Month: February 2012

a sermon delivered on January 29, 2012 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

We begin at the end, because the story of Kurt Gödel does not end well, and hopefully this sermon will. Gödel was one of the three great minds of the early 20th century who closed the door on the great project of the Enlightenment. More on that later. Through the middle of the last century, he could be seen most days strolling home from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, with his dear friend, Albert Einstein, one of the other two great reality-changing thinkers of the time…  Gödel was a difficult man verging on madness, and in the end it was madness that killed him, for he came to believe someone was trying to poison him, and when his elderly wife was hospitalized, he starved himself to death, not trusting anyone else with his food. It was a tragic end, to be sure, for a brilliant career. More than a decade earlier there was a more endearing reference to Gödel’s sanity when Einstein remarked to a friend that Gödel really had finally gone mad. When asked why, Einstein replied that the man had voted for Eisenhower. Continue reading “Positively Wrong”

a sermon delivered January 22, 2012 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

I got on the train, like I had many times before that year. I had my backpack, my passport, a baguette, sausage and cheese in case I got hungry. I also had my Thomas Cooke guide with train schedules for all of Europe and my Let’s Go guide, letting me know where I could find a hostel, cheap eats, and the best times to visit various attractions. And so we pulled out a Gare du Nord heading to Metz. Now, I am bilingual… I speak English and Southern, but I do not speak French. None-the-less, I did manage to understand the announcement, made in French, that revealed that half of the cars in the train were going to Metz, and that at some point half would split off and head to Luxembourg. And I was in the wrong half. Continue reading “On the complexity of not going to Metz”

a sermon delivered on January 15th, 2012 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

Scholar John Dominic Crossan stated the problem succinctly when it comes to how we interpret the Bible. Either the ancients wrote a text they believed to be literally true, and many of us are smart enough to read it symbolically; or, the ancients wrote a text they believed to be symbolically true, and many of us are dumb enough to take it literally. Crossan believes the latter. I tend to think it is somewhere in between, the ancients realizing parts were true and parts symbolic, and that many contemporary American Christians are unable to admit to themselves and the world that they are choosing which parts are symbolic and which are literal. Continue reading “Monkey-Soul-A-Phobia”

It is not uncommon for folks, on learning that I am a Christian minister, to say to me something like this: “Well, all paths lead to the same place.” I usually politely nod, move on to other topics. But I don’t really believe it.

As we begin our three week sermon series on “Lessons Learned from Other Religions,” I thought it might be helpful to clarify how we use the term “universalist,” and why I am specifically a Christian. Continue reading “On Being 2/3 Universalist”