“Nevertheless, She Persisted”     Lent 1           March 5, 2017  

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor     

click here to see the video

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7   ¹⁵The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. ¹⁶And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; ¹⁷but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

3Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” ²The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; ³but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’“ ⁴But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; ⁵for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

⁶So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. ⁷Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

It seems strange to say but I feel the need to categorically assert that I have had no contact with any representative of the Russian government either during last year’s election or before. And further, I will not recuse myself from being appoint as a special prosecutor in this investigation of Russian hacking in the 2016 election because I might be the last person in North America who has not had contact with a Russian spy, diplomat, or representative in the last year!

I do have occasional Face Book conversations with one of our listeners who is Russian but I can assure that that Mikhail Lapyansy is a Russian Jew who lives and teaches in Queens specifically because he does not want to have contact with the Russian spies that seem to be so much a part of the Trump administration’s “friends” list.

For a country that has an economy no bigger than that of Italy, the frequency with which we hear of connections between Russia and the Trump administration is difficult to understand.

One of Trump’s first foreign policy hires was a young oil industry executive, Carter Page, who made his chops speaking in Russia against American Cold War tactics of economic sanctions and calling for a more cooperative relationship between Russia and the USA. He has lately been seen stumbling over his tongue trying to act like his many contacts with Russian operatives during the election were purely friendly matters.

Early last year, Trump brought Paul Manafort whose most recent campaign experience was his work as a consultant to former President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, a Russian puppet.

By August, Manafort is forced to resign after the New York Times breaks a story about $12 million dollars in cash being given to Manafort from a political party in the Ukraine.

And you all remember what happened when Mike Flynn was appointed to be Trump’s National Security Advisor and it was discovered that he had lied about having contact with, you guessed it, Russian officials.

And, of course, unless you have been hiding in a cave for the last few days, we have the nearly constant buzz about the fact that our chief law enforcement officer, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, swore under oath, “I declare that I have had no contact with Russian representatives,” when, in fact, he had them in his office, texted with them, called the, and met with them at the RNC. For all I know, he is renting out his spare bedroom to a Russian spy through Air BnB.

Our 45^th president keeps telling us that he doesn’t know anyone from his administration that had meetings with the Russian Ambassador and yet the LA times just confirmed that Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, met with the Russians in December at Trump’s home in Trump Tower!

We keep nibbling around the edges with resignations, apologies, excuses and recusals but the elephant in the room, what everyone is wanting to talk about but are afraid to do so, is the apparent fact that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian operatives to leak materials critical of Hillary Clinton at just the right times to hurt her campaign and to swing voters towards Trump.

My personal speculation about this is that they had no serious hope that they could win and they were just pulling out all of the stops to keep from losing in an election day blood bath. If Trump had lost, no one would be looking into his and his staff’s contacts with Russians but now that he is the President of the United States, if this collusion is proven, he will almost certainly lead to a domino effect of impeachments and indictments and it is not too far of a stretch to use the word “treason” in this conversation.

The issue for me has nothing to do with perjury. The issue is not that they are all lying to the media and even lying under oath. The issue is, why were all of the Trump campaign and administration people talking to Russians in the first place? There is no plausible explanation for this behavior that can stand up to public scrutiny.

The news is happening so fast that it is hard to keep up with what should horrify us. Trump announced that he approved the XL Keystone pipeline project to proceed on the condition that the steel pipe be manufactured in the United States. Any guess where 40% of that pipeline is still coming from?  Russia. And to further protect oil and gas interests, Trump has ordered the gas fracking companies to stop measuring methane levels at their wells and he ordered the funding cut for our satellites that monitor global climate change. Folks, I suspect that most of you didn’t hear any of that in the news but you heard it in church….what does that mean about the state of our media?

I don’t want to trivialize such an important sequence of revelations but I currently have a $20 bet with Mark Rowland that both Trump and Pence will be impeached by the Ides of March next year. And, though I appreciate all of you who donate to this church that pays my salary, I can assure you that there is no one within the sound of my voice who wants to give me $20 as much as Mark Rowland does next March 15^th!  He doesn’t think it will happen but he really really really wants to lose this bet.

I’m not happy about this. I am not happy about seeing my country humiliated this way and I am really not happy about the fact that if Trump and Pence are impeached that Paul Ryan will become the 46^th president. As Joy Reed said this weekend, Ryan wants to repeal the 20^th century. He wants to replace public schools, Medicare, and social security with a handful of vouchers that amount to keeping the poor ignorant and making certain that they die young.

Replacing one authoritarian despot with another authoritarian despot is not progress. We knew on Nov. 8^th that we were going to have a hard time for the next few years but as cynical as I was about what Trump would really do, I terribly underestimated how insanely destructive he really would be. What sounded like red meat for his low information base turns out to be his actual plans for governing which means that he is actually as crazy as his rhetoric sounded.

But I have seen one silver lining in all of this and that is not a small thing. We had a scripture reading this morning. A highly symbolic story about what Catholics called “the fall” when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. There is a lot going on in this ancient Hebrew narrative but I want to make only one observation about it:  The thinker in this narrative, the one with speaking lines, the one who made decisions, was the woman.

It is not a true story…. After all, there is a talking snake in this narrative and if you take that literally you are probably in the wrong church right now. But what was the temptation the snake presented? It was wisdom. The woman chose to risk disobeying God, she gave up the blissful life of basically being a cow in a feedlot, in order to be awakened, to be aware, to be wise.

Adam has no speaking parts here, he is involved but he evidently just lumbered up and said, “What’s for dinner?” Honestly, I think that a woman wrote this narrative and maybe one day when the world is not on fire I’ll take the time to talk about interesting nuances of scripture again but don’t hold your breath. 

The election of this misogynistic president at least has awakened the social consciousness of this generation’s wise women. In spite of the lies told about the crowds, the people who came out for the inauguration were very small by comparison to the inaugurations of Barak Obama. But the women’s march the next day… that was, to quote my favorite Vermont senator, “huge!” And the crowd in Washington was nothing compared to the women’s marches in cities all over America and, in fact, all over the world.

We even had a big march here in Springfield. I was speaking in Florida that week and I got to attend the march in Sarasota and the energy was electric!

The evidence for how awake the wise women of this moment have become was seen when my favorite Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, was trying to very rationally read into the record an important piece of testimony regarding the character of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions from the late Coretta Scott King, and the least popular senator in America, Mitch McConnell, raised an objection and told her to take her seat.

Mitch explained, “She had been warned….” Did you like the litany I wrote for today? They warned Rosa Parks…. They warned Sojourner Truth…. They warned Dorothy Day….nevertheless….

Mitch said about Elizabeth Warren, “She had been warned…nevertheless, she persisted.” Mitch has all of the perceptive forethought of a kid who decided to hit a hornets’ nest with a baseball bat. I will issue this plea this morning to all of my listeners in Kentucky: please get me into some pulpits in Kentucky when Mitch is running for re-election.

Don’t worry about paying me. I will pay you for the privilege.  

Like a lot of other people, I had hoped to get to vote for Warren last fall and I am afraid that she will be a bit too long in the tooth to make a run in 2020 but folks, we must not be lured into the trap of waiting for a savior to rise up and save us from the ravages of the current administration.

It is not Hillary Clinton, or Elizabeth Warren, it is not even Hawaii Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard though I have to tell you I have high hopes for her. There is no messiah in the 21^st century who will rescue us. It will take the three million women and men who showed up for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the nearly one million who marched the same day in Los Angeles, the thousands I marched with in Sarasota, and the hundreds who marched here in Springfield. It will take all of you who chose to take a bite of the fruit of wisdom rather than to sit back and complacently hope that things turn out better in the future.

You have all been warned… nevertheless, the future is counting on you to persist. I am naive enough to believe in you.  

“Eulogy or Easter for the EPA?”        
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February 26, 2017   

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO                                      Dr. Roger Ray, pastor           

Noam Chomsky speaking on Democracy Now, December 5, 2016:

 The threats and dangers are very real. There are plenty of opportunities. And as we face them, again, particularly the younger people among you, we should never overlook the fact that the threats that we now face are the most severe that have ever arisen in human history. They are literal threats to survival: nuclear war, environmental catastrophe. These are very urgent concerns. They cannot be delayed. They became more urgent on November 8th, for the reasons you know and that I mentioned. They have to be faced directly, and soon, if the human experiment is not to prove to be a disastrous failure.

There are 52 Sundays a year and I am speaking either here or somewhere 51 of those Sundays except for the years when it has been 52. I’ll probably make it 52 more often if I can find a church in a tropical scuba diving location that will invite me to speak once a year.

I keep that schedule not simply because, as my former spouse like to say, “I believe that the whole world has a right to my opinion,” but because I have a lot that I believe needs to be said on a whole host of social justice situations in the world. And, as has been true for most comedians in the world, Donald Trump is supplying me with an endless amount of material to address.  I have no confidence in his claim that he is going to make America great again but you have to admit, he has made Saturday Night Live great again.          

We have never tried to create a topical index to my sermons and that would be a great project for some enthusiastic volunteer to take on but I probably come pretty close to hitting 40 different topics in every fifty sermons.

One of the people whose work I really admire and who I am glad to think of as a friend in this effort to create progressive religious content is Michael Dowd, the author of Thank God for Evolution.  Michael’s wife, Connie, is a both a scientist and a kind of organizer and manager for Michael. Years ago, the two of them decided to give up on settled careers or even home ownership and they have devoted themselves to working on a single topic, the environment.

They travel all over, speaking, doing research, and organizing events to promote environmental awareness and to try to shift our society’s priorities and practices towards a more sane and sustainable relationship with the earth.  It is not that he is indifferent about the problems of poverty, racism, gender discrimination, addiction, domestic violence, or the prospects of international warfare but they have decided that they are going to do one thing and one thing only.

Michael is a fireball of energy and he will regularly call, sometimes at very inappropriately late hours of the night, asking me to review a series of lectures, videos, or articles he is set to release. Peer review is important and a sadly overlooked step among a lot of religious writers, and I’ll confess that reviewing Michael’s materials has been very educational for me. I am always enriched by getting to see what he is working on, of course, Michael, if you are listening, if you would get it to me a couple weeks before you need to publish it, I would find that to be much more helpful. But for Michael, the world is almost literally on fire, As Chomsky noted in his December address.

Our environment is at a tipping point and dramatic action is needed, right now. Even if the human race suddenly ceased to exist, if the burning of oil and coal stopped right now, the oceans would continue to rise over the next 200 years by as much as 25 to 40 feet.

You might wonder why he and Connie don’t just strike off on a Al Gore styled education mission but for Michael this is distinctly a spiritual issue. He wears a green clergy shirt with the white collar when he speaks in churches now and he bills himself as an environmental evangelist.

One of the things I have come to see from my interactions with him is that traditional religion has been a part of the problem and it is difficult to see that people will change their relationship to the earth until they are able to change their religious perspective.

While you find some suggestions of reverence for the earth in the major western religions, most of what you see is fear of nature and a need to dominate it. The forms of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism that push relevance off into a transcendent other-world after-life diminish and undermine the importance of this world and this life.

Progressive religious thinkers are increasingly willing to stress evidence based faith rather than maintaining fealty to ancient pre-science texts and belief systems. We are in a position to change the way that religious people view and treat the earth but, and here is the really hard thing, this is the most complex and difficult problem we face. And because it is complex and doing anything about it is almost impossible on an individual level, people lose interest quickly…. Climate change is boring and therefore it is ignored.

As I have heard Michael say, “I drove here in a car tonight to tell you how wrong it is to drive cars.”  One of the most frustrating things to me about religious people is that we are so often satisfied with symbolic gestures.

Religious people will drop to their knees and pray about things when we need to be praying with our feet and hands. We light candles and obsess about changing our language when real action is called for.

People of conscience will keep their thermostats a little lower in the winter and a little higher in the summer when we need to be putting solar panels and wind turbines up everywhere. We will recycle our plastics, aluminum, and paper when anyone who thinks about it for a moment can easily see that the process of sending big trucks through neighborhoods picking up old newspapers and milk cartons does much more environmental damage than just throwing those things away.

We should stop using crude oil to make plastics and cutting down forests to make paper when we can replace both products with hemp, which is cheaper, sustainable, and biodegradable. We just have to get some pig-headed politicians to understand that growing hemp is not tantamount to legalizing marijuana … although we should do that too.

We keep debating fuel efficiency when we just need to stop using gas for fuel in our cars. The nation of Israel tried a very noble experiment in the past decade in which they proposed to replace all of their gas burning cars with electric cars. They overcame the limited battery life problem by designing cars with drop out battery packs. When you were getting low on electricity, you pull into a battery exchange station; they drop out the depleted battery pack and pop in a charged one. 

One day soon, battery technology will be much better, but even with existing technology, this system could work. It failed, as many environmental efforts do, because people were not ready to invest in change, even for a better future for themselves.

The free market does not always work, especially when it comes to sacrificing profits for long range environmental accomplishment. This is what we are facing now with our much too business friendly President who has appointed Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, to be the director of the EPA. There have been few people in America who have hated the EPA more than oil friendly Scott Pruitt and he has been appointed to pull the teeth of the agency to allow coal, oil, and gas businesses to accelerate their destruction of the planet, all in the name of profit.

We saw the coming shift in values clearly portrayed in the Trump administration’s quick approval of the Dakota Transfer Pipeline’s plan to put a crude oil pipeline under the Missouri River on Standing Rock Sioux land. I had predicted that this would happen but it is happening purely for immediate economic gain. The pipeline will eventually leak because that is what pipelines do. There have been more than 800,000 gallons of oil leaked just in North Dakota over the past five years. It is what pipelines do. But we are placing a major source of agricultural and drinking water in America at risk for short-term profit.

Native American spirituality tends to talk about a seven-generation perspective.

Even though their primitive technology did not pose anything like the risk of our industrialized era, they knew to treat nature in a way that preserved it for those who would come long after we are dead. The images of the remaining water protectors being removed from the Standing Rock camp at gun point this week speaks to what is truly sick about our current view of such basic things as land, water, and air. Dozens of this generations most valued spiritual leaders now face up to five years in prison for simply slowing down the construction of this stupid, stupid, pipe-line.

We must not be demoralized or defeated by this absurd abuse of the earth. And, folks, we must not placate ourselves with symbolic gestures. We feed the poor every week, for years we fed the unsheltered homeless at Bill’s Place and now we are taking meals to the victims of domestic abuse at Harmony House. But I want you to hear me say this very clearly: charity is not the solution to poverty. Charity is a spiritual practice that helps us to deepen our awareness and commitment to compassion but it is not a solution to anything. We have to change the system that creates so much poverty.

There is no justifiable reason in the 21^st century for there to be either hunger or homelessness. The problem, as Dorothy Day said, is our acceptance of a stinking rotten economic system. When we make meals for battered women and frightened children, we have not solved the problem, we have just become more aware of how much we need to change our society. 

We should be careful about our own carbon footprint. We should try to use less fuel and we should be conscientious about recycling, shopping for locally produced goods and foods.

But such things are symbolic. They are teaching tools but this is not the solution to the problem. The solutions to the big problems are right in front of us. We can move cargo off of our interstates and onto our railways. We can rebuild our mass-transit system. We can mandate a switch from gas powered to electric cars. We can generate all of the power this country needs through wind and solar if we just decide to do it.

I believe that the technology for renewable energy will improve but it won’t improve much until we commit to using it. As long as the market place makes our decisions for us we’ll keep cutting down our forests, burning coal and oil, we will continue to pollute our rivers, foul our air, and spoil our land.

I am not ready to write a eulogy for the earth or to give up on the future of the human race. I want the great, great grandchildren I will not live to see to have clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet in which to live. It is time for a resurrection in our world…. Not a resurrection to eternal life in heaven but a resurrection of a sane faith that knows that water is worth more than profit, and air is not for sale. I am begging you not to either give up or to be satisfied with symbolic gestures. What we need now is a revolution and we must not be satisfied with anything less.

“A View of Romance from a Non-Combatant”    Feb. 12, 2017   
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO      Roger Ray, pastor    

 click here to see the video 

I will not likely make a habit of coming to the defense of U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, but when she was being derided in the media this week for her mention of a “Bowling Green Massacre” I was carried back to my own time in Bowling Green, KY. I started college there in 1974 and I feel that it is not entirely fair to say that there never was a Bowling Green Massacre.

That fall was the first time in my life that I was allowed to move away from my too tiny Kentucky hometown where the zip code is still “E-I-E-I-O.” There, at Western Kentucky University, I met and fell madly in love with the most exotic  and amazing international student…. We’ll call her “Gloria”…since her name is Gloria. The Bowling Green Massacre occurred a few months later when Gloria abruptly broke up with me and soon thereafter married our Sunday School teacher, David.

Some of you will be thinking now that this unfortunate teenaged broken heart episode does not rise to the nomenclature of “massacre” and to you I can only say, “You were not there.” The wound found some balm a few years later when Gloria divorced David to marry her girlfriend. The existential angst created by the obsessive question, “Why didn’t Gloria love me?” became much less pointed when I realized that she didn’t really love any men. That made the whole massacre much less personal.

Perhaps I should add, at this point, Kellyanne Conway is still nuts.

Now, more than 40 years later, I find myself on the eve of another Valentine’s Day just as single as I was in 1974. I’ve been married and during the past 20 years that I have been single, I’ve had a couple of close brushes with the prospect of trying it again.  Samuel Johnson once observed on the occasion of the marriage of a widowed friend of his, that to marry a second time is a sign of the triumph of hope over experience.

Like many others, I have, more than once, foolishly tried to avoid the stigma of being alone on Valentine’s Day by trying to cobble together a last minute and ill-conceived dinner date but not this year. To save local singles from this fate, the Mother’s Brewing Company is offering a deal where, for the price of admission, you can spend Valentine’s Day at the brewery drinking as much as you can hold and then being sent home in an Uber. I’m not saying that I am going to go there, I’m just saying that it is none of your business if I am.

Last week I was talking about the rapid evolution of our social connections through the various technologies and social platforms of our modern life. The ancient structure of the time-honored institution of “romance” has been, perhaps, influenced more than most.

I’ve spent 25 years advocating for the rights of gay people to get married, and now that we have finally cleared that seemingly impossible social hurdle, the whole topic of marriage seems to have fallen out of vogue. Once considered to be nearly the compulsory goal of adult life, fewer than half of Americans are married today.

When our society was largely agrarian and life-expectancy was considerably shorter, marriage and having children was simply a part of the formula for survival. As our population has become more urban, and with the advent of more fair compensation for women, more career options, and with the arrival of reliable birth control, marriage is no longer deemed to be crucial to women. As Gloria Steinman said years ago, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Being married, or even being in a couple, is no longer an economic necessity and it isn’t even necessary to have or raise children. Now that being in a long-term committed relationship is no longer necessary, to enter into a romantic partnership is a matter of elective choice and more and more people are just choosing to “Netflicks and chill” by actually just watching a movie and relaxing.

The famous author and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, once said that without the initial lust of sexual attraction that no couple would ever be able to give up enough of their freedom to get married. In the absence of the moral strictures that once tightly governed intimacy, couples now have to find a larger reason to stay together.

Of course, we would like to think that reason is true love. And I expect that my email inbox will fill up in response to my saying it, but I don’t think that true love is enough either. I think that something more is needed. I think that coupling in our age calls for a certain depth of meaning, a partnership that makes one and one add up to something more than just two.

Springfield’s own Brad Pitt has now divorced two of the most beautiful women the world has ever known. Clearly, mere attraction is temporary even in the most extreme examples. In any relationship, the cute little curiosities that first attracted you to your partner become annoying and after a couple of decades, those same eccentricities can become reason for justifiable homicide.

My favorite joke about a rabbi, a priest, and a minister goes like this: The three were debating when life begins. The priest, predictably, was admant in insisting that life began at conception. The minister, a more progressive chap, insisted that life begins only when a baby is viable outside of the mother’s womb. Unable to persuade one another to budge in their opinions, they turned to the rabbi and asked him what he believed on the matter.

The wise old rabbi said, “You are both wrong. Life really begins when the kids are out of college and the dog dies.” Of course, my kid is out of college and I don’t have a dog and, in a lot of ways, you can say that I have a very enviable life. I don’t have anyone who is dependent on me to either provide them with a home, medical care, and I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission or consent about where I go on vacation or what I’m going to have for dinner. And I have a few very close friends with whom I go scuba diving and more regularly, just how to hear a live band or take in a movie.

But I will I remember the first time that I got to go to the British Museum in London. The British Museum is a tribute to that incredible period of archaeology when British scholars traveled all over the world and stole every amazing then they could find.

The wonders of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Middle East are all housed under one roof in London where the British government continues to turn a deaf ear to the nations that demand that their treasures be returned. I have made it a point to return there every time I have the good fortune to get to go to London but I will tell you, standing in front of these wonders of history, as wonderful is that is, can be hollow when you don’t have someone standing beside you to whom you might turn and say, “would you look at that?”

I’m a pretty good cook, I can take care of my own lawn, laundry, and I can pay my own bills and I have a lot of freedom but I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that there is a certain existential void when you do not have a significant other with whom to share the triumphs and wonders of living.

The ancient witness from the 21^st chapter of Proverbs says that, “It is better to live on the corner of a roof than to dwell in a mansion with a contentious and angry woman.” Of course, there is also the more modern proverb quoted by women that says, “The more I know about men the better I like my dog.”

I titled this sermon, “A perspective on romance from a non-combatant.” After more than 20 years as a single guy, I view romance from a fairly philosophical vantage point. I spend part of every week serving food to the women and children who live in our local domestic violence shelter and after a career full of pastoral counseling with couples whose marriage had become toxic, I know how bad a love relationship can become.

But I also know that there is not a straight line from the altar where two peopled pledge to love and respect one another for the rest of their lives to the night when they call the police to break up the fight. There are, what I call the “5 horsemen of the marriage apocalypse.” Economic stress can kill a marriage. Differences of opinion about child rearing can become toxic. And, of course, there is drug and alcohol abuse or related obsessions of smoking, gambling, hoarding, or compulsive shopping. There is infidelity, and finally there is physical violence.

I have had my share of all of those cases in the pastor’s study through the years but those are the obvious ones. There are more subtle poisons that take people to see their lawyers. The more quiet and insidious assassins are taking one another for granted. You can starve love with neglect. You can steal the oxygen out of a relationship by giving the time and emotional energy it needs to survive and give it to work, hobbies, and all of the things that we use to put distance between ourselves and our loved ones.

These don’t happen all at once but no one should pretend that they don’t know what path they are following. You don’t just wake up one day and find yourself on the east coast…. You have to drive and drive and drive in that direction and if you invest yourself, your time, your energy in constantly going east while your family is here in Missouri then you cannot believably just say, “we grew apart.” When you stopped for gas and then got on the road and kept going east, you knew what you were doing.

Look: We don’t have to be in a couple anymore. You can be happy and lead a meaningful life as a single person but we all know that is probably not anyone’s first choice.

If you are fortunate enough to share space with someone who is willing to try to make life work with you, and you know how difficult you can be, then do what you can to feed that relationship. You know what can poison it and you know what can make it strong. You are not the victim of random events in your life. Your life is the sum total of your choices.

I will leave you with the sage advice found in my favorite Langston Hughes poem:

“Folks, I'm telling you,

birthing is hard

and dying is mean-

so get yourself

a little loving

in between.”

 

“Just the Facts, Ma’am”   Feb. 5, 2017   Community Christian  Church

Roger Ray, pastor            

click here to see the video 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, “Lincoln and Free Speech”

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else.

A sign posted prominently in a neighborhood bar read, “No Wifi, Talk to each other and get drunk.” It is an old fashioned idea and one that we would do well to remember when we are meeting friends for dinner or going out to hear music. We are now so attached to our technology that it is not uncommon to see a group of friends sitting at a table in public, not interacting with one another but instead, they are sitting in close proximity to one another but texting, snapchatting, or face booking with friends scattered all over the globe.

A few years ago, a California news station had a helicopter following a 600 lbs black bear that was wandering through a neighborhood and they captured video of a man who ran into the bear because he was staring at his phone and texting while he walked.  I wouldn’t wish that encounter on anyone but sometimes the real world really has to forcefully break into our cyber-world.

We have, in fact, become so disconnected from reality and so locked into interfacing with our technology that there is now a sub-discipline within the field of anthropology called “cyborg anthropology.” Not that we are becoming RoboCop or the Terminator, but we are cyborgs whenever we made a digital or mechanical device a part of how we relate to the world.

When I go scuba diving, I put on a mask to be able to see clearly underwater, like a fish. I put on fins to be able to glide through the water, like a fish. I wear a regulator and air tank to breath under water like a fish. And I wear a bc vest with weights that allow me to balance my depth under water…. So for an hour at a time, with cyborg equipment added to my body, I am a fish, living in a universe that is entirely different from the world above the ocean.

Through our technology, many of us check out from the world of reality and enter a universe that is partially real and partially imaginary. Many of us are so locked into our televisions, computers, smart phones, and digitally integrated cars and houses that we spend more time starring into a screen than we spend doing anything else, including sleeping.

I was an early adopter of most of these technological innovations. I gladly made the switch from an electric typewriter to one of the first personal computers because I was in grad school and for me, simply being able to correct my papers on screen without having to re-type my papers over and over was a huge gift.

But while my first computer was little more than a smart typewriter, once you abandon the mechanical for the digital, it is like falling into the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. You enter a whole new universe.

Very quickly, my paper calendar day runner, became a Palm Pilot. My land line was supplemented by a pager and a car phone, then a cell, phone, then a smart phone that eventually completely replaced both paper and digital calendars, and the home phone, the camera, my GPS, and, to a large degree, the need to remember anything from my daughter’s birthday to the phone numbers of my closest friends.

The sociological changes that came with these technological advances were never anticipated, predicted, or even much thought about until it was too late to avoid them. How we communicate with one another and the larger world has totally transformed in the last decade.

When I was in grad school studying pastoral counseling, we spent a lot of our time learning how to help families in conflict to work out their problems and to save their marriages. We realized that couples would speak much more kindly to one another if they were sitting side by side than if they were, for example, sitting on opposite sides of a table from one another.

Proximity and physical contact, help us to keep our anger in check and to be less inclined to exaggerate or use harsh language. If, however, serious conversations were conducted by telephone, they almost always got more heated and less rational quickly. But our new technology of e-mail, texting and social media, adds even more layers of separation. It becomes almost as easy to curse and libel someone on Face Book as it is to cuss out the bad driver in front of you on the road who can’t hear you at all. In social media, you can say almost anything.

Most people can tell you about losing friends as soon as they opened a social media account because you find yourself drawn into vitriolic exchanges that, if you were having them sitting in someone’s living room, everyone would assume that you had entirely lost your mind!

Technology has turned us into watchers when we used to be readers. It has given us all a kind of ADD. A decade ago, we used to start the coffee, go get the newspaper out of the driveway, and spend 30 minutes to an hour, sipping coffee and reading the news. Now we say that we get our news online but for the most part, if the news is more complicated than a Face Book meme or the 140 characters in a tweet, then we quickly lose interest.

People who get all of their news by looking at the feed on their web browser and in scanning their Face Book crawl, will tell themselves that they are informed, informed enough to tell family members and former friends that they are stupid if they don’t agree with them.

We didn’t see these changes coming. This is not what we chose. But we have an increasingly uninformed population that is more vulnerable than ever to fake news and manipulative propaganda,…Fox News readers speak in such condescending tones that it gives the people who made Cs and Ds in school the false confidence to assume that the people who made As and Bs are somehow intellectually inferior. It gives the uneducated the assurance that the educated are simply elites who actually know nothing.

And then, to seek confirmation of their single sentence grasp of current events, they use the most pejorative language they can to demand that everyone they know agree with them. We don’t look deeply into the financial conflicts of Trump cabinet appointments; we just start calling them all Nazis.

Honestly folks, I make my living in a profession that is rife with exaggeration and apocryphal story telling but really, unless someone has set about murdering 6 million people in a modern holocaust then they are not a Nazi. Let’s save some of our vitriol in case we are going to need it later.

When my daughter was little, I never allowed her to use the word “hate” for things like homework, broccoli, or bedtime. I would tell her, “Honey, we really only hate Republican congressmen.” But when I found out that she was correcting her classmates with the same insistence that we really only hate Republican congressmen I had to tell her a little white lie and insist that we don’t even really hate Republican congressmen.

The election of Donald Trump to the office of the Presidency has thrown this whole cyber universe into overdrive. Our nation has suffered from serious partisan divide for a long time, it has progressively gotten worse over the past two decades and now social media and our cyber connections has poured gasoline onto the fire.

We are out of balance. We hurl the most absurdly exaggerated insults at those on the other side of the fence and we are seemingly incapable of being self-critical. When we started this church a few years ago, I naively hoped that a church created specifically to be a liberal-intellectual- and social justice oriented community would be free of the kind of ego-driven political battles I had seen in my 30 years as a Disciples pastor.

That wishful thinking was exploded over and over in our first two years with people coming and going from our community so fast that the ink never dried in our membership book. One large multi-family group left our church in our first months when I published an article that was critical of our troops for torturing prisoners of war. I asked the patriarch of the family, “Are you going to go to a pro-torture church?” And he said, “I’ll go to one where the pastor has the sense to not bring it up!”

Hardly a month later, when I criticized President Obama for appointing a Monsanto executive, Michael Taylor, to be in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, several members left the church because I had dared to criticize our new Democratic president. They didn’t like the fact that he had appointed a fox to guard the hen house, but they didn’t think that I should say anything critical of a Democrat. Look folks, is it hard to see that I am an equal opportunity offender?

Søren Kierkegaard said that we tend to be objective about others and subjective in our judgments of ourselves but intellectual honesty demands that we try to be subjective about other people but coldly, accurately, and fearlessly objective in assessing ourselves. We are liberals, but that cannot mean that we are uncritical of our own tribe while slandering all other tribes.

We began today with this wisdom lesson taken from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt. The media had taken a rough turn during his time and you can find examples of some mud slinging that would put some FaceBook trolls to shame. Roosevelt tried to speak a word of balance to the world in saying that we need to be honest and objective about our president. You don’t praise the president because you voted for him or her, or because she or he is a member of your party, but you don’t cut the president down just because he or she is from the other party.

To fail to be critical of a president when he or she is wrong is, as Roosevelt said, a failure to be patriotic. To fail to be acknowledge when president does something right, is to embrace dishonesty. Folks, I am certain that there is not a person in this room who voted for Donald Trump and I am reasonable sure that among our 15,000 internet listeners that we couldn’t find one in a thousand who voted for Trump. But Trump is not Hitler. He is not Stalin. He isn’t even Putin even if he lacks the critical thinking skills to see how Putin has played him.

We were on the losing side of this election and we will have a lot to do over the year or two that he stays in office, or if he is lucky, the full four years of his term to confront the xenophobia, homophobia, islamaphobia, and misogyny of his enthusiastic base. We have lost an election, but we do not have to lose in history. We have lost an election, but we must not lose our way. We lost at the ballot box, but we must not lose our souls.

We cannot meaningfully insulate ourselves from the hysteria of the 24 hour news commentators. We are not likely to avoid contact with social media, e-mail, or political slander; but we can choose to be better than all of it. I’ve been shocked, and angry, and itching for a fight, but I implore you to avoid burning bridges unnecessarily. Speak in ways to be heard and understood, not simply to make your point and leave your opponents bleeding. Persuade, educate, inspire, but don’t eviscerate, alienate, and reject people.

I will not be giving our new president a pass on any violation of public ethics but I invite you to not give me a pass if you ever hear me exaggerate the facts beyond reason or pass along false information. The way to fight against fake news is to be painstakingly honest. The way to avoid being a fawning fan of anyone is to be thorough enough to read beyond the headlines and to look for the more complicated truth that always lies beneath the surface of the too simple assumptions of gossip.

Let us be committed to the truth but if we must err at any point, let us err on the side of being generously loving, forgiving, and accepting. Trust me, if you have a friend left in the world it is because they have decided to be generously loving, forgiving and accepting of you and it is only right that you show them the same consideration.