Category: Main Blog

21 May 2023

Acts 1:1-11

Once again this week, we encounter a text we need to read as story rather than as history. I mean, maybe Jesus floated up into the sky, but as John Lennon famously sang, there is no hell below us, above us only sky, and then a solar system and a galaxy and a universe. So where did he float off to? 

Which is not to deny the possibility of heaven, because creation is cool and weird and who knows … just not that, Yahweh in a big chair up in the clouds and Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Besides, surely we can come up with some better bling these days than pearls, classic as they may be. I mean, if there are bedazzled gates, I sure hope they’re rhinestone when Dolly Parton gets there.

Even the most diehard Christians have accepted that we are not the center of the universe, at least not spatially, and the Roman church has sort of conceded they were wrong about that whole heresy and house arrest thing against Galileo, albeit 350 years too late. 

Yet, the religious imagination still holds on to this weird sort of “up” because we haven’t found new language for our confidence in the eternal goodness of God’s love. We might want to work on that. 

And some live in the cognitive dissonance of a heaven that is up somewhere even as they (mostly) accept that we have landed on the moon and sent probes to Mars.

Some cling to primitive belief despite the evidence, either ignoring contradictions like, you know, the actual universe, or simply pretending facts aren’t true, like natural selection and evolution. It is as if one horse gets out of the barn, and the whole herd will get loose, a stampede of deconstructed myths and fractured fairy tales. Though given the number of horses that died at Churchill Downs this year, the on-going destruction of those animals in the cruelty of horse racing, I’m all for getting horses out of some barns, literal and theological.

Barns always remind me of a short poem by the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bash?, who wrote: “My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.”

But this isn’t a sermon about having a positive attitude, as important as that is. It is about that barn and what happens when the doors come off, because folks, they are off and laying in the pasture. Things we thought were true or pretended were true are glaringly untrue.

Continue reading “The Barn Door”

7 May 2023

1 Peter 2:2-10

The folks who constructed Israelite identity in the ancient Near East crafted a story emphasizing racial purity, the idea that all members of their tribe were descended from the twelve sons of Jacob. They often located neighboring people as the children of those cast out of the tribe, of Ham, disgraced son of Noah, or of Ishmael, discarded son of Abraham. 

They celebrated a narrative of ethnic cleansing and genocide as recorded in the Books of Joshua and Judges, of burning cities and dead babies. Their holy texts were filled with polemic against inter-marriage and multiculturalism, against Jezebel and her priests. When the Israelite elite returned from the Babylonian Captivity, they convinced themselves that the lower classes who had been left behind were no longer pure, justifying the expropriation of their land. 

That version, of course, is utterly false, historically and theologically. Scripture provides several examples of people and groups absorbed into Israel, Ruth and Rahab among them. Modern scholarship is pretty clear that there was not a widespread campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide when the small group of escapees from Pharaoh’s Egypt settled in Canaan, the Promised Land, but that instead that small group, possibly only those who came to be known as the Levites, forged this new collective identity while merging with the existing Canaanite population. Their understanding of the holy, which they believed was the result of direct revelation, was formed over centuries, absorbing elements of Midianite and Canaanite belief.

Then, just like today, there were people who insisted that there was an “us” and there was a “them” that was defined by birth, that identity was a fixed thing.

So intense was the sense of tribal competition that when city dwellers in Jerusalem started adopting modern customs from the Greek culture that dominated the eastern Mediterranean, becoming Hellenized, rural residents of Judea rose up in armed rebellion, led by religious fundamentalists in what is known as the Maccabean or Hasmonean rebellion. 

Today, this is celebrated as a victory for monotheism, for Jewish identity and the worship of Yahweh, but if we are honest, it was no different than the “us” versus “them” in the United States today, the insane racist paranoia of “replacement theory” propagandists, the narrative of a metropolitan and cosmopolitan elite at odds with “real America,” real America defined as racially-segregated and white dominated patriarchy.

Continue reading “7 May 2023: Now A People”

30 April 2023: WWJD?

Acts 2:42-47

Much like us, they were Congregationalist and Abolitionist. After the Enslavers Rebellion had ended and Reconstruction had subsequently failed, plunging the South back into the abyss of exploitation and racism, their frontier congregation moved on to other tasks of life together in Christian community. 

In 1889, with a growing population, they decided to plant a new church. This is something that happened until fairly recently, until traditional churches started collapsing and megachurches started opening satellite campuses, and by satellite, I mean the pastor beaming in live from the main campus. 

Which we were all pretty snarky about right up until the pandemic, when we suddenly wished we had their production skills. 

So it was that Central Congregational Church was established in Topeka, Kansas. They called the Rev. Charles Sheldon, a native of Wellsville, New York, just a couple of counties west of here, then still in his early thirties and serving a congregation in Vermont. He was no radical. A graduate of Philips Academy and Brown University, he was comfortable and respectable. That was until he experienced that first winter in Topeka.

Poverty comes in many forms, from the manipulative images of humanitarian appeals on television to American elders who have to choose between food and medicine. Whatever it looked like in Topeka in 1889, it was enough to radically change Charles Sheldon. He spent less time in the pulpit discussing doctrine and personal salvation, and a whole lot more preaching Christianity as a way of living, preaching the practice of the Way of Jesus. He framed this with a simple question: “What would Jesus do?”

Sheldon would be appalled at what has become, his question, his message, reduced to a brand, “WWJD?”, and emblazoned on rubber bracelets and t-shirts and mylar balloons, products manufactured by functional slaves in an overseas authoritarian state, ashamed that “WWJD?” would become a generational mantra for people who focused on personal salvation as if it were a consumer product. Who, if they could fit the poor into their prosperity gospel at all, did so in the toxic form of tourism mission trips that cost thousands of dollars. 

Aren’t they just “blessed”?

Continue reading “30 April 2023: WWJD?”

Earth Day Sermon

23 Aril 2023

I am not going to stand up here this morning and tell you we need to stop destroying the planet, because duh! If you are here, you already know that. 

I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that neoliberal capitalism is a dumpster fire that was built on colonialism and slavery and that it is still based on exploitation and violence and has absolutely nothing to do with following Jesus. You don’t need to be ashamed of your privilege. It isn’t your fault. But you absolutely need to use your privilege to lift up others. But again, if you’ve been here more than a few times, you’ve already heard me say that.

Instead of preaching to the choir this morning, though it is a might fine choir up there, I am going to offer a challenge and name the theological task that is before us if we are going to save our species and our planet. And I start with the human brain. 

It is simply miraculous. We know way more about how it works now than we did even twenty years ago thanks to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, also known as fMRI. We know more about a lot of things, from the human genome to the Higgs boson. And yet, we are completely clueless about how the brain makes you you. We are more than a little terrified when we hear and sometimes witness how traumatic brain injury and diseases of the brain can make someone into another someone entirely. Being is mystery.

We are bipedal self-aware primates in search of meaning, fragile, finite, and fickle, and it is only natural that we begin with what we know, moving outward, the baby who discovers their own hand and slowly understands it as part of themselves.

We construct meaning, sometimes through discoveries, sometimes just making stuff up, which is totally okay, though sometimes that made up stuff needs to be adjusted for the discoveries. Which is exactly where we find ourselves today as Christians in a world on fire.

Continue reading “Earth Day Sermon 2023”

John 20:19-31

As most of you know, the problem with doing the things is that then people know you’ll do the things so they ask you to do the other things and it just never ends, like this sentence. 

So it was that Holy Week was the same week candidates had to file their petitions to get on the ballot for the November election, and before I had even recovered from Holy Week and holiday guests, it was time to meet with the Citizens Advisory Panel to discuss this year’s Community Development Block Grants, and me being me, I wanted to actually read the applications before voting to fund the programs, which meant I actually had to read the applications and prepare questions.

It is so much easier to just sit on the couch and watch cars drive in a circle.

The process was not too painful. I had to recuse myself once. This is a small town after all. And mostly I knew the programs and the good work they were doing. But there were a couple where I had concerns. The applications included stories, and you know I love stories, but when it comes to money, I want data. And as we were all reminded during the pandemic, anecdote is not data.

So I must say that I sympathize with Thomas. Don’t tell me. Show me.

Hang on to that. We’re gonna be back here in a bit. But first we have to start with a wider lens.

One understanding of Christianity is framed around direct and inerrant revelation, the idea that God spoke directly to the founders, prophets, and priests of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, directly manages the dissemination and translation of that revelation to this day, in every form and every language. This understanding mostly erases humans from the equation, doesn’t actually fit the facts, and is prone to disqualify anyone who does not share that particular orthodoxy.

Yeah. That’s not us, not our understanding of Christianity.

There is another understanding, one most of us embrace in the United Church of Christ, that leaves room for God to be God and humans to be human, which is to say imperfect and amazing, fearful and creative, all at the same time. 

That framework sees scripture as a human record of our encounter with holy mystery, a pious and mostly righteous attempt to translate the holy into terms we can understand, to make it actionable in our lives. 

We understand that the Word of God, whatever that means, is Christ, not a book. Not that the book doesn’t have some awesome stuff. Paul, authentic Paul, can be a complete knucklehead, but he’s also as close to a feminist as he could have been in his cultural context, and writes some pretty amazing stuff about faith, hope, and love. 

Then there is Matthew 25 and Micah 6:8, in the arbitrary system of chapters and verse numbers, texts that, if lived, would create a pretty amazing humankind, with an emphasis on kind. 

Even the most difficult portions of scripture, and there are plenty of difficult portions, rest on a strong foundation of expansive and restorative justice, despite our efforts to project our retributive justice onto them.The religious trajectory that starts somewhere around Moses is still around because it resonates with our experience, of ourselves, and of the world.

As that holy and human book was being written and assembled, over a period of more than five centuries, some texts made it in, some got left out, and some simply got lost. One of those texts that got lost was a text known as the Gospel According to Thomas. We have written references to it as early as Origen, who writes against it around 233 C.E., but we did not have a copy of Thomas until 1945. Once that copy, in an ancient language called Coptic and dated from around 340 C.E., was discovered, we were able to connect it to much older previously mysterious scraps of papyrus.

Why, you ask, should we care? And the answer is that this long lost gospel influences, or should influence, how we read today’s gospel lesson, the post-resurrection story portraying Thomas as a doubter.

But let me start with this simple truth. In the competition of ideas and beliefs, humans tend to push back hardest against those who are most like us.

The authors of the gospels don’t have Jesus in constant conflict with the Essenes, who were an influential if not extreme Jewish renewal movement. They don’t depict him railing against the Sadducees, a movement well represented among the elite who were profiting during the Roman occupation. He never mentions the Sicarii, who called for armed resistance to Roman rule. 

No, he spends a lot of time attacking the Pharisees, a religious movement that believed in the need to interpret ancient scripture and laws for use in the current context. Jesus believed in the need to interpret ancient scripture and laws for use in the current context.

Early Christians tried to reach agreement on what Jesus meant and how you should follow him. We see some of that in scripture, Paul’s struggle to create a Christianity for non-Jews, an effort that was not only successful, but that unfortunately overwhelmed the much smaller group of Jewish Jesus-followers. 

Some of those new Gentile Jesus followers brought along ideas from other cultures, religious and philosophical traditions. One of those was called Gnosticism, a sort of cult/secret-knowledge approach that existed as a sub-movement within many religions of that age. A modern equivalent of a secret knowledge cult might be Scientology, though of course, their secrets are not secret anymore. Thanks be to Xenu!

The Gospel According to Thomas was pretty gnostic. And you know which of the canonical gospels happens to come closest to a gnostic way of thinking? John, the only gospel that has this story about Thomas.

Centuries of Christians have read this as a text celebrating the virtue of blind faith. But what if the text is really mainly about making Thomas look bad so folks wouldn’t be attracted to the large movement associated with him? For there does appear to have been a significant movement associated with Thomas, with gnostic leanings, and possibly also associated with Mary Magdalene, another disciple who is sidelined in the canonical gospels.

Maybe we shouldn’t be freaking out about doubt. Maybe it is okay to ask for the data, touch the wounds. Jesus says in the gospel that even he doesn’t know everything. And he wavers in the Garden of Gethsemane, a human with doubts and fears.

Maybe it isn’t doubt that should worry us. Maybe it is certainty that should terrify us.

The Christian fundamentalist believes without doubt, is absolutely certain that everything humans need to know about God fits into a book that is nearly two thousand years old. But that little god in a book seems pretty small to me, and pretty dead, for life adapts and learns and changes, so how can that book be the same and be a living god? All life adapts and learns and changes. If creation is a reflection of God, if we are a reflection of God, then God tomorrow will not be the exact same as God today.

And though they may wrap themselves in the hubris that calls itself the Enlightenment, the Atheist fundamentalist is just as bad in their certainty that there is no god, though they have absolutely no proof. Their claim does not even meet their own criteria, their own standard for proof, ignores the unfolding wonder as we delve deeper and deeper into the weird and joyous quantum.

No, I’m not willing to make Thomas the bad guy, Thomas who is grieving, Thomas who is probably out buying the milk and bread the first time Jesus shows up and blows Holy Spirit on the apostles, John’s version of Pentecost. 

Doubt is not a sin, even if later authors wanted to distance themselves from a way of thinking about Jesus that was attributed to Thomas. Thomas wants data, empirical evidence, but he is also willing to believe, to act on his faith, to leave room for doubt and belief, to adapt and learn and change, as grief becomes shock becomes knowledge of the experience of the holy in a man he saw change lives, made people whole, taught selfless love, and here, here in this closed room, proved that love wins, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

And here we are. And there is certainly evidence to the contrary. Seriously, I talk about it up here most every week. People suck sometimes. 

And people are amazing sometimes. 

And we learn and change and adapt. I mean, someone figured out how to use mRNA to create vaccines just in time for us to keep a devastating pandemic that killed millions from killing trillions. Someone figured out how to turn sunlight into electricity. Someone figured out digital platforms so you can attend a committee meeting when you are on the road, though no one has yet to figure out how to get rid of committee meetings as long as our best way of governing ourselves and discerning God’s will is democratic, so there’s that.

So Thomas doubts? Cut the man some slack. Doubting isn’t about you being small, about insufficient faith. It is about letting God be God, bigger than our knowing, shocking us out of our grief, unfolding and becoming, this day and always. May it always be so. Amen.

There has been heated debate among biblical scholars about the Gospel According to Mark, the earliest of the Synoptic gospels and a source used by both Luke the Physician and the unknown authors of the Gospel attributed to Matthew. Especially controversial is Secret Mark, a version referenced in an ancient letter, then subsequently lost, that explained the naked youth with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

Don’t remember that part being covered in Sunday School? I’m not surprised. It wasn’t covered in Sunday School.

We do know that the version of Mark’s gospel we have today originally ended with the women running away afraid, no one yet having laid eyes on the resurrected Jesus. Whether this was the author’s intent or part of the text was simply lost, we don’t know. Later copyists and editors were uncomfortable with that ending, so they added text from other sources to give it a cleaner ending.

They needn’t have bothered. The ending they gave us is confusing, and maybe not even original. 

Continue reading “Easter Sunday 2023”

There are plenty of folks who can tell you what it means to be an American. Ironically, it does not include the first wave of immigrants, the inhabitants who crossed over from Eurasia and here centuries before Europeans sailed across the Atlantic. It does not include any of the other residents, indigenous, immigrant, or abductees in any other nation in the Americas. And to some, it does not include those residents of the United States descended from African abductees, or those who live in the traditionally multicultural context of the American Southwest, where the border has always been porous. Mostly it just means straight white capitalists, preferably ethno-Christian nationalists, though some Jews qualify as long as they are sufficiently secular. 

Their definition of American is a tiny circle with very high white walls.

In the same way, there have always been those defining Christian as a tiny circle with very high walls. There is an entire history of arguing over who Jesus was and what he meant, a debate that started while he was still alive. 

One of the definitions that evolved over the centuries was that to be a Christian, you must accept the ancient creeds, though they weren’t yet ancient. Definitely the Nicene Creed, though preferably also the Apostles’ Creed, and if you’re going for the whole enchilada, the formula of Chalcedon as well, which is complete nonsense. But that’s a sermon for another day.

Though Congregationalism and the United Church of Christ descend from these credal traditions, we are today non-credal, viewing ancient understandings as informative parts of our story, creeds as tools not weapons. And it is creed as story that I want to focus on this morning, and specifically on one phrase related to the crucifixion, that claims “he was crucified under Pontius Pilate” in the Nicene and “who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried” in the Apostles’. 

We’ve heard it so many times that we don’t think about it, though it raises an important question, one that has been central in the history of Christian antisemitism. Who killed Jesus?

Continue reading “Good Friday Homily 2023”

Matthew 21:1-11

Depeche Mode has a new album. Some of you are asking “Depeche who?,” while others are thinking “Wait, didn’t one of those guys die recently?” 

The answer to the second question is yes. Andy Fletcher, one of the founding members on the band’s first album in 1981, died of natural causes last May. But the two remaining members are still making music.

As to the first and probably more common response, “Depeche Who?,” you might remember them for their first big hit, “People Are People,” or for their controversial 1989 hit, “Personal Jesus,” though it was mostly controversial with people who just like controversy. 

And it is this last song that comes back to me again and again with its thumping beat, for while the song is not really about the bizarre consumerist theology of personal salvation, it is an absolute fact that people create a version of Jesus that fits their own preconceptions and needs. 

Though I’m sure some of our megachurch pastors and billionaire business owners would prefer Concierge Jesus.

Today is one of those days in the church year when Jesus becomes exactly this sort of screen onto which we project our own desires. For those who desperately need the world to fit into neat little cognitive boxes, who require easy answers, today is part in a divine script, a melodrama where humans are puppets or props as Yahweh acts out a ritual of slaughter and salvation through the second person of the Trinity. This is the Jesus where Fluffy and Grandpa meet us at the Pearly Gates, comforting, though at the cost of turning God into a monster.

Those with power and privilege want today to be about Jesus as a king, hoping that they might borrow a little of that luster, divine right or exceptionalism or earned grace, but that’s just old news, for the privileged and powerful have always claimed divine sanction, just as they were doing in Jerusalem as the rabbi from Galilee rode into town.

Folks like me, who see Jesus as a religious reformer or revolutionary, highlight the ways this entry into Jerusalem provided a contrast bordering on parody of the Roman prefect’s annual entry into Jerusalem for Passover, a time of year when religious and nationalist fervor meant rebellion was a real possibility. 

Continue reading “Carried Away: Palm Sunday 2023”

26 March 2023

Checkbox Grief

John 11:1-45

The gospel traditionally attributed to John the Disciple does not get a spot in the three-year rotation known as the Revised Common Lectionary. The other three gospels are similar, with Luke and the authors of Matthew drawing on a version of Mark, then adding material from a lost gospel we call Q, as well as from their own unique sources. The events and teachings are sometimes reorganized, and not always in the same geographic location, but they represent essentially the same narrative.

John, on the other hand, is odd, with many stories not found in those other gospels. Not only are many of the stories in John unique, they are often long and highly developed. Some scholars have argued that this sophistication means John must have been written much later, though there is no basis for that assumption. Later doesn’t necessarily mean smarter. Just watch the news.

Passages from John are sometimes difficult to work into a Sunday reading because of their length and depth. Such was the case last week, with the story of the man born blind, and such is the case this week, with the story of the death of Lazarus.

And gosh, does this story have problems! Does Jesus really believe Lazarus won’t die from the illness, as he actually says? Or does he believe the death of Lazarus will be a chance to demonstrate his power, which he also sort of says? That makes him a bit of a jerk, since resurrection or not, there are those four days of unnecessary grief, but it makes sense in the context of John, since the gospel attributed to John is organized around signs of the power of Jesus, beginning with the wedding at Cana and the cisterns of water turned into wine, and not rot gut, but the good stuff. John is sometimes thought to be based on a proto-gospel scholars refer to as a “signs” gospel.

With Lazarus, we’re left with lots on unanswered questions even after the happy resurrection. The ancient credal formulas claim Jesus as the first-born of the dead, text taken from the Revelation to John of Patmos. So what is Lazarus? Jesus ascends to heaven and so once resurrected, escapes a second death. Presumably, Lazarus is going to die a second time, which really doesn’t seem fair. 

Continue reading “Checkbox Grief: 26 March 2023”

John 9:1-41

A year later he would end up dead in his City Hall office, assassinated with the same gun that was used to murder Harvey Milk, but in 1977, George Moscone was still the mayor of San Francisco. 

That April, advocates for people with disabilities occupied federal offices around the country, demanding that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 be implemented. The legislation prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities by any organization receiving federal funds.

San Francisco rallied to the cause. Mayor Moscone sent mattresses to the activists occupying the office of Joseph Maldonado, the regional director for what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The local Black Panther Party sent ribs and fried chicken.

Twenty three days later, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano signed off on the implementation of 504. It would take another thirteen years before the Americans with Disabilities Act would extend protection for those with disabilities to all public spaces.

Judy Heumann, who died earlier this month, was one of the young activists in the San Francisco office. She would go on to serve in the Clinton Administration, and as an inspiration to many. It is hard to imagine, today, that she was turned away from school as a young child, called a “fire hazard.” Some in this room were alive when people with disabilities were routinely hidden away, institutionalized and warehoused, considered a family’s shame. 

Discrimination against those with disabilities is a cross-cultural phenomena. The Nazis perfected the art of mass killing with Aktion T4, the state slaughter of the physically and mentally disabled in 1939. Though initial reports in the West found over 70k victims, the discovery of archival material in the former East Germany suggests the actual death toll was three to four times that amount.

Today’s reading, from the gospel traditionally attributed to John, often gets glossed over, the tie to that classic hymn “Amazing Grace” providing the preacher with an excuse to avoid a long and difficult subject. If a preacher does dare to dig into the text at all, they might mistakenly focus on the sabbath violation, or on the general antagonism between Jesus and the group identified in this text as Jews, though the former would be to miss the point and the latter would be to misuse it. 

We, on the other hand, are going to take it head on, hoping to discover why this story is so unique, different than the numerous healings we find in the four gospels.

Continue reading “Born Blind: 19 March 2023”