Hey, White People! (From not-racist to anti-racist)

Hey, White People! (From not-racist to anti-racist)   Dec. 20, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray

click here for the video

 

We are cursed to live in interesting times, aren’t we? We have managed, and I hope that our democratic institutions have managed to survive four years of what will certainly be remembered as the worst president in American history who seemed to be working to end American history with unprecedented favors for Russia and the enemies of democracy. What is possibly even more horrifying is that this phenomenally incompetent and dangerous president would have been re-elected had a pandemic not shown up early in the 2020 election year. 

 

He came too close to winning as it was, and while there were many factors including, both some hard work in mobilizing the black vote in Georgia, thank you Stacy Abrams, and the choice of a woman of color as a running mate, but, as my friend, Steve Beltz pointed out to me, without his disastrous failure of leadership in the pandemic, Trump would likely have won a second term. Steve, if you have any more grand insights, please don’t call again, I’m trying to reduce stress in my life. 

 

The Covid-19 virus has claimed more than 300,000 American lives now and a few months ago, some experts were saying that it might be another two years before we could develop a working vaccine, which meant we might be facing a death toll of somewhere between two and five million people before this virus went away. We really must pause to both wonder and express gratitude for the fact that scientists have accomplished miracles. The previous record for developing a vaccine was four years, most take more than 8. The coronavirus has been around in several forms for many years but no human vaccine for any iteration of it had ever been successfully developed. 

 

But last week, with no government money or involvement, scientists at Pfizer got emergency authorization to start distributing their vaccine. And this week, a second vaccine from Moderna, one that does not require such super cold storage and transportation, that will allow us to more easily vaccinate Americans in rural areas and people in poor countries, was also approved. 

I want to take a moment to introduce you to one of the lead scientists at Moderna who has brought this vaccine into the world. This 34-year-old, diminutive, beautiful scientist, Kizzmekia Corbett has not only been a leader in the research and development, she has also stepped out to speak to the unequal distribution of healthcare in this pandemic that has led to a disproportionate number of deaths in the black community. 

 

I think it is important to highlight Kizzmekia and other black scientists involved in these vaccine projects to help to overcome the distrust and entirely reasonable fear that many black people have about being vaccinated but you know, even more, I want us to talk about her because she will still come as something of a surprise to way too many white Americans, not just the Proud Boys, and the QAnon, crowds, but the liberal allies of civil rights who still, at some level, think of the unjust plight of black people in America as forming a kind of liberal white man’s burden. 

 

Even white progressives who too often think of themselves as saviors of their black and brown sisters and brothers, suffer from unconscious racism that continues to perpetuate myths of racial inferiority so that some real education still needs to take place among my tribe. 

What we need is not just a lot of woke white people who can claim to be “not racist” but we need white people who become well enough informed, to become seriously “anti-racist.” We’ve tried black history month, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and even postage stamps with heroes of the civil rights movment on them but there are stubborn sterotypes that resist subtle correction.

 

Kizzmekia grew up poor but she had a shot at a couple of good scholarships that gave her a way out of her humble beginnings, a testament to why we should have tuition free colleges because without her PhD in science, we might have lost another million lives waiting for another vaccine. This is no exaggeration. 

When Anthony Fauci was asked about black involvement in the development of vaccines, without hesitation, he started talking about Kizzmekia but the media hasn’t said much because her’s is not, in our white minds, the face of reliable science. 

Four years ago, when the biographical movie, Hidden Figures was released, telling the stories of three black, female mathematicians who worked at NASA, who literally made it possible for us to put astronauts in space in 1963, was the first hint I ever had of this story. Loved the movie but I was disturbed by the fact that the movie had to teach me of the existence of these three brilliant women who had become, virtual, human computers against all of the racial apartheid that was America in the 1950’s and 60’s. 

 

I was born in 1956. I remember the Mercury space flights. I grew up with the news reports and Life Magazine pictures from NASA, from the moon, from John Glenn to the space shuttle. No one ever told me anything about these black women who were the geniuses that made it all possible . . . again, because they did not fit the narrative. 

These stories have been so suppressed that it isn’t just white people who don’t know about them, black people have been starved for their own stories just like we have.

 

I remember hearing Chris Rock talking about taking a course in Black History thinking it would be an easy A for him, since he is, after all, black. But he discovered that other than a few stories about Martin Luther King, Jr. and a mention of George Washington Carver, that black children’s education in the cultural and scientific contributions of blacks was almost as bad as that of whites. 

 

We have seen black people in entertainment and sports. It is true enough that certain groups of people excel in certain areas and black performers and athletes have certainly earned a place in our awareness but, you have to admit, they were held back and hidden as long as possible but what they do, they do in public. Black scientists, researchers, writers, teachers . . . they are still not being talked about and that helps to support the myth of black intellectual inferiority. 

For years I have encouraged white people to read novels by the late Toni Morrison, who I believe captured black culture and experience better than anyone. The Nobel prize winner was also one of my listeners . . . a fact which has nothing at all to do with this sermon but if Toni Morrison had been a listener of yours, I bet you would find a way to work it into conversation as well. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get it onto my resume for decade now. Her death, last year, was a real blow. Some folks that that Ta-Nahisi Coats would take up her mantel but I have a new fan crush.

I am slowly and painfully reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book that talks about race in America as a Caste, like the caste system we know of in the history of India. I say that I am slowly and painfully reading it because she is telling me so many things that I didn’t know and, I have to admit, some of it I didn’t want to know.

 

Did you know that the architects of the Nazi holocaust, in their early days in power, met and studied books about the racial apartheid in the USA? Did you know there were white scientists at Harvard and other prominent universities that wrote about the racial inferiority of blacks and helped to put in place the laws we had in the early 20^th century that kept white people from marrying people of color? Did you know there were aspects of America’s legal Jim Crowe and racist laws that the Nazis though just went too far? Hitler wrote personal notes to some American scientists, telling them how much he appreciated their work. 

 

People where I am from in rural Kentucky, often curled their lips at the Civil Rights movement and would say things like, “I never owned a slave, what does this have to do with me?” I wasn’t smart enough to say it then, but I wish that I could go back in time and ask, “Did you ever drink from a whites only water fountain?” “Did you ever sit in the whites only waiting room at a train station?” “Did you ever go to a segregated school, or a de-facto segregated church, or did you ever live in a neighborhood where blacks were legally prevented from living?”

 

Sure, slavery ended officially 180 years ago but, as Wilkerson carefully narrates, that was not the end of the caste system in America. 

The end of the war gave birth to Jim Crow laws, the KKK, lynchings, and a more deeply entrenched racism that has defied school and workplace integration. Even now we see repeal of the Voter Rights legislation giving southern states permission to make it increasingly difficult for black and brown people to vote. Trump shamelessly demanded that votes from largely black communities in Detroit and Atlanta be discarded last month, not because they were not legitimate votes but simply because they were votes cast by black people and our racist president does not believe that a black man or woman has a right to vote against him. 

 

For most of my adult life, the racial cast system in America has been enforced in subtle ways but Trump has a habit of saying the quiet parts out loud, from his “S-hole” countries comments to his suggestion that even American born women of color in the congress “be sent back to where they are from.” He is not a subtle racist and so many people like that about him that, I fear, without the ravages of the pandemic, we would have had him in the White House for another 4 years. 

 

The very concept of race is basically an American invention. There were no white people in Europe. There were Germans, and French, English and Italians, but they were not white until they came to America. The Irish suffered from a lot of anti-Catholic discrimination when they first came here, but because they were white, they assimilated very quickly. 

 

Wilkerson recounts a conversation she had with a Nigerian born playwright, who told her, “You know there are no black people in Africa.” Which sounds like non-sense on the face of it, the sub-Saharan continent is almost nothing but black people. But the woman explained, there “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, 

Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves.” 

There were no white people in Europe and no black people in Africa, until they come here. This is our caste system. It is an invention to protect the white privilege that maintains the differences in wealth, income, status, employment, and education that white people enjoy for no morally defensible reason. 

 

A century ago, when it was still illegal for white people to marry blacks or Asians, the definition of who was white and who wasn’t was legally described in our racial segregation laws. Most states insisted that one drop of Negro blood made a person black but when you get down to 1/16^th or 1/32^nd it takes more than just looking. The laws then would question association. If a person who looked white but associated, socialized with people of color, then they were assigned to the lower caste. 

 

It was interesting to me several years ago when we were introduced to Barack Obama that he was instantly identified as being black. He had a black father and a white mother, but he spent very little time with his father and his white mother was an anthropologist from Kansas. He did get to move from Kansas to Hawaii to grow up with his maternal grandparents. . . which at least placed him in a more racially diverse setting but in what way was Barack more black than white? To some degree, I’m sure, it was assumed by those around him. Obama looks black. At some point, Obama chose to identify as black.

 

Similarly, Kamala Harris is has a black father and an Asian mother and people from both ethnic groups loudly claim her, but at some point she chose to attend a traditionally black college and, if I am reading the tea leaves right, she has pretty consistently identified as being black. 

 

Last January I was sitting at the dinner table with my old seminary friends in their home in Birmingham. They have not always cheered my left leaning politics but as a black family, they were sick of Donald Trump and talked about which black woman we would like to see at the top of the Democratic ticket. We liked Stacy Abrams but when Kamala’s name came up and it was mentioned that she is married to a white Jewism man, you could see some doubt creeping in. Only in America would a white man and two black friends seriously engage in a conversation about someone asking, “Well, just how black is she?”

 

There are two people in my family. Me and my Korean born daughter, but no one ever sat around trying to decide just how white I am. Because no one questions the dominant race. 

 

I find it slightly entertaining when people buy a genetic test and announce what percentage of their heritage is from Norway or Russia or India. People, 100,000 years ago, humans started to migrate out of Africa. Where are you from? You are from Africa. Do you walk upright and have an opposable thumb? You are from Africa. Some of you left more recently than others but so far as genetics is concerned, race does not even exist. It is much ado about melatonin. 

 

Scientifically, genetically, anthropologically, race doesn’t really exist. However, socially, it does exist, and it exists as a form of toxic sickness that America is only starting to wake up from. Racism is real.

Looked at over a 50 year span of time, unemployment figures go up and down, but, consistently, black unemployment remains twice what white unemployment is. A black man is five times more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime as a white man. A black man is 8 times more likely to be shot by the police when being arrested than a white man. 

The numbers in this chart are dated but the contrast is still real. White and Asian families tend to have 10 to 12 times the accumulated wealth of black and Hispanic families. And, as a side note, without tuition free colleges, this gap will only get worse. 

You might say that Kizzmekia Corbett was one of the lucky ones because she got scholarships that allowed her to pursue her education in science but slow down a second. Who is the lucky one here? When the paltry 50 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine that Trump ordered have been used to inoculate health care workers and nursing home residents, a theological, fat, senior citizen, fighting type 2 diabetes will be standing in line for the Moderna vaccine. So, I’m luckier Kizzmekia. I’m lucky that Kizzmekia got to go to college for a long time, become a scientist and at the ripe old age of 34, she gets to create the vaccine that will likely save my life and the life of a whole lot of old white guys just like me. 

 

White people are so afraid of losing privilege, status, preferential treatment. They typically have no idea who racism hurts them too, that it confines them in a prison of fear and immorality, that it deprives our culture of great scientists, inventors, statesmen, writers, as well as musicians, actors, and athletes. 

 

There is no end the caste system until we raise the employment rate, wages, and wealth in minority families and end it we must. We can either tax the rich or we can eat the rich, but you know that it has to be one or the other. In sum we need to realize, even before we get started, that we are already lucky that most black people are only asking for justice rather than revenge, even though revenge may be what we deserve. 

Justice is about 400 years late for our black brothers and sisters. Any further delay is unacceptable. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Forest is Full of Socialists

The Forest is Full of Socialists          Dec. 13, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

I have two points to make today. The first is very practical and the second is deeply philosophical. The first is that by paying attention to science, especially in forest management, we can increase the profitability of our natural resources while sustaining our old growth forests which is good both for people in the construction business as well as for people who breath air. The philosophical point is important, but you’ll have to be patient with me to sus it out. For most of modern history, we have assumed a Darwinian competition in nature and economics which pits individuals and species in a life-or-death competition for resources that allows the victors to survive by killing off rivals. Like many such assumptions, you can point to evidence because it is partly true, but it is not entirely true and in fact, it is a crucially flawed assumption. But let me start with a conversation about forests.

 

Do you remember the 2009 blockbuster film, Avatar? Sure, the 3-D technology was amazing. The blending of CGI images with actual filmed actors was state of the art, and even the whole, space travel, sci-fi nature of it, that would normally have me in a theater seat watching it several times in a row didn’t redeem this film for me because, in spite of spending record setting amounts of money, $237 million, to produce it, it seemed to me that they had forgotten to hire a writer.

 

They had three dimensional images, but the characters were so two dimensional and the plot was so predictable that if it had not been for the popcorn, it would have been a waste of money. The intent was to contrast capitalist consumerism with the sacredness of nature. 

The plot seems to be a 3 hour long rendering of Dr. Seuss’ book, The Lorax. But, if I may set my role as movie critic aside for a moment, I will have to say that there was a certain redemptive aspect to the too thin plot. In its enthusiasm for accentuating the sacredness of nature, it portrays all of the distant planet’s flora and fauna to be somehow neurologically connected with a single great mother tree which seems to retain the voices of generations of natives and to possess profound healing properties.

 

But what is really weird about this terribly anthropomorphic plot line is that it contains a shocking amount of truth to it. As a spiritual community, one of the things that we are passionately concerned about is the health of our planet, about restoring and preserving the health of our ecology, but it is one of the most difficult things to discuss in church. But, as I have read about this work with forests, it increasingly seems to me, that we’re really talking about people.

 

It turns out that beyond the philosophical statement that “we’re all connected” and that flora and fauna are also connected, it seems that trees quite literally communicate with one another. Please don’t think that I am saying that they “talk” to each other. They are not all Ents out of the Lord of the Rings, but they do communicate. 

Suzanne Simard, the Canadian professor of forest ecology, has demonstrated that the roots of trees combine symbiotically with fungal threads that stretch from tree to tree, even between species of trees, and that through this web of threads, trees communicate with each other, and more than that, they can share carbon and water with one another. Her TED talk on this topic is well worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch . . . 4.5 million people are probably not wrong.

A lot of pseudo-science has tried to appropriate Simard’s legitimate research the way a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than for illumination. So, you have to be careful here when you are reading environmental science. 

There have been best-selling books published that take Simard’s legitimate research and combine it with their over active imagination and probably some Ouija board sessions, claiming that trees have souls and that plants feel pain and follow the stars. Let’s not be sentimental or mushy about this. There is serious science here. 

 

But the part of this that is both surprising and very important is that trees are communicating to both ask for and share resources and to warn one another about dangerous illness or insects. Again, don’t try to make them people. They are not talking in that way, but they are chemically communicating in ways that knit the forest together, defying our assumptions about the universal natural value of greed and self interest.

 

Forests are resources for people, of course. We use wood to build houses and to make furniture. And because different kinds of wood have different properties that make them more or less valuable in building houses or making furniture, we have tended to manage our forests in a way that gives us the quickest return on investment, what the lumber industry calculates in board feet taken from an acre of woods. For most of human history we have done this by clear cutting forests although, as in the Brazilian rain forest right now, an especially crazy president is simply burning forests down to use the land for grazing and agriculture. 

 

But in the United States and Canada, where so much of our forests have been clear cut, the timber industry wants to come back in and plant new trees to eventually replace the ones they had taken. But here is where Suzanne Simard’s research has been especially helpful: they discover that the saplings planted in a clear-cut forest, even though they are no long competing for sunlight and water, are actually weaker and more subject to diseases than the saplings growing up in an old growth forest. 

 

This is counter intuitive. Saplings carefully planted where they get full sun and lots water should be in much better shape. They don’t have to compete with big old trees for resources. But it turns out that it doesn’t work that way. 

 

At the risk of sounding a little too much like Avatar, she demonstrated that the older, healthier trees, sent nourishment to the weaker saplings. The floor of the forest is a network of communication between plants that will both inform and nurture one another, even at the expense of their own needs. The stronger, healthier trees work to nurture the weaker, younger trees in ways that fly in the face of our assumptions about competition in nature. The forest eco system is quite complex. Competition does exist there, but it would not be entirely mistaken to characterize a forest as a kind of socialist society in which those with the greatest resources support those that are in the greatest need. 

 

We have assumed that trees were naturally competing for sunlight, nutrients, and water, but it turns out to be more complicated than that and, in fact, there is what amounts to a kind of practical altruism within the forest community. 

 

Thank you for bearing with me up to this point, I know that I am punching above my weight class here, but stick with me: When Darwin was working out his theory of evolution based on survival of the most adaptive, the natural selection of the strongest and most healthy specimens in nature, economists were well ahead of him describing human economic culture in about the same way.

 

We have tended to accept that competition for resources is what has made humans stronger and smarter and that is why we are here and our ape like ancestors are not.

In fact, if you Google Adam Smith and Charles Darwin you will find a number of scholars who will tell you, way more than you want to know, about how dependent Darwin was on the writing of the economist, Adam Smith. We have accepted, almost uncritically, the assumption that humans, plants, and animals all evolve in a ferocious competition for resources and that survival depends on being the bully on the playground the way a Wall Street economist will take a Darwinian approach to capitalism . . . where the strongest and the most adaptive survive.

 

Without throwing any shade on either Smith or Darwin, I think that Suzanne Simard’s work asks us to at least make room for a certain degree of “both/and.” There is ferocious competition for resources both in economics and in evolution but there is also, just beneath the leaves covering the forest floor, a socialist network that says that we are all stronger and healthier when we work together. 

 

In fact, Ferris Jabr, with the New York Times, illustrates this “both/and” dichotomy in a piece he wrote on Simard by talking about the quarter million-acre forest in northeast Wisconsin managed by the Menominee tribe. To you and me, it would look like unspoiled old growth forest, but it is actually carefully managed for harvesting usable wood. But they protect the healthiest trees, allowing them to grow for up to 200 years as a kind of grandmother tree to the younger part of the forest. 

 

They harvest the trees that are the least healthy, and even still, over the past century and a half, they have harvested more than 2 billion board feet of lumber from a forest that has that much still standing. This makes it one of the most financially profitable lumber operations in North America while managing the forest in the most sustainable way imaginable. 

 

If this forest were clear cut, there would be a huge amount of money to be made immediately, but you would be destroying a socialist commune that is literally a cash cow over the generations. All the while, the forest is sequestering harmful carbon in the ground, manufacturing breathable air in its canopy, and holding soil in place while naturally cleaning and storing water. 

 

What we see in clear cut forests, what we are seeing in the burning of the Amazon, is a real history illustration of the old parable about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is not that capitalism is always evil or that socialism never works, it is that careful, intelligent management, combining the two ways of understanding the world, makes both systems work better. 

 

We get into this conservative-liberal debate in which we liberals think that conservatives want to roll back every environmental regulation until there isn’t any breathable air or drinkable water left on earth, and conservatives think that liberals want to hold up all economic progress until the earth looks like one giant jungle, denuded of all human life. 

 

There is, however, a both/and way of letting capitalism inspire progress through competition while preserving our economic engine through sustainable management of our forests and all other natural resources. 

Liberals want to live in houses and have nice furniture too, we just don’t want to clear cut the globe in a way that will keep our children and grandchildren from having houses and furniture. By limiting the amount of fish we take out of the ocean, we can make certain that there will always be fish to catch in coming generations. By managing our rivers and aquifers, by protecting our air, we not only are preserving our environment, we are preserving our markets to make them safe for capitalism. Sadly, however, in our partisan nation, it seems like the trees are communicating with one another better than Republicans and Democrats are communicating.

 

Yes, from a spiritual perspective, from a purely ethical consideration, I believe that our rich nation should have a living wage as an income floor for everyone. 

I believe that healthcare is a human right that should not be denied to anyone. And I believe that education costs should be such that the children of the poor have a fair shot at a good education so that the economic classes in America don’t become set in cement. 

 

But, for capitalists, do you know what is good for business? Having customers who have enough money to buy stuff from you. You know what is good for employers? Having employees who are healthy enough to come to work. Do you know what is good for the tech and economic industries? Having employees with enough education to put their dreams and aspirations onto paper or in the laboratory where you can make two or three or four working vaccines within a year of the appearance of a novel coronavirus. These miracles don’t happen by accident. 

 

When the stronger trees feed and nurture the weaker trees, the whole forest gets stronger. People are, in the end, not much different than the trees. Forgive the gender specific quote, but the truth is, we are our brother’s keeper.

 

Meet Me at the Corner of Compassion and You’re Not that Special

 Meet Me at the Corner of Compassion  and You’re Not that Special    

Dec. 6. 2020               Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

The internet is full of falsely attributed quotes, usually pinning modern proverb on a person of importance: Plato, Lincoln, Jefferson, or very popular movie stars. I can’t object too much, since that is basically the way that New Testament gospels were written. Much to the chagrin of many church going folks, scholars are in general agreement that very few of the sayings attributed to Jesus actually originated with that first century Palestinian preacher, but the name and image of Jesus gained popularity in the late first century and people tended to give Jesus the credit for coming up with whatever pithy parable or saying that was meme worthy in  the first century.

One of our most popular sages in this present moment is Dr. Anthony Fauci. This quote, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” has been broadly attributed to him lately because, well, the shoe fits. We keep trying to convince people to wear masks, avoid travel, not to share air with other people in confined spaces, and we’ve been saying this things for so many months that when you see people in public who are ignoring these rules, it really can’t be because they have not heard them, and it is unlikely that many people find the reasons and the methods difficult to comprehend.  What we are seeing, more sadly, is a whole lot of people who just don’t care. And, at that point, we do tend to run out of words. How do you explain to someone that they really ought to care about other people?

And I wouldn’t make such an issue of the fact that this quote has been mistakenly attached to Dr. Fauci, except that I think it is important to note that this issue of human selfishness is not an issue that was born in the pandemic.

The pandemic makes it easier to walk through the grocery store and see who cares about others and who doesn’t but this particular quote isn’t even related to Covid 19. The quote originates with an author of young adult books, someone you have likely not heard of: Lauren Morrill. She uttered these words in exasperation, where we get most of our philosophical insights these days, on Twitter, in 2017 just before Donald Trump was inaugurated. The then president elect had declared the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and Morrill was about to deliver her second child. Exasperated by the renewed fear of being uninsured with a young family, she tweeted that her problem with the whole universal health care debate is that she just didn’t know how to explain why you should care about other people.

 

That so many Americans are willing to say, “I’ve got mine so don’t change the system,” knowing that maintaining the status quo leaves millions of poorer and sicker Americans without healthcare is a disturbing fact. I have never been able to understand why the relatively unchurched nations of Western Europe seem to be able to think about public policy with the poor and vulnerable in mind while Americans, far too often, just can’t. It might lead you to believe that we are not good people . . . that there is something morally sick about us.

 

But I have this caveat, I think that Americans still have an innate impulse for compassion. In May of 2011, a tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, just 70 miles from here. It was the most powerful tornado in history, leveling houses, businesses and even a hospital in a mile wide and seven mile long swath. 158 people were killed.

More than a thousand were injured. Some bodies were never discovered. There was nearly $3 billion in damages. There may have been looters somewhere but not only did I not see any of that, what I did see were thousands of people coming from all around Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, …. So many volunteers that the United Way couldn’t register and assign them fast enough. Most of us just wandered into the neighborhoods that lined the swath where the tornado had taken everything but the grass, and we just started picking up broken glass, shingles, insulation, slowly bagging up the destroyed remnants of thousands of people’s lives. No one paid us to do it. No one asked us to do it. We just followed our instincts.

 

My long-time scuba buddy, Bill Ringo, has gone to Nicaragua with me to help build houses. Bill is a scientist who specializes in environmental toxins and so, when Katrina hit in 2005, FEMA tapped bill to coordinate the work in the state of Mississippi. My church wanted to send teams of volunteers but my good friend, Bill, said, “This is too big, and it is too dangerous for untrained volunteers.” As always, I am willing to follow the advice of scientists but, in fact, it was our own Mark Rowland, who replied to my news from Bill saying, “Well, I’m going.” To which I replied, “Not without me, you’re not.”

Over the next year, we make eight trips in a bus loaded with uncompensated volunteers, equipped with chain saws, wheelbarrows, and wrecking bars. We slept on the floors of churches and in tents, moving inward as the water receded, clearing roads, covering roofs with blue tarps, and gutting flooded homes to get them ready to be rebuilt.

 

All volunteers, responding to a humanitarian crisis. At the end of that year, my friend, Bill, told me, “Thank God for the churches that sent volunteers to the coast. They actually accomplished miracles while FEMA was trying to get organized. I don’t say that as a knock on FEMA. I am just saying well intended, good people, can make a huge difference by simply following their own impulse to be good people. I think that one of the differences between America’s response to Katrina and the Joplin tornado and the political battle about healthcare is that when a crisis strikes, before you have time to think about it or debate it, you are on a church bus loaded with equipment and volunteers.

 

On many public policy issues, it isn’t an immediate crisis . . . note how slow moving the pandemic has been. It was announced in March. It was frightening to many of us, but others found it to be a political badge of honor to insist that wasn’t real. We had the luxury of debating it for months before it became a common hazard in our area. And even though we’re experiencing more than a dozen deaths a day with hundreds of new infections, our hospitals are full, still… some are still saying it isn’t real. I know a couple of the people who are insisting that it isn’t real and I have seen these same people be extremely compassionate in the past. Something is wrong with this scenario.

Somehow, we allow a narcissistic strain, a selfish, fearful, self-protective strain of thinking to enter our minds and poison our hearts’ best instincts. Six months ago, when we were first recording services, I sneezed, threw myself off balance, and I fell off of the chancel into our drum set which was about the noisiest fall that any of us had ever heard. People who don’t even like me were yelling, “Call 9-1-1!”

 

I wasn’t hurt but it sounded like I might have broken every bone in my body. Your instincts don’t wait to pass judgement. We may build an elaborate defense against universal healthcare but if someone falls off of a ladder in front of you, you don’t wait to see if they have insurance. You don’t wonder about whether they are a good employee, or if they keep their yard well, or wash their car, you run to their side to give aid. I want to draw out that person, in Republicans and Democrats, in liberals and conservatives. I suggest that you try to put that person in charge of who you are.

 

If you will indulge me to talk about Jesus for a few minutes. I know you don’t really expect that from me anymore but if you will allow me to revisit my college teaching days. In the good ol days when a course on the life and teachings of Jesus was a part of the core curriculum at Drury University, I usually taught a section every semester. You start with a couple of dozen MidWestern teenagers who, when you ask them who Jesus was, will give you a pretty creedal response. Jesus was the son of God, who died on the cross for our salvation and he is now seated on the right hand of God in heaven, awaiting the final judgement.

 

So, as much as it is possible to set such notions aside, we would begin to read the gospels and I asked them to write a job description for the Messiah, based on what Jesus said and did. We read the gospels in the order in which we believed that they were written:  Mark, Luke, Matthew and John. The first supernatural thing Jesus does in Mark is a demon exorcism. So we start off our job description for Jesus with “exorcist.” Not really where anyone wanted to start but there it is in Mark 1.

Only made more uncomfortable by the fact that Jesus encountered this demon possessed man when he tried to go to church . . . haven’t we all been there?

 

The next thing he did was to heal Peter’s mother-in-law and a whole crowd of people who heard that Jesus was a healer, and came to Peter’s house to be healed.

When he had finished being an exorcist and a healer, he tells his disciples that he must go and preach. So, he is an exorcist, a healer, and a preacher. He ends up healing several people along the way, people who had become outcasts because of their illness . . . lepers, you know, couldn’t live among decent folks. So Jesus begins to incorporate curious dimensions to the healings. He tells a paralytic, not “you are healed” but rather, “your sins are forgiven.” Which upset the neighbors, who, after all, has the authority to forgive sins? Besides, what sins are you talking about, and who are you to judge?

 

I won’t drag you through the whole semester but what emerges from the process of going to the text to find out something about Jesus, is that he is primarily a healer, and a reconciler. That is, his message is tied to the healing events, he forgives and restores both prostitutes and self-righteous religious people. He shows mercy and generosity to the undeserving. He helps people who can’t help him.

I am deeply indebted to the work of the late Marcus Borg who published this book in 1994, right when I needed it. I used the book in my classes for several years because, I believe, Borg distilled the issue perfectly. Once you give up on the creedal Jesus.

When you try to understand what Jesus actually did in his first century setting, I don’t think anyone captured it as well as Borg, who called Jesus, “a teacher of radical compassion.” Think of the stories he told, what was the point of the parable of the prodigal son? Really a story about a father who showed boundless mercy to a poorly behaving self-centered son. And that business of a shepherd leaving 99 sheep unprotected to go out and find one that was lost, in danger, excluded from the fold. And that story about the Good Samaritan, the one person who actually stopped to put the clumsy preacher out of the drum set. That guy who put an injured stranger on his burrow and got him to an inn and told the innkeeper to spare no expense in the care of this wounded man, promising to repay him in full.

 

Compassion without boundaries, without limits, so radical that you can say, “Whatever it takes, in for a penny, in for a pound.” Before later generations attached a lot of religious stuff to Jesus the way that social media gives Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln credit for modern proverbs, before Jesus became a “get out of hell free” token, Jesus was the teacher of radical compassion.

 

He touched lepers, people no one else would touch for a million dollars. The demon possessed, probably the mentally ill, were social rejects. Healing them allowed them to go home again. He publicly dinned with sinners and prostitutes, people that the religious folks only visited under the cover of darkness.

I keep searching for ways to pull the divided people of America back together again. Where can conservatives and liberals meet on common ground? What shared experience, values, beliefs might we have that could get us to sing off of the same page of the hymnal again. I am modestly proposing that we try to consider our mutual value for the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

Could we stop fighting for power and recognition just long enough to remember the faith that most of us shared at some time in our lives, before we got distracted by 24/7 political bickering and figuring out who we hated and whose rights we were willing to bargain away. Remember when Jesus meant something to us? Not in a stained-glass sort of way but more in the decent food smuggled into the hospital room for someone who had the mystery meat and green beans too many times. The Jesus who goes to court with you and sits beside you while the prosecutor tells you that you are worthless and a scourge to society and that you should be in prison, the Jesus who pats you on the hand, looks you in the eyes and says, “I love you.”

 

I don’t want to shame people who fight against a stimulus bill for pandemic victims, or bring up the children kept in cages that we can’t even find the paperwork for where we sent their parents. I just want to invite you to meet me where a teacher of radical compassion will spread out his arms, even if his hands get nailed to a cross, to say that no one is disposable. No one is undeserving. No one has to earn forgiveness, acceptance, or a seat at the table. We may disagree about how to get there, but can we at least agree that Jesus was trying to teach us about radical compassion and that is something we should both value? I can’t believe that I’m saying this but, seriously, conservatives, liberals, can’t we agree to listen to Jesus?

 

Back in the summer, Paul Krugman wrote an opinion piece that I saw in the New York Times. The title was, “A cult of selfishness that is killing America.”

 

The pandemic divided Americans, like everything else, between conservatives and liberals but even though conservatives were largely saying that keeping the economy going was more important than slowing the spread of a virus that 99% of us will survive anyway. But conservatives didn’t just hurt themselves. The lack of being willing to work together has hurt us all.

 

It isn’t just that, as Krugman notes, Americans are 15x more likely to die of Covid than our European and Canadian counterparts. And while the ignorant and incompetent Trump administration’s management of the pandemic is significant, Krugman continues, It is more than that. He says, “They were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.”

 

Look at the intensity of opposition we’ve seen to having water saving shower heads, energy efficient light bulbs, or removing phosphates from laundry soap. These are all things that safeguard the environment, which is good for everyone, and not just people, but fish, frogs, horses, and eagles.

 But these benefits come as very minor personal sacrifices or adjustments and people often react with irrational ferocity to these micro aggressions.

 

Krugman concludes his piece saying, “What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.” What makes teaching radical compassion so necessary is this hatred Americans have for being told that we as individuals have a debt of responsibility for the public as a whole.

 

And if Jesus’ parables, sermons, conversations, and even his miracles were all teaching radical compassion then, it stands to reason, that radical compassion can be taught. Children can be raised to be compassionate. And adults can be changed so that even we old gray beards can learn to be more compassionate. I believe it because, as I have pointed out earlier, compassion is our innate, gut level response. We automatically choose compassion until by fear and prejudice we have been taught to suppress our innate kindness.

 

We are all in this together. We are all connected, in a pandemic more than at any other time in our lives. We are sharing air with everyone we walk into a grocery store with, with every kid working at a drive through window at McDonalds, and every janitor, nurses aid, RN, and physician we see when we are in a clinic or hospital. Their health, at least to some degree, depends on me. And that fact should not make us angry. It shouldn’t make us feel that we are losing our freedom or our independence. It gives us the opportunity to show compassion by being responsible. It gives you the opportunity to be a better person.

 

Regardless of political affiliation, don’t we all want to be good people? In a democracy where we are all free to choose to be anything we want to be, choose to be kind.

When (If) We Gather

When (If) We Gather     Nov. 29, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

This has to be said; so let it now be said. Whoever you are, whatever in other respects your life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool . . .^[1]

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD

 

Christian liturgy should intensify the “cognitive dissonance” between the community of faith and the world surrounding it.^[2]

—RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS

 

 

I had the opportunity to host Christine and Bishop John Shelby Spong for a dinner in my home a few years ago. The conversation got around, as it usually does among senior citizens, to talk about our children. We both remarked that our children were evidently sufficiently affected by growing up in the home of a pastor to choose to never go to church again. John shared with me that his daughter had explained to him, “The church has all of the answers to questions that no one is asking.”

 

Generally speaking, I couldn’t agree more! It was at about that time that I was becoming aware of the fact that people of the 21^st century, especially progressive people, were just no longer interested in hearing any more about the Bible. John continued to write new books about the Bible, as have some of my other friends in the academia. But once we had convinced our liberal constituents that God didn’t write the Bible or any other so called “sacred” books and that scripture is a product of sometimes very sincere and often quite misguided ancient authors, then the obvious question becomes, why should anyone make knowing more about that a priority? A generation ago, most people would have at least believed that the content of the Bible was important but now, those tables have turned, and only the fraction of society that still goes to evangelical churches still pretend to care about scripture and, let’s be honest, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of influence on even them. 

 

Once we are set free from the mental prison of traditional religions, we realize that both heaven and hell are creations of the church that have been used by the clergy to control their congregations. Fear of eternal punishment in hell and the desire for eternal retirement in heaven have served as the invisible carrot and stick to keep people coming to church, making offerings, and tolerating tedious sermons and enduring absolutely horrible music. 

 

So, once you accept that heaven and hell are not real, that God is not a finger wagging puritanical parent in the clouds, and that not only is the Bible not a reliable repository of eternal truths but nothing else is either and it is up to us to figure out what is true, what is right, and what is good, then, if you are still inclined to get together with a bunch of like-minded people, what do you do when you gather? And here is the big challenge:

 

I believe that the number one thing that poisons modern communities of faith is nostalgia. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean:  In 1997 the congregation of National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C. extended an invitation for me to come and be their senior minister. It was an amazing opportunity for a 40 year old preacher. I didn’t end up accepting the invitation for a laundry list of perfectly good personal and professional reasons but one of the issues that made me shy away from the opportunity was the list of expectations that I was going to inherit had I gone there.

 

The sanctuary building is a cathedral, immense and imposing in its architecture. The cathedral was flanked by an office building on one side and an education building on the other. In the 1950’s and 60’s, when Washington was largely populated by the people who worked in government, for the military, or in local businesses, the church had a thriving Sunday School program, replete with all of the youth groups, children’s choirs, and family centered activities that were a part of almost all churches of that time. But as Washington became either too expensive or too dangerous for people to raise their families there, and as life was being modernized by the new technologies of entertainment and communication, they found themselves with a much smaller congregation, only a remnant of a Sunday School program, and not even a hint of youth groups and children’s choirs.

 

Their remaining members commuted in from Maryland and Virginia, as did the staff. Some traveling a couple of hours each way. But, without saying it just this way, the leaders of the congregation wanted me to recreate what they remembered as being their halcyon days of the 1960’s. I wanted their pulpit. I wanted to be preaching blocks from the White House with an opportunity to have an impact on the elected officials on Capitol Hill, but I knew that there was no way to actually succeed in what they were asking me to do. 

 

National City Christian Church was, at least in 1997, an extreme example of the way nostalgia is strangling the life out of most denominational churches. It is true in a corporate way, in that there is an institutional memory of a more vibrant and exciting church that they want to get back, and there are individual memories that make people cling to ancient liturgies and hymns that defined their childhood but which they would never choose to play in their car or their home because no one really likes that music, and more than merely not enjoying it, it no longer carries the theological meaning that it might have carried in decades past. 

 

For nearly a century, educated clergy have been trying to make the church experience relevant again by gradually making their services more progressive. They redefine the meaning of religious terms. They toned down the fear and made nearly universal promises of eternal reward and they even tried to update the language of scripture and hymns to make them less gender and race biased. 

 

To a certain degree, such changes have been helpful even if, in the end, only slightly more helpful than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Look, people can change. People do change. But the sorry truth is that people don’t change very much and even then, they don’t do it very fast. When we started this progressive congregation in 2008, I think we had a firm grip on a modern and fairly academic view of theology. But when it came down to what we were going to do when we all got into a room together on Sunday mornings, our habits tended to have much more influence than our intellect.

 

We had preludes and postludes, candles and doxologies, prayers of intercession and communion and even an occasional baptism. We sang progressive hymns, written by intelligent liberals, that were largely set to what I can only describe as being absolutely unbearable music. Initially, at least, we even gave some homage to the common lectionary, increasingly ignoring the authority it once held over us.

I eventually all but ceased to wear vestments and I often found myself more ready to discard elements of the liturgy that were mere shadows of the supernatural theism of the churches we had all left behind, but I regularly found members of the church to be less eager to abandon these nostalgic ties to what made church meaningful to us in the past.

 

It is difficult to pinpoint but you will hear people saying that a particular service did or did not “feel” like church. It is akin to the smell of popcorn when you go to a movie theater. Most of us have not been in a movie theater since the Covid-19 pandemic began, but when we get to go back, whether you want to take off your mask and actually eat popcorn in the theater or not, the smell of it when you enter the theater is closely associated with seeing a movie. They might, for health reasons, stop serving concessions at movies and most of us would still go to see our favorite films on the big screen, but without the smells associated with the experience, it just wouldn’t feel the same. 

 

Maybe the decade of transformation was necessary for us to begin to give more weight to function and less importance to form but now, at this writing, when churches that care about the lives of their members are not meeting in person, while we are a church in exile, appearing only on the internet to those who seek us out, we have to ask what we will do when the current health crisis is past? 

 

Surely the advent of vaccines will eventually bring the current pandemic to an end but none of us are so naive as to believe that there will not be another pandemic in the near future on this over-crowded, stressed planet. We went from having a fairly formal though reformed service in our Sunday gatherings into a stripped down, made for internet live-stream service, that was comprised of a meditation, a wisdom lesson, a sermon, three secular songs performed by professional musicians, and a benediction/charge at the end. 

After several months of this, we further reduced our online offering to just a sermon or speech. What will we do when we can invite our congregation to reassemble for an in-person service?

 

As a matter of health safety, I assume that we will no longer have a formal “passing of the peace” asking church members to shake hands and interact is just not smart. I further assume that there will be no more virus spreading congregational singing or unison readings. And I hope that we will take this forced break as a time to take final steps in ridding ourselves of the vestiges of the more magical elements of traditional faith. Even a reinterpreted ritual of communion cannot help but reinforce some of the supernatural theism and magical thinking of our more sacramental past. 

 

Why do post-theistic people gather at all? Isn’t it to build community? Don’t we gather to give one another mutual encouragement, sometimes support in times of need or crisis, as well as organizing to be a positive force in a changing world? Don’t we try to educate, inform, and inspire one another in our times of gathering? 

 

So, while I am not throwing down the gauntlet to rid the modern church of all rituals, I do want to emphasize that what is useful to our purposes as a community is music that lifts our spirits and informs our noble causes, sermons that inspire and teach, as well as meditations and wisdom lessons that both educate and emphasize the values we share in common. 

 

I hope that progressive churches will economically survive the current pandemic and the inevitable pandemics that will follow. Most of what passes for spiritual education and inspiration will likely continue to migrate towards online formats but for those of us who find value in community, I hope that by summer of 2021, we will have a place to go. And even more, I hope that the church we go to will not be tethered to nostalgia and continually offering profound answers to questions no one is asking. 

 

I hope that our churches will emerge as healing and empowering communities of faith that can bind up the wounds of the broken and make those in power nervous. I hope that our churches will be centers of education and activism, organizing intelligent people of good will to become advocates for the environment, for the poor, to fight racism and classism, to welcome immigrants, and provide safe space for those of different sexual orientations and races. 

 

This time of pandemic church closures will end up killing off a lot of congregations. There is a part of me that isn’t even sad about that. As important as the church has been to me in the past, if churches are going to just reopen to try to reignite a passion for nostalgia, I would just as soon they stay closed. But if we can use this time to reinvent the church, so that we can emerge from our time in exile as a more meaningful, a more useful, a more prophetic church then I hope we come back from this sabbatical roaring like a lion. The world doesn’t need our dusty old texts and tedious hymns, but the world is in desperate need of real leadership. I never tire of that line in Bruce Cockburn’s song, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” where he reminds us that we have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. 

 

We have a lot of darkness in the world that still needs kickin, and, if I may appropriate the saying, “I just came here to do two things: chew gum and kick darkness, and I’m all out of gum.”

---

^[1]. Kierkegaard, “This Must Be Said.”

 

^[2]. Neuhaus, Catholic Moment, 65.