“Equality: From Principle to Reality,”

 12/3/2017    David Ketchum
click here to see the video
*Prayer of Confession It’s difficult to find solutions to problems that are millennia old; it’s painful to notice all the ways we are complicit, powerless, or afraid. It’s difficult to hear the voices crying out for change; it’s painful to grapple with our own fears, injuries, guilt, and rage. So we recommit to learning to listen, to come to terms with the suffering of others and ourselves, So that we can act in ways that set us free from indecision, confusion, self-righteousness, and greed, And so learn to relate to one another and the world with humility, kindness, wisdom, and grace. *Assurance of Hope Friends, it is no easy thing to learn to listen when it comes to justice and love. Most of us don’t want the world to be unfriendly or unjust, and we want to count ourselves among the shining examples of those humans who are good and kind and fair. So it can be difficult to learn to listen, to really listen, to those voices around us, and often within us, that cry out in rage and grief against the suffering of this world. It can be painful to learn the complicated part we play in social, cultural, institutional, and historical forces of injustice. And it can overwhelming to consider what must be done to bring about real and lasting change. But listening may lead to wisdom, and wisdom may yet make it possible for us to do what needs to be done. So it’s good for us to celebrate together the opportunity for us to listen, learn, and love as a community gathered in commitment to truth and justice. Let us greet one another with that peace. Amen.
Wisdom Lesson “The results of [these studies] demonstrate that, beyond improving attitudes, positive intergroup contact may also lead disadvantaged-group members to attend less to group inequality. These outcomes may both contribute to more optimistic expectations that the out-group will behave fairly—expectations that were associated with lower levels of support for social change …  Furthermore, with respect to advantaged groups, changes in attitudes produced by contact might reflect mainly a commitment to equality as a principle, rather than as a reality …  / We note that positive intergroup contact and intergroup harmony do not necessarily undermine efforts toward equality. The critical factor likely involves the nature of positive contact and how harmony is achieved. ... encounters that emphasize both common connections and the problem of unjust group inequalities may promote intergroup understanding as well as recognition of the need for change … . Such mixed-content encounters, through which common humanity and morality are likely to be emphasized, can both bring members of advantaged and disadvantaged groups together and perhaps motivate them to eliminate social inequities. However, it is critical, both in theory and in practice, to recognize that intergroup harmony per se does not necessarily lead to intergroup equality.” -Tamar Saguy, Nicole Tausch, John F. Dovidio, and Felicia Pratto
Communion Prayer        We remember this morning all the folks who have been too easily forgotten at this table, whose suffering was more than we thought we could handle, whose rage left us feeling unsafe, whose existence in defiance of the status quo left us feeling uncomfortable, guilty, or confused. We remember our own unwillingness to take the steps needed to move from equality as a principle to equality as reality. May our communion together, then, be a symbol of the healing work that needs to be done in us and among us, as a church, city, nation, and world. And may we turn our attention to how we may more faithfully, persistently, compassionately, and wisely live and love together in a way that makes equality and justice something real. Amen.
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“Equality: From Principle to Reality,” 12/3/2017
In the traditional Christian calendar, today is the First Sunday of Advent, a season expressing the longing for things to be set right in the world. And in one of today’s lectionary readings, the prophet Isaiah prays, “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil… .” (Isaiah 64:1-2) It’s a kind of desperation that we know all too well, when the injustice around us is heaped like so much kindling, waiting for the spark. We feel it when we hear the news, and we feel it in the experiences of our own lives, when we walk out the door into an unsafe world.
It is overwhelming, and has been for a very long time. The history of the West is also the history of white supremacy, imperialism, and patriarchy. And we are still bearing bad fruit, as recent headlines reveal, through stories of the violent and misogynistic actions of sexual predators,i or the late night passage of tax legislation that benefits corporations and the wealthiest 1%.ii And, with regard to the latter, we are yet to see what further impact the final form of the tax bill will have on the most vulnerable,iii especially since cutting vital social programs is a favorite past time of those in power. Meanwhile, approximately 1,100 people have been killed so far by police in the USA in 2017.iv And, according to the FBI, hate crimes continue to be on the rise, with over 6,000 reported cases in the latest numbers from 2016. Of those cases, 58% were motivated by “race, ethnicity, or ancestry”; 21% were based on religion, and 18% were based on sexual orientation.v
We could fill the rest of the day with a litany of these tragedies and injustices, with more than enough sorrow for Isaiah’s words to fit easily on our lips - “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil… .”
It is not surprising to say that we humans continue to experience a lot of polarization, growing farther apart. And humans have a long history to demonstrate how efficient we are in producing new circumstances that fuel those divisions. What we have proven to be less efficient at doing is bringing us together. That’s not surprising, as it is much easier and faster to destroy than it is to create, to bring death than to nourish life. And yet we have to find ways to keep walking out the door. We have to find ways to live in this very world, while injustice persists, and the water is always at or near boiling. And we have to find ways to do so without either giving up or giving in to the way things are.
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“Equality: From Principle to Reality,” 12/3/2017
Fortunately, there are lots of exceptions to human cruelty and greed, and many beautiful stories of change. We have made important progress in addressing systemic injustice in certain cases, and we have made important strides in understanding human psychosocial dynamics and applying those to social change programs. Unfortunately, we typically are unfamiliar with most of these stories, both successes and failures, and so their lessons are too often lost. And we have not been able to translate those bright spots into the type of lasting social change where everyone’s voice is heard and needs are met.
So what I’d like to think about this morning is one of the less skillful dynamics of how we come to live with the condition of this world and with ourselves, and especially how we come to tolerate, excuse, and even justify inequality and injustice. And then I’d like to reflect on some principles that might help us focus our energy and attention on working for lasting change.
I can think of many different examples from my own life where I’ve encountered this dynamic, but most of them are more personal than I would prefer to broadcast over itunes and youtube. So I’m going to stick with a more professional one. From 2007 to 2010, I was living in Cambodia. Besides providing support for organizational development, the bulk of my time was divided between two areas: 1) helping develop research-based training for community leaders addressing family conflict and violence and 2) providing training and services on conflict transformation, reflective practice, and nonviolent direct action to human rights defenders and community development workers. In both of those circumstances, we were encountering some similar challenges, interacting with people or engaging with the consequences following their violent, exploitative actions.
Sometimes, we felt powerless. Too often, we were limited in the kinds of actions we could take in response. We had to be creative, because the un-creative choices were things like despair, rage, or apathy, which generally made things stay the same or get worse. And there was always the risk that we would simply learn to tolerate injustice, to adjust to it as the “new normal” and make do. Simultaneously, we were working on developing cultures and practices of empathy and compassion, bringing healing to ourselves and others who had been wounded by injustice. And the question arose: how do we then deal with those who have acted coercively, violently, and hatefully? When and how do we interact with them? What is appropriate? And what will bring about true and lasting change?
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“Equality: From Principle to Reality,” 12/3/2017
In 2009, a paper was published that helped provide more clarity on why this struggle can be so difficult. Tamar Saguy (Yale University), Nicole Tausch (Cardiff University), John Dovidio (Yale University), and Felicia Pratto (University of Connecticut) conducted two studies to explore how contact between unequal groups impacted people’s commitments to equality. “The results of Study 1, an experiment with laboratory groups, and Study 2, a survey of an actual disadvantaged group, converged to demonstrate that, beyond improving attitudes, positive intergroup contact may also lead disadvantagedgroup members to attend less to group inequality.”vi
And attending less to group inequality erodes just the conditions necessary to energize and sustain movements for social justice. As the researchers explained, “because positive contact improves attitudes and blurs group differences, it can undermine the necessary conditions for collective action to occur: recognition that one’s group is subordinate and external (typically outgroup) attribution of one’s disadvantage … .” (ibid, 120) That is, people feel less motivated to do something about inequality and injustice when they lose the sense and weight of that injustice, and when they stop seeing the connections between that injustice and the actions and attitudes of the advantaged group. Positive interactions, however, can have just this impact. The feeling that “we’re getting along now” plays a psychological trick on us, and we become more tolerant of inequality.
In the study, one of the reasons this happened was that disadvantaged participants became optimistic that changes in the relational aspect would naturally translate into larger changes in behavior, structure, and culture. People in disadvantaged groups believed that, having gotten to know them better, the advantaged group members would become uncomfortable with inequality and want to behave more fairly. But that’s not what was happening in the advantaged groups. These participants did show a change in attitude that favored equality, but “to equality as a principle, rather than as a reality … .” (ibid, 120) In other words, they thought positively enough about the disadvantaged groups to support the idea of equality as a theory, but did not become more willing to take necessary steps to actually do something about it. In my experience, what is often going on here is that the human mind wants to find ways to reconcile these two conflicting experiences, and the easy way forward is to imagine that one of the scenarios doesn’t exist. In other words, because we feel better about a relationship, we want to believe that things are objectively better in the world. Because there is no longer a problem between us relationally, we want to believe there is no longer a problem structurally.
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“Equality: From Principle to Reality,” 12/3/2017
Despite these limitations, many of our approaches to dealing with inequality have focused on getting people from different groups to spend time together. The Contact Hypothesis,vii which in its strict form has some very particular guidelines and has demonstrated value in reducing prejudice, has been popularized in such a way that it is easy to view intergroup contact as a cure-all. While I am 100% in support of reducing prejudice, it is important to note that this emphasis also reflects our society’s preference for elevating the individual over the structural and cultural, a preference that means it is all too easy to deflect our attention and intentions away from movement building. The lessons of both history and psychology insist that, if we want true equality in community, we must not substitute individual change for systemic change. We must never confuse getting along with getting justice. But this is exactly the risk we take when we focus on harmony without also focusing on equality.
It also means that social change in the direction of justice requires more than a devotion to the principle of equality, or even harmonious feelings between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. As John Dovidio has expressed it,  “Superficial inclusion can be a problem because it cloaks injustice. … Inclusion, in terms of superficial commonality, seems like a solution, but it actually contributes to the problem. … Dominant groups strategically use superficial commonality to maintain the status quo and the stability of their advantage.”viii  With awareness of the tendency and potential of human psychology to find ways to tolerate injustice, we must be intentional and persistent in keeping ourselves and our communities accountable to the practices of justice in real life: in our habits, relationships, organizations, and cultures. So what kind of principles might we bear in mind if we want to take these very human limitations seriously? Three stand out to me.
1. I must continue to bring attention to the historical, institutional, structural, and cultural aspects of inequality and injustice, and not just the individual aspects, if I want to work for lasting change.
2. I must center the voices, experiences, and lives of people living in disadvantaged groups.
3. I must assume that lasting change will not happen unless we diligently work to make it happen and create mechanisms that hold us accountable at structural and cultural, and not just personal, levels.
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“Equality: From Principle to Reality,” 12/3/2017
There are some real practical applications of these principles if we take the time to reflect, but they may require a shift in priorities for many of us. For example, in talking with Roger about this Sunday, he brought up the topic of having conversations and relationships with people that have aligned themselves with injustice, particularly folks who support politicians like Donald Trump and Roy Moore. It’s also a timely topic, as many of us navigate holiday gatherings at work or home that put us in company with folks that we otherwise might not be likely to be in the same room with. I am sensitive to this situation, especially when it brings stress into family relationships, and it’s something I have to deal with myself.
But, to be honest, it is actually low on my list of priorities. My perception is that, most of the time, these types of conversations are more about making us feel better and less conflicted than about working for social change. I always ask myself, why is this important to me? Is it the most effective way to meet that need? Does it distract me from my deepest held values and aspirations? Is it aligning me more or less with strategic movement building? Is it making me more passionate and effective in building community and social capital that is truly just, equal, wise, and kind? When I get in touch with those answers, the path I want to take is usually a lot clearer. I’m not as easily distracted or upset, and I’m less likely to invest my energy in relationships, conversations, or habits that aren’t committed to dismantling oppressive systems and cultures.
It’s true that I used to spend a lot of time in conversation, trying to change the minds of people who were convinced that LGBTQIA+ folk were evil, people who believed corporate greed was a virtue, people who told racist jokes, people who were more concerned about men being falsely accused than women being raped. But the lessons I learned in Cambodia changed me; my own life is much richer and better for it, and my activism is more sustainable and effective. That’s not to say that I am unwilling to have those conversations now, but there’s a limit to the amount of change they can bring in the absence of a willing focus on inequality and injustice. If the folks we are having a conversation with are unwilling to acknowledge and address systemic and cultural injustice, that conversation is not likely, in my view, to be strategic when it comes to social change and social justice. To return one last time to the research, the study pointed out that -
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“Equality: From Principle to Reality,” 12/3/2017
“Whereas a sole emphasis on commonalities may deflect attention from issues of group disparities, encounters that emphasize both common connections and the problem of unjust group inequalities may promote intergroup understanding as well as recognition of the need for change … . … However, it is critical, both in theory and in practice, to recognize that intergroup harmony per se does not necessarily lead to intergroup equality.” (Saguy et al, 120)
So we must be honest about our situation. As long as white people have something to gain from systemic racism, we are going to face resistance to dismantling white supremacy. As long as men enjoy benefits at the expense of women and gender nonconforming folks, we are going to have to fight for an end to patriarchy. As long as the rich dominate and profit from the poverty of the poor, we are going to see the 1% grow in power and wealth. As Assata Shakur powerfully expressed it: “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”ix
I realize that this hasn’t been a happy or funny or even uplifting talk. But there are some pretty good reasons to suspect that the bad news is going to keep coming, and we can’t be wearing ourselves out chasing down dead ends. Beyond giving up and giving in, we can keep carving out a community where we can get a glimpse of what equality and kindness actually mean. And by working with, rather than denying, the suffering created by our oppressive systems, we can learn to transcend and replace those systems. As long as our hearts long for the heavens to be torn apart, and for the mountains to quake, for something good and right to replace these centuries of death and destruction, we must find ways to channel our energy into communities, relationships, and practices that bring life and keep us accountable to life.
And when Isaiah’s prayer is finally answered, and these oppressive structures are turned upside down, it will be because all of us, joining this long line of humans through history, dared to insist that equality become more than a principle, that equality become a reality.
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i https://jezebel.com/this-is-what-a-news-cycle-that-holds-sexual-predators-a-1820256617   ii https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonynitti/2017/12/02/winners-and-losers-of-the-senate-tax-bill/#712ca8ba254d   iii https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/2/16720952/senate-tax-bill-inequality   iv http://www.killedbypolice.net/   v http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41975573   vi Saguy, T., Tausch, N., Dovidio, J. and Pratto, F. (2009) “The Irony of Harmony: Intergroup Contact Can Produce False Expectations for Equality." Psychological Science 20:1, 114-121, page 119. Online publication date: 1-Feb-2009. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.504.8849&rep=rep1&type=pdf  vii https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15012467   viii John F. Dovidio in “Gender and Work: Challenging Conventional Wisdom” (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=CeDGkSCf2Fg ). ix https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/assata-shakur-on-race-war/  

“What I Know About the Afterlife”

“What I Know About the Afterlife”     Dec. 10, 2017   Roger Ray, pastor

note to viewers: I was unable to get back to Springfield in time to deliver this message in person but it was read in my absence by David Ketchum:  click here to see the video

Isaiah 40:1-2, 6-8

40Comfort, O comfort my people,
   says your God.
² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
   and cry to her
that she has served her term,
   that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
   double for all her sins. 

⁶ A voice says, ‘Cry out!’
   And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’
All people are grass,
   their constancy is like the flower of the field.
⁷ The grass withers, the flower fades,
   when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
   surely the people are grass.
⁸ The grass withers, the flower fades;
   but the word of our God will stand for ever. 

As you know, I spend several hours a day consuming both commercial and alternative news. My “shtick,” to call it that, is a spiritual and ethical commentary on current events. But I try to mix up my daily consumption of news with some samples of science and history.

A basic understanding of the sciences changes your relationship with the world. Sitting by the ocean this week, I become as hypnotized by staring at the vastness of the ocean as were my cave dwelling ancestors. But I know a bit more about it. I know that the waves are caused by wind, transferring kinetic energy into the surface of the water.

I know that the rise and fall of the tide is because the gravitational pull of the moon causes a bulge in the oceans that causes the sea level to rise and fall at any given spot on the coast. Further, due to careful measurement and observation, astrophysicists can prove that because the earth rotates faster than the moon orbits the earth, the bulge in the ocean does not line up perfectly with the moon. The earth’s rotation is always pulling the bulge a bit ahead of the moon, which, in turn, pulls the moon along a bit faster. The faster the moon goes, the farther away from the earth it moves. Currently, this gravitational affect is pushing the moon away from the earth at a rate of five inches every year, while simultaneously draining the earth’s rotational energy.

If this continues unaffected by other solar system events indefinitely, eventually the earth and the moon will arrive at a geosynchronous orbit in which the moon will be visible only to one side of the earth, as the earth is now visible only from one side of the moon. And there will be no more rising and falling of tides.

None of this is visible to the naked eye and none of it will affect any of us nor will the human race live long enough to observe it, but these are the thoughts that come to a theologian sitting on a sea wall in the Atlantic. But, regardless of the fact that it is not readily observable to us, it is none the less true because these are things that can be observed with the right equipment.

You cannot learn these things from the scriptures of any religion, nor can it be revealed through dreams, palm readings, tea leaves, Ouija boards, or Tarot cards. These facts about astrophysics do not require a belief system, a faith, nor do they change based on opinions or personal preferences.

All of this business about waves, tides, and the changes in orbits of planets and moons started out in someone’s imagination. All of these apparent facts were, at some time, just a theory in need of evidence but once evidence is found, these are no longer simply beliefs or ideas, they are reliable descriptions of the world in which we live.

Now, everything cannot be either proven or tested. Gravity, the force that basically created and manages the universe, is, though more observably present than any other invisible force, is shrouded in mystery. We know that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate and the only way to account for that is that there must be some great mass that we cannot see that is pulling the universe apart. Scientists call it “dark matter” and dark matter exercises dark energy but we know nothing about it except for the fact that, measuring its gravitational strength, dark matter must account for about 80% of the universe… even though we can’t see it and have no idea what it is.

We can’t see it, touch it, measure it, and we know virtually nothing about it, but there is this one thing: we have a compelling reason to believe that it exists because it must exist, otherwise, the universe wouldn’t be flying apart at an increasing rate of speed. That is, we have a perfectly good reason to believe that it exists… not just because we want to believe it but because reason, logic, evidence, observation, make it necessary to accept that dark matter or something of the sort does exist.

A couple of centuries ago, that dark matter might have been called “God.” Our ancestors tended to ascribe anything that we did not understand to God. In ancient times, God caused the wind and the waves, the rising and falling of the tide, and God held the planets in their place. I’m just more comfortable with accepting not knowing than I am in making up a supernatural entity to take care of what I can’t figure out.

One of my fears for our culture is that we cannot appear to easily tell the difference between what is true and what we want to be true. We cannot tell the difference between news and propaganda. We cannot tell the difference between science and wishing.

Religion can be a choice to fall headlong into a belief system for which there is little or no evidence but a lot of wishing, or it can be a passionate search for truth, a search that is fearless in its examination of beliefs:  always ready to dismiss beliefs for which there is no evidence, and to change beliefs in light of new information.

If you have not read the chapter entitled “Evidence Based Faith” in my 2014 book, Progressive Faith and Practice, then please let me give that book my very egotistical endorsement. There may be dark matter filling up the universe and there may be unicorns, the difference is that I have a reason to believe in dark matter and I do not have a reason to believe in unicorns. Now, both dark matter and unicorns were, at some point in time, produced by someone’s imagination… imagination is important, helpful, crucial even, but if you can find no evidence to go on believing in something for which there is no reason to believe it beyond what you wish, then, folks, that’s not religion, that’s just nuts.

You may want to believe that taking Emergen-C will help you to avoid getting a cold but, folks, there is no evidence that it is true. None. Zip. Nada. Not after 40 years of testing. The existence of products like Emergen-C are proof of one thing and that is that our public-school science classes are seriously lacking.

Now, we are not here today to talk about waves, tides, the moon, or fake cures. I do want to talk about something that is very important, but I felt the need to set the stage for this conversation. I have been asked to talk about life after death.

Specifically, I have been asked what I know about an afterlife and the answer to that is that I know nothing at all. Similarly, I have been asked what I believe about an afterlife and my answer is similarly disarming, I don’t believe anything about it because I have no evidence to suggest that there is an afterlife.

I believe that when humans became, not just conscious, but self-conscious, that their awareness of their personal morality was simply unbearable, and this fear and dread of personal extinction drove them to add to their religious beliefs,

certain reassurances that they would continue to exist in some form. However, it is important to note, that many refuse to fully embrace the belief that we somehow go on as we are for eternity.

I am fascinated by the voice of the ancient Israelite prophet, Isaiah, who says simultaneously, “Comfort, comfort, my people” and “all people will wither and die like the grass in the field.” The earliest strata of Hebrew writing offers no assurances of life after death, in fact, quite the contrary, the Hebrew Bible assures us that we are mortal and our lives are relatively short. For them, life was not simply resident in the individual but in the tribe, in the community, in the family.

Genesis 25:8 says of Abraham:  Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.

Which meant, simply, that his bones were added to the bones of his ancestors, peacefully, lovingly, realistically. And here, my dear friends, I fear that I am going to have to wade into the weeds a bit and I can only implore you to stick with me:

The Jewish and Christian religions form something of a bridge between eastern and western thought. Eastern philosophies and religions are much more comfortable with the notion that we are all connected, and that existence is not limited to any one individual. A single daisy may die but not all daisies and in the rebirth of daisies in general every spring, all daisies continue to exist.

In the west, we are much more focused on the individual and the personal and so, if I am a daisy, the fact that other daisies will grow in the spring hardly compensates for the fact that I will not. And so, as our religions became more westernized, we developed a belief in “daisy heaven.”

In their enslavement in Babylon in the fifth century BCE, Jews were exposed to Zoroastrian beliefs in an afterlife and that became a fringe belief in parts of Judaism thereafter, but it became a central belief for the Christian and Muslim faiths that grew westward from those Jewish roots.

Persian slaves, unhappy with their lot in life, developed a belief in a life after death in which their slave owners would burn in a lake of fire while they enjoyed the kind of luxury that their labor had provided for their masters. You can see how that is a comforting thought but it is a thought that has more in common with unicorns than it does with dark matter. You can see why they would want to believe it but you cannot find a reason to believe it beyond personal preference.

A few years ago, a neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander, had a vision of heaven while he was in a meningitis-induced coma. He published his account of being greeted by a beautiful, blue eyed, blond who loved him unconditionally as being proof of heaven. Yet, there is no proof in the book. He had an experience that seemed real at the moment but it was just a dream. I don’t know why I would have to explain this to him but many patients in near death circumstances or under heavy medication, have very real seeming visions.

We lost a church member several years ago because, when I visited him following serious back surgery, while he was in the throes of morphine delusions, he saw Jesus floating over his bed. I kept telling him that he was on morphine but even after he got out of the hospital he still believed that Jesus was floating above his bed and that I was just not spiritual enough to see it. The truth is that I was just too sober to see it but that truth never was persuasive to him.

I don’t understand why this is so hard for so many people. All of us who have had dogs have seen them chasing squirrels in their dreams… their paws move, they bark, they really are seeing the squirrel but the difference is, whey the dog wakes up, he immediately realizes that he was dreaming and there is not a squirrel running lose in the house. A human who is ostensibly a scientist, a trained neurosurgeon, has a dream and wakes up to write a book about his experience as if it proved something. This is not just stupid, it is embarrassing.

But beyond the easy stuff, dear friends, I really must wander a bit deeper into the weeds. Just as science cannot tell us what dark matter is, they are equally stymied by the question, “What is consciousness?” What makes you, you? Your hair can fall out and you are still you. I hope it never happens, but you could have several body parts removed and you are still you because what we mean by you is your consciousness, your thoughts, your self-awareness. If saying that you have a soul means anything at all, surely you are talking about your consciousness.

You are not your body because when you die all of your body is still here, but it has been transformed from being a person into being a thing, an object. We show deference to human remains out of respect for the person who was once associated with those remains but we all know that a body is not a person. It is hard to be a person without a body but a body without consciousness is something to be either buried or cremated.

In our computer age, science fiction has postulated about the ability to download a person’s thoughts into a computer program…. Could we exist digitally even when our body is worn out? It is an interesting question and though it is pure fiction at this time, it is a bit telling, isn’t it? If my mind can inhabit either another body or a computer, then I am still me, regardless of the disposition of my body.

Just for free: Christians basically invented the catacombs of Rome. Roman law required that the dead be cremated because there was no room for burying people in the city. But early Christians, in hope of a physical resurrection, felt that it was important to preserve the body by burying it. Rome did not allow burial within the city, but the catacombs developed on land outside of the city. The early Christians were not so much hiding in the Catacombs to worship in secret as many of us were taught in Sunday school. They were going there to make offerings and prayers for the departed saints with whom they were looking forward to the second coming of Christ.

For Pharisaic Judaism, early Christianity and Islam, whistling in the grave yard became a theological norm. All of the evidence points towards mortality, but theologians offered a promise of an unseen, untestable, and, I would say, non-existent balm for the fear of death. In that sense, “heaven” and “Emergen-C” have a lot in common.

My 19^th Century Theology professor assigned this book to us, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality. Since Professor Hodgson is no longer with us, I feel confident to confess to you that I never got around to reading it for class lo those 40 years ago, but I have read it since. If I had read my assignments when I was supposed to, it might have saved me a good deal of anguish as a young pastor having to work some of this stuff out on my own.

Feuerbach started out as a seminarian, but he was encouraged to reroute his studies into philosophy and from the vantage point of a young Hegelian, he wrote a searing criticism of the clergy and theologians of his day. He talked about consciousness and self-consciousness, and the fear of mortality that drove religious people to the inescapably narcissistic belief that they were somehow imbued with eternal life in a way that was personal and specific, a way not afforded to cattle, pigs, and chickens.

I think he wrote in a fairly respectful though insistent tone, but he was not rewarded for being courteous. He was fired from his teaching post and his career ended very early in his life but, while there is a price to speaking the truth, the truth cannot long remain hidden. Long before Freud and Jung, Feuerbach assured his readers that even though there is no permanent consciousness that continues when the body has died, he encouraged us to be fully alive in the time that we are given and to, as the Hebrew prophet said, “take comfort in your mortality.” He hinted at the collective consciousness of Jung, as we are all a part of all others, connected to one another. No one daisy lives forever but daisies go on.

My friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, late in his life, literally facing his own mortality head on, wrote a book about Eternal Life. Spong is, as you know, quite comprehensively well-read though, in this book, he does not specifically reference Feuerbach, he appears to reach the same conclusions.

Spong attributes belief in a literal heaven to the childish fears of primitive humans but he does not rudely dismiss the church and all of its traditional teachings. Though he specifically says that “religion has always been delusional, more about a search for security than a search for truth” (p. 206) he says that the beliefs of the church are not to be discarded as false and deserving our contempt but that we are to transcend them. The Christian faith has been our path and it is senseless to despise our path, but it is a path we need to pursue until we have outgrown the need for assurances that any one of us, as an individual consciousness will exist when our bodies are dead.

Though Spong rejects the self-centered notion that any one of us is just too darned precious for the universe to continue without us, he also affirms a belief that somehow, we continue to exist after death as a part of the larger consciousness of the universe, in much the same way that last year’s daisy participates in the daisies we will see in the spring.

Now, if you will allow me one step deeper into the weeds and then I promise that I will stop talking:  While there is certainly a connection between the gray matter of our brains and our thinking, our memory, even our dreams and self-awareness, you cannot say that consciousness is simply brain matter. When I remember my great-grandmother, sitting in her tiny Appalachian home, writing poetry, where is that image of her sitting in her rocking chair? If I can still see her in my mind, is she entirely dead these past 50 years?

Our community of faith is just less than a decade old, and yet, we have had to give many of our founding members back to the ocean of existence in which their individuality merges to become a part of both our history and our future.

We would not have this building without the sacrifices of Chuck and Ruth Snowden, Jim Price, and Nancy Pate. Whatever our church accomplishes in every meal we feed to domestic violence victims, or the homeless, every truck load of supplies we send to the poor in Nicaragua, and even as a new roof is built on a hurricane ravaged home in Houston, they are a part of that, as well as a part of every time that we gather.

I do not need to believe, as many of my peers in ministry seem to insist, that they are somehow still individually extant, looking down on us from above, because they continue to exist in the way that a stone thrown into a still lake sends ripples far away, long after the stone has sunk beneath the surface. That is not enough for those who still fear death, but it is enough for me.

I do not visit the graves of my ancestors because they are no longer there but they live on in my memories and in the traditions we keep. I cannot help seeing my mother’s twisted arthritic hands when I am shaping the little egg-shaped servings of dressing we cooked on Thanksgiving Day. When I cook country ham for my daughter, I remember the smoke house on the old Ray plantation in Kentucky where we aged our salt cured meats for nearly 200 years.

I am even keeping the family business alive in some ways… one of my forefathers was a black friar in London who was murdered by an assassin hired by his bishop. Another was a protestant reformer, burned at the stake under the order of Mary Queen of Scots. Fortunately, we deal with difficult clergy differently these days. . . Feuerbach and I were just fired for our preaching, but it is more difficult to have us removed by immolation.

Most of the religious world tries to invest themselves in what they wish was true though it does not appear to be either very convincing or very satisfying. Of course, we do not know much about consciousness, so it would be absurd to say what does not exist. I would not know have any reason to believe that the moon is five inches farther away this year than it was last year except that reliable sources in the sciences assure me that it is true.

I find no reason to believe in a heavenly existence but what I know is true is that the love does not die with the body, nor do people pass from memory, nor is their influence gone. We can remember, we can talk to and celebrate the lives of those whom we love. But, the apparent truth is that we give up individuality as we are assumed back into the ocean of existence and are reunited with the universe. I can see that. I feel that. I know that is true. And, in the end, the honest truth always feels best to me. 

“Thanksgiving as a Myth of Origin”

“Thanksgiving as a Myth of Origin”      Nov. 26, 2017

Roger Ray, pastor     The Emerging Church

 click here for the video

Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (pp. 18-19) regarding sacred feasts:                             

1.     It constitutes the history of the acts of the founders, the Supernaturals.

2.     It is considered to be true.

3.     It tells how an institution came into existence.

4.     In performing the ritual associated with the myth, one “experiences knowledge of the origin” and claims one’s patriarchy.

5.     Thus one “lives” the myth, as a religion. 

There are reasonable disputes about exactly when and where the first Thanksgiving took place. . . not that it especially matters. The regular observance as a national holiday can be easily traced to the days of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln called for the observance as a way to foster a sense of patriotism and pride in being Americans before America tore itself apart.

Most cultures have some sort of spring and fall holiday to reflect the agricultural cycles of life but in almost every nation, one of those has evolved into a religious or a nationalistic observance and, in our case, Thanksgiving is both.

I’ve been reading the work of the late Romanian scholar, Mircea Eliade, since I was in grad school, though I have never had the faintest idea about how to properly say his name. But it was in studying his work 40 years ago that my Old Testament professor helped us to understand how the Jewish observance of Passover was not a simple recitation of their story of origin but was, in fact, an almost magical feast in which their history was repeated in the telling of the story about their wandering Aramean father, their Egyptian captivity and escape, and how the things that they ate were to remind them of their deliverance from bondage, and the hardships of their journey to a land flowing in milk and honey.

The events described in a Passover celebration are not terribly historical. There was neither a mass exodus from Egypt, nor a sudden conquest of the land these nomads would later occupy. Nor did either Moses or Charlton Heston divide the Red Sea or provide mana from heaven. But the story is told as if it is absolutely historical and it defined families as being Jewish, as living on the land God had given to them, and it bound them to one another, their nation, their land, and their shared faith.

The Jewish claim that God gave them the Promised Land, a land that was already occupied by another nation with walled cities, and agricultural practices, has no more authority to it than if I showed up at your house and asked you to leave because God had given me your house…. Oh, and leave the car keys, God gave me your car too.

But we tell these stories and reenact myths through ceremony, liturgy, and sacred meals and at some very deep level we start to believe that it is true. God gave Palestine to the Jews, gave North America to British invaders, and lately the Russians think that they have some mythic claim to a great deal of eastern Europe. Just as Jihadists believe that God has put them in charge of Islam so that killing other flavors of Muslims is not a moral issue.

Thanksgiving is that for most of our nation, even when it is so unconsciously. In our elementary schools, we drew pictures of Pilgrims and Indians who shared in a great harvest feast. But in our homes we drew upon previous generations to eat foods that often go back four, or five, or six generations. Our traditions may be different but each family has theirs. Valerie and I have concrete expectations from our annual Thanksgiving feast from which we do not vary. The way my family makes a crusty dressing, the prominent placement of roasted chestnuts, and a sweet potato casserole that is both as addictive and possibly as bad for your health as heroin. None of these things are normal foods for us that we would eat any other week out of the year but they cannot go missing from our annual ritual that, in some ways, defines who we are.

But as Eliade points out, the ritual is also a part of reinvesting ourselves in our own myths of origins. The myths about God having gone into the real estate business on behalf of the Jews, giving them clear title to a parcel of land that already had people living on it, but the God connection justified how they treated the Canaanites. It so clearly baptized their national interests that their wars were not about land theft, enslavement, and cruelty, because they were fulfilling God’s will.

As we here in America were trying to sleep off our Thanksgiving feast this year, people in Egypt were waking up to a deadly horror as more than 300 worshippers in a mosque were being murdered by other Muslims. And here is one of the things I wish that most Americans could come to understand, including and especially our current president: the majority of victims of Islamic terrorism are, in fact, other Muslims.

Why would Islamic terrorists kill worshippers in a mosque? Well, because they were, from the Jihadist’s view, the wrong kind of Muslims. In this instance, it was not a case of Shi’a attacking Sunni’s or Kurds attacking Shi’a. In this case, the victims belonged to a smaller division of Islam called, Sufis. Sufism is often described as the mystical branch of Islam but in spite of the visuals of whirling dervishes, this is a branch of Islam that we would love to see spreading. Its adherents are peace loving and their spirituality is rooted in meditation and contemplation. If there is a progressive branch of the Muslim world, it is likely to be found among the Sufis.

But the existence of a peaceful, contemplative group of Muslims who pray five times a day, memorize the Quran, eat only Halal foods, but who yet disagree with both Sunni and Shi’a interpretations of the Quran is like trying to tell Judge Roy Moore that it is wrong for a thirty-year-old man to date teenaged girls. Please forgive me if I feel compelled to quote Voltaire once again, “Those who can persuade you to believe in absurdities and get you to commit atrocities.”

Passover, Thanksgiving, Ramadan, these sorts of rituals that mix myth with history and national identity can be so powerful that we start to deny facts and gloss over either current or ancient violence.

Isis fighters killed 300 Sufis in Cairo on Friday and you know immediately that is horrible. No myth of religious righteousness could justify that murder but before we move on, may I ask you:  The military fort that is just up I44 from us, Ft. Leonard Wood . . . do you know who Leonard Wood was?

He was a general who in the early 20^th century led an American army in the invasion of the Philippines. The battle for which he is best known was derided at the time it happened by none other than Mark Twain. General Wood was engaging a group of Filipina insurgents who happened to be Muslims. They were called Moro.  Over a thousand of these primitives armed with only wooden clubs and spears took refuge in the crater of an inactive volcano. Men, women, children, huddled in the crater to escape the gun fire of Wood’s army but the Americans were not in a mood to take prisoners.

They lined up machine guns on the lip of the crater and shot down on the Moro until they were all dead. The soldiers then went down into the crater to have their pictures taken with the mounds of dead bodies. We named this huge fort in Missouri after General Leonard Wood.

Now, in 1906, Wood’s men killed about 1100 defenseless Muslims. In 2017, this band of Isis fighters killed 230 defenseless Muslims. To hear our media pundits talk about it, the immorality and vicious nature of Isis is beyond comprehension. I don’t disagree with them, I just can’t get comfortable with pretending that we haven’t done the same and worse.

There are not many bleeding heart liberals who have not, at some time or another, quoted Gandhi’s famous teaching that we must be the change that we want to see in the world but the shoe fits in this case. We want Isis to stop murdering people and to join the world of decent civilized folks. But we may have to go first.

Telling the hard truth is what churches are for. I know an awful lot of em just give into indoctrinating folks into our cultural myths so deeply that we can confidently say that the German genocide against the Jews in the 20^th century is the worst crime in the modern world, while we hardly consider the American genocide of Native Americans as being historically relevant. That is why, in my opinion, it is important to pull apart our myths and take a serious look at what they are made of.

We use national myths to build patriotism and bind a diverse society together but we can also use them to whitewash both our history and our current conduct. From across the distance of a half a century, we can decry the racist ways in which black people were treated during the civil rights marches of the 60’s in America’s south but, folks, realistically, when last December the police in North Dakota trapped a couple of hundred peaceful protestors at Standing Rock on a bridge and sprayed them with fire hoses in subfreezing temperatures, using pepper spray and police dogs to keep the protesters in check… it doesn’t look like we have come very far from our racist past.

Oh, and if you are keeping score, I told you last year that if the DAPL pipeline was completed that it would leak…. It leaked nearly a quarter of a million gallons of dirty crude oil on North Dakota this week. I’m not a prophet or anything. It was easy to predict that the pipeline would leak because they all do.

The myth of American exceptionalism has an origin in the Thanksgiving story of harmonious celebrations between British invaders and Native Americans. We know that the truth of that relationship, while it had its moments of compassion and a good deal of financial trading, it was largely a history of violence, broken treaties, and land theft, usually in the name of God.

These encounters between Europe and the Americas sent corn, potatoes, and pumpkins to Europe and the Indians got cows, pigs, chickens, and wheat from Europe. They also got small pox, measles, and malaria from Europe, and because Europeans captured millions of Indians, mostly women and children, and took them to Europe as sex slaves, the Indians were able to share venereal diseases with Europe.

But there were instances of inter-tribal slavery as well. And, just like in Africa, there were Native tribes that sold captured members of rival tribes to the European slave trade. It is not, at this point, about good guys and bad guys. Humans of all stripes have a remarkable penchant for simultaneously being horribly cruel and at the same time telling themselves that they are doing the work of God.

I’m just saying that God doesn’t want your genocides, your real estate, your slaves, or your self-righteousness.

We don’t seek to expose the deception behind popular myths as some kind of public shaming of white, European history, or of some kind of religious self-flagellation but only this: ignorance of history dooms you to repeat it. Self-deception about past failures means that you learn nothing from those failures and set yourself up to do it again.

Our faith journey should give us insight into ourselves and into the world, not serve as a set of blinders to keep us from ever knowing what is going on. When we are honest about it, we have to acknowledge that our path to this juncture in history involved a genocide of 50 million Native Americans, the enslavement of 12 million Africans, and the exploitation of uncounted legions of immigrants, and some pretty shoddy treatment of the continent we took from its rightful owners.

But the past doesn’t have to be prelude. We are in charge of our future and we can put some of that liberty and justice that we want to be known for in it. We can put equal rights in it. We can put sustainable building and renewable energy into it. And please, let’s put some sane religion into it. God’s knows we’ve had enough of the other kind!