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Corporate media and political parties try to reduce the election process into identity politics which has more to do with a beauty contest or a horse race than it does a deliberative choice of policies and values.

Missouri, in an attempt to make obtaining an abortions more difficult, expensive, and humiliating, recently required a medically unnecessary second pelvic exam for all women who sought to obtain an abortion. This inexcusable and invasive addition of a medically meaningless invasive exam can only be called sexual assault, made much worse because it is mandated by the state government.

During the early 1980’s, when AIDS was first discovered, the Regan administration not only did virtually nothing in response, but when asked about it in press briefings, the response was laughter and gay bashing jokes.

The mortality rate is 100% and while traditional religions often offer unverifiable assurance that death is not final, this progressive message seeks to take reality on in honest acceptance. From this perspective, death does not call for either denial or the anesthesia of false hope. Rather, it asks us to cherish those whom we love and to make the most of the life that is known to us.

In the horrible crucible of the Civil War and the Indian Wars, Walt Whitman, in the Leaves of Grass, attempted to describe American greatness, not in our legislatures or executives, but in the inherent goodness of individual Americans. Many of us have lately been humiliated by the juvenile tweets of our chief executive and the morally bankrupt race in several southern states to take away women’s rights, but, as Frankel said, no one can take away from us our ability to decide how we will react to what they do. We get to choose who we are and to reject being defined by the racism, sexism, misogyny, classism, and xenophobia of our current political environment.

Nearly a century has passed since the Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed. Every other western democracy’s constitution includes a statement regarding gender equality but in the USA, we still need one more state to approve this long over due change. Women still earn significantly less than men and women of color earn even less. Sure, get your mom and card and flowers for Mothers’ Day but realize this: what she really wants is equal rights!

The Green New Deal proposes a set of goals that enumerates the changes necessary to simultaneously save our environment while transforming our economic system. We have already started the 6th period of mass extinction in earth’s history and to avoid a repeat of “the Great Dying” of 250 million years ago, the changes recommended in the Green New Deal are not radical, they are, realistically, necessary.

The world is not short on hostile insults and senseless arguments, but the world is quite bereft of kindness. Much of the social hostility we encounter comes from the pain that people have experienced that we know nothing about. We are surrounded by the walking wounded who do not need to discover how quick we can be with an eviscerating retort. What they need from us is kindness . . . undeserved, perhaps, but we can help the world to become more deserving if we will scatter seeds of kindness.

Six days after the attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand has outlawed military style weapons. Australia had done the same thing just 12 days after the Port Arthur massacre. From Columbine to the present, we have had more than 50 well publicized mass murders. While we can be frustrated by a government that ignores the fact that 75% of Americans want more sensible gun laws but what can we say about the silence of 400,000 churches in the face of this crazy situation?

While there are many factors that lead up to tragedy like the mass murders in mosques in New Zealand

The one sentence from the gospels that even the most critical Biblical scholars tend to agree was quoted directly from the historical Jesus is this: Love your enemies. The first century of the common era had dozens of Jewish messiahs, many of whom were said to be exorcists and miracle workers. The titles of “king,” “Lord,” and even “Savior,” were all ascribed to the Caesar as well as to noted religious leaders. The early Jesus movement may have created narratives and titles to distinguish Jesus as being a rival to the empire or on an equal footing to Moses or Elijah but his truly unique message was a call to radical compassion.

The Christian Bible contains a debate that raged over several centuries between nationalist protectionism and an admirably compassionate treatment of immigrants and refugees. Progressives chose to reject the xenophobic and racist passages in favor of the radical compassion which we believe is at the heart of a spiritual life. In which case, the proposed border wall between the USA and Mexico becomes not simply unnecessary, and economically unwise, but a real failure of American morality.

Frida Kahlo wrote the ultimate lovers’ poem that concludes with this assurance, “You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” In this age when couples typically no longer stay married out of economic necessity or for mere survival, what is it that keeps people together. Even more, what inspires a couple who are already past child bearing years or even career concerns, to sacrifice independence and freedom in order to share a common life? I think that it is meaning we seek even more than a mere surcease of loneliness. What we really want is not just someone with whom to share our morning coffee but also someone who will read poetry to us. Is that too much to ask, or do we, as Kahlo suggests, what we deserve?

The poem, Desiderata, enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the 20th century but its counsel to “speak your truth” both calmly and without surrender, while still being willing to listen to the thoughts of even the simple and uninformed, is excellent advice for our internet age where social media can sometimes lead even saints down a path of mudslinging and name calling. Let’s think about how we can be helpful in public discourse to both share ideas and heal our partisan divide.
 

TRIGGER WARNING! This video contains brief talks by two ministers and two psychologists and an original song by a composer/musician about pedophilia. The topic affects so many people that we felt obligated to address it though it is easily the single most difficult topic any of us have to think about. If you are disturbed by the content of this message, please reach out to your therapist, or your pastor, to talk through these issues.

During the Indian Wars, most Americans believed that killing Indians was patriotic, heroic, and some even felt it was Divinely ordained. But, at the Massacre at Sand Creek, two officers ordered their men not to participate. Captain Soule and Lt. Cramer refused to be silent about the murder of 150 men, women, and children, and their reports sparked a Congressional investigation that ended in removing their commanding officer, Col. John Chivington (a former pastor), from service and began to change the way our country viewed the Indian Wars. Sadly, soldiers who wake up to the illegal and immoral nature of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not being sympathetically heard by Congress, through the essay written by Kevin Tillman, the brother of slain serviceman, Pat Tillman, tells an unvarnished truth rarely seen in the media.

In Terry Crews book on Manhood, he talks about targeting high profile sexual predators in order to end patriarchy is like trying to cut a tree down by cutting the leaves. Toxic masculinity is a part of our culture and we need to lay the axe to the trunk of that tree, rooting out the male privilege that has been the source of victimization of women for centuries. Perhaps the current backward trend in our nation is the retreat that will force us to find the activation energy necessary to bring about the fall of the patriarchy.

President George Washington owned about 120 slaves who worked on his plantation in Virginia but when he moved to Philadelphia to serve as president, he took a few household slaves with him. One of them, Oney Judge, escaped. She spent the rest of her life as a fugitive avoiding being captured by George Washington’s representatives who were under orders to return Oney to slavery. It turns out that George really could tell a lie, as he tried to publicly advocate for liberty and freedom while personally profiting from slave labor even when people all around him were working to bring slavery to an end. America’s original sin deserves reflection today because it still casts a shadow over our nation’s ethical thinking.

The turning of the calendar is meaningless in many ways. What really matters is how much of the past dominates our minds. Entering a new year can be powerful if we first set aside our resentments and pain of past disappointments and hurts. Moving into the future can be a time to discover new worlds, new friendships, new love.

While there never has been a “war on Christmas” there has been plenty of debate among Christian sects as to its “true meaning.” There is, of course, no mention of the holiday in scripture and the two birth narratives in the gospels tell such different stories that we can be thankful that they at least agree on the name of the baby. But if we allow ourselves to ask our modern culture that it really means, beyond the shopping, gift giving, and requisite office parties, the culture, from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” to Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” and Hollywood’s classics, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” and “A Miracle on 42ndSt.,” it would seem that the true meaning of Christmas is a change in an individual’s heart from being cold, distant, and unloving into something more loving, joyful, and generous. That’s a conversion narrative that isn’t especially religious and, with Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, I will say, “God bless it!”

The Psalms are replete with urgent pleadings to be saved from enemies and critics. This ancient repetition of anxiety and panic inspired this modern reflection about anxiety disorders and panic attacks in our society which so often lead to addictive use of prescription medications. PTSD is real but many anxiety disorders are rooted in exaggerated fear of a mean society that is too quick to judge and to gossip. We don’t have to rent space in our skulls to the insincere.

An economic system is nothing more than the agreed upon method of distributing resources. Any nation can change their economic system if it isn’t working for the best interests of the majority of the citizens. Our economic system has become much worse since Dorothy Day called it a “filthy rotten system” almost a century ago. We don’t have to accept it. In fact, we must not.

While much of traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam profess a belief in a God who is a person, a person with a will, emotions, and preferences and that God is in control of history. Progressive people of faith tend to eschew this kind of supernatural theism. As St Teresa said, God has no hands in this world but our hands, no feet but our feet. The universe is capricious but we are moral actors. Meaning, love, purpose, happen when we make them happen.

The holidays lie ahead of us bringing family gatherings that hold promise of ideal loving encounters and the potential for disastrous or even violent exchanges. This sermon considers the two extremes of domestic violence and unattainable Norman Rockwell holiday by encouraging people to follow the advice from AA: Don’t tell me how sick you have been. Tell me how well you want to become. 

Generations before the birth of Jesus, Virgil wrote in the Aeneid the solemn advice that we should not speak of what cannot be or what is not known. We would all be a lot better off if religions of all stripes had followed that advice. The world’s great faiths offer moral insight and direction (though even that should be critically received) but this wisdom is encrusted with magical thinking and unsubstantiated truth claims that have little or no bearing on the real world. Progressives seek to reveal the wisdom of faith without passing along the neurotic or false claims of our traditional faith.

Joseph Campbell taught that all religions are true as long as they are taken poetically and metaphorically. However, when we try to take a religious text as being historically or factually “true,” then they all become false. God doesn’t write books. While we may wish for absolute truths, the fact of our spiritual lives is that we have to think critically and morally interrogate our beliefs constantly as we navigate our way between truth and “fake news.”

Though art and movies usually portray villains as being hideous, the truth is that the most evil temptations are usually irresistibly attractive. Israeli scholar, Yuval Noah Harari, has written about how we are drifting towards fascism in the west, not by conscious decisions, but by being tempted towards tribal power and justification of prejudice. To avoid fascism, we have to be aware that we really don’t want to go down that path, even when our personal tribe might have momentary successes.

Empathy is more than sympathy, it involves a deeper understanding of, and even the ability to anticipate the feelings of another person. There are two kinds of religion, the personal piety sort whose goal is to avoid punishment and attain reward, and the empathic journey of faith that seeks to be a blessing to others, even those who are not yet born. Maybe there is really only one kind of religion because, as this sermon argues, religion without empathy is really just self-service with rituals.

Telling ourselves that “everything happens for a reason” may be comforting but there is a minority voice in the Bible that screams out that it “just ain’t so!” In Job, Ecclesiastes, and much of the Proverbs, we find a rational counter argument to other witnesses that insist that God is active in human history and that there is a divine plan that justifies human suffering. This progressive church chooses to accept that Job got it right. Things don’t happen for a reason unless we can choose to bring meaning to the events.

F. D. Roosevelt recognized that the original bill of rights, that guaranteed certain political freedoms, would not be enough to make all American’s free with a similar bill of rights that would guarantee economic independence. Of the eight amendments he proposed in 1944, seven are still waiting to be implemented. The progressive movement is not dead but it has been too slow to gain ground. We really need to pick up FDR’s banner and run with it!

Molly Tibbetts was murdered by an undocumented immigrant farm worker. When her death was being used to promote the building of a wall along our border with Mexico and a stepped up deportation policy, Molly’s father wrote an op-ed asking for compassion and sanity. The spiritual practice of compassion is not simply a matter of civility and good manners but requires that we make sacrifices of our comfort or even our safety.

Suicide is now on the top ten list of causes of death in America. It is time for us to get honest about the social isolation that leads to a sense of worthlessness, of not being needed, of not belonging anywhere. While we do need to support mental health practitioners and access to appropriate medications but the most effective treatment for depression, the most effective way to prevent suicide is a combination of maintaining close friendships and the habit of exercising in sunlight for at least 30 minutes every day. Ultimately, we should be mature enough to accept that the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland was right: We are all mad here. Because we are all damaged in some way, we should be honest about the fact that we need one another (and we need to exercise in natural light).

The news media, traditionally called the “4th Estate,” is protected by the 1st Amendment because a free and uncensored press is vital to the health of a democracy. Through the years we have seen all manner of tyrants and dictators calling the media the “enemy of the people,” Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and now Trump all demonize journalists in order to make the state the only source of information given to the populace. In our day, the church and the media must step forward to give both trustworthy information and critical thinking about ethical decision making to protect the liberties and the safety of our nation.

The UBI (Universal Basic Income) is an idea that is growing in favor among economists as well as philosophers. The world is changing and as automation decreases the demand for labor our economic system must also change so that we are not squeezing human beings out of the equation as we make a few people super rich and leave millions to live in the violence of poverty. We must change our priorities so that we do not continue to push all of our real wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.

The obvious obscenity of narcissism or bloated egos among politicians (and preachers) makes us want to turn our heads and avoid contact. However, it deserves to be considered that some of the most mean and egotistical people are simply starving for attention and affirmation. What if we chose to give others attention and approval in advance? If we all need air, water, food, and sleep, and we also need positive social contact, then it would be foolish to deprive anyone of air, water, food, or sleep and it is equally foolish to fail to give others attention and approval. We all need meaningful connections and we should have the courage to reach out and make those connections.

We are exhausted with reports of corruption in government, a judicial system that is bereft of justice, and a penal system that seems to institutionalize social revenge rather than reform. While we will never acquiesce to the injustices of our judicial and penal systems, we will not surrender to corruption in business or government, we do recognize a need to live as wisely as possible to avoid turning our fate, or the fate of our children, over to a system that has shown itself to be rife with racism, classism, and corruption. The Proverbs call to us to love wisdom and reject the temptations of a foolish and dangerous life.