“Love is All You Need (Domestic Abuse Unplugged)”

“Love is All You Need (Domestic Abuse Unplugged)”     February 11, 2018   

Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video 

There's nothing you can do that can't be done

Nothing you can sing that can't be sung

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy
There's nothing you can make that can't be made
No one you can save that can't be saved

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time
It's easy
All you need is love

I generally believe that anything that can be put in a nutshell probably belongs there. The early 20^th century Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendel Holmes, said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I will give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” There are topics, even when they are summed up nicely, that require wading into the weeds a bit.

That general warning being issued, there is a t-shirt that I really like which allows the wearer to proclaim to the world:

Love is Love

Black lives matter

Climate change is real

Immigrants make America Great

And  -  Women’s Rights are Human Rights  

I could turn that into a weekend conference with six lectures and three hours of music with a beer garden. But these are conclusions . . . conclusions familiar to all of us but most of them took us a while to get there. These are all important truths, but we have to do a lot of convincing to get folks in most churches to wear this shirt.

The conclusions are simple and straight forward but the process of arriving at them requires thoughtful analysis, critical thinking skills, and a willingness to accept new information. And one more thing, you have to have the ability to hear, understand, and appropriate the information and not everyone is able to do that.

If I may, I want to engage you in a little experiment. Please just repeat after me:    

Ich bin gekommen, daß sie das Leben und volle Genüge haben     

Let me try that a little differently. Please just repeat after me:

I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly.

It is the same sentence, the only difference is that the first version was in German and the second version was in English. As English speakers, the second sentence had a place to go to in our brains. It was easy to remember and repeat because it is a language we know, in fact, a sentence we know from John’s gospel.

New ideas, alternative ways of seeing, even new facts, often slide right past our ears without leaving any muddy footprints on the clean waxed floor of our awareness because we have not cut a groove in our brains that is ready to hear it. That’s why advertisements, to ever really work, have to be repeated over and over again.

You may hate political correctness and constant demands of sensitivity about language but, folks, the truth is that words matter. Words are how we learn.

Words are how we remember things. Words create categories in our brains.

Let me give you an example:

This is a Patagonian toothfish. This fish lives in the very cold waters near Antarctica. It lives to be about 50 years old and can be seven feet long and weight more than 200 pounds. It had almost no commercial value. You have not, after all, every seen a Patagonian toothfish mentioned on a menu. However, some bright marketing guy decided to call it a “Chilean Sea Bass” even though it is neither Chilean or a Bass, and it became so popular that they have now been eaten nearly into extinction.

 

You may think that you would not like a Patagonian toothfish, but it turns out, if you just call it something more palatable, you like it quite a lot. A lot of our prejudices and beliefs and even our life styles are based on categories in our heads, all of which we have learned.

The most common meats in America are beef, chicken, and pork but in the Middle East, camel is a staple meat, in Ecuador, Guinea pigs and iguana are primary meat sources. I have had camel in Egypt and Guinea pig in Ecuador and I can assure you, they do not taste like chicken. But it is all a matter of what you believe about animals and how those categories have been established in your brain.

When I started graduate school in 1978 at Vanderbilt, we were told during orientation that we were not allowed to make male references to God in our academic papers and if we did so, we would be given one chance to make corrections and after that you would just get an “F” on your paper. Prior to that orientation, I had never God anything but “Father” and the use of masculine pronouns to mean both men and women was just the universe of language in which I lived.

It wasn’t easy to change and the emphasis my professors put on this way of speaking seemed to me to be radical and grossly exaggerated. But in 1978, I had also never seen a woman serving as a pastor, and not only was God called “Father,” so were Catholic and Episcopal priests. The language of the church, our hymns and liturgies were all male-centered and while you may not think that makes a difference, it wasn’t until we changed our language that we began to see changes in the roles of women in the church.

You may have never noticed that our prayers, liturgy, and hymns assiduously avoid using gender specific language and the fact that you have not noticed only proves the point that this has become normal for us. Our language sets the mental stage for being able to sustain progressive thinking.

People who have been indoctrinated into the white, heterosexual, male patriarchy, of traditional Christianity, are absolutely confident that their world view, their beliefs, are virtually universal. They don’t believe that love is love unless it is between a man and a woman. They would not be inclined to say that Black lives matter because they are confident that All lives matter in the sense that really all lives matter but while lives matter more than other lives.

For them, the Genesis creation narrative that describes the creation of a flat earth

that is in the center of everything is a substantial truth and climate change scientists are just a fad among atheists. For them, immigrants are simultaneously a charity case and something to be feared. And, women’s rights are not really on the radar.

Religious people tend to think of themselves as being good people. They think that going to church, attending Bible study, enduring sermons, and singing really bad hymns, is somehow feeding their souls and making them look more attractive to God but, let’s be honest, for the most part, being indoctrinated into traditional religious life tends to make you prejudiced against homosexuals, it supports a white, male, racist, patriarchy; it makes you impervious to scientific facts, it fosters nationalism, and, and this is what I am really on about today, it creates the universe of values in which women are not only paid less, passed over for promotions, and sexually exploited, but it also can justify domestic violence against women.

I am not trying to be flip about this by quoting Mark Twain, but when he said:

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so” he is describing the fundamental problem with religious indoctrination.

This is Valentine’s Day week and I asked Sean to have love songs for our service today and I really meant to do more of a straight up message about love relationships today, but I decided that the one I delivered last year covered that topic pretty well so if you really need to hear a philosophy of love relationships sermons then let me encourage you to look up my Feb. 12 sermon from 2017 on YouTube or iTunes. It is clever, insightful, and not nearly as grim as what I want to talk about today.

Because love relationships often become quite toxic. They start out with kisses, a diamond ring, a ceremony, usually some kids and a house, but there is often a cancer that grows in the shadow of love and sometimes churches feed the cancer more than they feed the love.

When I was a grad student doing my supervision in counseling training, I served a small church in Russellville, KY that was just a block up the street from the local Catholic Church. For a host of reasons, I became the de facto therapist for local Catholics. One of my regulars was a very little woman, a former nun who had left the convent to marry. She was a nurse at the local hospital, a mother, and an active member of the Catholic parish.

I came to my office one day and found her sitting by my desk. Her face was badly bruised. One eye was swollen shut. She was breathing with great difficulty due to broken ribs. Her concern was that her supervisor at the hospital would not believe that she fell down the stairs again. I asked her if she was ready to see a lawyer about filing for divorce. She said, “No.”

She explained that she had been to see Father Thomas before coming to see me and that he had told her that the violence in her marriage was the cross she had to bear. She added that it was punishment for having broken her vow to the order when she left the convent. So, you see, it wasn’t just her husband who was beating her…. It was also her church, and by inference, it was a judging, wrathful, heavenly Father.

I wish that I could bury that story in rural Kentucky of forty years ago but my weekly discipline of serving lunch at our local domestic abuse shelter keeps my experience current. Every week, there are women in line with their arm in a sling, with bruised faces, often shepherding small children who cling to them. I try to smile and joke with the kids, offering them treats and cartons of milk but many of them are afraid of men, and not without good reason.

The brief conversations we have with the residents often reveal that they are church folks. But I could have guessed that already. A woman I met at the shelter last week told me that she and her husband had gone to see their pastor for counseling about the violence. She says that she was told that if she would be more submissive, more obedient, that he would, in turn, be a better husband.

She left him many times but each time he would call and remind her of what their church taught. He would assure her that she would go to hell if she left him. When that stopped working, he made fake suicide attempts to make her feel guilty…. You know that special kind of guilt that only church people can really feel.

I was in a meeting recently that was supposed to be an educational meeting for pastors about domestic abuse. The women who spoke to us about their horrific experiences all included a narrative about talking either to their Catholic priest, or their Pentecostal pastor. And the event was dominated by students from a local Pentecostal university and members of a local Pentecostal church and they kept referring to God as “Father” and to Jesus as being God, and reiterating beliefs about God’s will and God’s deliverance as if they were not able to see how their male centered religion and created a misogynist world view that makes domestic violence not only possible but defensible.

They were set up for abuse by a patriarchal view of faith and they had all gone right back into the lion’s den of their familiar, abusive, and patriarchal churches. And, no, I didn’t keep quiet out of some tortured sense of diplomacy. You wouldn’t want me to would you?

I was on this topic before the news about Rob Porter broke this week. And Porter has his own religious chapter to his narrative. He is a Mormon and when he was first violent with his wife, they went to their Mormon Church for direction. And the direction was basically for her to stick with him and take the beatings.

It is easy to point at the high-profile cases of wife beaters, but I don’t want for us to let this topic get lost in the extremes. Domestic violence is common. It is not a disease found only among the poor and the uneducated. In my own 40 years of experience in ministry, the family home I was called to the most often was the home of two physicians who never seemed to get violent enough to call the police but there was frequently enough punching and slapping for the nanny to call the pastor.

Domestic violence happens in trailer parks and in gated communities with astonishingly similar frequency. Rob Porter, the secretary to the President of the United States who lost his job this week was a veteran and a star graduate of Harvard Law School who had multiple cases of violence in his past but never seemed to give off clues to those who worked with him.

When I chose the lyrics of John Lennon’s “All you need is love” for the wisdom lesson today, I was unaware that Lennon wrote his works about peace and love as sermons to himself because he was ashamed of the violence in his first marriage and with many of the women he dated when he was younger. It is a simple thing to despise a member of the Trump administration but when you throw John Lennon into the mix you have to sit up and take the whole subject rather more seriously.

We have a horrible problem with domestic violence in Springfield. Our shelter, Harmony House, has stayed full with a waiting list for years. While the majority of residents are women and children, there are also men, and many gay and lesbian people whose domestic relationship had become toxic. It can happen to anyone.

The shelter in Kansas City has evolved towards investing in prevention over treatment. They are realizing that they need to teach the warning signs of an abuser to kids in late elementary school and middle school. One of the primary warning signs is when a romantic partner becomes too jealous or too controlling. And now, with cell phones, it is all too easy to call or text constantly, “where are you,” “who are you with,” “What are you doing?” Excesses of this sort should send up warning flags, even if you are only 14 or 15 years old.

But my concern goes even farther back. As a pastor, my concern is with the training children receive on little painted chairs in church pre-school programs. My own training in misogyny started right here, in my Kindergarten class in the basement of the 1^st Christian Church in Glasgow, KY. I was the cute one in the back row.

It is not about political correctness. It is not about hyper sensitivity to using the right word to avoid other people’s too easily hurt feelings. It is about changing the world so that love doesn’t get distorted into violence. It is about changing church culture, and school culture, and work culture so that we don’t need 150 beds in this small city for victims of domestic violence.

The words you use reflect the way that you think and the way that you think creates the culture in which we live. Right now, it is not especially safe to be a woman in our culture, not even a woman who is in love.

It is time for us to hold a funeral for patriarchal thinking, patriarchal speaking, and for patriarchal religion. Maybe then it will be true that “love is all we need.”

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

 Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Feb. 4, 2018      Dr. Roger L. Ray, pastor

click here to see the video 

“Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”
― Desmond Tutu 

              

(start with only the first 20 seconds of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcAhZ5JzYJY&t=92s

David Foster Wallace begins his now famous commencement speech with this wonderful illustration suggesting that if we could talk to fish, we might discover that fish have never given a moment’s thought to water. They live in it, eat and sleep in, reproduce and die in it but something that is entirely pervasive in our environment rarely becomes something that we are aware of at all.

Racism is like that. If White Privilege and Patriarchy is the water you were born in, lived in, went to school in and worked in, it is quite likely that you are blissfully unaware of either White Privilege or Patriarchy. You might argue that persons of color have always known a lot about racism and women have always known a lot about Patriarchy, but it may be just as true that most people who have grown up being repressed and discriminated against may also just accept it all as the water they swim in every day.

When my good friends, Scott and Nicole Fisk, went to see the movie “Hidden Figures” about 3 black women whose math skills led to the first successful manned space launch, Scott looked at Nicole and demanded to know, “Why have I never heard about this before?”

And for those of us who lived through that time in history, the point is rather more pronounced. A story about the advanced math skills of black women was counter to the cultural narrative about the assumed inferiority of both blacks and women so even though it was an important part of history, it never made it into our text books or our newspapers.

And just as a sidebar, let me add this observation: Every time you have heard the media referred to as the “liberal media” or schools have been accused of having a liberal bias, let me just go on the record right now as calling BS on that propaganda. The media and school text book publishers are decidedly on the white/male/pro-corporate/pro-war bandwagon and any exception to that prejudice is rare and usually accidental. Patriarchy and racism is just the water we swim in.

A few months ago, David Ketchum observed in our Sunday morning class that all of the books we had read together had been written by white people. That was not a consciously intentional prejudice, but it is the way that it has worked out. The books that have come to our attention have been authored by white people. Chris Crass writes in his wonderful collection of essays, Towards Collective Liberation, that “this is how white supremacy operates: whiteness is universalized as the norm of what is. It does not require a conscious decision to have thoughts that are racist, as it is racism that shapes the structure of our thought. …. White supremacy is the tide that directs the flow of our thoughts. It does not require us to go out of our way to be racist. It just requires that we go with the flow of dominate ideology.” (p 131)

You don’t have to choose to be racist. The cultural myth, especially in America, is that everything of interest throughout history has been done by white westerners. Explorers, inventors, statesmen and philosophers were all white. We presume that the world is essentially a white culture only seasoned with the diversity of people of color.

The great American “land of opportunity” suggests that poor northern European settlers forged a great nation out of North America and made themselves wealthy and powerful. The truth is that American wealth depended entirely on the genocide of tens of millions of Native Americans whose developed farm land, roads, and structures we stole, and the uncompensated labor of black Africans we enslaved.

Please indulge me a bit longer quote from Chris Crass’ book:

The United States was created by the wealthy class to maximize private power and wealth through exploitation of the vast majority’s labor and oppression of the vast majority’s humanity. Wealth and power have been and are taken from the majority through slavery, genocide, colonization, indentured servitude, low-paying/high-profit making jobs, and unpaid reproductive labor in the home and community.

         Racism enables economic exploitation that drives down wages and drives up the cost of living, healthcare, education, and the basic needs that more and more people are unable to meet. Racism erodes safety and health for the people of color it targets, and then works on the rest of us. Racism causes environmental crisis that impact communities of color first and worst, and are changing life as we know it for all of us.

Segregated schools and segregated neighborhoods and segregated churches have served the interests keeping minorities and the exploited poor from ever forming bonds that would allow them to organize and resist this economic and cultural exploitation. Even after integration, please note the repeated prejudiced lessons about inter-racial dating and marriage.

Note the systematic removal of black men from neighborhoods and families through incarceration and unemployment that has kept black families locked into repeating cycles of multi-generational poverty.

Black people have always known about police brutality and excessive policing of black communities but it was not until they saw the grainy video of the arrest and beating of Rodney King https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Coui65pO2E in 1991 that many white people got their first exposure to the fact of police brutality.

The four police officers who were clearly videoed using excessive force and actually assaulting King were put on trial and all four were acquitted which sparked a riot in 1992 that resulted in the deaths of 63 people and more than 2000 were injured. The riots continued until the governor sent in the National Guard to restore order.

Over all of the violence and chaos, Rodney King was heard plaintively asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?”  It is actually a good question and part of the answer can be seen in how things don’t change much. The four officers charged with brutality against King were acquitted in 1992 and in almost every high profile case of subsequent beatings, shootings, and wrongful deaths, the police are almost never found guilty of a crime.

Six Baltimore police involved in the killing of Freddie Gray, three were acquitted and charges were dropped against the other three.

Sandra Bland dies in a Texas jail, all charges dropped.

Samuel DuBose, killed in Cincinnati… two mistrials and then the charges were dropped. 

 Philando Castile killed in Minnesota, charges against the officer were dropped.

And, of course, in Missouri’s own high-profile case, the officer who shot the unarmed teen, Michael Brown, was ruled to have acted in self-defense when he shot him six times when he was several yards away.

Why can’t we all get along? Maybe because the end of African slavery just became mass incarceration, prison labor, impoverished schools, and unemployment. Maybe because desegregation just became economic segregation. And maybe because equal treatment under the law has never never never actually happened.

Racism is so much the water we swim in that it has been difficult for us to be aware of how bad it has been. We begin to take some steps in the right direction and then we take a step back . . . sometimes several steps back.

The church I grew up in, the movie theater just off the square in Glasgow, KY both had balconies that were there so that black people could come to church and to the movies. They couldn’t sit with white people but they could at least be in the same room. During the civil rights movement, the backlash was such that it became unheard of for black people to attend a white church or go to the movie theater where the white kids went.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called 11 o’clock on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America. He said that more than 50 years ago and it is not a lot different now, is it? We elected the first black president in 2008 and eight years later we elected the most openly racist president in living memory. Where police violence against black people was nearly invisible to white folks 30 years ago, the advent of video cameras and smart phones has given us irrefutable evidence that we were wrong about this stuff all along, but the court system still acts like it can’t see the evidence right in front of their lying eyes.

A half a century ago President Lyndon B. Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

The ruling wealthy elites have tried to keep poor whites and minorities from organizing or even intermarrying. They feed prejudice and fear to keep us weak.

I do think that we have made some great strides in the anti-racist evolution of our country but progress has been too slow and we are nowhere near where we should be yet. But we cannot be defeated by the fact that we have not yet arrived at the land of freedom and equality. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”

It falls on us to convince our generation that Black Lives Matter. That inequality in our court system, inadequacy in our schools, discrimination in hiring, promotions, awards in movies and music, just impoverishes all of us. There wouldn’t be an America without the Revolutionary War units filled with Native Americans and Black soldiers. America wouldn’t have survived WWII if Mexico had not sent 2 million workers to grow food and provide free labor while our soldiers were at war and our workers were engaged in military manufacturing, and a half a million Latinos also served in the military.

Our racial diversity is not our problem, it is our strength, our resource for having become the most inventive and industrious nation in the world. The only reason that there is still so much poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and poor education among minority groups is because of the racist environment that has taught us not to notice and to passively accept it.

The day has come when relying upon the ignorance of the masses will no longer work. We will speak up. We will educate. And then we will organize. And then, we will ascend!