Month: June 2011

June 19th, 2011

Martin Luther famously said that Trinity Sunday was the one Sunday a year when the preacher should remain silent, for there is nothing that can really be said about the mystery of the Trinity. But before you get too excited, you should also know that the late Reverend Peter Gomes said that anything worth preaching about was worth at least forty minutes. So let’s say we split the difference?

I am a great fan of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the 19th century German theologian, and especially of his central work Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche, translated in an oversimplification into English as The Christian Faith. And since we are discussing something as profound and dare I say mysterious as the nature of God in trinity, I thought we might use Schleiermacher to clarify. Here he writes about the unity of God: Continue reading ““Unsermon””

Today after church we will host a rally in support of same-sex marriage rights. I have been invited to make some remarks… here is what I have prepared…

Sisters and Brothers,

Archbishop Timothy Dolan believes that granting same-sex marriage rights is a step towards autocracy, putting us on the road to a totalitarian state. Archbishop Dolan should look in the mirror, for he chooses to use his dictatorial power within an autocratic church and his influence in society to deny me the right to follow my faith. Jesus has some pretty strong words for hypocrites…

Churches are not forced to marry anyone… I regularly turn away opposite-sex couples who simply want the church as a prop in their wedding. Dolan’s argument is a straw man at best.

Scripture has been used to justify slavery and racism, ethnic cleansing and brutal crimes, and centuries of oppression. Those who project onto God their own prejudices are worshiping a god they created, not the God that created them. I call on them to abandon their idolatry, or to at least admit that their hatred does not come from God.

It is time for communities of faith to stop acting as agents of the state, to follow their own moral code and stop imposing it on others. Same-sex marriage rights are a civil right, not a religious rite. May God forgive those who mix the two. Hear me, you game-playing politicians… freedom will win… love will win… God will win! Amen.

June 12th, 2011

Last week I told you there was no such thing as “original sin.” I take it all back. There is an original sin, but it didn’t come about because of a talking serpent and a gullible Eve, so women, you’re off the hook. A millennium and a half of guilt, right off your shoulders! No, if there was such a thing as “original sin,” I believe it would be fear. All others sins find their origin in our fearful nature. Somewhere pretty early in the development of our minds we discover that there is a lot in life that we don’t control, so we set about the task of controlling what we can, and making up stories about the things we can’t. We create little mental systems and categories to convince ourselves that we understand and exert some control over our world. It’s a silly game, mostly lies, but we can’t help ourselves. Fear drives greed and tribalism, violence and lust. It even shows up in communities of faith when they are too fearful to trust God. Continue reading “Row, row, row your boat”

June 5th, 2011

God’s great creation is an amazing thing, isn’t it? Take, for example, DNA, those little chains of data that make us who we are, at least the physical part of what we are. That double helix of genetic data unzips, replicates, mutates, and, combined with a process called natural selection, produces a vast array of plants and animals that are more or less adapted to their context. It was DNA and natural selection that gave us our thumbs, these amazing opposable thumbs that sent us rocketing up the evolutionary tree, these thumbs that our cats envy… if only cats had thumbs they could open those cans, never mind that they still wouldn’t be able to read the labels to open the right cans! No, thumbs are just plain amazing, hands are just plain amazing, and with these hands, in just a few minutes, I will baptize a child. But for all the seeming magic of DNA and natural selection, for all of the miracle that is every moment in God’s creation, there is nothing magical about these hands. They’re just plain old hands, no different from yours… hands that cook and clean and paint and scratch and do all sorts of other human things you probably don’t want to hear about. So if these hands aren’t magical, it might be worth thinking about what is going to happen in this act of baptism. Continue reading “Dunkin’ & Sprinklin”