"Missed Connections -Faith communities in a post-theistic world"

"Missed Connections -Faith communities in a post-theistic world" Dr. Roger Ray

July 7, 2019

click here to see the video

Lost Connections by Johann Hari pp 10-11

Some one in five U.S. adults is taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem; nearly one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking antidepressants at any given time; around one in ten boys at American high schools is being given a powerful stimulant to make them focus; and addictions to legal and illegal drugs are now so widespread that the life expectancy of white men is declining for the first time in the entire peacetime history of the United States. These effects have radiated out across the Western world: for example, as you read this, one in three French people is taking a legal psychotropic drug such as an antidepressant, while the UK has almost the highest use in all of Europe. . . We are literally awash in these drugs.

                                                                                    

Not many sermons come with a warning, but I do feel the need to start today with a caveat that I am going to be punching a bit above my weight class this morning and given my size, that is saying something. I am going to be saying some disparaging things about serotonin drugs and the whole universe of anti-depressants, sleep aids, and other allegedly mood-altering prescription medications.  

No one should change the medications you take based solely on what you hear me say today. Changes in psycho-active drugs should always be done in close consultation with your prescribing physician. Anything else may, in fact, have deadly results. With that being said, the game is afoot.

When Dr. Paul Thomlinson and I were on the road in April doing a series of conferences in South Carolina, our conversation kept drifting back to this book and the insights it offers into the treatment of addiction, suicide prevention, and treatment of the most common forms of depression. We realized that we needed to build a whole conference around the concept of vital connections. And so, we did. 

But we wanted to approach it a bit differently. The premise of the book is that the real treatment for depression, the best suicide depression, the most effective treatment of addiction, and, in many ways the best ways to address sleep disorders, obesity, and many neurotic conditions, is to strengthen connections between friends, family, co-workers and neighbors, and to strengthen connections to meaningful work, spiritual values, and to nature. So, we don’t want to invite people to come to a conference and just talk about these amazing insights. We want to help them to practice making better connections. 

I am encouraging all of our church members to plan to participate in this conference, held on the first weekend in August, August 2-4 here at our church in Springfield, but I am especially encouraging our listeners to come. Every year, some of our enthusiastic internet connected members come from South Carolina, South Dakota, California, New York, Kentucky, Florida, and Louisiana, and sometimes even from England and Scotland, to be a part of this event. We have a very simple, plain building in this typically very dull midwestern city, but the people you will meet here are some of the most fascinating, and if I may say so, intelligent and good-looking people in the world. 

David Ketchum will lead us in mindful movement, an exercise developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, Music therapist, Harry Beckett will lead us in a drum circle, Molly Estes, the most photogenic of our line-up, will lead us in seated yoga, Sean Spyres and Harry will work together on group singing and musical aspects of meditation, and there will be a few lectures delivered by positive psychology expert, Dr. Jim Davis, and some further input from me and Dr. Paul Thomlinson.

To fit all of these activities in, we have to crowd out the lectures from the first weekend in August and put them, instead, as our four sermon posts in July. I encourage you to pay attention to the sermon I am delivering this morning. Next Sunday, Dr. Thomlinson and I will share the microphone to talk about addiction, depression and suicide. July 21^st, David Ketchum will speak about how connections to things undermine our connections to people and to nature. And on the last Sunday of July, I will speak directly to strengthening connections to values, particularly within faith communities. If you are driving to attend this event, you can catch all four of these talks on iTunes podcasts in the car at Progressive Faith Sermons. Admission is free but we need to plan for crowd size so please write to me at RevDrRay@aol.comto let me know that you are coming. 

As we begin this important series, let me put myself in the topic so that I don’t falsely posture myself as a sage on a stage talking down to you. All of my life, I have had an episodic relationship with sleep. For most of my adult life, I have struggled with my weight, sometimes winning for long periods of time and sometimes failing. I have had difficult times in my life. I have been through divorce and a related bankruptcy. I have had dozens of death threats resulting primarily from my controversial newspaper articles and work with families suffering from violence and addiction. I have been held at gunpoint for 5 hours and received cut up dead animals in the mail as a direct threat.

But, the trauma that I have obsessed about happened in 2007 when I was forced to resign from a church where I had been the pastor for 16 years. Since that time, I have gained nearly 100 lbs. and spent countless nights, sometimes night after night, lying wide awake and replaying the trauma of broken relationships and religious hypocrisy over and over in my mind.  

During these past twelve years, especially in the immediate years following that tragic summer, I saw several doctors to ask for help with my sleep disorder and my weight gain. And I want to tell you this: I have physicians whom I love, who are smart, professional people. They have tried, through prescription medications, to address my sleep disturbance and constant appetite.

What none of these very educated professional men and women have never done is to ask me why I have trouble sleeping or why I over-eat. One physician friend who knew what I was going through, walked up to me in the aisle of the church and put a bottle of Prozac in my suit coat pocket and just said, “One a day until this is over.”

What Dr. Paul and I will talk about more next week is the fact that sleep disturbance is a sign of clinical depression. Excessive eating is a response to trauma. No one in the medical profession ever had the temerity to suggest that my depression was a symptom rather than the disease. That my weight is the result of a larger problem and not, in and of itself, the problem, in spite of the social and health implications of it.

If I may, please allow me to make a glancing reference to one of Aesop’s fables . . . When Androcles was faced with a raging lion who was suffering from terrible pain from a thorn in his paw, Androcles did not offer the lion a prescription for OxyContin. The lion did not need to be doped up on pain killers. He needed to have the thorn removed. 

Depression is a symptom. Sleep disturbance is a symptom. Obesity is a symptom.

You do not catch a fever. A fever is symptom of an infection and, frankly, sometimes a helpful one because raising your body temperature can kill the bug that is infecting you. There is something to be said for “sweating out” some infections. 

I appreciate the doctor who wanted to give me anti-depressants, but I did not take them because I know that they make no statistical difference in depression, but the side effects can be serious, including loss of libido, weight gain, and suicidal ideation. I knew that I had a reason to be depressed and I wanted to try to address the cause and not the symptom.  A very bright and sincerely compassionate doctor gave me a prescription of Ambien to help me sleep but I did not take them because while there are prescription meds that will help or even make you sleep, they are all highly addictive and have very destructive side effects to include sleep walking and driving and making phone calls while you are asleep which, could get me some really bad coverage in the local newspaper. 

In the same way, though I have had minor surgery a few times and been given narcotic pain relievers afterward, I have never taken them because I know that there are things worse than being in pain. That’s not to say that I never will, but it is to say that I would have to be in a great deal of pain to ever take those meds. I have seen what they have done to too many people. 

I am certain that you remember the constant barrage of TV commercials for the headache remedy, “Head On” . . . apply directly to the forehead. There were no active ingredients in head on. It afforded no medical benefit whatsoever but, for a time, there were people who believed that it helped and the placebo effect is not nothing. If you believe that getting your spine adjusted helps you then, in a way, it helps you. If you believe that wearing copper or magnets helps you, then great. It doesn’t but the human psyche is a complicated thing. 

I never use Ambien to go to sleep but for years, knowing that there was a bottle of it in my bathroom kept me from panicking about being awake at night. I knew that I could force myself to sleep if I took one, but I never did because there are worse things than being awake at night. 

Now, back to pulling the thorn out of your paw. . . I mentioned last week that the trauma we were imposing on children at the border would have horrible impact on their mental health as adults. There is no way to go back and undo what has been done to them. In the same way, there is no way to go back and undo what happened to me in 2007. Every day I talk with people who were sexually assaulted as children. I talk with people who have been victims of violence. I sheltered a friend for several months this year whose ex tried to kill her by setting her house on fire one night. 

There are things that happen that are so traumatic that we cannot help that we somatize them, that is, exhibit the results in our bodies . . . the word “psychosomatic” is about how the mind and body are connected and there are times that it is easy to see and sometimes it is not, but it is always there. One of my professors used to say that if we could achieve mental health, hospitals would only exist to staunch wounds and set broken bones. That is an overstatement, but it may not be a much of one. 

Where traditional medicine often relies upon pharmaceuticals to solve every problem, psychotherapy often spends way too much time and energy focused on the problem. Like sitting down with a dangerous lion and saying, “Tell me how you feel about the thorn in your paw.”

Everyone tends to remember Abraham Maslow for his famous pyramid of the hierarchy of needs. And as helpful as that may be in introductory psychology classes to help young students begin to think about how their minds work, this is far from being Maslow’s greatest contribution to the field of counseling. Maslow realized that counseling involved way too much time and energy focused on where a patient hurts and not nearly enough of where their strengths lie. Positive psychology, which we will be talking a lot about, is focused on living a good, productive, and happy life in a way that overpowers the losses and the trauma.

I went to counseling after my divorce. I went through pretty exhaustive psychological testing and after four sessions he basically told me to focus on my work and not on my loss. And, in that, I think that he was really helpful. My work is basically trying to help individuals in crisis and to speak to the ills that plague society. If you can’t feel good about yourself when you are doing that, you have to have a cold hard place where your heart is supposed to be. 

There is a fake meme that has made the rounds on social media and I don’t want to show it all here because we are, after all, in church. Freud didn’t say it but it is none-the-less true . . . before you assume that there is something wrong with your brain that causes you to be depressed or anxious or going without sleep . . . don’t underestimate the possibility that you are surrounded by jerks. There could be something wrong with your brain or your diet or your environment, but we have a saying in psychology, “When you hear hoof beats you think horses and not zebras.” Acknowledging that there are sometimes organic causes of emotional pain, more often, there is a lack of vital connections . . . real and meaningful friendships . . . a healthy love life . . . work or volunteerism in which you feel like you can make a real difference, a real contribution to the world. 

As Viktor Frankel said, “If you have a ‘why’ to live, you can live with any ‘how.’”

My modest suggestion is that we choose to focus on the why and stop obsessing over the how. 

“Against Giving Up”

“Against Giving Up”   June 30, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray                     

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Paraphrase of Talmudic teaching of Rabbi Tarfon, late 1^stcentury

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

But neither are you free to abandon it.

In this Orwellian time in history, it seems that the remarkable events of our lives have taken over the pulpit and my only real task is to interpret these events in ways that continue to offer an orientation to reality and a bulwark against despair. Ron Paul thought he was quoting Orwell when he said that “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” Which sounds like something Orwell might have said but, alas, he didn’t.

But we know what it means. Our current president tells lies so often that now, for example, when even our intelligence agencies try to tell the world that Iran set two tankers on fire in the Gulf of Oman, no one believes them. Japan and Norway replied that they would need more evidence and the tankers that were set on fire were from Japan and Norway! So, preaching, for me, has become an exercise of trying to tell the truth in what has become an empire of lies. 

But before I fall headlong into current events, I would like to invite you to remember with me a fictional novel from the 16^thcentury, Don Quixote. The actual novel, in two parts, is impossibly long and complicated but the central themes were pulled out about 50 years ago and turned into a musical. 

In both the play and the movie, the character of Don Quixote is a middle-aged man who becomes inspired by old novels about the days of knights who chivalrously fought the villains of the world to bring honor and justice to their victims. He is indisputably mad, in a schizophrenic sort of way, imagining a windmill to be a four-armed giant against whom he sets out to do battle. The character is simultaneously sad and comedic. After the attack on the windmill goes badly, he retreats to a local tavern that he imagines to be a castle. 

There is a barmaid there, Aldonza, which, for 16^thcentury Spain, means that she was both a servant girl and, to put it bluntly, a village prostitute. Men abuse her, make sport of her, and treat her horribly. In the play, men even sing songs to taunt her and make her miserable. But Quixote walks in and sees Aldonza and imagines her to be a princess, Dulcinea. When he tries to treat her as a noble object of his loyal adoration, she is enraged. Abused people often assume that even kindness is somehow mocking. 

But his persistent respect begins to inspire her to think differently of herself. In the end, the men of the tavern attack her brutally because the world, once it has a victim, is loath to see that person, or those people, as anything but victims. The play does not have a happy ending so far as most people in the audience would see it, but Aldonza forcers her way into Quixote’s home as he laid dying because his adoration for her had made it impossible for her to think of herself as anything but Dulcinea. In fact, in the closing scene, Sancho calls her Aldonza and she corrects him, “My name is Dulcinea.” And she announces, though Quixote is dead, his spirit lives on.

The five-hundred-year-old novel leaves its footprints in our language. We will describe a foolish objective or quest to be Quixotic. We will say that someone who strives to fight for justice in meaningless ways is “tilting at windmills.” Quixote is the quintessential madman, but in the end, recognizing that it is fiction, was the women he adored Aldonza or Dulcinea?

The men in the tavern looked on her as a thing to be used. Quixote, in his madness, saw her as a woman to be adored. 

Surely you must know where I am going with this. The men of the tavern may have been technically correct… she was a servant girl, a maid, a slave of sorts, more or less, a sex slave. That may have been factually true, but the madman saw her as something of inestimable value and simply by being seen that way, her reality was changed. 

I do not mean to be cruel or manipulative. I would bring this up in a more gentle way if I knew how. But when you look at these children who have walked or been carried through a thousand miles of poverty, danger, civil war, sometimes sexual assault, to show up on our border asking for refuge. When you look at these little brown children, sleeping on a concrete floor, covered by an aluminum blanket, left undernourished, dirty, and often sick and infected with lice. 

When you look at them, what do you see? Illegal immigrants? Children who do not deserve decent treatment because they should not have been brought here in the first place? Do you see Aldonza? 

Trump said that the whole family separation policy was started under Obama and that he was trying to reunite families. When confronted by the squalid conditions in which children are being housed in concentration camps on the border, Trump blamed the Democrats who would not give them enough funds to be able to provide blankets, soap, and toothbrushes. 

Caliburn International Corpis one of many military for-profit corporations operating the concentration camps where asylum seeking families and children are being detained. There are more than 15,000 children in US detention centers. Caliburn International and their ilk are charging tax payers $750 per day, per child. Trump administration spokespersons told the media that they cannot afford to give proper bedding, clean clothes, soap, and toothbrushes to these children because Democrats in congress will not provide sufficient funding. 

Hilton Garden Inn, when I put Bishop Spong up when he and Christine are in town, costs $110 a night, or $55 per person for the two of them. But we are not talking about 3-star hotels, are we? Do you know what a foster parent in Missouri is paid to care for a child? Caliburn is billing $750 a day and is not obligated to provide a bed, clean clothes, decent food, or even soap and a toothbrush. $11 a day for a small child. $12.40 for a teenager. 

Can you imagine getting $750 a day for taking care of a kid? That trust fund baby would want for nothing . . . if you saw them as a kid, and not just an opportunity to get rich. Mind you, all of this is going on while conservatives are trying to scare tax-paying citizens about the socialism of universal healthcare and tuition-free higher education. What I wish that I could say to every unemployed or underpaid American is this: Immigrants are not the reason why you are poor. Corporate Socialism is what is making you poor. It is the Corporate Socialism that lets Amazon make $12 billion in profits last year and yet paid no taxes. 

It is the Corporate Socialism that allows military industrial corporations to bill tax payers $750 a day for caging children rather than providing healthcare, education, and a living wage to citizens. And, come on, 15,000 children? What is going on with that?

President Obama was often criticized for his aggressive deportation policy. He was called by many Latinos, “The Deporter in Chief.” Obama’s administration deported over 400,000 people. The problem here is not so much the deportations under Trump. The problem for me, right now, is these 15,000 kids he is holding onto. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants . . . some of whom are currently changing the bedding and mopping the floors at Mar-a-Lago. It hasn’t happened. He is not engaging in mass deportation but is, instead, turning these children into semi-permanent prisoners he can use as profit centers for his political cronies. For him, all of these children are Aldonza. I am just asking if anyone else can see Dulcinea among them?

When my daughter was little, she went through some tough attachment issues. She would sometimes scream inconsolably when I had to leave for work. This went on for some time but eventually she came to accept that I would always come back. It was traumatic for her because I was her primary care giver and, for a very young toddler, survival depends on that attachment.

Imagine being a toddler who traveled hundreds of miles, facing exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, and then, finally surviving to cross the border and then to be taken from the father or mother who had held your hand, walked with you, carried you, protected you. You are taken away, put in a dog kennel, separated from anyone you have ever known. And the mom or the dad just doesn’t come back at the end of the day, or at night, and not next week, or next month. Can you imagine the trauma? The screams . . . the tears . . . and what may be worse, when the screams and tears are replaced with a blank stare, a void, empty, hopelss little heart.

There was a large study done on several thousand people called the “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study” (ACE) What the Kaiser Permanente institute discovered was that if you had a childhood trauma you were predictably more likely to have a major episode of depression as an adult. The more trauma you experience, the more likely you were to have a problem with depression. If a child had six traumatic experiences, they were five times more likely to have depression as an adult. But here, when I think about these kids in cages, daily subjected to the trauma of separation, of cold, of hunger, illness, filthy, isolation . . . the study showed that if a child had seven categories of traumatic events they were more than 300 times more likely to commit suicide as an adult. 

At noon on Tuesday, protestors are gathering outside the local offices of members of congress to protest this state sponsored child abuse that every day is traumatizing 15,000 innocent children. I will be outside the office of Billy Long at noon on Tuesday. I hope that our listeners will find the congressional office near you. Congress will be on its 4^thof July recess so if Billy Long is not playing poker in Las Vegas, he may actually be here in his office. 

As bad as the trauma is, some people don’t even survive the process. Our news moves so quickly that we hear of one case at a time, but, in the past two years, 24 people have died in ICE custody. Some from such basic causes as thirst, and many from very treatable illnesses. 

When this gruesome image of a father and infant daughter who drowned while, in desperation, tried to swim across the Rio Grande because the bridge has been closed by the Trump administration hit the media, it revived media interest in the whole border crisis. But as horrifying as this image is, this is not an isolated incident. About 300 immigrants are believed to die along the Mexican/US border every year as they try to enter America. Some drown, some die of thirst in the desert. 

The skeletal remains of immigrants are often found in the Arizona desert. There is no way to accurately count the death toll. Some local residents have formed a group called “No More Deaths.” They strategically place water and food in the common trails the immigrants use. 

Scott Warren, an Arizona teacher, was recently arrested for the crime of giving water to a dying immigrant. He was put on trial with the treat of being imprisoned for 20 years. 

His trial ended a couple of weeks ago with a hung jury. At least some of the jurors simply could not send this guy to prison for the crime of treating people like they were people. But, evidently, there were ICE agents, prosecutors, and a judicial system that was more than willing to arrest him, charge him, try him, and attempt to send him to prison . . . they just didn’t get away with it, this time. 

I don’t mean to make this such a hard sermon. I accept that preaching is a matter of speaking truth to power, and now it is a matter of treason . . . speaking truth in an empire of lies. But you are not all called to be preachers, or prophets, or journalists, or even protestors. But you are called to give a cup of cold water to someone in dire thirst. You can choose to see the refuse of society, the ones no one wants, the ones Trump wants to build a wall against or at least to lock into a $750 a day cage, and you can choose to see them as the princes and princesses of Central America. There is no Aldonza among them. They are all Dulcinea.

I will end where we began this morning with this paraphrased first century bit of the Jewish Talmud: Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

But neither are you free to abandon it.

Join me, please, in being so crazy, that we see illegal immigrants as people.            

“Moderate Radicals”

“Moderate Radicals”            June 23, 2019          Dr. Roger Ray

Walt Whitman "Be radical - be radical - be not too damned radical!"

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This will be a big week for those of us who are political junkies. 20 of the 22 declared candidates for the Democratic nomination for president will be on a debate stage, divided into two groups on Wednesday and Thursday night where they will be given five to seven minutes to distinguish themselves from the pack. All of the talk in the news is about how the frontrunners will be positioned on stage and how they will try to outshine those next to them. 

Will Biden make one of the verbal slips he is so famous for? Will Sanders stop his slide in the polls? Will Warren manage to sustain her rise in the polls without being seen on stage between Biden and Sanders? 

This is familiar language to me.  I grew up in Kentucky and there was a time when I was a regular at Churchill Downs, studying the racing forms to consider a horse’s poll position, jockey, trainers, pedigree, and when all else fails, what colors the jockey and horse were sporting. And the time frame is about right . . . the horses get about two minutes to show which one of them will win. 

I understand why commentators turn it into a horse race or a beauty contest. They want to make it a contest of people when we, the voters, the citizens of this huge democracy, are much more impacted by policies and ideas. But those tend to get tossed off pejoratively with all of the depth of name calling on a school playground.

Not to put you on the spot, but, to honestly put you on the spot, how many of you know who this man is?  He is one of the least known Democratic candidates and, in any rational analysis, he has absolutely no chance of winning. However, he represents one of the single most important issues facing America’s future. Andrew Yang is an advocate for the Universal Basic Income. As an entrepreneur and philanthropist, he has read the tea leaves of the future of capitalism and has recognized that automation will increasingly reduce the need for labor, especially unskilled labor, and that we will very soon have a lot more people than we will have jobs. Under our current economic system, the way we distribute wealth, will continue to transfer more and more wealth to the top and a jobless economy on the bottom will lead to social collapse. 

Yang is a capitalist who wants to make capitalism more humane. His campaign slogan is “Make America Think Harder.” In the beauty contest that is our primary process, he has little to no chance of being noticed, but his signature policy is vital to saving America’s economy and, sadly, it is not even being publicly discussed.

Another candidate who receives almost no attention is this fellow . . . anybody care to hazard a guess? This is the candidate who asked that there be one Democratic debate devoted solely to discussing climate issues because we are now in the 6^thmajor extinction and we are deteriorating the environment of this planet in such a way that we are placing the ability of humans to survive here at risk. The issue is huge, vital, and given only a fraction of the attention that it deserves. Still, realistically, Gov. Jay Inslee, of Washington, has almost no chance of being a viable candidate. 

Two of the other important issues that we talk about in our hopefully soon to be released book about creating a great society, has to do with unnecessary wars and the absurd failure of our country to enact sensible gun laws to stem the more than 30,000 annual deaths from guns in America. There is a candidate who has spoken powerfully and meaningfully and knowledgably about these two issues. Could you hazard a guess as to which candidate that might be?

 Though David Ketchum might tell you that I only refer to Iraq war veteran and Hawaiian congress member, Tulsi Gabbard, for her exotic Polynesian beauty, she has actually been a very controversial opponent of America’s unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an opponent of regime change in Syria. She has also been a noted advocate for sensible gun laws that have been proven to work in other countries. She said some really stupid things about LGBT rights when she was in her early 20’s but has since made a 180 degree, and I would argue, plausible change of views. In spite of her military service on the battlefield, and her experience in elected office, she is receiving almost no serious consideration.

And while our nation continues to be the only developed nation in the world that does not have universal healthcare coverage, even though the majority of Americans want Medicare for all, and more than 80% of Democrats want Medicare for all, the party and the press keep telling us that the only candidates we can have are the ones who don’t favor Medicare for all. 

And what really frosts me on this issue is that the real winners in this race are people you not only don’t know but you will never know them. They are the lobbyists who are privately, secretly, recruiting candidates who will oppose any plan that will end the strangle hold that private insurance companies have on the bazillion dollar healthcare cash cow that they love so much.

I hope that you understand that I am not saying this to promote the candidacy of Yang, Inslee, or Gabbard or anyone else. What I am struggling to point out is that the media and the Democratic party would always want to guide voters to the safest possible choice. The choice that will not change anything very much. In politics, the status quo is always king. 

When I think about our economy, gun laws, healthcare, environment, military, and even civil rights, this image of Thelma and Louise sailing off the cliff describes our current political situation. And yet, the DOC and the media want us to choose a candidate whose best plan is for us to buy a newer model car to drive off the cliff.

I love Walt Whitman, but honestly, I don’t know if he was being serious or if he was making fun of Americans when he said, “Be radical – be radical – be not too damned radical.” Maybe it has to do with our sheer size, the economic weight of our institutions, but when radical measures are needed to make a course correction in America to keep from driving off the cliff, we never seem to be able to do it.

Just for example, in 2008, when large banks created investment tools that put high risk loans into commonly traded commodities, bringing about a global recession and housing crisis, in America, we gave huge bailouts to the banks that were “too big to fail” so that the people who caused the crisis were able to award themselves billions of dollars in bonuses out of the pockets of the very people who had suffered having their homes repossessed and the businesses go bankrupt.

In Iceland, key banking offenders were criminally charged, tried, and collectively sentenced to nearly 100 years in prison. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t look all that radical to me. It just seems to make sense. 

Don’t reward pharmaceutical companies that have raised the price of life saving insulin by 1000% in the past decade. Put them out of business and provide insulin to people who need it at cost. Why should diabetes be a profit center?

Is that such a radical idea? Am I the crazy one who sees illness as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to get rich by exploiting the desperation of people who are ill?

Most of you have never had to see me in full armored clergy “mad as hell” but, it happens from time to time. For 25 years I have been writing, demonstrating, and lobbying for a redress of the predatory lending in Missouri by Payday and Car Title loan companies. I was back before our city council on Monday night, passionately imploring the council to take decisive action on the matter, as I have in the past with Gov. Jay Nixon, and several members of our legislature. I made no more progress on Monday night than I have at any other time when I have mounted my steed and charged this Quixotic windmill. 

This usury is an easily solvable problem. For goodness sakes, Arkansas just outlawed them. Period. Full stop. End of story. All I have ever gotten from the governor, the legislature, or our city council, is excuses. Well, councilman Mike Schilling listened to my narrative about how this industry steals millions of dollars from the most desperately poor of our state and then tried to make fun of me personally. My sense is, however, that the only real joke in the room might not have been me. 

You may detect that I am more than a little angry about the indifference and inaction of our city government, our state government, and our national government on many issues that have to do with honestly life and death matters. 

What we get from almost all politicians is excuses and policy offerings that amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. At a recent fund raiser, current leader in the polls, Joe Biden, told a group of wealthy donors, “I need you very badly." Then he said, "No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change." As they said on The Young Turks, That could be his campaign slogan. Do people still not understand why progressives have no interest in voting for him?

 I am going to pay attention to the primary process. I will vote for the candidate that is willing to make the most radical statements about substantive change on the topics that matter the most. But what I am sure of is that we will never vote our way into the great society that long for. Our savior will not hold elected office. 

I am always grateful for the meaningful work that Sean does with our music program but this week I am especially impressed with this Billy Brag song he found that was inspired by this moment in 2017 when a woman of color stepped into a neo-nazi demonstration in England to defend a woman who had become the target of racist abuse. Saffiyah Khan stepped up nose-to-nose with this racist demonstrator and smiled. And that courageous act, that non-threatening yet radical act, defused the potentially violent situation and revealed neo-nazi racism for what it truly is. . . an impish, immature, form of frightened racism. 

May I ask you to read the banner behind me in unison:  Thou shalt not stand idly by. 

Please, my friends, think past identity politics. Don’t focus on the candidates you like, think about the issues that face the world. The environment isn’t Republican or Democrat. The economy isn’t male or female. Racism, sexism, fascism, and xenophobia are not young or old, black, brown, or white. The stakes are very high and we need more than a beauty contest or a horse race.

I implore you to be radical, not to be iconoclastic, not to encourage any kind of childish anarchy, but be radical enough to make real changes in the arenas where the world is accelerating towards the cliff. Be radical – be radical – be sure that you are radical enough to get the job done.             

“State Mandated Sexual Assault”

“State Mandated Sexual Assault”      June 16, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”  Margaret Sanger

There are things you talk about in public. There are things you talk about among close friends. And, there are things you just don’t talk about. . . and the latter is what I need your permission to talk about this morning. I don’t expect any part of this to be comfortable for any one of us. However, our governor started it.

I have had the good fortune for many years of having a physician who was a personal friend. Which is great when you need some medical attention in off hours or with some immediacy. However, once a year, there is an uncommonly uncomfortable moment when the ultimate “exit only” orifice of a man’s body calls for what the medical profession calls a “digital exam.” Now, “digital” typically means electronic and on a small screen but in this case, it involves my friend’s index finger, which can make eye contact rather difficult on the way out of the office. 

It is not like the pelvic exam that women have to endure in the process of a physical. Similar, in terms of vulnerability and awkwardness but, in any reasonable analysis, a more brief and slightly less personal interaction. The only thing that makes a man drop his drawers and bend over is that it is a necessary medical exam that might be a matter of life or death. However, if my physician or anyone else should propose such an exam for any other reason, it would be the height of inappropriate. 

Imagine, gentlemen, that your dentist proposes including this procedure in your semi-annual checkup. Or if your pharmacist suggests that this is a part of standard procedure for getting your prescriptions filled. There is no point in a man’s life in which we are asking for one kind of medical service and, in order to obtain it, we are asked to, for no medical reason whatsoever, to drop our drawers, bend over, and allow ourselves to be violated. 

Can you imagine the litigation and controversy that would be created if anyone ever tried that?

So, imagine my surprise, when I was sitting in John and Di Churcher’s living room watching the BBC last week, which was, I don’t mind saying, tirelessly covering the visit of our president to the UK, and painstakingly pointing out in fine detail what an immoral and mentally deficient person that he undeniably is, but, as if bearing that burden of my uniquely American shame in London was not enough, the BBC presenters turned their sights on Missouri.

In the race to moral bottom among red states trying to legislate away a woman right to elect to terminate a pregnancy, Missouri pulled into the definitive lead. The state government has been trying to find a way to close down the last remaining abortion provider in the state, so that Missouri would become the only state in the union with no legal and safe providers anywhere, but our governor and his public health official, Dr. Randall Williams, announced that any woman seeking an abortion had to submit to a medical pelvic exam . . . no, wait a minute, not one pelvic exam, they have to submit to two pelvic exams. 

The first one, maybe, has some medical plausibility. The second one adds expense, time, and, well, humiliation. This is an attempt at increasing the cost of obtaining an abortion to put up a barrier to low income women, but making it an invasive vaginal exam is intended to scare off others who are unwilling to endure what can only be called a state mandated sexual assault. If you insist that women must have instruments and a stranger’s fingers inserted into their vagina for no medical reason in order to exercise their constitutional rights to not be forced into motherhood then, that is, in anyone’s universe, sexual assault. 

I have asked Dr. Gil Mobley to be our liturgist today because Gil actually has some professional history with Dr. Williams and it will be very interesting to hear what Gil has to say about him, which will not be all bad, by the way. Williams has done some laudable work in the past. However, what Rachel Maddow made internationally known about his past is that in 2016 the state of North Carolina hired him to be their public health officer so that he would reverse a warning against consuming water contaminated with the coal ash. 

This byproduct of coal mining contains mercury, arsenic and other toxins which were found to be at levels threating to human life. Williams, however, was willing to assure the public that their drinking water was safe, when it clearly was not. So, Dr. Gil, I’m sure he has done some good work but you can also put lipstick on a pig and I’m pretty sure it is still bacon on the cloven hoof. 

What we see in Dr. Williams is a glaring example of someone who is willing to set aside what he knows about medicine, and even to set aside what he knows about truth, integrity, honestly, and decency in order to bow to the throne of power. We see this all of the time in national politics. One of the most disappointing examples is Senator Lindsey Graham who, very honestly, called Trump a “kook who is unfit to be president” during the 2016 primaries, but almost as soon as Trump was inaugurated, he changed his tune in a total reversal, deriding the media to insinuating that Trump is a kook who is unfit to be president. As a church, we try to be and to do a lot of things to make the world a better place but the single most important thing that we do is to speak truth to power. Elected officials often do, what Lindsey Graham confessed to in a recent interview . . . they say and they do what they need to do to be re-elected. People like Dr. Williams say and do what they have to do to obtain and keep a government appointed job. I get it, almost every priest and pastor in this country is stuck in the same spot, either have the integrity to tell the truth, or tell enough lies to keep your job. You have to think that being forced to tell obvious lies is why people like Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee didn’t last very long as White House press secretaries. 

So, Williams, who is evidently not an untalented physician, is willing to do monstrous things in order to hold onto a place in government. I couldn’t do it. I trust that you couldn’t do it. We exist to try to bolster people’s awareness and commitment to not doing this kind of thing, but this sort of hypocrisy is as common as dirt in our chapter of history. It is disgusting but it is a fact.

So that is who we are dealing with, and just to help to put this into perspective, let me take a moment to mention Dr. Larry Nassar of Michigan State fame.

I am not going to show you a picture of Dr. Larry Nassar, but rather I want to show you a group photo of some of his victims – 80 are here gathered at one time to testify against him for his crimes of sexually assaulting them when they were young athletes sent to him for medical treatments. 

Without being too graphic about it, what Larry Nassar did to these young women is essentially what Governor Parson and Dr. Williams have mandated for women seeking an abortion… pretending to conduct a medical exam while actually just invading a woman’s vagina for no medical reason. And as shocking as it is to see these 80 women in this group photo, and mind you, Nassar was sentenced to 175 years in prison for what he did . . . but there are about 3000 abortions in Missouri every year . . . Nassar sexually assaulted a hundred young women, Williams and Parson are mandating assaulting 3000  women this year . . . so, tell me if I am wrong about this, but shouldn’t they each get a prison cell next to Nassar? And, check my math on this, but that would be for about 500 years, right?

Maybe it is not my place to judge, but if Gov. Parson or Dr. Williams are in any way morally different from Dr. Larry Nassar then I am going to have to have someone explain to me why that would be so. To be clear, I am not talking about the clinic doctors who don’t want to perform this unnecessary exam. They apologize to the patients and, in most cases, the patients apologize to the doctors for being forced to do something that is unnecessary, unprofessional, and could end up getting them into trouble with the AMA because, everybody knows, they shouldn’t be doing it . . . they are putting their careers at stake to help women who are being abused by the state.

Now, maybe I have taken too much time to make this point quite so clearly but let me sum it up for you: The state of Missouri, in order to create greater barriers for women seeking an abortion, have mandated an invasive pelvic exam to be repeated twice, adding expense, humiliation, and trauma and what could easily be understood to be one of the hardest days of any woman’s life and it is being done with the tacit approval of our legislature. 

However, if the Gov. and Dr. Williams were to mandate, for example, a digital prostate exam for men who were seeking a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication, an entirely unnecessary but precisely similar requirement, then the male dominated legislature of this state would, no doubt, begin impeachment procedures immediately. Men will not tolerate state mandated sexual assault against themselves. What I am asking you to consider is, why would we not tolerate it for men but we do tolerate it for women? 

I am sorry that our internet audience couldn’t be here to hear Aiyana Williams sing our anthem which is a rather baudy English melody written more than 300 years ago in which a young woman euphemistically speaks of how many men have tried to seduce her but she insists that “her thing is her own,” and it very cleverly goes through many verses asserting that women are in charge of their own bodies and that men need to keep their hands off of their private parts. Of course, it has a lot of verses, most of which neither Sean nor I were brave enough to ask Aiyana to sing in church but those here got to hear enough to image what the more explicit verses might have said. I find it fascinating that this awareness of women’s empowerment was being so cleverly made popular in England in the early 1700’s. Patriarchy, it seems, is not an easy thing to kill off, even when it has been identified, labeled, and condemned.

But it was more than 100 years ago that Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in New York, for which she was promptly arrested. However, let me end where we began today with her famous quote: No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

I get that a lot of people, and not just Catholics and Evangelicals, but just a lot of people have very passionate feelings about abortion. I am a father only because abortion was not legal in South Korea in 1988 when my daughter’s birth mother decided to put her newborn up for adoption. For that matter, I am alive at all because abortion was not legal in the USA in 1956 when I was the last and most unintended child born to my parents. I get that there is an argument to be made against abortion but what we are trying to say here, in the midst of this horribly controversial and complicated matter, that in a free nation the choice belongs to the woman who is pregnant, not to Missouri’s governor, not to the health department administrator, not to Catholic priests or evangelical ministers, not even to the parents or lovers of the pregnant woman. Her thing is her own and our agreement or consent is not relevant. And, if I may call upon my 18^thcentury English vocabulary, a pox on anyone who says otherwise.