“Going Where We Have Never Gone Before”

“Going Where We Have Never Gone Before”  Dec. 30, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ring Out, Wild Bells"

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that sapsthe mind For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be

There is nothing especially funny about the dementia that often accompanies old age but I have known several people who have approached it with uncommonly good humor. One of our city’s matriarchs, Marion Hobblet, was one of my parishioners 25 years ago who would show up in her stretch Lincoln on Sundays, usually bearing fresh dents and paint chips on all four corners of the car. She announced one day, “I feel just like Christopher Columbus every time I leave home. I have no idea where I’m really going or how I am going to get there and when I get home, I have no idea where I’ve been.” 

I thought at that time, she wasn’t really that much different from the rest of us. As Yoda told Luke in the Empire Strikes Back, “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.” Kierkegaard said that we live our lives like a ship that sets sail with sealed orders, you have to strike out without knowing exactly how things are going to turn out.

Do you remember the original prologue to the old TV show, Star Trek? 

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

It sounds a little kitschy to our ears now, but it was actually adapted from a 1958 White House pamphlet that was encouraging interest in space exploration. Ironically, the prologue had almost nothing to do with the actual episodes in the popular sci-fi series, perhaps because none of us ever know where we are really going when we launch into the future.

And yet it is hopeful isn’t it? It anticipates exploring strange new worlds, it expects to find new life forms and new civilizations. Of course, in the actual TV series, they did encounter new civilizations and life forms and seemed to engage in armed conflict with most of them. But at least initially, from the White House pamphlet promoting interest in NASA to our own early interest in sci-fi, space was the equivalent of looking out beyond the horizon for Magellan or Columbus. We would be Darwin on the Galapagos Islands for the first time.

When my daughter was young and the movie about the Titanic had captured her imagination, I took her out of school to come with me to hear a lecture by Robert Ballard, the archaeologist who had found the wreck of the Titanic. But he hardly mentioned that history making find that helped to inspire the movie. Ballard talked to us about the Black Sea, what was, five thousand years ago, a fresh water lake surrounded by villages and full of fishing boats, that may have been the site that inspired the flood narratives in the Gilgamesh Epic and in the Genesis story about Noah. 

It is possible that the earthen barrier that separated the lake from the Mediterranean collapsed all at once, burying all of those towns and people in a flood that never receded. Ballard told us that there are more historical finds on the bottom of the Black Sea than there are in all of the museums all over the earth, just waiting to be discovered. I saw my daughter’s eyes light up at the prospect of discovering a virtual lost world from a time before written history; but I found it fascinating that a man who could boast about having found the Titanic, at a time when virtually everyone had images of that find burned into their recent memory, was hardly interested in what he had done last year or the year before, he was obsessed with  what might be in the next year or the year after that.

Of course, the turning of a page of a calendar means next to nothing. The assignments of names to months and days and numbers to years does not actually affect anything but what does made a difference is how much space in your skull you are renting to the past and how much room you are making in the coming year to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms, and new civilizations, to discover new things that have been long hidden from sight, to live a new life rather than simply repeating the past.

I talk about setting down your resentments, leaving the past behind, raising the rent on negative thoughts so that they can’t fill up your skull, but it is a lot easier to say than it is to do. A lot of the psychological attraction to gambling is believed to be the way in which unknown outcomes calls us into a present moment. When the cards are being dealt, you don’t have time to worry about the broken heart you got ten years ago, or the election your side lost two years ago, or even the outcome of the last hand. In the flurry of the game, you are only thinking about the next card to be turned up.

We tend to obsess about past failures, insults, broken hearts; sometimes you will lie sleeplessly on your bed, replaying painful incidents in your memory over and over again. I have stepped into those huge casinos in Las Vegas and looked around at all of hypnotized throngs, locked into an unblinking stare into the flashing lights of slot machines, and I wonder what all of those people are trying so hard to forget?

I often use sci-fi or fantasy movies in just this way. When I find my mind stuck on some past hurt or insult, some friendship lost or some cruel insult, I will just drop out and go see a movie that distracts me from myself. I don’t want to let my past take away my future but it is always there, a cloud of unhappy memories that could just fill your head and keep you from ever risking a new love relationship, a new friendship, heck, some of you people have never even allowed yourself to try sushi because you are afraid that you might not like it. 

I love the quote from John Shedd that observes that a ship in harbor is safe but that is not what we build ships for. Many of you will have gone back to your hometown to attend a class reunion and you know that there are few things more sad than trying to talk to that old friend who never left home, who stayed right where they grew up, who kept their ship of life tied to the dock, and never ventured away to experience a bigger world. It is as if they were perpetually in high school, undisturbed by a new thought or a new experience. There are exceptions, of course, I just can’t think of any right now. 

I thought my world had come to an end 25 years ago when my marriage abruptly ended. Again, I thought my meaningful life was over eleven years ago, when I was forced to resign from the denominational church where I had built my career. 

I have, at times, lost friendships that have made me promise myself that I would never ever trust anyone again. The past can make a horrible roommate in your head. 

The things that can make us check out of the future are not always personal. Probably everyone here has heard something on the news in the past two years that made you say to yourself, “That’s it, it’s too much. I’m not watching the news anymore, I’m not gonna care anymore, not going to try anymore.” 

My drug of choice when Trump just pushes the limits of American constitutional democracy and moral sanity, is to watch recordings of shows about moving to the islands of the Caribbean. When it seems like America is just too broke to go on believing that it can be fixed, I dream of moving to an island, growing vegetables and scuba diving every day. And that very thing may happen one day, but it needs to not happen now. I don’t blame anyone for taking a vacation from the news, or even from family, the church, or America but we go on vacation to get refreshed so that we can come home and try again. 

You know, a year ago this past summer I was down in Florida for a preaching engagement and I got a phone call that let me know that my good friend, Dan Goodwin, was in the hospital having had a heart attack. I was horrified by the thought of possibly losing Dan and I was eager to get on a plane and get home but like a true Ozarker, Dan got up out of his bed in ICU and walked out and drove himself home. But for a little while, I was afraid that Dan’s life might be over. A year later, without any warning, he just falls in love and announces his wedding plans. One year after having stints put in his heart, he starts acting like a teenager and his greatest health challenge becomes the prospect of getting acne again. 

In 2017, you could never have guessed what 2018 had in store for you. Aren’t you glad you hung around to see what would happen?

We don’t know what 2019 holds in store for us. We can be pretty sure that Trump will say or do something even more stupid than what he has said and done in 2018. But we have reason to expect Bob Mueller to issue his investigation’s report in the next couple of months. Spring will come again, maybe it will include an impeachment trial in the Senate but whether it does or not, there will be strawberries and if you allow yourself to venture out again, there are strange new worlds to be discovered, new civilizations, new love, new friendships, the potential for a better world. 

My friend, Dr. Nicole Fisk, brought this Tennyson poem to my attention… sometimes it is nice to have an English professor in your inner circle, but it is a bit disarming to have a British poet writing a poem 150 years ago that sounds like something we needed to write this week, about the transition from 2018 to 2019:

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be

Folks, we are not in the throes of slavery, with naked Africans being auctioned on the city square. We are not in the midst of a Civil War that will claim the lives of one out of every 40 people alive in America. We are not fighting a world war or an epidemic. We are living through a dark chapter in American history but not the darkest. This is not the end of democracy. Trump will not bring social progress to an end. He, of course, will not make America great again but he has made Saturday Night Live great again and I am grateful for that. 

I don’t want to make a habit of quoting Woody Allen, but I think that he was onto something when he said that 80% of life is just showing up. You have to keep your game piece on the board, you have to stay in the game. You can retreat for a moment, take in a movie, yell back at the TV news, then get up and give 2019 a chance. If we try, we can make it better than 2018.

“Family, Friends, Food, Credit Card Debt, Guilt, and Resentment”

“Family, Friends, Food, Credit Card Debt, Guilt, and Resentment” Dec. 23, 2018

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor     click here to see the video

A poem (?) by Roger Ray

Airports, hectic and dehumanizing,

Highways, congested and slippery,

Crowded stores and credit card fatigue,

Religious sentimentality and tired old carols everywhere.

But it is going somewhere . . .

To the familiar smells of holiday cooking

And the nostalgia that erupts with each decoration

Taken from its hiding place under the stairs

To breathe again into life memories of children now grown

Parents now buried, hopes dashed, and dreams realized

Family squabbles simmer just beneath the surface

As potentially dangerous as an old-time pressure cooker

All wrapped up in the certainty of mortality

And defiantly topped with a bow that cries, “Not yet! Not this year!”

The original owners of this building would be none too happy about seeing a Christmas tree up here in the chancel of what was a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall. The J. W.’s are quite particular about only observing holidays that are actually named in the Bible and even though you can find two very different accounts of the birth of Jesus in the New Testament, there is no mention of either Christmas nor of a December birthday. People in the non-instrumental Church of Christ like to similarly distinguish themselves by not observing non-Biblical holidays, certainly not Christmas or Easter and they don’t even talk about Old Testament holidays, regardless of whether Jesus observed them or not. 

This is not just a matter for modern American Protestantism as these pious, and self-congratulatory sects try to find ways of distinguishing themselves from the mainstream. It was illegal in early Puritan colonies in the New World to observe Christmas because it was considered to be decadent. Which is also not a new thing. 

The December observance of the birth of Jesus was set in the third century, probably to try to overtake the popularity of the winter Solstice holiday of Saturnalia in Rome. 

Jewish and Christian holidays all have their origin, in one way or another, in a practical observance of the agricultural calendar. When the fall harvest is all in, the fields are bare and frozen and the days are short, people have the time an inclination to feast, dance, and make merry. In fact, a century after the celebration had been dubbed a Christian observance, a 4^thcentury pope bemoaned that Christians were eating and drinking a bit too much in their adoration of the Christ child and maybe everyone should cool it a little bit. 

This year, with a colorful Republican occupying the White House, we have not heard the Fox news crowd incessantly bemoaning the alleged “war on Christmas,” in fact, I awoke to the news on Friday that there is not only no longer a war on Christmas but there is no longer a war on Isis . . . Trump says that he won that war too! So, Merry Christmas indeed!

The suggestion that there ever was a war on Christmas or that the true meaning of  Christmas was being, somehow, destroyed, was always just something for Bill O’Reilly to blather about while waiting for the next round of blond beauty queens to be hired by Fox. What should be obvious is that there is no “true meaning” of Christmas because Christmas has always meant something different at different times and places and to different people. 

The birth narratives in Matthew, in which Jesus was born in the family home in  Bethlehem where they were found by eastern astrologers who followed a star to their house, or the completely different version in Luke where the family traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, describing how Jesus was born in a stable, announced by angels to shepherds who were in a nearby field, are later additions to the gospel accounts. What, in Hollywood, they call an “origin” story. 

Sort of like when Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, turning him into the Amazing Neighborhood Spiderman. 

Ancient religious narratives often included accounts of miraculous births all of the way from the familiar Venus rising from the sea to the story of the birth of

 The Hindu god, Krishna, who, it turns out, was threatened with death when he was born so family members put him in a basket and carried him through water to safety . . . hard to know if Moses gets to claim that story first or if it originated with Krishna but there has always been a good deal of honorific plagiarism among ancient religions. 

Despite the sincere and centuries long efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to make stories of incarnation, virgin birth, angels, and magi seem like historical events, it isn’t very persuasive to us or to any of the academic traditions around church history.

So what is the real meaning of Christmas? Well, we kind of have to turn that question back around and ask our society what meaning it really has? How is Christmas used in culture, in literature, in the movies, and in art?

It has become, at least in the west, a time of gift giving. Trying to tie that to the frankincense, gold, and myrrh of the magi is quite a stretch. It is obviously just a tradition that has grown in the west as parents became better able to buy mass  produced goods to give to their children.  The retail dimension of Christmas hardly needs a gospel birth narrative to inspire it or support it. Some iteration of Santa Claus will exist without the church or the Christmas story as long as children hope to get presents.

In the mid 19^thcentury, when Charles Dickens first published his short novel, “A Christmas Carol,” England was just coming out of one of their more puritan times when all Christmas celebrations were either illegal or at least frowned upon. I have always called it the “best Christmas sermon ever written,” because with very imaginative characters and the extremes of tear-jerking narratives that would make some of those ASPCA adds, blush, Dickens tells a story of redemption, of conversion.

It is no accident that all 20^thcentury Christmas classics have followed suit with  Dickens’ account. “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “A Miracle on 42^ndSt,” even “The Grinch” and to some extent, “Bad Santa,” are all stories of changed lives. It is not at all about a religious conversion, it is a conversion from a horrible, greedy, worthless, existence towards finding connection to others, forgiveness, charity, compassion, and love. 

In “The Christmas Carol,” as in most short morality plays, there is an exaggerated villain, Scrooge, and an admirable saint, in this case, it was Scrooge’s nephew, Fred. Fred is trying to draw out his wealthy, but miserable uncle and Scrooge literally is derisive of any pleasure that does not fatten the bottom line.

It is an exaggerated caricature, of course, one does not encounter such one-dimensional characters in real life.

Well, we used to not encounter such one-dimensional characters but let’s not talk about Trump today. 

Fred beautifully tries to open a crack in old Scrooge’s heart, saying to him:

"There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited . . . Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round-. . .-as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

When I wrote the brief poem that we took as our wisdom lesson today, I was reflecting on how the holiday has evolved for me. My daughter will be 30 in a couple of weeks. We no longer shop for presents nor go to great lengths to decorate the house. I am flying out to Denver tomorrow to spend Christmas with her and to meet with the guys who will be installing central air in her little house before the heat of summer arrives. So my Christmas gift, again this year, will be digging into my retirement savings to help solve a problem for her, which is a great deal more expensive and a lot less fun than Christmas was 29 years ago. 

As she has grown up, I have grown old. I have buried my parents and many more of my friends than I can bear to think of, and I have arrive at a time, before this month’s stock market “correction,” when I have thought a lot about my own retirement and the fact that one day, I will no longer be around for her at all. I’m not being morbid, I’m being mortal. I don’t know how many more trips around the sun that I have left in me but I know that I have this Christmas, we have this year and I am going to try to make the most of it. 

Among the lies and myths, the church told us when we were young is that we have an eternity to get life right. I can’t believe that anymore. What I believe is that we have a fairly short amount of time to get it right. The shorter days, the cold air, the gray skies all scream mortality but that doesn’t mean that it is time to give up, it means that it is time to hurry up. 

As Langston Hughes said, “Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard
and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.

“Escaping the Fowler’s Snare”

“Escaping the Fowler’s Snare”  December 16, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Psalm 124            click here to see the video

² if it had not been the Lord who was on our side,
   when our enemies attacked us, ³ then they would have swallowed us up alive,
   when their anger was kindled against us; ⁴ then the flood would have swept us away,
   the torrent would have gone over us; ⁵ then over us would have gone the raging waters. ⁶ Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us
   as prey to their teeth. ⁷ We have escaped like a bird
   from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken,
   and we have escaped. ⁸ Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

On November 30, 1954, Mrs. Ann Hodges was taking a nap on the sofa of the home she rented with her husband near Sylacauga, Alabama when she became the only person in recorded history to be struck by a meteor. It came crashing through the roof of the rural house, bounced off of a radio and struck her in the thigh, leaving a large bruise, a photograph of which was featured in Time Magazine. In some ways she was lucky, the meteor had broken into two pieces before this six-pound rock came through her roof. She was lucky that it hit the radio before it hit her, slowing it down enough not to have killed her like a giant bullet from heaven. 

The incident that made her famous probably also made her feel pretty unlucky. Billions of people, over thousands of years of history, and she is the only one who has ever actually been hit by a meteor even though several thousand rocks that weigh a pound or more hit the earth every day at a speed of about 200 miles an hour. Several cars have been hit over the years. When a large meteor breaks up in the atmosphere there can be a sonic boom that is like an explosion. The largest one we know of took place a hundred years ago over Siberia, flattening an estimated 500,000 acres of uninhabited forest. But no injuries. Just poor old Ann Hodges.

I don’t think that I have ever mentioned Ann Hodges in a sermon before, but I have told her story more than a hundred times. I use her story as a part of Rational Behavior Therapy when I am working with someone who has a severe anxiety disorder. Now, I don’t mention Ann when I am talking with someone who has a substantive reason to be anxious. I worked with a lot Vietnam vets who had PTSD when I was a chaplain in a VA hospital, my father had PTSD from his experiences in WWII. I have a good friend here in town who is currently being treated for PTSD after barely surviving a housefire that we have reason to believe was an attempted murder. 

There are a number of people among us who suffer from panic attacks and a generalize anxiety disorder that they come by based on very real experiences or fears. But many people suffer from anxiety disorders, panic attacks, or phobias that can have very serious effects on how they live their lives for no good reason at all.

Most of these are exaggerated anxieties. All of us worry when we send our kids off to college that they are not mature enough to make good decisions. 

We worry about drugs, sexual assault, or a growing tendency to cut class and keep us from finding out how bad their grades really are. But if you can’t sleep at night because your kid is away in college, then you may be allowing your fear to become exaggerated. 

I have a good friend who is so afraid of lightening that when a storm comes, she hides under the stairs until it is over. We have talked about this many times. I will tell her, don’t worry about the lightening, it isn’t going to get you inside the house. Worry about the meteors. Every hour there are more than 200 of those heavenly bullets raining down on the earth at 200 miles an hour and they can come through the roof, the ceiling, and the stairs and get you right where you are hiding. If I just say “Ann Hodges” to her, she looks at me like she is going to choke the life right out of me. 

But, seriously, irrational fears can paralyze a person. If you tell your physician about your anxiety, you will probably get a prescription for an anti-depressant, usually one of the serotonin drugs because they seem to work, at least for a while, and they have fewer side effects. However, they have a horrible rate of recurrence. That is, when you stop taking the medication, the fear comes back.

Many others will get a prescription for Xanax or some other benzodiazepine medication, which can be very helpful, but it is also highly addictive and tends to require a higher and higher dose to be effective, which almost guarantees addiction. 

Clinically speaking, the most effective treatment for anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and phobias, all of which are similar to one another, is talk therapy. Therapy that is aimed at reality orientation, perhaps desensitizing exposure to or talk about what a person is afraid of. Most therapists take a more sympathetic approach than telling people who are already terribly frightened that hundreds of meteors will strike the earth in the next hour at the lethal speed of 200 mph, but then, I am not paid by the hour and I prefer to cut to the chase. 

Most of what people have talked to me about over the years are social phobias . . . fear of public speaking, fear of the marketplace, Claustrophobic anxieties or fear of heights, of flying, or even of ladders. Children grow up with anxiety dreams about being chased, or of falling, or of monsters under the bed. Children are small and vulnerable, and their dreams betray those general fears. As they grow into their adult bodies, these unconscious fears usually just go away.

Teenagers and young adults often suffer from anxiety dreams that generally come in one of two flavors: the test anxiety dream or the dream about being naked or in your underwear in public. Both of these are fears that we will be discovered to be inadequate in some way. Again, these anxieties typically resolve themselves in your 20’s as you gain more self confidence.

Most of us grow out of those anxieties of youth but they can be replaced by fears of all sorts that we see reflected in popular movies.

Fear of ghosts 

Fear of spiders       

Some people would add the fear of snakes here, but I do not find that fear to be the least bit irrational. Rationally, I know that most snakes are not poisonious and that many are actually quite helpful in keeping down the rodent population. However, I find it best to assume that every snake is, in fact, a Black Mamba that can kill you with a single strike. 

There are irrational fears and then there are totally reasonable self-defense reflexes and that is all that I am going to say about snakes. 

A couple of months ago I got to spend four days making a silent retreat at the Gethsemane Abby in Kentucky. While there, I gathered with the brothers seven different times during the day to chant psalms in the church. The Trappists’ daily life is a constant flowing between work, prayer, study, and sleep. Spending a few hours a day chanting psalms with the community, the frequent refrain of fear verging on paranoia that is repeated in the psalms came to my attention. 

Who are the enemies who so frequently tried to ruin the life of the psalmist 2500 years ago? Some of the psalms are about foreign powers, some about abusive captors, but even granting that, a lot of them are just downright anxiety riddled about unnamed critics and enemies. 

It seems that they, like we, spent way too much of their time worrying about what people say about them or think about them.

My father was a stutterer. When he was upset or nervous, he virtually could not talk. He took public speaking classes and was prescribed what was, in those days, called “nerve pills,” usually Valium but he never got over it. I was interested then, when I encountered an article in grad school that noted that stuttering was virtually never seen among Native Americans. I later learned that it is equally rare among the Chinese.

Doctors and Psychologists sometimes battle for theories to account for this but what I knew about my father and about many others, is that he did not stutter when we sang. That seemingly subtle shift in where the language is coming from in your brain, completely eliminates the nervous disorder. But still, it seems to me that it just can’t be a physiological issue. It is an anxiety issue. It is speculated that Native Americans don’t stutter because their culture is less judgmental of public speaking. 

I don’t want to appear to be dismissive of what is a very serious problem for many people but stuttering and anxiety attacks and dreams, and many phobias and neurosis arise from caring too much about what other people think or what they might say about you. Again, this is not always true. 

I, myself, went through a period of years of disturbed sleep after having been held hostage at the end of a shot gun for five hours. I spent those hours anticipating my death every second until my form addiction counseling client got sober enough and tired enough to lay the gun down, allowing me to escape. For months, I could not close my eyes without seeing the open end of a double-barreled shot gun and the man’s bloodshot eyes at the other end of the gun. 

I know all too well how a trauma such as warfare, a car accident, a house fire, or an assault can leave you with scars that take years to recover from. But the extreme cases of battlefield PTSD and other violent events can hardly account the very high rate of anxiety and panic disorders in our culture. 

I fear that the majority come from the basic meanness of society and our innate desire to be liked. They come as ways of literally somatizing our fear of gossip, judgement, rejection. And to that, I have something I want to say to you as your pastor, as a person who cares about you and your happiness:

Don’t let your critics take either your joy or your self-confidence. When I began writing opinion columns for the News-Leader, and I wrote columns that I knew would be controversial because I wanted to stimulate thought in this very conservative city, but I was destroyed by the hate mail. I went into explosive fits of rage and horrible bouts of depression and I wanted to fight back. I said controversial things to make them think about things they didn’t want to think about, so they wrote nasty personal insults to me to hurt me. And for years, it worked pretty well. I made them think and they made me miserable. 

I finally had an editor who gave me good advice, and mind you, I have endured dozens of editors over the decades, almost none of whom had any good advice, but this one guy finally got it through my skull: Irrational criticism is the price you pay for having a public voice. 

You have to choose. Do you want to accomplish good and important things with your life, or do you want to avoid the discomfort of being criticized? Any time you light a candle in the dark place, you are not just dispelling the darkness, you are also attracting bugs. That’s just how it works.

It is not simple and it is not easy, but you don’t have to let toxic people rent space in your skull and drive you insane. You can choose to, day by day, raise the rent on those suckers until you get them out of your life.

Sure, you guys see me up here every week sharing an unvarnished 20 minute version of my views on everything but the reason that I don’t soft peddle things or stutter is because when I walk up here, I have decided to be this guy:

And you can be this guy too. 

A hundred potentially lethal meteors have struck the earth while I have been standing here talking to you. None of them hit you and probably none of the others that will fall in the next several decades will either. The things that people say about you, what they may think about you, also will not hurt you, unless you give that power to them. 

“Justifying the Inexcusable”

Dec. 9, 2018          “Justifying the Inexcusable”            Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

The late economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, said: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” 

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A decade ago, I began the habit of going out every Monday night to a local pub where an Irish band plays pretty much the exact same set of songs every week. Monday is sort of a pastor’s weekend and I found that no matter what I might be worried about, mad about, or depressed about, a couple of hours of Irish drinking songs and a couple of pints of Guinness, would at least temporarily lighten an old vicar’s heart. Over the years, different friends have joined me in this ritual so that I am never there alone. It has become an unofficial communion service for our little congregation as various members drop in to break bread, lustily sing about having been a “wild rover,” or to help raise the sails in the choruses of Irish sailing songs like, “John Kanaka.”

But, mostly, we have heard all of these songs so many times that we no longer listen, we visit with one another, make plans for the week ahead, and generally toast one another’s genius. But, I find that there is one song that never fails to demand my attention, and I will even insist that the people around me stop talking to listen respectfully if they sing The Fields of Athenry. 

The ballad tells the story of a young mother weeping as her husband is being taken away in a prison ship to Australia. His crime was having stolen corn to feed his starving family during what we Americans call the Irish Potato Famine, what the Irish call simply, “the Great Hunger.”

We know that more than a million Irish immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800’s to escape the famine. Perhaps as many as a million more died of starvation in Ireland. Millions more fled in other directions. I’ve ridden a train from Dublin to Galway and you can see that the country is still depopulated, having gone from more than 9 million before the famine to half of that in the generations that followed, never to recover. 

Potatoes were the staple food of the poor and you might wonder why, when the blight struck the potato vines, didn’t they just grow other crops? Well, they did, in fact, all during the great famine, Ireland was a major grain exporter. It is just that the grain belonged to the British, and Irish were expected to eat increasingly rare potatoes. Ships carried Irish produce to markets in England and Europe while other ships carried poor Irish farmers who had stolen grain, many off of their own farms, to feed their starving family, in chains to work camps in Australia. Many sent off on those prison ships died en route, most were never reunited with their families. 

More than 4000 ships loaded with grain left Irish ports in 1847 for England when, in that year alone, a half a million Irish died of starvation.  

Somehow, poor Irish farmers had largely accepted an economic system that locked them first into poverty and then into hunger, while they continued to labor to make distant land owners wealthy. So, when they sing Fields of Athenry, I still stop talking and I usually weep a bit for millions of lives destroyed in a truly evil economic system. And, folks, I’m not of Irish descent. My family is from England… which, in fact, makes it that much worse. (HAVE SEAN SING)

The famine lasted from 1845 to 1849 and the horrors of that time became a part of Irish self-understanding. The famine returned in 1879 but the Irish had changed in the 30 years since the great hunger. This time they revolted, refusing to be starved for British profits. That is the change in thinking that I want to talk about today. When, indeed, is enough, enough? What does it take to make the poor revolt?

It was an unguarded moment when the radical founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, said, "The problem is our stinking rotten system, and our acceptance of it.” 

Most of us were reared to believe that Capitalism was just a part of the fabric of Christianity and Democracy. We believe that our constitution and body of laws make us free and independent but we also have this proverb that says “possession is 9/10ths of the law.” It is legal to use the police to protect private property, it is legal to lobby for a tax structure that taxes the rich at a rate much lower than the rate the poor pay taxes. It is legal to pay wages that guarantee poverty for your employees. You have to stop and think, who writes the laws? 

There are three lobbyists on Capitol Hill for every elected official there just for the pharmaceutical industry. How many lobbyists are there advocating for a living wage for the people who cook your lunch and mop your floors? You may remember a few years ago, about a dozen of us joined a local labor union to demonstrate for a living wage for employees at McDonalds. We picked a busy McDonalds in a very poor part of town and we showed up and encircled the restaurant during their morning rush. We didn’t block traffic, we didn’t impede business…. We’re were, after all, not exactly anarchists . . . we were mostly older citizens just saying that a wildly profitable business could afford to pay their help a living wage.

Within ten minutes there were eight patrol cars and a paddy wagon there to haul us all away if we kept anyone from getting their Egg McMuffin in a timely manner. I have volunteered with homeless programs in the same neighborhood where we have had to wait for hours for a single patrol car to respond to a violent outbreak among our clients. 

So, who do the police work for? What are the priorities of business, government, and most of the church? To defend the filthy, stinking economic system that creates and defends profit and poverty. 

This poster attempts to illustrate the various economic systems of the world, using cows, as they were explained to us when we were young:

In socialism, you have two cows and you are forced to give one to your neighbor. In communism, the state takes both of your cows and gives you some milk. In fascism, the state takes both of your cows and sells you some milk. But skipping to the end, the point of this illustration, in glorious capitalism, you sell one cow, buy a bull, multiply your herd, sell them, and retire on the profits. 

This sounds wonderful and, in fact, capitalism is an economic system that can reward innovation, hard work, frugality, investment, and intelligence. 

The problem is that most of us never owned a cow. Most of us just worked for the dairy industry. The United States does not have one economy. We have several. There are very few people who are actually a part of the capitalist part of our society. 

School teachers aren’t capitalists. They don’t own the school building. They don’t charge their students. They are employed by the state and paid through property taxes. 

Fire fighters are not capitalists. Our military works in a virtually communist system, our police work in a socialist system, for heaven’s sake folks, I am not a capitalist, I work for this little socialist collective called a church!

Do you know who is a capitalist? Only people who have capital, i.e., cows, to invest. Paris Hilton is a capitalist because she inherited ownership of a large hotel chain and several related businesses. She does not make money based on innovation, hard work, frugality, or intelligence. She makes money the old-fashioned way, she inherited it. All of the people who change the sheets at Hilton hotels, who mop the floors, carry the room service trays, work at the front desk and mow the lawn . . . they are not capitalists. They are labor. They are overhead. They are a cost of doing business and in unbridled capitalism, you are always looking for ways to cut costs and increase profits such that worse you treat the thousands of people who work for Hilton the more you are rewarding the capitalist at the top.

An economic system is just a means of distributing resources.

Imagine that 10 people are shipwrecked on a ten-acre tropical island full of fruit trees and readily available vegetation and sea food. So, after a bit of time, they divide up the island into one-acre plots and they each build their own home and develop their own gardening, hunting, and fishing regimen. It is an egalitarian society where they may trade goods or labor and everyone lives in a sustainable way on their island.

But one homeowner learns to ferment fruit juice, invites his neighbors over for 

drinks and a card game. His nine unsuspecting neighbors get drunk and lose their acres in a night of card games. The winner now tells the other nine that all of the island’s resources belong to him and they no longer own a home and that they either work for him at his whim or they can no longer eat from the island’s resources nor even drink the water. Clearly, even if they agreed to drink the fruit juice and play cards with the distiller, they would not long accept that unfair arrangement.

The difference is that most of us where born on that island and there was always just 10% who owned everything and the rest of us serve their wishes. In the mid nineteenth century, there were babies born in England who owned land in Ireland from birth. And there were babies born in Ireland who were born to work the fields for the English babies and both the Irish and the English grew up thinking that this was just how the world works. 

The system was so engrained that both the English and the Irish followed the rules of the system even as one became increasingly wealthy and the other slowly starved to death. At least, that’s how it worked in the first potato famine.   

People come to accept this. Folks, everyone here was taught in high school about the history of child labor in the United States. You know that the children of the poor were made to work in textile factories, sitting at looms and doing dangerous work, breathing dangerous fumes, and typically dying young or being seriously injured. We look back on that era with shame and with no small amount of confusion as to how it could have gone on for a hundred years in this largely Christian democracy. 

But I will tell you this, about 20 years ago I was leading a tour of a couple of dozen church members through Israel and Egypt. When we were nearing the step pyramid of Memphis, our tour bus stopped at an Egyptian rug factory. My church folk were led through the factory where hundreds of children, five, six, seven years old, sat at looms, weaving rugs. As they walked, they were told that without this work, these children would starve, and they would not ever receive training in a craft. Five minutes later, all of these good Christians were in the factory store, buying child labor produced rugs and proudly marching back to the bus with the belief that they were helping the children by buying the rugs. . . because if we did not exploit and enslave them, how would they eat?

This is not as hard as they are trying to make it out to be. Look:

Don’t ever drink and play cards with a pirate. That’s obvious, right? And secondly, don’t passively accept a filthy, rotten system that impoverishes the masses for the enrichment of the few. There is a way to make capitalism work, a way that rewards innovation, hard work, frugality, and intelligence but doesn’t starve anyone. And, it really isn’t that hard.

Our economic system has always been a blend of capitalism with socialism and maybe a bit of fascism. Darwin’s theory of evolution is not based on the strongest surviving, it is based on adaptability. A species is most likely to survive if they are able to adapt to changing circumstances. Every species is everyday faced with a choice between heading towards extinction or adaptation.

At this moment in history, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the expanding disparity of income in America threatens to bring our culture to the brink of extinction. The invisible hand of the market will not save us. Unbridled capitalism has one goal: profit. It has no conscience and will not correct itself to improve standards of living for the poor. 

Seeing this freight train rolling down the tracks, earlier this year, the so called “middle class tax cut” actually cut taxes on the super wealthy and shifted the tax burden more squarely on the shoulders of the middle class.

The investor class, suddenly experiencing a windfall, invested in the market, largely through stock buy backs. The market surged to new heights. What no one wanted to talk about was the fact that it was surging on the strength of borrowed money and that can never work for long. In fact, I am afraid, we are already seeing necessary corrections that will exacerbate what a horrible economic move that tax cut was. There are two issues here. There is income and there is capital. 

There are people who own the cows and their income comes from their investment. Then there are the people who milk the cows, haul the hay, muck out the barn, build the fences, and work in the slaughter house, whether those people can afford to buy a carton of milk will depend, not on the generosity of the capitalist but on the legal system set in place. With the recent tax cut, the rich were rewarded and the poor were punished, but possibly even worse, the same measure that changed the way income was taxed also removed a great deal of inheritance tax. So we were not only hurt on the income side of things but we also rigged the system so that more of the capital will flow into the hands of the already rich. 

As long as the wealthy can transfer their wealth to the next generation without at significant part of it going back into the public economic arena, then we continue to stand on the tracks waiting for the hurtling train to run us down. . . because the train is coming, and the conductor is a capitalist and he isn’t going to stop for you.

In his famous book about Capital, the French economist, Thomas Piketty says, “the durability of this system depends on the effectiveness of its apparatus of justification.” However, as you know, there is no credible justification.

That is, as long as you, the voters in western democracies, are willing to be convinced that this filthy, rotten system is the only way the world can be, then there is a fairly inevitable end. Let me give you a clue:

You are not going to like it.

The yellow vest protests in Paris this week are a united reaction to a similar tax shift in France in which a tax on the super-rich was eliminated and they made up the income by adding a fuel tax to gasoline, a tax largely paid by workers and the middle class, most of whom feel that they are already being taxed into poverty.

And I want to tell you, when I wrote the first draft of this message, because I make the English sound so horrible for exploiting the Irish, even as million of them were starving to death in a mere four year period of the first potato famine, I sent my draft to my friend John Churcher, in England, and I asked him, “Is this accurate, is this fair?”  He sadly acknowledged that it was a fair depiction of a very bad chapter in English history.

A few days later he sent me an article about this woman, Priti Sushi Patel . . . and yes, her name is Priti Sushi. She is a British politician who was born, reared and educated in England but evidently has only a sketchy awareness of British history. As England is negotiating their exit from the European Union, she suggested this week that in order to put more pressure on the EU to accept more favorable terms for the English “Brexit” that they restrict food shipments to the half of Ireland that is staying in the EU. That’s right, Priti Sushi thinks that if they plunge Ireland into hunger, it will economically help England. 

Honestly, folks, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Even if her name sounds like character in an Austin Powers movie, this is not fiction. This is just a sign of how governments act when we accept this filthy rotten economic system that creates, defends, and expands poverty. 

There was a time in human history when poverty and hunger were caused by scarcity and we were always one harsh winter or one bad growing season away from being destitute. But in the presence of modern industry, advanced agricultural sciences, medicine and banking, the only reason there is still poverty is due to greed. And that, I submit, is no longer tolerable.