Sermon

Sermon Archive

Toxic Religion

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
January 29, 2012 Epiphany 4

I Corinthians 8:1-9
Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that "all of us possess knowledge." Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; 3but anyone who loves God is known by him.
4Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that "no idol in the world really exists," and that "there is no God but one." 5Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth--as in fact there are many gods and many lords-- 6yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
7It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. 8"Food will not bring us close to God." We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. 9But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

A woman limped into my church office one day when I was a graduate student serving a little county seat congregation in southern Kentucky. She had been to see me a few times but this time she looked much worse than ever before. She had survived a brutal beating. She had a broken nose and broken ribs, she limped from having been repeatedly kicked. She was a nurse in the local hospital and had told them too many times in the past that she had fallen down the stairs and so this time she feared going in for treatment because if the emergency room doctor called the police she might lose her job and if she lost her job, she was sure her husband would kill her.

I begged her to let me call an attorney, to take out a restraining order, to file for divorce. She shook her head and wept.... She couldn't. You see, she was a Catholic.... She had been a nun and she left her convent twenty years ago to marry the man who was now her abuser. She had been to see her priest before she came to see me.
He had told her that this was happening because she had broken her vow and that now these beatings were her cross to bear. I knew Father Tom. I knew him to be a kind and sincere man. But I could also hear him saying those words..... a vow to God is a vow that is not broken without severe consequences.

I can name Catholic priests, monks, professors and authors all day long who are wonderful, insightful, spiritual people.... I'm not trying to tar the Catholic Church with a single brush but neither am I willing to white wash the offenses because of the good on the other side of the scales. If you can't tell the truth in church, then where can you?

Earlier this month, Aaron Anson wrote an article for the Huffington Post about his struggles with coming out to his family. He says, "My cousin was a teenager when my family first learned he was gay, and you would have thought an airplane had crashed in our backyard. The malicious, bigoted religious rhetoric that ensued stunk to the heavens. I'm certain it contributed to my remaining closeted for the next 20 years. When I finally did come out, you would have believed Jesus himself had shown up in the backyard that time. Their rhetoric was condescending, venomous, and loaded with ill intent."

He writes about the "It gets better" initiative which is now more than two years old, in which celebrities and other adults post articles and videos to reassure young people who are being bullied and harassed to help prevent the epidemic of teen gay suicide. Of course, there are also examples of people who have posted reassuring videos who later decided that it didn't get better and they have also taken their own lives.

Anson is making the point that a lot of the anti-bullying effort is aimed at public schools and colleges where peer abuse makes young gays feel that they will never ever be accepted but the fact is that the most vicious, the most damaging bullying doesn't come from school or peers..... it comes from church and family.

It's hard to accurately talk about numbers because I believe that many teen suicides are not reported as suicides and the ones that are, are often reported in a way to allow the family to pretend that they have no idea why their son or daughter took their own life because they would not be willing to admit to the abuse they had dished out themselves and to the derision to which they had subjected them in Sunday School and church. Because, it shouldn't matter to us if it was 1 suicide or 1,000 suicides and, frankly, of the 4 to 5 thousand people who take their own life in America every year, no one knows how many of them are the direct result of sick religion but I suspect that most of us would guess that more than half bear the marks of religious persecution.

In the biblical text we read this morning, Paul is imploring the members of the church in Corinth to get along with one another even though they will not all agree on everything. Now, you have to understand that getting a letter from Paul telling you to be more understanding of one another's differences of opinion would be a little like getting a phone call from Charlie Sheen asking you to reign your behavior in a little bit.

There is a tension here that I simply must beg you to take very seriously. On the one hand it is incumbent upon those of us who insist upon being open minded, unjudging, compassionate and accepting.

It is not too strong a statement to say that the survival of the world is dependent upon people being willing to let other nations, other peoples, and sometimes our immediate neighbors to have different religious, political, economic and family values and beliefs.

However, you cannot say that religious beliefs that tell battered women to remain in a marriage where they know they will be abused.... You cannot defend someone's right to believe differently if they are using their beliefs to drive teenagers, and sometimes the teenagers under their own roof, to commit suicide. You cannot say that the religions that have defended slavery, child labor, sexual and gender oppression are mere matters of opinion.

If you need to believe that the Noah's ark story is literal history.... If you insist that Moses really did divide the Red Sea.... If you insist that a snake talked to Eve and a donkey talked to Balaam, and a fish swallowed Jonah.... As much as that kind of talk offends the religion professor in me, we have to say, "Go ahead."

But when you quote the gospels to say, "the poor will always be with you" to justify not trying to fight poverty, or if you quote Paul saying that women should be subject to men and should keep quiet in public, or if you insist that the Levitical injunction to stone gay men is something you must do..... then I have to call "foul."

It is far too simplistic, far too dangerous, there have been way too many deaths, and too many destroyed lives to say that we have to respect and honor whatever someone decides to call their religious values.
There is sick religion and there is healthy religion and we must not be afraid to make that distinction and depending upon the severity of the illness, we may need to make that distinction very forcefully. I do not know if the woman that I told about a few minutes ago managed to get out of that family alive but I know that I didn't do her any favors by respect her priest's pious Catholic views..... I shouldn't have just tried to talk her into believing differently.... I should have walked the two blocks down the hill in Russellville, KY and gone into the manse at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and said to my colleague and friend, "Father Tom, we have to talk."

If we are too timid to confront religion that has a body count of victims then, my friends, we are too timid. Progressive Christians, of all people, cannot justify any compulsion to stand idly by and pretend that abuse is not happening in the name of being polite.

As Karen Armstrong says in her autobiography, "If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

I asked Paul to come sing Ziggy Marley's song, "Love is my religion," today.... My apologies to our YouTube viewers.... We can't legally include the song in our recording but you can look it up yourselves.

His simple lyrics declare that after searching for meaning in the religions and Bibles of the world, he had reached this one conclusion: Love is my religion.
He says, "I don't condemn and I don't convert cause no one is gonna lose their soul."

Madeleine Albright wrote a book a few years ago entitled "The Mighty and the Almighty," in which she carefully talks about the ways in which Jews, Christians and Muslims have allowed their religious differences to repeatedly draw the world into violence and war but she emphasizes that these same religions also contain within them the cure for war and violence. Faith can heal the world, faith can be the basis for compassion and peace. Albright says that we must encourage the angelic tendencies in each nation, in each religion, to reinforce that which is healthy even when we cannot always do surgery to simply remove that which is malignant.

When the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about letting one another disagree on matters of personal preference, he spoke from the background of someone who came from a toxic faith.... Paul had been a man who had been willing to use the law to imprison and use his religion to justify murder of people who had, in his opinion, perverted his religion.

Most of us here would not be happy to hear that someone had followed us around with a video camera 25 and 30 years ago and were ready to play clips such as what we see in political attack ads these days. We are not unfamiliar with toxic faith, poisoned family values, and nationalism driven by misinformation, racism and fear. We have simply decided that we want to be better than that....
We don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past... we want to emerge into something better.

I think that Millard Fuller had the right idea when he tried to get Catholic and Protestant, Fundamentalist and Main Stream churches to come together to build Habitat for Humanity houses. Fuller called it, "the theology of the hammer." You don't have to agree on doctrine, sacraments or what happens to you when you die; you just pick up a hammer and help build a house for a homeless poor family.

We should try whenever it is possible, to find common ground with all other religions and every flavor of Christian. We should work with them to fight poverty, support civil rights, promote justice and defend the weak, but we should never be afraid to speak clearly about our belief that liberation theology is the obvious conclusion for anyone whose religion is love.

I believe that we should be more gracious towards our critics and those on the opposite end of the theological spectrum than they are towards us, but as I have said before, peace in the absence of justice is just surrender and people of faith should never consider surrender an option.

I have been told that the French Foreign Legion had a motto that went something like, "If I falter, push me. If I stumble, help me up. If I retreat, shoot me." That may be a little strong for church folk but really, what possible excuse do we ever have to turn our backs on the victims of abuse no matter what religious excuses may be used. May God do this and more also if we ever fail to be heroic in the face of injustice.

Roger L. Ray, D.Min.

Pastor
Community Christian Church
4806 E. Cherry Springfield, MO 65809
(417) 877-7821

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up." (Martin Luther King, Jr. - Nobel Speech)

Main Navigation

Sermon