jimrigby.org

Someone just sent me a very kind private message asking that I not use the word “bewitched” as a pejorative term. The friend just wanted to make sure our Wiccan and Pagan friends know I respect them.
I am always so grateful when people take the time to help me be kinder and more inclusive. Thanks to my friend for the message and apologies to any Wiccan, Pagan or nature mystic who felt disrespected by my use of an insensitive term.

Capitalism requires a lack of human solidarity that renders humanity’s greatest problems unsolvable.
Humanity will never arrive at the beloved community through property rights alone. When ethics are crafted from rights of possession, the working poor become like sawdust in a carpenter’s shop. They are seen as the tragic but inevitable victims of economic necessity, instead of as members of our one human family.
For many bewitched by capitalism, the word “freedom” no longer refers to personal human rights. For many, the word “freedom” now means “freedom to hoard, pollute and mistreat workers.
Many Americans now evaluate our national economy by how many billionaires it can produce, instead of how well it improves the lives of the masses.
Think of the cost of incarcerating immigrants and criminalizing homelessness. There is need to protect society from violent predators, but the land of the free now imprisons more of its people than almost any other country.
The answers to environmental challenges and to homelessness in America will never be found within capitalism’s cold blooded analysis. For example, the problem of homelessness in the richest nation on earth would not seem so intractable if we put people ahead of profits.
The answer to homelessness in America might be to take the same amounts we now waste on prisons and detention camps. We would actually save money by not employing walls, weapons and prison guards, and we would save our own hearts by refusing to build cages for the indigent members of our human family.

I am often asked to pray for public rallies and gatherings, but Austin is so wonderfully diverse I don’t think it is respectful to make assumptions about what people do or don’t believe.
Prayer is a form of intimacy, and like every other forms of intimacy, prayer requires consent. I have no right to walk through someone’s psyche uninvited.
I’ve sat through too many prayers by preachers who showed no recognition of other peoples’ boundaries. I experienced prayers that felt like the spiritual equivalent to a subway groping. I’m not going to do that to someone else. In fact, even at Saint Andrews I try to use language that will be just as meaningful to the Agnostic as to the believer.
What I can give is a invocation, not in the sense of a magical incantation given by a clergy person with magical connections to heaven. To me an invocation is simply one person rising to give voice to our common hopes that we might all feel the tie that binds us together as members of one human family, as threads in the web of life, and as fellow offspring of the mysterious cosmic process beyond the comprehension any of us, including clergy.

Religion is either a bridge, or it is a prison.
Religion either opens us to the larger life we hold in common with all beings, or it imprisons us within itself.
Religion is either the pursuit of the original song of our hearts or it is a parrot song whimpered within gilded cages.
If religion does not free us from its own dogma, it fills our minds with words of the dead. Such faith permits us to believe but not to think.
If religion does not free us from its own moralisms, we become robotic mimes living in formulaic gestures instead of loving relationships.
Religion either calls us beyond its own walls into the whole of life or it shrink wraps our horizons down to those of its own sect and culture.
Immature religion praises the seed but forbids the blossom.

If Christian nationalists are correct and the Christian religion is about being patriotic, armed, anti-abortion and heterosexual, why didn’t Jesus directly teach about any of that?
The answer many Christian Nationalists give to that question is “Jesus didn’t talk about a lot of important things but that doesn’t make them right.” That is very true but it also completely dodges the real question: which is, “How can Christian Nationalists claim to speak for Jesus when their social positions are based almost entirely on things he didn’t say?”
How did Christians Nationalism degenerate from “turn the other cheek” to “stand your ground’? How did Jesus’ call to share the world get replaced by a mindless and heartlessness commitment to free markets? How did Jesus’ call to care for our one human family get replaced with calls to preemptively bomb other nations and to turn the needy sojourner away from our borders?
Jesus never said in order to be married you need to get approval from the church. He never linked marriage with getting a license from the state. Jesus never approved a hierarchy of clergy. Jesus never signed off on any of the creeds that would be developed centuries later. If anything, Jesus rejected the religion of dogma and hierarchy in favor of a life of simplicity, humility, forgiveness and sharing.
When a rich young ruler asked Jesus what to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus didn’t mention baptism, confession of sins, or any of the atonement theories of Paul. He told the young man to share his possessions with the poor. Think about that for a moment. Jesus parable of the good Samaritan is a teaching story about pious religious people getting it wrong and a merciful outsider getting it right.
Doesn’t the story of the good Samaritan imply one doesn’t need to be a sectarian Christian to live the kind of life Jesus described? In fact, the lesson seems to be that a merciful Atheist is actually much closer to the teachings of Jesus than a orthodox but judgmental Christian.
If Christian Nationalism is correct and the essence of Christianity consists in things Jesus never mentioned, then Jesus would have to be the worst teacher of all time. If we assume Jesus WASN’T a bad teacher, then we must also assume he did not come to teach people to be moralists, religious nationalists nor sectarian Christians.

When I was young, entering the ministery was the last thing I would have predicted for myself. I had a chip on my shoulder toward religious superstition and sectarian bullying that I carry to this day. But, against my most cynical inclinations, I still believe there is hope for religion and for the church.
I remember as a child being mystified why some of the meanest people I knew identified as Christian. I could not understand how white Christians had defended slavery, or how some German Christians had confused our Christian faith with anti-Semitism.
It bothered me that Nazi Christians had sung some of the same hymns and recited some of the same creeds as my church back in Dallas. Do not the horrors of church history imply there is a crack in the foundation of European Christianity that needs repair?
I have spent much of my life wondering how so much of the church lost its way. Here are some of my best guesses:
MUCH OF CHRISTENDOM LOST ITS WAY BECAUSE IT BEGAN TO WORSHIP GOD AS POWER INSTEAD OF LOVE
How is it possible that so many members of a movement that began with “turn the other cheek” now embrace the AR-15 as a God given right? How did a movement that began with a call to serve the world get redefined as a call to impose Christianity on everyone else?
When God is worshipped as power, it implies there is a sacred pecking order. When Christianity spread into the Roman empire, many Christians lost Jesus’ message of universal liberation and focused on places in scripture that gave them power over others (“slaves, obey your masters,” “wives, obey your husbands,” et. al.) When the church worships a God of power and believes in righteousness as a sacred hierarchy, it is a matter of time before Christendom becomes infested with bullies.
MUCH OF CHRISTENDOM LOST ITS WAY WHEN IT BEGAN TO WORSHIP GOD AS A CAPRICIOUS INDIVIDUAL BEING INSTEAD OF AS A SYMBOL OF THE SOURCE OF OUR COMMON BEING
Jesus taught that God’s love is like the sun’s light – it falls on good and evil. He taught that we can look at the birds of the air and the lilies of the field to learn about God’s will.
When people believe in a temperamental God, it makes it very hard to be scientific. There is no point in studying physics if the laws of nature are routinely violated by disembodied spirits. Somehow, the church must learn to find the sacred as a deeper experience of our ordinary world, not as a supernatural world haunted by irrational spirits.
MUCH OF CHRISTENDOM LOST ITS WAY BECAUSE IT BEGAN TO WORSHIP GOD AS A MALE INSTEAD OF A LOVE THAT TRANSCENDS THE HUMAN CONDITION
Many clergy claim they are not being sexist by calling God “He.” They say the Hebrew word for God (Elohim) is male. Yes, and the word is also plural which somehow gets left out of the English translations. We must never forget that God is a symbol of the mystery beyond human understanding.
When we worship God as male, we lift up masculinity as if it were an essential trait of the sacred. The patriarchal church opposes women’s control over their own reproductive lives and opposes political justice for our LGBTQ neighbors, not because Jesus mentioned either subject, but because those issues are essential in protecting the irrational and unjust hierarchy of patriarchy.
MUCH OF CHRISTENDOM LOST ITS WAY BECAUSE IT BEGAN TO WORSHIP JESUS AS WHITE
When Christianity spread to Europe the simple teachings of Jesus were replaced by creeds and rituals that allowed the church to praise Jesus and follow Caesar. The church began to fill with stained glass images where Jesus looked less and less like a rabbi from the Middle East and more like a ski instructor from Sweden. Much of the church then defended slavery because they could not see Christ in People of Color.
MUCH OF CHRISTENDOM LOST ITS WAY BECAUSE IT BEGAN TO WORSHIP CHRISTIANITY ITSELF INSTEAD OF CHRISTLIKE LOVE
When some believers began to use the word “Christian” as a synonym for everything good, they implied that non-Christians lacked those same virtues. It was then easy for clergy like Martin Luther to assault the Jewish people as a threat to Christian civilization.
Likewise, it is easy for modern clergy to justify passing laws that impose our own Christian privilege onto the rest of the world. If the church is not to be a sheepskin disguise for narcissistic self-worshipping bullies then it must become an humble sacrificial vessel for a love that honors the entire human and animal family.

We endure an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering trying to gain approval from those incapable of loving us back.
It is of great comfort to realize that, when people are wise, they can love our human hearts even if they do not like our our destructive disguises and defenses. The wise are able to see our humanity because they know their own.
if someone cannot love our human hearts they probably do not know their own. It is almost impossible to receive love from those who do not know themselves. It is precisely this familiarity with our own human tissue that allows us to empathize with other humans being even when we detest their words or actions.
People may know every other inch of the universe, but, no one can be truly wise if they cannot recognize the human heart. The wise can love us even when we seem unlovable because they recognize the human heart we may have temporarily lost.
If people cannot love our humanity, in spite of our mistakes and travesties, there is no reason to fret over their opinions of us. Even if they have mastered every other science and art, they cannot be truly wise if they are not lovers of the human heart.

This year it will be a strange 4th of July.
This year we will celebrate our “liberty” even as military vehicles rumple through the streets of our cities using the violence of the few to justify crushing the peaceful dissent of the masses.
This year some of us will be celebrating America as a powerful military empire with flags and firecrackers. Others of us will be in grieving for America as an unfulfilled hope for universal human rights.
It is vital this 4th of July for Christians to take the flags out of our sanctuaries. We must return to the call to love beyond every boundary. If our love does not reach beyond family or nation it is not the love that embraces enemy as well as friend and, thus, heals the world of animosity.
When we allow our leaders to dismantle protections for anyone else, it is our own rights we throw away. We can only love our nation by loving the earth and our human family more.
This year Christians must remember that ours is not the Christianity of the inquisitors and crusaders. We must be the descendants of people from every religion and worldview who suffered for saying “no” to Pharaoh, and then suffered for saying “no” to Caesar.
This 4th of July poses us with the question, “do we now stand ready to suffer for saying “no” to any American Caesar whether liberal, conservative or MAGA?”
Resistance to tyranny was once a central part of many religions. The midwives of Egypt disobeyed Pharaoh so Moses could be born. Moses killed an Egyptian for mistreating his people. Mary sang a song while she was pregnant that her son would topple the mighty and lift up the weak.
It is important for Christians to remember that God didn’t invent the cross, Rome did. Rome didn’t crucify people for their religion. The reason the Romans put Jesus on the cross was probably because they thought he was an insurrectionist.
The great friends of humanity, whether religious or not, have called us to resist tyranny, by not submitting to anyone’s persecution. This 4th of July gives us the opportunity to demonstrate we would not have been good citizens of the Nazi regime but would have broken the law to protect the all targeted people in Nazi Germany.
The proof of our love is not found in any religious ritual or sectarian creed. We can only embrace the love that grows into justice by joining in resistance to every form of domination and injustice anywhere in our human family.

When I was young, I was a bit thin-skinned about personal criticism. I believed people could “see through” me and so I took criticism very personally.
Eventually, I realized that most people are so wrapped up in their own lives they aren’t really perceiving me at all. This realization gave greater peace and compassion. It also convinced me that I am usually doing the same thing when I dislike others.
It is very hard to see through the disguised mirror images we project onto the world. When people dislike us and say cruel things about us, it is an indicator that they are seeing their own projections, not our own humanity. Anyone who really sees us will have some compassion for our humanity even when we are wrong. We can learn from the criticisms of others, but we should not imagine they are looking into our souls.
Usually, a critical person isn’t really dealing with us at all. They are trapped in their own pain and are dealing with their own issues through us. And if a person doesn’t really like themselves it is vain to think they will, or even can, approve of us.
At some point in my life I realized, if I was going to be an authentic person and challenge the superstitions and cruelties within and around me, I needed to get better at dealing with people who don’t like me just because I am making them uncomfortable.
Eventually, I realized I must love people enough to risk losing their approval.

Those who say “We the People” meaning only those like themselves will eventually turn on each other.
If MAGA conservatives do not consider liberals and socialists to be true Americans, eventually they will begin to purge those in their own ranks for not being conservative enough.
America should be a good example of universal human rights, not a constant exception to the rule.
If you cannot get along with people who are different from you, then you have not begun to understand the principle of “E Pluribus Unum.”
A confederacy of narcissists cannot long stand.