Progressive Faith Sermons - Dr. Roger Ray: Recent Episodes
Dr. Roger Ray
Sermons from the Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO.
We are believers in Jesus Christ who accept all people without judgment and who desire to work and worship as a community striving for social justice.
This will be the last installment of my preaching career on line. I will still do some pulpit supply as needed and we will use our remaining resources to keep all of our years of sermons on line on our YouTube and iTunes channels. Indulge me in this last sermon to reminisce with you about my own journey from being a traditional evangelical Christian to being an academic Unitarian liberal. Peace be with you all!
The best way to totally misunderstand a good story is to try to take it literally. The birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are not historical, not even close. They are mini sermons in the form of a story. While they are really bad history, they are actually really good sermons if we can dismiss literalism and hear the story the authors are trying to tell us.
An undeniable aspect of the current state of affairs in our world is that we have fewer friends than we used to and more and more families have estranged family members. There are a myriad of reasons for it but no matter what aspect of modern life you blame, the bottom line is still the same: we have too few friends and too much family weirdness. Without complicating the psychology of it all too much, maybe we can try to just "let that shit go."
In the Marvel Universe, the Norse god, Thor, takes his place alongside of Iron Man and Spider Man without theological comment on the improbability of either human superheroes or gods from Asgard existing. Most of the time we easily can tell the difference between what is real and what is fantasy but when it comes to religion, it seems that most people are all too willing to suspend reason and to at least pretend to dive into myths and fantasies. Such religion does us little good and more often does a great deal of harm. So, let's free ourselves from mental slavery since none but ourselves can free our minds!
T. S. Eliot may have been painfully prophetic when he described our nation as being hollow folk with heads full of straw. None of the major religions represented in our nation have successfully created an influential conversation about character, honesty, or personal or corporate virtue. Maybe we could try again? Perhaps a time of reading the sayings of Confucius, without the distraction of a rival theology, might help us to spend time thinking about becoming better people.
Americans are dying from gunshot wounds in America at a rate of about 47,000 per year. That number looks more like the casualty count on a battle field! In fact, it is about the same as the number of deaths in the Gaza Strip during the two years of the recently ended war with Israel. But for us, this is a death toll that goes on year after year, almost entirely due to the Republican Party's unwillingness to support sane gun laws at a federal and state level. It is time to stop voting for Republicans until hey agree on a cease fire with America.
Acknowledging that evidence and critical thinking are crucial to a credible faith, the other side of that coin is that there is a great deal that not only is not known but, in fact, cannot be known. The most amazingly smart and insightful astro physicists still look up at a star filled sky with a sense of awe, a genuine humility in the face of what can only be described as a mystery. Our intellectual capacity does not define the limits of what is. We remain in a state of wonder at the mystery which we must experience without ever hoping to define it.
How do we know what we know? Philosophy tells us that knowledge can be inherent, deductive reasoning, or it can be based on experience. What it cannot be is just imagination or personal prejudice. Science, which looks for knowable facts, depends upon something being at least 3 things: observable, repeatable, and testable. Everything else is either personal preference or something we should be more suspicious of than gas station sushi!
We have hot wars in the Ukraine and Gaza. A border skirmish between Thailand and Cambodia, and an unknown potential for violence in Iran. Why do we find lasting peace so difficult in an age when the potential for devastating warfare is so great?
We have always had both priests and prophets but we are quickly growing beyond our need of priests who provide the rituals, religious texts, hymns, and institutions of organized religion. But the prophets, the ones who inspire us and challenge us to be and to do what it really means to be spiritual people, to embody courage, work for justice, and guide our society in ways of compassion, where will we find them when the church is no more?
Beyond the fear of A.I. taking over our nuclear arsenal and attacking us is the very realistic fear that A.I. along with automation and robotics, will quickly and dramatically end the need for human employees in very many parts of the economy. Left unchecked, the wealthy will reap a windfall from these changes and the working class will be plunged into poverty, unless we make changes to our economic system that will turn A.I. into a blessing rather than a fearsome curse.
230 years ago, in his Age of Reason, Thomas Paine implored his fellow Americans to break free of the mental prison imposed on them by monarchs and priests and to embrace a mental freedom found in reason. The pendulum has swung more than once since that time but clearly, we are living in a time in which propaganda is more warmly embraced than is critical thinking. As Bob Marley sang, "Free yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds."
If we follow the norm of never talking about politics or religion in polite company, we become a society that doesn't know how to discuss the important matters of politics or religion in a polite way. In fact, our faith (beliefs about ethics) are quite relevant to our politics (public policy). With civility, mutual respect, and rational language, let's have an exchange of ideas in search for common ground.
We inherit prejudices from our family of origin as well as the culture around us and in the media. The first time our irrational prejudices are confronted, it is unlikely that we will give them up. For most of us, overcoming gender, racial, sexual orientation, or religious prejudices was a process of many steps taken over several years. Once free of that curse, we will do well to remember that our transformation took time, reflection, critical thinking, and no small amount of patience out of other people because we need to become the prophets who challenge the many prejudices that remain a part of our society.
Our mind can be our worst enemy, the invisible opponent who keeps us from staying in the battle with our visible opponents. We need to learn to pay attention to how our internal voice is talking to us. Does it tell us that we are a loser, does it call us stupid, or insist that we give up? If so, we really need to take control of our self talk, to focus of positive thoughts, encouragement, and hope. Persons of conscience in this time of great social struggle have to remain "cheerful" as we continue to fight the good fight.
For centuries the world's religions have constructed a mental prison in which they try to control the conduct of their adherents through threats of eternal torture or, for the very good, promises of eternal reward. However, once you awaken to the reality that these are empty promises and threats, in a world where there is not heaven or hell, then there are no moral absolutes . . . then we are left to discern for ourselves, "how shall we then live?"
Between Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day, let us consider what it is that holds couples together in this age of liberty when neither church nor society has much to say when a couple decides to call it quits. Are we trying hard enough to foster healthy relationships what create a healthy environment both for child rearing and retirement? Does our faith have something to say about commitment and self sacrifice?
We have now seen Donald Trump through the first 100 days of his second term and what we have witnessed has been a horrifying attack on our constitutional democracy. It is sad to have to admit that the clowns are now running the circus but what is more frightening is that our nation may not survive the Trump administration with either our constitution or our democracy intact. We cannot just avoid talking about politics and hope that everything will be ok. We are in danger and there are no hoofbeats of a coming cavalry coming to save us. We will either unite and save ourselves or we will not be saved.
By the end of the first century of the common era, the message of Jesus the preacher had been entirely transformed into a message about Jesus, turning the spokesperson of radical compassion into a magical symbol who hods out a promise of life after death. We have no reliable sources to tell us much about the message of the historical Jesus since the authors of the New Testament had their own agendas which had little or nothing to do with what the historical Jesus had to say. We have only hints and suggestions of what really happened on the first Easter but this message attempts to strip away the dirt and stones that both Rome and the early church tried to bury Jesus’ message under.
Estrangement among family and friends is a sad occurrence which is becoming increasingly common in a society that continues to trend towards isolation and loneliness. Our decade is more polarized than most but even though we can rehearse the arguments to defend our distance from parents, siblings, and formerly close friends, we really can do better if we make reconciliation our goal. Sometimes we have to put some distance between ourselves and those who would extinguish our "light" but estrangement should be a last resort. Let's not be too hasty in giving up on love.
The greatest moral failing of the modern world may be our quiet acceptance of what Dorothy Day called "our filthy rotten system." Every year the income gap grows wider and the gap in ownership of capital becomes more stark. If we cannot change course it is not hyperbole to predict that the USA is on its way to becoming what we have too easily called a "third world country."
If we ask ourselves what it was about the historical Jesus that inspired the loyal following and explosion of writing on his behalf in the first century of the common era, beyond all of the talk about a kind of divine fire insurance, we find a message that is unique and powerful and nearly impossible to incorporate into our lives: Love your enemies. As Marcus Borg described him, Jesus was the teacher of radical compassion and that, in the most healthy spiritual context, is why we still talk about him today.
The Bible doesn't speak with one point of view nor does it teach a singular message. Religious people have to be willing to enter the debate which is found even within the pages of scripture in order to choose the right path towards a healthy spirituality. You can find harsh judgement and prejudice in the Bible, and, if you look, you can find the cure for harsh judgement and prejudice. It just depends on what you are looking for.
Realizing that he had made a tragic mistake by ending his engagement to Regine Olsen, the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote in his journal, "To live without love is a mistake for which there is no reparation, either in this life or in the life to come." Successful coupling is more difficult in modern times when we no longer need a spouse for the basics of survival but, in the end, falling in love was never really about survival. It is about meaning, and who couldn't use more meaning in life, along with a little coffee and poetry?
This week's inauguration of Donald Trump was painful for most if not all of our listeners. Still, short of resignation, illness, or an implausible impeachment, his chaotic administration will be a threatening fact of life for the world for four more years. How then can we adapt ourselves to a reality we wanted so desperately to never face? How do we protest or resist his insanity while trying, at the same time, to heal the lethal divide of our nation?
If Trump keeps his campaign promise to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants in the USA, we should prepare ourselves for some economic and service industry hits and we are not going to like. Acknowledging that our immigration system is broken and than neither a coast to coast wall or an open border is a workable solution, what can we do to fix this problem which is crucial to our future as a nation?
We are entering a new year with the single glaring feature of the return of Donald Trump to the presidency which will have far reaching implications both domestically and internationally. For most of us, this is a future to fear and yet, for good or for ill, we must face the reality we have been given, regardless of the future we had hoped for. So, now what? I say that we refuse to surrender and commit ourselves to the roll we progressives know best: resistance.
How Christmas is celebrated has evolved a great deal through the centuries but most of us alive today inherited a very churchy version of Christmas that focused on the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke and the whole incarnational theology of the ancient church. Modern progressives find it more uncomfortable to fit into those beliefs than an ugly Christmas sweater. If we demythologize the birth narratives we may be able to find merit in some of the Christmas traditions without all of the phony mythology.
A prophet is not someone who predicts the future. A prophet is a person, religious or not, who accurately describes the present, even if no one wants to hear it. There is a saying in journalism that says journalism happens when you publish something that someone doesn’t want published. Everything else is just advertising. The ancient prophets were the ones who could speak truth to the monarchy, to the priesthood, and to the marketplace, especially when they didn’t want to hear it. We don’t have many prophetic preachers in our day but even worse, we don’t have many prophetic congregations that are willing to stand up to a culture that has lost its way. As the old proverb goes, only dead fish always swim with the current!
Climate change is not merely a matter of either science or politics. Wealthy people don’t tend to live in mobile home parks, after all, so the stronger hurricanes and tornadoes have a direct impact on those who are forced by economics to live in the least substantial housing. We must do more than open our hearts and wallets to participate in relief efforts. We need to “go upstream and see who keeps throwing all of these poor people into the river.”
It is not hyperbole to say that our election on Tuesday is probably the most important election in our life times. In fact, it is entirely possible that this could turn out to be the last free election held in the United States if the anti-democracy wing of the Republican Party gain the reigns of power. We have been subjected to increasingly insane political lies during the campaign as Donald Trump and JD Vance attempt to use fear to motivate voters. We can only hope that voters who are able to think their way through the propaganda to a reasoned decision will show up at the polls in larger numbers.
In light of the recent assassination attempts against Donald Trump, in which the infamous AR-15 assault style rife was used, it seems like a good time to raise the issue of passing much needed gun reform legislation. The majority of Americans want sensible gun laws passed and yet we keep re-electing politicians who refuse to give us what we want. What about this – what if we stopped voting for candidates who won’t do what we want and started voting for candidates who will?
We have arrived at the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the war drags on and even threatens to escalate. The Israeli response has, for many, overshadowed the horror of the original attack. The world is asked to witness a problem with no evident solutions, endlessly debating who is to blame while hostages, at least the few who have survived, continue to be daily raped, tortured, beaten, starved, and held in inhumane circumstances. What now?
We cannot feign surprise at the outrageous and hypocritical misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris, but isn't it a shame that we are still having to fight this fight in 2024? Women have fought for a place at the table in law schools, medical schools, and in America's pulpits with a great deal more success than they have had in executive and legislative politics. Since this is clearly not because of some inherent deficit in leadership skills, what else can we call it but the fear that weak men have of strong, competent women?
When Louisiana's new governor, Jeff Landry, signed an order that every state classroom from Kindergarten through university classrooms would have to post a poster sized copy of the Ten Commandments, you probably heard a voice in your head saying, "What an idiot." But what if he wasn't just trying to make culture war news and appeal to his base of conservative voters. What if he is, in fact, cueing up the Supreme Court for their next unbelievable reversal of settled law. Anyone else feeling that "Here we go again," feeling?
All of the world’s religions promote compassion towards the poor as a central spiritual value. However, it should be noted that the world’s major religions all were born in times of great scarcity of resources. It was impossible to prevent poverty because there simply was not enough resources to lift everyone up to a decent standard of living. However, in the modern world, scarcity is not the issue. Our problem is an economic system that allows for the hoarding of resources in the hands of a few super rich individuals whose wealth is the real source of poverty in our time. Capitalism which has fueled innovation and inspired people to be productive, if left without guard rails, will lead to a kind of social cannibalism that none of us would want to tolerate. We have to be willing to use capitalism to create wealth rather than allowing unrestrained greed to let capitalism create poverty.
“Why do the innocent suffer? And can we consider as well how many who are clearly victims are also unconsciously coconspirators in their abuse? Just as Bob Marley sang, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds,” we all must consider the ways in which we have failed to take responsibility to allowing or even empowering those who have caused us pain. We should have tons of compassion for all of those who suffer unjustly, but it is also important for us to become aware of the chains that have kept us in a toxic situation.
In the hope that Donald Trump will win the November election, the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, has composed a huge book of plans and resumes to transform our government called the 2025 Project. It is 900 pages long and too much for any one news show or religious podcast to treat comprehensively but this message attempts to take a pastoral view of the changes this powerful minority would like to impose on the USA. This may serve as a good introduction to your own study of the issues.
What makes some topics controversial is because you can make a rational defense of either side of the issue. For example, you can mount logical arguments in favor of either socialism or capitalism but you cannot have a reasonable debate about whether the Earth is round or flat.
Unfortunately, we often fail to have the needed rational debates that help us to grow and learn because we have become afraid of the kind of divisive fighting that crops up around subjects for which there really isn't a logical debate.
We need to have more conversations that bring light into the world and fewer that just create heat.
The news has been uncommonly full of conversations about who lied and about what. Hunter Biden lied on his application to buy a hand gun. Michael Cohen lied about lots of things, specifically around the hush money payment made to an adult film actress to remain silent about her sexual encounter with Donald Trump. But it goes a lot deeper than that, with rampant conspiracy theories and obviously false narratives created to gain political sympathy or to provide political cover. Isn't it about time that we reaffirmed that honesty is a virtue and that lying is wrong?
The gloves are off, at least in the left leaning media, as we now hear the Trump base regularly being referred to as a "cult." That's strong language that should not be used lightly but does the "shoe fit?" This message asks us to consider the diagnostic criteria for identifying any movement as a cult and to apply these criteria to ourselves.
Most progressive church goers have been exposed to academic criticism of the New Testament, especially as concerns the nature of the historical Jesus. After all, the Jesus Seminar has been around for 40 years, giving us those wonderful books by Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong, and Jon Dominic Crossan. Still, I have marveled at how church members can leave a brilliant lecture about the historical Jesus and in minutes, default to a kind of 4th century creedal set of beliefs about Jesus. This message attempts to challenge us to critically interrogate the image of Jesus we carry around in our heads.
When we watch a movie like Star Wars, we immediately know that it is fiction. No one tries to hitch a ride on the Millennium Falcon or tries to order a working light saber from Amazon. Sadly, however, many modern religious people read biblical myths as if talking with a snake in the Garden of Eden or following Moses through a divided Red Sea is something that actually happened. This sermon attempts to help us all to interrogate the myths that help us to define morality in the modern world.
Similar to the WWII generation, we are living in a time facing dramatic changes that may end up being good but which also have the potential of being catastrophically bad. As Eric Holder recently warned, there is no cavalry coming to save us. Storied institutions like the Supreme Court and the Congress have demonstrated their willingness to side with a fascist trend led by Donald Trump. We, persons of conscience and compassion, must be the cavalry the world is waiting for.
The claim that the coming election is "the most important election of our lifetime," has been sadly over used and possibly worn out to the point that people easily ignore those of us who are urgently crying "wolf" about the November 2024 election. This message attempts to state the stark reality of the risk to democracy and individual freedoms at stake in this election. Please, listen to it and share with every voter you know.
Two great periods of revivals saved the Christian religion from extinction in the United States. The Great Awakening, near the birth of our nation, and The Second Great Awakening that came along with the western expansion, the Civil War, and the end of slavery. Much of what modern American Christians think is a biblical faith is actually the echos of revivalist preaching based on a very poor reading of the writings of John Calvin.
Easter, as it has been taught to us through traditional modern sermons, is, as Bishop John Shelby Spong described it, simply "unbelievable." Stepping back from the "yippee, we're all gonna live forever" myth, this lecture tries to treat the first Easter in a historical context with a critical discussion of early Christian writing.
THIS IS NOT NORMAL! Cultural values we worked hard to correct over the past century are slipping back into what is being allowed to become normative language, thinking, and voting. North Carolina's GOP nominated candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, who enjoyed more than 60% of the vote in the primary, has publicly denied the holocaust, insisted that the Nazis were "not that bad," is opposed to women's right to vote, to LGBT+ rights, and he even insists that the Sandy Hook School shootings were a hoax. This man is currently the lt. governor of NC and is tied for the governor's election in November. America, we have to push back on these ideas and make certain that it is clear that theses are not acceptable cultural values and that for the sane among us, this simply is not normal!
The sad news of Alexey Navalny's death in prison brings to mind many who have chosen personal sacrifice as a way to raise awareness in the public's mind or to confront the evils of governments through the centuries. Navalny takes his place along side the likes of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and others whose names remain written on our hearts. There is a kind of suffering that can be redemptive. We might wish that such sacrifices were unnecessary but, alas, they almost always are.
32 of the 33 developed nations in the world have universal healthcare. Why is the United States the only outlier? We spend more on healthcare than any of the other nations, why can't we get the distribution system to be more fair? We also have between five and ten times as many of our citizens in prison, than any of those other developed nations. Why have we not managed to address the roots of poverty (which is what causes most crime) as those other nations have?
Obviously, it is some combination of heartlessness and greed of a very short sighted sort. Our country needs to wake up to some very obvious economic and social facts. And while we are at it, let's also consider supporting the news and educational sources that help us to see the world with new eyes.
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Men and sometimes women confuse anger with a show of strength, or of being courageous when, in most cases, anger is simply a product of being afraid. As we try to understand the dangerous divisions within our American population, I think that we need to give careful consideration to the role of grievance, of irrational anger fueled by a paranoid level of fear. Fear of immigrants, loss of white privilege, and Evangelical influence in society is largely ephemeral but the consequences but a move towards the fascist right has dire implications that should be alarming to all of us. Fear leads voters to make bad decisions. In 2024 we need to vote intelligently and not irrationally.
For many congregations, the Bible is still the church's book but not many progressives find scripture to be either authoritative or even relevant in their lives. We have lost an anchor in our lives when we give up on sacred texts but the church of the 21st century has to find its truth to less clearly identified but indisputably more reliable sources.
The prophetic church has always advocated for human rights, civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and has opposed the forces that create poverty, war, illness, and racism. As fascist language keeps rising in our current political environment, the prophetic church must find its voice again; before it is too late.
Time is not a material thing. Our units of time actually measure movement, i.e. if there was no movement the concept of time would be meaningless. Talk about going back in time is not merely science fiction, it is, in fact, more a matter of fantasy, of imagination disengaged from reality. Understanding science is increasingly important but to move forward intellectually we have to accept that simply saying "it pleases me to believe in delusions" is not helpful.
Americans have fewer annual vacation days than any other western government and more than that, we tend to tie retirement and healthcare to our employment. So, out of fear and anxiety, we work more than almost any other nation and yet have millions without healthcare, income, or housing. Our world obviously needs our involvement and action but it also needs for us to step back from the fire and gain perspective, insight, wisdom, and peace. Take a break. Enjoy the holiday. Then come back smarter and stronger to save democracy!
The war in Ukraine shows no signs of coming to an end and now the war in Gaza is escalating to an unthinkable death toll and seems only to get worse daily. What are we to make of these tragic wars that remind us so much of the way that WWII started? And as Americans, since our tax dollars and military hardware are deeply involved in both wars, what are we to say within this democracy that is supposed to care what we think?
The United States has perpetuated compromises in our constitution which were originally written to give slave holding states assurances that the institution of slavery would not be immediately wiped out by larger and more populous industrial states. What gave some citizens a larger voice in managing our government at the end of the 18th century has become a choke collar in the 21stcentury, taking away the voice of the poor, minorities, and immigrant communities who tend to live in major cities in more populated states. It is a bit complicated but it deserves our attention as we prepare for what may be the most important presidential election in our lifetimes.
The familiar image of Lady Justice, blindfolded, holding up balanced scales in one hand and a sword in the other (a little frightening if she can’t see) suggests our desire that we will be a nation of laws and that there is only one standard of justice in the nation. We hope that the rich and the poor, people of all races, nations of origin, and public status will be treated the same in our courts. However, we know that is not how it really works. We have a goal of equal justice in mind but our execution of it seems to come and go in unreliable ways. The way the children of our two most recent presidents are being treated is a case in point.
Most of us have given an uncommon amount of time and energy to the news in the past weeks as Israel mounts a military response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks launched by Hamas. Just as the USA did after 9-11, it is only human to want to strike back against such a horrible act of war with an overpowering military response. But Hamas is like Isis, they are more of an ideology of hate than they are an army or even a political party. Trying to fight an abhorrent idea always ends up killing more innocent people than prophets of terror. However the world moves on past Oct. 7, it must involve both political changes in Israel, and human rights changes in Palestine.
Does our support for Ukraine in their defensive war against Russia’s invasion qualify as a “just war?” Thomas Aquinas insisted that for a war to be just it must be conducted by a sovereign government, and the war must be for a just cause, and it must be fought by soldiers who fight to accomplish something that is good. Of course, innocent people die in all wars and no army is comprised of entirely noble soldiers, so war crimes will be committed by all nation’s armies in some instances. When is the cost of supporting Ukraine too much for the stated goals in defeating Russia?
Church attendance, especially among progressives is in decline, and financial support of these struggling congregations is going down even faster. Do we have a way of forming spiritual communities without churches, pastors, and budgets or do we need to redouble our efforts to save the ones we still have?
More than a year away from the next presidential election, it appears that we may have the same candidates that we had in 2020, in spite of multiple criminal charges against Donald Trump that range from insurrection to theft of nuclear secrets and classified documents. Why are his supporters so loyal when he doesn't seem to feel any obligation to be honest with them? Could we be looking at a cult of voters who are willing to undermine democracy and individual freedom to assuage the ego of their "dear leader?"
Today is my last sermon as co-pastor and so, this week, I’ve been looking back as a way of looking forward, thinking about and learning from the years we’ve spent together. I am grateful for all the ways that our community has helped transform the stories that dominate our society and to turn it around: offering kindness instead of condemnation, and justice instead of a tired resignation to the way things are. Our banners boldly remind us that we will not stand idly by, that we can make a difference, and that our own, very earthly voices can call one another to a more beautiful and just and altogether wonderful way of life. Thank you!
While shame and humiliation are part of the human experience, we should not promote them or build our communities and movements around them. Instead, let’s focus on becoming places where we learn to care for ourselves and one another, with healing for when we hurt and celebration for when we thrive. Wisdom and compassion as a “way of knowing” will serve us better for creating social norms and communities where we can learn to take care of our personal and collective well-being; where we can be and feel safe; and where we can nourish our creativity and joy.
The suicide of a 40 year old scientist (and athlete and musician) raises two crucial issues with modern day America. 1) While we have possibly the most advanced medical science in the world, our distribution of health care and our priorities in research are based on profit and not health and that is killing us. 2) The government (and the police) insert themselves into an individual's choice to end their own life when they have no prospect of living meaningfully, which forces them to not discuss their decision with family, friends, or professionals. These are problems that we can solve.
The authors of America's Declaration of Independence acknowledged that people seem to be willing to suffer the abuses of their government until such time that the liberties the government gives to itself become unbearable. With the loss of voter protection, the license given to corporations to make political donations (bribes), taking away affirmative action, women's right to manage their own reproductive lives, and the open threat to the civil rights of gay, lesbian, and trans folks, isn't it time for meaningful and sustained protest to demand reform, especially in our Supreme Court?
Anyone actively involved in trying to make the world a better place has felt the pressures to push past our limitations, abandon boundaries, and sacrifice our well-being and aspirations in the name of a cause. While it is true that sometimes we may strategically and intentionally place our needs to the side to deal with a crisis, it is not sustainable or healthy to do so over the long-term – for ourselves or our movements. Jo Musker-Sherwood called this commitment to knowing and honoring our boundaries a “humble return to the natural rhythm of giving and receiving, of action and rest, that we can find healing personally and globally.” That return is an empowering, joyful, and hopeful invitation that I hope to encourage all of us to embrace.
Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, and our very cell phones themselves have shortened our attention span to the point that we hard know how to talk to one another anymore and even worse, it seems that we are nearly incapable of listening to someone. We can never understand another person, especially not someone we are inclined to avoid or reject, unless we are willing to actively, patiently, and sincerely listen to them long enough for them to feel heard and for us to understand them, even if we still disagree. As Paul Tillich said, the first obligation of love is to listen.
We often reflect on how economic and social disparities are symptoms of an unhealthy society, associated with environmental degradation, poverty, violence, and oppression. However, we continue to hurtle headlong toward ever-increasing disparities. Examining the rise and role of consumerism can help us understand some of the reasons why this is so, and what we can do to encourage change.
Following up on my reflections in June, I share some of the ways that lovingkindness meditation has been helpful in my own life, especially with transforming self-hatred and anger into understanding and kindness. All of us who are committed to continually growing into compassionate, wise people can benefit from having these kinds of skills and resources available to us, our communities, and our movements for justice – increasing our wellbeing now and supporting us when we need them the most.
The most popular forms of philanthropy, in giving sandwiches and sleeping bags to the unhoused or sending goats to poor farmers in Central America are symbolic gestures. Handing out free meals is not a solution to poverty and sending goats to Central America rarely has the intended effect. (The goats I sent to Nicaragua a few years ago ended up eating all of the neighbors’ vegetable gardens and nearly started a village war!) But these gestures can be seen at teaching opportunities that help us to grow the kind of conscience the world needs to find the real solutions that can help to make serious inroads into environmental sanity and economic justice.
This part 1 of a two-part series on philanthropy. Today we consider the ways that charitable foundations can be twisted into being tax loopholes for the super-rich while still allowing the wealthy to use 95% of the foundation’s holdings to invest in stocks that profit them personally. Part 2 will be about the benefits of philanthropy which can be huge, but the downside of our tax structure that punishes people for being poor and rewards people for being rich deserves our attention.
We get lots of cultural signals that our personal worth goes down with each birthday. Many feel pressured to choose extreme measures to deny the reality of the passing of time, but rather than grieving over what age takes away from us, maybe we can spend some time considering what gifts can come with old age? The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, praised the advantages of getting older, especially in making a hard exit from the ego driven competition of our younger years. We can be liberated in our senior years to enjoy a more whole life that is free of the anxiety we may feel about such things as appearance and focus more on wisdom.
Week after week, we turn our attention to injustice, violence, and oppression, so that we can encourage one another to not stand idly by. But as we face all this suffering, there is also that nagging question: How can we humans be so wonderful and horrible at the same time? So generous and compassionate on the one hand and so cruel and violent on the other? By reflecting on our own experiences and listening to the emerging research on violence and empathy, we can make decisions that build resources, cultivate community, and help make wellbeing, in ourselves and in society, available to all.
In May, the Biden Administration announced a new border plan, which turns out to be more of the same, including recycling failed and dangerous policies. Even Federal asylum officers have called the new plan “inconsistent with the asylum law enacted by Congress, the treaties the United States has ratified, and our country’s moral fabric and longstanding tradition of providing safe haven to the persecuted.” We must continue to speak out against continued abuses and injustices against migrants, and to act in ways that embody and insist on the humanity, safety, and wellbeing of all – including and especially vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees.
Our deeply divided nation will not become unified by learning to either deny or accept the racism and prejudice that is inherent in American culture. We should be kind and patient but we must not fail to be honest and factual about our history of institutional racism and religious prejudice and to chart a higher path towards unity by dispelling the scourge of our irrational hatreds and fears.
Humanity’s collective hubris has led us to the edge of catastrophe, as we have collectively ignored the reality of climate change and wreaked destruction on the environment for decades and centuries. Yet not all is lost. We have the science, data, technology, and practices we need to nourish cultures and communities where this kind of hubris, whether dumping contaminants into groundwater or pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is avoided as much as possible, and recognized, healed, and transformed whenever it does arise. Together, we must take steps to create cultures and systems where this care becomes the norm.
t is Mother's Day but rather than deliver a solipsistic sermon in praise of mothers, I am going to talk about influential female mentors who never gave birth. This is a personal message, naming the wise women who guided me in hope that you will remember the childless mothers in your life.
I can’t copy it all here but I encourage you to look up and read this poem:
An Ode to Childless Mothers by Natasha Sanders
With the release of the final section of the IPCC’s sixth report last month, humans are without excuse. There is no time left to value short-term profits over long term health. It took billions of years for all this earthly beauty to blossom, a vibrant and interconnected web of living and dying. If humanity is to have a future here, it is imperative that we notice, listen, and act – now.
Without absolutes, without a God given set of rules in holy writ or a supernatural theistic judge in the clouds, how do we determine right from wrong or even sensibly talk about what it means to be good? Are these arbitrary value judgements in a toothless religious debate? Progressives tend to elevate the value of compassion as a primary spiritual attribute. As you might guess, conservatives and progressives don’t always agree!
In the ancient Persian slave ghetto, Zoroastrian religion evolved an expression of ethics and eternity that influenced what became modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Their succinct description of how to be a good person was the three fold injunction to think good thought, speak good words, and do good actions. I tell my world religion students that this has hardly been improved upon over the centuries but now, in 2023, I am forced to wonder if many people even have being a “good person” as a goal? Dishonesty, self service, greed, all seem to be assumed to be normal conduct.
This last week, trans folks in Missouri have been living in the thick of the intentional, ongoing attacks against transgender lives. On Thursday, April 13, 2023, Missouri’s Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, issued expanded emergency regulations that effectively restrict and, in many cases, make impossible life-saving, life-giving care that many transgender and gender expansive people depend on. We are supporting each other and doing an amazing job of it. We are not giving up or backing down. But we can use and need all the community support we can get right now. Please do not stand idly.
When we begin to give up the formal, creedal faith of our youth, accepting that no religion is entirely true and no sacred text was actually written by God, many people will abandon the journey of faith entirely. But for those of us who find value in a spiritual life, we are inclined to turn away from the false certainty of formal religion and turn towards the more honest uncertainty of a mystical faith in which we accept the “isness” of God, as Meister Eckhart said, “God is a word unspoken, a thought not thought, a belief unbelieved.” For those of us raised in a formal church, the mental prison of belief is hard to leave behind . . . especially for the clergy!
Walter Brueggemann posed the challenge of Easter as deciding to be “a part of the Easter movement of civil disobedience that contradicts the empire,” to “see if life is longer than death.” Each day, we face a litany of suffering born of oppression, mirroring the crucifixion, that we must match with the determination to keep going, mirroring the resurrection. In the face of injustice, we insist on creating just, joyful, equitable communities. At Easter, we repeat these stories in order to remember the choices we make between “empire death and Easter life,” to make our hells into healing, and rise again.
This is Palm Sunday so I am going to take my speaking time this week to demythologize the gospel narrative a bit. Judas was not a historical character. Mark created a literary fiction and named him Judas, which is spelled "Judah" in Greek, and means "Jew." Judas represented the faith community, nation, and family of Jesus. Mark set's the execution in a passion narrative in which Jesus is betrayed by his family, his faith community, his friends, his nation . . . and haven't we all been there? The passion narrative is not a historical piece about what happened way back when but it is an "everyman" story about surviving betrayal
Not many of us got to enjoy the luxury of growing up in a "woke" environment. A great deal of growing us has involved overcoming the prejudices and too comfortable peace we had with the status quo. Being progressive often means that we are giving ourselves to give voice to our own stories, detailing how and why we felt compelled to change. We can be grateful for a lot of our family of origin and the religious community in which we grew up, but we are under no obligation to deny or hide the skeletons in the closet.
Elsa Tamez wrote that “The situation of oppression and pain tends to make people feel depressed, to dehumanize them, to destroy not only their bodies but also their spirit, to make them see their oppression as normal and natural.” These words will be recognizable to anyone who belongs to a marginalized community. Unmasking the lie that change is not only impossible, it is unnatural, we are called to respond with a praxis grounded in our values. We connect patience with resistance and integrity with solidarity, so that we can more intentionally participate in the personal and collective healing and growing we need.
2023 has been unprecedented in the barrage of attacks on gender and sexuality minorities by both public commentators and lawmakers across the USA. From calls to “eradicate transgenderism” to the continued insistence to “Don’t Say Gay,” we are witnessing a cultural and legislative movement that specifically aims to make it more difficult for LGBTQIA2s+ folks to be safe, access basic care and protective rights, and joyfully live out our beautiful, human lives.
Time Magazine’s choice of the women of Iran as their heroes of the year for 2022 is a fitting tribute to the courage and sacrifice necessary to incite a serious reformation within Islam. Adherents often say that Islam is a religion of peace and it certain can be that and is that for most Muslims but in nations with conservative Islamic regimes, the truth can be anything but peace. The women of Iran are an inspiration to all of us who hope for liberty and equality.
It has always been true that Covid-19 presented a greater threat to the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions but in this time that so many people insist on calling "post covid" we are still losing 300 people a day to Covid and most of them are over 65, and the majority of them have been vaccinated. Our indifference towards the death of the aged reflects the veneration of youth in our culture and the devaluation of the lives of senior citizens. Being dismissive of the threat Covid represents to the elderly is a mistake we need to consider, especially considering the contributions made to our world by those who are no longer "hot."
For many of us, society is not a safe place to exist, and we lack the supports and resources we need to thrive as human beings. Yet even when we enter into movements and spaces dedicated to working for social justice, activism fatigue and burnout take their toll. Can we practice in such a way that kindness leads to confidence, compassion and wisdom create safety, and a trustworthy community helps us remain open to change?
Many societies, including American society, have made mindless consumption a way of life. Not having clear paths for working with suffering in skillful ways, we are encouraged at every turn to merely cope, while our core social issues are often left unhealed and untransformed. Spiritual and reflective practices offer a way for us to cultivate insight, let go of habits that harm, make healthy choices that heal and make us happy, and build cultures and communities where we can continually move from mindless consumption to grateful contentment.
The beginning of Black History Month has been already crowded with new entries in our long history of violence and inequality. Yet even while we mourn, honoring the grief and rage of the recent murder of Tyre Nichols, officials in power have been quick to remind everyone that protests must be “peaceful and nonviolent” and that there is a “right way” to protest. However, people’s anger and grief at injustice is not the root problem. What is “out of hand” is a system that depends on police brutality and systemic racism. And the best way to prevent violent protests is to create a just, equitable, compassionate society.
We spend a lot of time focused on understanding and transforming social norms that bring about injustice, oppression, and violence. But we also know that it is just as important to hold that awareness of our capacity for injustice alongside an awareness of our capacity for cooperative, kind relationships. We use the wisdom of both to learn how to establish wellbeing in ourselves and healthy relationships with others. Reflecting on the Buddha’s teachings on “The Bonds of Fellowship” is one way to remind ourselves how important it is to practice healthy community, and some simple pathways to do so.
Last weekend, we carried an awareness of the grieving communities in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California. Then, on Monday, two high school students were shot and killed at a charter school in Des Moines, Iowa in an apparent feud between rival gangs. Three days, three shootings, three settings: community dance center, workplace, and school. As a nation, we hold space, tending these open wounds, these seemingly unending cycles of violence. And we are back to that question: What is it about our society that so effectively waters the seeds of violence in us?
Last week, the completely terrifying and avoidable tragedy of Larry Eugene Price’s 2021 death in an Arkansas jail came to light. As shocking as his story is, the painful reality is that we have managed to create a society where these kinds of tragedies happen with horrific regularity. The settings change: prisons, hospitals, schools, workplaces, religious institutions, homes. The relationships between the inequities and oppressive systems shift emphasis: race, gender, class and poverty, disability, age, sexuality, and more. And each person’s story is unique, but these experiences also form a pattern. Understanding those patterns, and transforming them into action, is the continual responsibility for all communities of resistance, so that everyone can have a chance to recover wholeness and health.
It’s easy to divide the world up into the foolish and the wise. It’s harder to take the time to really discern how our actions impact one another. We easily forget that our friendships train our minds. Whom we spend time with is also a question of how we spend our time. What activities do we do together? What do we talk about? Where do we go? The people in our lives both reflect and influence what we think is important, how we treat one another, how we understand life and the world, for good or for ill. Being intentional about community helps us create habits the help and heal, instead of harm.
We continue to face head-on the injustice in the world, because honestly engaging with that suffering is essential to change. But we also understand that this emphasis alone can be disheartening and exhausting. If we are going to have the energy to carry us through, to keep working together to help birth a beautiful, caring, and just world, then we must be equally committed to cultivating our wellbeing in the present moment. During January and February, David will be offering reflections on the Buddha’s “Discourse on Happiness,” with the hope of helping us explore ways we can encourage each other to cultivate happiness and wellbeing right now, even as we continue to engage with and transform the injustice and cruelty of the world.
New Year's resolutions can be a very meaningless exercise unless you take seriously the awareness that we really can change ourselves by conscious decision. This sermon addresses the substantive need to take personal responsibility for the path we are following.
Once you accept that the Christmas story as recorded by Matthew and Luke in the New Testament is not a reporting of history then we are left to wonder what the point of these mythical stories is. Clearly, far from the sweet manger scenes we have heard way too much about, this is an account of the government and religious leaders conspiring to murder the god-child by killing all of the babies in a region around Bethlehem. This is a story of a new hope born to the poor who lived in an occupied nation in which the state church is in an alliance with the state, either by active cooperation or through indifference. So, these are not history lessons. If we pay attention, the Christmas story is a mirror held up for us to see that we live in a country where the government locks thousands of migrant children into dog cages, sexually abusing some, torturing others, and allowing many to die while the church is largely compliant and silent. And we seriously wonder if this government might actually win election approval from poor church goers in a few months. Merry Christmas?
In many ways, religion resembles a long-running, uncontrolled social experiment on the human condition and social change. And a moment’s reflection reminds us that all cultural, including religious, systems, have been used to justify everything from the terrifying to the sublime. Dorothee Solle called this the “double function” of religion: “as apology and legitimation of the status quo and its culture of injustice on the one hand, and as a means of protest, change, and liberation on the other hand.” Discerning which is which, and acting accordingly, is essential if we want our present troubles to be birth pangs of a new world, rather than the death throes of humanity.
How you feel about hope likely depends on your own experiences and circumstances. It’s been portrayed as both salvation and delusion, and many things in between. Navigating hope and hopelessness, grief and despair, rest and apathy, action and futility, is something of a craft and an art. It is also why the words don’t always fit, because we are often at different places on this messy spectrum of grieving, healing, acting, or giving up. What is it that keeps us from giving up, giving in, or standing idly by while honestly facing the devastating challenges of the day?
The congress of leaders of world religions, meeting in September, drafted a resolution trying to imagine the ways in which spiritual communities might become part of the solution to the crisis of a world that is literally "tumbling" out of order. With the threat of modern wars, the potential of nuclear disaster, the collapse of the environment, and the growing refugee crisis, the traditional religions which have too often been a part of the problem must now undergo a substantive revolution themselves if they are to be a part of the solution.
The holidays call for family reunions for both happy and healthy families as well as families who find these times together to be emotionally difficult. We have a right to be honest about both our family's strengths and weaknesses. We have a right to tell our own stories, even if the story turns out to be horrific. We can all choose to work towards more healthy and more loving family connections as we also choose to pass the good stuff onto our kids while sparing them some of negative baggage of our family history.
Human Rights Watch recently observed that “The US is the only UN member country that has not ratified the international treaty on children’s rights. Most people might think this isn’t such a big deal because the US is good to children. But it turns out we aren’t and our state laws don’t help.” Today’s anniversary of adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is an opportune moment to reflect on some of the reasons why the US has resisted ratifying the Convention, the cruel realities still faced by many of our children, and the importance of cultural transformation in opening up a way where children’s rights, dignity, and humanity are finally honored.
In 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated a row of trees and grieved that they had been cut down. His grief expanded from those trees to the hubris of humanity, elegantly and painfully describing how quickly we alter the living world of which we are a part – often to its (and our own) devastation. Though our worlds are different, his voice remains relevant in a society dominated by the violent accumulation of wealth and power. We must continually turn to voices and cultures that remind us that care must be taken, and will be taken, if we are to enjoy living in societies that support the wellbeing and joy of all their members.
The trend started years before the pandemic, before, even, the traumatic divisions caused by the Trump administration. Sociologists are doing verbal gymnastics trying to explain why making and keeping friends has become so difficult in this era. Maybe it is partisan politics, maybe it is just too much self-revelation on social media, and maybe even it is the break down of the mainstream churches or the trend towards working remotely but whatever the cause, it surely isn't something about which we should be passive. In a world in which close friendships are increasingly rare, we should all realize that we are not merely passive passengers in this train of anti-social change. Let's pause to think about what we have lost and endeavor to become the kind of people who are deserving of the trust and depth of character that makes friendship possible.
Of course, we would all like to end the partisan bickering in Congress as well as around our own family dinner tables! But at what price? When are we reaching a healthy compromise and when are we just surrendering, giving away our closely held values and beliefs? Peace, without justice, is really just surrender.
In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer, Jesus warns of the dangers of contempt. Yet this hasn’t stopped us from finding ways and excuses to label people as contemptible and treat them with contempt, often using that contempt to control and hurt one another. Jesus’ story invites us to observe how easily we fall into this trap and get caught. Reflecting in this way, we begin to understand how the Pharisee’s contempt was an obstacle to his ability to be part of the change, and the tax collector’s humility was the open door to transformation.
Jesus’ parable of the persistent widow still hits close to home: a world where those in need are ignored by those in power, where those in power are unjust, and where the marginalized and oppressed must wear themselves out just to be heard. In a world like this, we recognize the struggle: how do we “break the mold” of the normal, everyday ways we are conditioned to accommodate injustice, creating little opportunities for change to take root, without losing heart?
We often talk about violence as a last resort, even while our society increasingly relies on violence as the first and most trustworthy solution. But this wholehearted commitment to violence as a solution has come at a steep price – the failure to invest in our personal and social wellbeing. Even if we believe that violence is sometimes necessary, or inevitable, we all benefit from moving as much as possible from harming to healing, and from coercion to connection. The work of this moment is to increasingly learn better ways to parent, teach, practice religion, do business, organize society, and treat one another that rely less on violence and coercion, and more on equity and goodwill.
The FCC's Fairness Doctrine that required honesty and full disclosure in TV and radio news was removed thirty-five years ago, making way for the advent of 24 hour news programs and talk radio filled with propaganda, distortion, and entertainment that tries to pass for news. Intentional or not, the profit motive influences the content of news programs, leaving the public uninformed about important issues and seething about the inconsequential or the just plain false conspiracy theories of the day. The prophetic pulpit, then, has a larger responsibility to inform and to challenge our modern society.
During the pandemic, we’ve witnessed a mass exodus of people, especially women, from the workforce, returning and staying home as caregivers to the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled. It’s another instance of exposing the USA’s lack of infrastructure and policy to support this most basic of social functions. At the same time, caregiving jobs are often among the most labor-intensive and lowest paid. Time and again, our society has demonstrated how little we value caregiving, a trend rooted in racist, sexist, and ableist norms. With greater awareness of these limitations and their impacts, we can begin to ask: What might a society look like that reorients itself around supporting and valuing the giving and receiving of care?
Chapter 16 of the Gospel of Luke contains what has been called one of Jesus’ “strangest parables,” a tale of a rich man with a clever manager, who wiggles his way out of economic and social ruin. Rather than speeding by the economic aspects of this story, we can use it as an opportunity to both better understand how debt and economic justice often go hand in hand (then and now) and better act to create societies where people’s lives are valued for their humanity, and not for their potential to be exploited for profit.
On this 21st anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks, we pause to consider the story of one detainee from our prison in Guantanamo Bay, Mansoor Adayfi. He was just a teenager, a Yemeni far from home in the wrong place at the wrong time and was sold by Afghanis to the American soldiers who were looking for al Qaeda terrorists. Mansoor was innocent but he was none-the-less held prisoner and tortured nearly to death for 14 years. He serves as an example of how a fear-based war on terror turned America into terrorists.
Labor Day is a compromise holiday in America because we didn’t want to honor labor on the first day of May, May Day, as it is observed all over the rest of the world. May Day, some of our early 20th century presidents and capitalists believed, was too closely associated with Communism and Socialism and we never wanted to be a part of that. America wants to honor laborers, they just never really wanted to pay them very much. Somehow, in the richest country in the world, we still can’t figure out how to honor labor by paying workers a living wage and until we can do that, we will continue to stand on the verge of class warfare.
LA Progressive article mentioned at 14:50: https://www.laprogressive.com/ economic-equality/the-economic-policy-façade
Black churches have traditionally talked about civil rights and organized voter events like Sunday voting bus trips called "Souls to the Polls." But do predominantly white churches talk about voters' rights? Now that many states are eliminating polling places in minority neighborhoods, ending Sunday early voting, discouraging mail-in voting, and adding onerous ID requirements to vote, shouldn't all churches be concerned about the growing influence of institutional racism? Maybe it is time for us to pause and reconsider what we mean by "salvation" if we are passively watching people having their human rights taken from them?
While we have watched news reports about Brittany Griner's trial in Russia with shock and horror, similarly insane court proceedings have taken place in our own country. The Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v Wade came at the same time of another decision that would have commanded public attention if it had not been for the furor over the abortion case. Early in May, in a decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the state of Arizona was given permission to execute Barry Jones, after it had been proven in court that he was innocent of the murder charge for which he has been on death row for 27 years. Thomas wrote that mere innocence is not enough to prevent the state of Arizona from carrying out the death penalty against Jones. We do not have a justice system. We have a legal system and that system sometimes becomes the enemy of justice which is not acceptable when it happens in Russia but it is even more unacceptable in the USA.
The world is witness that gun violence does not have to be the norm. But until the United States is willing to reckon with the deep structure and enduring legacy of our own gun culture, we will not escape it. Gratefully, for all of us who long for healing, and the peace that comes from belonging to a place without the constant threat of violence and death, we have a way forward.
In 2013, an Italian programmer named Alberto Brandolini observed that - "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it." It became known as Brandolini’s law, although it is an astute observation rather than a scientific conclusion. Unfortunately, we’ve had nearly a decade to observe just how often this is true, with the flowering of conspiracy theories and proliferation of disinformation all around us. Though the situation is daunting, with a better understanding of why humans are so susceptible to conspiracy theories, we can chart a way forward.
Philosophy and Religion departments in universities, once considered to be the "queen" of a college campus, are now being relegated to subheadings in either History or Anthropology departments, treated more like a scourge than a source of wisdom and guidance. The failings of organized religion cannot be denied but maybe we are being a bit hasty about this transformation. There is, after all, more to life than work and mindless entertainment.
Many of us like to say that we are “spiritual but not religious,” but what does that mean? As church attendance of all sorts is in steep decline, what exactly are we turning away from and what, if anything at all, are we turning to?
Is there a way to hold onto spirituality and still try to remain in community of some sort?
All over Europe there are memorial stones set in streets where the victims of the Holocaust once lived. These scattered memorials serve as reminders of the moral failure of the Nazis and their many sympathizers. In the USA, we have been more inclined to memorialize Confederate military leaders than to acknowledge the evils of slavery they sought to protect. The resistance to teaching a factual American history to young students about our nation’s moral failings leaves us vulnerable to making the same mistakes again. In fact, in many ways, we already are.
We are all connected to one another. We may not insist that our neighbors to the south use child labor to produce our fruits and vegetables in our grocery stores but, if they don’t keep the prices down, we won’t buy them. Our casual daily choices in which we are legally simply exercising our rights, has an impact on others that we often do not see. Still, our choices to do legal things, like buying an assault rifle or a handgun, choosing not to be vaccinated, or not to take public health precautions seriously, is why we have so many gun deaths in America, why we have lost over a million Americans to Covid-19, and why most of the people in rural Central America are still very poor. Hopefully, becoming aware can change our attitudes and eventually, our behaviors, so that the outcomes will eventually change as well.
Given the decisions handed down by an increasingly out of touch Supreme Court, today's message will be a reading of an article Dr. Ray has written for the July 4th edition of the LA Progressive outlining some of the philosophical challenges surrounding the court's decision to strike down Roe v Wade and the suggestion that they may go even farther in taking constitutional rights away from American citizens.
Victor Frankl, reflecting on his own suffering in Auschwitz, said that the extremities of the concentration camp revealed the true selves of his fellow prisoners. Some became saintly in their self sacrifice and acts of compassion, while others became moral monsters, turning on one another in their desperate desire to survive. In our current hard times with the rise of fascism around the world as well as in the United States, many are still simply seeking diversion rather than engagement but it is time for those who have the potential to be saints to rise from their slumbers and to act for the good of refugees from Ukraine, women of child bearing years in the USA, as well as the children in our schools being taught to hide from “active shooters” in their schools.
It may be true, as suggested in a recent Atlantic article, that America has been uniquely stupid over the past decade and our gathering cloud of ignorance is largely due to our over exposure to partisan news sources and the scourge of the internet, with its unfiltered social media. How can we, as Soren Kierkegaard suggested 150 years ago, become less concerned with freedom of speech and more concerned with freedom of thought?
More than three months into the unconscionable invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the international community is still wringing its hands, asking themselves, “How can we survive without oil and gas from Russia,” while the purchase of Russian oil funds Putin’s terrorist military campaign against the Ukraine, destabilizing the entire world’s markets, and threating several regions of the world with food shortages. Why can’t we stop the Russian armies from this rampage of rape, torture, murder, and destruction of cities? Because we have failed to take seriously the need to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable wind and solar energy sources. We should have done it for environmental reasons years ago but now we are faced with the fact that the market in fossil fuels provides almost all of the funding of terrorism everywhere in the world. We need to stop funding global bad players and, incidentally, save the planet from environmental collapse at the same time!
Our culture often speaks out of both sides of its mouth, acknowledging in popular proverbs that “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” or, as my homiletics professor often said, “the mortality rate is 100%” while still commonly insisting that we all have a certainty of life after death (either in reward or punishment). Progressives began to be dismissive of the belief in a burning hell but, for the most part, have held onto the security blanket of belief in a wonderful eternal existence after death. The sad fact is that there is no evidence to support this belief and it amounts to a denigration of the value of the only life that we actually know that we have. Perhaps it is time for spiritual communities to accept mortality as a fact and stop trying to push our hopes off into an imaginary future.
Why are mass murders so common in the USA and so rare among our global peers? Every other western democracy has managed to regulate guns effectively but the Republican led effort to protect the gun industry from any meaningful regulation has resulted in literally selling the lives of people attending religious services, buying groceries, attending a music festival, or just going to a public school in exchange for political donations. This is evil on a scale that defies any further attempt at diplomatic conversation. Now, it is absolutely necessary to reject the Republican Party as a legitimate American political party. They have sacrificed themselves on the altar of greed for power.
The leaked Supreme Court document concerning Roe v Wade has confirmed our worst fears since the appointment of the last three justices to the court, all of whom were chosen specifically for their anti-abortion views. But perhaps this is not the time to begin to rehearse the arguments we have been repeating for the past fifty years. Maybe it is time for us to take action to change the kinds of people we elect and appoint to powerful decision making positions. We cannot continue to lend tacit political support to politicians who have shown us that they do not believe in civil rights or even in democracy.
I stumbled upon the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh in 2005, at a time in life when I was struggling to hold together my own social activism and spiritual practices. It is a custom to offer reflections of gratitude for a Buddhist teacher on the 100-day commemoration of their death. May 1 marked this continuation for the Most Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, and this is my belated offering of gratitude.
Pt 1: The leaked Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade is not exactly surprising, but it is terrifying news for millions of people. Yet even as we process the shock, we need to reconnect with our commitments to act in ways that bring social and economic justice, including reproductive justice.
Pt 2: Estrangement and isolation are the everyday reality for huge numbers of Americans, weighing us down with both grief and a “sense of incompleteness.” It has also made it challenging to know when and how to trust, and when and how to distrust, in healthy ways. The spectrum of trust is a simple conflict tool that can help us strengthen the positive aspects of our relationships, work on weaknesses and places that need healing, and maintain healthy boundaries.
It’s May Day, so let’s look at the present status of labor rights and celebrate working class history, as well as the recent successes of union organizers in unfriendly places! But let’s also do more - we can all contribute to the process of creating and sustaining a movement for true change in the direction of economic and social justice.
Islam is the youngest of the major world religions and yet its extremist factions are the most wedded to a violent and oppressive form of a religion that Muhammad would not recognize and which none of us should be willing to tolerate in modern civilization. It is a mistake to associate all of Islam with wars among Muslim factions and international terrorism but the fingerprints of official national policies in the name of Islam cannot be ignored. While all of the major religions of the world are in need of serious reform and a thorough process of demythologizing, Islam is crying out for a new and post theistic way of becoming what most Muslims say that they want, a religion of peace.
Beyond the sentimental and supernatural retellings each Easter, the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus continues to resonate with us in very human and hopeful ways. Every year - in the midst of constant wars, intractable conflicts and oppression, and ecological devastation - it invites us to ask: how can we go on? And more especially, how can we go on when the world has found a way to make things that we thought wouldn’t - couldn’t - get any worse, worse? It acknowledges the terror we feel in the wake of violent injustice, and it speaks to us of hope - a hope that comes to us, even in our weariness, and says: “Please don’t give up.”
The numbers of people interested in and practicing earth-based spiritualities has soared over the last 30 years. This has been empowering and healing for many, especially for members of oppressed communities. However, it has also brought new challenges, from the rise of pagan White supremacy to the profit-driven trend of “Spirituality for Sale.” We’ll explore these issues, as well as the (re)emergence of “Naturalistic Paganism.”
The Christian religion is the largest in the world and has been a part of the global culture for nearly two millennia. During that time, it has been used to justify wars and even genocides. Christian scriptures have been used to promote homophobia, misogyny, racism, and sectarianism. Still, the Christian faith has encouraged generosity, compassion, peace, and reconciliation. As faith in mythological and superstitious religious claims rapidly declines in the modern world, we have an urgent need to extinguish the morally reprehensible and intellectually insulting aspects of Christianity while trying to preserve its helpful moral influence in the world.
Rabindranath Tagore once wrote to a friend: “Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin… Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of [humanity] are mine.” This openness is a fitting aspiration for the pluralism that has often characterized Hinduism, the Sanatana Dharma (“eternal law/way”), over its long history. But, like all cultural and religious traditions, Hinduism has also struggled with religious nationalism and violence. Today, that violence again threatens the wellbeing of India and Hindus around the world. So against “all forms of bigotry and oppression,” from caste to Hindu supremacy, many Hindus are organizing to build a society free from hate, and free to feel that unalloyed gladness and peace.
Buddhism has been subject to the same limitations as any other cultural or religious system, including fundamentalist violence. However, various Buddhist traditions also contain important insights and practices for “learning and practicing non-attachment to views and being open to others’ experiences and insights in order to benefit from the collective wisdom.” Using the first three of “The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings” from the Plum Village tradition as a reference point and guide, we’ll explore one Buddhist pathway that helps us “transform dogmatism and violence in ourselves and the world.”
We too easily think of modern Judaism as being an ancient religion that hails from Abraham and Moses. The truth is that Judaism began as a polytheistic faith rooted in a priestly cult that practiced animal sacrifice. A religion that bears very little resemblance to what we would encounter in any modern synagogue. Religions are always fluid, changing, growing, and, frankly, they are almost always in need of review, evolution, or reform. Judaism is not exception to this rule. Especially as we consider the unique relationship between the Jewish faith and the state of Israel.
The world's major religions have roots in antiquity when historical literacy was not highly valued and when it was common to "personify" aspects of nature, turning the world into a place full of gods and spirits. In the 21st century, it is important for us to be able to demythologize all of the world's religions to mine them for moral insights and instruction while leaving behind much of the magical and mythic thinking which has led to so much prejudice and abuse.
If we want to understand the world, to be able to read current events with insight, we need to take the time to understand the history. This sounds so obvious, but it is a necessary reminder in a society that has struggled to learn how to remember and tell its history in meaningful, truthful, and transformative ways. No where is this more obvious in the US experience then in the observance of Black History Month. As LaGarrett J. King pointed out, “We can’t get Black history education right because we teach about Black history instead of through Black history.” Let’s remember why this annual focus is still necessary and our responsibility to not just study Black history, but to truly listen and learn, be changed, and change the world.
As a pastor, I have worked with veterans who were still struggling with the cost of war decades after they were discharged. As a peace worker in Cambodia, I saw the trauma of war still living in people’s hearts, influencing cultures, and scarring the land itself, decades after the official end of war. The wounds of war are deep and last a long time, unless and until we decide, as a society, to do the work to heal them. In the current situation, we have both the immediate responsibility to help bring about an end of the war in Ukraine as swiftly as possible, and a long-term responsibility to help bring about healing and rebuilding for all who have been impacted. Note: Our regularly scheduled sermon will still be posted
You can read this reflection online, including links to articles and resources: http://archives.spfccc.org/2022/02/reflections-on-russias-invasion-of.html
You can also read Dr. Ray’s earlier reflections, "Will Arms Sales Set the Stage for Ukraine?", at the LA Progressive: https://www.laprogressive.com/will-arms-sales-set-the-stage-for-ukraine/
Growing up, the way I learned Jesus’ teaching on loving my enemies was confusing and even harmful. Especially where abuse and oppression were concerned, rolling over and looking the other way could not be options. But I also understood that violence and hatred could not create a just, compassionate community. I felt the trap: fight back violently, and become like those who had harmed me, or do nothing, and allow myself and others to get hurt again and again. Encountering Walter Wink’s reinterpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, I found a way forward that empowered me to stay grounded in goodwill without giving into the demands of oppressors.
Most of us have spent our lives in communities that made it more difficult for us to thrive and flourish as human beings. And it is very likely that we have picked up on those very habits, mistreating ourselves, others, and the earth. We add to that the exhaustion that comes from suffering from, resisting, and transforming oppression, and the odds seem to be stacked against us. And yet we still carry inside of us this conviction that it is possible for us to live together in such a way that everyone can flourish, and the aspiration to make it so. When we act on that aspiration, we make space for our own well-being and keep alive the possibility of a compassionate and caring world.
As the world waits to see if a ground war is about to start between Russia and Ukraine, it seems good to give some thought to how we got to this deadly threatening point. How has the spread of nuclear weapons and NATO bases in Eastern Europe led to war always being proposed as the solution to the world’s problems. As Sting once sang, “I’ve never seen a military solution.” We have much better options and spiritual communities should never stop pointing towards the pathways to peace.
Jung suggests that the dragon, a mythological beast common to virtually all cultures, is unconsciously an archetype that reflects human potential. After all, a dragon is a snake that can fly! Spiritual people need to rise above the situational ethics that ignores moral misconduct in others that allows them to slither more than their soar! Remember, a snake doesn't have to bite you to be a snake.
Despite the insistence on being the “land of the free,” the United States is the global leader in both total number of prisoners and per capita rate of imprisonment. The prophetic vision of proclaiming release to captives and letting the oppressed go free is a good opportunity to reflect on the vision and practices of the restorative and transformative justice movements. These approaches invite us to look more intentionally at the world we have, and then ask what kind of world we want to create.
The world as we know it has been shaped by an approach to development and success that has fueled terrible inequality, catastrophic climate change, and now, vaccine inequity. Thankfully, other approaches have been offered that help us re-think how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the earth. The development of a patent-free vaccine called Corbevax is one example of how we can reimagine society to prioritize personal and social well-being and realign our policies and institutions to create conditions where our human potential can be fulfilled.
Fiction author, Kurt Voneggut, once pointed out the hypocrisy of many loud conservative Christians who demanded that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public buildings and court house lawns without ever asking to have the Beatitudes publicly posted. He was certainly no theologian but he hit on a very good point. Religion that is "useful" in controlling the conduct of civil society is always going to be popular with the "law and order" crowd but the moral teachings of Jesus about love, hope, forgiveness, generosity, and compassion, those tend to make the self-righteous pretty uncomfortable and therefore are largely ignored.
Jesus Seminar founding member, Marcus Borg, first described the message of Jesus as being “radical compassion.” Peer and fellow seminar member, Karen Armstrong, took that concept to an interfaith (or no faith) form of spirituality, saying, The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
The opposite of spirituality is not atheism. It is, in our partisan, narcissistic, and cannibalistic capitalist society, more akin to sociopathy. The good news is that we get to choose which path we want to follow.
Ten years ago, when I was still blond and clean shaven, I delivered this sermon in our former church building to try to give an honest and academic explanation of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. This year I am speaking out of state so we will re-run this video and I will be back next week to share with you the message I am delivering in South Carolina this weekend. Merry Christmas!
In 1971, in the early days of the “War on Drugs,” then President Nixon appointed a commission to study marijuana and to release their results and policy suggestions. More than 80 people worked for most of a year to produce a nearly 4000 page long report and even though Nixon commissioned the study, the results were that pot was no more dangerous than alcohol and they recommended that it be decriminalized and managed in the same way as alcohol in the interests of public health. The report even named the danger of the growing trend of incarceration on marijuana charges which was likely to make keeping people in jail an income stream within the prison industrial system. Obviously, Nixon ignored both the facts and the recommendations of his own commission but, even worse, every president for the past 50 years has done the same while deaths from lethal drugs have increased by more than 500% since the failed “War on Drugs” began, we still waste billions of dollars in police and prison resources devoted to marijuana “crimes.”
A familiar image from the Advent season is leveling the mountains so that all "may walk safely." One example of this process in our own times has been the increasing emphasis on healing trauma, especially since marginalized people disproportionately experience trauma. From ACEs to trauma-informed care, to emerging approaches that are healing-centered and asset-informed, we wholeheartedly welcome resources to prevent, heal, and transform trauma. At the same time, we recognize and celebrate that we are more than our trauma. Together, we are leveling mountains and creating communities where thriving can be the norm, rather than the exception.
Stephen Colbert observed that, like most of us, not being a lawyer, it is hard to judge whether 17-year-old, Kyle Rittenhouse, broke any laws when he took a semi-automatic rifle to the demonstration in Kenosha and ended up killing two demonstrators. But, if he didn’t, then the laws need to be changed. Years of progressively liberalized laws regarding open-carry and the availability of military styled weapons is a part of the fabric of a society in which a teenager, imagining himself to be a conservative superhero, ends up killing liberal demonstrators and then being found “not guilty” in the justice system. Clearly, he is guilty of a monstrous crime . . . it just wasn’t “illegal,” which means that state legislatures and maybe even all of us, are guilty of these murders. America must come back from the brink of gun insanity.
Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Jeremy Adam Smith observed that, “Americans are very grateful and they think gratitude is important—they’re just not very good at expressing it.” In our world of constant and chronic stressors, it takes intentional effort to recognize, appreciate, and savor the good things in our lives. But when we do, we create conditions for our relationships to thrive: savoring positive experiences, expressing thanks, and receiving gratitude from others.
As we approach our national observance of Thanksgiving, we are being asked to also give respectful reflection to the Indigenous Nations who were here thousands of years before Europeans sailed across the Atlantic in little wooden ships. Guilt for the centuries of genocide, enslavement, and pathological land theft hardly makes sense in the 21st century. What we need now is understand about how we got here and not some exercise in self-flagellation for the sins of our ancestors (though reparations might make for a good conversation!).
US borders are almost always in the news, ubiquitous even to the point of invisibility. But the abusive treatment of Haitian refugees last September, from administrative policies to violent border patrolmen on horseback, was a stark reminder of their cruelty. Political borders are real and have real impacts, but they are not objective or neutral. Their history, along with their psychosocial meanings, reflect the inequalities of colonial violence. We need to think deeply about, and act courageously, in favor of honoring our shared humanity and our relationship to the earth.
While the disappearance of anyone is tragic, the way the media exhaustively covers the disappearance of beautiful, young, white women compared with the silence around the disappearance of tens of thousands of women of color shows more than a media bias, it reveals a self perpetuating racism in the way the public shows more concern about white victims than we do about non-white victims. The real roots of racism hide, not only in our institutions but inside our own brains and that is where we have to go to end the generation after generation education in racism.
This pandemic has taken a heavy toll, world wide, in lives, to be sure, but also it has closed businesses, terminated jobs, set millions of students back a year or two years in learning, while it has shifted wealth around the world. As we have focused on lost jobs and shuttered businesses, the world's super rich have managed to used the pandemic panic spending to make themselves much more wealthy, some billionaires have even doubled their enormous wealth in just the past year.
As horrible as the pandemic has been for so many of us, we do find ourselves in the fortunate position of being able to change the world for the better, not simply to return to "normal" which wasn't that great for most people, but to redesign our economy, our healthcare system, our education and penal systems, to be more of what we have dreamed of. A time of great social chaos is also an opportunity for meaningful reform.
This pandemic has taken a heavy toll, world wide, in lives, to be sure, but also it has closed businesses, terminated jobs, set millions of students back a year or two years in learning, while it has shifted wealth around the world. As we have focused on lost jobs and shuttered businesses, the world's super rich have managed to used the pandemic panic spending to make themselves much more wealthy, some billionaires have even doubled their enormous wealth in just the past year.
As horrible as the pandemic has been for so many of us, we do find ourselves in the fortunate position of being able to change the world for the better, not simply to return to "normal" which wasn't that great for most people, but to redesign our economy, our healthcare system, our education and penal systems, to be more of what we have dreamed of. A time of great social chaos is also an opportunity for meaningful reform.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness of Month and, unfortunately, it is as necessary as ever. A look at how domestic violence was normalized and accepted until relatively recently helps us understand the vital importance of transforming attitudes and cultures about gender, violence, and love. Together, we can work together to support lasting and healthy change, until everyone has a home that is safe and full of love.
Please join us at 4 p.m. central every Sunday to discuss that morning's message at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83410382821?pwd=RjA4enlmelkwbm5XQ3J2My9jaE1tZz09
In one of my favorite stories in the gospels, Jesus disappoints a rich man. The encounter invites us to consider the tension between the rich man, who wants to be moral while also hoarding wealth, and Jesus’ insistence that economic justice is a prerequisite to healthy community (the kingdom of God). In the 21st century, we still wrestle with huge and growing economic and social disparities, despite overwhelming evidence that Jesus’ vision of economic justice is actually better for everyone. Changing our relationships to wealth, consumption, possessions, and one another to align with equity and justice are vital spiritual and ethical practices needed to heal ourselves, communities, and the earth.
Ironically, though we have talked a lot about learning to be sensitive to matters of race, gender, sexual identity, and class, somehow, in most of society, "fat-shaming" is still allowed. Those of us who have struggled with weight for all kinds of psychological, physiological, medical, or work reasons know that losing weight and being more healthy is complicated, difficult and sometimes, virtually impossible.
Still, when comedian Bill Maher has insisted over the past year that losing weight, exercising, and eating a more healthy diet is crucial to protecting ourselves from dying with a case of Covid-19, he is not wrong. And if this is true, why are we hearing it repeatedly from a comedian and not from the CDC? Why hasn't Anthony Fauci included it along with wearing a mask, washing our hands, and keeping a safe distance from others? Strangely, we sometimes need a court jester to be the one with the courage to tell us the honest truth.
For most of us, our lives are dominated with messages that reduce our worth to productivity, exhaust us with constant comparisons and competitions, and trap us in a ruthless cycle of praise and blame. This simple chant from the Buddhist tradition - ‘My very life is sustained through the gifts of others’ - invites us to reflect on how we relate to life, one another, and the earth with more gratitude, open-heartedness, and joy.
Whistle blowers are modern prophets. You don’t have to be a minister or a famous politician to do the work of a prophet, you just have to be willing to speak truth to power. Just don’t expect to have a statue raised in your honor. Most whistle blowers are shunned in public in their own time, if they are lucky enough to not be put in prison or murdered. Still, progress is made by being the unreasonable person in the mix who refuses to go along in silence in the face of great injustice.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the USA, and the violent response that has shaped so much of the world during the last twenty years. With outrage over the tragedies accompanying the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, we also take time to reflect on the world we have created during two decades of occupation and war. And we remember the words of Daniel Berrigan, who, along with countless others through the centuries, taught us to insist that another way is possible and to do the work to bring it into existence: “One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”
The owners of Purdue Pharma have been released from any liability in the deaths of a half a million people in the opioid crisis because they were willing to give a fraction of their ill-gotten gain to the victims of the opioid crisis that they helped to create. When did you ever hear of a drug dealer getting a suspended sentence for giving a donation to an addiction treatment program? We see billionaires spending the wealth earned by low waged employees for a joy ride in space while the wealth gap in America grows. On this Labor Day weekend we need a wakeup call, a reminder that the disproportionate amount of wealth going to the top of the income ladder is making more and more Americans poor for no good reason and eroding any claim we ever had to being a democracy.
Though most public school history classes are silent about it, there was a serious insurrection attempt made in 1932 to overthrow the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and install a fascist leader who would reverse the New Deal legislation in favor of a wealthy ruling class. Although the coups was stopped, none of the finances and planners of the coups were charged or tried…. familiar names like DuPont, J. P. Morgan, William Randolph Hurst, and the father of George H. W. Bush, Prescott Bush, were among those fans of Hitler and Mussolini who wanted to see Roosevelt removed. Do you hear echoes of today?
The oldest known written story is the Gilgamesh Epic, the four-thousand-year-old tale of an ancient king who becomes obsessed with finding the secret to eternal life. From the dawn of civilization, humans have tried to grapple with the awareness that we are mortal, some turning to entirely unsubstantiated religious promises of life after death but some, like Gilgamesh, discover that eternity is beyond our grasp and that we must finding meaning and purpose in a life that is, by definition, limited and yet has the potential for great joy.
As Dr. Ray turns 65, he and David Ketchum will begin to share the preaching load equally. On this special Sunday, Dr. Ray reflects back on his 43 years in the pulpit (so far) with some important observations on the nature of parish ministry with all of the wonders and horrors that come with trying to break out of merely being a priest and striving to become a prophet, leading the community of faith to speak truth to power.
The history of forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, such as residential schools, has often been hidden or excused in popular memory. By looking at the historical context that brought about these institutions, we can understand how a cultural shift is needed to move away from the attitudes and ideas that were prominent in the history of colonization and continue to be embedded in our collective consciousness. Especially for White folx, our work of the present moment is to heal and transform our collective consciousness, honoring the great web of life and finding our place within it. And to do that, we must part ways with the sins of superiority, forced assimilation, and greed, learning that our own well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of the diversity of humans and human cultures, or from the earth itself.
The realities of residential schools and the tragedies of forced assimilation have filled the news this summer, to our grief, rage, and shame. So while we welcome Secretary Haaland's investigation into these schools and their impacts on Native children and their families, we also recognize our own work that needs to be done. All of us who are not Indigenous, especially White Christians, need to honor and participate in the process of accountability: to own up to injustice when we are confronted with our own complicity, and to speak out and act to help heal the harm.
While many of us long for greater social equality, moving past the identity politics that emphasizes race, gender, and sexual orientation, often times at the expense of discussing ideas, budgets, policies, and infrastructure development, we cannot pretend that such divisions do not exist or that they do not matter. Perhaps one of the most lethal expressions of white, male, hetero dominance is to claim that it does not exist. So, how do we intelligently move past either being afraid of our differences or feeling compelled to “check all of the boxes” towards a more meaningful and way to create a unified society that cherishes its diversity, while affirming the equal worth of all?
Capitalism is here to stay but that might not be a bad thing if we could put up the kind of guardrails that can harness the greed that drives it in a way that does not allow for the abuses it also engenders. Progressive communities of faith can be a part of the “fifth estate” providing alternatives to corporate media and the propaganda spewed by corporations and the politicians they own.
The way that we have settled into minimum wage laws is not simply an exploitation of the labor of the poor and, in fact, in many ways looks like a reconfiguring of slavery. Slave owners provided housing, food, clothing, and basic care of slaves. Does $7.25 an hour provide even that for minimum wage workers anywhere in America, particularly in LA, NYC or Boston? We are not suffering from a lack of resources in our country but we do have an apparent lack of both imagination and compassion. We can fix this.
For many of us, July 4th is a time to forget about history and indulge in nostalgic and sentimental celebrations of freedom. But the holiday can provide us with more than just an opportunity for barbecue cookouts and firework displays, if we are willing to look beyond the romantic notions of popular nationalism. The recent controversies over the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory invite us to re-examine how we relate to history and how to provide a "true civic education." By doing so, we find that history can become the honest study of human experience, giving us humility in the face of our mistakes (from the most laughable to the most cruel) and hope in the face of our greatest challenges. It is an opportunity to remember that we are making history right now, and we can make a better, freer future not only possible, but something real.
People often have passionate beliefs about things for which they have no evidence or, even worse, they believe in spite of contradictory evidence. In religion, such baseless convictions often masquerade as a virtue but isn’t blind belief just a narcissistic projection of personal preferences? Karen Armstrong, the late Marcus Borg, and Bishop John Shelby Spong have argued that faith has more to do with courage and commitment than it does with belief in a literal set of creedal statements. This sermon takes the position that presenting sacred stories as being literal historical accounts actually robs them of their intended meaning and purpose. A faith community’s sacred stories are the myths they use to bind them to one another and by which they define themselves and their purpose. Perhaps progressives can once again renew their love for their faith community if they cease trying to force themselves to believe in the absurd and the obviously false claims of creedal faith. The major world religions are always the most healthy when they focus on right behaviors rather than right beliefs!
Let’s be honest, most of the truth claims made by traditional forms of almost all religions are not just beyond anyone’s ability to prove, they are, by and large obvious absurd to any critical thinker. It wasn’t just Voltaire and Bertrand Russell who clearly articulated deep skepticism about religion, most of us have in less articulate ways. But the choice is not between either total atheism or assassinating our brains to pretend to believe silly things. There is a way of being intensely spiritual within the mystery and wonder of existence. The way of the mystic promotes love rather than division, and joy rather than fear. We can live beyond the guilt and manipulation of our former religious lives into a much more honest and happy existence.
Overcoming Religious Trauma - Tuesday June 22 at 7:00 PM Central Time
Events of the past few years have brought the issue of race much more clearly into focus, especially for the dominant white culture that has been willing to learn about the ways in which race has affected wealth disparity, policing, the judicial system, the penal system, as well as housing and employment. We recently discovered that most white people had never even heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre until the city was marking the 100th anniversary of this most violent attack on the black population in America’s history. Even still, there are public protests in many states against teaching Critical Race Theory even when what is basically at stake is making our history lesson more factual and less dishonestly “white washing” America’s history of discrimination. How we think shapes our culture and when it comes to race, it is time for us to prophetically embrace truth and reject propaganda.
In addition to today’s sermon, we will be hosting an online event via Zoom on June 22 discussing “Overcoming Religious Trauma.” Despite our growing understanding of religious and spiritual abuse, many people continue to suffer. And despite the public record of this harm, too many religious individuals and institutions refuse to take these issues seriously. We need to reflect on our own experiences in light of 1) historical and sociological analysis of religious institutions and 2) with our best psychological modalities for addressing religious trauma. By doing so, we can continue to move ourselves and our communities toward relationships that are not built around delusions and threats, but around reason, curiosity, wisdom, compassion, and love.
This Memorial Day weekend we mark the passing of 600,000 Americans in the Covid-19 pandemic and we are similarly aware of the many ways in which millions of lives have been impacted in lost jobs, damaged health, and in the closure of many vital and familiar businesses and institutions. We also acknowledge that churches, synagogues, and mosques have suffered from the pandemic, many will never re-open for in-person community services. As our Emerging Church, which has been a hybrid of on-line and “seated” congregations for 13 years now becomes an almost exclusively on-line resource, we acknowledge the grief that comes with change but we double down in hope of being a meaningful force for social justice for many years to come.
Childhood poverty in many American communities now exceeds 50% of school aged children. A part of the proposed stimulus bill addresses this problem in the most direct way possible, offering a monthly stipend paid to parents as well as support in child care and education. If this bill is passed it will be the most transformative correction to poverty since FDR's "New Deal." It may be too much to hope for but if we don't all speak up in support of this, what does that say about how we really value our children?
The word “socialism” has been, through media and political manipulation, turned into a term that means little more than “pure evil.” That’s just crazy. The belief that economic resources should be owned and controlled by the few rather than the many is contrary to all world religions and fundamentally favors slavery over freedom. Christian Socialism was a very strong movement in the late 19th and early 20th century and was undermined only by associating socialism with fascist dictators. What we really need to do in our sharply partisan country, is to set aside the name calling and talk about the most effective and compassionate way that we can share resources.
We often think of the great moral leaders of history as if they just fell from the sky in our hour of need. The truth is that people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and even Ruby Bridges had courageous mothers who taught them, inspired them, and even held their hand while facing a culture in desperate need of change. It often seems to be "reasonable" to adapt to the status quo but, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, progress depends on the unreasonable person who demands change.
One of the lessons we have continually been reminded of throughout the pandemic is how interconnected we are all, whether we like it or not. Similarly, both social and ecological justice issues remind us that our worlds are intimately connected, even if we create artificial boundaries that give the illusion that harmful actions don't have consequences. The last year has been terrifying in so many ways, but we've also witnessed wonderful acts of creativity, compassion, wisdom, and community. We carry both that pain and that joy with us as we take tentative steps toward creating communities of care in a post-pandemic world.
This live event is taking place on Monday evening, May 10, at 7 p.m. central. It will involve about 30 minutes of conversation between me and Jay Thomlinson (of Best of the Left fame) and then we open the floor for participant conversations with us and with one another. This is a huge experiment for both of us. Please click on this link to register (it is free but signing up with get you reminders and invitations to the event) https://www.airmeet.com/e/e7617ed0-a228-11eb-adb3-57581f4a41d1
The death of George Floyd at the hands of the police has finally resulted in a guilty verdict in the murder charges against the responsible officer(s). What have we learned from the highly publicized cases of unarmed black men (and women) being killed by the police in relatively minor cases? Beyond even the call for massive reform in how policing is carried out, this message is concerned with the undeniable fact that it is common for police to try to hide their own crimes under a smokescreen of press releases and media propaganda. While we want to show respect and support for public servants generally, such respect must also be met, especially now, with a willingness to question authority and to challenge the racism and classism that is so deeply embedded in policing.
While many are uncomfortable with calling for defunding the police, there is no way around the need for massive reform of our nation’s police force (and military) to root out the systemic racism that makes encounters between white police and black citizens turn out to be so very tragic, so very often. Clearly, there are too many guns on the street. We are sending heavily armed police out to make mental health calls and way too many traffic stops that are nothing but a pretense for cops to stop drivers whom they have profiled as being suspicious, what many call “driving while black.” Police shoot and kill nearly 1000 people every year while, in the United Kingdom, police shoot and kill between 0 and 6 people per year. Something is dramatically wrong with American policing and we cannot turn a blind eye to it any longer.
As we emerge from our covid isolation into increasing social contact, we realize that during these months of spending too much time on social media and watching conflicting news reports, our stress and anxiety has inevitably damaged some of our relationships. Do we need to be generously forgiving and reconciling, or do we need to evaluate which relationships really are toxic to us and erect boundaries to protect ourselves in a post pandemic world? Or, obviously, some of both?
The list of the suffering in this world could go on indefinitely, and this week has been no exception. From the courtroom where Derek Chauvin is being tried to the growing refugee crisis in Ethiopia, we find ourselves asking: how do we grieve the oppression and violence, while we also celebrate the moments of joy and justice that we encounter along the way, and encourage each other to live like another world is actually possible? On this Easter Sunday, we reflect on how spiritual practice can help us continually find new life as we dismantle supremacy and claim our dignity and joy.
Events of the past week have revealed the weakness of our nation’s lax gun laws, the dangerous escalation of anti-Asian prejudice, the insidious racism behind a wave of new voter suppression laws, and even the unworkable nature of attempts at legislating morality. The good news is that the problems that seem impossible to solve to our elected officials have all been fairly well resolved in most western democracies. What remains for Americans is to wake up to the best practices that were implemented in western Europe a generation ago.
In most western nations, the penal system is designed to reform convicted criminals so that they can return to a productive life in society. In the USA, where we have two million people in prison and nine million on parole, a far greater percentage of our population than any other western democracy, prison terms are more likely to be used for a kind of social revenge than they are for reform. Sex crimes are typically considered to be the most heinous, but in a penal system bent on putting more people in prison for longer sentences, have we lost our way in imprisoning those who have not committed rape, assault, or even sexual harassment but who have viewed illegal pornography in their own homes? A teenager with the impulse control issues that often accompany autism or bi-polar disorders who watches child porn in private may not be "innocent" but is their crime on the scale of murder? If not, then why do we punish them more severely than we do murderers? Have they, somehow, committed the unforgivable sin?
The question that echoes from the primeval pages of Genesis demands a new answer in this era of a global pandemic, "Am I my brother's (sister's) keeper?" We all know that the right answer is "yes" but fear sure can make us a lot more selfish than in our more relaxed moments. Some of us are afraid of either getting or spreading the virus, others are afraid of being manipulated by what they see as public hysteria. On either side of the fence, fear doesn't bring out our best qualities. But, in spite of the way the pandemic has been made into a partisan issue, we have a common though invisible enemy, Covid-19. And in the midst of the pandemic, we have myriad opportunities to find and express our better selves by being mindful of the needs of our sisters and brothers.
When injustice and oppression become normal in a society, it often requires persistent and even outrageous actions to unveil, resist, and ultimately transform it. Like Jesus turning over tables in the temple, we must continually braid our own whip of cords by learning and applying creative tactics that help us both unveil the evil of injustice and live our way into another world.
This year’s conservative Republican gathering, CPAC, included the surprising presence of a golden statue of Donald Trump. It is surprising that the gathering of largely Evangelical Christians did not immediately see the easily drawn analogy to the golden calf idol from Exodus. But, it is a fitting symbol of the idol the former president’s supporters have bowed down to worship: greed, racism, oppression, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and more. The statue represents in a very real way the “id” of our culture but, as an idol, it is slated to be destroyed. The liberation of America from the shadow of our heritage of white supremacy and economic oppression must end.
This talk has been prepared for a group of progressive clergy in the United Kingdom who posed this question: What must be done to rebuild America after Trump. This message proposes 4 key responses: Massive campaign finance reform. A restoration of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine. A renewed commitment to education. An emphasis on vital but achievable goals around which we can unite.
In the novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, two young lovers are thwarted in their desire to be together, only to be given a second chance at love when they are old. Still, though about half of us now live alone, that does not mean that we have to give up on hope that we, even in our later years, might not have, at long last, a real opportunity for a meaningful connection. This sermon speaks to the stresses we are feeling, a year into our pandemic, that might tear at the fabric of existing relationships and dash hopes for single people of ever making a meaningful connection. Regardless of the challenges, as the poet Marty McConnell has written, “You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
It's now common for us to hear false accusations that social justice movements are just "ideological poison" and honest treatments of the more difficult aspects of US history are just "toxic propaganda." Activists and historians alike have come under increasing attacks, especially when it comes to racial justice, while so-called "patriotic education" programs have inspired conspiratorial beliefs and Capitol riots. Over the last year, the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission have become symbols of these two approaches, reminding us that how we remember the past impacts how we deal with the present. And how we deal with the present shapes the possibilities of creating a better, more just, more compassionate, and more livable future.
Though Gandhi and MLK are lauded as great social heroes in our day, during their lifetimes they were often put in jail and were regarded as enemies of the state. To be honest about some of the people currently regarded in the USA as being traitors or at least being guilty of espionage, we should wonder if they will one day be regarded as heroic whistleblowers? Already, in Berlin, there are statues erected in honor of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden but here in the United States, Manning has served seven years in prison and the US government is trying to get their hands on Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, both of whom are doing everything they can to avoid extradition from Russia and England. History will be the eventual jury of all three, but it seems that the crimes of the whistleblowers are dwarfed by the government crimes they have revealed.
The laudable stated goal of the new Biden administration to bring unity to the red and the blue factions of America is obviously necessary, but it is a steep hill to climb. For the most part, the Jan. 6 insurrection was the product of a constant diet of lies and propaganda. Certainly, the first step of reuniting the United States calls for a renewed commitment to the truth, from politicians, in the media, and from the pulpit! Secondly, the huge gulf in how justice is applied to the rich and powerful and how it is applied to the rest of us must be closed. It is not just those who desecrated the Capitol Building who should be arrested and criminally charged, we must treat those who incited the insurrection in the same way. It will be simultaneously internationally embarrassing and a source of reassurance that democracy prevails to see a former president and several members of the Senate and Congress on trial, facing almost certain jail time, but it is necessary.
A Haitian proverb declares, "No one listens to the cry of the poor or the sound of a wooden bell." That seems like a sad resignation to the way that things are but what we realize about Martin Luther King, Jr. is that his peculiar genius was to amplify the voices of the poor, to make the injustice of racism visible, on the evening news, to people who had been covering their ears and looking the other way for a century. Honoring King's memory is more than a mere exercise of reciting history. It really should be finding a way to continue his work in the 21st century. The Voters' Rights Act that King fought to get passed has been gutted. Voter suppression, especially in southern states, is back again. How can we amplify the cry of the poor in our day? (and, seriously, shouldn't our pulpits be on the front line of that project?)
America is horrified and embarrassed but not many of us are shocked. The failed insurrection that took place on Wednesday, January 6th, was planned, orchestrated, inspired, and incited by our president who recently lost re-election and who has been desperate to hold onto power even if he had to destroy democracy to do so. We have witnessed the embodiment of Voltaire’s prophetic declaration that those who can make believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Having blown the dog-whistles of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia for five years, the president’s minions desecrated our Capitol building, the seat of Democracy. The next ten days may contain even greater atrocities but with hope and determination, we must resolve to overcome lies with the truth, irrational conspiracies with evidence and critical thinking, and fearmongering with disciplined love and community.
Video mentioned in sermon: Trump family watching crowds/rioters
Changes are coming that give us reason for substantial hope. We will have a change in administrations in early 2021 and an amelioration of the pandemic later in the year followed by a huge economic recovery. But looking past this new year, very soon, electric cars will replace gas burning cars and sustainable energy will end carbon pollution from generating electricity. Artificial Intelligence will not only drive our cars for us, AI will largely build our cars. People will be liberated from mundane repetitive labor but they may also be liberated from an income. The promise of new technologies is huge but the risk of lapsing into a world dominated by the few who are wealthy while most are relegated to a peasant class similar to the Dark Ages is very real. We can use this new technology to design an economy that gives us a kind of heaven on earth, or unrestrained capitalism can consign most of us to a living hell of poverty and want. Now is the time for persons of conscience to become in
Mary’s song, the Magnificat, has been a favorite text from the Christian tradition for millennia. The exhilaration of hope and the certainty that “the arc of the moral universe” really does “bend toward justice" continue to inspire both faith and activism, especially in the face of all the terrible, and terribly unnecessary, suffering that fills our world. With a long road still ahead of us, it can be hard to keep up with the injustices that fill the news, let alone act on them. Sometimes, the best we can do is keep singing, insisting that justice and mercy have a place. And the more of us who are singing it out, with our words and with our lives, the easier it will be to listen, and change the world.
In her brilliant new book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson speaks of racism in America as a caste system that is like the studs that form the frame of our house. We rarely see them or think of them, but they are there, holding the whole house up and if termites or mold get to them, the house will collapse. Racism establishes the social order so that even after the end of slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, segregated schools, restrictive real estate covenants, discrimination in hiring, and voter suppression kept much of our black population in the ranks of the “untouchables.” Ending racism will take a lot of work with many complicated steps but it must include closing the wealth gap, the employment gap, making education accessible, and dealing with the unequal distribution of healthcare, and correcting the current trends towards minority voter suppression.
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 more complicated but it questions our assumption that 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, is not only not entirely true but is undermining the survival of both forests and civilizations.
The late Marcus Borg is credited with describing the historical Jesus as being the teacher of radical compassion. In this time when it appears, as Paul Krugman has recently published, our culture of selfishness is killing us, it is vital that we take up that mission of teaching radical compassion. We are all connected and our innate instincts validate our natural desire to care about the welfare of others. We just need to be reminded of the fact that we all really want to be good people.
Economists are predicting that one in six restaurants will be permanently closed as a result of the pandemic. Sadly, when progressive congregations emerge from our current sabbatical or at least our retreat to online only services, the casualty rate may be much higher than what has hit the restaurant business. Still, the progressive church was already changing, and this nightmare virus may have simply accelerated our transformation. When our congregations attempt to again open their doors to seated church services, what will those services look like? Will there be choirs? Congregational singing? Passing the Peace? Communion? This is a sad time but it may also be an opportunity for thoughtful and meaningful change so that when we do return to church, the church we return to will be much more meaningful than the one we put into mothballs.
How did wearing a mask to avoid spreading the Covid virus become a politically partisan issue? It has become apparent that one of the most difficult tasks ahead of the USA is learning again how to disagree without dividing the nation. For many of us, this isn't about politics, it is about ethics and being honest about both economics and science. It is hard to bridge the gap to those who seemed to have denied reality but the stakes are too high not to try to hold out an olive branch and try to reconcile our deeply divided nation.
At the end of World War I, there was a hope that this had been the “war to end all wars.” Armistice Day was established to celebrate the agreements that they hoped would lead to an eternity of peace on the planet earth. It was only 30 years before the world was plunged into another global conflict that claimed even more lives. As horrific as wars are, there is a tendency to glorify wars and those who survived fighting in them, so that Armistice Day became Veterans Day so that rather than honoring world peace, we were back to, ipso facto, honoring the hellscape of war. Veterans for Peace are asking us to take the focus off of them and to put it back where it belongs, on a deep and passionate commitment to peace. We can honor the courage and sacrifice of soldiers while demanding, in the 21st century, that there be no more wars.
Despite Tuesday’s election results, Donald Trump received widespread support across the USA, signaling a tolerance for, and, in many cases, a celebration of, Trump’s performative fascism and a growing normalization of White nationalism. Understanding that the popularity of Trump is a symptom of these deeper problems in our society, we realize that we still have vital work to do to close up the vulnerabilities that make fascism possible. Now is not only a moment to celebrate, but a moment to rededicate ourselves to creating a future where kindness and compassion, justice and wisdom, are not only possible, but real.
President Kennedy’s speech he was set to deliver on the very day when he was tragically assassinated included this plea to the nation, “let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation’s future is at stake.” Every presidential election is important, but it is not an exaggeration to say that both global and domestic issues are at stake this week in unprecedented ways. No matter who wins the election, a huge portion of the country will be deeply disappointed, and it is not unrealistic to fear more than vitriolic language as there are those who literally want to start a civil war. So let’s strive to be the good people who will go high when others go low so that we can shepherd our nation through the coming tumult towards a better 2021.
The directors of the FBI and DHS have warned Congress that white supremacist, anarchist, and other armed militias pose a significant threat to American security. Our nation, unlike our peers in western democracies, has been held hostage to the gun industry which appears to be motivated by profits to the exclusion of concern about human life. It is up to us to reverse that priority and stem the accelerating rate of gun deaths in America.
Power begets power and institutions that are rife with power will increasingly resist change, reform, or moral responsibility. An excellent example of this is the perception that protesting police killings and violence as being inherently “anti-police” just as protesting the Catholic Church’s history of hiding pedophilia as well as the rape and forced abortions common among nuns in their relationships with priests is decried as being “anti-Catholic.” Can we imagine legitimate policing without shooting unarmed black men? Can we imagine a Catholic Church which teaches compassion and care for the poor without rape, forced abortions, or pedophilia? If we are not allowed to even discuss such reforms then, clearly, both the church and the police have become too powerful.
We're not dead yet, but we need your help. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to sell our church building, but we are still online and plan to return to an in-person presence once it is safe to do so. Making that happen requires your help. Please consider donating by visiting http://spfccc.org or mailing a check to:
Community Christian Church
PO Box 10062
Springfield, MO 65808
A civilization’s shared myths account for why things are the way they are. They can bolster loyalty to a religion or a nation, and they can excuse class and race privilege. Ancient Hebrew scriptures claim that God gave them a land where other nations were already living just as America’s “manifest destiny” excused genocide and pathological land theft. But myth’s don’t have to be toxic, in fact, they could be quite useful in uniting a people around a common goal of actually becoming a great nation that, for example, eradicates poverty and racism, ends militarism and environmental exploitation. We need to be able to purge the myths that support religious or racial superiority and replace them with a vision of compassion and peace.
Faith is typically based on “belief” and science is based on objective research and analysis. In this address, written for the Malvern (United Kingdom) Science and Faith conference, Dr. Ray discusses the concept of “evidence based faith,” attempting to rank our beliefs based on Bayes’ Theorem of probability analysis. This invites communities of faith to put the majority of their energy into what they can know (indeed, what they can hardly avoid knowing from the news!) rather than stressing the unknowable truth claims of traditional religion. We have no real evidence of heaven and hell but we have lots of evidence of racism, poverty, violence, and illness.
The late Congressman John Lewis wrote what could be his own eulogy in the essay he wrote to be published posthumously in the New York Times. He called on “ordinary people” to be willing to get into “good trouble.” Of course, the sins of racism, oppression, and enslavement were not creations of black culture. These were white inventions and as such, we must acknowledge that the end of racism in America demands that white people choose to stop being racists. Visionaries like Lewis, King, Parks, Malcolm X, and many more gave voice to the vision of a post racist America but bringing that reality to life calls for ordinary people to, in extraordinary ways, rise above their racism to be more intentionally anti-racist and inclusive people.
Politics and profit have tremendous influence over which foods we eat, especially the poor because almost all government agricultural subsidies go to beef, dairy, and grain production and less than 1% supports growing green vegetables and fruits. The biblical narrative about the birthday party given for Herod concludes with the head of John the Baptist being brought out on a platter as if his very life was the main course at the feast of the wealthy and powerful. Our out of control capitalist and subsidy driven food supply is causing diabetes and heart disease among the poor who are trapped into eating the most lethal food imaginable. The good news is that in a democracy we can change this. People over profits!
While protests verge on becoming riots in our city streets in response to multiple murders of unarmed black men at the hands of our cities' police, we must focus on how to pull racism out of our culture by the roots. Many of us find the common placement of Confederate monuments and the names of leading Confederates and KKK members on universities and public structures to be a part of making racism appear to be a normal part of our culture. While it is far from being the only answer, surely cleaning up the common vision of this tribute to our slave owning (and raping) racist past is a part of the answer.
Labor Day is an American substitute for the International Workers Day, celebrated on May 1. Americans of the early 20th century associated organize labor with communism and sought to suppress union organizing while applauding the contributions of laborers to our country. Of course, what labor really deserves is a living wage, safe working conditions, health care, retirement, vacations and a shorter work week, along with well-deserved praise. A Universal Basic Income is a step in the direction of a more just nation and a fairer economy.
Fear provokes prejudice and makes people willing to sacrifice their rights in favor of an authoritarian government that promises protection from the “others.” But shouldn’t faith offer some cure for fear? Can’t we see other races and nationalities as sisters and brothers rather than a threat? We are on the verge of an election and, hopefully, substantive social progress.
170 Danish scholars from 5 universities came together to consider how the world needs to change post covid-19. They make five crucial suggestions: 1) Move away from ‘development’ focused on aggregate GDP growth. 2) Develop an economic framework focused on redistribution. 3) Develop a form of agriculture that is regenerative. 4) Reduce consumption and travel. And finally, 5) debt cancellation. This sermon acknowledges the seriousness of the current pandemic but also seeks to honestly articulate how messed up the world was before covid-19 to imagine a better world when the pandemic is over.
Self-care has become a buzz phrase in recent years, and we’re (necessarily) hearing about it even more during this pandemic. In a healthy, functioning society, self and community care is integrated into its habits, relationships, organizations, and culture. Special actions would not be required except in times like these, and preparations to meet such a crisis would have been carefully made. Although we have known for some time that this is not the case in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed just how unprepared we were. Moreover, it has reminded us in very public and painful ways that unhealthy, unsustainable, and unjust work and life conditions serve to perpetuate oppressive systems and cultures. It leaves those most impacted with the least access to time, resources, safety, and energy to devote to personal and social healing, as well as movement building. We must insist that all people, especially essential workers and vulnerable populations, have access to the care they need.
Anthropologist, Margaret Mead, said that the first sign of human civilization was the discovery of a 15,000 year old skeleton of a man who had a broken femur. She speculated that such an injury could only mean that others had cared for this man for several weeks while the broken bone mended, something that was not seen among our ancestors prior to that time. The issue is, however, that we have to make similar decisions every day to keep human evolution from slipping backwards. Especially, in the midst of this pandemic, we have to make choices to be more “human” as we care for those who are physically at risk, those who are unemployed, impoverished, and without either shelter or access to healthcare. Evolution didn’t happen once thousands of years ago, it is something that must be renewed daily or we are in danger of slipping back into more primitive if not reptilian ways of thinking.
We really are not in the same boat but we surely are in the same storm. The pandemic is very inconvenient for the people who get to keep their jobs, income, health insurance, and home. But those who are now unemployed, uninsured, evicted or facing foreclosure are in another kind of boat and it is in danger of sinking. Refusing to wear a mask, resisting “stay home” orders or social distancing rules, and certainly, refusing to get the vaccine when it is available is a luxury of the secure that the poor can not afford for us to choose. Basic human compassion demands that we set politics and personal preference aside and all work together to reach the goal of “herd immunity” so that going to work or visiting neighbors is not a life threatening proposition.
Opioid overdoses increased by 18% in March, 29% in April, and 42% in May making addiction and overdose deaths a silent pandemic within the viral pandemic. To respond to this crisis, today’s message is a panel presentation from our pastor, a physician who is an addiction specialist, and a psychologist who specializes in suicide prevention and addiction. Even if you are not personally in danger of drug or alcohol abuse, you can be assured that someone you know well is and this information may be very helpful to you as you reach out to those who are in danger.
When we begin to give up the formal, creedal faith of our youth, accepting that no religion is entirely true and no sacred text was actually written by God, many people will abandon the journey of faith entirely. But for those of us who find value in a spiritual life, we are inclined to turn away from the false certainty of formal religion and turn towards the more honest uncertainty of a mystical faith in which we accept the “isness” of God, as Meister Eckhart said, “God is a word unspoken, a thought not thought, a belief unbelieved.” For those of us raised in a formal church, the mental prison of belief is hard to leave behind . . . especially for the clergy!
The anti-mask vs pro-mask divide in this stage of the global pandemic becomes an interesting litmus test for either an empathetic world view or a kind of apologetic for being something of a sociopath. Given the irresponsible leadership of Trump in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Boris Johnson in the UK, we can see how many people are willing to follow the lead of a public figure who denies science, evidence, and expert medical advice with horrifying consequences. To many of us, this indifference towards public health looks evil but we may actually be seeing a kind of emotional exhaustion that becomes defiantly self-serving. A spiritual world view asks us to change our behaviors, even when we don’t feel like we have anything left to give emotionally, to stretch ourselves to simply take on the habit of caring, even when we cannot feel it, until, miraculously, we can feel the desire to be empathic again.
Far too often, patriotism is expressed as enthusiasm for wars as if the battlefield was the only way to become a hero or to find virtue when, in almost every case, the opposite is true. As Jimmy Carter recently observed, no nation on earth has ever been as engaged in warfare as the USA and it has cost us the ability to protect our environment, build sustainable energy infrastructure, to feed, educated, house, and provide healthcare for our people. America’s greatness is yet to be realized, but it is within our grasp.
Our wisdom lesson offers us a view of the how things could be, through illustrations and words. It’s the kind of world that everyone could enjoy living in, because it would be organized around compassion, equality, and justice. But that world has mainly lived in human imagination, though not because it is impossible. Instead, we have inherited a set of obstacles to achieving well-being for all. A case in point is the mobilization of the powers that be to defend the power and wealth they have accumulated – even in the midst of a global pandemic and in the face of an uprising against police brutality and White supremacy. While much of public discourse continues to fixate on the fear and fascination of “looting” by protesters, the real thievery of runaway capitalism continues and even increases. Until Black lives are more valuable than White profit, the world we’ve imagined will stay in our dreams.
Covid-19 will also have a casualty count among congregations. Which churches will survive into the 21st century and, frankly, which ones really shouldn’t? If loneliness is the number one form of suffering in the western world, surely the connections made in a faith community should be a major solution to that isolation. But, perhaps more importantly, the churches that will survive the virus and the ongoing church exodus will be congregations that are morally relevant on a global scale as we address the social justice issues that exist in the real world (demanding that we stop obsessing about superstitious beliefs in invisible beings and places).
While we are currently focused on racism as it appears to us in policing and in the pandemic, we know that the roots of racism are centuries old and expressed in every dimension of our culture. Today we are especially focusing on race and healthcare outcomes. We welcome sociology professor, Kyler Sherman-Wilkins to our pulpit to speak to this specific area of his academic expertise.
Many progressive people, maybe even especially progressive clergy, are often so afraid of criticism that they keep their most passionate beliefs to themselves. This is especially true for those of us who live in deeply conservative areas dominated by traditional forms of religion. However, since most of us did not have the luxury of being born into progressive families, we had to think, study, and painfully grow out of our comfortable prejudices into a new place of open minded and liberal views. Don’t we then owe it to others to have the courage to speak up? This is especially true in this moment as demonstrations continue across the globe as we seek to bring an end to police brutality and murder of minorities and to seek greater justice generally for people of color. Now is a time for a prophetic community of faith to make its voice heard.
“I can’t breathe.” Eric Garner’s last words were echoed this week by George Floyd as his life slipped away. The challenge for us is not to become inured by repetition. This time there was an arrest but immediately the coroner started the cover up saying that Floyd just happened to die from other causes while Derek Chauvin was kneeling on his neck. Will he be found “not guilty?” If not, will he be pardoned by Trump? Will he find his way onto another police force and kill again? This often-repeated scenario must be stopped. Here we plea for two things: Immediate reforms to policing, the judicial and the penal systems AND longer term work in bringing racism to an end in America, a long overdue educational process that starts in the nursery and continues in lifelong learning and self-correction.
Every lie incurs a debt to the truth that must eventually be paid. This was initially said of Russian lies about the Chernobyl disaster but it certain applies to lies told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the cover up in Catholic and Protestant churches about pedophilia, Boeing’s cover up of the failures of the 737 Max. We will see how many people die in direct response to Florida’s governor trying to manipulate the numbers of Covid-19 infections in that state. A quick comparison to the honest treatment of the pandemic in South Korea to how it has been handled in the USA leaves us to wonder if the price incurred by our President’s denial and lies has been more than 90,000 deaths.
Logic and faith should be partners! A healthy spirituality does not deny reality but rather interrogates and interprets reality. We are not seeking to escape this world to be transported into an imaginary “other” world but rather to logically, ethically, lovingly transform the only world we know into a better, more compassionate world. For faith communities to be relevant in the emerging world, we must embrace an evidence based approach to our spirituality that is defined by critical thinking and a fearlessly prophetic scrutiny of our own beliefs.
We are taking a wide angle view of what it means to be a woman in the 21st century, from being relegated to carrying water and fire wood in the third world where female genital mutilation and sex trafficking are still common to the USA where, sadly sex trafficking is also common, but there is also religious oppression, a glass ceiling, and a sorely lacking representation in the houses of government. It's like Mother's Day on steroids…. join us!
May 1 is the international workers’ holiday but this year, in light of the pandemic, more consideration needs to be given to the very nature of the economy beyond the traditional rivalry between owners and laborers. As the income gap has grown and the more complex issue of the ownership of capital has pushed assets into the hands of fewer and fewer people, it is time reconsider our assumptions about ownership and distribution of wealth. As President Trump and many states’ governors are pushing (largely minority) workers to go back to work in unsafe conditions for less than a living wage in the midst of a pandemic, is the word “revolution” too strong to use or is it not quite enough?
Prejudice is its own logic, or, at least, it is impervious to logic, evidence, or critical thinking. This week we'll consider the irrational beliefs behind many of our prejudices. We look at the early American assumption that Native Americans, Africans, and Asians were somehow less than human and then we pay special attention to the case of the British mathematician, Alan Turing, who was of unique importance to both winning World War II by breaking the German Enigma code, and later laying the groundwork for the invention of the computer. In just a few years after the war, Turing was put on trial for being gay and chose suicide over the chemical castration imposed on him. Considering our history of prejudice shines a particular light on the current violence against the trans community.
"On Reparations" presented by Dr. Kyler Sherman-Wilkins, Missouri State University professor of Sociology
The subject of paying the descendants of African slaves some form of reparations is complicated but just because it is complicated does not mean that it should not be done. Imagine starting to play Monopoly with 10 players but one player starts with 90% of the property and the bank. Liberated slaves were promised "40 acres and a mule" to give them a more fair start in life but with the assassination of Lincoln, that plan was never carried out. How can we meaningfully address the injustice of centuries of forced, uncompensated labor and the centralization of capital in the hands of the few? We have to be honest about the history of American wealth and seriously drill down on solutions which will inevitably be controversial but must, none-the-less, be carefully thought out and implemented.
The pandemic is almost all that is mentioned in the news and it certainly occupies much of our emotional and mental energy. Sadly, however, the Covid-19 virus might not be the most dangerous thing going on in the world right now. The Trump administration had rolled back more than a 100 Environmental Protection Agency regulations before the coronavirus elbowed its way into our awareness but since journalists are paying attention to nothing else, the Trump administration is crucifying the EPA in what CBS news has called "an open license to pollute." The virus will eventually recede, even though it may take a year to 18 months, but the earth . . . the earth is forever!
As we try to learn the skills of staying home, maintaining distance, and the disciplines that prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus, that means that some of us are very isolated, living alone with almost no face to face contact with anyone. Others are quarantining with a significant other, or with children. There is a lot of stress in both contexts, stresses from anxiety, depression, or domestic conflict, all of which can lead to substance abuse. Dr. Roger Ray and Dr. Paul Thomlinson met two decades ago working on an addiction research project and have often shared a lectern to speak about the most recent research and the insights they have gained from both personal and professional experience with drug and alcohol use and abuse. This talk on addiction is directed to our unique situation as we are all trying to survive both the coronavirus and the quarantine it demands of us.
The world as we have known it no longer exists. This pandemic will end, realistically, however, the virus will remain and will be held at bay, largely by a vaccine that will have to be repeated as the virus evolves every year. Still, when it is safe to go back to church and to restaurants, movies and music venues, not all of them will have survived. And as governments around the world try to navigate the complexities of having shut an economy down and then trying to start it up again, we will have to make serious decisions about universal healthcare, and possibly even a universal basic income. As Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has observed, the virus did not so much create new problems as it poured gasoline on existing problems with health care, the income gap, foreign policy, prison policies, and the environment. We have the opportunity to forge a better world after Covid-19 than we had in the first weeks of 2020.
Two mass shooting events took place on Saturday morning, August 3, in Texas, and that night in Dayton, Ohio. In both incidents, the shooter was stopped, the first in 6 minutes, the second in less than a minute. Still, in both cases people were killed and many more wounded because of the insanely powerful, military style weapons available for purchase all over America. This cannot go on.
My newest book is a collection of the meditations (post-theistic "prayers") written originally for use in our Gathering services at the Emerging Church. We now how to share these liturgical resources with progressive churches everywhere.
The shocking North Carolina rally in which Trump led the crowds in a chant of "Send her back" was a bridge too far. This is no longer merely conservative blowing of dog whistles and being a bully to draw support from racists. This is the all too familiar laying of ground for fascism and none of us should allow this kind of thinking to become normative in America.
This podcast is produced in a small independent congregation in Springfield, Missouri. The church is small and not close to being self supporting. This progressive material is made available to the world only through the donations of listeners and, frankly, we went totally broke in the middle of June and would have been in real trouble had we not received major support from a few special friends. We absolutely must grow our donor base or these videos and podcasts are threatened with extinction!!! Help!!!
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Community Christian Church
4806 E. Farm Road 136
Springfield, MO 65809
I will be speaking in South Carolina the first two weeks of April and in Exeter England on June 9. Please join me at the listed locations if possible. As always, we encourage our listeners to also become supporters to help us to keep these progressive messages on line. You can donate by clicking on the donate button at www.spfccc.org or by mailing a donation to The Emerging Church, 4806 FR 136, Springfield, MO 65809.
The mere existence of an entirely honest, progressive church is fiscally unlikely. We don't have enough support from our small Springfield, MO congregation to keep us afloat. We need the support of our listeners to keep producing new material. Please support us if you can. You can click on the donate button on our webpage (spfccc.org) and sign up to make monthly donations in any amount you can afford.
There are not many truly progressive congregations and very few that have a meaningful presence online. Please become a monthly donor to this channel to help us to stay online.
Christmas Eve message regarding the message of Luke's and Matthew's accounts of the birth of Jesus.
We are a hybrid church. We continue to exist only because we receive support both from our small seated church in Springfield and several of our Internet listeners. And more specifically, for the past several years we have been able to keep our doors open because of the larger year end gifts we have received in November and December. Please consider making a donation before the end of 2017 so that we can share 2018 together!
I hear from listeners who group our videos with the lectures of Spong, Borg, Crossan and Armstrong and while that is flattering, I know that I am not on the "A list" of progressive speakers (I can see the book sales numbers, after all!). But as important as the work of these leading progressive scholars has been to all of us, Borg is regrettably deceased, Spong is recovering from a stroke, and we get only a few new lectures every year from Armstrong and Crossan. Our channel produces 48-52 new messages every year, offering a progressive perspective on current events. Our continued presence on the web is entirely dependent upon finding a few folks who are willing to help to financially support us. No one is trying to make a big salary out of this effort, in fact, we are a very lean operation, but we still have to have some support to keep going. Please become more than a listener, become a donor by going to www.spfccc.org - click on the donate button and become a monthly donor to keep the messages coming…. for you and for literally tens of thousands of listeners who will never become a contributor but who benefit from the content of our channel. Thank you!
We are proud to announce the release of Holly Ketchum's new children's book, America Will Be Great. This wonderful book is aimed at early elementary aged students and illustrates inclusion and acceptance rather than bans, walls, rejection and prejudice. We are distributing the books at our cost - please go to www.spfccc.org, - click on the donate button - and donate $7 per copy and give us a mailing address and we will send you your author autographed copies.
Of the more than 15,000 viewers and listeners we have each month, fewer than 100 support us financially. Our continued existence is in question. Please become a regular contributor to keep this progressive resource in existence. Without listener donations our church would not exist. If we are your virtual church, please support us (you can donate on line at www.spfccc.org).
You can donate by clicking on the donate button on our website: www.spfccc.org
Or you can mail donations to us at:
Community Christian Church
4806 E Farm Road 136
Springfield, MO 65809
Reinhold Niebuhr said: Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; and he added, Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. These important observations should inform people of faith, recognizing that we are mired in the present moment yet the just society we long for cannot likely be attained during our lifetimes and we certainly can’t make much progress as isolated individuals. We must not allow our cynicism about the next four years to keep us from working for those important goals that will not be visible for generations to come.
Noam Chomsky offers two dire warnings following the election of Donald Trump: The first is an accelerated use of carbon based fuels that will bring the human race to extinction and the other is a renewed nuclear arms race leading quickly to a nuclear war. As real as these threats are, this sermon speaks to the ways in which fear is a villain that pushes us to make the worst decisions in response to these global threats.
The Standing Rock camps are still in operation. The DAPL construction equipment is still poised to return to drilling if the Trump administration reverses Obama's halt on the project. This important protest still calls for our involvement and support.
This sermon was written and delivered by Rev. Mel Miller in 1963. The Millers had four children when they decided to adopt a black child and then a Native American child in the early days of the Civil Rights movement. They were sorely abused for their progressive decision but Mel wrote this sermon (which is read today by his eldest daughter) to kindly and patiently help his congregation to understand the bold moves his family was making.
Matthew and Luke tell completely different (and contradictory) accounts of the birth of Jesus. Neither are meant to be taken literally. They were writing a theological message (sermon) to introduce their gospels. Where the two agree is that the Jesus they were going to describe was a messenger who would turn the world upside down, casting down the rich and powerful in favor of the weak and poor. There is our real Christmas story, a story of liberation and justice.
We cannot make America Great by exporting Hispanics, by closing our borders to Muslims, by taking away the rights of same sex couples, women, union laborers, and the differently abled. In fact, America is great, not in spite of its diversity but specifically because of it.
Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted that education was failing on two fronts: we were failing to teach students to think critically, and we were failing to teach character. A shocking number of people fall for fake news and it is changing our government and our society. King's complaint is very relevant to our present crisis, as we now appear to live in an Empire of Lies in which speaking the truth appears to be treason.
Economics is not a hard science. Economists sometimes try to make us believe that it is and they do equip their textbooks and classroom lectures with impressive charts and graphs but an economist will call things like the fish in the ocean and the trees in a forest an “externality” that has no value. In truth, as philosopher Alan Watts has written, money doesn’t exist, it is just a concept. We must begin to think about intrinsic value of things like clean water and air, the value of farmland and forests, beyond what they would bring in the marketplace.
For the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota, this Thanksgiving was a time for defending not only the Missouri River from pollution but also defending themselves from assault from Dakota Access Pipeline security employees and sheriff’s deputies hired from five states. Native Americans are forming what may be the civil rights movement of our generation as they stand up to the full force of a $3.8 billion fossil fuel construction project.
As progressives try to process the election of Donald Trump and we face the prospects of a ban on Muslim immigrants, the deportation of millions of undocumented Latinos, and appointments to the Supreme Court that could bring an end to legal same sex marriage and abortion, we look for a way through our disappointment, anger, fear, and grief, to find a path into moral leadership.
The Native Americans camped out in North Dakota in opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline have hardly been mentioned in the news and much of what has been reported is either misleading or patently false. The use of propaganda often makes it hard to tell who is right and who is wrong in any protest, whistleblower case, or "leak" of sensitive information. Who is the terrorist, who is the traitor, and who are the heroes?
Grief is the price you pay for loving any living thing. The morality rate is, ultimately 100% and so do we deny our grief by investing ourselves in a belief in some kind of life after death or find a way through the grief into sacred remembering?
People migrate, as refugees of war, famine, or poverty. These migrations are often the cause of the worst genocides and most violent clashes in history. In the modern era it is time for us to start being honest about these intentional holocausts as land is taken from one nation by another. This sermon proposes the change from our observance of Columbus Day to a more appropriate Indigenous Peoples' Day. (Oh, and Dr. Ray knows that it is the Missouri River in North Dakota and not the Mississippi River….regardless of what he may have said in this recording)
The ancient mythic account of Jacob's night wrestling in the wilderness with a man/demon/God made him a new person… with a limp. Coming to terms with ourselves, taking a fearless and searching moral inventory of our own life, is the path out of the wilderness of isolation, constant victimization, and life destroying anger.
Many are surprised to find that their favorite source for progressive sermons is a tiny church in Springfield, MO, the reddest of red states. I can tell you that our survival is now dependent upon the donations we received from our world wide audience. Please take a moment to become a regular donor by clicking on the "Donate" button on our website: www.spfccc.org and make your gift a recurring monthly gift.
Progressive religious people have made a choice, not one necessarily based on evidence or critical thinking, but a vital choice between self service and service of others. For us, the spiritual life is rooted in an evidence based faith in which we use critical thinking but we have chosen an ethic of interconnectedness with other people rather than simple self service.
Progressive communities of faith, if they are to survive the coming generation, must be willing to make some fundamental and fairly quick changes. Churches must be willing to embrace critical thinking and set aside creedal beliefs in otherworldly myths and superstitions. We must embrace a radical mission of service and prophetic witness to social justice. But, and this is crucial, we have to learn how to make this journey joyfully. Without joy, cynicism will paralyze our congregations.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” The prophet Amos was angry about how the poor were abused by merchants in his day and we have every reason to be even more angry today but we cannot wait for the marketplace to grow a conscience. The victims of economic exploitation but organize, unite, and demand fair treatment and people of faith need to get out of the pews and join them in the streets!
On this 15th anniversary of 9-11, we look back and ask ourselves if 15 years of war with more than 600,000 civilian casualties, have we defeated terrorism or have we just created new generations of terrorists. As Malala has told us, with a gun you can kill a terrorist but with education you can kill terrorism. We must immediately cease the drone killings, invasions, and military tactics and begin teaching peace on both sides of this violent divide.
Though our world has completely transformed in the span of a century, our attitude towards labor is still locked in the more primitive era of scarcity. The real modern world is still waiting to be born when we will afford all human beings a decent way to live without fear of homelessness or hunger.
Rev. John Churcher's 2nd lecture in the "Evolution of God" conference. This recording was made in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Columbia, SC
The 600% increase in the price of a life saving Epi Pen was a purely capitalist decision because the corporation holding patent felt that the market would bear the higher price. That is the whole problem with the health care system being in the hands of unbridled capitalism. Capitalism, as an economic system has neither a morality or a conscience unless the society chooses to place ethical boundaries around it… which we should.
What do we mean when we say “GOD”?
A religious conference addressing the evolution of what people think about the nature and character of God.
Community Christian Church in Springfield, MO
4806 E Cherry St
August 5-7
Then
Unitarian Universalist Community of Columbia
AUGUST 12-14, 2016
2701 Heyward Street, Columbia, SC 29205
Keynote Speaker, Rev. John Churcher, of England’s popular “Permission to Speak” fame and noteworthy speakers include Rev. Mo Wills, Sean Spyres, and Dr. Roger Ray.
One of the great contributions of Abraham Maslow to the practice of psychology was a shift in emphasis from trying to focus on what was wrong in a person's life to trying to enhance personal strengths. As one old hardware store sage advised a customer, "Stop worrying about killing weeds and focus on growing grass." In the progressive movement, we need to move beyond stressing where we disagree with mainstream religion and really get good at expressing what we do believe and how we want to incorporate those positive beliefs into the world.
Five years after Luther began the Reformation he was damning Anabaptists who did not agree with his Biblical interpretations. Within a generation the initially bold and dramatic reforms envisioned in Protestantism settled back into the same magical thinking of traditional Christianity. With the current Progressive movement also fail? Are people afraid to think for themselves; will they always fall back into the comfort of creeds and magic shows? As Voltaire observed, if you can persuade someone to believe what is absurd you can then get them to commit atrocities. The world needs a fact-based faith that refuses to believe lies.
"The Intoxication of Power"
(I Kings 21, the story of King Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard)
There is a very distinct anti-government thread that runs through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings of the Hebrew Bible. The story of how Ahab’s wife had a citizen killed so that the king could take his land represents the danger of how power corrupts an individual and destroys a society. As easy as it is to criticize the abuses of those in power, there is also a personal message in this to reflect on how much better we really are when given the power to abuse others.
In this epsiode I am reading an article that I wrote in immediate response to the shootings at Pulse in Orlando. You can read the text on the Daily Kos at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/6/12/1537676/-Who-Did-it-This-Time-Maybe-a-Little-Bit-it-Was-All-of-Us
Dr. Paul Thomlinson, chief researcher for Burrell Mental Health speaks to current social aspects of the stigma of mental illness and how the failure to receive treatment relates to addiction.
Addiction is back in the news, largely because opiod and heroin addiction is reaching into the mainstream of middle and upper class. This message addresses the assumption that, as Jung suggested, the root of addiction is a spiritual thirst, perhaps best seen in the need for positive community connection.
Of the more than 10,000 listeners we have each month, fewer than 80 support us financially. Our continued existence is in question. Please visit www.spfccc.org and become a regular contributor to keep this progressive resource in existence.
US General Boykin described our war in Iraq as a battle between our God and their God. This unfortunate prejudice is also visible in the battle described in I Kings between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. We need to rise above such partisan divisions and recognize that governments are not interested in religion, they just use religion to recruit the poor of one nation to kill the poor of another nation. Wars are about money and power. There is no reason for people of faith to ever go to war because of their religion.
Progressives often seem to feel a kind of compassion fatigue from being asked to be concerned about so many different issues of injustice. Perhaps the issue is that we give ourselves permission to give up because we get tired, or bored, or we allow indifference to get the best of us. Perhaps the spiritual prescription for the church is that they should choose to love more.
Early 20th century theologians as well as many poets, journalists, essayists, and philosophers were urging the public to embrace a progressive approach to faith that was concerned with behavior more than beliefs, that was rooted in ethics and not in magical thinking. Maybe it was WWII, or maybe it was the advent of evangelists on TV and radio, but Americans did not embrace their sages at the time. We can hope that a more rational approach to faith is being born in 21st century America.
Accepting that the world has a beginning and an end leads to a dismissive view of poverty, pollution, warfare, and social classes. While everyone certainly has a right to their personal beliefs about life after death, Muslims, Christians, and Jews must focus on the life that we know and to root our faith in what we can see in front of us. The early church was so confident that Jesus was coming back soon that they ignored many important matters of ethics. We cannot afford to make that mistake.
Once every month we remind our listeners that our presence on the web, our continued existence as a church is predicated entirely upon people being willing to make donations to support the church. Without the donations of our internet listeners, we would be closing the church this year. With your help, we hope to last for many more years but, in all honesty, it is up to you.
You can donate by clicking on the donate button on our website: www.spfccc.orgOr you can mail donations to us at:Community Christian Church4806 E Farm Road 136Springfield, MO 65809
If we are, in fact, your church, please support us!