Progressive Faith Sermons - Dr. Roger Ray

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?