jimrigby.org

Easter is the hardest Sunday of the year for me to preach. Every year our church fills with new visitors who understandably want to hear the typical children’s tales of Easter. How could these poor people know that our church is filled with freethinkers who would walk out if I preached such a message? These innocent visitors expect to hear the story about a dead guy who got up on Easter morning. They want to hear that they and their sweet children will also physically rise up from the grave if they recite and believe the magic words of religion. They have been taught a version of the story that denies death instead of one that illumines life. No wonder they do not really want to be in church!

I can see the flowers in their Easter bonnets begin to wilt as I tell them that Easter happened, not when a corpse got up, but when the disciples began to see Christ in each other. Visitors do not want to be told that Easter has not yet happened for them if they cannot see Christ in the face of a gay or lesbian person. Or that Easter has not yet happened for them if they cannot not see the face of Christ in the people they are calling “illegal immigrants.” After Easter has happened to a person, he or she can hear the profound love behind an atheist’s hatred of superstition. Easter is a celebration of this universal love that alone could save our world.

Most Easter visitors do not want to hear a living message that makes them uncomfortable. They prefer a comfortable story about waking cadavers that does not require that they, themselves, resurrect into the common life.  They do not want to hear that the cross represented the threat of empire and so now the church is standing on the wrong side of that cross. Instead of presenting itself as a living sacrifice for the whole world, the church now consecrates the cross of the American Empire. The church must be told that, if they cannot see the cross in the form of our own killer drones, if they cannot admit that poverty is a form of crucifixion, then they are worshipping a dead Jesus not a living Christ.

I understand that Easter visitors not want to put on fancy clothes only to be reminded that those garbs were woven in sweatshops, which are also a crucifixion. Visitors at Easter certainly do not want to hear about the young Muslims arrested on the word of bounty hunters and now on hunger strike in Guantanamo because we took away their Korans. After Easter, to refuse to renounce our power and privilege over the weak and the poor is to deny Christ.

Easter is not a magical denial of death. It is a symbolic affirmation of life. Easter is not about a miracle that happened only for the Christian Church, it is an awakening into our one common life. Easter is remembering that, when we give ourselves to the one life, even our death teaches the Way.

I wish every Bible given or sold was required to add the following warning label:

“Warning! Do not use as a textbook, rulebook or drug.”

The Bible isn’t a textbook because the heart of its message is understood symbolically not dogmatically. My warning label might have a picture of church people afraid to look through Galileo’s telescope. In the corner of the picture would be a smirking biblical expert showing a chart of the earth as flat with relevant bible verses.
Bible training shouldn’t be the functional equivalent of a lobotomy. The Bible is a horrible textbook on astronomy, geology or the biology of human sexuality. That same scripture, understood poetically, can be a wonderful aid at helping us figure how the truths of science can be converted to meaning for living. For that to happen, we must never pit the claims of religion against those of science as if they were speaking of our world in the same way. Science tells us what the facts are, religion is the art of turning truths into meanings. To that end, the Bible should stoke the fires of reason, not extinguish them.

Just as the Bible is a poor substitute for a brain, it is also a poor substitute for a sense of justice. The Bible isn’t a rule book, because justice is relational not abstract. We cannot mistreat others just because we can find a verse in scripture that allows it.
While most turn to the Bible for personal guidance, there always some who turn to it in an effort to control others. On my warning label, I would have a picture of an inquisitor torturing a pagan. The inquisitor would have a kindly smile and a picture of hell to assure all concerned that he was only torturing the poor man to save him from an even worse fate.
When human beings appoint themselves as God’s enforcers, they see their own sins as marginal and their victim’s as unforgivable even to an all-powerful God. Thus they mistreat others to save them. They secretly picture society as a totem pole with themselves mounted on everyone else’s back leading them to the good shepherd. They cut the Bible’s clear message not to judge into verses, and then rearrange those verses into honey coated daggers of judgment.

Finally, the Bible is not a drug. Just as many turn to scripture to gain power, others turn to it as a surrogate to the art of living. They would rather read Psalm 19’s depiction of the sky, than actually look up in wonderment at the actual gift that has been given them. They can sing the songs of David, but cannot hear the song of their own hearts.

To illustrate this warning I would simply post a medieval Christian painting with dull colors, no depth perspective or understanding of anatomy. Perhaps people could realize that is what the whole world looks like to one lost in artless religion.

There are those who love God and the angels, but are numb to the aspirations of actual human beings. There are those who weep for the wounds of Christ who cannot find a tear for those who suffer today. There are those who long for eternity who are indifferent to the beauty of this moment. The Bible should not be a heart by-pass, if it does not make us more loving, we have misunderstood.
If I could, I would put a warning label on every Bible given or sold:

“Warning! Do not use as a textbook, rulebook or drug.”

It was a typical fundamentalist message someone left for me at the church office yesterday. I’ve received many of such letters over the years, almost always unsigned. In essence they all say:

“Rev. Rigby you are leading your flock astray. God has told me to tell you to stop basing your message on what the world wants to hear. Base your message on God’s holy word. Remember that God reserves a special punishment for clergy who mislead.”

I can almost count on some such self-appointed prophetic condemnation whenever my name shows up in the paper or on the news. It is a hollow feeling to receive such notes and have no opportunity to respond, but I’ve also learned that such notes are usually written by people who are so accustomed to hiding in like-minded groups that they do not really wish for dialogue. They would rather use such “drive by prophecy” approaches. I’ve often wished I knew where to send a response to such letters, but the opportunity never seems to present itself, so I’ve decided to write down a response to this latest letter and send it to the winds.

To whoever left this note at my office:

I’m sorry that you did not have the courage to stay and discuss this issue. When you say that my message is an appeal to the flesh, I do not know if you are referring to my stance on gay marriage, or women’s reproductive health or immigration reform, or something else. But since you kept mentioning the word “flesh,” I assume you are referring to the issue of marriage equality. I would like to respond to you with the same honesty and bluntness you addressed me.

I am so sorry for you that you look at people’s bodies and do not consider their character. It is sad to me that you cannot feel your obligation to give others the same rights you claim for yourself. Do you really think that their sex is “of the flesh” and yours is not? While I have no doubt that you are sincere, I also believe you are the one who is deceived. I am not the one focused on these peoples’ flesh, you are. I am focused on their faithfulness, their hopes and their love. Those are some of the qualities Paul called “fruits of the spirit.” Everything you bring up against them is based on their flesh.  I hope you will repent of your sin against your gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and return to Christ’s message of grace.

If you had even the slightest knowledge of Jesus, your only fear would be of judging and mistreating others. You would not turn other peoples’ struggle for equality into an imagined assault on your moral superiority. Instead, you would offer others the same grace that you yourself need as a fallible human being. But, you have appointed yourself their judge and jury. How can you possibly claim that the one who commanded us all not to judge, has now appointed you to do so?

Since you spoke a word of prophecy and quoted Revelation, allow me return the favor. God wants you to know your day is over.  Whatever the Supreme Court decides, the war is over and you lost. Had God been on your side you would have won, but your anti-gay slander now takes its place beside other disgraced historical church movements that  defended slavery, inquisitions and witch burnings.

Fundamentalists always say that they do not hate anyone, but God wants you to know when you try to take other people’s children, deny them insurance or demean their relationships as less than yours- you indeed hate them in any meaningful definition of that world.

It is not too late for you to leave your false religion of fear and judgment and return to Christ’s message of grace and love. We are all called into a new humanity where things like race and gender no longer define the worth of the human soul. Please know you can stop sitting in God’s judgment seat without the whole world going to hell.

Have a little faith.

One week after it was discovered that the NRA has worked to prevent local courts from taking guns away from abusive spouses, it was discovered that the NRA has also made “robocalls” to the grieving families of Newtown Connecticut to send them a pro-gun message:

 Christopher Wenis is a resident of Newtown who has found himself at the mercy of such calls. Wenis reached out to the NRA multiple times in an attempt to remove himself from their call lists. Despite assurances that he would be placed taken off their lists, the phone calls continued through out the week and into Friday evening.

Ignoring the phone calls won’t help either as voicemail machines pick up the prerecorded 30-second phone messages. That is what so deeply offended Tom Maurath, a 40-year resident of Newton, who said he worried that his six-year-old son could have been unintended recipient of the message. Maurath has also received post-cards from the NRA which blame the Connecticut General Assembly for trying to take away gun-owners rights. (Andrea Ayres-Deets)

The Infernal Lord Satan held a press conference shortly thereafter:

 “The NRA has reminded us today of what it’s all about. We were aware of their efforts to keep battering spouses well armed, but this latest news was frankly embarrassing. We are supposed to be the paragons of pure evil. Why didn’t we think of calling the victims of a shooting to send them a pro-gun message while their tender children are still freshly laid in their graves? The NRA has shown us that we have gotten soft. We need to return to their kind of single purpose philosophy that is willing to tear the heart out of its opponents. So we are announcing today that we are hiring the NRA leadership as consultants. We also have a few openings for gun owners who would never stoop to these tactics, but still mindlessly defend anything done by the NRA. In the coming months we also hope to appeal to the millions of Christians who are tired of turning the other cheek and who are willing to join us in turning America’s plowshares back into swords.”

http://www.policymic.com/mobile/articles/30807/assault-weapons-ban-2013-nra-harasses-sandy-hook-parents-with-pro-gun-robocalls

There is an interesting article in Slate today about the role an infant's pointing plays in learning how to bond with others. It seems particularly important when an infant points at an object, not because it wants something to be done, but simply to share awareness of that object with another person.

Over the last decade, a series of studies out of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have made a very good
argument for marveling at your pointing infant. A group of psychologists
there have documented that infants, beginning at around 1 year of age, point and
react to other people pointing in remarkably sophisticated ways. Babies point to
refer to events in the past and the future. They point to refer to things that
are no longer there. They can figure out, when an adult points across the room
toward a group of objects, what exactly the adult is gesturing toward (the toy
they’ve previously played with, say). They can deduce that, by pointing, an
adult is trying to communicate something specific (find that toy hidden in that
bucket). And not least of all, babies point because they want to share their
experience of the world—that puppy—with someone else.

 

I have only just seen the study, but it seems enormously suggestive of why humans seek out religion as well. There is a world of human experience that does not exist in the physical world, but only in the intuited “world” of our inter-subjectivity. From one angle, such experiences are ethereal wisps of our imaginations, mere vapors of vain existence.  But, from another angle, such intuitions are expressions of the universe as real and as natural as  a beaver’s dam. Far from being an escape from existence, such worship would be an ephemeral expression some deeper more lasting energy, like the glow of a firefly expresses a world of energy we cannot see except in such incarnated form. What if communal prayer were understood, not as an attempt to cajole an invisible celestial overlord to grant our wishes, but instead as communal art putting our deepest subliminal ties into something we can share? What if worship is not flattery directed at a divine being, but instead an attempt to “point” at being itself, and to share a moment of gratitude that we are here at all?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/how_babies_work.html

Christianity was born of two parents, Judaism and religions we sometimes call “pagan.”

I believe that when people orignially heard the stories of Jesus, they must have recognized that many of those stories were coming from earlier religions. If this is true, it is likely that the first Christians would not have understood the stories to be literal or historical, but as illustrations of universal truths put into the cultural idioms of their own day.

We live at a time when faith has died for many simply because the church lacks the honesty to admit that our symbols have belonged to many religions before us, lacks the humility to admit that these symbols still belong to all humankind and lacks the courage to translate those same symbols into a form that would make sense to us today.

Our next sermon series at St. Andrew’s (beginning the Sunday after Easter) will be a trip back in time to understand earlier versions of our Christian stories, to think about how the first Christians might have heard the accounts as told in their gospel forms, and to imagine how we might understand the stories today so they might actually illumines our lives and our world.

There is a great article by Paul Buchheit in Alternet about wealth inequality in the US. That article lists 5 facts, but it is insight rich so I have listed 10 facts all from Buchheit’s article in condensed form:

1. Any of the ten richest Americans could pay a year’s rent for all of America’s homeless with their 2012 income.

2. For CEOs and minimum-wage workers, the  difference is $5,000.00 per hour vs. $7.25 per hour.

3. A single top income could buy housing for every homeless person in the U.S.

4. These ten rich men together made more than our entire  housing budget.

5. For anyone still believing “they earned it,” it should be noted that  most of the Forbes 400 earnings came from  minimally-taxed, non-job-creating capital gains.

6. In 2009 the poorest  47% of America owned  ZERO PERCENT of the nation’s wealth (their debt exceeded their assets).

7. Since 1980 the American GDP has approximately doubled. Inflation-adjusted wages  have gone down. But the stock market has increased by  over ten times, and the richest quintile of Americans  owns 93% of it.

8. Out of 141 countries, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of  wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

9. For every one dollar of assets owned by a  single black or Hispanic woman, a member of the Forbes 400 has over  forty million dollars.

10. Minority families once had substantial equity in their homes, but after Wall Street caused the housing crash,  median wealth fell 66% for Hispanic households and 53% for black households. Now the average single black or Hispanic woman has about  $100 in net worth.

The article even offers some suggestions on how to begin to correct the problem:

What to do?

End the  capital gains giveaway, which benefits the wealthy almost exclusively.

Institute a  Financial Speculation Tax, both to raise needed funds from a currently untaxed subsidy on stock purchases, and to reduce the risk of the irresponsible trading that nearly brought down the economy.

Perhaps above all, we progressives have to choose one strategy and pursue it in a cohesive, unrelenting attack on greed. Only this will heal the ugly gash of inequality that has split our country in two.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/five-ugly-extremes-inequality-america-contrasts-will-drop-your-chin-floor

If you want a crystal ball to peer into our future under capitalism in the United States, consider Rupert Murdoch’s efforts to buy the Los Angeles Times:

“Mr. Murdoch, who has never shied away from a regulatory battle, has been beefing up News Corporation’s lobbying efforts in Washington in the last few months to urge regulators to revise a media ownership rule that would prevent the company from acquiring The Los Angeles Times and other newspapers in markets in which it already owns television stations.

“He wants it,” one person close to Mr. Murdoch said of The Los Angeles Times.” (NY Times)

Mr. Murdoch’s efforts to further limit whatever information Americans are able to obtain about their world hit a setback when the chair of the FCC resigned last recently. Murdoch already owns the San Antonio Express-News, The Star, New York Post, Fox News, The Weekly Standard, Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s Magazine, Smart Money and the Economic Review.

Now Murdoch wants the LA Times. And while the U.S. has rules forbidding such monopolies, in a capitalist country such as ours, even the laws are for sale. While anti-monopoly laws apply to many businesses, the super rich simply buy a waiver through the form of bribery capitalists call “lobbying.”

So our nation, already starving for truth, will be further bombarded by propaganda parading as news, talking heads disguised as journalists and news celebrities wearing American flag pins marching to the orders of an Australian overlord.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/business/media/murdochs-appetite-for-los-angeles-times-may-depend-on-fcc-changes.html?_r=0

The “Hitler Argument” is one of the most successfully used tactics in American politics. Denuded of specifics, the argument goes something like this: “My opponent is in favor of X, Hitler was also in favor of X, therefore anyone who supports X or my opponent is in favor of the holocaust.” With some sections of the population, it works every time.

The Hitler Argument is commonly used when the topic of gun control arises. “First Hitler took the guns, then when the population couldn’t defend itself, he took over everything.” I’m so used to hearing the argument used against gun control, I didn’t bother to question whether it was even true. So, I was surprised to run across this article, first in the AP and then in Huffington Post. The article based on the work of an historian who specifically studied gun laws under Hitler, claims that, while Hitler did take guns from the Jewish population, he was a complete “gun nut” for the population at large.

Soon after Hitler was named chancellor in 1933, he used the arson of the Reichstag as an excuse to push through a decree allowing for the arrest of many Communists and the suspension of civil rights including protections from search and seizure. But as the Nazis increasingly targeted Jews and others they considered enemies, they moved in 1938 to loosen gun statutes for the loyal majority, said Bernard Harcourt, a University of Chicago professor of law and political science who has studied gun regulations under Hitler.

The 1938 law is best known for barring Jews from owning weapons, after which the Nazis confiscated guns from Jewish homes. But Harcourt points out that Hitler’s gun law otherwise completely deregulated acquisition of rifles, long guns and ammunition. It exempted many groups from requiring permits. The law lowered the age for legal gun ownership from 20 to 18. And it extended the validity of gun permits from one year to three years.

“To suggest that the targeting of Jews in any of the gun regulations or any of the other regulations is somehow tied to Nazis’ view of guns is entirely misleading,” Harcourt said, “because the Nazis believed in a greater deregulation of firearms. Firearms were viewed, for the good German, were something to which they had rights.”

With the 1938 law, Nazis seized guns from Jewish homes. But few Jews owned guns and they composed just 2 percent of the population in a country that strongly backed Hitler. By the time the law passed, Jews were so marginalized and spread among so many cities, there was no possibility of them putting up meaningful resistance, even with guns, said Robert Gellately, a professor of history at Florida State University and author of “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany.”

Of course, if we were to infer that people who support gun rights have anything else in common with Hitler, we would equally fall into the fallacy of Hitler Argument.

I’m not saying any argument based on Hitler is invalid, only that such arguments are easily misused when lifted out of context.  It is much safer to look at the larger themes of history if we wish to avoid repeating Hitler’s attrocities. From that larger context, I actually agree that an American version of Hitler might poll quite well in certain parts of the United States. Remember, an American Hitler would replace German self-worship, with American patriotism. He would replace the swastika with an American flag. And, he would replace scapegoating the Jewish population with villification of Muslims. With that platform, would you want to run against him in parts of the South?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/23/hitler-gun-control_n_2939511.html

“So, if the far left can marginalize Santa and the Easter bunny, of they can tell the children those symbols are obsolete and unnecessary, they then set the stage for a totally secular society in the future.” – Bill O’Reilly

To me the funniest humor is unintentional. For example, when someone feigns indignation on behalf of an unlived principle.

I have no idea about Bill O’Reilly’s personal faith, but his words are truly comic here. What could be funnier than indignation at the secular forces that are destroying the true symbols of the Christian religion- like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? The religious message of Christmas, “peace on earth good will toward all,” was the victim of a hostile take over years ago by the very commercial symbols O’Reilly is defending.