Bob Fellner: Respect

10/25/2015


Good morning. If you don't know me I am Bob Fellner. Cheryl and I have been coming down to Springfield for several years because you have a congregation and a Service that fits my understanding of a progressive congregation. It is good to be back. It is because of our similar beliefs; there are some issues that I would like to address. You need to know, I did not always hold progressive views.

One of the nice things about preaching is that I get to choose the topic. In choosing a topic I tend to choose issues that I believe I need to address in myself. There is an assumption here, and I apologize because I assume that if I need to face an issue, so do you. So I apologize to any of you who do not fit the stereotype that is based on my life.

Last month Cheryl and I attended the 60th anniversary of my graduation from 8th grade. There were about 20 former classmates attending. That is about half of our class. Thirteen of our classmates have died over those 60 years. It was a pretty good turnout.

Many memories. It was a parochial school emphasis on the word 'parochial'. We never considered our school as 'parochial. We were a Catholic school. That should tell you something.

Belleville, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis was a small town and it was about 1/3 Catholic. We were taught to believe in our uniqueness. In fact we believed that we had to TRUE path to heaven. If you were not Catholic, you were doomed.

My school, St. Mary's, was located on 18th street. The local public school, Henry Raab was located on 13th street. This permitted to two groups of students pass each other on Raab Ave on our way to school. The Henry Raab students kept to the north side of the street and we stayed on the south side. That was convenient since we could taunt each other without physical contact. We called them Puplickers and they called us Catlickers.

This attitude has been present in Christianity for a long time.

1. It began in the early church with the doctrinal fights over the divinity of Jesus.
2. Later we declared war on Islam when we invented the Crusades.
3. With the Reformation, we not only got to argue on a Protestant vs. Catholic basis, but we were able to build these disagreements into war.
4. Catholic declared war on all heretics when we invented the inquisition.
5. We destroyed Native American cultures by giving the Native American the choice of being baptized or executed.

 At this point, this sermon could go in several directions. We could talk about the influence of religion on our upcoming elections. That could be fun. We could discuss candidate's use of religion to gain votes. The fun continues. Or simply, should religion have a place in our elections?

As tempting as this is, I am not going to address any of these topics. I would simply like to address our attitude in the face of people who disagree with us.

I gave that long preamble about my childhood religious training to give you some idea of my original religious beliefs. (You might call that Original Sin.) It was that early childhood training that led me to become a priest. However, it was in the seminary that I began to change. I attended St. John's Seminary in Little Rock for both under grad and graduate studies.

In the catholic seminary, everyone is a Philosophy major. You can never tell what will happen with a philosophy major. I was encouraged to think on my own. What a novel idea. In that process, I did begin to change.

1. I had to reject an elsewhere God. In fact for a couple of years I rejected God altogether. Even that changed.
2. In the process I rejected Atonement theology. A father who would send his only son to die for sins that I had not yet committed almost sounds illegal. We would arrest such a father for child abuse.
3. The church's teaching on divorce and remarriage is not based on scripture but a celibate's interpretation of scripture.
4. The prohibition on birth control obviously is not mentioned in the bible, but is based on ancient Greek Cosmology. Science has moved past that at least 300 to 400 years ago.
5.  The whole idea about infallibility is one grand circular argument. It is very simple. I am infallible because I say I am. 

By the time I was ordained, I had developed a personal theology that made me a minority. But as a minority, I decided that I had an obligation to help free my parishioners from the bindings that were imposed by Rome. I started some 'theology' classes for our parish. I  discovered that many people were truly interested began to grow personally.

However, I had a problem. It is so easy to isolate yourself and consider the rest of the world a bunch of idiots. I learned rather quickly that this attitude turned people off. I gradually saw the effect that my attitude had on others. Some people agreed with me. But others avoided me as much as possible. I never did anything overtly to imply that someone was an idiot. I discovered that it is next to impossible to disguise these feelings. Even acting kindly toward people, they could tell that deep down, I considered them idiots. When I finally came to a realization of what I was doing, I had to overhaul myself.

As you can tell, I left the priesthood for all of the above reasons and also I wanted to get married. Cheryl likes to point out that my first marriage did not involve her. However, it was in marriage that I learned that a relationship required a change in my attitude. If I was going to believe that I was superior to you because I had discovered the truth, I was never going to have reach you.

I had to change my attitude. That is difficult. Imagine someone with whom you disagree having the same right to an opinion as you. I struggled with this. I finally came to one of those Eureka moments when I realized that the person with whom I disagreed was me 50 years ago.

We all reflect our history and experience. The fact that my background is different than yours does not make you an idiot. What sharing my story and listening to your story does, is allow me to respect you and develop a relationship with you. I have discovered that I can form a relationship with someone with whom I disagree if I truly respect that person. If we do form a relationship, there is no limit to where that relationship will take both of us.

What I had to learn the hard way, is that if I do not respect someone for any reason there is no chance of anything happening. No matter how clever I am or how good of an actor I am, I cannot hide that deep seated negative attitude. Have you ever had that feeling that someone is talking down to you. You are experiencing a lack of respect. I hope that you have not had that feeling about me and if you have, please let me know.

If we respect each other we can actually discuss our differences. That can be the beginning of a relationship. If we want to be able to form a relationship it must begin with RESPECT.

Redemptive Suffering

Proper 24    Oct. 18, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Isaiah 53:4-12                      
4Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.6All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 8By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. 9They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. 11Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. 

It can be said in a much longer form, but for the sake of brevity, the most simple statement of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is this:

1)    All of life is suffering.
2)    Suffering is caused by desire.
3)    You can escape suffering but giving up all desires.
4)    The way to give up desires is by following the eight fold path.

Stated in this way might lead you to believe that all of suffering is bad and to be avoided at all costs. Of course, the Christian religion seems to take a rather different view, to the point of praising martyrdom and making the image of the tortured and crucified Jesus a central symbol of the faith.


I have to credit Scott Peck with this idea since he said it long before I thought of it, but Christians often think too little about the joy of our faith and Buddhists often think too little of the suffering of the Buddha. The two are not mutually exclusive, or in the words of the new Steven Jobs film, suffering and joy are not binary.

But let me be quick to say this, I totally agree with the Buddhist perspective that decreasing suffering the world is an ultimate goal. We talk about environmental concerns, not because we need to save the planet.... The planet it not in danger. The planet with survive no matter what. Human, however, are in danger from pollution. Polluting the planet causes human and animal suffering and it is the avoidance of that inconvenient reality that motivates our environmental concerns.

We are opposed to wars, to racism, to discrimination, to poverty, domestic abuse, and sexual abuse because they cause suffering. So, in that sense, Christians and Buddhists are on the same page. And it is not difficult for me to reject the old Roman Catholic way of thinking of Redemptive Suffering.... That is, that Jesus had to suffer for our sins in order to redeem us from the punishment we so richly deserve.

Any construct of the Christian religion that can be boiled down to saying, "You are so bad that God had to kill his son," cannot bear serious critical thinking. No matter how many times evangelicals say it, the notion that Jesus suffered to pay a price for your sins two thousand years before you were born is utter non-sense and in the modern age, such Iron Age mythological thinking will kill what is left of the church.

I understand why the early church attached themselves to the suffering servant songs in Isaiah. Even as you heard Chris reading these verses from Isaiah 53 this morning, it is all but impossible for we modern Christians to not hear the orchestra striking up in the background as a full-throated chorus takes up Handle's Messiah.

Mark first wrote the passion narrative to mirror this ancient concept of Israel as the suffering servant that will suffer in order to bring salvation to the world. When the prophet wrote these verses 500 years before Jesus was born, he was not thinking about a coming messiah or of any individual. He was speaking of the remnant of Judah.... Finally accepting that through their tiny tribe was not destined to rule the world that they could, through their faith and leadership, literally through their hardships and suffering, could help to save the world.

This is hard for many modern Christians to accept, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, farther from the minds of those 5th century BCE slaves in Babylon, than the hope that some savior would be born to them four hundred years after they were dead. Isaiah was not talking about Jesus or about salvation in the traditional Christian sense.

But, and I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to get to this "but" but this is the "but" that matters in this message..... But there is a sense in which suffering can be redemptive.  That is, there are times when people have accepted suffering, when they have heroically accepted personal risk or even personal sacrifice in order to save others, in order to change the world, in order to being an end to human suffering.

On that first Sunday morning in March of 1965 when black activists seeking the right vote began their march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the state police turned their dogs on them and beat them with batons. Several were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. But two days later, they were back, marching again... still peacefully, taking in their own flesh the beatings that would eventually ignite the conscience of the white majority in America, stemming the tide of racial oppression.

You can easily see that the beatings, imprisonment, and starvation of Mahatma Gandhi was redemptive suffering in the sense that it was only through his exemplary leadership of peaceful, non-violent protest, that the British colonial rule of India was finally ended.

During my own adolescence, there were a lot of us who could see, who knew that the War in Vietnam was immoral, unnecessary, and wrong but it took many draft protestors going to jail, lead among them being Philip and Daniel Berrigan, to wake up American Catholics and a lot of the rest of us to demand a change in our government's policy of neo-colonial warfare.  A lot of people were willing to demonstrate and protest but the Berrigan brothers were willing to be imprisoned.

The Christian reverence for the cross, the reason we have a cross in this little church, is because it is the willingness to suffer on behalf of others when we, especially we in the middle class, can comfortably decide to avoid almost all forms of suffering. We don't live in dangerous neighborhoods.  We will not be drafted, invaded, enslaved, made to flee as war refugees, and other than having to attend some family holiday dinners, we will not be imprisoned against our will.
Many of the people I talk to say that they simply do not watch the news because the suffering in the world upsets them and they would rather not know.

In the midst of a sea of indifference someone who is willing to suffer on behalf of others becomes a shining star, a hero, an inspiration.  Malala Yousafzai was only 12 years old when she began anonymously writing a blog for the BBC about what life was like for a girl in Pakistan under Taliban control.

The New York Times persuaded her to identify herself and a series of reports were done on her work, advocating for education for young girls in these repressed, Muslim controlled areas. It was this month, just three years ago, when a Taliban extremist boarded her school bus and shot her in the face in the presence of all of her fellow students.

Thankfully, Malala survived the attack, though it has left her appearance marred, and it has clearly affected her speech and general health but the attempted murder did not change her devotion to seeking education for girls.  She was hospitalized for months, but two years after the failed assassination attempt, she became the world's youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

She has visited the White House and was not simply honored by being invited there but took the opportunity to school President Obama in how stupid his drone policy is and how he is causing new generations of terrorists rather than ending terrorism.  She is arguably the most famous teenager in the world and she keeps up a demanding schedule of advocacy for others, even though the Taliban have publicly reiterated their intent to kill both her and her father.

It would not be anything to be ashamed of, nothing hard to understand, if Malala went into hiding for the rest of her life. She can live in the United States or in Great Britain and be safe, if only she would be quiet, but she has continued to raise her voice on behalf of young girls everywhere knowing better than anyone what suffering is really like and what fear can be realistic in her world.

In our country, we don't typically see that kind of institutional misogyny but we do see millions, hundreds of millions of people being pushed down and down into poverty, with either no employment or poorly compensated employment.  We are watching the cost of sending our public school graduates to college go up and up so that education is becoming available to a smaller and smaller percentage of our children.

We are seeing labor unions undermined so that it is becoming absolutely rare for workers to have a pension fund or any realistic expectation of retirement at 65 or 70 or 75. You see our senior citizens waiting on tables and sweeping floors all around us....grandmothers in orthotic shoes carrying people's scrambled eggs and toast to restaurant tables.... Grandfathers, with bent backs and arthritic hands, mopping the floors at the mall.

Fifty years ago, young black men and women were joined with white sympathizers and they paid for access to the voting booth through the passage of the Voters Rights Act with their own blood and some with their own lives. Now, our Supreme Court can gut the Voters Rights Act without more than a whimper from the public. In the past two years, Republican controlled state legislatures have sought to make it nearly impossible for 30 million poor blacks to vote.

They cut out weekend voting. They require government issued photo IDs knowing that more than 30 million elderly and poor black families don't have a car and so they don't have drivers' licenses. And to make sure that they don't get a photo ID, Alabama just closed divers license offices in 12 counties with predominantly black residents. In some states, you have to show your birth certificate to get a photo ID and if you can't find your birth certificate, you have to show a photo ID to get a birth certificate.

All of this happens while the media and the church is silent.

Why are we silent in the face of these gross injustices? Who would shoot us in the face for challenging the violence of capitalism run to the point of insanity?  No one.  No one will shoot us. But some will shame us. It is could be uncomfortable. With more than a half of our local peers being ginned up and angry by the constant flow of misinformation from Fox News and Gannett Newspapers, it is uncomfortable to raise your voice for justice, for fair wages, for dignity for the elderly.

Uncomfortable and yet, for persons of conscience, necessary.  I wish we were made of stronger stuff. I wish that we had more grown-ups with the courage of a child like Malala. If we had even a half a dozen members of congress who had the courage and character of Malala Yousafzai we would have a very different country right now.

What I am asking of you, what I implore our listeners on the web to do, is to decide that you are going to care, that you will be informed, that you will use your votes, your voice, your conversations to help fight against poverty, discrimination, the spoiling of our earth, and oppression of the rich and powerful over the poor and the weak.  And, if you can do that, if you can practice that, to grow in your courage so that you too may be willing to bait the trap for evil with your own flesh. Very little progress has ever been made if there were not leaders who were willing to suffer to make it happen.

Where Art Thou?

Proper 23  Oct. 11, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

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

Prior to her death in 1997, Mother Theresa was one of the world's most undisputed spiritual icons. In fact, in 1997 she and the Dalai Lama may have been the two people on the top of that list, ahead of even the pope. So it is no surprise that Mother Theresa is now on what might be considered to be the fast track for recognition by the Catholic Church as a saint. Her charitable work with the poor and sick of Calcutta has already won her the Nobel Peace Prize and recognition the world over for her selfless compassion.

But a few years after her death, in 2002, her diary was published, against her dying wishes. She had wanted her diary and personal papers burned upon her death but instead her personal thoughts and feelings were made public.  What these papers revealed came as a shock to many who had viewed her as a paragon of faith.

She recorded her feelings of despair and loneliness and for 40 years she said that she had no feeling of the presence of God.  She said, "As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."

When she was young, she had a strong sense of calling to be a nun. She had the religious experiences and enthusiasm that many of us who grew up in the heart of the church can recall, but what she was willing to say in private she was not willing to say in public though many other spiritual writers before her had said, more or less, the same things.

When we are young and impressionable, we tend to take religious teachings very literally and we tend to have the feelings and experiences that we have been taught to expect to have... such is the power of suggestion. As we mature, provided that growing older also includes maturity.... That is not a certainty, unfortunately, but it is a hope that with time our critical thinking skills help us to be more discerning, more analytic about faith and everything else of importance.

Rather than tarnishing Mother Theresa's halo, her record of perseverance in the absence of self-deceiving feelings bolstered her character in my view.
Though the Bible is full of accounts of the miraculous as is much of the religious writing of other faith traditions, our Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, has managed to also preserve what might be called the "minority report" of the Jewish cult.  We have some examples of more naked honesty about the absence of God, the silence, the inaction from on high that comes closer to telling the truth about our mature, adult, experience of life.

Our reading from Job today, the ancient philosopher bemoans:
8 'If I go forward, he is not there;
   or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
   I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
Now, let me be quick to say that the text of Job did not survive without many attempts at editing it to be more sympathetic with the larger context of the Hebrew Bible.  Job is 42 chapters long and I believe that somewhere between a third to a half of its current 42 chapters were added centuries after the original author penned these desperately honest lines.

The faith community cannot always stand too much honesty.  And it is one of the real perils of progressive faith. When you start to get honest about religion. When you acknowledge that God doesn't write books and that most of what people call prayer is little more than wishing, when you accept that whatever intervention that God makes into human history takes place only when people of faith choose to act in accordance with the heart and the ethics of their faith, most people just look for the exit.
Take away the carrot and the stick of heaven and hell, expose the magical thinking of intercessory prayer, and the symbolic nature of sacraments and many people will simply assume that the whole thing is just a charade and they give up on religion entirely.

It is significant to note then, that for 40 years, Mother Theresa kept caring for the poor and dying of Calcutta, when she no longer felt the presence of an imaginary friend. Everything that made Mother Theresa famous, what made the BBC do a special series of reports on her life, what earned the Nobel Prize and made her image immediately recognizable to the world, all of that came while she did not feel the religious confidence she had enjoyed when she was a child.

The world hardly recognized her death, and that is so for the very simple and indicting reason that she died the same week as Princes Diana. Theresa was an icon of faith, character, radical compassion, and charitable accomplishment.... Princes Diana was an icon of beauty and wealth and the media tends to report on what the society genuinely values.

Though I have generally disparaged my first book, Christian Wisdom for Today, for being way too specifically Christian, the part of it that I would still defend, twenty years later, is that the significant stage of faith doesn't start until you have allowed the faith of your childhood to die a natural death and you have experienced the dry nothingness of continually doing just what Job described....

8 'If I go forward, he is not there;
   or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
   I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. 

It is not until you have the distinct feeling that when you pray that not only is no one answering but that, in fact, no one is listening. It is after what St. John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul," in the silence and void that you discover what we mean by the practice of faith. The practice of your convictions.

It is like the old adage that says that character is what you do when you are certain that no one is watching. People who change their behavior or who engage in worship and religious observances out of fear of hell, or desire for eternal life in heaven, or even for the more venial rewards of good luck with their annual physical or increasing their chances of winning the lottery are not really spiritual.... They are just narcissistic in a magical thinking sort of way.

Real faith begins when you have given up on magic and superstition and you are seeking to be and to do what you believe is right and has meaning and substance.  The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, is famous for saying, "People believe that walking on water is a miracle. To me, walking peacefully on earth is the real miracle."

I get that many people will be disillusioned initially when they lose their childhood faith.
And with some regret, I accept that the majority of people will never continue to search until they find a faith that has greater substance beyond the void and the darkness of a silent sky. But for those who will practice without need for either invisible or felt reward, who can practice their faith without prompting from either fear or guilt, then, I believe, the world can be full of miracles that come from living a life of compassion, forgiveness, sincere love, and true friendship.

And this is a matter of evidence based faith because you only have to try it to discover that I am telling you the absolute and unvarnished truth.

The Yen and Yang of Friendship

October 4, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Mark Antony:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar ... The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it ...
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all; all honorable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral ...
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man....
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.... Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Literature professors are fond of telling their students that there are only three or four basic story lines in all of literature.

A little over a decade ago, a Jungian influenced author, Christopher Booker, published a book outlining the seven archetypal tales that make human tell stories.  He identified:

Overcoming the Monster, in stories like Beowulf, Dracula, or even Star Wars and the Hunger Games.

Rags to Riches, as in Cinderella, Jane Eyre, and The Prince and the Pauper.
The Quest, as we see in the Iliad, The Lord of the Rings, and the Indiana Jones movies.

There is the Voyage and Return, you see in the Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit or Gulliver's Travels.

And, of course, there is Comedy and there is Tragedy which were the only two kinds of stories used originally differentiate Shakespeare's plays.
Finally, Booker identifies tales of Rebirth, such as we see in Scrooge's character in A Christmas Carol, or in the Beauty and the Beast, and even in Despicable Me.

I would like to suggest that there is an eighty category that deserves to stand on its own, and that is the story of betrayal. I have long believed that the passion story itself, the story of how Jesus was betrayed and murdered, is an archetypal story.

It won't come as a surprise to any of you though I hope our internet audience will bear with me if this seems a bit shocking, but we have no way of knowing how much, if any, of the passion narrative is historical. Mark originated the account of the triumphal entry, the last supper, the arrest and betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane, the trial and execution.  Matthew, Luke, and John use Mark's story and add their own color and perspective but they do not challenge the core narrative.

None of them, of course, were eye-witnesses so Mark gets to lay down the tracks but when you turn to the first writer in the Jesus movement, the self-appointed apostle, Paul, he does not mention Judas. Nor does he seem to know anything about one of the twelve elect having turned on Jesus. In fact, twenty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul is still referencing "the twelve." The Matthias story in Acts should not be taken seriously.

No, it appears that Mark was creating a narrative that captures an archetypal story that lives in all of us... the experience of having been betrayed by a trusted friend.  If you can't feel the power of the image, then you might need to look in the mirror and see if you are, in fact, the Judas character in your own life story.

The name, "Judas," is a derivative of the name "Judah," that is, Judas is a character created to represent all of Judah, all of Jesus' people, his family, his closest friends.... It was not a single individual who betrayed Jesus, it was, to greater and lesser degrees, his tribe, his family, his disciples, the people he had healed, the people he had saved from persecution, isolation, the people from whom he had removed the stigma of being a prostitute, a leper, a foreigner, an outcast.... They all betrayed him.

I took the familiar funeral soliloquy of Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as another illustration of this type of literature that I would put under the "betrayal" heading.

In the same way that Mark used the historical event of the crucifixion of Jesus as the basis of his passion narrative, Shakespeare took the historical fact that Julius Caesar had been assassinated by members of the Roman Senate and built his story around that historical fact.

In Shakespeare's recreation of the event, he weaves a narrative of false friends and bewildered loyal friends to build up to the moment when the conspirators surround Caesar and they begin to stab him, and as the realization dawns on Caesar that this will be his death, he turns and sees Brutus, a friend he had really trusted and loved, and at that moment Caesar utters the only phase that most Protestants know in Latin, "Et tu Brute?" "You too, Brutus?" You of all people! You, my beloved ally and friend, you are in on this plot too?..... "then die Caesar."

Of course, in real life, a mortal dies from multiple stab wounds, but Shakespeare describes it in the way that it feels... the vicissitudes of life may be whatever they are, but only a true friend can really hurt you.

In my twenty years as an opinion writer for the News-Leader, it was not uncommon for me to receive as many as a hundred pieces of hate mail in a week.  I have endured a few fairly serious death threats and a number of stalkers.  It has been a year and half since my column in the New-Leader ended and I still have one stalker who still regularly calls and sends threatening letters... the simple minded can't change channels very quickly.

But none of that ever bothered me as much as the loss of any single real friend. The hateful criticisms of strangers don't feel good, but it isn't hard to see that if their response to a well reasoned and persuasive opinion column is vitriol and threats that they are telling you a lot about themselves but what they say about me hardly matters.

But when someone who has been a guest in your home, and you have sat at their holiday table, when you have let down your defenses, confided in them, turned to them for advise and counsel.... When they join in with the assassins to surround you outside of the Senate, when they lean in to give you a kiss in the garden with the Roman guards right behind them... that is when your heart breaks.

I believe that the story of being betrayed by a friend is archetypal because it has happened so often throughout history... when someone realizes that their parents don't really believe in them, or when a beloved spouse finds the arms of another person to be their true home... when someone you have sacrificed for, helped through their own life crisis, for inexplicable reasons, rejects you, turns on you, stabs you in the back... it isn't the nails through the hands and feet on a Roman cross that really kills you, it is the kiss in the garden, the triple denial in the courtyard, it is the friends who run and hide when you need them the most.

To love someone is to make yourself vulnerable to them. It is like putting your heart into their hands.  It is only reasonable then, to be pretty doggone selective about who are willing to befriend.

Therein lies the real challenge of forming a spiritual community.  Rationality says to be cautious, to protect yourself, to be very choosy. But a spiritual community is intentionally inclusive.  What is the price of admission to become a part of the community?  Just step across the threshold and you are in! It doesn't matter if you have just been fired, or just been released from prison, if you are homeless, addicted, or terminally ill.... A spiritual community is a welcoming home. But it can be a very one-sided equation.

The faith community chooses then, by our very nature, to accept very real emotional risk. In the old renaissance paintings of the Last Supper or of the disciples in the garden, Judas was almost always portrayed as a dark, hairy, hook nosed, beady-eyed character that anyone would instinctively be wary of ... but in reality, Judas always looks like your best friend... the one you can trust... the one who would never do that to you!

In Shakespeare's story, Mark Antony is able, in three minutes, to change a crowd that was willing to go along with the murder of Julius Caesar into a lynch mob that was ready to go and kill Brutus and everyone else involved in the conspiracy.

Caesar was libeled in the morning and everyone was willing to ignore his assassination. His assassins were criticized in the afternoon, and the mob turned against them.

The disposable nature of relationships, our vulnerability to being swayed by gossip has left the beauty parlor and the barber shop, it has gone beyond yellow journalism, and the tabloid press, and has become a part of our moment by moment participation in social media so that a face book meme or a twitter post can change how you feel about a political candidate, the pope, or your best friend.

What I would like to suggest in the most emphatic way is that recognizing the powerful archetype of the story of betrayal is that you choose to honor love, respect friendship, and choose with all of your might not to be Brutus, not be play the part of Judas. Don't be the kind of friend that should come with a warning label, "Will irrationally break your heart for no apparent reason."

There will be relationships that you need to walk away from but you never, without exception; you never need to intentionally hurt another person. Don't libel, don't slander, don't gossip.  Don't be vulnerable to having your relationships with others affected by gossip. And really, it is up to us to choose not to listen to gossip.

And, so far as I am concerned, you never have to come to me to tell me what someone else said about me.... all I would like to know is why the gossip felt comfortable in saying those things about me to you.

We want to have the moral authority to address the climate crisis, to confront our government about the torture of prisoners and about our drone policy.
We want to be able to make a public case for sane gun laws. We want to be able to confront the hypocrisy of the traditional church for its prejudices against gays and scientists. But we have no credibility at all if the first thing people notice about us is that we have a hard time getting along with one another.

Passionate, loyal friendships give us credibility. Healthy, long lived love relationships give us the authority to speak with moral clarity.

Liberals tend to be a bit too impressed with themselves and to give themselves license to dismiss others out of cynicism and hyper-critical standards that are hypocritical and self-defeating.  As St. John of the Cross said, we will either pass the love test or we will fail entirely. So, my friends, let's study hard to pass that test.

What If This Is As Good As It Gets?

September 27, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor

Albert Einstein - I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble minds harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms. 

Episode seven in the Star Wars movie franchise will be released in mid-December. Don't judge me, I will be among the throngs of people of a certain age who will be seeing this $200 million reenactment of one of my favorite college memories....that seems like more than inflation since in the first movie only cost $8 million but you have to bear in mind that they are using many of the same actors they used forty years ago and there is only so much that makeup and plastic surgery can accomplish... there will be a lot of computer generated imagery in this film.

I was finishing a degree in philosophy and preparing to go to seminary when the first film was released in 1977.  I am my friends saw the film repeatedly and would sit and talk for hours about the religious imagery in the film... Obi Wan was a dying and rising savior, Luke, with his obviously Biblical name, was a disciple.... And the Force.... Well, the Force could be a bit troubling.  On the one hand, you could say it was the Holy Spirit but the constant references to dark side and a good side of the Force made it all sound a tad eastern.  No metaphor is perfect and so we continued to see a lot of what we wanted to see in the film's imagery and remained faithful fans for the subsequent films' releases that tracked the universal battle between good and evil.
My college friends and I were certainly not the only ones to see religious significance in the Star Wars saga. Unlike in the United States, in Great Britain, census forms ask citizens to identify their religion. A write-in entry was being used so often that they ended up having to add "Jedi Knight" to the religious preference form.

Ironically, what was the weakest part of the theology of the movies in those pre-seminary days is now what I find the most attractive. When, at the age of 20, I walked into that theater in Memphis, Tennessee to see the first film, I took with me a firm belief in a very specific God, who had a very specific name: YAHWEH. I believed that YAHWEH had a solitary Son and that he had primarily authored the most important and exclusively holy book in the world.

My seemingly unshakable confidence in those beliefs was soon to be undermined in the process of earning a graduate school education but the echoes and shadows of that creedal faith lingered for years. Beyond all rational thought, I held onto a belief in an invisible heavenly friend who would grant my requests if only I made my requests for the right reasons, and in the right way, and often enough, and I believed that somehow that same invisible friend would one day welcome the more vital though equally invisible part of myself into eternity when my mortal life was finished.

Even when my intellectual certainty of such things was long gone, the hope remained. Even still, some of the smartest and most academically honest people in the world, cling to the hope of some kind of eternal life.
Anyone that I would care to spend any time in conversation with has certainly given up the old concrete imagery of pearly gates and streets of gold in an exclusively Christian heaven, but still, they hold onto a hopeful belief in some kind of eternal existence. I do not want to insult that hope to take it away from anyone who either ardently believes in it or even if they simply need to believe in it to cope with personal losses of loved ones or fear of their own mortality.

I only ask that we dare to consider the possibility that our existence is, as the Psalmist says in Ps 103:

14 For God knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.

15 As for mortals, their days are like grass;
they flourish like a flower of the field;
16 for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.

What if this life is all that we are allotted? What if, as another of my favorite movies asks, "What if this is as good as it gets?" Yes, the water and star dust of my body will go on and perhaps become a part of future rivers, animals, and people, but the essence of who I am... my thoughts, feelings, loves, and memories, will cease to be. If this life is all that we have, how then should we live?

The founder of the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church, St. Ignatius of Loyola, was a 16th century reformer who was trying to save the Catholic Church from the Protestant Reformation through an ardent revival of classic Christian faith.

Ignatius, in his famous work, The Spiritual Exercises, flatly states that humans were created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save our souls. Ignatius designed a 40 day retreat in which retreatants were to spend their days in silent reflection on their sins and to vividly imagine how many people had gone into eternal torment for sins that were not as egregious as our own, and the only way that we could avoid spending eternity in hell was to dramatically change our lives and live for Christ, who alone could save us from this fate.

Avoiding the flames of hell involved not only a life of service and religious devotion but it also involved meticulous avoidance of almost everything that was natural for humans to do.

It was the great modern philosopher, Garrison Keillor, who observed, "You can teach a bear to ride a bicycle but it always looks uncomfortable doing it and you know he would really rather be out in the woods doing what bears do." Yes, there is no animal in the world suffers from neurotic anxiety that there is a deity in the clouds above who is fiercely concerned with how they express their sexuality or with what they eat, drink, or do.

Only humans, out of fear of death, created a belief in heaven and hell and coupled that belief with a series of guilt provoking rules about denying our animal instincts.  I am certain that my mother and my Sunday School teachers never read The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius but I am convinced that the religion that they wanted to pass along was rooted in the belief that our natural instincts, if not corrected and defeated, would lead us all into eternal torment.

Pope Francis, the most famous living Jesuit, in spite of having a much more evolved view of these things, still is basically teaching the same fundamental beliefs.  And we can all say, that a lot of good things have come from these beliefs.  We would not want to do away with all that we were taught about morality, personal restraint and responsibility, and we certainly would not want to live in a human jungle that was ruled by nothing but our more base appetites which would turn our world into a violent and competitive living hell.

If you take away notions of eternal reward or punishment, if you remove the guilt associated with simply being human... if you, with Yoda, accept that even without a supernatural theistic person, there is a mysterious Force in the universe that unites all living things. And that this Force has both a good and a dark side, then we certainly want to avoid giving into the dark side of the Force and to try to live in harmony with one another. Then what is the best way for us to live?

What I am asking you to consider is that living in a purely unrestrained way like a naked ape, leads to one kind of suffering, but also, a full embrace of a life lived, as Ignatius and my Sunday School teachers suggested, in which you put all joy and living a fully human existence in order to avoid hell and to gain heaven, leads to a pitiful waste of the only life that we know that we will ever have. Having no theology is dangerous in one way, having a sick and largely narcissistic theology, is just as dangerous in the opposite way.

My mother firmly believed that anyone who drank a beer was an alcoholic who needed to change his ways. She was absurdly puritanical about that and many other things, and yet, we all know many people whose lives have been ruined by drug and alcohol addiction or by an unquestioned embrace of their appetites in matters of either sex or materialism.

There may be some kind of spiritual existence for us beyond our mortal lives but no one, not even Pope Francis, can assure you that there is, just as I cannot be certain that there is not. But what Frank and I, and all of you do know, is that you now have this life, and it is a gift, an opportunity, a living reality that is not to be wasted, perverted, or imprisoned by either addiction or guilt.

The beat poet, Langston Hughes, said,

"Folks, I'm telling you,

birthing is hard

and dying is mean-

so get yourself

a little loving

in between."

The First Casualty in Any War is the Truth

September 20, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

The American people were told Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons.  He was not.  We were told he had stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction.  He did not.  We were told he was involved in 9/11.  He was not.  We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from Al Qaeda.  It was not.  We were told our soldiers would be viewed as liberators.  They are not.  We were told Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction.  It cannot.  We were told the war would make America safer.  It has not.  Ted Kennedy

In spite of upheaval in Syria, and Isis military activity in Iraq, and in spite of all of the tension around the negotiation of a nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran, it seems that today, this Sunday morning in mid-September of 2015, that there is no nation that the USA is about to invade. And, it seems to me, that at a moment when there are not clouds of war gathering on the horizon, is the perfect time to spend a few sane moments in reflection about war.

I would like to go on the record as being in opposition to the next war, wherever it will be. I trust my saying that doesn't shock anyone.  I am a pastor. This is a church. Religious people have been proponents of peace through the centuries when we have managed to keep our wits about us even when congregations are falling prey to the hysteria of fear generated by governments that want to go to war.

The people who profit from warfare always try to silence religious voices by telling us that we have no business commenting on politics when the business of faith has always been to protect life, to seek peace and justice, and to defend the poor and weak.

The military industrial complex makes money in both times of peace and times of war but there really is no comparison to the amount of profit they make in peace times to the money they make in wartimes.  Ammunition and equipment that is stockpiled gathers dust and doesn't have to be replaced.  Missiles that are fired, airplanes that crash, tanks that are used... they have to be replaced and that is where the profit is, as well as all of the purveyors who make uniforms, provide food, and related services to an army.

The capitalists get rich during wars and so they want the religious people to stay out of their way.  Just to be clear, the answer to their request for passive silence is, "No," or, more accurately, "hell no."

Over the past fourteen years the church has been far too silent and, when they weren't silent, that often embarrassed themselves by speaking up on the wrong side of the issue.  We began today with this quote from the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who in 2003 accused the Bush administration of lie after lie, saying that the case against Iraq was a myth cooked up in Texas to give them an excuse to start a war.

To the best on my knowledge, I was the only pastor of a Springfield church who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and it was years before a few others began to join our all too infrequent anti-war protests. The seriousness of the deception sold to the American people through the vehicle of fear, only got worse in later years as we became unavoidably aware that it was not only an illegal war based on lies, it was also being conducted in the most immoral way possible through the unconscionable torture of prisoners of war.

We felt entirely justified in even going into nations who are ostensibly our allies to kill Osama Bin Laden because he was the mastermind behind a terrorist attack that killed more than 3000 Americans. We invaded Iraq and killed possibly more than a half a million people to get Saddam Hussein who, though he had nothing to do with the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the USA, he had been guilty of a running a brutal regime in which he had killed thousands of his own citizens....not a tenth as many as we killed but still, a horrible ruler.

Though, by comparison, the crimes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may seem to pale in comparison to our own war crimes, nothing has been seriously said about putting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their administration on trial for treason against the American people or for war crimes.

Switzerland is not going to invade the United States and arrest or execute George Bush or Dick Cheney though there was speculation in 2011 when Bush suddenly canceled plans to speak at a conference in Switzerland that he did not go because he feared being arrested there. There are no known warrants in any nation for the arrest of either Cheney or Bush because no nation would be willing to suffer the backlash they would get from the US government but it is also true that neither Bush nor Cheney have ventured into Europe since they went out of office.

Even appearances in Canada have provoked thousands of people to show up with signs denouncing them for being war criminals.

In some cases the police have felt the need to don full riot gear to protect them from the angry mobs.

There were certainly people in the United States who wanted members of the Bush administration to be charged and made to stand trial but President Obama made it clear that he would not be seeking prosecution for past crimes though he announced with taking office that the policy of torture would end immediately.

In the past few months the American Civil Liberties Union has been asking the Obama administration to grant pardons to Bush, Cheney, and several key members of their administration.  The precedent they cite is the 1974 decision of the newly sworn in President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon who had recently resigned from the office of the President.

Ford's thinking was that the nation needed to be spared the trauma of putting a former American president on trial, but he was not willing to pretend that Nixon was innocent nor that his crimes were insignificant just because a sitting president of the United States had committed them.  Sadly, in a interview with David Frost in 1977, Nixon was still clinging to his personal belief that he was innocent when he said, "If the president did it, that means it was not illegal." But the rest of us knew that the president is not above the law and that the mere fact that Ford had pardoned Nixon, was a statement of probable guilt.

President Lincoln pardoned southern soldiers after the Civil War because the nation needed to heal. President Carter pardoned draft dodgers after the War in Vietnam because the nation needed to heal.

What the ACLU is saying is that we should not pretend that lying to the American people, the Congress, the Senate, in order to start an illegal war, and that defying Geneva Conventions of War by torturing prisoners should not be ignored.  We cannot pretend that these would be war crimes if committed by an Osama Bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein, but they are not illegal if done by an American President.

While there are certainly those in the ACLU who would like to see some of the Bush administration stand trial, the official request is that, accepting that it would be bad for the country to put an administration on trial, it is morally unacceptable to pretend that they are innocent. They are asking President Obama to:
. . . pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.'s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all.

Their argument is that we absolutely must not say to the world or to ourselves that torture is okay as long as it is only the USA that is doing it. Nor can we say that USA can invade a sovereign nation without just cause. To pardon Bush and members of his administration will at least acknowledge that we are a nation of laws and not of kings.

Frankly, this is not entirely satisfactory to me because as we sit here this morning there are a half a million Americans who are in prison, not because they led us into an illegal war or because they tortured prisoners but for some drug offense. Thousands of them were just kids caught in possession of small amounts of marijuana. How can their crime merit years in prison but war crimes and treason are somehow above being even mentioned?

For the same reasons that Switzerland wouldn't really arrest a former American president who happened to be on their soil, I know that members of the Bush administration who are guilty of horrible crimes will never serve a prison sentence or stand trial, but they should at least be pardoned to show that we know better than to do to Iran what we did to Iraq.

I'm not anti-American but I am anti-war. I'm not unpatriotic, I am patriotic enough to want my country to be one of the good guys.... You know, the kind of country that doesn't torture prisoners of war. I don't hate George Bush or Dick Cheney, I just don't think that they are any different from the two million Americans who did stand trial and are currently in prison for the crimes that they committed.  And that's not politics, that's just sane religion.

The Illuminative Way

September 13, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, Pastor

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."  Isaac Asimov
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush.  It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.  Robert Maynard Hutchins

Like a lot of people, I still love my home state and even though I have lived here in Missouri for 24 years, I still feel that Kentucky is my home. I love my home state, but I have to admit, it is often hard to be proud of it. I thank God for the images of Kentucky broadcast every first Saturday in May when the Kentucky Derby is run because almost every other time that Kentucky is mentioned in the national news, it undermines my claim that I am from the MENSA Club capital of the world.

Once the media is locked onto a story they seem to have difficulty in letting it go, hence we have been treated to so many stories about the ignorant shenanigans of Kim Davis, the court clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky that I have found myself longing for another story about the last horrifying thing that Donald Trump has said.

Davis not only makes my beloved Kentucky look like a grossly exaggerated version of Hee Haw, but she is simultaneously giving the Christian religion a black eye it really doesn't need right now.  Claiming her loyalty to God over the laws of mere mortals, she has resolutely refused to follow the decision of the Supreme Court in making same-sex marriages legal.

You have all seen her, by this time, I'm sure.  Evidently she has made the gay community in Rowan County so angry with her that she can't even find anyone to do her hair. Her current husband, Joe Davis, has also enjoyed the media attention, showing up on camera wearing a dirty t-shirt and coveralls and making such profound statements as:  Just because five people on the Supreme Court say so doesn't make it a law.

Clearly, neither Joe nor Kim are either legal or Biblical scholars but what has been alarming to me is that people who actually are national figures are saying things that are just as factually in error as the constitutional interpretations of Joe and Kim Davis.  Two presidential candidates, Gov. Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, actually showed up for her release from jail and others, including Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio, have defended her right to refuse to issue marriage licenses for same sex couples.  They keep using the phrase, "Five unelected justices," to reference the majority vote of the Supreme Court, as if to say that the Supreme Court is not, what the name clearly implies, the Supreme Court, i.e., you can't appeal their decision because there is no higher court.

There have been decisions made by the court that have seemed to me to be wrong, and sometimes even immoral, and I would be the last person to say that you don't have a right to refuse to obey a law that your conscience tells you is morally wrong, but to say that the Supreme Court, because the justices are constitutionally appointed rather than elected, does not have judicial authority, is just a denial of facts, a denial of reality, it raises stupid to the level of a sacrament.

Because we are progressives, we are disinclined to believe in things for which there is no evidence.  We talk about "evidence based faith" and I often quote philosophers who urge us to simply ignore truth claims that have no testable veracity.

I would also like to add that our perspective is not something new or unique to us. Even though the Kim Davis' and Mike Huckabees of the world may use the word "faith" to mean asserting things to be true that clearly are not true, that is not what religious thinkers have meant by faith through the centuries.

I don't often mention the fact that my doctoral research was in monastic spirituality. Over the years I have realized that no group of adults can remain awake for more than 90 seconds of me talking about this topic that has been fascinating to me. So I will be brief.

My dissertation looked at the great spiritual classics produced between the 4th and 18th centuries in Christian monasteries. I found in this literature the assumption that the spiritual journey followed three essential steps. In Latin they called these steps: the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive.  I will give a copy of my 1999 book, Christian Wisdom for Today, to any of you who have the courage to try to read about this.  I have several copies here today and I will mail a copy to any of our internet audience who are willing to send me the $4 for postage.

But, here is my less than 90 second spiel:  For centuries the assumed path of spiritual growth started with a time of purgation... of self-denial, self-examination, of getting your appetites under control and getting out of your life those things that might prevent you from progress in the spiritual life.  The last of the three steps, the unitive, had to do with uniting with God, the contemplative, prayerful, devoted life in which the self is united with the Divine.

The middle step, the illuminative or the gaining of illumination, was about study. No matter how many religious people try to insist that faith is a matter of just believing, or more likely, just denial of reality, even the ancient monks of the Alexandrian desert, expected monks to read books, meditate, and study.  An uninformed religious opinion has the same value as an uninformed medical or mechanical opinion.

That is not to say that study makes you always right but it means that you are capable of rational critical-thinking and that you are a great deal more likely to be right.  The untutored are sometimes just inherently insightful but most of the time it amounts to what my father used to say about how even a blind hog sometimes finds and acorn.

It has to be said that there has always been a difference between a healthy religious faith and an unhealthy faith. Our most famous Missouri born theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr said, "Religion makes good people better and bad people worse."

I don't think that it was her conversion to an evangelical flavor of Christianity that made Kim Davis into such a horrifying and prejudiced human being but I do think that she has used the Christian religion in the way that a drunk uses a lamp post, for support but not for illumination.  She has used irrational, anti-intellectual, anti-factual religious claims to give her the courage to hold onto an outdated prejudice and by using religious language she has bought into a community of similarly affected supporters.

Before Davis brought a herd of reporters to rural Kentucky, I had selected this quote from Isaac Asimov as our wisdom lesson for today, because when he said that we are suffering from:  ...the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" I felt like he was specifically describing one of the crucial problems with religion in our time.

There is lots of noise and spectacle, but not much illumination.  There is an abiding insistence that an ignorant assertion of belief is to be shown the same serious consideration as a conviction that is the product of actual study and critical thinking.

Lots of people will sometimes buy a lottery ticket if for no other reason than that it is fun to sit around and speculate about what you would do if you won...like how much of it you would give to your church and how you would keep your grown kids from finding out how much money you suddenly have.

But if you buy a lottery ticket and tell yourself that you are going to win millions of dollars in a couple of days and on the strength of that belief you go ahead and quit your job and draw out your life's savings and put a down payment on a mansion, then you are not being a person of faith, you are being irresponsible....like Sarah Palin kind of stupid.

We are people of faith who live in a world where the science of military power has grown beyond the moral reflection of the people who run our government. We are a spiritual community in the midst of a culture that is willing to continue to bolster prejudices based on misinformation, person fears, and pseudo-science that threatens our planet's environment, that places human lives at constant risk, and prevents progress towards such things as equal rights, rational gun laws, and an educational system that works.

Because we want to have a healthy spirituality then we are in favor of supporting education... higher education should be provided without charge to every person in this country because information is the ladder by which the poor can climb out of misery and into an equal place in our economy. There is nothing we can do to keep the poor in a permanent peasant class that is more effective than what we are doing now in making higher education more and more unattainable by the poor.

This is not about conservative and liberal. Science and math don't care about politics. Politicians can argue about whether human activity is causing climate change and many news agencies still insist upon giving us statistics about how many Americans don't believe that climate change is real.

What I'm saying here is that science is not concerned with opinion polls and real religion shouldn't be either.  Truth is our scripture.  Scripture was considered to be sacred because it was believed to be true.  What we must now, in turn, be able to say, is that where we find that it is not true, in the face of new information, our religion changes.  Holy books, doctrines, creeds, may not change but by not changing in light of reality, they simply become irrelevant. We are so over that stuff.

Because we want to have a healthy religious life, we want to create for ourselves and encourage and support the creation in other places of churches that throw their arms around real science, an academic approach to theology, psychology, economics, sociology and, frankly, compassion.

When politicians trumpet a fake, obviously doctored bit of video to remove funding from Planned Parenthood, where most of the poor women in this country get needed reproductive care, critical thinkers don't fall for their manipulation of the truth.... Not if they are thinking.

Conservatives can claim that raising the minimum wage will cause unemployment and making the rich richer will create jobs but the math is not on their side. Math is not conservative or liberal. Math doesn't care about politics.  Math shows that incremental raises in the minimum wage creates jobs and reduces suffering while easing the burden of state funded welfare. They can call it liberal, or socialist, or whatever they want to call it.... We just need to be sure that we are on the side of the math.

While intellect may not be the key to the Kingdom of God, I don't think that ignorance has much to offer. Reality is our creed. The truth is our Bible. Critical thinking must be our contemplative prayers for the world. Ignorance and lies are the real demons that possess our world and we are here for the exorcism.