Jesus: teacher of radical compassion (this stuff is hard!)

Jesus: teacher of radical compassion (this stuff is hard!) Feb. 24, 2019 Dr. Ray
Luke 6:27-38  

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27“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.29If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. 31Do to others as you would have them do to you. 32“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.34If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. 36Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
37“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

I began teaching at Drury University about 20 years ago under their old curriculum when they were still, at least marginally, a church related college that had at least one required class in religion. The title of that class was the rather pretentious sounding: Life and Teachings of Jesus. When I took on the task of teaching this class, I didn’t want to talk about what the church said about Jesus, I wanted to try to drill down into what Jesus said and what made his teachings unique.

What would you say was the unique thing that defined the life and teachings of Jesus? What sets Jesus apart from other early common era preachers?

So, you go to the gospels and you ask, well, what did he do? He started off
exorcising demons but, you know, he wasn’t the only demon exorcist running around Palestine at that time. Exorcism might get you movie rights in our day but back then, exorcism was as common as chiropractors and with similarly controversial reputations among other professionals. I’m not saying that casting out
a demon or adjusting your spine has about the same amount of science behind it, unless, of course, that is exactly what I’m saying. But I digress . . .
Jesus did exorcisms, and so did a lot of other people. Jesus did miraculous feedings. So did a lot of other people in his era. He was said to have had a miraculous birth, that certain miracles were attributed to him, he was even described as being the son of God . . . none of which, I am afraid to say, was uncommon in the first century.

A careful reading of the Jewish Histories written by Josephus in the late first century can yield the names of about 50 Jewish messiahs with various claims to the sort of things we find attributed to Jesus. So, I ask again, what is the unique aspect of what Jesus did that gives him a job description that is different from all other messianic characters of the time?

When I went to seminary in 1980, I was sure that I knew, as most of us who grew up in more evangelical, or Orthodox, or Catholic settings, were sure that we knew: Jesus died on the cross for our redemption, becoming our savior from a richly deserved eternal sentence in hell, giving us the hope of attaining to heaven.

And I understand that would still be the answer for a whole lot of people and I don’t want to be the one who goes around to Kindergarten classes telling 5-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and there is not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. People generally come to these realizations as
they are intellectually and emotionally prepared to allow themselves to figure out the difference between imagination and reality.

In grad school, when you are forced to put your Kindergarten faith under the microscope, you begin to realize that the biblical gospels were ancient religious narratives that had very little to do with the actual historical Jesus. Gospel writers recorded events of Jesus healing and even raising the dead, to connect him to certain Hebrew fables about Elijah and Elisha. That stories about Jesus feeding the multitudes and walking on water were simply derivations of the stories about Moses providing manna in the wilderness and dividing the waters of the Red Sea.

And if all of that wasn’t obvious enough, the gospel writers even invented this transfiguration story in which Jesus was standing on a mountain top talking with Moses and Elijah. It is a literary technique, similar to Obi Wan appearing to Luke in movies after the first Star Wars movie in which we saw Obi Wan killed. It is literature, it isn’t a historical account.

I know that I make people mad when I say that sometimes because it is not what you were told in years and years and years of church going but before you send me hate mail, let me ask you this: Who you should you be mad at, the people who filled your head with fairy tales and lies for years or the guy who is finally telling you the truth? You might want to think that I making this up or exaggerating but I assure you that there is nearly 200 years of the best of biblical scholarship behind
what I am saying to you and some amazing historical examples of insightful philosophers and historians through the centuries.

There is a core to the historical Jesus tradition which is profound and unique and later generations attempted to fatten up his resume by heaping up claims and titles on him that they took from other religious and political figures of their time.


Roman coins of the era called the Caesar “Lord,” and “Savior,” and tradition had it that he was a son of god, born to a virgin. The early enthusiasts for the Jesus tradition didn’t want him to be second to any Old Testament prophet or current ruler and they put him up on a literary pedestal above all others. But what a real scholar, an honest seeker wants to know is “why?” What was so unique about Jesus to inspire this kind of adoration?

I am grateful to the late author, Marcus Borg, who so compassionately articulated an understanding of the historical Jesus that gives back to the name of Jesus some of the credibility it loses with all of the magical and superstitious attributions that have been heaped up on him for most of the past two thousand years. When you look past the later myths, the exaggerations and the obvious additions of later church leaders . . . when you look at what may be actual quotes from Jesus, or at least the echoes of what he taught, you do find a unique message. Borg says that the job description that Jesus filled was just this: he was a teacher of radical compassion.

In fact, if you look at the conclusions of the hundreds of scholars involved in the Jesus Seminar over the past two generations, the one statement in the gospels that almost every agrees actually came from Jesus, the one verse you can imbue with some real academic certainty is a fragment of this verse that led off our wisdom lesson from Luke, chapter 6, verse 27: Love your enemies.

Luke sets it in a narration, “But I will tell those who will listen; love your enemies. Do good to those who harm you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.” Jesus may have just said, “Love your enemies,” but Luke wants to drive the point home. . . love your enemies, do good for people who have hurt you, bless those who cuss you out, and have good thoughts about the people who have abused you.

Before the empire prostituted the name of Jesus to be a salvation cult that kept
slaves obedient and hard at work so they could go to heaven when they died, before the gospel writers buried the message of Jesus in silly miracle stories and magic carnival shows, he was the teacher of radical compassion and by radical, I mean, undeserved, counter intuitive, maybe even bordering on neurotically excessive . . . forgiveness, generosity, kindness.

Am I the only one here who kinda wishes he hadn’t said that? When my father died a decade ago my older brother, John, asked me, “Do you want any of dad’s guns.” And I immediately answered him, “I don’t want to own a gun because I know too many people who deserve to be shot.” I don’t think I would ever do it, even if I owned a hundred guns. But I don’t want to spend any time fantasizing
about revenge against liars, users, socio-paths, child molesters, wife beaters, or murderers.

We are a people who believe in revenge. After 9-11, we bombed out almost every structure that was in the country where Al Qaida had hidden training camps and when decimating Afghanistan didn’t satisfy us, we attacked a whole other country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with it at all. We are big on revenge.

There may be countries where the penal system is designed to reform criminals but ours isn’t. Our prison system is designed to make criminals “pay a debt to society,” and by that they mean exacting an eye for an eye. Our jails and prisons are set up to make inmates feel that they are subhuman and that we have a right to treat them like garbage. In this sense, our institutions are a reflection of what is in us, collectively, as a community of individuals.

We prefer revenge to reform. We would rather get even than to choose to forgive. What made Jesus stand out from almost every other religious and political voice of the day; what made him unforgettable, even when you honestly would kinda like to
forget him, was that he insisted that we love our enemies, that we pray for our abusers, that we return kindness in response to hurt.

Jesus introduced the radical idea that revenge doesn’t work, that evil doesn’t end evil. . . what the modern twist of Old Testament ethics says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leads to a blind and toothless society.” As Martin Luther King said, “Darkness doesn’t drive out darkness, only light does that.”

We are now daily faced with the inescapable paradox of a nation full of religious people who continue to support the world’s most abusive prison system, the most vengeful judicial system. We have religious people insisting that the most prejudiced, elitist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, xenophobe in modern government is actually some kind of divinely appointed president.
And these are the people who 20 years ago were taking the Left Behind series seriously and now they seem happy to declare a virtual anti-Christ to be a modern messiah. Religion has gone off the rails. Traditional Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have lost their way, expressing their faith in excesses of militarism and a preference for a fascist government.
It was Missouri’s own Richard Neibuhr who made the observation that “religion makes good people better and makes bad people worse.” It is true. Healthy religion inspired spiritual people to start our local hospitals, homeless shelters, domestic abuse shelters, emergency food and medical services. It is a healthy spirituality that gives us relief agencies like the Rainbow Network in Nicaragua, the Convoy of Hope, Doctors without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, and countless congregations who care for their own elderly, infirm, and troubled individuals, who encourage healthy marriage, loving and stable families, and ethical behavior.

But you can’t say that without being aware that there is unhealthy religion, often sharing the same pews with healthy religion. There are people who, in the name of Jesus, teach their own gay and lesbian children to loath themselves to such a degree that they have become the largest single reason for teen suicides. They
teach the kind of misogyny that keeps our spouse abuse shelters filled with the victims of domestic violence. And they foster the kind of paranoid exclusivism that makes them turn away Muslim, Mexican, and other brown refugees who come to us seeking our aid. Unhealthy religion denies reality, preferring instead a magical and superstitious world view that is leading to a too slow response to pollution, climate change, and destruction of our eco-system and the extinction of many forms of life on our planet.
The good that is done in the name of religion does not obliterate the bad that is done by unhealthy religion. We cannot, in the name of tolerance, simply avert our eyes and pretend that whatever someone else chooses to believe is their business any more than we would ignore it if Campbells started putting a lethal dose of cyanide in their tomato soup. We know the difference between healthy faith and toxic faith, and it is our obligation to teach the former and extinguish the later.

As Karen Armstrong wrote: The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.

Honestly, this is why John Churcher and John Shelby Spong have both become a bit upset with me when I even mention retiring. They have not stopped speaking and not only are they old than I am by a decade or two, Churcher has cancer and Spong had a stroke, but the need to teach a healthier way of being people of faith is too important to abandon. The mainstream church is still refusing to give up on the “die and go to heaven in Jesus’ name” scam. And we have to keep trying to find another way to say it, to be more persuasive, to be more insistent. . . beyond your fear of hell and lust for heaven is a real faith, a faith in a man who was not just a man, because he was a man who was willing to say what no one else would say and most of us didn’t want to hear: love your enemies. None of us will ever find any semblance of salvation until we can do just that.

The Bible and Immigration

The Bible and Immigration              Feb. 17, 019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Leviticus 19:34              

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

 

 This is a map of North America, it uses color codes to identify the lower 48 states of the United States, and Alaska, separated by Canada, with Mexico to our south, and the several Latin American states of the southern tip of Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Columbia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.     

But contrast that with a simple photograph of North America. Both images represent a certain reality. The photograph shows no boundaries, no national borders. It shows the earth, a singular planet, which is host to humans, mosquitos, various forms of marine life and birds. But both images represent certain truths. All of North America is not the same. Most people up here in Greenland speak Danish, in Quebec, most people speak French. English is the majority language in most of the rest of Canada and the United States, with Spanish being predominant in Mexico and south. There are pockets of Inuit, Sioux, Cherokee, and other indigenous and ethnic tongues. 

But a political map is little more than a portrait of a moment in history. Before Columbus landed on a Caribbean Island, North America looked more like this,

With more than 90 distinct tribes claiming agricultural and hunting grounds across this part of the world.

When we learned American history in public school, most of our teachers viewed the growth of the United States from a European political perspective. When our nation was very young and Napoleon was cash starved by his European wars, we bought the “Louisiana Purchase” from France. This is the territory that becomes Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, the Dakotas, part of Texas, and Wyoming. 

The truth is that the French claim on the territory was tenuous at best. They traded there but not many lived in what was Sioux, Cheyanne, and Crow, Native American territories. Admittedly, Small Pox had dramatically reduced the native population but to call this region French is absurd.

Shortly after the Louisiana purchase, the territory to the west and south that had been controlled by Spain, fought several wars to establish Mexican Independence, both against Spain and to repel an invasion of Napoleon’s forces. 

Again, many of us were given the impression that the western movement of the United States was a matter of European decedents fighting off tribes of Native Americans. Obviously, that fails to tell the whole story. Mexico claimed control of what is now New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and western Colorado. Some of that land was purchased, some taken in border clashes and wars, and a great deal of it was just stolen at the point of a bayonet by our military. 

When Abraham Lincoln was in Congress, he vociferously fought against these border wars with Mexico and decried the use of soldiers to steal farms from Mexicans who were literally harvesting their crops. Much like Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric, James Polk would claim that Mexicans had killed Americans and Polk proclaimed that American blood has been spilled and we must retaliate. Lincoln knew he was lying, and he kept asking, “Show me the spot where American blood was spilled.”  He raised this objection so often during the war that newspapers of the day started to call him “Spotty Lincoln.”

We took the northern half of Mexico and made them a part of the United States and now scream about how many Mexicans live “illegally” in territories that were illegally taken from them. All of that without even mentioning nearly 50 years of efforts to annex Canada in the early days of our union. 

Please forgive me for taking so much of your time to review something almost everyone here would already have known but I want to make the point that, in the end, we have only one planet, national boundaries are fluid, and people move, immigrate, resettle, or migrate all during every page of history. 

 Again, I have obviously just been talking about North America. The same is true of other parts of the world. This was the Middle East a century ago, and this is what it looks like after the British and Americans said, “Here, let us help you.” Turning four or five major regions into dozens of chronically warring states.

It is more than a little pretentious of me to boil modern demographics down into this nut shell in the presence of several history and geography professors but what I really want to talk about is more in my wheel house. 

I advertised this message as a biblical perspective on immigration and I did so, as a rare tip of the hat to the revised common lectionary that is used in most mainstream Protestant denominations, which quotes this passage from the 19^thchapter of Leviticus which says: The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

This passage makes it clear that there is no such thing as an “illegal alien.” There is just “someone who is new to the neighborhood.” The passage turns on a kind of historical compassion:  We used to be immigrants ourselves, we have no right to be abusive of the next wave of immigrants. I love that line in Michael Franti’s song, Hello Bonjour, where he sings: 

I don't need a passport to walk on this earth
Anywhere I go cause I was made of this earth
I'm born of this earth, I breathe of this earth, and even with the pain I believe in this earth

But the Bible is not so simple. You should always beware of anyone says conclusively that the Bible has a clear message on any ethical issue. The fact is that the Bible is a collection of religious literature written in several languages, over several centuries, in several countries. It is more like a leather-bound cultural debate than it is a solitary word from God. 

If you look for racial prejudice and militant views towards foreigners and immigrants, you can find that in the Bible too. We liberals who claimed that the core of the Christian message is radical compassion, always gravitate to passages like this verse from Leviticus but it is not the perspective you can find in the Bible.

The 23^rdchapter of Deuteronomy says clearly that Moabites are not allowed to live among God’s people. But then, the whole book of Ruth is about Ruth the Moabite and her immigration into Judah and she later appears in the genealogy of Jesus.

Jeremiah was willing to declare the people of Uz as being pure evil. But then, the favorite book of wisdom literature, Job, is named for a faithful man of Uz. 

The book of Deuteronomy clearly condemns all eunuchs, but then the book of Acts describes the baptism of a eunuch as one of the first converts to Christianity, and the whole of the reconstruction era literature in the Hebrew Bible condemns Samaritans but then Jesus keeps telling stories about how Samaritans are more righteous than his peers who are Jews.

So, who are you going to believe about these foreigners? Jesus or Donald Trump?

Like Ezra and Nehemiah, Trump wants to build a wall and keep foreigners out, and like Jesus, we don’t want ‘no stinkin’wall and we choose to take a more kind approach to immigration. Even though I do not consider myself to be exclusively Christian, it always feels better to be on Jesus’ side of an argument, especially when it is an argument between Jesus and Donald Trump. 

I was in Mexico last week and was pleased to see that most people are keeping a pretty good sense of humor about this horrible period in American history, so far as our immigration policy goes. But the truth behind most of immigration is rarely very funny.

The debate we see in the pages of scripture are not much different from the debate we see raging in American politics today, though our much more densely populated globe complicates everything. There were times in the history of Judah that their primary concern was for doing what they had to do to protect and preserve Judah. The more xenophobic and paranoid passages of the Bible come from those times. 

But there were prophetic voices, and some of them also were to be heard during challenging times in Judah’s history, but the prophets kept trying to get people to raise their ethical standards, to try to see the world more compassionately and more fairly. Frankly, our own treatment of the Bible is that, for generations, we have picked and favorite passages and ignored the pro-slavery, anti-feminist, polygamous, classist, racist passages that are, I assure you, abundantly present in the Bible. As progressives, we can feel fully empowered to say flatly that those passages are just wrong. They are not the word of God and they don’t even sound very good when those sentiments are expressed by a low browed racist like Donald Trump. 

Any rational read of current events makes it plain that this xenophobic fear of brown people is irrational. We have serious things to be afraid of: domestic gun violence, deaths from drug over doses, and fatalities on our crumbling roads. 

Just those three add up to more than 100,000 preventable deaths per year so, clearly, the declaration of a national emergency to build a wall along the border with Mexico is economically stupid and morally tragic. 

Trump recently claimed that more than 60,000 Americans had been killed by illegal immigrants since 9-11. A truth claim that has no basis in fact and is traceable only to the ranting of the clearly racist Republican Congressmember from Iowa, Steve King. Not that murders have not happened, they have, it is just that illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to commit any crime than native born citizens. King’s numbers are inflated by several thousand percent. You are about as likely to be killed by lightening as you are to be killed by an illegal immigrant and, frankly, many who are killed by lightening were playing golf in a thunderstorm, so, if you consider holding a lightning rod up in the air during a thunderstorm as entertainment, I might be persuaded to see your death as a part of Darwin’s natural selection. But I digress…

Immigration, in our complicated time in history, is not something that can be managed with a open borders policy, even if that is what Jesus might have done. But as spiritual people, what I am imploring of you, is to strive to take the most compassionate view of immigration that you possibly can.

I will not wade into the weeds about how many times we have invaded our neighbors to the south, or assassinated unfriendly political leaders, or bribed and threatened our way into creating the Banana Republics that have empowered cruel dictators and corrupt governments which have impoverished the people of Central America and left them vulnerable to the violence of drug cartels and civil wars. 

America is not the cause of every unstable government in the world but when you are the elephant in the room, it is difficult to say that you don’t have some influence over everything else that is happening in the room. Our foreign policy and our trade policy have been designed to keep wages low in poor countries and to keep our military empire beyond local threats. As such, our policies have been profit-driven and stupidly short sighted. 

An intelligent, long range view for the Americas must acknowledge that successful governments and economies in Central and South America are ultimately good for the environment, for our national security and theirs, and probably for the economy because we need markets more than we need slave labor. And, trust me, when living conditions are bearable in Central America, they have little or no desire to immigrate north, legally or illegally. Remember to be mindful of the ice on the parking lot when you leave today . . . and that is something you will never hear in a church south of the border. 

A friend of mine, Javier, works in a Microsoft call center in Nicaragua for $1.25 an hour. We were talking last week about their efforts at unionizing for better wages, hours and working conditions. He told me that his managers at Microsoft, one of the most-wealthy corporations in the world, told them that if they unionize, they will move the shop to India where they can pay less than a $1 an hour for college educated workers. 

So, when Augusto Sandino warned Nicaraguans a hundred years ago not to trust the Gringos, you can’t say that he was wrong! Javier, nosotrous en la lucha por la paz y la justica, mi amigo.

Americans voters have elected a monstrous government because they were vulnerable to manipulation by fear and prejudice. I have one point to this sermon that though it comes with Uncle Sam pointing his finger, my listeners in England, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand need to know when the shoe fits as well:

I want you to stop being afraid, afraid of other skin colors, religions, sexual preferences, gender identities, and especially of immigrants. For God’s sake, I can’t end with a “thus sayeth the Lord” but clearly: The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were too were once aliens and you are better than prejudice and fear.

“Coffee and Poetry – a Valentine’s Reflection”

“Coffee and Poetry – a Valentine’s Reflection”  Feb. 10, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray

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“You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.
You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe, who can consume this world whole if he walks hand in hand with you; someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin.
You deserve a lover who wants to dance with you, who goes to paradise every time he looks into your eyes and never gets tired of studying your expressions.
You deserve a lover who listens when you sing, who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom; who flies with you and isn’t afraid to fall.
You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
― Frida Kahlo

Three or four cars ago, I indulged a long-postponed dream. When my daughter had become a licensed driver and had a car of her own, and I no longer had to haul her and a half a dozen of her friends around town, I traded my Volvo station wagon in for a 2-seater convertible. It caused a buzz in the church, of course, in much the way that growing a beard or wearing a suit that is not black or navy blue causes a stir. Mid-life crisis, childish indulgence, call it whatever you want . . . I loved it. 

In fact, I loved it so much that after about a month of driving it, I called the used car dealer where I had bought it to thank him for selling it to me and to tell him how happy it had made me. There was silence on the other end of the line, finally he said, “And?” “That’s it,” I said, “I just wanted to thank you again for selling it to me.” 

This gray-haired old hand in the car industry had evidently never sold a used car and had the buyer call and say, “thank you.” He was sincerely speechless. Experience had taught him to expect the worst. If you get a call from someone who just bought a used car from you, it was bound to be a complaint because people don’t call used car salesmen with good news.

Oddly enough, being a minister is a lot like being a used car salesman. No one ever schedules an appointment with me to tell me that their kids are doing well in school, that they have never had a run-in with the law, and that they are dating the most charming and intelligent people. No one ever drops by to say, “Just wanted to let you know that my wife and I are more hopelessly in love than we were ten years ago when you married us.”

In fact, for the last few months, every time my phone has rung, I feel a sudden existential angst. And there is palpable relief when it is someone inviting me to dinner and it is almost okay even when someone is calling to ask for someone’s phone number or email address… even if I had given the same phone number to them not 48 hours earlier. . .  but I don’t really want to go down that rabbit hole.

Of course, I have no idea how many married couples are really happy, or how many are just quietly tolerating one another. I’m afraid that many settle into a kind of quiet acquiescence. The thrill is gone, the passion as cooled, and, over time, even the curiosity goes away as you become so familiar with one another that you not only finish one another’s sentences, but you can become irrationally irritated by the fact that she is always losing her keys, and he never remembers to lock the back door.

Poets and playwrights have always waxed eloquent about romantic love, but in all honesty, for most of human history, being in love or being happy was not all that relevant in marriage. Most marriages were either directly arranged or substantially arranged and couples stayed together out of a survival need as much as for religious values or reputation.

When homes were lit by oil lamps, food was cooked on a wood fire stove, and clothes were washed in a tub and hung on a clothesline to dry, whether your husband had gotten a little big in the middle or your wife’s breasts sagged was not something you spent time worrying about. A hundred years ago, pastors did not hear many couples coming in to complain that there were just not happy… that their marriage wasn’t fulfilling. In the days before refrigeration, they had to worry more about whether the meat in the smokehouse was safe and edible and whether their old horse was going to make it through another winter. 

It was World War II that began to see the American family in rapid evolution. Women were forced from their homes into offices and manufacturing floors. Prior to the war, women mostly had contact with their family and a few neighbors and church members but in the world of commerce in the midst of global conflict, and their world had changed and they were not necessarily eager to go back to the old ways when the war was over. 

I wasn’t alive then but I grew up hearing sermons and religious debates that were focused on getting women back into their homes. A married woman with children who tried to keep a career was portrayed as being inherently irresponsible, wayward, maybe even sinful. 

My father came home from the war and got a job with the newly formed Rural Electrification Corporation, the REA, and for the next 40 years he was involved with stretching the copper wires that made modern life, with all of its labor-saving appliances and conveniences possible. 

This time period not only saw the divorce rate rise, but in recent years, it has seen more and more people choosing to live alone. More than half of Americans are not married now. Women no longer need a husband to bring home the bacon, chop the fire wood, and slaughter the pig and they don’t even need a husband to have and raise a child. And I don’t need someone to iron my clothes, cook my dinner, or explain to me why almost everything that I say or do is wrong . . . maybe that was just my home life. I don’t mean to speak for you. 

I am generalizing, of course, but for most of human history, family stability was largely maintained by the fact that there was no other practical choice. Families stayed together for unconscious psychological reasons, being the pack animals that we are, but we also stayed together out of economic necessity and for sheer survival. For the most part, that chapter of human history is in the past. 

Now couples largely stay together because they choose to do so. So why do they choose to do so? There is a lot of sexual impulse that we inherit through evolution and that is certainly a big part of it, at least in the beginning. But this is one thing that same sex couples and opposite sex couples have in common: sexual frequency starts at a high point and declines pretty quickly. It may be uncomfortable to talk about, but it is a nearly universal event.

There is an old Italian proverb that says: In the first five years of marriage, you are lovers. In the second five years you are friends. In the third five years you become like brother and sister. And in the next five you become like two sisters. Now, as we tend to live longer than our ancestors, the question we might pose to anyone who starts towards marriage after their child bearing years are past and when their careers have peaked or been put to bed, what is it that would make you sacrifice your independence and some measure of your self determination to enter into a seven-day-a-week partnership under one roof?  

Again, I think of this on a personal level. Having spent most of my adult life as a single person, what would make me ever change my marital status? What would make it worth it?  And I have an answer for that. Meaning. 

There was a wonderful moment in Robin William’s movie, the Dead Poets’ Society, in which he tells his students, “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

My late parents were married for more than 60 years and I do not doubt that there were moments of real emotional connection between them, but as an observer of nearly 50 of those years, their marriage was about function. They were Puritans with a Protestant work ethic that would have killed Paul Bunyan. They worked, and cleaned, and cooked, and mowed, they planted, harvested, canned, and froze, but what I never saw them do was read to one another. If it were not for the daily newspaper that each held in silence before going to bed, I would not have been sure that they even knew how to read. And, really, if you know how to read but you just don’t, how is that different from being illiterate? 

Last year, when my good friend Dan, met Mary, and the two of them seemed to have jumped off the cliff of rational behavior in a headlong plummet of love towards marriage, I began to wonder what I would say when it came time to officiate at their ceremony.

Mary, of course, has her heart set on me doing an impersonation of a traditional Christian minister who will deliver a proper biblical sermon but you know, I am a Bible scholar and I can tell you something about the Bible and marriage, Jesus, from whom Christians draw their identity, was ostensibly never married and Catholics would have us believe that he died a virgin. In the gospels, there is no point at which Jesus utters the word “marriage” in a sentence in which he does not also mention “divorce.” And the self-appointed apostle, Paul, who wrote the largest part of the new testament does mention marriage and what he says is quite straight forward. Paul says, “just don’t do it.” So, Mary, because I love you, I promise that I will take some passage completely out of context and apply it to your wedding but we both know that Jesus and Paul were not exactly great family men. 

But I found a bit of poetry from the brilliant and sometimes disturbingly eccentric Mexican poet and artist, Frida Kahlo. The whole of the verse is magical, but it ends, as good poems always do, in breath-taking crescendo: 

“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”

I have never come as close to getting a tattoo as I did on the day when I read that. 

You deserve a lover who brings you coffee, the most basic and mundane act of grace in a sleepy household. The first one up brings the other a cup of  “wake up, it’s morning.” It is just the civil thing to do. But it is a hero who takes away the lies of the world, who is strong enough to bring you hope. Hope is not a cup of coffee. Hope is defiance in the face of contrary evidence. It is a reason to believe even when the world is dark and full of lies. 

But a lover who will read poetry to you, that is a lover who will share their heart. Who will let you see their weakness and their brilliance. Someone who will read poetry to you as you drift off to sleep will be there in the morning, and will bring you coffee when you are in your last days, and you will greet your mortality with the ring of their words in your ears:

Te mereces un amante que se lleve las mentiras y te traiga esperanza, café y poesía.

“Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

“Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”       Feb. 3, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video  

Desiderata                           

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. 

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. 

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. 

Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. 

Take kindly the counsel of the years,

gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. 

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. 

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy. 

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.

             

Please forgive my poor Latin pronunciation but “Desiderata” is Latin for “desired things,” or maybe it substantively means, “desirable thoughts.” Max Ehrmann wrote it in the 1920’s and never copyrighted it. After his death, his wife did copyright it in a collection of her late husband’s poetry. Unfortunately, the rector at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore published it in a collection of his favorite spiritual quotes and he published on the cover of his collection the supposed date 

of the founding of St Paul’s church, which was 1692. So, when I was young, people like my older sister had a copy of it on a psychedelic poster in her room which bore the absurd 1692 date. 

It’s real history of familiarity came when an army psychiatrist had copies of it given to soldiers during WWII to help them to stay centered and to fight off depression and despair. I had not thought about it for years until one of our listeners, my friend, Susan Mendola, in Lufkin, TX posted it on Face Book and I took a moment to read it again. 

There, on Face Book, the home of Russian propaganda bots, insane conspiracy theory advocates, racists, neo-Nazis, and extremist political memes from the left and the right, stood this sage advice:

As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

And it just hit me, it was possible to discuss important topics on line while speaking your truth quietly and clearly; and also listening to others, because
even the dull and the ignorant; also have a point of view that may be entirely valid!

Ehrmann was not a 17^thcentury sage and, frankly, he wasn’t even a well-known poet. This, his most famous work, was only used by him in an early 20^thcentury Christmas card, generations before there were computers, an internet or social media. But it speaks a relevant word to our generation beyond what Ehrmann might have imagined. 

Ours is a nation that fought a bloody Civil War and so I have to remind myself that we are not more divided than ever . . . there have been worse times, but things are bad. Many of the most important decisions in our nation’s history have been made only when the left and right, Republicans and Democrats managed to work together:

In 1964, in the midst of controversial and sometimes violent racial strife in the midst of the civil rights movement, LBJ managed to get a bi-partisan vote to pass the Civil Rights Act.

Republicans and Democrats, when it has really mattered, have been able to set aside their differences long enough to work together to accomplish great tasks. In 2019 we almost had to cancel the State of the Union Address as Republicans and Democrats squared off over a debate about building a wall along our southern border. Mind you, I won’t watch it, I just think that it ought to happen . . . it is in the Constitution!

I have commented before on the nature of social media on-line, allowing us to fall into heated partisan debates in which we eviscerate one another in a matter of seconds simply because we can. And though the parody of the Bohemian Rhapsody we are going to enjoy in a moment says that no one ever changed their opinion because of a Face Book mudslinging session, the truth is that most progressives did not have the luxury of growing up with progressive, open minded parents who took you to a liberal church.

Most of us have had to grow out of our native conservatism and religious literalism and tracing those steps through our own transformation is not always easy. 

Maturity may be part of it, education as well, but maybe also becoming disillusioned about some things, cynical, maybe even embarrassed, or even humiliated. Heated debates may have been a part of our transformation.

With the release of the White House tapes, I learned that the President of the United States was even more foul-mouthed than me and my adolescent malcontent friends. In the Pentagon Papers, I learned that my government would lie to me about a war in which they were willing to trade my life for corporate profits. 

In college I learned that, in fact, my dad did not know everything. In seminary I learned that the church had been maintaining a charade of lies for centuries, and in years of church board meetings, I learned that pompous and self-righteous elders could lie like a cheap rug just to make themselves feel important. It is not difficult to come to see the world as a grand contest of “them and us” a battle between the righteous and well informed with the ignorant and ignoble. 

St. Paul apparently first used the phrase, “suffer fools gladly,” and even he did not use it as a compliment. Most of us find the emphasis on the “suffer,” like having to listen to our relatives talk about what they learned on Fox News, but G. K. Chesterton encouraged his peers to focus on the “gladly” part of the quote. 

I will readily confess that I have been sucked into a bloody battle of words on line in discussion boards and in social media. Every time I think that I have outgrown those childish exchanges, someone will find a new hot-button that even I wasn’t aware of, and we find out just how long my fuse really isn’t. 

In real life, I have almost no contact with people who do not essentially agree with me in matters of politics, religion, ethics, morality, and economics. 

Even on line, I have insulated myself from almost all disagreement. I don’t like to fight. I don’t like unpleasant exchanges, but I also don’t want to be entirely disengaged from my surroundings.  We live in a district that has elected Billy Long, not once, not twice, not even three times, but five times! Seven out of ten voters around us, voted for Donald Trump, one of the highest rates in the nation.

Still, somewhere between surrender and slander there is sanity and that is what I am advocating for today. As Ehrmann wrote nearly a century ago:

As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.

Because there is no reason why we cannot manage to, as he said:
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. 

I am tired of racists. I am tired of the rich exploiting the poor. I am tired of a government run by corporations for their own profit instead of a democracy that seeks the common good but even though the stakes are high, there is little to be accomplished through hateful vitriol. I should know. I have tried. 

I will share this with you, I write sermons and articles with a bobble head of Lewis Black by my keyboard. I have never claimed to suffer fools gladly. But I know very well that Lewis’ angry rants don’t help.

I do not agree with Ehrmann’s sort of Unity inspired assertion that the universe is unfolding as it should, and I suspect that the soldiers in WWII who were supposed to find solace in his words would not have felt so either.

But I do agree that both my peeps, my progressive, democratic socialist peers who have lots of sheep skin under glass and enormously informed opinions, as well as the Fox News consumer in the auto mechanics waiting room sitting across from me with a smug and condescending look on his face, are all children of the universe, made of the same 12 particles of matter as the trees, rocks, rivers, stars, and air, and that they have a right to be here, just like me. 

I will not abandon my values. I will not surrender simply to be accommodating or to find peace in my personal life. Still, I choose not to be a jerk. And when I realize that I am being a jerk, I choose to correct course, and come back to being prophetic in a sane and civil manner. I still believe that the whole world has a right to my opinion, I just want to present it in a package that seems credible and persuasive, not mean and vindictive. 

“The Horror All Around Us”     January 27, 2018   Dr Roger Ray

click here to see the video

From  Conversations With a Pedophile, by Dr. Amy Hammel-Zabin,p. 35

“I saw myself as a person who, ‘through no fault of his own,’ was deprived of a ‘normal’ life. And as I convinced myself that I had been somehow cheated by fate, I felt I had a license to do anything I chose to. If I didn’t play by their rules, why should I? I was never allowed to ‘play in their game.’ If I wanted to force some smaller child into having sex, why shouldn’t I? After all, I was the real victim here, not him. This self-created and self-serving sense of victimization allowed me to do anything that I desired without the slightest twinge of guilt, shame, responsibility, or remorse.”

A little less than a decade ago, Peter Newman, an assistant director of Kanakuk Camps in Branson, turned himself into police after admitting to having had sexual contact with young boys at the camp for many years. Peter was well liked by both the young campers and their parents. He interacted well and went out of his way to play midnight basketball and other extra activities with the often-bored campers. But his activities also led to things like naked hot tub Bible Studies, which is much as I would like to say about Peter Newman.

It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that the cases of sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests began to dominate the news but a full decade earlier, society began to talk about child abuse more publicly and when the documentaries began to hit TV, my phone began to ring with requests for appointments to talk about childhood traumas that had remained hidden for 40, or 50, or 60 years. Pedophilia was not invented by Catholic priests in the last half of the 20^thcentury. But it was a topic so riddled with shame and confusion that no one wanted to talk about it. 

I was in grad school studying pastoral counseling in the early 80’s and so we talked about this a lot but I am afraid to say that a lot of what I was taught did not seem to survive the test of time and research. 

My professors were right about the numbers of victims, when they told us that one in four or possibly one in three of both girls and boys were sexually molested prior to their age of consent. But they were wrong about two important things:

The first was the suggestion that there are a lot of pedophiles lurking in families, the Boy Scouts, Big Brothers, foster care, churches, and YMCAs. The more accurate fact is that pedophiles are fairly rare, it is just that each one will, in the course of their lifetime, have between 200 and 1000 victims. It does not take many offenders to victimize a whole lot of people . . . which also goes to how hard it is to detect who is most likely to be an offender. 

Secondly, I was told that virtually all offenders were victims as children. My text books were confident on this point and this appears to not be true. My friend, Josie Rose, recently sent me a copy of book that has been important to her clinical psychology practice, it bears the creepy title: "Conversations with a Pedophile." The book is written by a therapist who was a childhood victim, herself, and she is interviewing one of those prisoners who had spent years grooming and seducing more than 1000 young victims before he was arrested and incarcerated.

I have asked my friends, Paul Thomlinson and Josie Rose, to join me in this presentation because, quite frankly, I have more questions than answers on this topic and I would like to solicit their professional views about how we allow our children to have the security of having lots of adult mentors while we do everything we can do to keep them safe.

I want to use my own family as an example of the problems posed by both a lack of awareness and a hyper level of fear when it comes to child sexual abuse.

In those halcyon days of my own youth in rural Kentucky, our school nurse would come around once a year and tell us not to take candy from strangers or to accept rides from unknown persons. They never told us why. I was left to assume that it had something to do with avoiding tooth decay from candy. 

Even as a young elementary student, I could walk from my school to the church where my mother was the secretary. I could drop my books and walk all over town, as long as I was back at 5 when she locked up the office. During the summer, we could ride our stingray bikes as far away as Mammoth Cave National Park and spend the day hiking with international tourists until time to ride the 30 miles back home in time for dinner. No one ever asked, “Did anyone try to talk to you? Did anyone try to touch you?”

In the neighborhood, there were other fathers and grandfathers who knew my dad well enough to know that if I was ever going to see a movie, a circus, or a parade, that one of them would have to include me with their family outings, which they did regularly and generously. So far as I knew, all adults were benevolent parent figures from whom I had nothing to fear.

By the time I became a parent, I had been taught to view the world as being nearly the opposite of what I had believed it to be when I was growing up. I always knew where my daughter was and who she was with. And I did subtly question her about babysitters, teachers, coaches, and church youth sponsors. And I instilled distrust in her, telling her, perhaps more than she needed to know, to make her wary of adults and older teens in her life.

My own professional position became increasingly difficult through the years. Because so many scandals, like the one I mentioned when I began, are rooted in church experiences, pastors and churches have had to become so guarded that we hardly have youth programs or religious education anymore. 

When I entered the ministry, I could round up three or four boys and go on camping trips in the summers and out to the circus or other events all summer long. One of my professors used to sum up her lectures on sexual misconduct saying, “you don’t have to be guilty, you just have to be accused.” Now most children grow up with almost no close contact with adults beyond their immediate family members and, sadly, that is exactly where most child abuse to takes place.

Nothing frightens, disgusts, or enrages us as much as child sexual abuse and yet, how can we simultaneously protect our kids while allowing them to have a secure childhood full of trustworthy adults?

DR. PAUL THOMLINSON

How Can We Be Mature In Our Thinking About Pedophilia?

I must first confess my ambivalence about even addressing this topic, and further, about the tentative conclusions I draw from what I think is a fair reading of key findings from the psychological research on this many-headed beast. I will attempt to summarize some of these key findings here today, realizing all the while that fair-minded people can, will, and have come to very different conclusions than I have. 

Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children Are Two Different Things 

In the same way that desiring to strangle someone and actually murdering them are two different things psychologically, morally, and legally, desiring sexual contact with children must be distinguished from engaging in such contact with them. Cohen, et al. (2017) showed that among nearly 600 child-attracted men recruited in an online survey, 39% reported to have never offended, and about half of convicted sexual offenders against children do not show a dominant sexual attraction to children. By the way, these studies use the very direct method of penile plethysmography to determine and verify sexual attraction, and a full description of that method is not something I wish to provide here. Suffice to say, it is a reliable and valid measure of sexual attraction. In another recent peer-reviewed study, Dombert et al. (2016) found that 56% of men with pedophilic sexual interests had never committed child sexual abuse or used child sexual exploitation materials, yet 44% of all reported sexual offenses were committed by men without fantasies with pedophilic content. I have to conclude that, as difficult as it is for me personally, as difficult as it can be for my therapy practitioner colleagues, it is possible and desirable to accept a person with pedophilic interests, while simultaneously condemning as abhorrent any sexual acts that are illegal or immoral or harmful, especially to vulnerable little ones. 

We Should be Aware that Stigma-Related Stress May Make Mental Health Problems Worse and Increase Offending Risk among Those with Pedophilia 

A common misperception exists that ostracizing people with pedophilia is likely to help keep children safe (Jahnke & Hoyer, 2013; Lasher & Stinson, 2016). But the reality is that heaping shame on people for their sexual and emotional attraction to children may only ramp up known risk factors for sexual offending, including poor mental health and social isolation. Even those at low risk of offending because of good behavioral control and strong motivations not to offend are likely to face major problems if their sexual interests are discovered—they are likely to lose partners, friends, and work opportunities, and are likely to be the target of frequent threats (Wagner, et al., 2016). Research has well established that social stressors related to stigma and prejudice contribute to higher prevalence of mental disorders. Since one can hardly imagine a stronger stigma than the one attached to pedophilia, experiences of stress are likely to contribute to even higher rates of psychopathology among pedophilic individuals. On a related note, when social acceptance seems unattainable due to stigma, people with pedophilia might be more tempted to embrace subcultural values legitimizing adult-child sex as a coping mechanism (Freimond, 2013; Jahnke, Schmidt, et al., 2015). So, it seems to me that we should address stigma and help pedophilic individuals deal with its potential repercussions in the interest of keeping them offense-free. 

Stigmatizing People with Pedophilia Represents a Barrier to Treatment

Speaking of living an offense-free life, that is usually, and appropriately, the primary treatment goal for those with sexual interest in children. This stands to reason because, to my knowledge, there is no method to selectively reduce or eliminate sexual attraction to children. So, current treatment protocols typically focus on diminishing risk factors for child sexual abuse (Beier, 2016). However, not surprisingly, treatment opportunities for these individuals are few and far between. Again, this stands to reason because seeking treatment for pedophilia may have disastrous consequences legally, socially, financially, and familially, especially with mandated reporting laws in effect (Cantor, 2014; Lasher & Stinson, 2016). By creating an unfortunate bottleneck of circumstances where those with pedophilia have little or no access to psychotherapy, and are systemically discouraged from seeking it, ingrained structural stigma is likely undermining our efforts to prevent sexual offending. 

Stigma research has furthermore revealed stigmatizing attitudes on the part of clinical practitioners, which may dissuade pedophilic individuals from disclosing their sexual interests or from pursuing therapy. Pedophilic individuals appear to have little trust that mental health professionals would treat them respectfully, even in countries like Germany, where laws assure patient confidentiality even when a patient discloses past sexual offenses, and that do not oblige psychotherapists to report planned sexual offenses (but note that psychotherapists are allowed to break confidentiality in the latter case).

Mental Health Practitioners Need to Become Aware of Their Own Stigmatizing Attitudes 

This is hard for me, as my attitudes were formed pretty early in my psychological career. I worked quite a lot, and intensely, with sexually abused and molested children from ages 5 to 17…and I had to come to grips with a certain murderous rage that would sometimes overtake my thoughts; thoughts that included vivid mental images of my hands around the throats of known abusers of the beautiful children in my care. And I used to hear Mark 9:42 in my head a lot, wherein Jesus issued the very stern warning that “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to stumble, it would be better for him that a heavy millstone be hung around his neck, and he had been cast into the sea.” But, hopefully, I have learned a thing or two about how little my rage, or society’s fear and rage, can actually help a single child from being harmed by a pedophile. 

Since psychologists and other mental health professionals are part of the culture that rejects and demonizes people with pedophilic sexual interests, we really ought to take seriously the identification of our own assumptions and feelings regarding the issues at hand. Biased or blanket negative assumptions may exist implicitly and explicitly and, if so, they are likely to interfere with successful therapy outcomes. We should know and appreciate that clients with pedophilia may pursue psychotherapy for a variety of reasons, at least outside of forensic settings. Some may seek treatment because they have problems controlling their sexual urges or finding appropriate ways to achieve sexual satisfaction, while others may be struggling to develop a positive sexual identity or to find ways to share their sexual interests with close friends or family members. We have to watch our biases and be careful not to betray those seeking treatment before we have a chance to help them: e.g., not believing someone’s statement that he or she has never offended against children due to stereotypical beliefs about the nature of pedophilia will invariably threaten the therapeutic alliance. 

Why We Should Try to Reduce the Stigma of Pedophilia 

It is my considered opinion, with which you are free to disagree, of course, that we (i.e., psychologists, therapists, health care practitioners, the clergy, and the community at large) should seek to destigmatize pedophilia and treat human beings who have these sexual interests with respect and empathy. We need to take great care in separating sexual interests and criminal behavior when speaking or writing about pedophilia. Research findings based on incarcerated offender samples should not be over-generalized to all people with pedophilic interests, which is often the case (Cantor & McPhail, 2016; Feelgood & Hoyer, 2008; Seto, 2007). For these reasons, explicitly referring to pedophilia as a sexual orientation and separating it from sexual offending in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, (the DSM-5) constitutes a step in the right direction, and one that should not be walked back in the face of pressure from a misinformed or highly inflamed public. 

David Ketchum

Pedophilia and child sexual abuse are topics that we are not used to discussing at all, let alone in public, which is why I think Roger has gone out of his way to include multiple voices here today. We need all these perspectives: pastors, researchers, practitioners, parents, survivors, artists. For myself, I’ve also dealt with this issue on multiple levels. I experienced sexual abuse as a child; I’ve worked with both perpetrators and victims while providing pastoral care, and also with people who experienced pedophilic inclinations; I’ve been a foster parent to children who experienced sexual abuse; I’ve been an artist who channeled anger, grief, healing, and hope into music and writing. 

As all of us know, life does not usually ask for permission for the pain and loss it doles out. But what strikes me most in all of these conversations is that 1) healing is not automatic or inevitable and 2) we have managed to create a society and culture that too often actively works against the healing of victims and perpetrators. This has been a theme this morning, perhaps best expressed when Paul spoke about having to “come to grips with a certain murderous rage” he felt as a practitioner when learning about abusers’ actions. And we can widen that net to include our entire larger culture. 

Anecdotally, what I experienced growing up is still way too commonly experienced by the folk I continue to work with in conflict coaching, workshops, and support groups. Statistically, we’ve read the numbers from this stage several times, but I’ll share another study, from January 2018, to add to the catalog, that’s especially relevant to the topic of children who experience sexual abuse. Stop Street Harassment (SSH) and Raliance surveyed 2,000 people and documented that “81 percent of women surveyed ... had experienced sexual harassment or assault and ... 43 percent of men said they had experienced sexual misconduct … . … More than half (57 percent) of women and nearly half (42 percent) of men said their first experience of sexual harassment or assault occurred by the age of 17. Thirty percent of women and 22 percent of men said their [experience] occurred by age 13.”  (https://www.newsweek.com/after-metoo-study-finds-nearly-all-women-and-almost-half-men-us-have-815660) 

And further, again both statistically and anecdotally, the reality is that most sex abusers are never discovered, let alone treated or charged. In fact, “The low rate of reporting leads to the conclusion that more than 90 percent of all sex offenders are living in communities nationwide without ever having been charged for their crime.” (https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90200&page=1) 

I talk about shifting the norm a lot, and it applies here, too. We want to act like sex abuse is uncommon, because we are socially trained to think it is disgusting and shocking, so disgusting and shocking that it surely can’t – doesn’t - happen. And when we are confronted with the reality that it does happen, we just want it to go away. We substitute silencing victims and demonizing perpetrators for the very difficult work of transforming our cultures and creating communities that are actually healthy and safe. It’s very difficult because our social norms have provided very few accessible ways – policies, processes, resources, and professionals – to prevent, address, and heal sexual abuse. Instead - 

• We feel angry. Retribution is our most common cultural pathway, and no one elicits the disgust and violence of the mob like a sexual predator who preys on children. But retribution centers the perpetrator and does very little to support and heal the victim or the community, let alone the perpetrator. We need to move from retributive to transformative and restorative models. 
• We feel ashamed. Conservative cultures are especially vulnerable to deep shame and aversion when it comes to anything related to sex. Many victims of abuse are ignored simply because the adult hearing this stuff is ashamed and disgusted and responds by silencing the child. Or, in many cases, children learn to silence themselves. We need to move from repressive sexual attitudes and practices to comprehensive, developmentally and age appropriate sex education that includes bodily autonomy, sexual boundaries, and clear instructions for what to do if you are abused. 
• We feel helpless. We don’t like to experience things that we don’t know how to deal with, even if we think they are wrong. But because our society focuses on retribution, and most sexual abuse is perpetrated by people we or our families or co-workers know and care about, we simply don’t know what to do. A refrain we hear time and again is that families are afraid that addressing sexual abuse will ruin someone’s life, or that they are afraid that another family member will be devastated by learning that a family member is an offender. Again, the result is that the victim is silenced. Or when perpetrators are prominent and powerful people in a community, we are afraid of the consequences of confronting them. So again, we do nothing, or we silence those who do try to speak, because we’re afraid things will just get worse, and we’ll feel even more helpless. We need to move from victim-blaming and cultures of silence to victim-centered models that normalize trauma-informed care and make that care universally available. 

The #MeToo movement is largely aiming at shifting these norms, but ignorance and repression is pushing back. The Economist conducted surveys, one year apart and polling 1,500 US residents, to track some of the cultural responses to the #MeToo movement’s goals of normalizing conversations about sexual assault. “When it came to questions about the consequences of sexual assault and misconduct, there was a small but clear shift against victims. / The share of American adults responding that men who sexually harassed women at work 20 years ago should keep their jobs has risen from 28% to 36%. … And 18% of Americans now think that false accusations of sexual assault are a bigger problem than attacks that go unreported or unpunished, compared with 13% … . (According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, … , 63% of sexual assaults are not reported to police, whereas between 2% and 10% of assault cases are falsely reported.)” This shift was most noticeable among conservative respondents, both male and female; a full 50% of respondents that identified as Trump supporters indicated that they now believe that “Women who complain about sexual harassment cause more problems than they solve.”(https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/10/15/after-a-year-of-metoo-american-opinion-has-shifted-against-victims)

This is victim blaming. This is rape culture. This is the kind of attitude that translates into families, schools, churches, and communities that empower and enable pedophiles and sexual predators. When we talk about shifting social norms, we need to remember that we are talking about engaging with deeply held patriarchal values, attitudes, behaviors, and institutions that resist change. Again, I think most of us are really uncomfortable with the idea of just how prevalent sexual assault and abuse continues to be, including the abuse of children, and our patriarchal culture makes it very easy to fall into those patterns of helplessness, anger, and shame. 

So we continue to have a lot of work ahead of us, in our hearts, homes, churches, schools, workplaces, communities, and cultures. I don’t believe it is possible to create communities that are completely immune to abuse, but I do think it is possible to create communities where the risks of abuse are greatly minimized, where people can easily and simply seek and receive help, as victims or perpetrators, where everyone grows up learning about healthy sexuality, and where everyone grows up learning about the resources available for preventing and healing the wounds left by abuse on both individuals and communities. We need to move to transformative and restorative models of justice. We need to move to comprehensive, developmentally and age appropriate sex education that includes bodily autonomy, sexual boundaries, and clear instructions for what to do if you are abused. We need to move victim-centered models that normalize trauma-informed care and make that care universally available. 

Conversations like these are an important part of that process. We have to normalize talking about sexual abuse and pointing to practical changes we can make. And for that, we need to support spaces that make these conversations possible. I know that we, as a community, and I, personally, deeply appreciate and value the work we do as a faith community to make conversations like this possible, and it’s why I am happy to support it in whatever ways I can, including giving financially each Sunday.