did what he was accused of, would certainly end up badly.

Similarly, we were horrified this week by the news of a 12 year old boy, Tamir Rice, being shot and killed by Cleveland police.  Again, the boy was technically unarmed but he had a real looking BB gun and he was pointing it at people in a public park in order to make them think that he had a gun.

He should not have been killed.  The police should have managed the situation much better.  Tamir needed a good talking to but he didn't need to be shot, or arrested, or anything of the sort.  BB guns are still legal and they are still sold in the toy department of Walmart....they probably shouldn't be but they are and as long as they are, it shouldn't be a crime to buy one.

There were, however, many things in the Ferguson case, in Officer Wilson's testimony and subsequent interviews that are disturbing.  That he said that Brown looked "demonic" and that he was afraid for his life.... So much so that he fired his weapon 12 times, hitting Brown six times, possibly killing him when he was still a hundred feet away.

Wilson had never fired his gun on duty before.  He was not known as being either a racist or for being excessively aggressive, but when asked if there was anything that he could have done differently, he insisted that he did the only thing that he could.... I wasn't there, I don't know what I would have done in the same circumstances, but I can't help believing that there were a whole lot of things that could have been done short of using lethal force.

I don't think that Wilson was likely a monster but that he not only didn't get an indictment but that he can't even say that he wishes that he had wounded Brown rather than killing him.... Couldn't he at least say that he wished that he had not killed Brown?  Well, as I said, I understand why there are riots in Ferguson.

But in this same week, decades old charges of rape against the seemingly charming and lovable comedian, Bill Cosby, seemed to come in such large numbers that it is no longer possible to ignore them.  A new TV show featuring Cosby has been canceled and even his appearances in Las Vegas have been canceled and Vegas is not known for setting a high water mark in their expectations of virtue in their performers.

If he is only 10% guilty of the charges against him, then his career is over.  But six years ago people were saying that big named entertainers like Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey had made it possible for Barak Obama to win the 2008 election to become the President of the United States.  Here is the paradox that we have to be willing to deal with as mature adults.... His sex crimes are horrible.... And he was a transformative figure in race relations in America.

Thomas Jefferson, John Kennedy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, even Dorothy Day, all had some things, sometimes horrible things, to be ashamed of in their personal lives.  So, yes, Michael Brown wasn't a saint.... But you don't have to be a saint to deserve not being shot by the police.

In many ways in spite of how they died, it was fortunate that Gandhi, Kennedy and King, all got to leave the stage of public attention before their personal lives became fodder for media taunting.  No one can stand the scrutiny of a probing modern media that is more interested in what happens between your bedroom sheets than they are in the rampant injustice against an entire race of people in our streets.

Al Sharpton may show up for every public civil rights fight, but he is not the face of civil rights, nor is Cornell West, ... though I don't know of any substantive moral criticism of either Sharpton or West... but then neither are Bill Cosby or Michael Brown to be dismissed because we know of some things that they did that were wrong.... Or am I alone up in here as the only person in the room who has made some mistakes?

We have to stop allowing the mud slinging and public humiliation of any individual to take the power out of the larger issues.

No, rioters should not burn down businesses or police cars to avenge Michael Brown.  But, folks, racism is real.  Wilson should not have shot Brown.... That, however, was an individual event and the rightness or wrongness of the public's anger can not be judged based on whether or not Michael Brown reached in the Police patrol car window and fought Officer Wilson for his gun.

Every life matters.  Michael Brown's death is tragic and important but the issue of state sponsored racism did not begin or end with Michael Brown.

Black men are disproportionally stopped by the police, they are five times as likely to be charged and jailed for the same offense as a white person is.  Even the way the penal system is written discriminates against black people.... Jail sentences for possessing crack cocaine used to be many times the punishment for having powder cocaine.... Crack being preferred in black neighborhoods and powder cocaine being more popular among members of Congress and the Senate.

You may think that I'm exaggerating but I will point out as just one example the recent resignation of the Florida representative, Trey Radel, after being arrested with cocaine and he had been one of the legislators pushing for drug testing of all food stamp recipients.  I guarantee you that a higher percentage of members of Congress would be found to be using drugs than are food stamp recipients.
If we couple drug testing of elected officials to drug testing of welfare clients, there will never be a bill passed mandating drug testing of people on welfare.

Al Sharpton and Bill Cosby, though condescending in tone, were not wrong to counsel black young men not to try to make themselves look threatening and anti-social.  Crime in the black community is not an imaginary problem.

However, I can tell you how to cut crime in the black community by as much as 90% in a single year and I'm not even all that smart.  We could cut crime, I'm going to claim by 90%, by creating good paying manufacturing jobs in the inner-cities, by funding our urban schools the same way predominantly white private and suburban schools are funded, by decriminalizing drug addiction and by offering treatment for addiction rather than incarceration...AND, if I may add.... By instituting sane gun laws and by making health care universal.

We turned the "war on poverty" into a "war on drugs" and it has evolved into a "war on the poor."  I don't like to use words like "stupid" in the pulpit, but this shift in public policy is stupid....well, not entirely stupid.... It is mostly evil.  Racism in 21st century America is a choice, an institutionalized, wicked, inexcusable choice and it is time for it to end.

More than a decade before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a run-away slave, Fredrick Douglass, was asked to deliver a 4th of July address in Rochester, New York.

Perhaps next summer we may just read the address in its entirety as our sermon for Independence Day but I used an excerpt from it for our wisdom lesson today.

But if I may summarize, in the years before the Civil War, before the end of slavery in America was anything but certain, he reminded his white audience that the Independence they were celebrating on the 5th of July had been given to them by a generation of brilliant and largely peaceful people who had simply had enough of the oppression of the British crown.

He said, "Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression."

There were those who were scandalized by the suggestion that we forcefully reject the oppression of Great Britain.  There were those who protested the Civil War and refused to serve in it, insisting that the end of slavery would come gradually and peacefully if we just gave it time.

So, I understand why anger among the black communities of our nation's major cities can go from the boiling point to the point of open flames.  As President Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

I don't want to be guilty of exaggerating for effect because what I want to say, I want to be understood literally:

America is at a breaking point.  The income disparity that is driving the middle class into poverty and making the burden of poverty unbearable is not sustainable.  The absence of jobs that pay a living wage and the inaccessibility of health care, transportation, housing and education so that a smaller and smaller slice of society can be obscenely wealthy will push our once great nation to the point of violent revolution if we cannot intelligently correct our course.

The news media on both the left and the right use fear and misinformation to keep a profit generating audience.  The Republicans and the Democrats both serve corporate interests and both are guilty of wholesale deception of the voting public.

In the real world, however, racism is real.  Poverty is real.  Schools in poor neighborhoods are breeding grounds of ignorance, crime, and addiction, making them a pipeline into for-profit prisons.  It isn't slavery but it has so many of the elements of slavery in it that you have to strain to defend the differences.

A hundred and sixty years ago, Douglass said:

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Men and women, I suspect that there are young black men in Ferguson who have turned over police cars and thrown Molotov Cocktails at stores who could not even tell you why they feel such violent rage.  Just as, if they can catch the white extremists who burned down Flood Christian Church would not be able to sensibly describe why they are so afraid of black people and why they give vent to such hatred and violence.

We know that it wasn't the death of Michael Brown or the vilifying of Darren Wilson.  Those are the fuses on a social bomb that has been under construction for 200 years.... A fury that was born in slave ships and at the business end of whips on long forgotten plantations.

The rage comes from media that feeds a gullible public on subtle forms of racial fear and hated, disguised as entertainment.  As Noam Chomsky has said:  "As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome."

So, my friends, it is up to us not to be passive, apathetic, nor easily diverted by corporate media, nor led by our ignorant, racist friends into hatred of the vulnerable....because will must not let the powerful do as they please.  We must not stand idly by.

In A Country Well Governed

Dr. Roger Ray        
                       

Confucius "In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of." -

Deuteronomy 8:7-14, 17   7For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, 8a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. 10You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.
11 Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. 12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,..17Do not say to yourself, 'My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.' 

The Lord of the Flies, by British author, William Golding, was a 1950's novel that most of us had to read when we were in middle school.  It describes a plane crash on an island in which all of the adults were killed and only a few dozen pre-adolescent boys are left to fend for themselves.

Initially their only goals were to have fun, survive, and keep a signal fire going so that a ship might be enticed to come and rescue them.  The novel brilliantly chronicles the emergence of the darker side of human nature even in a fairly plush tropical island, as the boys engage in power struggles, dividing into rival clans and finally killing one of the boys.  In the end, the entire island is set ablaze in an attempt to corner and kill another of the island's leaders.  The smoke does attract a ship and the boys are confronted by a single adult officer and suddenly, their conscience catches up with them as they realize how feral, how violent, and evil they had become in just a few days of being left unsupervised.

I suppose that our teachers assigned the book to us just as we were coming into adult bodies and being pulled in every passionate direction as we struggled to become adults but it is not as if the story could only be told about pre-pubescent children.

This week we will celebrate our American Thanksgiving holiday that embodies a lot of myths about the awkward beginnings of the British colonies that became the United States of America.  The Jamestown colony was a group of several dozen adults who had the opportunity to build a new world settlement in the presence of abundant natural resources but they were nearly wiped out by the individual greed of the colonists who spent time looking for gold rather than planting crops.

Captain John Smith forcefully took control of the colony and gave work assignments to everyone so that their circumstances were improving until Smith had to return to England for medical treatment, and, like a bunch of unsupervised children on an island, the colony fell back into their old habits without Smith there to hold them accountable.  There is solid historical evidence that the Jamestown colony actually resorted to cannibalism, not just in digging up freshly buried Indians, but also in killing and eating a teenaged girl in their own colony.

A few years later, the Plymouth colony that was largely founded on religious principles, did not fare much better.  The sad commentary on both Jamestown and Plymouth was that when everyone was supposed to work for the common good, most people tried very hard not to work, even when public flogging was employed to discourage sloth.

It was not until they abandoned shared community property and began to work only for their own benefit that most people began to work hard enough to make a living in the new world.  This has, of course, encouraged some people to insist that free market capitalism saved America but that is far too simple an explanation for just how dark our human shadow can be, even when our own survival depends upon our willingness to help one another.

The Thanksgiving storyline that taught us that European immigrants came to the colonies for religious freedom and for liberty, democracy, and the free market was more than a little exaggeration.  Most immigrants came to escape poverty, the poverty created by an entrenched economic system that forced the many to serve the interests of the wealthy few.

Sadly, The Lord of the Flies, is not just a fictional novel.  It described the truth of our very human ability to exploit one another, even when we are trying to escape being exploited ourselves.

The Plymouth community was not unfamiliar with the failings of the Jamestown Colony.  The Pilgrims on board the Arbella crossing the Atlantic to found the Plymouth Colony, were not, however, all Pilgrims.  The cost of the voyage made it necessary to sell passage to a few people of means who were coming to America to get rich.  They did not plan to get rich by the sweat of their own brows but rather, they certainly planned to employ some poor Pilgrims.

Fearing their potential for failure, before they made landfall, their spiritual leader, John Winthrop, delivered a highly idealistic sermon to his captive audience in which he said:
"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our own wants (superfluities), for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ... community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."

Economics is a complicated science.  Religion gets involved only when the dark shadow of humanity takes charge of the economy so that it becomes abusive.  If you look carefully at the dating of the careers of the Old Testament prophets, it becomes clear that there wasn't any notable prophetic preaching when things were going well in ancient Israel.  It was only when the majority were being exploited or abused by the powerful and the wealthy that we began to see the bold preaching of the prophets arise.

It is nice when religious leaders and focus on baptizing babies, presiding over weddings, funerals, and holiday festivals with poetic liturgy and nostalgic carols and hymns. But when people are going hungry, homeless, and uneducated... when the poor are being left to suffer with their illnesses or being forced to bear the weight of the labor that benefits the rich, then people with a sincere spirituality cannot be idol, indifferent or devoted to Bible Study and Christmas caroling.

John Winthrop's fears came true.  Their attempt at communal living failed but their survival strategy, an "every man for himself" capitalist economy has not proven to be salvific either.  Somewhere between the extremes of communal property and economic survival of the fittest there is a just society and we can never be blindly patriotic until we have found that right balance.

We began today with this wonderful Confucian quote about poverty and wealth.  We think of Confucius as either a philosopher or a spiritual leader but he drew his paycheck for being a low level government official.  He thought about government a lot, about how a government can succeed or fail in supporting the creation of a just, harmonious, and he would even say, a courteous society.

He says that in a country that has a good government, that is being well managed, there mere existence of poverty should be embarrassing because, if you still have poor people when you have an efficient government then that can only mean that the people in power just don't care about that plight of the poor and that should be humiliating to them.

Confucius tended to teach in parallel couplets and the mirror image of this first statement is the observation that in a country that is poorly managed, that has an ineffective government, wealth should be a source of shame.


We can look to our southern neighbors to see examples of that.....the government of Nicaragua is one of the most ineffective that I have had the chance to see up close... in a nation of 4.5 million people, there are five fabulously wealthy families and nearly 2 million people living at the point of malnutrition.  Wealth, in a poorly run country is almost always gained at the enslavement of the powerless.  We have monkeys in our local zoo who are better housed and fed and who, frankly, have greater personal freedom, than do the Nicaraguans who work on most of the coffee plantations.

The people in our country who think that they would like to have a Libertarian led government have no idea what a nation governed by the survival of the fittest really looks like.  It looks like a nation without roads, bridges, schools or hospitals, with millions suffering in abject poverty while a few demonic super rich families try to imagine new ways of enjoying their wealth.

Still, the Thanksgiving myths that inspired the first Thanksgiving and the school plays we are endured as children should not be set lightly aside.  We have a strong and comparatively efficient government.... And if you don't believe that they are, try not filing an income tax return for a year or two, but it is a strong and efficient government that often fails to have a moral rudder.

Winthrop and many early leaders of utopian religious communities simply gave human beings more credit than we deserve.  The "dark side of the force is strong with us."  In our minds, we can see, we can do the calculations and we can see that we have come into, as Moses said, a land flowing with milk and honey.
We have the resources in the United States to wipe out poverty, to care for the sick, to educate the next generation and to employ the poor at a living wage.  All we have to do is marry our minds to our hearts, to let our idealism, our patriotism, our spirituality, become sufficiently influential to keep our shadow at bay.

There will be no more poverty in America when we will no longer tolerate it.  There will be no more discrimination against minorities, no denial of rights to gay people, and no splitting of families because of which side of the river they were born on, when we will no longer be willing to be a part of a nation that is well governed but still possessing a second class of peasant citizens.

Winthrop was idealistic but he was not wrong.... We must make the conditions of others our own, having always our community before our eyes, until everyone has reason to be thankful for the circumstances of their lives.

So, in conclusion, let me tell you a little bit about the word "amen."  We say it sometimes just to indicate that we are at the end of a prayer or hymn, or we shout it as a sign of agreement with a statement or a speech.  Technically, it means "truly," or "so be it."  Where our gospels translate Jesus as saying, "Truly, truly, I tell you..." the text literally says, "amen, amen, I tell you...."

There is, in saying it in a religious context, both a sense of affirmation and a bit of a prayer of intercession.... A hope, a wish, that what has been said will become true.  And so, as we prepare for our nation's observance of Thanksgiving, I hope that we will rekindle a dream of a nation so great that we don't have to be ashamed of our mistreatment of the poor, our neglect of the aging and the ill, our oppression of minorities, but that we may, in fact, become that nation that is a city built on a hill as a shining example of a place of opportunity, freedom, liberty, and of real social justice.  To that, I hope, we can all say, "amen."

Israel's Alternative Goddess

Proper 27       November 9, 2014
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16            
12 Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
13 She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
14 One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate.
15 To fix one's thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
16 because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought. 

They say that history is the version of events as recorded by the people who won the war.  The voices of the defeated are soon forgotten and lost to history with very few exceptions.

That can certainly be said of scripture.  The Bible was written by the people who won the religious wars.  The ancient near east was full of rival, regional religions, with various gods who specialized either in certain aspects of nature or life, or they were at least jealous about certain hill tops and high places.

But the Bible we inherited as children was written from the perspective of the Palestinian religion centered in Jerusalem, at the hilltop temple on Mt. Moriah.


There were other temples that practiced forms of Yahwistic religions, made sacrifices, and talked about Moses, the escape from Egypt, and the 10 commandments but the version that comes down to us states clearly that Israel was a monotheistic state with its religious center in Jerusalem.  That's not historically true but that is the sanitized version of religious history that we were handed.

Even if you are talking about those settled and stable periods when the royal family and the priestly class worked in harmony and there really was a fiercely dominant state religion, as Christianity was to a large degree in the first half of the 20th century in America.  Even still, there were always those who, on the more superstitious end, dabbled in other religions and forms of magical thinking, and there were always those on the intellectual end of the spectrum, who spoke the language of the dominant religion but who understood it in more symbolic and utilitarian terms.

I'm fond of the saying that equates religion to a swimming pool.... Most of the splashing and noise usually comes from the shallow end... but there is still usually a deep end for the stronger swimmers.  My value judgments are added to this sermon at no extra charge.

Seriously, though, if you read even the dialogues of Plato, you see that 400 years before Jesus, in Greek society, thinking people did not take their religious myths either literally nor even all that seriously.  Read the Republic and you see how Plato articulates through the character of Socrates that religion is used to tame and control the simple minded and the poor and to give encouragement to the noble and the wise, but it is not taken literally.

We get hints and echoes of the same, even from the sanitized view of religious history we get from the Bible.  As the Palestinian religion rubbed up against Greek culture more and more, we see the suggestion of a kind of alternative goddess standing somewhere near that monotheistic faith that attributed all holy things to Yahweh.

It is, of course, much more than an echo in the 4th chapter of Proverbs where we find a virtual hymn of praise to a goddess known as wisdom.  You always have to pay attention when a staunchly monotheistic faith speaks out of the corners of its mouth about some other god standing next to the big God.

There were people in ancient Palestine that spoke of angels and demons and buried religious trinkets in their fields in hopes of a better harvest.  And there were orthodox Jews who imagined that the one true God's presence actually sat on a throne in an inaccessible inner chamber of their temple on top of Mt Moriah within the walled city of Jerusalem.  But there were others who turned with religious devotion to wisdom itself, to intelligence and truth as if intelligence could be personified in a person.... Literally... a person to be desired.... A woman,... a strong, beautiful, woman.

Greek mythology had it that wisdom was a warrior goddess, Athena, and in unmistakable symbolism, she had been born, fully grown and clothed in battle armor, straight out of the forehead of Almighty Zeus.  As such, she was a mythic goddess.... A personification of a character quality that was respected, adored, and desired by ancient people who could see that wisdom was their way out of the darkness of primitive society.

Our wisdom lesson today comes from one of those "in-between" pieces of ancient literature.... Attached to Old Testament material but probably originally written in Greek rather than Hebrew.... A hybrid of Hellenist and Hebrew cultures.  It is from what Protestants call the "Apocrypha" and Catholics have called the "deuteron-canonical" part of the Bible but for our purposes, it is an example of how the ancient mind was striving to break free of the magic and superstition that had dominated the ancient civilizations and to aspire to something higher, something more honest if somewhat less comforting.

Our good friend, Dr. Charlie Hedrick, has mused about this point recently in his writing.  Several of the honored "wise men" of history eventually became described as being either divine or partially divine but that evolution of praise through the fog of history usually took a century or two, or three!  But in the case of Jesus, there were people who were saying that he was semi-divine within a generation of his death.

Why did it happen so fast?  What was it about Jesus that called forth such a rapid promotion from sage, to saint, to prophet, to demi-god and finally to God?

Sermons, unlike college classroom lectures, really ought to have only one point.  I know better than to stand up here and have lots of options in a short speech but this is a topic that simply can't tolerate a one note description.

The first person we know of who tried to push Jesus beyond mere mortal wisdom into a divine role was a guy who had never met him but who did at least have a geographical and biological reference point for Jesus and that was none other than Paul, the self-appointed apostle.
Sadly, however, even though he was closer in time and space, Paul apparently knew less about the historical Jesus than we do and, even more importantly, he cared even less.... He was not interested in the man, Jesus.... He was interested in a mystical Christ.

Fifty years later, one of the first of the famous Christian writers whose works did not make the cut to be included in the New Testament, a man we remember as Justin Martyr, wrote that, "Now the son of God, called Jesus, even if only an ordinary man, is on account of his wisdom (σοφία) worthy to be called son of God." (First Apology, 22)

In the early second century, Justin did not argue that Jesus was God's own offspring because he was miraculously born of a virgin by divine parentage, or that he was any kind of human, divine mix, but rather, quite simply, because he bore the stamp of the goddess who is wisdom.... It was his teachings that made Justin regard him as being a son of God.

In that sense, we too are chosen to set aside the manipulations and deceptions of a creedal religion that wants us to focus on pie in the sky in the by and by, in favor of a religious devotion to wisdom, to the truth, to faith rooted in rational evidence, reality and facts.

Folks, the best part of our faith has nothing to do with denial of reality.  Mysticism is not an embrace of fantasy over science.  Our faith is a principled decision not to be deceived by the trickery of modern magicians who are always asking for you to look "over here" while they are picking your pocket "over there."

Proper 27       November 9, 2014     Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor      "Israel's Alternative Goddess"
Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16            
12 Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
13 She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
14 One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate.
15 To fix one's thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
16 because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought.

They say that history is the version of events as recorded by the people who won the war.  The voices of the defeated are soon forgotten and lost to history with very few exceptions.

That can certainly be said of scripture.  The Bible was written by the people who won the religious wars.  The ancient near east was full of rival, regional religions, with various gods who specialized either in certain aspects of nature or life, or they were at least jealous about certain hill tops and high places.

But the Bible we inherited as children was written from the perspective of the Palestinian religion centered in Jerusalem, at the hilltop temple on Mt. Moriah.


There were other temples that practiced forms of Yahwistic religions, made sacrifices, and talked about Moses, the escape from Egypt, and the 10 commandments but the version that comes down to us states clearly that Israel was a monotheistic state with its religious center in Jerusalem.  That's not historically true but that is the sanitized version of religious history that we were handed.

Even if you are talking about those settled and stable periods when the royal family and the priestly class worked in harmony and there really was a fiercely dominant state religion, as Christianity was to a large degree in the first half of the 20th century in America.  Even still, there were always those who, on the more superstitious end, dabbled in other religions and forms of magical thinking, and there were always those on the intellectual end of the spectrum, who spoke the language of the dominant religion but who understood it in more symbolic and utilitarian terms.

I'm fond of the saying that equates religion to a swimming pool.... Most of the splashing and noise usually comes from the shallow end... but there is still usually a deep end for the stronger swimmers.  My value judgments are added to this sermon at no extra charge.

Seriously, though, if you read even the dialogues of Plato, you see that 400 years before Jesus, in Greek society, thinking people did not take their religious myths either literally nor even all that seriously.  Read the Republic and you see how Plato articulates through the character of Socrates that religion is used to tame and control the simple minded and the poor and to give encouragement to the noble and the wise, but it is not taken literally.

We get hints and echoes of the same, even from the sanitized view of religious history we get from the Bible.  As the Palestinian religion rubbed up against Greek culture more and more, we see the suggestion of a kind of alternative goddess standing somewhere near that monotheistic faith that attributed all holy things to Yahweh.

It is, of course, much more than an echo in the 4th chapter of Proverbs where we find a virtual hymn of praise to a goddess known as wisdom.  You always have to pay attention when a staunchly monotheistic faith speaks out of the corners of its mouth about some other god standing next to the big God.

There were people in ancient Palestine that spoke of angels and demons and buried religious trinkets in their fields in hopes of a better harvest.  And there were orthodox Jews who imagined that the one true God's presence actually sat on a throne in an inaccessible inner chamber of their temple on top of Mt Moriah within the walled city of Jerusalem.  But there were others who turned with religious devotion to wisdom itself, to intelligence and truth as if intelligence could be personified in a person.... Literally... a person to be desired.... A woman,... a strong, beautiful, woman.

Greek mythology had it that wisdom was a warrior goddess, Athena, and in unmistakable symbolism, she had been born, fully grown and clothed in battle armor, straight out of the forehead of Almighty Zeus.  As such, she was a mythic goddess.... A personification of a character quality that was respected, adored, and desired by ancient people who could see that wisdom was their way out of the darkness of primitive society.

Our wisdom lesson today comes from one of those "in-between" pieces of ancient literature.... Attached to Old Testament material but probably originally written in Greek rather than Hebrew.... A hybrid of Hellenist and Hebrew cultures.  It is from what Protestants call the "Apocrypha" and Catholics have called the "deuteron-canonical" part of the Bible but for our purposes, it is an example of how the ancient mind was striving to break free of the magic and superstition that had dominated the ancient civilizations and to aspire to something higher, something more honest if somewhat less comforting.

Our good friend, Dr. Charlie Hedrick, has mused about this point recently in his writing.  Several of the honored "wise men" of history eventually became described as being either divine or partially divine but that evolution of praise through the fog of history usually took a century or two, or three!  But in the case of Jesus, there were people who were saying that he was semi-divine within a generation of his death.

Why did it happen so fast?  What was it about Jesus that called forth such a rapid promotion from sage, to saint, to prophet, to demi-god and finally to God?

Sermons, unlike college classroom lectures, really ought to have only one point.  I know better than to stand up here and have lots of options in a short speech but this is a topic that simply can't tolerate a one note description.

The first person we know of who tried to push Jesus beyond mere mortal wisdom into a divine role was a guy who had never met him but who did at least have a geographical and biological reference point for Jesus and that was none other than Paul, the self-appointed apostle.
Sadly, however, even though he was closer in time and space, Paul apparently knew less about the historical Jesus than we do and, even more importantly, he cared even less.... He was not interested in the man, Jesus.... He was interested in a mystical Christ.

Fifty years later, one of the first of the famous Christian writers whose works did not make the cut to be included in the New Testament, a man we remember as Justin Martyr, wrote that, "Now the son of God, called Jesus, even if only an ordinary man, is on account of his wisdom (σοφία) worthy to be called son of God." (First Apology, 22)

In the early second century, Justin did not argue that Jesus was God's own offspring because he was miraculously born of a virgin by divine parentage, or that he was any kind of human, divine mix, but rather, quite simply, because he bore the stamp of the goddess who is wisdom.... It was his teachings that made Justin regard him as being a son of God.

In that sense, we too are chosen to set aside the manipulations and deceptions of a creedal religion that wants us to focus on pie in the sky in the by and by, in favor of a religious devotion to wisdom, to the truth, to faith rooted in rational evidence, reality and facts.

Folks, the best part of our faith has nothing to do with denial of reality.  Mysticism is not an embrace of fantasy over science.  Our faith is a principled decision not to be deceived by the trickery of modern magicians who are always asking for you to look "over here" while they are picking your pocket "over there."

Just as the ancients struggled to break free of a world defined by fear of demons and spirits by giving their faith and loyalty to a more reliable deity, a goddess they called "wisdom," so we choose to be freed from a culture that worships war, bows down to the power of wealth, worships at the altars of banks, corporations and a hysterical media that distorts reality as if they were feeding us a cocktail of meth, coke, and alcohol that they call "news," and we choose in stead an informed, sober, and sometimes somber awareness of reality that buffer only with hope that is born of faith.... Faith that together, we can make it better.

The Long Overdue Death of Denominations

Proper 26    November 2, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Matthew 23:1-12      Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2"The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; 3therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. 4They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 5They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.6They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 7and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. 8But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. 9And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father--the one in heaven. 10Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 11The greatest among you will be your servant. 12All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

There is an old proverb I'm very fond of about a time when a certain man and the devil were taking a walk together.  As they walked along, the man stumbled upon a great truth.  He showed it to the devil and Satan said, "Here, let me organize that for you."  There is just something about institutionalizing something wonderful that takes everything good out of it.

We get used to expecting politicians to be dishonest and self-serving.  We regrettably accept that corporations and the wealthy will manipulate the banking and tax systems to serve their own interests.  We may even become wary of friendships and love relationships that come and go far too easily.  But when it comes to the church, that vessel that has carried the gospel through the centuries, it never seems right to just accept corruption there and when we find it there, it seems always to be more malignant, more insidious, more heart breaking, because it is so very out of place.

It is one of the things you have to love about the gospels.  The Bible wasn't written by God, or Jesus nor was it even written by the Apostles...the gospels are a product of the early faith community, preserved by churches and edited by pastors and priests.  And yet, as we find in it, here and there, as in our reading from Matthew this morning, an occasional stone thrown right at organized religion and the pompous bishops, priests and pastors who run it.

There really isn't much preserved of the teachings of the historical Jesus, especially considering how important he has been to human history... but of all that got left out, edited out, covered up by later church tradition, it is kind of surprising that Matthew was able to preserve this stinging rebuke of the clergy in his gospel.

It is a helpful reminder for us in this age to make sure that we realize that the gospel and the church are not the same thing.  As important as the church was as a social institution, I always wondered if Jesus ever would have bothered to attend one.

The primary preaching message of Jesus was about the Kingdom of God.... The rule of God, the world where people didn't kill, steal, or lie.... The world in which there was neither warfare nor poverty... that's the kingdom Jesus talked about... that's the kingdom that Jesus said was coming.... But it didn't.  He didn't get the Kingdom of God.  He did get the church.... Is it any wonder then that he hasn't bothered to come back?

The church has been the vessel of the message of Jesus.  The church codified the gospel, ritualized, and in many ways sanitized it but at least it preserved a way of thinking and a vision for a better world.... Even while often lending its support to governments and economies that are the exact opposite of what Jesus envisioned.

But the church has been a vital institution for hundreds of years.  There was hardly a rural crossroads in America that didn't sprout one or two churches.  Our downtown city-scapes have been punctuated by cathedrals and steeples.  But the dominance of the church has gone the way of the wooden slide-rule and the manual typewriter.  Churches all over America and Europe are closing or being repurposed.

Twenty years ago, on a Sunday morning, I preached to between 300 and 400 people who crowded into two services in an ornate sanctuary.  In those days we had thirty or forty people a week who asked for a cassette tape of the sermon and a few hundred read a missive from me in the printed church newsletter.  Now we see 40 or 50 people gathered in our simple little church while somewhere between five and ten thousand people will download the message every month as either a video or a podcast.

I have tried in vain to make substantive connection with our far flung audience... struggled to somehow make them a part of our community...but the world has changed.  People don't connect they way they once did.  I fear that bricks and mortar churches will exist only in symbolic ways in the next generation but even still, you have to see, the church is not the gospel.

Our church never bothered to affiliate with any larger denomination.

I served Disciple of Christ churches for nearly 30 years and there was a time when I looked up to my denominational leaders with admiration and with confidence.  As the institution shrank, and jobs became scarce, it seemed to me that all of the really good guys were forced into retirement or unemployment and the rules of Machiavellian power manipulation took the place of virtue and noble leadership.

In place of self sacrificing servants of the church, the few remaining judicatories seemed willing to be as dishonest and corrupt as they had to be in order to keep drawing a salary and to hold on until they could retire.  My relationship with the Disciples did not end initially when I reported a former General Minister and President of the denomination, William Nichols, of pedophilia and of using church funds to pay for illicit sex.  I reported it but I trusted the church to deal with it appropriately but they didn't.  They paid of the living victims and swept it all under the rug unwell Nichols had died.

Closer to home, I demanded an audit of our local Ozarks Lakes Area office when it became apparent to me that the Area Minister was using designated funds to pay his own salary until all of the funds were depleted and all of the records had been destroyed.  To this day I cannot believe that Mike Weinman is not in prison rather than still serving as Area Minister.  More than that, I cannot believe that all of the Disciple ministers in the area, who saw this happening, chose to be silent and to allow the embezzling to just go on.

But the hypocrisy of others is no excuse for indifference on our own parts.

The institutional church was dying from financial starvation and now they are making themselves morally irrelevant.  I want to believe that this new pope, Pope Francis, is the real deal.  I hope that the reforms he is hinting at actually take root but whether they do or they don't, the Catholic Church is at least a half a century behind the inevitable changes of society and though they have the numbers and the money to survive for another century, they will shed numbers at a rate that will look like a free fall.

Smaller protestant denominations will either merge with one another or they will blink out of existence and, so far as I am concerned, they won't disappear fast enough to suit me.  They were useful at one time but have become too sick to redeem.  They need to get out of the way and make room for something new and different to emerge.

The institutional church is somewhere between the intensive care unit and the morgue but the gospel is still alive and well.  Where it will take root is still not entirely clear to me.  Though we have ten times as many listeners on line as we have in the room, I do not think that faith will find it's home on iTunes or YouTube.  Somehow, people of faith will still need each other, they will have to find one another and build community.

Bishop Spong has pointed directly at our little church and has declared that we are an example of what the church must become.  I find that validating and encouraging but like the two thousand people who will download one of our messages on the web this week, Bishop Spong lives a thousand miles away and even though he and Christine Spong have generously contributed to our future work, it remains to be seen if even our wild and rebellious version of church can survive.

But folks, you have to realize, the kingdom still hasn't come.  The military industrial complex still has more power than our elected Congress and President.  Our corporate media still tries to distract us as if we were all pre-school children, and poverty, which could have been stamped out by now, is actually on the rise.

The denominational church may and probably will, and probably should, die.  The whole business of religious institutions being against other religious institutions may have served a purpose in previous centuries but it threatens to kill us now.  There is no need to have a religious body that thinks that Christianity is right and Buddhism is wrong.... We need faith communities that believe that peace and justice is right and war and injustice are wrong.  It is not about communion, baptism, praying five times a day while facing Mecca, or putting food offerings and incense in front of a statue.... It is about paying a living wage to workers.... It is about treating people with respect and affording fundamental human rights to minorities, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation or nation of origin.

There are big issues in life waiting for our time, attention and resources.... Religious turf battles need to be relegated to the pages of history.

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.