“Choosing the Right Rather than Choosing the Winner”'

April 30, 2017   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor    

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 H. L. Menchen, Treatise on the Gods        

Their prayers always go up for kings, not for rebels and reformers. During the American Revolution, the priests of the established church were almost unanimously loyal to King George, and during the Civil War the clergy of the South remained faithful to the Southern economic system, and to slavery as a part of it. The great religious reformers have never preached the liberation of the masses. Luther, Calvin and John Wesley were all on the side of authority. The Catholic church is for it everywhere today, and more intransigent it is the better the church likes it. Thus the patriotism of a priest is hard to distinguish from the patriotism of a stockbroker. When he is found questioning the established order it usually develops, upon inquiry, that he is also questioning the tenets of his church, and is on his way to heresy.

After enduring nearly nine years of intense public scrutiny and totally unprecedented levels of vitriolic, racist, partisan and sometimes conspiracy theory driven criticism, as the Obama’s prepared to become the first black family in American history to leave public housing so that a white billionaire could move in, Michele Obama endeared herself to the nation by telling reporters that all during their growing up in the White House, she had told her daughters to hold their heads high and to not reply to the criticisms they were witnessing. She said, “When they go low, we go high.”

I trust that I am not alone here when I say that I miss the Obamas terribly. I miss their class, their confident and calm demeanor, and their ability to suffer indignity without reprisal. Good on them. And as a pastor, I can only applaud any examples of civility and respectful language in the midst of heated political discourse.

But I heard one feminist commentator say recently, “With all due respect to Michele Obama, I think that when they go low we need to grab a shovel and bury them.”   

The heated rhetoric of recent years, fueled by social media and right-wing talk radio, and given some credible substance in the 24-hour news channels that give more partisan red meat to their viewers than actual facts is a huge social problem. It makes voters demand virtual insanity out of their legislators which has given us a congress and a senate that is about as useful as giving a bicycle to a fish.

So, sure, civility is called for. We all need to reign in our rhetoric and try hard to speak the truth in love but what our wisdom lesson from H. L. Menchen’s, Treatise on the Gods, is pointing out is that the church, and I can probably very safely add, the synagogue and the mosque, have often chosen symbolic patriotism, civility, and loyalty over the truth. Organized religion may throw roses at the concept of speaking the truth in love but they are much more likely to get the love part right at the expense of the truth.

I certainly don’t agree with all of the conclusions Reza Aslan reached in his very popular book, Zealot, in which he describes the historical Jesus as being a radical, anti-empire, reformer, but I think we can safely agree with the basic premise that Jesus was not killed because he healed the sick, fed the hungry, and taught children to obey their parents, and neighbors to love one another.

If we can deduce anything from the historical clues left as echoes in the first century written accounts, Jesus was executed by the state because he challenged their moral authority, their violent control of the people, and their economic exploitation of the poor.

Please don’t get tired of hearing me say this because as I have been mapping out my sermons for the next three months, I realize that this is a fact that will be standing over a lot of what I plan to say…. In all of modern history, there has really been only one war and that a continuous one…. The war of haves against the have-nots.

And this may be painfully obvious but please give me a moment to spell this out clearly. You can tell the truth about the monetary motivations for modern warfare while still respecting the young men and women who serve in the military. Most recruits for the past 45 years were going into the military out of economic necessity. Low paying jobs and high college tuition drives the children of the poor into military service.

Once inducted, no one is more subjected to daily infusions of propaganda than are these soldiers. The high unemployment in their hometown and the lack of opportunity for higher education that drove them into uniform is driven from their heads as they are repeatedly told that they are answering a high calling of the defense of freedom. Vietnam didn’t threaten our freedom, Korea didn’t threaten our freedom, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Haiti, Panama, didn’t threaten our freedom. In each case we deployed the children of the poor to go kill the children of the poor in another nation to defend economic interests.

And please don’t try to change the subject to terrorism, if we were concerned about American safety we would outlaw handguns. Terrorists present much less danger to American’s lives than not getting the flu shot.

Again, let me be very clear:  I didn’t say that everyone who enters the military does so for economic reasons. I am sure that there are those who feel drawn to a career in the military for reasons of family heritage, to bolster a future political career, or out of genuine patriotism, but we have a saying in psychology – when you hear hoof beats you think horses and not zebras.

Most of the people we recruit into the military come from rural, poor, families and while their heroism and personal sacrifices are to be applauded, respected, honored, and compensated from health benefits and counseling to a decent retirement – we don’t have to pretend that they are in Afghanistan defending our freedom.

I’m going to come back to the topic of the government’s manipulation of the poor in military adventures over the next few weeks but for today I want to return to this observation that H. L. Menken made nearly a century ago…. That in matters of state, the established church is almost always on the side of power. During the Revolutionary War, most established churches supported the British king. During the Civil War, almost every southern church supported not only the military cause of the South but the institution of slavery as well.

Luther, Calvin, Wesley, all knew which side their bread was buttered on. Right up the later half of the last century, when some Catholic priests in Central and South America were finally siding with the poor in the Liberation Theology movement, most met their deaths with the approving nod of the Vatican itself.

And, frankly, for all the reasons we have to like current pope, if you want to continue to like him, you probably should probe too deeply into what he was doing during the round up of liberation priests in Argentina. There are wonderful exceptions but, in general, the Catholic Church has behaved just as Menken said, in service to whoever was in power.

None other than our nation’s own founding father, Thomas Jefferson, wrote: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own.”

We may tend to err on the other side, being always a tad eager to jump on the ethical failings of governments and corporations and it may be that we should accept a certain degree of criticism about how lovingly we articulate the truth…. There are, paradoxically, ways in which we can be so right that we become wrong.

But the one thing that the church, the synagogue, and the mosque must do in this present moment is to clearly and unapologetically tell the truth. Our good friend from the progressive movement in Great Britain, John Churcher stays in touch and just this week forwarded an article to me from a British newspaper that was saying basically what our Senator Elizabeth Warren was saying yesterday about the 100 day mark of the Trump administration.

Both listed the lies, the broken campaign promises, and the thus far failed legislative attempts to ban Muslims from entering our country, to end Obamacare with a huge tax give away to the super-wealthy, and this silly, one page tax reform proposal that would, at best, give hundreds of billions of dollars to the super wealthy and do nothing at all for 98% of wage earners in America. Mix that in with scandal after scandal in the West wing from dealings with Russian spies and conflicts of interest in the business world, and we cannot avoid saying that this is the most inept, corrupt, and dangerously flawed president in modern American history… but both Senator Warren and the Jonathan Freeland article from the Guardian that John sent to me said that the one good thing we can take from these first 100 days is the apparent fact that protest works.

The missteps of the Trump administration have mobilized opposition in ways that we have not lately witnessed in American history and that mobilization has shown itself to be effective in ways that we might not have dared to hope. Freeland concludes: Donald Trump is as bad as we feared: delusional, dangerous, dishonest. But there is another lesson from these 100 days. Even when faced with the greatest menace, resistance is not futile.

When we started this church in 2008 we hired a local fabric artist to make two banners for us that would at least be suggestive of stained glass windows that we would hang in the windowless conference room where we were meeting at the time. This one to my left, the winged lion, is taken from the familiar art depicting the gospel of Mark but rather than a quote from the Bible, we took as our motto a quote from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize speech in which he said that the ethics of the whole of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures could be summed up in a single phrase:  Thou shalt not stand idly by.

Wiesel said then that the holocaust only happened because people who knew better, who had a more sensitive and refined conscience, held their tongues and though hurt and horrified by what happened, said little and did nothing.

That is a mistake that we are resolved never to make again and though we started our church just months before Obama was elected, now, more than ever, our motto must be reaffirmed, we are resolved that we will never stand idly by and watch in silence and inaction in the presence of great social evil.

“Would You Kindly Turn Your Head While I Swallow My Spit?”

“Would You Kindly Turn Your Head While I Swallow My Spit?”

Easter 2    April 23, 2017   Community Christian Church          Roger Ray, pastor

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I Peter 1:17-23       ¹⁷If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. ¹⁸You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, ¹⁹but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. ²⁰He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. ²¹Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. ²²Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. ²³You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.  

I was in the fifth grade when I was given my first Bible. That was nearly 50 years ago, back in the days when public schools still allowed Gideon Society evangelists to come into classrooms to hand out Bibles and give little sermons. Because it was 50 years ago, what they gave us was a King James Version of the New Testament and the Psalms.

It was delivered with the story that Gideons have told in many versions for nearly a hundred years: A soldier carried his bible next to his heart inside of his jacket and one day when his troop was under enemy fire and soldiers why dying all around him, he was struck in the chest by a bullet but, thankfully, the bullet struck his little Gideon Bible and the bullet pierced the layers of paper to end like a molten lead finger pointing to Psalm 91:7, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”     

These grown men told groups of children stories like this to both frighten and indoctrinate them.

We were left to assume that the soldiers who failed to carry their New Testaments were killed…. And they probably wouldn’t have been killed if they had been more faithful. The Bible carried a certain magic with it that undergirded the claim that God had written it and that everything it said was true.

I am also quite fond of the story that Woody Allen told about the rough neighborhood where he grew up. To give him courage, his mother put a large rifle shell on a chain that he could wear as a necklace under his shirt. And, Allen said, one day it saved his life when a crazed Gideon threw a Bible right at him. It would have gone right through his heart if it had not been stopped by the bullet he was wearing under his shirt.

But the world in which many of us grew up was a world that assumed that the Bible was God’s word and we went to Sunday School for years trying to understand it. And several of us here went on to college to study it, paying intense attention to matters of translation, we even studied Greek and Hebrew, and Ancient Near Eastern history.

The more conservative among us tried every kind of logical gymnastics to make it all fit together, to explain how the more difficult and absurd parts of the Bible fit into some acceptable and divine whole. The more progressive were willing to focus on what we call a “cannon within the cannon.” That is, we focused on the more plausible, agreeable, and useful parts of the Bible and we interpreted everything else from the perspective of those favorite passages.

For decades, many of us put on what amounted to a Kellyanne Conway attitude and tried to insist that the Bible didn’t really say, that Paul didn’t really mean it, that these hard passages were taken out of context, or misunderstood. Look folks, the Bible praised Jephthah for sacrificing his daughter to fulfill a pledge. The Bible ordered the slaughter of the Midianites, and the stoning of folks for doing stuff that most of us have done more than once.

When we encountered a text like the one we read today from I Peter, a text that sums up the core of evangelical Christian witness saying that we have been saved from eternal damnation by the blood sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, many of us with more progressive leanings would try to say that substitutionary death is only one way to understand the life and death of Jesus and that the Bible offers us several alternative interpretations.

We would say that the scriptures speak in many different voices, from many perspectives, and so we try to push such ugly images to the side, and focus on what is more helpful, more relevant, more acceptable to our modern views. But what I was not willing to say for the first two decades that I was preaching and what I’m still waiting to hear from many of my peers, is that in very many cases the theology we encounter in the Bible is just wrong.

For many of us who grew up with a giant Bible sitting on a Olive wood stand on the coffee table in the living room and a Gideon New Testament in the hip pocket of our Levi’s, who went to Sunday School, and college Bible Studies, and especially for those of us who went to seminary and beyond, that was too much.

You could study it, dissect it, interpret it, argue with it, but to publicly say, “look, the Bible says a whole lot of stuff that is not just wrong and if taken seriously is really psychologically and morally damaging,” that was just a bridge too far.

Not all scholars agree on this point, but I am persuaded that all of the New Testament was written in conversation with the letters of Paul. Everyone agrees that Paul certainly wrote his core letters before any other New Testament author had set quill to paper. And his letters to Corinth, Rome, Galatia, and Philippi formed the earliest definition of the Christian faith. The gospels, which give us our best source of Jesus material, were all written under an umbrella, a theological assumption, of Paul’s view of the meaning of Jesus’ death. The other Catholic epistles offered some departure from Paul’s views but, in the overall scope of things, they didn’t give themselves much permission to question his core teachings.

Paul lived in the last days of the Jewish temple. He was executed in Rome less than a decade before the temple was to be destroyed, never to be rebuilt. The whole aspect of Judaism as an animal sacrifice cult was passing out of vogue even during the time of Jesus as Synagogues were being built that owed no allegiance to the temple or its priesthood.

In Paul’s mind, the Jesus he never met, because the Jewish faith that was about to be ended by Roman occupation and Greek influence, was a sign of a new way to be Jewish. What Jesus said, what Jesus believed in, what motivated Jesus to place himself in harm’s way and finally to be executed was of no interest to Paul.

For Paul, Jesus was an eschatological figure, a symbol, a sacrifice that ushered in a new age. Realistically, the religion of Paul had virtually nothing to do with Jesus.

There is a great deal to praise about the Christian religion, both historically and in our present day. There is a great deal to praise about the genius of Paul who literally shaped the culture of the western world, may I say, more even than did Jesus because most of what we know about or think we know about Jesus is really an invention of a religion based on Paul’s thinking.

Jesus may have been a radically anti-empire reformer whose beliefs the empire sought to snuff out quickly. But Paul offered a religion that not only did not threaten the empire, it was, in fact, very useful to the empire. The Christian faith as Paul and the Catholic epistles taught personal piety, a confident faith in an after-life, and obedience to the state.

And, as it is interpreted in this passage we read from 1^st Peter, it taught that you need to be afraid of God, “live in reverential fear,” and that your redemption from a very bad outcome on judgment day was based on the sacrifice of the innocent life of Jesus. Literally, “You are so bad that God had to kill himself.” We were taught to believe in a God who was concerned with the minutia of, not only what you ate and wore but even what you thought about. The God of our Sunday School classes was worse than Santa Claus because he not only knew when we had been bad or good in the weeks leading up to Christmas, he was watching us all of the time.

 

One of my favorite passages of scripture is found in the book of Job, chapter 7, verse 19, where Job’s friends have been trying to convince him that all of the bad things in his life have happened because God knows of some private sin that deserved to be punished. Job rejects this hyper judgmental God and screams at the sky, “Would you kindly turn your head while I swallow my spit.” It is colorful but even from the ancient world we have this poet saying that a God who is that watchful, that judgmental, does not deserve our respect.

If religion has a lasting value in a scientific age, surely its value rests in a passionate search for truth. A lot of what you read in the Hebrew scriptures, in the New Testament, and in the Quran could be said to be correctives of our narcissistic and greedy tendencies.

Clearly, while I object to the kind of neurotic guilt that is present in so much of traditional religions, we all know some folks who could use a bit more of a conscience. Clearly, our governor could stand to feel some guilt about our state not expanding health care to more of our poor citizens. Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, and Bill O’Reilly could stand to feel some personal guilt, some shame, some remorse. And our president, who very quickly came to Bill O’Reilly’s defense saying, “I don’t think he did anything wrong.” And I would even rearrange that sentence a bit because it seems to me that what Trump really means is that he does not believe that what O’Reilly did was wrong.

Guilt is not always neurotic. We have a conscience for a reason and we should try to train it to be honest…. Somewhere between the narcissism of these public figures who seem to assume that no moral rules apply to them, and the cowering supplicant who is crippled with neurotic guilt, there is an honest and true path. 

Lewis Black claims that Jews basically invented guilt, Catholics codified it, and Protestants turned it into a perpetual feeling of tension. All of our world religions could stand to be updated with a dose of psychological sophistication.

God does not keep a list of sins nor is there any reasonable sense in which any of us owe a blood debt to God. There is no “final judgment” but there is, in a very real sense, a daily judgment… a moment by moment call for good judgment.

Sin is a social construct. There is no sin if you live on an island all alone. Sin is when you do preventable harm to others. Even what is and what is not social good can never be nailed down. The needs of society change and our ability to empathize changes… hopefully towards greater empathy though that is not always certain.

Religion has often burdened society with horribly ill-informed sexual guilt. Repression often leads to sexual perversion rather than the intended goal of sexual abstinence. A healthy spirituality should promote a healthy sexuality but understanding what is and what is not healthy is a topic that requires constant revision. Most of us in the 21^st century have come to the conclusion that sex between consenting adult partners is not a sin but clearly, people like Trump, Ailes, O’Reilly, and especially Bill Cosby, totally miss the “consent” part of this.

And as much as I want churches, mosques, and synagogues to come into the 21^st century, if Trump makes another sexual comment about his daughter then I may go all medieval on him and call for a renewal of public stoning of perverts.

And even when there is adult consent, there are social and health concerns that should be a part of an informed conscience…. We should respect the exclusive promises that couples generally make to one another. We should be concerned about taking precautions against spreading diseases or causing unplanned pregnancies. But we absolutely should not teach young men and women to loath their bodies or feel guilt for their very normal and natural desires.

The Catholic Church must come out of the 16^th century and reconsider this whole celibate priesthood thing… can they still be collecting evidence for what a bad idea this has been for them? 

And Islam absolutely must stop pretending that they are not a misogynistic faith…. They don’t have to continue to be misogynistic but there is a growing pressure on Muslim women to cloak their bodies in a way that implies sexual guilt. And Protestants that still promote these abstinence only programs and especially their cruel “exodus” programs must take a scientific course on human reproduction and just stop with your silly and uninformed fear and guilt.

I want to respect the faiths of all other people but I also want faith communities to be respectable and in our scientifically, medically, and psychologically aware age, any religion that still condemns homosexuality, that wants to treat women as being somehow either inferior to or personally responsible for the sexual urges of men, or any religion that leads you to believe that you are inherently evil so that you must live in fear of divine judgment…. That’s just not worthy of respect.

An illumined spiritual life joyfully embraces the fruit of scientific discovery and both in what we know and in what we do not yet understand; we commit to live out the claim that love is our religion.

“Resurrection is not a Fact, it is an Opportunity”

Today's Easter message consists of 4 vignettes coupled with 4 original musical compositions of David Greathouse. Hearing all four will require clicking on four different videos or podcasts. Our YouTube channel can be found at CCCSPRINGFIELD and our iTunes channel is called Progressive Faith Sermons. The link provided here takes you to the first of the 4 vignettes. 

Click here to see the first of 4 videos 

Easter – April 16, 2017   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor     

I know very well that in churches across our nation, throughout the Americas, as well as in Africa, Australia, in Europe, Great Britain, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, churches will gather to hear the Easter story recounted as a promise of eternal life after our mortal deaths. This is one of a small fraction of churches where we will not take that approach though I want to talk about resurrection in several ways that are meaningful to us and to me.

From the dawn of human consciousness, there has been a fierce resistance within us to the suggestion that one day the universe will go on without us. Trees are cut down and burned in our fireplaces. Chickens, pigs, and cows are harvested for our meals and all of that seems normal enough. But we can’t accept our own demise as easily.

The oldest story we know of comes to us from Sumer, it is the Gilgamesh Epic. Gilgamesh was a Herculean character who was so strong that no one could restrain his lusty and gluttonous habits and so the people called out to the gods to send a champion, someone who could rival Gilgamesh in strength. And so the gods sent Enkidu. I’ll spare you the details but after some rather earthy battles, the two became great friends and went on superhuman adventures, but then, mortality strikes and Enkidu is killed.

Gilgamesh, the poem says, grieved so that he could not even leave the side of the fallen Enkidu, sitting there for days until, and this is the sort of detail you get in an ancient Sumerian poem, a worm fell from Enkidu’s nostril.

Hold onto your breakfast! Unable to accept Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh sets out to find the place where the dead go that he might find the secret of resurrection, of eternal life. Again, sparring you a lot of details of the story, the upshot of this grand journey was the message that death was both inevitable and final… religious people keep trying to find a loop hole in that narrative and many say that they have found it but whenever some cult comes along that believes it with enough certainty to commit suicide to embrace the next life, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus all say that they were crazy, a cult, or a heretic. As Sean has sung for us several times, “everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”

Resurrection may be a religious denial of the reality of mortality for most church going folks but for me resurrection is a fierce, a bold, a determined, facing of reality. There are a lot of things that take life away from us that don’t kill us. People can acquiesce to a hostile and meaningless marriage that sucks life out of you one day at a time. You can trade your life for a meaningless job that ruins your health and seals your hours while filling you with boredom and drudgery.

And, of course, there are deaths that come unbidden from external sources…. Warfare, corrupt governments, chronic poverty, and personal deaths through illness or inescapable poverty.

David’s song, “Purpose in the Pain” takes the various deaths of life seriously and asks the question that Job asked of God, “Is there a reason for all of this?” Is there some purpose to so much suffering, so many deaths? 

On the one hand I am inclined to say that we live in a capricious universe. The world is sometimes just mean and senseless…. Or as the bumper sticker said:

Stuff happens. But on the other hand, suffering can be instructive, it can be transformative, it can, in fact, be redemptive.

Ten years ago I was fired by a denominational church that I had given a huge portion of my adult life to. The end of that ministry was a nightmare. People I had loved sat back and watched, people I had trusted lied, people I had believe, with good reason, could be counted on to do the right thing in almost every situation, apparently lost all connection to reality or morality.

What I can say about that now, though it felt a lot like a public assassination, the experience has ended up being very educational, even transformative, and dare I say “redemptive?” It liberated me from the last vestiges of a dying and sick theology. It set me free to follow the path of reason to truth wherever truth could be found.

That does not retroactively make what was said and done in those dark days a morally neutral event… far from it, but a kind of resurrection can make the memory of the pain less and less significant.

Even the resurrection narratives in Matthew, Luke, and John, insist that Jesus came back to life with all of his scars intact. We don’t have to deny our wounds, we just have to deny them the right to define us. We don’t have to keep renting space in our skulls to the person we used to be married to, the person who didn’t keep their promises, or to the employer, the school, the church, that did us wrong.

I will offer a few images of resurrection that are rooted in this world, in our mortal existence and we will punctuate these short stories with music by our local singer and songwriter, David Greathouse…. Or we will punctuate some of David Greathouse’s music with some prose offerings from me…. I’ll let you be the judge of which is the correct perspective….

DG’s song, “Purpose in the Pain”

I live my life in wonder and I love to laugh and sing

If I had to do it all again you know I wouldn’t change a thing

But I’d like to know the reason for the sunshine and the rain

And I’d like to know the purpose in the pain.

As another day is laid to rest the city cries herself to sleep

And her children do the best they can

To make it on the streets

And in the midst of all her darkness

There’s a light on in her eyes

That searches reams of reason and begs to be told why

Why’s it all so hard? Is there anyone to blame?

And if He counts us all as equals Why aren’t we all the same?

Where is it we go to? Do we ever begin again?

What’s the motive for the madness? What’s the purpose in the pain?

I live my life in wonder and I love to laugh and sing

If I had to do it all again you know I wouldn’t change a thing

But I’d like to know the reason for the sunshine and the rain

And I’d like to know the purpose in the pain

                 ********************************************

DG’s song, “The Sound that Love Makes

You can hear it as a new day is waking and again as it’s fading away

In the time in between it is fleeting and faint, it just seems to have little to say

Like whispers awash in the wind it is lost in the noise of a world disarrayed

It laughs like a child for the lovers, cries the lonely to sleep in its arms

It flies on the furious wings of the scorned and it tries to make sense for those harmed

Reason denies it. Belief amplifies it. But nothing can keep it at bay

There’s the sound that love makes when it triumphs. There’s the sound that love makes when it fails

And the sound that love makes is abundant and free like adventure-bound wind in your sails

There’s the sound that love makes when someone falls in it or when someone gives up and dives in

There’s the sound that love makes when discovered and there’s the sound that love makes when it ends

It is the sight in the eyes of the blinded and might in the fight for the weak

An anthem of hope for the hopeless defeated and a voice for a choice that can speak

It’s vespers and pslams, fettered dreams of the longing set free to become what they seek

Its melody carries no memory and its harmony knows no regret

Its rhythms can drive the meek into wild and the mild into passion’s duet

Symphonies soar for it. Poets adore it. But no one has captured it yet

There’s the sound that love makes when forsaken. There’s the sound that love makes when it flees

There’s the sound that love makes when it’s taken for granted like a stone thrown into the sea

There’s the sound that love makes to preside over grieving like the sweet singing comfort of rain

Seeping in deep to remember the receiver ‘til they’re ready for laughter again

There’s the sound that love makes when forsaken. There’s the sound that love makes when it flees

There’s the sound that love makes when it’s taken for granted like a stone thrown into the sea

There’s the sound that love makes to preside over grieving like the sweet singing comfort of rain

Seeping in to redeem the receiver ‘til they’re ready for laughter again

There’s the sound that love makes when it blunders and the sound doesn’t make any sense

And the sound that loves makes roars like thunder when the sound that love makes is incensed

It holds all hope for the future and releases regret from the past

And all that is worthy of memory is shared with any who ask

It speaks in the echoes of laughter and it rings in the halls of the heart

Its mercies are tender and heal the surrendered but bitter when broken apart

The source of forgiveness, a recourse for weakness, and, of course, it is peace at its core

The sound that love makes resounds unabated with boots on the march against hate tolerated

You can hide. You can fly. But you can not evade it

It will fill up the world ‘til it’s past saturated and every last soul is soaked through

With the sound that love makes.

Before we were able to buy this building, we met in rented space in an executive conference center. I had an office that doubled as a storage room, which is basically what I have now in this small building. But during those months I had two young men in counseling for addiction issues. Although I did my master’s thesis on addiction treatment, I really don’t like doing it because the success rate is not very high. I often find myself wanting my client to succeed more than he or she wants to succeed. I pour my heart and soul into their sobriety only to see them relapse and sometimes relapse repeatedly until they die.

In those days when I moved carts loaded with hymnals, and a roll-away piano aside to make room for them to sit down next to me, I feared that neither one would survive. The first young man, I’ll call Adam, was living with his grandmother after his parents had kicked him out for stealing from them and for lots of arrests. He began stealing from his grandmother and graduated from alcohol to meth.

Adam died one night in Joplin when, while partying with other meth addicted friends, the police were called. Adam was non-compliant which is fairly predictable when you are high on meth. The police, in their testosterone driven enthusiasm, repeatedly hit him with their Tasers until he died on the scene from a heart attack. He was 21 years old.

The other young man, I’ll call Cain, had, in my opinion, showed less promise of recovery than had Adam and his relapses were the stuff of legend, often reported in TV news segments and newspaper stories. Like Adam, he was surrounded by family who loved him, who encouraged him, who refused to see him as an addict and a failure no matter how much he tried to convince them otherwise. Cain survived. More than survived, he thrived, and became not only a successful person but a loving person who contributes to society… he married, he became a father, a true friend to many, and a real live piece of evidence that even though resurrection is not a certain promise, it is a potential. This is not a religious story. This is a real life story of resurrection.  

David sings about the sounds that love makes. Not all of those sounds are sounds of passion or poetry of lofty affection.

Sometimes it is the sound of a heart breaking when a recovering addict has a slip and then another slip, and usually a third one and a fourth one.

I know the statistics about spouse abuse…. That a woman will leave a violent relationship and return to it about seven times before either leaving permanently, to freedom or to a coffin. I know the numbers but what makes it hard is that I also know some of the  names. I have had to share a meal with a woman, begging her not to go back to her abuser…. I’m a pastor so they will usually lie to me and tell me what they think I want to hear, but I know from the posture and the darting eyes that they are going back, and I have to let them. Sometimes love just makes the sound of a sigh.

For those on the outside, it seems like the addict can just stop. It seems like the domestic violence victim could just leave. But for those of us who love someone on the other side of resurrection, well, it is for us to keep making the sounds of love. It doesn’t mean enabling or even believing the lies. But it does mean having faith in the potential of resurrection.

DG’s song, “Black Snake”

Oh, the black snake, foretold, coaxed out of its hole

In the name of the progress of man

His fatal addiction, this ancient prediction

Comes slithering, ushering days to an end

And the inky black god of the filthy black crude

Dictates the dogma that's spouted as truth

Brandishing ignorance, as the ignorant do

The death rattle of reason in a dark age of fools

There are toxins in the aquifers

Moccasins crossing sacred waters

Poised to strike our sons and daughters

May, someday, they forgive their fathers

Oh, the black snakes come oozing from the tar and the silt

Coursing through leaky extrusions we built

Bringing rivers of riches to thieves free from guilt

For the rape of a nation they'd just as soon kill

An unslakable avarice strikes from the black abyss

Armored by pious purveyors of grift

And the ancestral bones of those who resist it

Are bulldozed and broken in its wake as it hisses

And the servants the serpent has charmed

Revisit the past on the peaceful, unarmed

Trespassing on trust of unheeded treaties

And driven by lust of the bloated and greedy

There are toxins in the aquifers

Moccasins crossing sacred waters

Poised to strike our sons and daughters

May, someday, they forgive their fathers

When the water is poisoned and black

There'll be no bringing paradise back

Explain that to the pleading, young eyes of the offspring

Bequeathed the depleted and fracked

We left toxins in the aquifers

Moccasins in the sacred waters

Waiting for our sons and daughters

Can they ever forgive their fathers?

Toxins in the aquifers

Moccasins in sacred waters

Bound to strike our sons and daughters

I am one of the nostalgia suckers who goes to see all of the comic book movies… the good ones, the mediocre ones, and the really really bad ones. I go because these films are all of a piece of cloth. They depict the battle between good and evil and the good always eventually wins…. Which, as exciting and entertaining as that narrative can be, it has absolutely no root in reality.

Reality is a very uncomfortable blending of good and evil. The people who do the worst things in the world often also have amazingly redeeming qualities. Some of the most laudable heroes of righteous causes also have horrible flaws and limitations. I have done relief work in Ecuador and Nicaragua, and have paid bribes to government officials in both places just to be allowed to deliver medicines to sick people.

I made eight trips with teams of volunteers to help the victims of Katrina on the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi and though we did a lot of good work in that tragedy, I am not unaware of the theft and corruption all around me, taking advantage of the good will of donors and volunteers. I have participated in relief efforts here in Missouri following ice storms and the Joplin tornado and have seen how institutions like the Red Cross and United Way have exploited tragedy for profit.

Last year we were transfixed by the gathering protest at Standing Rock, North Dakota, as first nation peoples and their friends stood up to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Thousands of people representing some 200 different Indian tribes, Veterans, and persons of conscience not only from America but from native tribes from the Middle East and Europe came to suffer peacefully from the abuses of police and security guards as well as the weather itself, from the blistering heat of summer to the outrageous blizzard that Dan and I endured there in December.

It was a beautiful and heroic peaceful protest that demonstrated daily the difference between the self-sacrifice of the protesters and the violence and greed of the pipeline company. Still, I knew when I headed north into the blizzard with a load of cold weather supplies, that the pipeline company would eventually win. Trump had been elected, three billion dollars had been spent, and there was no way around the fact that the pipeline would be finished.

And, to be honest, there were some horrifying aspects to the camp of protestors where there was rape, sexual harassment, and a lot of theft and con artists. If you went to the Standing Rock Camp looking for an idyllic utopia of principled protestors….well, you would have had moments of tremendous reward but you would have also been heart broken in a lot of other moments.

Marvel comic movies have good guys fighting bad guys but, folks, that is the stuff of comic books. In the real world the good guys have flaws and the bad guys sometimes do good things. The real battle of ethics is always fought in a fog and if there is ever any real clarity, it comes only after the battle is over. If you set out to do good things in a world torn asunder by greed, violence, prejudice, and abuse, don’t expect to finish the day without getting your hands dirty.

In the weeds of the particulars, there are a lot of convoluted motivations. But when you look at the big picture, that is when it starts to become clear. There were rapists, con artists, and lazy beggars among the protestors but on the other side of the barricades there was a pipeline company that was willing to put the water supply of millions of people at risk for a very temporary profit.

The pipeline was what the Indians called metaphoracially “the black snake” – a mythic character that threatened to eat the earth. Beyond all of the particulars, this became a battle between a corporation that was willing to eat up the earth along with its soil and water for profit and a people who were willing to use their own bodies to protect the water and the earth.

That’s a noble cause, right? That is the kind of battle that if Marvel was doing a movie about it, the Indians would win and the pipeline would have been destroyed. But in the real world, the pipeline was finished and it is now pumping toxic crude oil under the Missouri River and the protestors are dispersed. So we lost…. We were defeated…..well, maybe yes and maybe no.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, Native Americans never managed to get organized enough to have a voice. The plight of Black Americans was greatly improved in that time…. Prejudice was not swinging from a scaffold and integration is hardly complete but there was a lot of progress. But the plight of Native Americans was not much changed.

The victory at Standing Rock, if I may dare to call it that, is that dozens and dozens of tribes actually stopped fighting with each other and they worked together in common cause to protect water and the earth. And they brought indigenous people from Finland, Holland, and Palestine, and they brought white people from all over America, to sit around sacred fires, to pray, to chant…. You should have seen Dan when a grandmother came over with a smudge pot to purify him…..

it was new for him…. Weirder things have happened to me but it was new for Dan to throw a little sage and tobacco into a sacred fire… but you don’t leave that experience unchanged.

We went to North Dakota to stand with our Sioux sisters and brothers in the face of the Black Snake and maybe they won this battle but, I believe, the seeds were planted to win the war. Resurrection doesn’t always happen all at once but I believe that I see the beginning of an Easter Sunrise for America’s first nations. DAPL was finished and it is pumping poison through the Missouri River but I would be willing to bet that it represents the end of an era because there is now new cooperation, new awareness, new partnerships in a resurrected Native America. I’m not always right, but on this one, I am surely not wrong.

Who is a Refugee?

DG’s Song, “Shine On”

Did you light burn the eyes of those souls in the dark?

Is that why they tend to extinguish your spark?

Because one little light doesn’t pose any threat

 Unless you’re the darkness that bans lanterns lit

Chorus

Sine on little light, too bright for sorrow

Shine on little light. Remind us we’re bright lights too

Shine on with the light redefining tomorrow

We mold in the strengthening hands

Demanding the future is not only man’s

Shine on little light. Delight in your wonder

Shine on ‘til the old walls, asunder, fall

Crack the night with the light that prefaces thunder

Abandon illiterate fears and luminous wisdom appears

Shine on little light. Shine on!

I’m not a musician and I cannot claim to find my fingerprints on much in the musical world except for when Sean sets one of my prayers to music or when we play fast and loose with someone else’s lyrics. But this song that David sang may be a byproduct of a sermon I delivered a few years ago.

David and I have a mutual friend, Tim Piland. Tim likes to write plays and one sleepless weekend, Tim stayed up all night listening to my sermons on YouTube and he heard one in which I talked at length about my hero, Malala Yousafzai. Tim decided to write a play about Malala and he turned to David and asked him to write music for the play and “Shine On” is at least a first installment. I don’t know if the project has progressed from there but I insist on at least an honorary mention in the footnotes.

Malala is now a refugee from Pakistan living sometimes in the UK and sometimes in the USA. There are now more than 5 million refuges who have fled the civil war in Syria, one of whom will be our keynote speaker at our August Conference this year. But not all refuges are fleeing from war or terrorists or the threat of death.

Some are just trying to escape insanity in order to breath freely and to give their children a chance to have a normal life. One of those is a listener of ours:

Mikhail Lipyanskiy is an adjunct instructor in Comparative Literature at Queens College and John Jay College.

No, we did not come from a war-torn country. No, we did not escape bomb threats and militants. But we are refugees. We came seeking shelter and opportunity – to the land that was the epitome of both. I should not need to exonerate my status by debating the conditions of pre-and-post-perestroika Ukraine. We knew well enough who we were. It said so on our passports, on our birth certificates and, let’s be honest, on our faces. When in the third grade I was accosted by a bully seven years my senior who came up to me, as I was “on duty” in the halls of our school – I was not surprised. Not by the attack, not by the “Save Russia, kill the Jews!” that he yelled as he punched me right in the stomach…No, that was expected. It had happened before, whether physical or mental – discrimination was ubiquitous. Whether it was in schools, or at work, in colleges or in the army. It was not our religion we were despised for; it was not even our blood. It was simply our “otherness” that was so easily scapegoated. We were the “enemy within” – a target for those who could not understand why their own life was terrible.

There is an old Soviet joke – a truckload of bread was promised to be delivered to a local store. By 6 AM there was a line of people patiently waiting for bread. At noon the director of the market came out and announced that the truck will be late, and the shipment smaller than originally promised. No Jews will be allowed to buy bread. At 6 PM, there was still no bread, and the director once again came out to make his announcement. The truck will be later still, and the shipment even smaller. Only veterans of WWII will be allowed to buy the bread. At midnight, the director finally announced that there will be no bread today. The grumbling crowd dispersed, and one person could be heard telling another “Did you see? Again the Jews lucked out! They didn’t have to wait!”

And so, we came here… not so fast. Let’s take a step back. Came here how? Refugee vetting is no simple matter – “extreme” or not! First, one must gather all the documents, in several copies, with English translations. Oh – that is the easy part, right? Do you think the clerk didn’t know why you wanted the copies? Do you think they didn’t hate you for “getting out”? Surely, they did…And you needed them to like you, to be your friend. Thus you begin to sell things, books first, then heirlooms, then whatever is left. To the last penny. And you lie. A lot. At school, at work, at home…even to your friends… because “who knows?”

What if you don’t get the status…what then? A year and a half later, after an interview in Moscow, after bowing and scraping, after multiple boxes of chocolate and cognac with envelopes full of “gratitude” to every clerk that had to stamp or copy or print some basic document, you are finally granted that magical status of a “refugee”.

You are now free to gather your bags. Nope, sorry, your bag. Only one, per person – that’s it, basta!  Put your life in that suitcase, but leave room for a pillow and a blanket (because those, we are told, are expensive in “Amerika”). Tell your children they can have one stuffed toy to bring. Maybe two… maybe a few plastic soldiers. Then you sell everything that is still left, everything you can – perhaps you will gather enough for a month’s rent in that magical country that you are hoping to get to… You sell your apartment too, for a sliver of what it is worth, to a man who makes sure that you understand he is doing you a huge favor; he takes all the risk (oh the martyr) by buying an apartment from a “traitor”. And you get yourself to Moscow.

The last goodbyes from friends and relatives, the last humiliation too, as the border agents take anything they can from your already pilfered possessions. They tell your children that the toy in their hands does not fit into the suitcase and thus will not be allowed through, too bad. And then – only then –  do you board that plane to freedom…

I cannot imagine the terror in the hearts of those refugees who were “turned back”. Stop. That’s not true. Yes I can. I can imagine – because I am not afraid of empathy. I am not afraid to remember the fear and the excitement that “Amerika” represented to us, to refugees. I will not be suckered into the “chaos vs order” narrative. I will not buy the false civilizational mythology of survival. We are not separate civilizations. “They” are not agents of chaos.

When the militants destroy ancient artifacts in Iraq – it is not “their” history being destroyed. It is mine, ours! Where would we be without ancient Mesopotamia? Without Ur, Babylon, Ashur and Nineveh? What about the medieval Damascus? The centers of science and literature and law… Our civilization does not depend on their destruction. It never did. Our civilization has moved past that myth of survival. Look around – we are all the same. We are all refugees in this land. We came seeking shelter and opportunity. We came to earn a better life, not to take it. I am a Refugee. I am an American. I am a Jew. I am a Muslim. I am you.