“America Will Be Great When…”

“America Will Be Great When…”   July 2, 2017          

Click here to see the video

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor   

(This sermon is accompanied by a Power Point presentation that cannot be show in this platform. I suggest that you watch the video)

Aristotle’s Politics, Book III, Chapter 8

The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is between poverty and wealth. Whenever the rulers, whether they be a minority or a majority, owe their power to wealth, that is an oligarchy. Whenever the poor rule, that is a democracy. Usually, where the rulers hold power by wealth, they are few, but where the poor rule, they are many, because few men are rich but all are free.

Stephanie Ruhle, one of MSNBC’s news hosts, fines guests on her show $2 every time they say the word “unprecedented.”

In the moment by moment coverage of Donald Trump’s gaffs, tweets, lies, and decisions that have turned the office of the President into a marketing platform for Trump family brands, hotels, and golf courses, words like “shocking,” “unprecedented,” “incomprehensible,” and even “crazy,” have come up too often. Stephanie just got to a point where it didn’t make any sense to keep saying “unprecedented” every single day when there has, in fact, been a precedent set now…. A precedent for low-brow, greedy, misogynist, xenophobic, and dangerously unhinged person who is currently occupying the oval office.

With this week’s petty and embarrassing tweet attacking Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski,

the outrage has become less divided along party lines as both Republicans and Democrats are just sick of the way that Trump is daily disgracing the office of the President and eroding America’s place in the world.

This week the New York Times printed a full page account of Trump’s public lies since he took office in January.

I tried to reprint the list on the cover and back of your bulletin today but even using the smallest print choice available, I couldn’t even get half way through April.

I love Stephanie, but this level of tyrannical dishonesty is, in a word, unprecedented!

On this Independence Day weekend, it is inescapable that along with our celebrations replete with fireworks, cookouts, and time spent with family and friends, we must also acknowledge that our nation is in big trouble and because we are the only remaining world super power and our economy is, by and large, the economic engine of the world, when we have a cold the world gets the flu.

A very wonderful, kind, and intelligent woman in our congregation, Holly Ketchum, turned her concern for what was happening in our country into a meaningful response by writing a book for children.

Donald Trump had campaigned last year under the banner of “Make America Great Again,” but the sub-text to his speeches included fear mongering of immigrants and illegal aliens, derision of the women, the handicapped, and often of other races and religions.

Trump blew all of the dog-whistles for prejudice, implying that greatness would be restored to our nation by, and I don’t think it is a stretch to sum it up this way, by putting rich, white, men back in charge of the world.

Holly’s children’s book claimed the larger theme, titling her book, “America Will Be Great,” and on a dozen beautifully illustrated topic  pages, talked about our nation’s greatness in terms of unity, of caring for the earth and for each other. She addresses delicately and lovingly issues related to war, poverty, racism, religious prejudice, access to health care, housing, and education, as well as mental health and care for the disabled.

There is so much love and kindness in Holly’s book that I’m not even sure that the most hardened, right-wing, FoxNews consumer would see it as being controversial or confrontational. And Holly is to be applauded for this spontaneous gift of healing to the world.

This is the voice in which we should speak to children, but I have not been able to shake the belief that there needs to be an adult version of this book that speaks in a more “gloves off” fashion to adults. With Holly’s permission to piggy back on her title, I have started working on a new book with which I am collaborating with other authors to talk seriously about what needs to happen to make America great.

The stakes are very high. In Noam Chomsky’s most recent book, Requiem for the American Dream,

he warns that we are in the most dangerous moment of human history. Our very existence is threatened by the dual challenges of the threat of nuclear war and destruction of the planet. Our massive military budget is not only bankrupting our ability to accomplish other important goals but the deployment of forces and hardware all over the globe is like, to quote Bonnie Tyler’s 1980’s pop song, “we’re living in a powder keg and giving off sparks.”

You don’t have to have a Hollywood imagination to see several potential scenarios of conflicts with nuclear armed, unstable states that could lead to a globally lethal nuclear war. And it is no exaggeration to list the United States of America, the most nuclear-armed nation, as being rather more unstable than ever before. John Kennedy managed to thread the needle during the Cuban missile crisis and

prevented nuclear war fifty years ago but is there anyone, Republican, Democrat, or Independent who believes that if Donald Trump had been president on that day

that there would still be a human civilization on earth?

We have been lucky for 50 years of the nuclear age but a whole lot of luck involves having had educated, experienced, and qualified people in charge of the nuclear football. That, sadly, is no longer the case in America.

As to the environment, folks, we are already passed the tipping point for massive sea level rises. I may be able to safely retire in Florida someday. Maybe even my daughter could too. But if she has children, by the time they reach retirement age,

most of Florida will be under water, no matter what we do to stem the tide of global climate change. Horrible things are going to happen over the next century. The only question is whether we can arrest the speed and the degree of the damage.

Our current president seems determined to race to the edge of the cliff of

environmental failure like Thelma and Louise in the final frames of the movie that is American history.

But even if we can through science and statesmanship avoid global destruction through war or environmental collapse, our nation has a laundry list of ills, most of which are traceable to the conflict between democracy and capitalism. Now, democracy, as a form of government, and capitalism, as an economic system, can and often have, work together with each strengthening the other. However, what we have seen in our lifetimes is what Naomi Klein calls in her new book, No is Not

Enough, (p. 4) “It’s a naked corporate takeover, one many decades in the making.” Capitalist interests are no longer simply trying to influence the government, they have taken charge and are sitting in the seats of government power, turning our democracy into an oligarchy just as Aristotle warned could happen in his 2500 year old book on politics.

It is not the sanity and concern for the welfare of the public that has prevented the United States from joining the rest of the western world in offering universal health care to all of our citizens, or from becoming one of the growing number of western democracies that offer tuition-free higher education to their entire population, it is the control of corporate profit-motivated over our government.

We have 2.5 million people in prison and more than 9 million on parole, many times more than any other nation in the world per capita, not because we are more evil people and have a much more dangerous criminal element but because our prison system is controlled by for-profit interest that reduce the employment pool by creating virtual slave labor camps, while funding jobs, construction, and supply contracts to corporations. We have a million human beings living in cages for no rational reason other than the transfer of wealth from the tax payers to corporations, a moral travesty that should keep all of us awake at night though it never seems to come to the front of our awareness until one of our own family members gets sacrificed to the system.

Our nation is cursed with a paucity of jobs that pay a living wage and our crumbling middle class is sending economic shockwaves around the globe. Our low wages pour gasoline on the chronic fires of poverty everywhere which

combines our corporate exploitation of poor nations with our militarily enforced stability and that, my friends, is the cause of terrorism in Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East, and Australia. Regional wars create the refugee crisis and strain the tolerance of stable nations for welcoming strangers into their midst.

We are now facing an epidemic of opioid overdose deaths, more than 60,000 per

year, more than gun deaths and car fatalities combined, which is a symptom of the despair, poverty, and hopelessness that is especially noticeable in the rural parts of our country.

The irony of Trump’s campaign slogan, wanting to “make America great again,” presumes that there was a time when America was uniquely great.

Well, there have been many times when it has been great if you were rich, and usually it has been better for white people than it has been for everyone else, and men have and do get first pick of top careers with the highest salaries.

Trump’s vision of American greatness is sort of like an episode of Andy of Mayberry, a tiny town in North Carolina in the 1950’s where, as if by magic, there were only white people even though the state is nearly half black, and they were all blissfully happy and where there was only one alcoholic and he just provided comic relief.

We tend to romanticize our past as if the failings of our nation are only a recent aberration. At every baseball game, Americans stand and sing parts of our national anthem in the lofty words of Francis Scott Key, inspired by our victory in battle

during the War of 1812. But we only sing the first verse about old glory still waving over Ft. McHenry after a night of bombardment.

The third verse boldly proclaims that indentured servants and African slaves will go to their graves before they can successfully revolt against their free-white masters:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

We never have quite made it to that goal of being the shining city on the hill, the truly great society that our patriotic songs and movies portray.

Though America has been a beacon of freedom and opportunity for hundreds of millions of people through our brief history, we have never achieved the greatness that we are capable of. Through the ingenuity of science we could, if we could harness the united will of our diverse nation, bring an end to poverty, open the doors of our universities, and transform our military might into a renewable energy rescue mission to save the planet, making the part that remains above sea level, safe for human habitation. We could care for our sick, give equal wages to men and women, pay everyone a living wage, and reduce our imprisoned population to a fraction of what it is now. Many of these ideals wouldn’t even be hard to accomplish if we could swing the pendulum of power from capitalism to democracy, to shift from creating a super-rich ruling class to creating a civilized world.

All governments rule by the consent of the governed. We have a long history of having our consent manipulated out of us through fear and propaganda so that we consented to slavery, we have consented to unjust wars, economic and racial segregation, exploitation of the poor, and gender and sexual oppression. Well, let me just say this: that government doesn’t get my consent anymore.

I’m not giving my consent to any government that doesn’t promote liberty and justice for all. I have not seen that government yet but I have faith that it is out there. Right now it exists only in our hearts and in our imaginations but together we can make America great and because it is a possibility, we really must do it.

“The Dubious Luxury of Anger”        June 25, 2017   Community Christian Church

Roger Ray, pastor     Click here to see the video

— ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 66 “Big Book”

If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.

AA devotional - "Dubious luxury." How often have I remembered those words. It's not just anger that's best left to nonalcoholics; I built a list including justifiable resentment, self-pity, judgmentalism, self-righteousness, false pride and false humility. I'm always surprised to read the actual quote. So well have the principles of the program been drummed into me that I keep thinking all of these defects are listed too. Thank God I can't afford them—or I surely would indulge in them.      

The gloves come off and the language gets salty as voices are raised in a lot of the meetings I attend these days, and I’m proud to say that it isn’t even always me who starts the shouting. Just this week, I had a meeting with Senate staffers in Clair McCaskill’s office to talk about some judicial legislation and it ended with a very normal housewife and mother talking like a sailor in a heavy storm at sea.

I hosted a support group meeting at my home for the parents of incarcerated sons and one father, in total frustration, condemned the whole of not just America’s court system but the government, the corporations, and the whole fraud of American freedom and liberty in a blue streak of desperate anger.

I went to a meeting that the library about feminism led by two professors who were basically talking about the historical evolution of feminist philosophy and a young college student talked herself into an absolute rage about her family members who had somehow ignorantly and indifferently voted for a narcissistic tyrant to become the president of the United States.

And I know enough about these sorts of family conversations to know that her family members probably assume that she voted for a narcissistic tyrant who happened to have lost her bid for president. There is a lot of anger in the world today. We have a lot of reasons to be angry. I’ve been too busy to write newspaper articles for the past few months but when I heard what was in the Senate Republican’s new healthcare bill, I dropped what I was doing and poured my vitriol though my fingers into my keyboard and it was on the editor’s desk before I had time to reword calling Trump, Ryan, and our legislators, Blunt and Long, murderers. You’ll be seeing that in print early next week.

We have reasons to be angry, lots of them, lots of good reasons… in fact, I would worry about someone who could be the least bit aware of what is going on in the world and not be angry sometimes. But, pastorally, from a spiritual perspective, I just want to slow down for a few minutes and think about this.

Our emotions should be our servants and not our masters. I keep asking people to try to turn their anger into action… don’t just get mad, get involved, make a plan, make a difference, but the truth about anger is much more complicated than just a simple fight or flight reaction.

Many years ago, my eldest uncle was dying. My father and I went to see Uncle Presley in his home near Chicago. Shortly after we arrived, I saw my father get angry about how dirty the house was… he wanted to fire the housekeeper.

We stepped outside and he became enraged about how poorly the lawn and garden were being kept and he wanted to fire the teenaged boy next door my uncle paid to care for his lawn. I had been around enough to know that my widower uncle was very lonely and when the cleaning lady came, she spent more time sitting and talking with him than she did in cleaning and I suspected that the lawn boy was being equally compassionate, spending more time talking with my uncle about the garden he loved than he spent in trimming and weeding.

And it dawned on me that what was really going on is that my father was horrified by the looming death of this man who had been more than a brother to him because Presley, as the eldest, had been like a father to my much younger father. My dad wasn’t really mad at the cleaning lady or the gardener, he was afraid, afraid of the inevitable death of a man that he loved and wasn’t quite sure that he could live without.

What he needed to do, what my father was never able to do, was to tell Presley that he loved him, that he would miss him, that he was sorry to see him slipping away, he needed to thank him for all that he had done for him and his family… which was considerable… and he needed to be able to say “good-bye.”

But in a man’s world of the old south, such sentiments, while felt, were not allowed to come out and be seen in the light of day. There could be no tears, and little affection, but the macho emotion of anger was always the go-to emotion. Deceptively, anger presents itself as being strong, even threatening. It suggests confidence and courage.

What is surprising, however, is to realize that the root of anger is fear. The “fight or flight” response is a fear response. When we are scared, adrenaline jumps into our blood, our pulse quickens, and though we may shout and growl, we are not suddenly courageous lions… we are, in fact, frightened rabbits trying to get away from the monsters that scare us.

As sad as the death of my wonderful and loving uncle was, it gave me the first real insight I ever had into understanding my own father… it gave me a chance to be forgiving for a childhood literally terrorized by his frequent temper fits. He wasn’t a tyrant or a bully, he was just afraid…. He was an old soldier traumatized by too much violence, a man who had seen too many people die, a man who could not control his world or his surroundings. Thomas a’Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ, that to fully understand is to entirely forgive.

There is a modern proverb that says that holding onto resentment is like drinking poison in hopes that it will kill your enemies. What so many people, especially men, and I think especially red state, rural, southern men, which is my tribe, keep turning to anger as a way of responding to our fears and frustrations without realizing that anger is poison.

You have heard me repeat this quote from Scott Peck many times… he said, “If you need therapy but can’t afford it, pretend to be an Alcoholic and go to AA.” The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, though not perfect, is an amazing distillation of the wisdom of 20^th century psychology.

I’m particularly fond of this little piece from the Big Book about anger that calls anger the “dubious luxury of ordinary people.” Clinically, I don’t always like the way the Big Book draws a line between “normal” people and alcoholics though I understand that a lot of people in recovery resent the fact that they know a lot of people that can go to a bar and have a couple of drinks and still wake up the next morning in their own bed with their car parked safely in the garage… resenting people who can drink and still be sane is the sort of thing that alcoholics have to let go of.

But the Big Book tells alcoholics that they can’t afford to let themselves wallow in their anger… anger, for them is a poison that will, with certainty, rob them of their sobriety. So the Big Book leaves a little room for people who are not alcoholics… maybe they can afford to get angry, but I love the way they qualify that by calling it a dubious luxury because that is sort of like saying, “well, you can get a tattoo on your face but I’m not sure that you can call it a good idea.”

While there are lots of good reasons to be angry, I’m just asking you to realize that in most cases you are not angry that your daughter wrecked her car… you are scared that she might have been hurt. Behind many angry marital fights is the fear that your spouse may not really love you anymore. And if I may add, if you want to hasten that problem, keep drinking the poison that is anger.

It is the nature of a child to let their emotions have nearly total control of them.

Growing up is little more than learning to stop pooping in your pants and to make your emotions work for you rather than working against you.  The Buddha said, it is not your enemies that you should fear. It is your anger that destroys you.

Think of your anger as a precious commodity to be reserved for times of great need. Slow moving traffic does not deserve the energy and sacrifice of your anger. Neither Mediacom nor AT&T should be dignified by you becoming angry at either one. Your children live right inside your heart. You love them so do not let your fear become anger, let it always express itself as what it is, undying love.

When my daughter was young and going through the phase of using the word “hate” too liberally, I would often correct her by saying, “we don’t hate broccoli, we really only hate Republican congressmen.” It wasn’t until I found out that she was quoting me in her Sunday School class that I had to explain to her that we wanted to save our anger for when we really need it and not to waste it on the school lunch program.

The opposite of anger is not indifference. The goal for a wise person is not to become neutral about everything that happens.

All that I’m suggesting is that anger doesn’t make you brave, it doesn’t make you strong, and it sure doesn’t make you smarter. It is a fear based emotion. I’m just asking you to stop being afraid.

“War is a Racket”

Community Christian Church   June 18, 2017     Roger Ray, pastor

Click here to see the video

Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler   “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

It is certainly no secret to any of you that during the 2016 primary season, I was an enthusiastic supporter of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

I was not taken with him because he was a political savior who just happened to comb his hair with a balloon, but because he advocated for a rapid change to renewable energy, for making higher education tuition-free, for raising the minimum wage, lowering military spending, and reigning in the excesses of Wall Street investment banks.

Republicans derided him as being crazy. Traditional Democrats said that he was impractical and pro-banking media said that he lived in a fantasyland.

However the famous French economist, Thomas Piketty, heartily endorsed him and his economic plan as did

Noam Chomsky. So, the world’s leading economist and the world’s leading political philosopher both endorsed Bernie Sander’s policies and, true to Chomsky’s form, he even said that voting for Sanders might be the last chance we will have in our life times to save the modern world.

And so, you might reasonably ask if I am grouping myself with the likes of Piketty and Chomsky, and I can only say, that’s ridiculous… but if the shoe fits….

So what is going on here? The world’s leading experts in the field are applauding the economic revolution proposed by Bernie Sanders while both political parties, the corporate geniuses of the world, and virtually all of the media agreed to be entirely dismissive of him? Well, honestly, it is not that one side was right and the other was wrong. If you assume, as the Republicans and Democrats do, and Wall Street does, and the corporate media does, that the constant accumulation of wealth at the top of the ladder cannot be challenged, then Bernie’s program is just a fantasy. If, however, you are willing to challenge the current trend of redistributing all wealth to the top, then it really isn’t even that hard to do what he envisioned.

The complaint is that there is not enough money to pay for these fantasies of education, housing, nutrition, and health care. When the government wants to talk to us about federal spending, they show us a chart like this:

If 60% of our budget is spent on Medicare and Social Security before we even think about universal healthcare and higher education then it is easy to fall into a mindset of scarcity, and hence we have all of the political hand wringing about cutting entitlements.

Of course, what Sanders, Piketty, Chomsky, and I hope you know is that Medicare and Social Security pay for themselves and even universal healthcare, if it were a Medicare for all program, could pay for itself if we paid for Medicare instead of a for-profit health insurance policy…. It would pay for itself and save us money at the same time. This is not hard, in fact, it is easy-peasy if you can accept that insurance companies do not have a God-given right to a significant profit out of your wallet.

So the pie chart that includes entitlements is really just a way of tricking you into accepting the status quo. If you look only at the remaining portion of the budget, you see an entirely different situation in which military spending comprises more than half of every dollar we spend on the government.

As a percentage of the budget, our military spending is more now than at any time since World War II. And when you factor in parts of this budget that are really military…. Like Veterans’ Benefits, (you don’t create veterans out of thin air… veterans come from fighting wars), then the elephant in the room just gets bigger.

Now, I am no Mahatma Gandhi, I’m well aware that we live in a dangerous world and that our military means more to the world’s stability than just defending our shores. But we could make public colleges tuition free for about a 5% cut in military spending and anyone who claims that we couldn’t find 5% of wasteful spending in that budget is not being realistic. They are the ones who should be labeled as being crazy, or impractical, or living in a fantasyland.

We took our wisdom lesson today from this man:

      Brigadier General Smedley Butler.

Butler is interesting in several ways not the least of which was that he managed to bring down a Fascist plot to overthrow the American government during the Roosevelt era. He was a recently retired and wildly popular general and a group of corporate bosses were afraid that the New Deal might diminish their power that was based on their wealth.

They tried to recruit Butler to lead their revolt but instead Butler managed to bring their plot to a sudden end… even though, and you may not be shocked by this, those who intended to violently overthrow the American government were never put on trial. The super rich rarely are.

My interest is in this slim volume that Butler wrote in the 1930’s that deserves to be read again in our age:

Told in the authentic voice of one of our history’s most decorated soldiers, Butler describes even his service in WWI as being “a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.” As necessary as some of the aspects of WWI were, when it was over, there were 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires in the USA.

Military spending is the fastest way to move the largest amount of money from the whole of the population into the pockets of a tiny fraction of the country. And, in many cases, nothing much has to be shown for it. Reagan’s Star Wars initiative was a sham from the start. There was no science behind

 it, just a lot of spending. Hundreds of billions of dollars were paid out to defense contractors who simply had to “look busy,” all the while knowing that the project was impossible to fulfill.

If we had all day, we could go on and on with examples of military bases that are still open that were built for use in WWII, for weapons systems that are manufactured and sent straight to scrap piles, and that is without even mentioning that we keep building ships and airplanes when modern wars will not be fought with ships and airplanes.

Modern offensive weapons just make aircraft carriers great big, slow moving targets. There are 19 operating aircraft carriers in the world right now. We have 10 of them. China has 2, Russia has 1. Great Britain, still, after all these years, totally surrounded by water, Britain used to have 40 of them but now, 0. Who just asked for a new one to be built? Our very own Clementine Caligula, though, trust me, you don’t want your sons or daughters serving on it because if there is ever any real shooting, it will be the first to hit the sand on the bottom of the ocean.

We keep trying to negotiate our way into peace accords, forming defense alliances, and using trade agreements for forge lasting peaceful partners. I have my own ideas about making friends with the world through education, clean water, and micro-business initiatives but in spite of the fact that I did just a few minutes ago Photoshop myself in between Thomas Piketty and Noam Chomsky, I might as well claim that I just slept in a Holiday Inn Express when it comes to this.

But General Butler actually published a plan to stop all unnecessary wars and useless military spending, acknowledging that sometimes it just has to happen, but when a government goes to way, Butler suggested, take all of the profit out of it.

His plan was pretty dramatic. He said that before going to war the government must literally draft all of the executives and employees in the military industrial complex and that they, as well as generals and politicians, would all earn the same salary as the soldier drafted to serve in the trenches, until the conflict was over.

The truth of modern warfare is that we send the children of the poor in one country to go kill the children of the poor in another country. There are noble and patriotic exceptions but by and large, the Trump family doesn’t serve in uniform nor any of their private club members. War is a racket designed to enrich the few at the cost of life and limb among the poor. It has always been that and now it may be more that than in any time General Butler lived to see.

As he watched the world building towards WWII through the build up of armies and machinery that always mean that they will eventually be used, he proposed that we add a Peace Amendment to the constitution. The amendment would make it illegal for American troops to leave the Americas or for our ships or planes to stray farther from our shores than necessary to defend ourselves against invasion unless we were dispatching them on a mission of mercy.

That may sound entirely impractical but let me remind you that we basically imposed that on the constitutions of Japan and Germany after WWII and both have obeyed their federal documents and have stayed out of military entanglements. He was a Republican but I think that Bernie Sanders and General Butler would have been friends!

Financial and natural resources are limited. We can’t do everything that we can imagine but what we can do is redirect our use of natural and financial resources to create a world that is sufficiently stable as to make military action less likely because if our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us nothing else, it is nearly impossible to actually win a conventional war in the modern era.

We can defeat an army but not an ideology. We can build better war technology but we cannot engineer peace through warfare. And, clearly, we cannot expect the manufacturers of military hardware to police their own excesses and we cannot hope for sane leadership out of politicians whose elections are financed by the military industrial complex.

I know that talking about the end of war in our time sounds far fetched and idealistic and therefore unlikely… I know that, but what I am telling you is that is not only achievable it is not complicated. It would be very easy to accomplish… granted, we have to talk about campaign finance reform, but that is for another day. We can end war by changing how we spend our federal budget and, wonder of wonders, you are the federal government.