Is Love worth It?

November 29, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive?  Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.  Erica Jong

To live without love is a mistake for which there is no reparation, neither in this life nor in the life to come.  Søren Kierkegaard     

Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, when the Old Testament was still under revision in a fairly primitive and tenuous Palestinian culture, the Greeks were reaching a zenith of art, literature and philosophy.

In the fourth century before the common era, Plato wrote the first truly great and classic works of western philosophy. His life's work makes an impressive collection of dialogues. Unlike most of the philosophy assignments I had to study, Plato did us the favor of writing his material in the form of conversations. They read something like a play in which different characters carry certain roles in the unfolding of Plato's thoughts.  His beloved teacher, Socrates, is the character that gets all of the good lines and great ideas.

You sometimes have to pay attention to the setting of a conversation, whether it is day or night, whether they were in Athens, the home of all great thought, or elsewhere, where conversations might be a bit less informed or insightful.

But you especially have to pay attention to when he gives lines to someone we know Plato despised.  And he despised no one more than the Greek playwright, Aristophanes. Aristophanes had libeled Socrates in his plays, perhaps leading the generally dismissive view that his fellow Athenians had of him, making it possible for the city government to condemn Socrates to death.
I don't want to play armchair psychologist across the distance of some 2300 years, but I find it to be curious that the only time that Plato brings up the subject of love relationships, that he gives most of the lines to the hated Aristophanes.  So it is hard to tell how seriously that Plato wants to take the recounted myth that Aristophanes describes in the Symposium but at the very least, it is reflective of a very ancient understanding of why people seem so determined to sacrifice their freedom, independence, and often their happiness to be connected to another person.

The myth that Aristophanes retells is basically this:  Originally all humans had two heads and two sets of genitals, and four arms and four legs. There were three different kinds of people.  Some had two sets of female genitals, some had two sets of male genitals, and some had one set of male genitals and one set of female genitals.  And this paragraph alone, my friends, more than doubles the total number of times that I have said the word "genitals" in a sermon in the past 30 years.

Because some of the humans were becoming too aggressive with the gods, the gods decided to split them into two, making them much weaker and much less of a threat to the gods.  The end result of this tragic event is that all humans spend their lives looking for their other half.  Note that in this ancient myth, if you do the math on this one evenly, there are more men looking for a male partner, and more women looking for a female partner, than there are men and women looking for an opposite sex partner. I don't know if that says something about Ancient Greece or about Aristophanes or about all of us, but no matter how you divide up the math, the myth is intended to state that no single individual is ever whole without his or her other half.
I hope that we have long ago dispensed with any sense that because some source is ancient that it is somehow magically superior and insightful. More often than not, the opposite is more likely to be the case. However, this bit of philosophical whimsy from Plato's pen can tell us two things, not the least of which is that same sex relationships are perfectly normal and have been a part of human coupling from the dawn of humanity.

A fact which is especially interesting in this particular year because after a lifetime of fighting for gay rights, we finally got legal same sex marriage in all of these United States, and I mean, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and though they were sometimes little jerks about it, even in Kentucky. And that only happened about six months ago and no one talks about it anymore because it was, is, and always has been, perfectly normal and nothing to discuss. It all happened so fast that we almost forgot to be happy about it.

The other thing we see in this myth is that there is a long-standing awareness that somehow we are drawn to live in marital unions.  For most of human history this was a matter of economic necessity and survival.  When most of humanity was dependent upon agriculture, it took a partnership with kids spread out over the decades to have adequate labor and mutual support to make society work.

Civilization became deeply entrenched in gender specific roles around labor, childcare, education, and even retirement. A hundred and fifty years of my patriarchal family existed almost every day of their lives on a farm in Kentucky where the house was near the spring, the church was at the end of the lane, and the graveyard was on a hilltop between the house and the church. Most of the world worked more or less in just that way for most of human history.
We are not, most of us, tethered to a parcel of land. Having children not only does not enhance our economic stability but, in fact, the people who never had kids are the only ones who ever seem to have any money! In the past half-century, we have seen that women don't necessarily need a man to support them or even to help them to raise children. Single mothers raised both our current president and our previous democratic president. It not only can be done, it can be done very successfully.

I had primary care of my daughter for her entire life but especially after she was five years old, and I have to tell you that she is very nearly perfect. I was told when we applied for her citizenship that she could never be president because she wasn't born in the USA but since that fact hasn't stopped Ted Cruz from running... I'm not so sure anymore. Anyway, clearly, men can get along quite handsomely without a female partner as well.

We don't have to have a spouse to run the farm, or even to have and raise children. And, though this may be a more delicate topic to treat in this context, we don't have to have a spouse to have a sex life. Statistics still indicate that married people have more frequent sex than single people do, in spite of the myths on both sides of that matrimonial fence, but even among fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases seems to be about the same as among non-believers so while there is a whole lot of deception and outright lying going on, pretty much, everyone is involved to one degree or another.

It is a recent development, in terms of the history of civilization, but it is a pronounced change.  We no longer need to be married for economic reasons or for sexual reasons, or even for procreation.
So why do people continue to seek their other half?  The poet and novelist, Erica Jong, said it very simply:  Do you want me to tell you something really subversive?  Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

Now, she is married to her fourth husband and she has written novels about the first three so I bet number four his holding on to the end. But the mere fact that a relationship doesn't last forever does not mean that it did not have its moment in the sun. Success is not always defined in terms of permanence.

When marriage also included the powerful concerns of economic survival, agricultural food security, safety of a family and mutual support in old age, people probably adjusted their expectations about emotional fulfillment accordingly. You cannot escape the fact that religious norms evolved to lock people into stable marriages for the benefit of society...not for the benefit of making two people unhappily stay together.

Now, coupling is a rather more exacting proposal. People do not especially need another person but there is still that open wound from when Zeus cut us in two that makes us remain on the lookout for our other half. But now it is about love, it is about meaning, companionship, shared values and mutual emotional support more than it is getting the laundry done, the crops harvested, and getting the kids raised.

I have taken today to be publicly philosophical on a topic about which I am more the perpetual spectator than I am a participant but love in the 21st century does seem to be a topic that demands thoughtful analysis.  Still, talking about it is sort of like a TV commercial for a perfume or cologne.
As we get close to Christmas, all of the men's and women's fragrance companies are advertising their wares heavily but you will notice that not one of the commercials uses a single adjective that has anything to do with their product. They don't talk about their product having a spicy or flowery smell, they don't talk about their fragrance at all, which is odd since fragrance is what they have to sell. But rather they try to project masculinity to men, femininity to women, and sexual desirability to both.... All things that you cannot get from a bottle of fragrance.

We talk about sex, on our better days we talk about friendship, companionship, but what we want defies description. We want what love makes us feel but all of our language ends up talking about things that are inevitably less than that feeling.

Søren Kierkegaard, who may have been the smartest man to live in modern times, never married.  He was in love. He was even engaged for a time, but he didn't believe that he could make Regine happy, and so he broke off the engagement and, it is safe to say from his books and his journal, he never stopped regretting that decision.

He made the entry in his journal that you heard read a few moments ago... a stand alone sentence, "To live without love is a mistake for which there is no reparation, either in this life nor in the life to come."  For all of the richness of intellect, and the satisfaction of his very meaningful life as an author, he knew that there was a void that so eluded him that he never found it, and I might add my own belief that the want of it is what caused him to die at such a young age.

I have been single for most of my adult life and I can say, in spite of the occasional solitude and inconvenience of single life, that it is a heck of a lot better than living with the wrong person.  Still, like everyone else who has lived alone for a long time, you always existentially know that there is a void that wants to be filled.

Those of us who are single often do pity many of the married people we know who seem to be trapped or stuck in an unhappy union.  And many married people look at those of us who are single as projects who need to be fixed.  There is nothing wrong with spending your entire life as a single person, but I suspect that there has never been anyone who did who would not gladly have traded their solo act for a meaningful partnership had the opportunity ever presented itself.

I think that many of us who have tried and failed to find the right person may suffer from excesses of perfectionism and a kind of idealistic view of marriage that defies the reality of mere mortals.  Many of what we would call successful marriages have survived through the years for no reason other than obstinacy, they just refused to give up!

You look at some of the most wealthy, beautiful, and successful couples in the world and you find out that it just isn't easy for anyone.  The famous actor, Will Smith, recently said about his 20 year long marriage to actress, Jada, "It's like our marriage was the most difficult, grueling, excruciating thing that we have ever taken on in our lives. And you know we're just not quitters."

I know that he didn't say that as an indictment of those of us who have given up on past relationship though there is a none-too subtle reality to it. It is like this, as the novelist, Ursula LeGuin, said:
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. That is, you don't find love.... We look for it, we look for the perfect partner, the right partner, the other half, but any successful relationship is made, and remade, literally renegotiated to give it new life and purpose.

My marriage and family professor told us 30 years ago that a marriage has to be totally recreated approximately every seven years or it will die from being stale and irrelevant.  I'm afraid that advice may have become, in and of itself, stale and irrelevant because the world is changing so fast now. I suspect that relationships probably need to remain rather dynamic, constantly changing, being renegotiated, fed, renewed, to continue to have a meaningful life.

I have to stop these musings at some point so I will try to conclude with this:  Marriage is no longer a necessary institution in our time. It is not economically, agriculturally, or even pro-creatively vital, and yet it remains mysteriously desirable as an existential partnership in the face of the inky blackness and isolation of the universe.  Being married doesn't make you happy unless you put happiness into it. Being married doesn't give life meaning, unless you continually bring new meaning to it. And being married shouldn't be a lifetime bondage unless both parties remain stubbornly willing to make it more than an economic roommate sort of dependence.

Whatever the mysterious core of true love is, that part that defies adjectives, religion, contracts, or rules, it is not something you find... it is something you make and so, in a word, I'm simply encouraging you to make love and I hope that you will not try to misinterpret that.

Living with Gratitude in an Imperfect World

November 22, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."
― Elizabeth Warren                        

When I was a grad student at Vanderbilt, I took a field placement one semester in a mental health center in Bowling Green, KY to get some supervised experience in counseling.  A young psychologist on the staff there had a bumper sticker on his car that said, "Happiness is an inside job." I spent weeks seeing that sticker every day and trying to figure out what it meant, assuming that it had some obscure psychological, tongue-in-cheek message that I should be able to figure out.  I finally gave up and just asked the psychologist.

The actual meaning was not at all obscure. In fact it was so basic that it should have been obvious. He said, "After one year of working for a construction company through the bitter cold of winter and the heat of summer, I was inspired to go back college and earn the degrees that would get me a job in an office building."

It was probably a meaningless exchange for him but it was, for me, almost like a brief encounter with a Zen master.


I grew up in rural Kentucky surrounded by the tenet farmers and the crushing poverty of the majority of those who were trying to scratch a living out of the poor agricultural land around us. When I hauled hay and housed tobacco, however, it was for extra spending money.  When I milked a cow by hand, it was for entertainment, for the novelty of it.

Though my parents could not afford to send me to college, the fact, the cultural assumption, that I was going to college was reinforced in my life from my earliest memories. I have done hard manual labor, helping to build houses in the thin air of the Andes in Ecuador, and in the heat of Managua, Nicaragua.

After a day of carrying concrete block and mixing mortar on the ground with a shovel and a pale in Nicaragua, I asked my friend, Bill Ringo, as we stumbled back to our hotel, "Bill, are you doing OK?" And he replied, "If I hurt just a little bit more I would sit down right here and start crying like a baby."

But, for us, it was five days of labor in what Bill fondly called, "Gandhi Camp" and we were jetting our way back to the USA, making plans for our next scuba vacation. My life is not charmed. I have had some real tough blows to endure and have had to put in a lot of long hours and do some pretty demanding work. But, with rare exception, I work indoors. I get to take a lunch break. I always have access to both healthcare and a safe place to sleep, running water and flushing toilets.

More than that, I was born into the dominant race, of the dominant gender, in the dominant nation of the world. There is no predictor of success in life greater than being born white, male, heterosexual, and protestant in North America.
It is fair for everyone to have the same finish line in a race if they all have the same starting line but white men in this country get a solid head start before women and minorities ever get into the race. White privilege is not just a real thing, it is almost an undefeatable thing even while it defies detection and definition.

For those of you who, like me, watched both of the Republican debates on TV, the mere fact that white, male, millionaires could look into a camera and say with a straight face that salaries in the USA are too high and that rather than raise the minimum wage, that wages in America are already too high and have to be lowered in order to be competitive on the world market.... If you have ever doubted white privilege, watch that clip again.

They can pay lip service to the fact that wage disparity is destroying our economy and that it is the number one challenge facing the future of America and yet, when asked point blank, if they would favor a raise in the minimum wage, every one of them was against it.  If I may mix my literary genres and images a bit, they all sounded like odd combinations of Voldemort and Ebenezer Scrooge.

I don't want for Ben Carson to become a running theme in my preaching, but when he said that the United States went from its birth to being the dominant economic force in the world because of its positive business environment. I don't feel like I should have to be the one to point out to Ben Carson that what he is calling a positive business environment is what historians call the institution of slavery.

But folks, as we are nearing our Thanksgiving observance, I would like to add one more thing to our awareness of white privilege in America.  As morally bankrupt as the treatment of European settlers of their African slaves was, and as horrible as the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans was, the historical aspect that is typically really undersold is the fact that the takeover of North America from the tens of millions of Native Americans who were living here when we arrived was largely due to the diseases we brought with us.

So unprepared to face the illnesses that most Europeans had evolved to survive were the native tribes that entire villages simply collapsed under the weight of the casualty count. There were villages where people died in such numbers that they couldn't even bury their dead, they simply abandoned their entire village of houses and agricultural fields.

The reason why there are so many cities in America with "field" as a part of their name, there are more than 40 Springfields in America and a lot of Mansfield, Fairfield, Greenfield, and so on because white settlers found cleared and established agricultural fields that had been prepared and used by our Indian predecessors that had been abandoned after the epidemics of measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, pertussis (whooping cough), tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chickenpox and sexually transmitted diseases that Europeans brought across the Atlantic on their little wooden ships.

The arrival of large numbers of Europeans spelled near extinction for the American Indians but it presented those settlers with vast resources of cleared farmland and a leg up ahead of the rest of the world that was braced for an industrial revolution.

So, no, no one in modern America can claim to be a self-made person without acknowledging the inheritance of a continent from Native Americans, and an infrastructure due in large part to the uncompensated labor of African slaves and barely compensated labor of Chinese railroad workers.

And for all of the talk about building a wall between us and Mexico, the same people screaming for a wall now will be wanting to tear it down when they find the cost of their fruits and vegetables going up by three digit inflation year after year. No one who owns a farm, a hotel, or a restaurant really wants to try to endure the spike in labor prices that would result from a real ban on immigration, not to mention a mass deportation of the undocumented.

If wealth were predicated on hard work and frugality alone, the richest people in the world would be the women of sub-Saharan Africa where they carry water on their heads and fire wood on their backs, day after day.

Nobody here ever killed an Indian or owned a slave. Everyone here has, however, dramatically benefited from the theft of land from the Indians and the labor of African slaves. We are all connected. No one is an island and no one can take credit for their successes as a stand-alone event.

Therefore, we have a very basic, moral, logical, just obligation to pay it forward to the next generation, to the next person, who is trying to make it. Many of us here did not come from wealthy families who sent us to college. I not only worked my way through school but I even had to help my parents out financially through much of my grad school experience.... But you know what, I lived in a time when that was possible. That time no longer exists.

Spiritual Reflections in an Age of Terrorism

In the Wake of the Paris Terrorist Attack     Nov. 15, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

James Madison, Political Observations, 1795 "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes...known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

During my annual physical my doctor asked me if I am seeing my dentist every year, then he asked me if I wear a seat belt when I am in a car, and finally he asked me if I smoke. He explained, the three most likely things to kill a man in middle age is to be in a car accident without a seat belt on, or to smoke cigarettes, or to allow gum disease to go undetected, which, was news to me, is suspected to have a relationship to heart disease.

My doctor was doing his due diligence, asking me about behaviors or habits that might pose a threat to my welfare.  He did not mention dying from being shot, which is, statistically more likely than dying in a car accident but you can't really expect a doctor in the Ozarks to bring up anything that might draw gun ownership into question.

As a progressive spiritual community, in the midst of the fear, outrage, and dangerous talk of war in response to the Isis inspired terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday evening, it is important for us, since we talk about evidence based faith rather than superstitious or purely emotional thinking, to apply both our faith and our critical thinking skills in the midst of a crisis.

This is who we are. This is what we do. We have to talk about what is true and not be sucked into the anxiety, hatred, and bloodlust of our lower nature.

In spite of what might be implied by watching the news on a daily basis, your chances of being killed by a terrorist is not only not high on the list of likely causes of death but, again, based purely on math, you are many times more likely to be killed by a dairy cow.  You may say that you are highly unlikely to be in a field or barn with a dairy cow, and yet, even though that is probably true, it is more likely than that you will be a place that will be killed by a terrorist.

Since 9-11, our nation has spent over $700 billion dollars on Homeland Security. It is now a huge industry with office buildings rivaling the capacity of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, devoted to finding potential terror threats and either stopping them or defending against them.

We had a speaker at Drury University a few years ago from the Homeland Security agency who was, basically, on a public relations mission.  In the question and answer time, I asked him if the flu was actually a much greater threat to American lives than terrorists and that rather than spending $700 billion dollars on Homeland Security, we could save many more lives by encouraging people to get their annual flu shot and to remember to wash their hands.  Our guest speaker was furious, I suspect, because, in fact, the flu does represent a greater threat to Americans than terrorists do by a factor of several hundred thousand.

Terrorism is the warfare of the poor.  When we go to war, we use our navy, our air force, and our armies. Oppressed people who feel that they have a legitimate reason to go to war but who do not have the equipment of modern warfare, turn to terrorism. You cannot defeat a country like Russia by blowing up a single passenger plane but you frighten the population and humiliate the government.

They do not have the ability to attack a French military base but they can strike a newspaper office, a concert, a market where unsuspecting civilians are vulnerable.

They certainly could not take on an American navel vessel or take to the air to challenge one of our fighter jets, but they can infiltrate commercial airways, or leave a bomb on a city street during a crowded public event.  Again, that does not amount to defeating the United States in a war but if you listened to our 24-hour news cycle, it would appear to come pretty close to doing so.

The point of terrorism is to scare people. It only works if the general population agrees to be scared. Terrorists try to make their numbers, the size of their constituency seem many times larger than it actually is through violent scare tactics. And our media plays into their deception.  Some of our presidential candidates were immediately reacting on Friday night, talking about refusing to accept any Syrian refugees into our country, or even deporting the few who are already here as if we should now suspect every Muslim on the planet of being a terrorist or a terrorist supporter or sympathizer.

There are over six million Arab Muslims living in France. If even 10% of them were extremists wanting to commit acts of terrorism, that would be 600,000 terrorists in France alone.  If it was one percent, that would still be 60,000 terrorists. People, if one tenth of one percent of Muslims were terrorists, that would be more than 6000 terrorists in France. These people who committed these horrible acts do not represent Islam... there were eight known criminals who may have some more accomplices, some of whom were from Belgium.  These are violent criminals and they should be treated as such and we should not try to take a pound of flesh out of every Arab or every Muslim we meet.

Isis announced that they would infiltrate the flow of refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and take their fight to Europe. In spite of Europe's best efforts at vetting the millions of refugees who have streamed into their countries, Isis managed to make good on their pledge and brought a nightmare to France. Vetting refugees who arrive in large numbers with no papers, no known history in criminal records, is going to be virtually impossible.

So, is the answer to turn our backs on millions of refugees fleeing violence and starvation? There will be people in France who say yes. There are lots of people, including people who think that they should be president of this nation of immigrants, who would turn their backs on millions of desperate people to keep out a dozen terrorists. Because some people are willing to be very virtuous as long as it doesn't cost them anything.

It is not a small thing. Paris just lost a hundred and twenty lives of mostly young people who were out having a good time on a Friday night... more than 300 were also shot and wounded. This is huge, it is serious, but is it enough to make us turn our backs on millions of people among whom there are thousands who are innocent who will be killed if they are not allowed to escape battlefield of war.

The fact remains, that the majority of what is called terrorism comes from people who claim Islam as their motivation. Modern Islam has challenges to face because it isn't just those who become terrorists but those who are sympathetic with the extremists. It is a real issue and not a small one.

Of course, if you were listing terrorists from the perspective of a schoolgirl in Pakistan, or a farmer in Afghanistan, you might think that the people who are operating our drone program are terrorists.

People in Syria might think that American, French, British and Russian bombers that kill people in their neighborhoods and villages, are terrorists.
As was reported in the New York Times this week:  "Mr. Hollande actively stepped up French participation in the military air campaign in Syria at the end of September. Just last week, France attacked oil operations under the Islamic State's control in Syria. On Oct. 8, it conducted a targeted strike against militants in Raqqa, Syria, apparently targeting Salim Benghalem, a French citizen fighting for the Islamic State."

We tend to see a terrorist attack like the one in Paris as a stand-alone crazy crime...but there are no coins that have only one side.  And our media has been nearly apoplectic talking about the horror in Paris without mentioning the fact that Beirut and Bagdad have been attacked on the same day. No one in the American press was screaming for an all out war on Isis when they brought down a Russian commercial plane.

And I get it.  I have a friend in Paris.  I called Brigitte to be sure that she was okay.... We tend to identify with Western Europeans more than we do with Middle Eastern or Eastern Europeans because we are more likely to have family or friends there. But really, come on, does it really matter if you are sleepless and frightened in Beirut or in Paris?

We can all agree that terrorism is evil. We can agree that the public beheadings, the deaths of innocent civilians in almost all of these events is horrible... but if we are honest, we must admit that they do not happen in a vacuum. There are reasons why Isis can recruit people and why some people can be driven to the point of becoming a suicide bomber.

They do not hate us for our freedoms, though they are often offended by many of our cultural customs. What they hate us for are things like sending in the CIA to overthrow the government of Iran to install Reza Pahlavi as shah. They are mad about our manipulation of their governments for access to their natural resources and to control their borders and their trade.

For the most part, the Arab Muslim world loves the west. They want our economy, our technology, and many of our products. They don't want to be occupied and they don't want to have their culture extinguished by ours...and, honestly, who does?
I am horrified by the civil war in Syria. I am heart broken for the millions of refugees. We hear of politicians screaming that we can't just sit back and watch - and a part of me certainly agrees with that and yet, I think of the Hippocratic oath that doctors are suppose to live by.... The pledge that in their practice of medicine they will do no harm.

We keep deposing tyrants to install someone we think will be better only to find out that things are much worse.  There is a bloody civil war going on in Syria but if the west brings our air force and military might to help the rebels and Russia brings their air force and military might to help the Assad government, then, what we can be sure of is that thousands upon thousands of innocent Syrians will die and millions more will become refugees.

If only we could topple bad governments and install good governments, it might be worth doing, but so far our track record is horrible.  Ever since 9-11 we have assumed the posture that every terrorist act calls for us to make a horrifying and disproportionate punch back, telling ourselves that will stop them next time.... But it doesn't, it only makes it worse. And now, we have lots of people demanding that we do it again...without ever stopping to consider what a horrible mistake that can be.

Which, it must be said, is exactly what the members of Isis want us to do.

They are not frightened by the prospect of a war with the West. A war with the West is their goal.  That is what they want.  They suffer from delusions that they would win such a war with Allah's help but what they never seem to notice is that Allah doesn't get involved with such things. Rationally, does it really make sense to do exactly what Isis wants us to do?

I would remind you of the tragic murder of nine innocent people at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston this past summer.  The shooter, a domestic terrorist, went into this historic church that has a long history that began in opposition to slavery and continued as a leader throughout the Civil Rights Movement.

This deranged white racist thought that if he went to that church, and murdered a lot of black people, that he could start a race war. And, he assumed, that his race would win that war because, after all, a lot of his sort have been stockpiling arms for a hundred years for that precise purpose.

But there was no race war ignited by that June 17th mass murder because by June 18th there were surviving church members speaking up about forgiveness and reconciliation. And by the time a week had passed, that church was covered in flowers and filled with donations from white people all over the world including from us.... I collected your donations and drove the check to Charleston myself and delivered our sympathy, our support, our commitment to compassion to them in person.

And one of the people that Dylann Roof hoped that he could make to hate people like you and like me enough to want to kill us, came out onto the sidewalk in front of Mother Emanuel Church on that 100 degree day in June in Charleston, SC and she hugged me and we wept and thanked each other for the opportunity to show that there is another way, a better way, than hitting back.

The United States government did not bomb Shelby, North Carolina even though that is where Dylann Roof was arrested. They did not bomb Lexington, SC where he lived.  That's the nest of racist sympathizers that produced him. No, they arrested Dylann Roof and put him in a cage where dangerous animals deserve to be but there was no hint of needing to kill his relatives and friends with drone strikes....

Or invade Canada because a lot of people there look like him, the way we invaded Iraq because they lived in the same global neighborhood and were the same shade of brown as the people from Saudi Arabia who attacked us on 9-11.

I do not know what the comprehensive answer to the threat of terrorism is but one thing I do know, doing things that create more terrorists is not the answer. We need to stop manipulating the internal affairs of foreign governments and we need to strop trying to use the military to address every global crisis.

As president James Madison said 225 years ago: "War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes...known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

Real global peace will be achieved through raising the standard of living of people everywhere, by making sure that everyone has access to clean water, housing, education, health care, and a chance to live free. We will not create the world we hope for at the tip of a spear.... We have already spent more than $2 trillion dollars and killed a half a million people proving that doesn't work.

Now we can try something else, something smarter, something more kind, and something more effective.  For today, I beg you to stop being afraid. If I may end with a philosophical quote from Yoda.... Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering.  So, I think we should try the other way.

The Rise of Religious Consciousness

November 8, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways.       Bishop John Shelby Spong

To give our musicians fair warning, I outline my sermons several weeks or months in advance. So, we know that three weeks from today I will be talking about the fluid and often deceptive and fact-challenged nature of political speech and I don't want to get into that topic too deeply before that day rolls around.... But Ben Carson is testing me.

There will be a lot of grist for the mill for that sermon at the end of the month but today I wanted to explore something of Bishop Spong's articulated vision for the future of the church... that is the hope that there might be a religious consciousness that would arise from the myths, superstitions, and spiritual instincts of more primitive times that would preserve a religious consciousness that is relevant to modern life, that simultaneously is concerned about social justice and the environment, while also finding deep and passionate wonder and awe in the complexity and beauty of existence that might find substantive expression in deepening and loving ties to one another.

Our friends, Bishop Spong, Dr. Charles Hedrick, Dr. David Trobisch, Dr. Teresa Hornsby, and I, ... as well as many of our favorite authors: Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong, and others, all grew up in religious environments in which we were expected to take Biblical narratives as being historically and morally correct, normative, and even necessary to both happiness and survival.... Especially in the eternal sense!

All of us went to graduate school, not to debunk that ancient faith and confidence, but to build upon a foundation that would allow us to become teachers of the faith and leaders within the structures of the church. None of us were happy to discover that the intellectual and factual integrity of that whole body of church teachings and assumptions about ancient scriptures was not only unreliable but were, in very complex ways, sometimes factually mistaken and psychologically dangerous.

There is a very high drop out rate in the more academically credible seminaries all over the world.  People who do not want to have their bubble burst, people who want to hold onto magical thinking, some of whom burst into either angry shouting or who dissolve into miserable tears in class, find reality threatening and undesirable.

What stood at the doorstep of our decision to start this church was the awareness that there is and has been for far too long, a huge gulf between what is good scholarship in our religious institutions of higher learning and the pews where people are literally victimized by a body of teachings that ask them to assassinate their brains and invest themselves in misinformation, bad moral guidance, and long outdated views of gender, race, class, and, my friends, even of God and eternity.

I will credit my friend, Michael Dowd, with coining the phrase of "evidence based" or "fact based" faith.
The religious consciousness that Bishop Spong has talked about hoping to see arise within churches cannot come into existence in the thick fog of sloppy thinking, magic or superstition of past generations.  The people who ran screaming from the classes I attended at Vanderbilt 35 years ago were confronted with realities that they didn't want to think about, didn't want to know, and didn't want to allow to change their magical thinking.... But, I would argue, they would always have to know that they had chosen unreality over reality. They could never escape the fact that they were dismissing the real world in favor of an imaginary world.

But, if I may now pick up the thread of my earlier comment, what we have seen this week in Ben Carson's dogged insistence that a comment he made years ago at a church related college, his personal belief that the pyramids in Egypt had been built by the Joseph of Genesis to store during a famine in Egypt five thousand years ago, is historically and factually true.  He has gone so far as to say that only progressives who are atheists would find his statement to be absurd.

My friend, Bill Ringo, who is a rocket scientist, has been gloating this week that now rocket scientists stand alone as the proverbial reference for intelligence since Ben Carson has single handedly made saying, "Well, it doesn't take a brain surgeon..." no longer a high water mark for being smart. You cannot argue that someone is a scientist who insists that the world is no more than 6000 years old, that evolution is a deception of Satan, and that the patriarch, Joseph, built the pyramids to serve as grain storage barns.

Carson may have had technical success in the operating room but his orientation to reality and his ability to do critical thinking do not show up on the radar.

Yet even in the face of what must be thought of as public humiliation, a significant percentage of our friends and neighbors still want this man to become our president.  And, again, I don't want to focus on this today as political speech but I do want for us to think about it as a litmus test for religious thinking.

Of those who have been willing to discuss their decision to continue to support Ben Carson's candidacy in light of these anti-scientific, anti-historical, and even anti-Biblical scholarship statements, about half of them agree with him for reasons that simply cannot be explained but even more sad to me are the half of his supporters who simply do not care.  They are willing to say that facts, good thinking skills, information, just don't matter to them.

I lead a fairly homogenized life. In spite of living in one of the most conservative communities in America, I am surrounded by largely like-minded church members. I am sufficiently outspoken and published that any residual family members or friends who take radically different views stopped talking to me years ago.

But with my morning coffee most mornings, while I passively take in the morning news, I play several local people in a form of on-line scrabble and sometimes that turns into a conversation.
One of my regular opponents is a local teacher, a conservative Christian with several children and a baby-daddy in prison.  Our sidebar conversations are as close as I get to heated debate with conservatives these days.  She is devoted to the form of Christian faith that you have often heard me call "magic and superstation" and, she is also a Ben Carson supporter.

Though there are multiple video clips of Ben Carson saying in public that he believed that Joseph built the pyramids, that Satan is the author of the theory of evolution, and that the earth is 6000 years old, she believes that all of those things are just media deceptions. And, she adds, paradoxically, he might be right.

Why is it taking us so long to switch from burning coal creating nuclear waste to more renewable and safer forms of energy?  Because a large part of our population has been taught not to believe in facts and reality!  Why is it so difficult to curb our military budget that feeds the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the 1% at the top of the economy?  Because people have been trained to react out of fear and false patriotism rather than facts and reality.

And, you have to admit, religious training is often the foundation for the magical thinking that is a part of every other social problem we seem to be unable to rationally address.  As the French philosopher, Voltaire, said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

You have heard me quoting Todd Schaible in the past. Todd says that in any research project you need to be able to answer the three "so's"....What is so?  So what? And, So what should we do? You can never get to a reasonable plan of action if you refuse to take the first step, if you resist acknowledging what is so, or if we are willing to willie-nilly mix fact with imagination, wishful thinking and a bit of magic and superstition.

Several of our church members joined me on Thursday evening at MSU for a lecture by Dr. Gerardo Marti, a sociologist of religion. He was talking about the Emerging Church movement, an obvious topic of interest to our church.  He didn't make any predictions of the future direction of the church, which is what I really went to hear.  In many ways, he described the path by which we began and some of our past evolution into the more inter-faith church that we are now.

But there were a couple of points where I disagreed with him, at least to the degree that we are an emerging church and he was not accurately describing us.  He talked about a very generous tolerance of differences in belief. He implied that beliefs don't really matter.  And I have said that behavior is much more important that belief, that orthopraxy is what religion is really about, not orthodoxy.

But I don't that that we are very tolerant of imaginary religious beliefs... we are not very welcoming to anti-science, anti-medicine, unreal or untrue statements of belief.

A great deal of religious history has been deeply invested in deception and manipulation and for that the church writ large, church with a capital "C" owes the world and apology and we need to work hard to clean up our mess.

Bishop Spong has articulated a vision for the future of the church that is an emerging spirituality that honors the earth, works for justice, and fosters real love, forgiveness, compassion, and meaningful connection between all people. I don't know if the church has a future but if I am going to be found in any kind of church in the future, it will have to be that kind of church.

Both the government and the traditional church have tried to keep you afraid of Muslims and Arabs to keep you impoverished by military spending. You have been manipulated by the banks and corporations to be afraid of the Chinese so that we will go along with the TPP (trans Pacific trade pact), locking in low wages and unemployment in our own nation, to prevent the economic growth of an impoverished people on the other side of the globe.

You have been seduced by TV ads and government misinformation into believing that only way that we can get around is in private gas burning cars and the only way you can heat and light your home is by burning coal.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

If the church of the future has anything of value to offer to you, let it be this: the courage to stop being manipulated by fear and the wisdom to be devoted to what it true rather than what is imaginary. Because, you are not going to go to heaven, you are either going to make this life heaven or we will be doomed to hell of ignorance and injustice.... And I'm not going to go there quietly.

Discovering a Progressive Bible

Nov. 1, 2015
Community Christian Church of Springfield MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.  Buddha
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.   Bertrand Russell
Make your own bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture."
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

Long before there was such a thing as Google or smart phones, I was in the habit of carrying a small leather bound notebook with me everywhere that I went. Whenever I read something, heard something, or experienced something that seemed to be a learning moment, those things that astonish our souls, that open our minds to new ideas, different perspectives on life and its meaning.

That is why that you should never loan a book to me that you ever hope to see again.  If I find something useful in it, I will dog-ear the pages and write in the margins so that if you ever do get it back, it wouldn't be in presentable form.

Through the years, I have been doing exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested.  I have been writing my own Bible, collecting the truths that I have encountered in poetry, literature, philosophy, music, and conversation knowing full well that I am rarely more than seven days from the next time that I will be standing in public confronted by a group of people who expect me to have something meaningful to say.

Thirty years ago, when I was ordained following eight years of higher education, I was positioned in front of my family, friends, and the members of my student church and I was given an examination by the regional minister of the Christian Church in Kentucky.  And in that examination I was expected to answer in the affirmative about a long list of things such as my faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible as the word of God, and in my redemption in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and several other things that I could not now, not only not answer in the affirmative, but I am not ever certain that I could keep a straight face in the process.

I complained at the time that the church requires seminarians to spend years questioning everything, learning to critically examine every truth claim, considering contradictory philosophies, and then, at the end of all of those years, they want you to basically forget everything they required you to learn, pull your brains out by the roots, and claim to confidently believe what is evidently not true and that no one on earth could sanely claim to believe with any certainty.

The ancient creeds of the church, the accumulation of church doctrines, rules, and dictates, are not the culmination of human learning.... They are the end of learning. They are the death of reason, inquiry, growth, and discovery.
I fear that the traditional church is dying but my fear is not in the fact that the old denominational structures of religion are dying, my fear is that they may not die fast enough to get out of the way and allow something more meaningful to arise from their ashes before our civilization turns its back on spirituality entirely.

If it was not the Buddha himself, at least from very ancient Buddhist tradition, there has been an awareness that you cannot simply pass on an intact religion to a new generation. The Buddha taught that we should not take any religious book, not the Bible, the Quran, or any other religious text as if it had actually been written by God. The sacred texts of all of our world's religions are the best efforts of ancient faith communities to express what had astonished their souls, the truths that had guided them, and helped them along the way.

Though the Buddha became the founder of a religion that bore his name, he instructed his students that they should not believe things just because these beliefs have been handed down by authority figures or preceding generations but that they should look for truth by observation and analysis. Truth is not Republican or Democrat, it is not liberal or conservative, and, as Gandhi observed, God is not a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu or a Buddhist.  Ultimate truth does not belong to any religion, any philosophy, or any generation.

I suspect that most of us had similarly indoctrinating Sunday School experiences in which we were encouraged if not rewarded for trying to force ourselves to believe religious claims for which there was no evidence.  I'm not sure where Lewis Carol got all of his ideas, but Alice's famous conversation with the White Queen in
Through the Looking Glass sounds almost like church school when Alice objected that she simply couldn't believe impossible things.  The Queen scolded her and said:
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Traditional religion rewards us for exerting ourselves to believe, but as the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell said, "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."  We should not admire or praise anyone for believing things for which they have no reason to believe them.

The use of the word "faith" to mean believing in things without evidence is, I am convinced, a bad use of the term, but even if that is what it means to many religious people, they cannot command that their unsubstantiated convictions be shared by the rest of us.  There is no more reason to believe in heaven and hell than there is to believe in Asgard or Star War's Tatooine.  There is no more evidence for angels than there is for unicorns, and there is more evidence that there is a Santa Clause than there is that you have an immortal and invisible soul.... At least I have seen the Christmas presents Santa Clause left in my living room!

Yes, you have a right to believe whatever you wish about life after death, or angles, demons, souls, but you do not have a right to expect the rest of us to change school text books to reflect your flat earth beliefs or to enact laws to safeguard your prejudices about gay folks or gender roles. You have the right to believe that the sky is green and that grass is blue but you should recognize that most of the rest of us are more interested in reality than we are in your superstitions.

Now, I recognize that for many people, holding onto traditional religious beliefs, in spite of the total lack of evidence and support for those beliefs, is an important part of how they hold their world together.  Some people could not face the grief they have experienced, or deal with the horrors that have happened to them, without a belief in an invisible world where things are all going to be set right again.  And therein lies the challenge for progressive thinkers.  Are you willing to let go of the security blanket of false certainty in order to live with the uncertainty of honest inquiry?

Thomas Paine, of the founding intellectual giants at the time of the birth of our nation, said that "To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

There certainly is a wide and popular strain of religion that engages in wishful thinking, irrational beliefs, magic and superstition but I want to remind you that from the time of Moses and Buddha, of Jesus and Confucius, there has also been a kind of religion that has been called a "wisdom" tradition. A tradition that is not full of creedal answers but of sincere seeking, questioning, searching for meaning and truth.

A tradition that adamantly rejects vacuous beliefs and is willing to change in the presence of new information and be willing to advocate, prophetically and even when threatened with martyrdom, for justice, liberation, truth, and towards a realization of a common humanity in which we respect life, and nature, and are enriched by art and beauty, and in which we seek to emerge from the darkness of ignorance and prejudice into the light of reason and sincere love.

It may not be politically correct to say it just this way, but, no, all religions are not the same. In The Spiral Staircase, one of Karen Armstrong's biographical works, she says very plainly:    "If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. "

We are surrounded by bad theology.... In many of the Christian churches around us, in the extremist forms of Islam that we hear about in the news, and in the Zionist forms of Judaism too often found in both Israel and in American politics... but it is our job to seek, grow, discover, a health faith and then not simply to teach it and put it into YouTube videos and iTunes podcasts but to embody it, practice it, become it, as witnesses to a healthy faith.

In the same book, Armstrong says:

"Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed." 

So, my friends, I invite you to keep your treasured scriptures only to the extent to which they challenge you morally and astonish your soul but then add to them the truths that discover along the way. Apply reason, critical thinking, and intellectual inquiry to your search. And then, and more importantly, have the courage to embody the truths that you discover. Do not cower or conform. Live like a prophet. Be willing to be that one-eyed man in the nation of the blind.  Don't fall for propaganda whether it comes from a church, your government, or the corporate media. Think, live, be free, and be willing to be changed by the truths you discover.

You are not your parents, you are not the religion you were born into or the nation where you were born. You must be your own creation....be that person with courage and honesty.

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.