“Time and Our Place in It” Click here to watch the video

January 15, 2016       Community Christian Church    Roger Ray, pastor

Reinhold Niebuhr:   Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Though I love the escapism of a good science fiction movie, the genre is never on more shaky ground than when it suggests that there is some way to travel faster than the speed of light, whether that’s through a warp drive, hyperspace, or the really dumb things that some movies use like going through a black hole…. A body with such great mass that even light cannot escape its gravitational pull which, if approached would reduce a spaceship with several hundred crew members to a small dense object smaller than the point of a pin.

Time doesn’t really exist. Time is just what we perceive because things move. If everything, every molecule and atom suddenly stopped moving, we would say that time had stopped. Though fiction writers from H. G. Wells to modern comic books have talked about going back in time, there is no such thing. If you could make every atom, every molecule and planet move simultaneously backward it could seem like time was going backwards but, alas, even then, the concept is meaningless.

When physicists like Einstein and Hawking speak of variances in time or the possibility of time travel, they are talking bout going into the future but still, that’s not what you think of in movies.

The faster a thing moves, the slower the atoms in that thing move, so if you approach the speed of light, it is as if time has slowed to a near stop. If we could shoot a rocket at light speed around the earth, when it landed, the people on earth would have aged 10 years and the person on the space ship would have only aged less than a second.

Of course, they would also be dead because as speed increases, mass increases. At 90% the speed of light your weight would double, but after the 90% mark, mass increases much faster and you would weigh several tons long before you reached light speed. You could stop aging but your weight would kill you instantly so it still isn’t a good plan.

So, while time travel is hypothetically possible going into the future, it isn’t a very pretty sight.  We are prisoners of time. We cannot go back and we cannot meaningfully go forward any faster than one day at a time. We are mortals given a few years of productive adult life. Some get more than others but none of us get very many.  

That’s what caught my attention when I read Reinhold Niebuhr’s very matter-of-fact assertion that:  Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.

We can all dispute the absolute nature of that claim… especially those of us who believe that we have successfully raised an amazing child into adult life. I can think of a few fairly substantial projects that I have seen from inception to successful completion but if we let the saying stand, especially now when it seems that news, and mostly bad news, is coming at us so fast.

We may see the Affordable Care Act repealed in the next week and I will add my voice in protest to all those who are screaming with their hair on fire as we watch this happening. I just want to say, as bad as it is, this is not the last word.

It is like Garrison Keillor said about a cat trapped on top of a tall fence by a pack of mean dogs… the cat knows that he just has to be patient because all of the barking and jumping won’t be the last word.

Not many of us will live a hundred years but let me remind you what a hundred years can mean in human history. A hundred years ago the average life expectancy in America was 47 years. In 1917, more than 90% of our so-called “doctors” had no college education. There were no antibiotics but you could buy either heroin or morphine over the counter at the corner pharmacy.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.

My parents were born at home, carried water from a well, used an outhouse, did their homework by lamplight and attended a one-room school. The world changes but not at a predictable pace and the changes are not always in the direction of progress.  A hundred years ago there were about 200 murders per year in the United States… simpler times and yet somehow much less violent.  Still, Pneumonia was the leading cause of death, followed by tuberculosis and diarrhea.

I believe that in the next hundred years we will have all renewable energy sources. I believe that we will have solved the social ills of homelessness and hunger. And I believe that we will have universal health care and that it will be much better than what we have now. I believe that our cars will drive themselves, cutting traffic fatalities by more than 90% and allowing the elderly to continue to live independently without waiting for their kids to take them somewhere.

Of course, most of what life will be like in those decades many years after I am gone are not even within the realm of our ability to predict or even to imagine but the big stuff I can imagine. I can imagine a healthier planet and a more just society. The trick is that there are a lot of ups and downs on the way to getting there and it won’t happen in my lifetime and, it doesn’t matter.

That’s the part that’s hard to communicate to anyone who doesn’t already see it. These steps towards progress need to happen even though they will never benefit me and might not benefit my daughter but I hope it will help her children. It is that lovely concept of planting trees whose shade you will not live to see.

This is the philosophical problem around all of the Affordable Health Care Act debate. How can you explain to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan that they should care about other people? This is the bottom line problem in most of our public ethics debates.

About 15 years ago, when I was about the only pastor in town who gladly officiated over same sex weddings, a group of conservatives in my former church hired a private detective to find my gay lover. They must have paid that guy, John Snow, more than $50,000 to follow me for 8 months, go through my garbage and interrogate former employees and ex-girlfriends before finally giving up and accepting that though I don’t appear to be a very successful heterosexual, I am clearly not gay.

What those people could not understand was why anyone would risk their career, their reputation, and in some instances, their safety, to advocate for an oppressed minority of which I was not a part. The ability to feel empathy, to show compassion, is what defines what it is to have a spiritual life.

I think that perspective can be learned but it isn’t easy and it doesn’t happen quickly. I am afraid that it can be unlearned too. I think that cynicism can paralyze a formerly generous heart. I think that people can take enough beatings in the public forum that they can retreat into self-interest and public indifference. It is up to us to try to keep that from happening either to ourselves or in our community.

Niebuhr also claimed that:  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. I’ve raised the money for and chaired 14 Habitat for Humanity projects. 14 families in Springfield now live in homes of their own, all now entirely paid for and owned by the occupants. I am proud of that but it wasn’t all my money that built them and it sure wasn’t my construction skills. Other than a little insulation work and painting, it was a whole community of compassionate people who built those houses.

I chaired a drive to build 200 houses for the rural poor in Nicaragua. A picture of a hillside in Matagalpa covered in those little houses sits at the foot of my bed and that effort continues to be my greatest source of pride in my ministry but I only paid for one of those houses. I mixed some mortar and carried some concrete blocks up a mountainside but I was just one among many who sacrificed and got those houses built.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.

My single greatest complaint about liberals is that we have a hard time ever sticking together long enough to get anything done. As long as management can keep their workforce fighting with each other, there will never be a strong union. As long as the rich can keep poor whites fighting with poor blacks and poor Latinos, no one ever looks up to see who is really turning the crank on the organ grinder. And as long as progressive religious folk keep dissecting one another in petty ego battles then monstrous prejudices and greed that has ushered in the most dangerous government ever seen in this republic will continue to rule.

But they didn’t get my vote and they won’t get my surrender either and I hope that they won’t get yours. Together we can eventually change the world, as long as we can realize that it isn’t all about us.

Fear is a Villain

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Jan. 8, 2017   Community Christian Church       Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor 

“Fear is a Villain”      

“Fear is a Villain” by Theo Bard

What drives a man to lock his doors and bar his windows tight

To leave his lights on timers so his house appears so bright

A ten foot fence around his door and cameras on the wall?

A fortress so secure that he can hardly get in at all?

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

We’ll sing a song for beauty, sing a song for me

Sing a song for flowers in bloom and snow upon a tree

Sing a song for those who don’t see beauty but see a shame

The beauty shall be end and ashes will remain

What drives a man to jealousy to beat his loving wife

What drives a man to hatred to take another’s life?

What drives a man to spend his life regretting chances lost

For when a man has lost his chance what man can count the cost?

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

I’ll fight the man that turns on me if I must fight or die

I will fight for justice against laws I can’t abide

I’ll try to fight with courage, to always give my best

Though I must fight the fear itself that grows inside my breast

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

Well people talk of weapons with threats to life and limb

They blame different types of demons for the state that we are in

But fighting is fear’s firstborn son, it’s what the fear is for

It just undermines you people’s trust so you can start a war

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

During his lifetime, many people in the world were comfortable in the conviction that Albert Einstein was the smartest person in the world. I don’t know if it was possibly some false humility or, more likely, that the exchange is apocryphal, but there is at least a story that says that when he was asked what it felt like to be the smartest person in alive, he is said to have replied, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Nikola Tesla about that.”

But since both Tesla and Einstein are no longer with us, let me ask you, who do you believe to be the smartest person alive today? In all fields, science, politics, religion, philosophy… is there someone who stands out in your mind as being at the top of the pile?

I am a big fan of John Spong but I don’t thing he is the smartest religious scholar alive today. I would have to hand that distinction to Karen Armstrong, but that being said, Spong is a lot easier to read! In the same vein, I am a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson because he makes science exciting and accessible but I doubt that he is the smartest scientist in the world. That distinction probably belongs to Stephen Hawking, or maybe even the impossibly young British physicist, Brian Cox.

But, not to drag this out too long, in my opinion, the smartest person alive today is the MIT emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy, Noam Chomsky. He is not a bubbly public speaker and he doesn’t try very hard to be easy to understand but he is one of the few people in the world that you are basically impugning your own intellect if you disagree with him.

Last month Chomsky spoke to a packed house in New York’s famous Riverside Church, reflecting on the meaning and the implications of the election of Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States. And when one of the most intelligent people in the world is speaking about one of the most confounding yet vitally important events in modern history, it behooves us to pay attention.

I’m not going to lie to you, most of what he had to say was rather dire. Chomsky is the sort of person who, as my friend Dan Goodwin likes to say, will tell you exactly how the cow ate the cabbage. I’m going to talk more about this speech one Sunday next month but for now let me just say that Chomsky is deeply concerned about two issues that could lead to the end of the human race. One is global climate change, made many times more important by the cascade of cabinet appointments in the Trump administration of climate denying, and science denying who clearly intend to accelerate the very activities that are making our planet uninhabitable to our species.

Chomsky very clearly says that Donald Trump wants us to march toward the destruction of the species.  That doesn’t feel good to say but we need to be clear about what is at stake over the next few years.

His other concern is about the very real threat of a renewed nuclear arms race with a narcissistic and clearly incompetent president in possession of the nuclear launch codes. My own muscle memory of the bad old days of the Cold War almost refuses to acknowledge, once again, the prospect of a nuclear war, but

Chomsky, and a number of professionals in the field, fear that it is more like than it ever has been before. I don’t want to believe that this could possibly be true but this is why I am quoting one of the smartest people in the world who clearly believes that it is true and we would be foolish to not take his warning seriously.

Now, any sane person who is taking either me or Chomsky seriously at this moment has plenty of reason to be in fear. That fear is what I really want to talk about today.

I’m a big fan of the sadly nearly unknown British folk ballad singer, Theo Bard. I asked our musicians to sing one of his songs as our wisdom lesson today because I think that Bard captures a very important awareness in his poetry.

Why, he asks, do people choose to live behind 10 foot tall security walls, with bars on their windows, and cameras on their walls? Why does a suspicious man beat his wife?

And I could add, why do millions of Americans keep buying handguns when handguns are made exclusively for shooting other people? Please don’t act like there is a “sport” behind handguns. If you have an IQ higher than the cabbage the cow is eating, you know that handguns are for shooting people and the only reason to have one is because you are afraid.

Fear, Theo Bard sings, is a villain. It keeps you awake at night. It fills you with dread. And here I need to say something specifically to men, especially young men. Men, you have been told a lie about what it means to be a man. Men have been sold a myth that anger is a macho reaction to the world. It is not. The root of anger is fear. Anger isn’t macho, it is the opposite of being a brave and strong man. Anger is almost always just cowardice fueled by the adrenaline of the fight or flight fear response all mammals share with rabbits and squirrels.

The next time you feel the need to abuse the woman in your life, or beat your own kids, or buy a new gun, let me suggest that you try growing a pair and just stop being such a coward. Try being a man.

Fear is a villain that robs us of our ability to think with maturity, clarity, and reason.

Fear erodes our social skills and divides families and races and communities. Fear is what makes us react negatively to people who speak a different language, who love differently, or who act differently. Have you noticed how every time the police shoot someone around here that our media says that the victim had mental health issues? And when there is yet another mass shooting like there was in Florida on Friday, the media immediately scours the horizon to find someone to say he had mental health issues.

Give me fifteen minutes to question anyone and I can come up with a defensible diagnosis of some kind of mental health issue. People who have mental health issues are not “other” than us, they are us. And frankly, if you own a gun, you are 90% of the way to a solid diagnosis right there so why do we still sell these lethal weapons to clearly unstable people? And by “unstable people” I mean, ALL OF US!

Let me close today with some comforting observations. Although Chomsky’s December address contained such dire warnings as I have described, he also cautioned his audience against giving up. We have come to a pretty dangerous place in American politics but it isn’t like we have collectively chosen a right wing dictator.

The majority of votes cast in our presidential election, a majority counted in millions of votes, were not cast for Donald Trump. Our nation has not collectively lost its mind. And, though Chomsky, like many of us, was deeply saddened by the failure of the party to seize a once in a lifetime chance at substantive change in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, still, if the election were decided purely by voters under the age of 40, Bernie would have won the nomination and the general election.

Older voters were not willing to go that far in the direction of democratic socialism but the people who will run this country when my generation has been laid to rest are not so afraid of real progress. If we can keep from either blowing the planet up or irreversibly poisoning it in the immediate future, if we can just give the next generation a chance, they may be the America we have dreamed of being.

Standing Rock, Dec. 29, 2016

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Winter in North Dakota is, at best, harsh, and Christmas week it has been literally life threatening. Driving into a blizzard is an experience worthy of having your life insurance canceled and even when the snow dies down, the wind blows a shallow river of snow over highways disguising the layer of glistening ice on the road that makes use of your brakes either a hazard or an insult. In short, I am glad to be alive to write this report on the Standing Rock Sioux camp because prospects for surviving the trip were frequently dubious.

Representatives of many tribes of American Indians have joined the Sioux who remain in the three protest camps at the site of the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. I even met indigenous peoples from Norway and Palestinians who have come to join the cause to protect the water. The stated intent of the camp is to both welcome all who wish to come and to run the camp based on shared community leadership. This is both a wonderful opportunity to build a diverse and inclusive community around the cause of protecting water and First Nation sovereignty but it is also an opportunity for criminals and predators who have created serious security concerns. Looting is common and sexual assault allegations seem to be credible.

Some homeless, unemployed, and impoverished people have shown up and attempted to place themselves in the care of the camp community but there are also many professionals who have put their medical, counseling, construction, or catering careers on hold while they come to volunteer their skills to support the camp. Because the camp hopes to foster a constant environment of prayer, sacred fires are tended in careful observance of Sioux tradition; ritual smudge pots and ceremonial use of lavender and tobacco are ever-present. Of course, the open nature of the camp also draws every sort of eccentric who hopes to present their various herbal, massage, and “snake oil” products and practices as being somehow connected to Native American spirituality. It seems like almost everyone you meet has a grand story to tell about how they know how to cure cancer or tan deer hides. Having been a left-of-center pastor for three decades, I know what it is like to draw both deeply thoughtful social reformers and colorful quacks into community but the Oceti camp seems to draw even more extreme examples of both sorts into this deeply frozen camp populated with thieves and saints.

Like Moses, Chase Iron Eyes, seems to have inherited the task of organizing this band of water protectors gathered in the wilderness to make sure that everyone is safe, and has access to environmentally sensitive toilets and shelter, along with food, medical care, and water. Iron Eyes is a lawyer who recently mounted an unsuccessful bid for a North Dakota seat in the US Congress. He is a product of the reservation who clearly articulates the need for a revival of First Nation pride to help his people regain their immediate claims to sovereignty and to break out of more than a century of enforced poverty. I am convinced that Chase Iron Eyes is the most patient and sincere person that I have ever met. With both humility and evident wisdom, he shows selfless leadership while be surrounded by people demanding attention and resources. I encourage you to watch some of the video interviews with him on LastRealIndians.com and you may see the early development of this century’s Martin Luther King, Jr.

The camp, though largely a freewheeling place, has strict rules against bringing any weapons into the camp or having alcohol in you or in your possession, a tall order for a society noted for both hunting and a haunting problem with alcoholism. They insist upon non-violent resistance to the construction of the pipeline even in the face of inexcusable violence on the part of DAPL security and local sheriff’s deputies.

At present, the Obama administration has brought construction of the pipeline to a halt and Mother Nature is doing her part to enforce the ban by making any further progress on the pipeline virtually impossible. But the inauguration of Donald Trump and the inevitable return of spring will almost certainly reignite the confrontation between the water protectors and the Dakota Access Pipeline construction company. The astonishingly resilient volunteers keeping the camp open and running have the shared goal of making certain that they can welcome thousands of more protestors when they are needed.