Four More Years?

Four More Years?      January 26, 2025     Dr. Roger Ray. 

Click here to see the video-

 

Last week we saw the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United State. This event has left many of us almost gasping for air as the impossible has become, not just possible, but inevitable. I would say that it was a bit like Alice falling down a rabbit hole but more accurately, this is rather more like Lewis Carrol’s second novel in which Alice returns to Wonderland by going through a mirror. In Through the Looking Glass, she finds a world of opposites in which everything is reversed, particularly, logic.  Nothing about Trump’s election makes any sense. In a contest between a pretty good candidate and Trump, who had demonstrated that he was the most inept, idiotic president in American history, whose candidacy had been reviled by some of his own family members and most of the people who had worked in his previous administration, there is no way that anyone could have logically voted for him, and yet, by the smallest of margins, he has slithered back into office.

 

News outlets have tried to stoke up our sense of horror and shock with each cabinet appointment he makes, with each crazy sounding policy recommendation from tariffs to deportations, but, honestly, who can even feign shock at this point? If you put a clown on the throne, the clown does not suddenly become a king, the palace just becomes a circus.

I never managed to sit through the whole of the 2006 comedy, Idiocracy, in which an average soldier is put into hibernation and then forgotten until he is awakened in a distant and bleak future in which the world is run by total morons, making the main character, the smartest man in the world.

The premise is funny, in a way, but who wants to be aware in a world full of idiots . . . because that is the nightmare in which we are all consigned to share for the next few years.

 

I am profoundly disappointed that Trump was even allowed to run for office again. Why wasn’t he put in prison four or five years ago? I’m brokenhearted by the realization that our judicial system is so inept, so feckless, that when things as egregious the January 6th Insurrection, when Trump tried to incite a violent revolution to overthrow the American government so that he could stay in office, there are no consequences. And the recording we all heard of his conversation with Brad Raffensperger, trying to steal the election in Georgia, and the classified documents he hid in a bathroom, stealing nuclear secrets and military battle strategies, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars he took in illegal emoluments while in office. None of this should have been difficult to charge and take to trial but they literally let the clock run out on these stunning crimes so that a traitor, a thief, could run for office again and win. He was tried and found guilty of rape but somehow, he is just too important to be punished for rape?

 

So, sure, Trump is not just a horrible person and a dumpster fire as a president, but somehow none of this mattered to the majority of American voters. Lewis Carol couldn’t have smoked enough opium to imagine this world of opposite logic, but this is the Idiocracy that we now live in. It is not hyperbole to say that America is no longer a constitutional republic or democracy. We may be an oligarchy but we are verging on a monarchy that has a divine right of kings.

 

In 2016, I consoled myself with the belief that he would be impeached early in his term in office. Such hopes were venial then and entirely improbable now.

Somehow, with his appointments in the Department of Justice or with Democratic appointments, there is no justice for Donald Trump.

 

The media has been captured by Trump’s antics for 9 years now . . . realizing that they are boring their audience and losing their relevance, but they have not been able to tear their constant gaze away. Even during the final months of 2024, as his cabinet nominations rolled out, each more shocking and insane than the last, we couldn’t seem to break out of his orbit.

 

And it was a disgusting string of appointments, almost all based on people he had seen on TV praising him. He is a predictable narcissist. People like Matt Gaetz, and his replacement, Pam Bondi, both election deniers, criminals and worse, but they have constantly found themselves in front of a camera, fawning over Trump. And his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend host, has no relevant training or management experience and yet he is being proposed to manage the largest organization in the world because he has, week after week, praised Trump on TV, with some people saying that his show always just had an audience of one…. Trump, endlessly addicted to looking into a mirror.

 

Nominating dog shooting Kristi Noam, and TV snake oil salesman, Dr. Oz to positions of responsibility? Honestly, I don’t care if Oprah did make him famous, if you ever actually listened to Dr. Oz on TV and you didn’t hear a voice inside your head saying, “Quack, quack, quack,” them I am afraid that your critical thinking skills should be reported as “missing.”

 

As democrats have tried to do their post-election autopsy to figure out what they did wrong and how they have to reposition themselves, one of the consistent pieces of advice has been to stop talking down to Trump voters as if we thought they were ignorant. Well, maybe as a tactic, but the fact is that we do think that they are ignorant. There is no secret why pollsters always make note of who voters with no college degree vote for and who voters with advanced education vote for.

 

People without much formal education are not only more likely to vote for an idiot like Trump but they also, make less money. College grads earn, on average, twice as much as high school drop-outs and one and half times as much as those with only a high school diploma. They also live, on average, 7 years less than college grads because they tend to be employed in higher risk jobs. They are also 4 to 5 times more likely to die of a drug overdose. I get that we need to not be condescending to Trump voters if we want them to start being better at voting, but denying reality is nothing more than a technique. If you voted for Trump, that was a remarkably stupid vote with virtually no credible way of defending it. You have the right to make a bad choice, obviously, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a stunningly stupid choice.

 

OK, you were upset about inflation at the grocery stores . . . tell me about grocery prices after Trump deports 80% of our agriculture labor and then slaps a big tariff on imported foods. I hope you like ramen noodles because you have some tough shopping in your future.

 

In sum, Trump is just a child. He doesn’t have the attention span to actually look at resumes and plan an administration. He sees the world as a reality TV show and he wants people who look like the central casting part and who suck up to him.

He is just a spoiled child, and we just need to get over obsessing about him. He is dangerous, we can’t entirely ignore him, but we can certainly stop acting shocked when he does something stupid. Stupid is his only feature, not a flaw.

 

Even the famous MSNBC couple, Joe and Mika, have made a trip to Mar-a-lago trying to negotiate a fresh start with Trump, because just waking up to those two screaming at the cameras every day will run off their remaining audience. We’re tired of Trump, we’re tired of being angry, and we are through trying to muster the hope that someone in the department of Justice or the Senate will rid us of this trash. It isn’t going to happen, and we just have to try to survive this absurd administration with good humor.

I love reading the British journalist, Ed Luce, but I like listening to him even more. He always sounds like a Shakespearian actor scolding the United States for whatever mess we have most recently created . . . I can’t explain why a classy reprimand feels better than a straight up slap in the face but somehow it does. A couple of weeks after the election, Ed Luce wrote this:
“It is time to study Caligula. That most notorious of Roman emperors killed what was left of the republic and centralised authority in himself. Donald Trump does not need to make his horse a senator; it will be enough to keep appointing charlatans to America’s great offices of state. Rome was not destroyed by outsiders. Its demolition was the work of barbarians from within.  The question of whether Trump consciously wants to destroy the US federal government is irrelevant. You measure a leader by his actions not by his heart.

To judge from what Trump has done within a fortnight of winning the presidency, his path is destruction.”

 

What I am trying to convey to you today is this: Much of what was said in the final months of 2024 is still true. Trump is a danger to democracy. He is a threat to the integrity of NATO and hence the sovereignty of Ukraine, and the safety of Poland. He could tip the Chinese hesitance about invading Taiwan towards a bold military conquest. His administration will certainly be a threat to environmental health, renewable energy, civil rights, and the rule of law. All of this is true and yet, surrender is not a viable option.

 

Trump will be an even worse president in 2025 than he was in 2017 and the modern world is in danger, but we can acknowledge this without giving our tacit approval or acting like we are willing to simply be resigned to it. We do need to tone down our rhetoric, and to do what we can to bridge the ideological gap between those who love American democracy and those who are willing to sell their birthright for a cheaper bowl of beans.

 

I am sorry that he will take office again at the sunset of my own career. I intend to keep posting new messages for as long as our online church remains fiscally solvent but I suspect that 2025 will see us closing up shop. So, I am going to focus on speaking about spiritual virtues more than dwelling on the failings and disappointments of right wing political madness.

 

It is not the only response needed in these times but at least a part of preserving what is good about America in the 21st century is to be found in our resolve to be better people . . . more compassionate, more patient, more loving, and even more generous.

 

To that end, my next sermon will be posted on February 9th, the week of Valentine’s Day, and so I will take that opportunity to talk about being in love.

The Economics of Immigration

The Economics of Immigration     January 12, 2025   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Politicians and priests use fear to manipulate people. Fear is a primal emotion. Traditional religions use fear of divine punishment to keep people in their pews and to fill their donation baskets. Progressives tend to dismiss belief in hell and many of us, me included, dismiss any belief in an afterlife. Hence, fear-filled evangelical churches are full and progressive churches tend to be tiny if they exist at all. Motivating religious people by encouraging compassion and generosity just doesn’t have the same motivational power as pitchforks and burning lakes of fire. Religious people invented this non-existent hell so that they could offer the only known insurance against it without ever having to provide any evidence for the existence of hell or any evidence for the efficacy of the cure that they offered. It is the biggest scam in history but maybe only slightly ahead of politicians who promot fear of immigrants.

 

When Donald Trump took his famous escalator ride in 2015 to announce his candidacy for the presidency, he was such an unlikely and comical candidate that he had to hire unemployed actors to come and swell the crowd in Trump Tower to fake enthusiasm. But he filled his announcement with fear baiting statements about illegal immigrants, suggesting that they were criminals, rapists, drug dealers, and a threat to everyday Americans. It was an absurd and obviously racist ploy but, as Mark Twain allegedly said, “A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth.” And in politics, a lie told and repeated often enough, becomes the truth in the minds of many voters. 

 

It is not unlike the lie about the existence of an eternal hell filled with impossible pain and torture. Most of the time, when traditional religious people have heard me say that what they have been told about hell is entirely fictious, that it is a preposterous lie for which there has never been a grain of evidence or the slightest reason to believe that it exists, they get angry at me! As if they want to hold onto their fear of being tortured for all eternity for having lascivious thoughts about their middle school English teacher . . . or maybe you didn’t go to school when young teachers wore miniskirts and high heeled boots?

 

People have been so conditioned to be scared of hell and to have moderated their behavior, avoiding all kinds of sins that they would have really liked to have indulged in, out of fear of hell. And if you try to take that irrational fear away from them, rather than being relieved, they are often angry. I insist that they have every reason to be angry at all of the priests and preachers who have lied to them about it for decades but rather than being mad at Father O’Connor or Preacher Sidesaddle, they get mad at me for pointing out that the myths just “ain’t” so. People are funny.

 

But when it comes to illegal aliens, let’s first deal with some facts. Trump has claimed that 21 million people have come over the border during Biden’s time in office. The truth is that there are not half that many undocumented people in America, total, from all of the years prior to now. Still, 10 million people is a lot of people. Major cities, where most of these migrants show up, have some real issues with strains on their public services such as housing, education, and emergency medical services.

I happen to live in a small coastal town in eastern Florida and while we have a racially diverse community and my neighborhood is integrated, you don’t see a lot of immigrants in any one place, unless, of course, one of my neighbors is getting a new roof, or if someone is having landscaping work done, or new construction, or painting, or if someone is getting their house cleaned or their pool serviced.  And, like in your town, if you go to Asian or Mexican restaurants, you are likely to encounter Asian or Spanish speaking servers, cooks, and staff, whose legal status you know nothing about. Our local French bakery is run by a Lebanese guy. I don’t know if he is a citizen or not but as long as he keeps making those phyllo dough cookies he sells, he is alright by me. 

 

No country can have totally open borders but countries with advanced economies cannot well survive without an influx of workers who are willing to do low waged jobs. Is 10 million too many undocumented immigrants? I don’t know how to gauge that. If you are the mayor of New York and you are having difficulty keeping people off of the streets and sleeping in the parks, maybe. But what I hear from restaurant owners and construction managers is that they can’t find enough people to hire who will actually show up to work to keep their businesses going. 

 

And I get that we could wish that people would do this legally but let me assure you that the legal process is not that easy. I adopted my daughter from South Korea. Thirty-six years ago, it took a few thousand dollars and four months to make that happen. It felt like an eternity. She was assigned to us in her first week of life, but it took four months to get the documents signed and permissions granted for her to make the trans Pacific flight. Now, the process is much longer.

 

Currently, my significant other and I are in the process of obtaining a legal visa for her to move here from Thailand. We have paid several thousand dollars in attorney and application fees and have submitted tons of time-consuming paperwork. Our case is very simple. She has never been married and has no children. She isn’t trying to bring any family members with her. She is an educated, English speaking, professional, with no criminal record or health issues. I am just one of millions of old men living in Florida with a swimming pool, beach access, and time and income on my hands that I would like to spend with someone who also profoundly dislikes Donald Trump. 

 

We’ve paid for her medical exam and police background check and so, this is about as easy as it gets. However, our documents are at the bottom of a pile of applications. It took me four months to get my baby here but the US Immigration service estimates that it will take them 13 months to rule on this visa. 13 months! When you are 68 years old, that sounds like a significant chunk of the time I have left on earth! And that is for an application that is guaranteed to be approved with lawyers working on both sides of the globe to make it happen.

 

If you are an unemployed farm worker in Nicaragua, watching your wife and children starving to death and living in an area overrun by violent gangs, what are the chances that you could muster the resources to make an entirely legal application to come and pick oranges in southern California? Republicans and Democrats agree. Our immigration system is broken. Because it is so absurdly difficult, expensive, and time consuming, temporary workers come over the border any way that they can. Still, this is not an unsolvable problem. 

 

The immigration office could, especially considering the fees they charge, hire a few more people to work through the back log of applications gathering dust on their desks so that grumpy old men don’t have to go to the movies alone and there should be a pretty quick process for workers who have eager employers waiting for them in the USA to gain temporary work visas. I’m just a dumb country preacher and I could generate the proper forms and procedures manuals in a week or so. Hire me, President Trump, and I could make your administration look like it verged on competence in the first month you are in office. 

 

Oh, and all of this “hand wringing, panties-in-a-wad” talk about illegals voting in our elections, yeah, that doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. When my intended is able to come to the United States, sometime late in 2025, she will have to live in the USA for 5 years before she can apply for citizenship and if she is successful in gaining citizenship, then and only then, will she be able to vote for the Mayor of Vero Beach. And just for free, everyone who has ever told you that these undocumented immigrants are pouring over the borders and voting in our elections knew that they were lying to you. They lie to you because they think you are stupid enough to believe them. Please prove them wrong.

 

And if, as some political talking heads have suggested, inflation in the grocery store was the single leading factor in Kamala Harris’ defeat; what do the Trump people think will happen to produce prices when they deport 70 or 80% of the farm workers who pick our fruit and vegetables? Right now, the USA is the most agriculturally advanced country in the world but take our labor force away and see where we stand in global agriculture six months later. 

 

 

One of my former neighbors from Joplin, Missouri, Jessie Memer, who is famous only for her viral social media rants, recently put to bed another silly rumor about migrants taking up welfare and food stamp money, when she said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the final point I want to make on immigration, I have to acknowledge a lecture I heard by Richard Wolff, emeritus economics professor at Boston University. I have to acknowledge him, even though the basic math and logic of it is so simple we all should have realized it on our own but somethings are as plain as the nose on your face but, you may have noticed, it isn’t easy to see your nose without help.

 

Wolff points out that the first 17 or 18 years of anyone’s life is the most expensive. Children must be housed, fed, educated, and medically cared for while they produce almost no useful labor. Whether you grow up in Europe or North America or in some profoundly impoverished country, your first 17 years require massive investment from someone to get you ready to enter the workforce. So, every time a migrant crosses our borders to work, someone, somewhere else, has already made a huge investment in them, getting them to the age where they can pick peaches and apples, and the even more back breaking work, of picking strawberries and green beans.  And if they can nail shingles to a roof, mix concrete, plant landscaping, or clean a hotel room, so much the better. And that’s without even considering the physical therapists, physicians, psychiatrists, engineers, and IT experts we need to run our economy which our universities fail to produce in numbers enough to keep us at the head of the line of development…. We have lots of literature and art history grads but not a lot of the kinds of scientists and inventors we need.

 

So, men and women, we don’t need to build a wall. We don’t need mass deportations. And we really don’t need for you to be afraid of the hysterical lies you have been told about undocumented workers. Do America a favor, be a rational, critical thinker, and be willing to, as the Bible has told us for centuries, to welcome the stranger as one of our own. 

 

I’ve said it before, but let me say it again . . . you aren’t going to go to hell, neither is anyone else and some days I’m kinda sorry about that because there are people who really ought to go to hell but there just isn’t one to go to. And, immigrants have to be limited in number but that number is a whole lot higher than you have been led to believe. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by going along with mass deportations unless you want to pay a lot more for groceries, lawn care, construction, and wait a lot longer for an appointment to see a cardiologist or an oncologist. In general, I just want for you to stop being afraid. 

 

“Once More, Into the Breach”

“Once More, Into the Breach”     December 29, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Following last month’s presidential election, popular New Yorker humorist and essayist, Andy Borowitz, begged for a week off. He explained, “Dear reader, I have plenty to say about last night’s dumpster fire but today I want to take a break from jokes. Many of you are in pain and I don’t want to make light of that.

You shouldn’t misinterpret my pause, however, as acquiescence or resignation. We all deserve a moment to curl up in the fetal position. But when that moment is over, I want to do what I can to make life better for my children and grandchildren (not to mention people I don’t happen to be related to). I hope you’ll feel that way, too. 

Remaining silent and surrendering to despair is exactly what fascists want us to do. So let’s not.” 

I didn’t publish anything about the election in the immediate aftermath of what Borowitz fitting calls a “dumpster fire” because I didn’t need to simply repeat what nearly every progressive in the world was saying. And, I can’t think of anything to say to make this predicament OK. I can echo thoughts expressed well by others that I am sorry that Biden initially tried to run for a second term. I wish that we had been able to hold a normal primary season and select a candidate from a field of viable options but, still, Kamala Harris did an amirable job and picking her campaign apart is worse than futile.

 

America was presented with a choice between a well prepared, intelligent, and trustworthy candidate and a candidate who is elderly, mentally unstable, uneducated and unteachable, who is a rapist, a adulterer, a serial liar, a con artist and thief. And the majority of American voters cast their vote to return the demonstrably worse president in American history to the highest office in the land. 

As one person paraphrased Robert Frost, “Two paths diverged in a woods and America chose the psychopath.”

 

I am disgusted, disappointed, and, honestly, I don’t like Americans very much right now. Germans, after Hitler, often excused themselves saying that they just didn’t know what he would really be like. American voters cannot claim that excuse. We have seen Trump at work and worse, he has told us what vile and immoral things he plans to do in a second term. No one gets to plead ignorance this time. Now, it remains for persons of good will to decide how we will respond to this tragic event.

There are very few people of my generation who are not familiar with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy so I trust that most of you will remember that bleak moment when Frodo and Sam are facing an impossible task of destroying the ring of power within the confines of Mordor, when Frodo has all but lost the will to go on, he asks Sam, “What are we holding onto Sam?” And Sam, brilliantly replies, “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”  

 

I will tell you, honestly, that in the immediate days following Trump’s re-election, I didn’t have much fight left in me. I am in a committed relationship with a wonderful woman in Thailand. Hui and I have been making plans for her to come join me here in the United States. In fact, we are deep into the process of getting her visa and bringing her here. 

But I had already planned to go spend a couple of months with her in Thailand this winter while we wait for the slow visa process to work its way through the government bureaucracy, but I started to reconsider our plans. 

 

I never wanted to live in Thailand until the evening of November 5^th, but that night I started looking at houses for sale in the southern regions of Thailand on the Andaman Sea. The scuba diving there is much better than it is here in Florida and housing costs are half of what they are here. But, again, as Andy Borowitz said, giving up, despair, is exactly what fascists want from us and I’m not going to allow myself to go down that path. 

 

The majority of Americans voted against democracy, against civil rights, against progress, fairness, decency, and character, and a part of me believes that they deserve whatever Donald Trump is going to do to them, but I am not going to vote against America. 

 

We progressives know the ropes when it comes to being the loyal opposition. We have spent most of our lives kicking against the darkness of prejudice, greed, and privilege, and so we know how to do this. 

 

I woke up about 20 years ago to the realization that I had been seduced by prestige and recognition. I was the pastor of a prominent church in Springfield, Missouri and many civic and not profit organizations had recruited me to serve on their boards. I was on the board of mental health agencies, charities, the community foundation, and many others but while they printed my name on their stationary and put my picture on their websites, it finally dawned on me that they had consistently ignored nearly every suggestion I had ever made. 

I was being used. They wanted my reputation to lend credibility to theirs, but they had no intentions of actually being effectively in service to the values I represented. I resigned from all of those boards, accepting that I had cuddled up to closely to money and power and that if I wanted to be prophetic, I could do better standing on the sidewalk and shaking my fist and the palace and the temple than I could by enjoying a free lunch at the conference room table.

 

I wish that Harris had won. I wish that Democratic candidates in Florida and Texas had won. I wish that the house and the senate had been returned to democratic majorities. And, I wish that the executive and legislative branches of government had been able to team up to fix the judiciary by either impeaching half of the current supreme court or by expanding it to outnumber those who are trying to make America into a Catholic monarchy. But, as my father used to say, “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t keep bumping their butts on the ground.” We didn’t get many of our wishes this time, but we are back in familiar territory.

 

The German/American poet, Charles Bukowski, always gets my attention with his sometimes brutal honesty. One of his first collections was titled, “Poems written just before jumping out of an 8^th story window.” He once said, “We must bring our own light to the darkness. Nobody is going to do it for us.” Folks, this, I believe, is where we are.

 

In 2016 I consoled myself with the knowledge that Trump would surely be impeached . . . and he was, twice! But he managed to skate. We had faith in the Mueller investigation, then we allowed ourselves to be seduced into some confidence that surely, he would be found guilty in the classified documents case in which we had all seen undeniable evidence of his guilt. 

 

We believed that the Georgia election tampering case would surely put him in prison, we heard the evidence with our own ears. And how could he escape being convicted in the January 6^th insurrection case? We all sat in horror and watched his assault on American democracy play out for hours on TV!

 

What I think we must all learn from this is the unavoidable fact that the American judicial system does not have the power to convict wealthy and powerful men. It just doesn’t. There is no cavalry that will come charging over the ridge to save us. And in spite of all of the commentators who had said that, in spite of Trump’s best efforts, America’s institutions have survived, you know that they have not. Has the Supreme Court survived? Do we have justices making decisions based on the constitution? Certainly not the American constitution!

 

Everything that was said by Trump’s family members and former government associates is still true. He is still a fascist. He still represents an existential threat to American democracy. The future of NATO is now uncertain. The Russian invasion of the Ukraine may now end with Ukraine being defeated, and the island nation of Taiwan is now at much greater risk of being invaded by China. The global environment is now much more threatened than it was two months ago, and immigrants of all stripes, legal or illegal, have reason to be fearful. 

 

Farm workers will be deported and farm owners will go bankrupt. The civil rights of women will continue to be eroded. As in all circumstances, it is better to be rich than it is to be poor . . . persons of means can still fly to Europe to access abortion services when needed and the poor will be forced to raise their children of their rapists and incestuous family members in abject poverty.

 

But still, folks, you have to bring you own light to the darkness because no one is going to do it for you. We will have New Year’s Eve celebrations in a couple of days, or, at least, it will be New Year’s Day on Wednesday, whether you celebrate it or dread it, 2025 will see the whole world holding its nose as Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

 

I grant anyone the right to grieve this turn of events. Anyone and everyone has a right to think about moving abroad or just checking out of the news and, as one of my close friends has done, vowing to watch sports and movies and refuse to give any more time or energy to the disgusting turns of politics. And, I’ll tell you now, on the day when Trump is inaugurated, I will be lying on a beach in Krabi, Thailand with my girlfriend. But, I’m coming back. Because I am not going to surrender my faith in democracy.

 

We have made a lot of progress on many issues over the last century but, sadly, progress never marches forward in a straight line. Sometimes progress pauses, sometimes it takes some steps backward. I am an old man and I may not outlive the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong- Un, or even Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, but I will not become indifferent to what they represent. 

 

Over the past 4 decades and more, it has often been both my duty and my honor to stand at the graveside of someone that I just wasn’t finished with yet, and to commit their remains to the earth.

Often, in that moment, I have quoted a passage from Edna St. Vincet Millay’s "Dirge Without Music" where she says:

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

 

With the end of 2024, many of us are grieving a kind of death. In 2008, when Barak Obama was elected, we saw the beginning of an era of progress that brought us close to universal healthcare, to marriage equality for the gay community, to greater fairness for women in the military, and serious reform in issues like sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Now we must recognize that the first term of Trump was not merely an anomaly. Not a brief reactionary blip on the moral radar of our culture. The Obama era is now over. I know. But I do not approve; and I am not resigned to accepting an era of American fascism. 

 

I could wish for some kind of Deus et machina that would turn the world around. I wish that Michelle Obama would announce that she will run for president in 2028 and that she will appoint Willie Wanka to be the new Supreme Court Chief Justice; but I know that here on Earth 1, the task of bringing light into the darkness of 2025 depends upon you and me. 

 

Break down the walls of your isolation. Get out, meet other progressives. Collaborate, organize, encourage one another. Find your voice. Resist the decay of civil rights and demand justice, and please, don’t give up or give in. 

 

Jesus: from preacher to God

Jesus: from preacher to God      

December 15, 2024         Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

 

At the age of 41, I was newly divorced and, it so happened, I had finally, over a period of nearly 20 years, accumulated enough points to claim a free ticket to Europe. On the advice of several friends, I made my first European trip as a tourist to see Paris.

I was working my way through all of the Michelin Tour Book recommended things that a tourist really must see, and that is a long list in Paris. I got through all of the 4 star sites and worked my way down into the 2 and 3 star sites, one of which, was the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

I had been surprised at several points in my tour of Paris, by how much oblation was shown to the memory of a man who had not been portrayed in a very favorable light in my public school education but that only means that my public school was not in France. The sarcophagus sits enthroned beneath a dome that is more than 100 yards high, and the tomb itself is so massive that it could have held the remains of two dozen men of Napoleon’s stature. 

 

Hitler attempted to militarily conquer the world but Hitler is not well remembered in most of Germany but Napolean, who had similar designs on world domination, has grown larger in the memory of the French than he ever was in real life. Everything about him, his apartments, his furniture, his personal effects, are treated with greater reverence than a beloved saint. I made a remark in my own diary of my trip to Paris that, were the French given a choice between having Jesus return or Napolean, that they would choose Napolean without hesitation. 

 

Without debating the good or the ill aspects of Napolean’s character, he is revered by the French because of what he represents, not really for who he was. He represented a time when France strove to be the world’s super power. And, a couple of hundred years later, you wouldn’t have to scrape the surface of the collective French ego to find a still surviving belief that France really ought to rule the world. 

 

People tend to expand the memory of their heroes over time. People in our time comment on the obvious phallic nature of the Washington monument, erected in honor of America’s first president, standing 555 feet tall, which, consciously or unconsciously, says something about the remembered stature of President and Revolutionary War general, George Washington. And, not to be outdone, even after losing the Civil War, survivors saw to the construction of a memorial to the first president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, near his birthplace in western Kentucky. It goes without saying that the monument to Davis, when completed, was dedicated by the Klu Klux Klan who burned a cross at the top of it. 

 

In the ancient world, there was a predictable evolution of historical heroes being enhanced by the generations that followed, for their own benefit, until a late king, like Gigamesh of Sumer, goes from being a popular king, to be a person of super human strength, to finally being portrayed as a god.

 

While most Buddhists would insist that the Buddha was not a god, one need only spend a little time in Thailand to discover that, in spite of the protests, the treatment of the Buddha is a classic example of deification. But, I have also known some Trappist monks whose “veneration” of the Virgin Mary went far beyond fond thoughts about a human woman. Some even call Mary the “co-redemptress” with Christ. It just doesn’t really sound like monotheism, does it?

 

Deification almost always wipes out the intended message of any religion. To the extent that we can take historical narratives about the Buddha seriously, he was born a prince in India and set aside power, position, and wealth to be an ascetic monk. But over the centuries, Buddha stops being such an ascetic figure and is, more or less, brought back into the palace.

The most holy Buddhist temple in Thailand is where this, the Emerald Buddha, is kept. You have to take off your shoes to enter the temple and attention must be given to how you sit on the floor in front of the statue so that the soles of your feet are not exposed to the face of the Buddha. You can’t take pictures or videos and you are expected to be quiet and respectful. The temple is next to the king’s grand palace, so the monk has been brought into the palace of the king, surrounded by ornate decoration and, if the point were not clear enough already, this statue, which is made of Jade, also wears clothing and the clothing is changed every six months by the King, himself, because only the King is allowed to touch this most revered image of the Buddha. 

It may seem like a humbling task for a King, but, come on, no one can touch the statue but the King which doesn’t exactly make the King divine, but he is certainly divine adjacent, right? 

 

No matter what you may say about the Buddha’s message regarding compassion, rejection of material wealth, power, status, none of that means much in a context in which the Buddha’s image is presented in opulence, power, and ultimate status. Deification is how we silence a religious message and turn it over to the government or organized religion where it becomes a guardian of the status quo.

 

Which, it should be obvious by now, is what happened to the historical Jesus. Because trying to describe the historical Jesus is a matter of academic conjecture, it is impossible to come up with an entirely agreed upon description but, using the broadest possible terms, Jesus was a Jewish reformer during the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine. He was killed by Rome because he challenged the authority of Rome and a couple of generations later, Rome tried to wipe out the Jewish population entirely. They destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and the remnants of Judaism, including its branches like the Christians and the disciples of John the Baptist, were pushed into hiding from which they continued to be rather subversive, anti-empire forces.

 

We are now in the thick of the Christmas season and there are a lot of wonderful things to be said about Christmas as a cultural event; especially for the more healthy families for whom holiday gatherings are happy times with feasts and presents and parties and it is a huge boost to the retail economy and it usually even gives Wall Street markets an end of the year shot in the arm. 

 

Forgive me if I can’t be quite to ebullient about the biblical role of the Christmas narrative. I was just 19 years old and actively involved in a college campus ministry that actually encouraged daily Bible reading, something that I was eager to do anyway. But even as a kid who was much more inclined to be defensive of all things Christian and not at all a critic of the Bible, at that time, even I couldn’t help noticing that the two birth narratives in the New Testament, the one in Matthew with the star, wise men, and dreams, and the one in Luke, with the shepherds, angels, and a stable did not read like they were actually a part of the gospels where they are found. The language, vocabulary, and mythic nature of the birth narratives made me ask our professor if they were late additions to the gospels, and I wondered if they were not more imagination than reliable accounts.

 

The students around me were shocked and offended by the question but they were even more shocked and offended by the professor’s response, because even 50 years ago in a conservative Christian college, the professor sighed and acknowledged that the birth narratives were late additions to the gospels and they they should be read as apologetic sermons, not actual accounts of events. The professor ran some professional risk by being so honest but, thankfully, he was one of the good ones who believed that telling students the truth was ultimately easier than keeping up the scam. 

 

You see, the thing is, trying to make a mythic account a literal historical account, robs it of the theological point of the narrative. If you try to take movies like Star Wars or the Matrix as being documentaries, and, it is not impossible that the History Channel might run them as documentaries given how they play equally fictional pieces about Egyptian history as documentaries, but sane people know the difference. The enthusiastic Christians who wrote the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke were, on the face of it, ascribing to Jesus the kinds of things said in their culture about other important figures . . . . philosophers and royalty were often said to have divine parentage, such that they were born to virgin mothers, and sometimes astral signs accompanied the birth of a king, or angels would make announcements.

The writers of the Christmas story were, you could say, padding Jesus’ resume but it wasn’t just that; they were also writing a sermon. Luke gives special place to women in his narrative. He has the Christ child born into humble circumstances and the announcement of his birth was made to the lowest and most poor members of society. Matthew stretches Jewish exclusivist prejudices and has the birth of Jesus announced to foreign astrologers, pagans, rather than to the temple priesthood or to the Jewish king. 

 

There are good messages to draw out of the New Testament’s birth narratives, just not any history. And, in my younger years when I had to try to find ways to bring modern meaning to ancient myths, I tried. I really tried. I had the midnight lessons and carols services on Christmas Eve, with candles and communion. I kept trying to preach demythologizing sermons while still giving some lip service to tradition. 

 

I even tried to change the tradition. A couple of times we did full on theatrical productions of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol,” which really is a Christmas sermon about conversion and compassion. Finally, we just replaced it with musical presentations of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which was fun and it still taught a moral lesson without being as heavy handed as the Christmas Carol or as overtly religious as lessons and carols. 

 

Picking hymns for the Advent and Christmas season got to be harder and harder. Once you demythologize the whole incarnational view of Christmas . . . well, my music director sat in my office one day with tears in his eyes saying, I just can’t sing this Christmas crap anymore. We turned to Christmas albums by Sting and Bruce Cockburn to find more acceptable holiday fare that could be sung with full throated enthusiasm without all of the Little Town of Bethlehem or Hark the Herald Angels singing. 

 

I’ve tried to go to traditional Christmas Eve services a few times, to hear a friend’s kids singing in a choir, or to placate someone’s desire for me to accompany them, but, at least for me, there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. The virgin birth, incarnational tales of the first century lost their power in the age of reason and I don’t think you should feel guilty about not participating in it anymore.

 

Enjoy the family gatherings. Indulge yourself in traditional holiday dishes. Be generous in gift giving, especially to children and to the poor. And there really is some good holiday music out there that you can enjoy, even though you may have to look for it. 

 

I will leave you with the apologetic that Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, offered to him in the Christmas Carol when Scrooge said that Christmas was just “humbug” that never put a scrap of gold in your pocket. Fred said:

 

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

 

So, please, have yourselves a merry, albeit rather secular, Christmas!