Progressive Faith Sermons - Dr. Roger Ray

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!