Constructive Faith

Luke 24:36-48

1 John 3:1-7

As most of you know, I am pretty firmly committed to letting God be God, beyond our human constructions of the holy, the well-intended but rickety little shacks we want to house mystery. Thinking of God along human lines of being, as rooted in time and space with will and agency like ours, can be useful, as long as we don’t confuse the limits of our own imagination with limits on God.

To that end, I routinely try to shift language, freeing God from embodied gender and socially-constructed notions of gender. On occasion, I even reverse tradition, using female pronouns or neutral pronouns. In other words, I am the MAGA-Christians’ worst nightmare, and quite proud of it.

So you may ask yourself why our reading from the first letter attributed to John was full of “He” and “Him.” And this is where we get a little nerdy, but only a little, because this text is one of the few places in scripture where we do not know the antecedents to the pronouns. The correct question in First John is “He who?” The author writes about God, then seems to shift to writing about Jesus, but there is no proper noun to signal that shift. Some and probably all of the he/him references are Jesus, and we have no reason to doubt that Jesus was biologically and socially male in that ancient patriarchal context, as much fun as it might to be to imagine otherwise, so I am hesitant to start messing with the pronouns in this passage.

The other interesting thing about this passage is that it says “we will be like him,” which leads me to believe they hadn’t gotten to a particularly high Christology yet, since the Jesus we get to after they hammered out orthodoxy, and hammered one another in the process, was barely human at all, making it incredibly hard for us to imagine that we might become like him. I have a hard enough time becoming like me, or at least the me I want to be.

“He who?” is not the only question for First John, because we might also fairly ask “We who?” And for that, I’m going to suggest we turn to the gospel reading, which comes from Luke, but is echoed in the “Great Commission” found in Matthew. That version is a command to baptize and make disciples of all nations. Luke’s version has Jesus describing his role as Messiah, commanding “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

And this is where I land. We honestly don’t know how Jesus felt about non-Jews. A pre-rabbinic Judaism existed throughout the empire, from Babylon to Rome, and people not ethnically descended from the Israelites could be found around synagogues. 

As I recently shared with you, Jesus taught and healed in a multi-cultural context. But the social movement that gathered around Jesus took uniquely Jewish forms. Did he, the rabbi executed on Golgotha, anticipate a movement made up primarily of non-Jews? For that matter, did he really anticipate any movement at all? He proclaimed the right rule of God as an in-breaking heavenly kingdom, and early Christians held on to this idea that some sort of divine intervention in creation was immanent. And either it arrived in the form of a new way of thinking about God and living in the world, or it didn’t happen at all, because the anti-Christ did not show up in 33 C.E., and wasn’t born in 1946 either, despite evidence to the contrary.

What we do know is that the gospel we received was universalist, though that word can mean many things.

Continue reading “He who? 14 April 2023”

Acts 4:32-35

During the second year of my professional degree program, I completed a major paper on prayer. I particularly wanted to explore what prayer could mean once you moved beyond human constructions of a puppet-master God who was arbitrary and capricious, who granted some miracles and denied others. 

As part of that process, I spent some time on the Lord’s Prayer, which is problematic despite the fact that it is still central to our collective and individual lives. Does God really expect us to wait passively to receive daily bread, or has God already given us the gifts we need to produce our own bread, and to provide bread to those who cannot? 

What sort of God would lead us into temptation? This is something members of the Catholic clergy have been wrestling with in European language versions in recent years.

None of this is helped by the fact that Jesus would have likely spoken the prayer that went from oral tradition to gospel in Aramaic, but the gospels were written in Koine Greek, and for the Roman church, the authoritative text comes from a third layer of translation, in Latin.

One of the most difficult passages to translate is the reason we have multiple versions of the prayer in the English language tradition. The Greek word “opheil?” refers to a legal and financial obligation in ancient Greek literature as well as in the Greek translation of the Hebrew language scriptures, and this is the only word used in Matthew’s version, the one we recite. But Luke, using the same Q source as the authors of Matthew, asks God to forgive sins, “amartias,” while commanding us to forgive those indebted to us, “opheilontí.” Luke can do this because by the time the gospels were written, “opheil?” was most frequently used to mean a moral obligation, something also reflected in the changing use of the Aramaic root in Rabbinic Literature. 

In the end, neither “trespasses” nor “debts” alone will suffice. We should be asking forgiveness for our sins, and forgiving both the financial obligations and moral wrongs of others.

Now multiply this debate by a million doctoral dissertations, and you have a sense of the challenge of translation, and that only of the text itself, never mind the need to translate practice and theology across wildly different intellectual, conceptual, and cultural frameworks. 

Continue reading “7 April 2024”

This beautiful and difficult building was constructed when you still needed a place to keep the horses that pulled the buggies that brought the people to church. There is flood mud in the basement from 1972, more than a dozen electrical boxes throughout the building, and the “former parsonage” on the fourth floor at the Gray Street end is like something right out of a Stephen King novel. 

Much of the building is inaccessible to those with mobility challenges, including our office space, and even if we manage to fund an elevator, figuring out where to put it is a challenge since the floors in the three sections of the building do not line up. 

Even this worship space has gone through a radical transformation, the organ and choir moved from the front to the back, the single central pulpit replaced with the pulpit and lectern model common in more liturgical churches. And can we talk about the mid-20th century craze for light wood and Scandinavian design? I cannot tell you how many Mid-Atlantic and New England churches I have been in that have a mismatch of chancel and sanctuary.

Historic preservationists, sometimes more hysteric preservationists as someone recently noted, want old buildings to exist in a mythical never-time, but this simply isn’t reality. Any building that is in active use changes because humans change the world and are changed by the world. If you want a building that does not change as fast, look to a mausoleum, where residents are less inclined to demand updates, though time still takes a toll.

Christianity, being so much older than the Park Church, is also filled with creepy corners, weird wiring, and things that just don’t line up. Much like this building, we’ve learned to live with this suboptimal situation, but it is easy to get lost. 

For example, the unknown authors of Matthew want you to see Jesus as the new Moses, yet they share Luke the Physician’s view that Jesus is a king descended from the House of David, and all of the gospels dabble in the idea that Jesus is a blood sacrifice in accordance with the transactional nature of worship in the Second Temple. 

Don’t even get me started on the figure of the Human One, a point of self-identification for Jesus picked up from the Book of Daniel, sometimes translated as the Son of Man, which definitely is not the Son of God. 

You’d be forgiven if you found it all a little confusing, forgiveness being the point of much of our theology.

So many Christians embrace sacrificial and transactional interpretations of Easter because that is how the human brain is wired, but I want to suggest that the Holy Mystery we name as God is not a giant human in the sky with human wetware, so the victory of Easter is to be found not in burning the sin mortgage on our souls, but rather in the liberation from our own violence. 

Jesus is in Jerusalem for Passover, and it is Passover, not the Kingdom of David, that should inform us here.

The Passover story is a story of liberation. When the eleven brothers of Joseph joined the former slave in Egypt, they were welcomed and celebrated. But over the years, as generations thrived in the new country, native Egyptians became envious, slowly clamping down on the immigrant population until they were once again enslaved as Joseph had once been.

Their liberator turned out to be a stuttering fugitive, ethnically Israelite, culturally Egyptian. The mythic struggle included a series of disasters, the plagues the Israelites believed were sent by God, culminating in the Passover, in which the first born male of every household not marked with blood on the doorposts was killed. Notably, the lamb or goat butchered to mark the door of the Israelite homes on that night was not a sacrifice, but was nourishment for the journey. Let me say that again: the Passover or Paschal Lamb is not a sacrifice.

We might discount the more extravagant and miraculous claims of the Exodus story, but there is a strong case to be made for a core historicity. And asking ourselves what we can learn from the story yields a rich harvest. 

The Israelites in their “Promised Land” do not replace one monarch, Egypt’s pharaoh, with a new monarch, Moses or otherwise. In fact, Moses isn’t even there as they live into their new covenant, just as Jesus would not be present 1200 years later as his followers live into their new covenant. The twelve escaped tribes have only one true ruler, a God they experience in the world, but who cannot be depicted, no idols with human or animal faces, no deified human on a throne.

Later Christology would try to shove Jesus back into the role of priest or king, but he is only truly a prophet in the Israelite tradition of troublemakers, good troublemakers, who challenge and unwind human systems of oppression. 

Jesus leads us on a new Exodus, out of the sin of human violence, out of the sin of our fear and scapegoating. We humans create rules and systems of violence, convince ourselves that the victims of our violence deserve our violence, even as we declare that the violence of others directed toward us and those we love is without merit. 

And there is Jesus, tried and convicted and executed at the request of the religious through the legal authority of the state, and the murder is not justified. The scapegoat is and always has been completely innocent. That Jesus did nothing to warrant execution is obvious. That he would return from the dead was not. The Exodus escapees pass through a desert on their journey to a new life, and Jesus, having passed through a desert and temptation at the start of his ministry, now passes through death itself, through human violence at the very worst, for they have seen him destroyed at the hands of church and state, and yet they experience him as still present, as having returned from the grave.

Easter morning is liberation from Rome, liberation from the Sanhedrin, liberation from the transactional God, for God no longer requires slaughtered bulls, indeed… She never did. God is no more nor less than mysterious and loving Creator, calling us into being and surrounding us with grace.

The Promised Land is not some ethnically-cleansed re-creation of a three thousand year old kingdom under the warlord usurper David. It is not a kingdom at all. It is many tribes sharing the same land, tribes that practice jubilee, that cares for vulnerable elders, orphans, and the poor, that does justice, just not the transactional and retributive justice of humans, for the stone has been rolled away, and we are called to practice resurrection justice, the righting of wrong, restorative justice. Let evil and death feed the gaping maw of evil and death, for it always does. We, this body gathered, we are an Easter people, and though we are surrounded by the worst, we are loved by the best.

The floors might not line up, and some pews are cracked, and some parts of the structure may need to be reconstructed in order for this to be a house for all people. And while we are working on retrofitting our theology, we might take a crack at the building as well.

May you experience Easter freedom, this day and always. Amen.

Mark 11:1-11

I am an old nerd. I started playing computer games when they consisted of green text on a terminal screen. We’ve come a long way since then. I can play a gunslinger seeking redemption on my Xbox in full color with vast regions to explore and NPCs, non-player characters, who respond to my player character’s decisions. 

Recently, I’ve been playing the console version of Baldur’s Gate 3, the newest digital iteration of the ancestor of all roleplaying games, Dungeons and Dragons. I started playing D&D before it was even published in book form, back when it was still a series of pamphlets produced on a mimeograph machine, and players gathered around a table with graph paper, dice in a variety of shapes and colors, and every conceivable form of snack food, Cheetos fingers on everything.

Folks still gather to play the old book and dice version, as I did before the pandemic, but the electronic version offers entertainment when you can’t manage a regular gathering of six to eight players. And at least in one way, Baldur’s Gate 3 reminds us that the game is meant to be analog, for when you have to check to see if you’ve succeeded in using a skill, the game rolls an on-screen version of a twenty-sided die, known as a D20. And just as in the paper and junk food version of the game, rolling a 20 on a D20 is a “critical success,” and rolling a 1 is a “critical failure,” the outcome exaggerated at both extremes. Rolling a one is swinging your sword, missing the monster completely, and tripping over your own bootlace in the process.

By D&D standards, old school or new school, the events of Holy Week, the next five days, are a critical failure, a 1 on a D20. Not only does Jesus end up dead, he ends up dead in a very public way, tortured and put on display as an example to others who might contemplate disrupting a system that was benefiting colonizer and collaborator. 

Of course, we don’t see the events of Holy Week as a critical failure because we know how the story will end. But we also miss a tremendous amount of what is going on, miss the emotional, social, and even political context because we read Jesus through the lens of later Christology, as wholly unique and part of a divinely-scripted intervention in creation. And I’d like to ask you to park that this Holy Week and just let events unfold as they would have, in a time of unrest and violence, of resistance and rebellion.

The entry into Jerusalem is just one half of the story. The gospels do not mention the other half. 

Tiberius Caesar’s governor in Judaea, Pontius Pilate, did not live in Jerusalem. The governor’s residence was in Caesaria Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast. He despised the locals and was in Jerusalem for one reason only. The region was historically unstable, the Jewish peasantry notoriously resistant to foreign rule, and Passover was a religious celebration of an ancient rebellion. If trouble was going to break out, if the oppressed Jewish peasants were going to rise up, it would all happen in Jerusalem at Passover. So the governor would travel to the city in the days before Passover began, arriving from the west at the head of a legion and mounted on a horse. 

Jesus enters the city from the east, from Jericho, riding on a donkey, at the head of a rag-tag group, some fishermen, a former tax collector, some folks he had healed, people with nothing really to lose.

The Jewish Council, the Sanhedrin, is not happy he is in the city. We have no reason to doubt reports that they were plotting against him. Earlier prophets and reformers faced hostility as well. But by all accounts, the Palm Sunday Protest March was not really a threat. Sure some local residents got in the spirit of things, waving branches and chanting “Hosanna,” but not enough to matter, not enough to rise up and throw off the shackles of Roman rule, not enough to drive corruption and greed out of the Temple that served as the center of their religious tradition. 

There is certainly something to be said for prophetic witness, for offering an alternative to Roman Empire, even to being a martyr if necessary, but can we talk a little about effectiveness?

Again, don’t read it backwards. Read it like we might have lived it. 

Read it like those of us who watched as, the day before Palm Sunday six years ago, students and supporters gathered around the nation for a March for Our Lives, and yet today, there are more guns than ever, and a decidedly un-Supreme Court that seems hell-bent on turning our nation into an apocalyptic war zone somewhere between Mad Max and modern day Haiti. 

Read it like it is real life, not a movie.

It is a little crazy to operate as if good can overcome evil. It is a little crazy to believe love and grace are bigger than judgment and vengeance. It is a little crazy to believe that the realm of God is a way of living, not some foreign place, and that victory is not a pile of gold, but a legacy of love, of co-creating with the first creator, as artist and parent and farmer. 

It is a little crazy to believe that it is the game that counts, not the trophy, that we are called to give our all during this bright shiny moment we call life, and that life itself is meant to be the gift, though we must work together to cultivate joy.

It was a little crazy to believe that the false god of the priests was never really God, that God was not to be found in the gold and smoke and finery, not to be found in the holy places and religious manipulation, but could instead be found hoping someone could help him into the healing pool, hoping a child would stop having seizures. God could be found hanging on a cross, a roll of 1 on a D20 in every way.

It is a little crazy to sit in the middle of conflict and chaos and to believe still, to see still the goodness deep down things.

But we believe all sorts of crazy things every day. So why not choose the good ones? The ones that give you hope and grit and enough strength to get to the coffee pot. 

Because there is a pack of goblins out there, and you’re going to need a little caffeine and a good roll of the D20 to hit’em with a fireball spell and save the day. May the dice be in your favor. Amen.

John 12:20-33

The Gospel traditionally attributed to John, the brother of James and disciple of Jesus, is unlike the other three gospels. Those three are so similar that they are collectively called the Synoptic Gospels. John has unique stories, like the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine, and today’s story of the Greeks at the door. And I love today’s story, not because it contains deep theological meaning, but because it is a mess.

But first, let’s spend a moment on the cultural context. After all, Greeks are all over the place in the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters, but they don’t really play a role in the life and ministry of Jesus.

Many Christians have ideas about Israel and Jews in the biblical context which are simply wrong. I know, for I was raised with the same sort of incorrect assumptions.

There was probably never such a thing as an ethnically-pure Abrahamic people. That is a myth they created in retrospect. More likely, a smallish group of escapees from Egyptian slavery merged with an existing population in Canaan, constructing a sense of shared identity, and developing an innovative religious system that would continue to evolve over many centuries. 

King David, really more war lord usurper than king, consolidated the loose confederation of tribes into a single state, probably with a healthy amount of ethnic-cleansing. This kingdom, what most people think of today as Israel, only lasted a century almost three-thousand years ago. First it split, then it fell to foreign invaders.

The smaller southern portion survived as a semi-independent state longer than the north, and so centered itself in the continuing work of constructing identity and belief. Since the dominant tribe in the south claimed descent from Judah, son of Jacob, Judah would name the nation, and through that root, the people themselves, the precursors of today’s Rabbinic Judaism, which was founded after the rebellion against Rome in 70 C.E.

Already an amalgamation of migrants and escapees, in the 8th century B.C.E., the region became even more diverse. The Assyrians, who conquered the northern kingdom, resettled other people in the territory, and the Abrahamic people who were left in the north, known as Samaritans, were never fully absorbed into the southern Jewish polity. There are fewer than a thousand Samaritans still living in the land today, including some descended from Levi.

By the 6th century B.C.E., the south had been conquered as well. A rebellion in 140 B.C.E. and another round of ethnic cleansing re-claimed something close to the old Davidic borders, but that didn’t last long. The Maccabean revolt was a sort of MAGA movement, with nepotism and corruption, and royal interference in religion.

Jesus was born near the end of the reign of Herod the Great, the Roman puppet king who had restored the deteriorating Second Temple in Jerusalem. Herod was not ethnically Jewish. He was an Idumean, from a region that is today southern Jordan, descended from a conquered and converted people.

When the Romans took full control from their proxies, they colonized Judea and Galilee, destroying some Jewish cities and building new cities that were Greek, which is really just shorthand for not Jewish. 

This attempt to replace the native population is not unlike what is going on in the exact same region today, as Netanyahu’s genocidal government supports ethnic cleansing on the West Bank.

Greek culture, called Hellenistic, dominated the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and Koine Greek, not Latin, was the common language of commerce and governance. The Christian Testament was written in Greek, meaning Paul was literate in Greek, and it is likely that Jesus and many of his followers spoke both Greek and Aramaic, a semitic language that was the common language of the streets. That some of the disciples were bilingual is evident in the frequent exchanges between Jesus and his circle and folks identified as non-Jews, like random centurions and residents of those Greek settlements as in the exorcism at Gerasene, notably not Jewish in that they raise pigs.

Jesus did not live in a Jewish state.

And for all of that, accepting the reality that the life and ministry of Jesus took place in a multi-cultural context, these Greeks at the door are probably still religious Jews from the centuries-old Diaspora, since they are in Jerusalem for Passover. 

Doesn’t really matter either way, for as best we can tell, they are left at the door, as Jesus goes off on a tangent, foreshadowing the crucifixion, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in another booming voice from heaven, similar to the baptism of Jesus and the Transfiguration on the mountain.

And this morning, I’m not interested in the Son of Man or archetypal “Human One” trope or the foreshadowing or even God’s voice. 

I just love the mess.

I find the claim that any text is the definitive and only word of God terrifying, whether that is the Torah, the translation of the Christian Bible we call the King James, the Qur’an, or the Book of Mormon. 

I find true believers terrifying, whether their belief is in the God-dude who walks by Elijah’s cave or in Xenu the inter-galactic dictator or in Q revealing the secrets of a deep state child sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.

Doubt is good, for there is more we do not know than what we do know.

Messiness is life, not just the result of life. 

Our weird little species of upright primate exists because reproduction is messy, and some mistakes are better than others, naturally selected as Mr. Darwin claimed. There is nothing in creation that is static, that is self-contained. The minute you try to stick a pin through something and fix it in time and space, you kill it and have already failed, for time marches on anyways, and life at scale, large and small, is weird and entangled.

I understand the fear that wants answers, it just isn’t what I choose for myself, for fear, like regret and anger, can be a useful tool, but too much of it will leave you hollowed out and twisted.

When the early Christians turned the oral traditions about Jesus into written gospels, they preserved his humanity, his messiness, despite their growing conviction that he was also an incarnation of God. The Jesus in the gospels loses his temper. He weeps. He says things that objectively aren’t true. And the gospel authors and redactors didn’t clean it all up. Greeks show up at the door and there is no closure. Like seriously, what happened to them?

Our brains hate this. We are curious, and always at work clarifying and categorizing. We want answers, and if we don’t get answers, we make stuff up. We want people to be all good or all bad, accuse politicians of flip-flopping if they change their mind, as if new data is somehow bad, as if learning is bad, though at the same time we are all about new data and learning, so yeah… explain that, slap a label on it, and put it in a box, because that there is a mess.

A beautiful and glorious mess.

As we continue on the road to Golgotha, so many want simple answers, want to believe that everything is perfectly ordered and is meaningful, that the disciples stole a donkey for the Palm Sunday ride and that was magically okay, that the brutality of the crucifixion was divinely scripted. 

Maybe that works for you. It doesn’t work for me. I’m okay with human violence killing Jesus. It just makes the Easter victory all that sweeter. Because in my world, people are often more than one thing, so that Jesus can be both victim and victor.

You may have it all together. Maybe the Greeks come to your door when they are expected and sit down for a cup of Earl Grey. 

My Greeks? They’re wandering around outside, not completely sure which door is the right door, and I can’t hear them knock anyways because Alexa is playing “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” in the kitchen and I’m folding laundry upstairs. But I’ll realize that they’re here eventually, and those Breakfast Bars will just have to pass for cookies, but we’ll still laugh and still be present in the midst of all the chaos and the demanding barks of the Golden Retriever. 

For as the meme goes, my ducks are not all in a row, and I’m pretty sure a couple of them aren’t even ducks.

Stop trying to stuff the world into a box that is way too small. Stop trying to stuff God into a box that is way too small. And while you’re at it, stop trying to stuff yourself into a box that is way too small. The box is stupid anyways, constructed by prior generations, by wingnuts and charlatans and the con-artists on Madison Avenue.

Just be. Just be all the things, for you are all the things, good and bad, though, you know, I wouldn’t be much of a pastor if I didn’t urge you to lean into the good. No matter how it turns out, you’ll be loved, and you’ll be covered with our Creator’s Amazing Grace.

Amen.

Exodus 20:1-17
John 2:13-22

I was a late bloomer, and went back to college at 40, so I sorta managed to keep up with popular music until about ten years ago. That was when I took a clergy friend with me to a Pearl Jam concert and realized that pretty soon, a significant percentage of the audience would be using mobility assistance devices. Folks are bringing their grandkids to Dave Matthews Band concerts, and DMB is actually a generation after me!

I guess we can’t all be Mick Jagger. 

These days, when the Grammy nominations are announced, I don’t recognize half the musicians, and if I watch the ceremony, which I have made the mistake of doing at times, I usually find a reason to be offended by the sexuality of the performances. I think they are just raunchy. And I definitely have not adjusted to the cognitive whiplash when someone is on the Disney Channel one week and swinging on a wrecking ball dressed like a dominatrix the next. 

I am now officially an old geezer. I might as well join AARP, even if I can’t afford to retire.

Of course, this happens in every generation. Jesus has words for “this generation,” and Socrates may have originated the line “kids these days.” Still, I do sometimes wonder what my own parents were thinking when it came to popular music when I was a kid. 

If I didn’t get any afternoon delight, and it turned out that tonight wasn’t the night, if Captain Jack didn’t get me high tonight, I could always just whip it good, with nods to the Starland Vocal Band, Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, and Devo, the plastic suit and flower-pot hat-wearing band on your Order of Service.

I always think about Devo’s biggest hit when we get to today’s lectionary reading, when Jesus disrupts commerce in the Temple complex, one of American Christians’ least favorite texts, right up there with that Socialist nonsense in the Acts of the Apostles where the followers of Jesus share resources. The cleansing of the Temple story is bad enough in that it suggests a connection between our religious life and our economic lives, but it also betrays the notion of Jesus as a pacifist, the Breck-shampoo model surrounded by international children and lambs, because this is Jesus absolutely going off, complete with a whip.

Maybe we can just spiritualize it and pretend it isn’t actually about religious greed and economic exploitation.

If we are honest, economic justice is a theme throughout scripture. The first labor dispute comes when Jacob agrees to work seven years for Laban in exchange for Rachel’s hand in marriage, only to lift the veil and find that he has married her sister, and has to work another seven years. The prophets of Israel and Judah spend as much time talking about economics as they do about religion. So does Jesus. He may say that there will always be poor among us, but he praises the widow who gives what she can and condemns the rich who give less than they should, he lets the righteous but rich young man walk away when he clings to his wealth, and in the parable of the other Lazarus, not the resurrected friend but the poor beggar, Lazarus ends up in heaven while the rich man who ignored him in life ends up in another place.

Continue reading “3 March 2024: Whip It Good”

Mark 8:31-38

During Lent, we are asked to repent of our sins, to grow into who we are truly meant to be. Whether you align yourself with spirituality and religion, as most of us do, or are a hardcore empiricist, viewing humans as nothing more than the evolutionary effect of an unknown cause, we humans are meaning making creatures. Most of us accept that beyond our lizard brain and biochemical impulses lies a little bit of inexplicable magic, the part of us that writes poetry, that stands in awe before a painting by Marc Chagall, and that runs into a burning building.

The dual themes of meaning making and repentance bring me to the problem of Joss Whedon. Whedon is a multi-talented creator… developing, directing, and producing television shows and films, writing comic books, composing music. Among his most successful and culturally significant works was the comic book and television character “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Whedon’s personal values align pretty well with many of the values we hold here at the Park Church. He is, for example, an outspoken feminist. He is anti-corporate and anti-authoritarian. He is also a humanist and an existentialist, but there is a little bit of that around here too.

Sadly, he is also a jerk, a workaholic whose bullying behavior does not match his professed values. Though Whedon has not been accused of sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement exposed other forms of workplace toxicity, and Whedon’s sets were toxic. He has been effectively cancelled by the film industry, and while I stand by my belief that some people deserve to be permanently cancelled, I do wonder about redemption for the repentant, one of our core Lenten themes, whether or not we really believe someone can learn and grow.

I mean, Jesus is pretty clear that he came for the sick, not the healthy, and we are a church more of sinners than of saints.

In a 2012 interview, long before his misconduct was exposed, staff from “The Guardian,” the historic progressive newspaper from Manchester, England, asked Whedon to “Tell us a joke.” 

He responded, “Your life has meaning.”

Hold that thought. We’re going to circle back.

No matter what actually happened after Jesus was executed, the early followers of Jesus, from the apostolic witness in Galilee to the converts in Rome, believed that his life had meaning. What that meaning was they were still trying to figure out. 

Continue reading “25 February 2024: Tell Me a Joke”

Above all, repentance; not wholesale repentance: “I have sinned, father, I have sinned,” or, still worse, the admission that I am wholly in sin, that I was born in sin, that every step of mine is sin. This admission, collecting, compacting all the sins in one heap, seems to separate them from me and deprives me of that inevitable spiritual use, which by the mercy of God is attached to every sin. … We have a terrible habit of forgetting,—of forgetting our evil, our sins. And there is no more radical means for forgetting our sins, than wholesale repentance. All the sins are boiled down, as it were, into one impermeable mass, with which nothing can be done. – Leo Tolstoy (1905)

Genesis 9:8-17
Joel 2:1-17

On the sports calendar, we are in that bleak period between the Super Bowl and Spring Training, though hockey and basketball carry on, and the Nascar season is supposed to start this afternoon with the Daytona 500, Florida weather permitting. 

On the civic and cultural calendar, we are a few weeks out from the MLK federal holiday, and more than half way through Black History Month. 

And on the Christian religious calendar, we are celebrating the first Sunday in Lent, which comes very early this year. And there is a thread, of sorts, that connects our first reading this morning, on repentance and from Leo Tolstoy, with the story of the African diaspora in America, though I couldn’t quite figure out how to work in the Daytona 500. Maybe Bubba Wallace will win the race.

You see, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired in his nonviolent resistance to American apartheid by Mohandas Gandhi, the revered leader of India’s independence movement who began as a civil rights activist in South Africa, and Gandhi was in turn inspired by Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded. 

Tolstoy himself was profoundly changed by his experience as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, much as Francis of Assisi was profoundly changed by his experience of war centuries earlier. Tolstoy became a Christian anarchist, though he rejected the violence traditionally associated with anarchism, self-identifying as a pacifist. Today he is mostly remembered for his novels, but he was an important Christian thinker in his time.

It is Tolstoy who gives us our first Lenten challenge, a season traditionally treated as penitential, a season to acknowledge our sins and repent. We don’t spend much time on sin in the reconstructive and progressive Christian tradition, and honestly, with good reason. It is hard to tease out a timeless concept of sin from historically-specific human systems of oppression and power. 

Even though scripture contains a deep layer of justice and admonitions for right and loving relationships, you have to jackhammer your way through ancient misogyny and oligarchy to get there, not to mention current misogyny and oligarchy.

So let’s start with the ancient problem, then circle back to sin in our own lives.

Some of the Torah was written during the First Temple period, about four centuries from the reign of King Solomon to the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians. 

The balance of the Torah was written, redacted, and given something close to final form during the Second Temple period, another six or so centuries from the return to Jerusalem authorized by the man they considered a messiah at the time, King Cyrus of Persia, until Jerusalem and the Second Temple were once again destroyed four decades after Jesus was murdered, both the execution and the destruction at the hands of the Roman Empire so lauded today by America’s white ethno-nationalists.

Like most cultures in the Ancient Near East, the culture of the Yahweh-worshipping Canaanites, broadly called Israelites or Jews depending on the year, was patriarchal, so there’s that. But more critical to this period, they believed that the human relationship with God was transactional. 

The Torah takes the form of a treaty with hundreds of clauses. In exchange for faithful observance of the contract, the people would be rewarded with prosperity and independence. And funny enough, many of those clauses had to do with making payments to the Temple. They fell into various categories of offerings and/or Temple taxes, but the bottom line was that there was this immense bureaucracy that sometimes settled civil disputes but had little other function, and it was self-serving and corrupt. Unless you take seriously the idea that God is an angry narcissist in the sky, in which case, the showier the better, so bring on the gold leaf and incense.

There was only one offering in the entire Temple system, a sin offering called a holocaust, that was completely consumed by fire. Every other form of offering supported the priests and their families. The more sins the priests could invent, the more they could demand from the increasingly impoverished people.

Continue reading “18 February 2024”

Transfiguration/Racial Justice Sunday

2 Kings 2:1-12
Mark 9:2-9

On the night of December 2^nd, 1577, a group of Carmelite friars broke into a religious community in Ávila, Spain and took another Carmelite friar, John of the Cross, prisoner. He was tortured and held in brutal conditions for eight months before he managed to escape. 

John’s crime was joining in a Carmelite reform movement led by Teresa of Ávila, a movement that would come to be called “Discalced,” meaning barefoot, as one of the matters in dispute was whether members should wear covered shoes or simply sandals.

It was all rather stupid, like so many religious disputes, but as Monty Python famously declared, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Today, few have heard of John of the Cross, unless their local parish in the Roman communion happens to be dedicated to him, for he was eventually canonized. If folks have heard of him at all, it is not due to the Battle of the Birkenstocks, but is instead for his writing, especially the poem “The Dark Night of the Soul,” composed during or immediately after his captivity.

The phrase “dark night of the soul” has become a trope, used today to mean a crisis of faith, but that is not quite what John meant. The opening stanza goes like this:

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

Note the line “Oh, happy chance!” John was a mystic, and “Dark Night of the Soul” is a love poem to God. It reflects a theological position expressed a century earlier in the anonymous work “The Cloud of Unknowing,” what theologians call the “via negativa,” where we stop trying to posit divine attributes, and instead accept God as ultimately mysterious and unknowable. Mysticism and the “via negativa” were post-modern theologies before post-modernism, or for that matter, even before modernity.

Now, hold that thought a moment, because we are going to circle back. But let’s first turn our focus to our scripture readings. The first is the story of Elijah, that great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, being taken up by a flaming chariot. Elijah is one of only two individuals in scripture who do not die. The other is Enoch, an obscure figure in Genesis. Everyone else dies, including Jesus, for you have to die in order to be resurrected.

This sets up the expectation in the Second Temple period that Elijah would play a future role in the restoration of an Israelite kingdom. There was speculation that John the Baptizer might be Elijah, or maybe Jesus was Elijah, or that it was Elijah to whom Christ called from the cross when he cried “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?,” which is actually the first line of the 22^nd psalm, and has nothing to do with Elijah.

Folk myth around Elijah was so strong that even during the medieval Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent had the eastern gate of Jerusalem walled off and a cemetery placed in front of it in the mistaken belief that Elijah was a kohen, a priest in the line Aaron, and therefore could not enter a cemetery. If no false Elijah could enter from the east, as tradition demanded, then no false messiah could follow.

It is the “not dead yet” Elijah and the very dead Moses that appear with Jesus on the mountain top in today’s gospel reading, always the last before Lent, and traditionally called the “transfiguration,” though Mark is not at all clear what he means when he says “transfigured,” other than everything becoming shiny and white.

And there is our problem, this whiteout, this idea that whiteness is good. And I get that there is a primitive fear of the dark, but the creation myth does not offer us day as good and night as evil. God creates both. We have evolved on a planet that spins on an axis, alternating periods of light and dark, and that rhythm is hard-wired and necessary for our health. Keeping the lights on is a form of torture.

Every time we hold out the idea that whiteness is good, even in this sort of abstraction, we reinforce the pernicious lie of race. And race does not even exist in the ancient context! It is a modern category that was invented to justify the enslavement of Africans and involved a lot of Enlightenment pseudo-science. 

And in the Oompa Loompa Paradox, some of America’s worst racists pride themselves in their whiteness while also spray painting themselves orange to look like healthy people of leisure.

Which is kinda nuts.

Continue reading “11 February 2024: Whiteout”

Mark 1:29-39
1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Twenty or so years ago, as prosperity gospel churches were modeling themselves on professional sports, stadium tours, and Ponzi schemes, a smaller movement in American Christianity was striving for authenticity. I was among the followers of progressive and reconstructive Christianity who engaged in ideas from this movement, sometimes called “Emergent.” 

Emergent authors like Brian McClaren wrote popular best sellers, while average Christians started reading work by scholars like John Dominic Crossan, folks who wanted to understand Jesus in context, a new wave of the historic Jesus school that has been around for a century and a half.

One interesting aspect of the Emergence movement was an emphasis on spirituality. During the last half of the 20^thcentury, the culturally and politically dominant form of American Christianity, white Mainline Protestantism, had become pretty dry, civic and social and sometimes intellectual, but with little emotion or enthusiasm, except when it came to carpet color, because nothing gets us fired up quite like minutia. 

As the new century dawned, some Mainline churches tried to create renewed energy and attract younger members by adding drum kits and guitars and praise music, while others, especially the emergents, dove deep into liturgy, into candles and contemplation and Taizé. Sometimes they’d even move out of and break away from the big old institutional church, forming “house churches.” They argued that this was how Christianity started, which is more or less correct.

But the problem with striving for an authentic original Christianity is that there is no such thing as original Christianity, just as there was no distinct single Judaism before 70 C.E. Never mind that it didn’t work because many of the pressures keeping people out of church are economic and political and beyond a local congregation’s control.

All of our original sources are biased at best, with Josephus, the closest thing we have to a historian of Galilee and Judea in the First Century, about as “fair and balanced” as Fox News. And even though some of the theological extremes were eliminated in the process of constructing the canon of Christian scripture, our earliest list of authorized texts, from late in the Second Century, is missing five books. 

The canon of scripture we have today, called by Christians “the New Testament,” is not one single text written by one single human or revealed by one single angel on or under some mountain. It is the result of centuries of religious evolution. There are plenty of contradictions in the text, and no definitive answer when it comes to what Jesus was about and how Christ saves.

Early Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Medieval Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Enlightenment Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Modern Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Post-Modern Christianity is dynamic and diverse. 

But one thing is pretty clear. Just as there are bottlenecks in biological evolution, there are bottlenecks in cultural and religious evolution. And Paul is the bottleneck in what would become early Christianity. Trying to see what Christianity would look like without Paul is like trying to imagine the sky Vincent Van Gogh was looking at when he painted “Starry Night.”

Of course, Paul didn’t know Jesus, and even though the gospels that were eventually accepted into the Christian canon pass through the Pauline bottleneck, the gospels don’t always align with that Pauline faith. 

Scripture claims that Paul’s ministry and his approach to evangelizing the Gentiles was approved by the leaders of the actual apostolic community, by a church council led by Peter, the first leader of the community after the execution of Jesus, and by James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jesus community in Jerusalem.

And as an aside, Peter was married as was made clear in today’s first reading. There is nothing in scripture that creates a celibate priesthood. And there is nothing to indicate that James the brother of Jesus is actually James the cousin of Jesus or James the half-brother of Jesus or James the generic male relative of Jesus, so work it out for yourself but full of grace or not, Mary had other kids.

But back to Paul and today’s second reading, because if we can get past the minutia, there is a big picture there. Paul tells us that he is willing to adapt to get the message across. 

If he was writing today, he might say “To the hipsters I became as a hipster in order to win hipsters. To Gen Z I spoke like Gen Z that I might share the good news. To skate punks, I appeared in a Supreme hoodie, though seriously, I cannot skate, but I was willing to look ridiculous if I could share the good news. But the skate punks were a bit cynical, and just said ‘Okay, Boomer.’”

Continue reading “4 February 2024: Good News”