Constructive Faith

Moving is never fun, even when you are moving somewhere you want to go. Things get lost… my old Scout and Army uniforms disappeared in a move years ago. Stuff gets broken. Mostly, it is just stuff, like the cheap Target lamp that didn’t survive the trip to Elmira. Our lingering sense of loss over material things should serve as a check on our privilege and sense of vulnerability, our Buddhist sisters and brothers having a thing or two to say about attachment. But sometimes, we have things that are truly precious because they are physical manifestations of our deep story, the way we locate ourselves and make meaning.

One of the most precious physical objects in my household is a small wooden side table. It is not much to look at, not even slightly fancy, more the sort of thing a freshman might make in wood shop, if wood shop still exists in an education system chasing scores on standardized corporate tests.

This little amateur table was made by my grandfather, a man I never knew, for he died when my own father was still a child. He’d been a police officer like his father before him, but back then there wasn’t any effective treatment for tuberculosis, so he was pensioned off and sent out west, to a sanatorium in Albuquerque. There, the family lived in late Depression poverty, sometimes with little more to eat than a potato and a piece of fatback, or whatever was available at the soup kitchen.

This experience had a profound impact on my father, who as an adult worked non-stop until his body would not let him work any longer, that body that was a container for all of his fear of poverty and of hunger. And just as trauma becomes embodied, is mysteriously and genetically passed down through the generations, so too is that anxiety about poverty passed on, that work ethic that says go until you can go no more. I have it. So do each of my sisters. My half-brother, adopted and only re-discovered five years ago, never knew Dad, but he grinds it out like the rest of us.

So when I think about money, I know that the weight, the gravity in my family history, distorts things, the event horizon of a black hole of hunger and fear. I probably get angrier with those who benefit from unearned wealth than is completely appropriate, and am more judgmental of those who are unwilling to work than grace requires. I have little tolerance for those who steal, whether the robbery is committed by a thug with a gun or a private equity firm. Like the Seven Social Sins developed by Canon Frederick Lewis Donaldson and popularized by Mohandas Gandhi, I consider “wealth without work” to be an evil, a cancer on the moral fabric of civilization.

Continue reading “Your Money’s Worth: 7 November 2021”

Back in the olden days, when we used to go to the cineplex… You remember movie theaters, right?

Back in the olden days, when we used to go to the cineplex, there would be movies in some of the other little boxes that I didn’t particularly want to see, but at least I knew what they were, knew that someone was going to see “My Little Pony: The Revenge of Spike” or “Friday the 13th: Escape from Mar-a-Lago,” knew what films were part of the broader cultural conversation. Or not.

These days, we’re all in our own homes streaming Netflix or Hulu, a trend that started even before the pandemic made public gatherings dangerous. And what we see when we open Netflix is what the algorithm decides we should see based on demographics and what we have watched in the past, another little part of the Matrix I discussed two weeks ago. But every so often, a program or film still breaks through into the broader cultural conversation. This has been true recently for the Korean series Squid Game, a smash hit with a serious promotional campaign.

Now, I’m delighted at this one aspect of globalization, not so much with moving all manufacturing to nations with no environmental protection and slave-like working conditions, but definitely with the multiculturalism. I remember feeling sophisticated and even a little smug when I went to the art house cinema to watch a French film back in the ’80’s. Now, I can and do routinely watch programming from Germany and France, India and Korea, at home. Though to be honest, I’m still not quite down with telenovelas yet.

Squid Game, however, is not my favorite import. I’m clearly just not that cool, but you probably knew that. The premise of the series is that hundreds of poor people are tricked into playing a set of children’s games, though with this twist: the losers are killed, the winners get some money. And the whole enterprise is entertainment for the truly rich. It is part Hunger Games, part Battle Royale, and thoroughly grim. Continue reading “Squid Game and Ted Lasso: 31 October 2021”

It is a sign of our extreme peril that when I speak of Siwanatorz, Beliebers, and the Beyhive, I must explain, but I can say “Just the facts, ma’am,” and almost everyone in the room is old enough to know I am referencing Joe Friday on Dragnet, a television program that broadcast its last episode a half century ago. Nonetheless, we start our engagement with today’s gospel reading with “Just the facts.”

The three male disciples we get to know best in the gospels are Peter, James, and John. Peter, of course, is traditionally understood as the leader of the movement after the public torture and execution of Jesus. Like James and John, he has a brother in the movement, though Andrew is at best a minor character.

James, the disciple, brother of John, and son of Zebedee, should not be confused with James, the brother of Jesus, who becomes a follower only after the death of Jesus and is the head of the church in Jerusalem. John, the disciple, brother of James, and son of Zebedee, should not be confused with John who receives the revelation on Patmos, despite the tradition that conflates the two. And none of the three likely wrote any of the texts given their name in the New Testament.

Peter is actually a nickname, given to Simon by Jesus, Simon the Rock, flatteringly “upon which Christ will build the church,” more likely, because he could be a bit thick at times. James and John also earned a nickname, for they were rowdy, and were called “the Thunder Brothers.” And it is the Thunder Brothers who take center-stage in our reading, for they ask Jesus if they can sit, one at his left and one at his right, when he comes into glory.

In the dialogue that follows, Jesus teaches his disciples about servant-leadership, a concept at the absolute heart of the Christian faith and of our United Church of Christ understanding of ministry, a belief first articulated in the Suffering Servant passages of Isaiah. But Jesus also says it is not for him to decide who will sit at his left and at his right.

This is important, and a reminder that we always err when we isolate pieces of the story, when we have neglected our Bible, for this left side and right side is meant to point forward to that moment when there is someone at his left side and someone on his right side, when he is on the Cross, certainly an odd way to come into your glory. Today’s reading should end with “to be continued,” for the meaning will be revealed in later chapters.

In the same way, the question Jesus asks, whether James and John will drink the cup he drinks and receive the baptism he receives is a pointer to the Passion, for it is in Gethsemane that he prays “Abba, take this cup away from me, though thy will, not mine, be done.” And that cup is the cup of crucifixion.

The Man in Black, the Dread Pirate Roberts, not Johnny Cash, once said “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Well, I’m not quite that grim. I mean, life is also beauty and joy. But it is absolutely true that pain comes to all of us at times, often as a result of or prompt toward growth, and it is a non-negotiable truth that discipleship, the Way of Love and Justice, is going to cost you something. Grace may be freely given, but it is not cheap, not in the traditional theology of costly grace, and not in any modern interpretation, for once you have eyes to see the brokenness of the world, you cannot pretend you haven’t seen. Life may not be pain, Highness, but it is always a risk, a flicker of love at risk of going out. Continue reading “17 October 2021: Escaping the Matrix”

Birth is a crap shoot. No one chooses their family of origin, their gender assignment at birth, the nation-state of which they are a citizen, or worse still, being born state-less, as is true for the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar and a growing number of Muslims in India who are being stripped of their citizenship by Narendra Modi’s racist Bharatiya Janata Party, better known as the BJP.

Expected gender roles, class and caste, race? Socially constructed fictions with no basis in biology, though powerful fictions to be sure. And on this weekend when we celebrate the Indigenous People of North America, organized into tribes and nations, we are mindful that this traditional notion of tribe was itself an accident of birth, leading to tremendous modern conflict over who makes it onto the tribal roll.

But there is another understanding of tribe, one that is in line with the early Christian experience, one based on affinity and choice. You might be one of Justin Bieber’s “Beliebers,” for they are a tribe of sorts. Red Sox fans are definitely a tribe. Members of the evil death cult that refuse to get vaccinated or to wear a mask are definitely a tribe, and a dangerous one at that, bonded together by insane belief and toxic values. Like the Crips, the Bloods, and MS-13, members of the white supremacist affinity tribes have markings and signs to identify one another, the white power hand sign and special hats. But then again, the early Christians used the fish as a sign, and then there are the Masons with their rings. Belonging in and of itself is not bad. In fact, belonging is essential for our health as social creatures. It is what we choose to join that matters. Continue reading “10 October 2021”

“I’m OK – You’re OK” was a 1967 self-help book by Thomas Anthony Harris. You may have read it. Heck, it may have changed your life. Me? I’m more Gen X than Baby Boom, more Nirvana than Beatles, so not really my thing. Besides, I’m more like my esteemed colleague The Rev. Otis Moss III, who is beginning a sermon series titled “I Am NOT Okay.”

I mean, that cabin off the grid is looking better and better. The news is often terrible. Far too many of the neighbors I am supposed to love are complete idiots, and how exactly do you speak THAT truth with love? Things in general are way too complex, and I’m not just talking about that password that needed a number and a letter and a special character and three words in Esperanto that I’ve completely forgotten, or the difficulty of finding a plumber or a rental car. I’m talking about moral issues and conflicting values.

Take, for example, U.S. immigration policy, in the news and historically driven by white supremacy, sometimes, but not always, overt, as I have stated from this very pulpit. I am rightly disgusted by this history, and embrace the United States we are trying to build together, diverse and beautiful. I love Taco Tuesday and the music of Bollywood, African prints and Japanese animation, jazz and gumbo.

At the same time, I believe in a just and equitable economy and in addressing exploitative economics here and abroad, in being honest about the terrible legacies of slavery and colonialism and the ways these evils have made us rich as a nation while impoverishing others. I believe in the form of reparations that seeks to build capacity in the nations we have manipulated and exploited, that we have drained of resources and people or that we have used as proxies in ideological wars.

So I have been troubled in my spirit by the flood of refugees at the border. I have no problem rejecting the intentional cruelty of the last administration, for cruelty was a feature, not a bug, in their system. But I also don’t believe in unregulated borders. When a doctor from Ghana is driving a taxi in Brooklyn, that is one less doctor in Ghana. The problem is not that we cannot take in others so much as it is that the drain on poor nations, not just the brain drain but also the loss of hustle and drive, creates an un-virtuous cycle, where those nations become poorer and less capable with every wave of emigres.

And I worry that what I consider to be a fairly progressive and nuanced position on immigration, justice, and reparations is impossible to surgically remove from our sordid history of white supremacy.

One person who had little interest in nuance and even less in American white supremacy and neoliberal imperialism was the late celebrity chef and traveller Anthony Bourdain. In fact, he attracted controversy when, featuring Houston on a 2017 episode of his program “Parts Unknown,” he gave producers a simple edict: “No white people.” The result was good television that lived up to the name of the program, a look at the diverse cultures within Houston that were largely unknown to Anglos with privilege. Continue reading “3 October 2021: World Communion Sunday – Dangerous Food and Good Booze”

Jojo Siwa was a second-tier cast member on a second-tier reality show, Dance Moms, on a second-tier network, Lifetime. That’s like sixth-tier or something, which should amount to a whole lot of nothing. But Jojo was only second-tier when it came to dancing. When it came to personality, she was cream-of-the-crop, and she sure had that hustle…

Over the next several years, Jojo and her sparkly candy-colored wardrobe and upbeat anti-bullying message became a brand, all glitter and bows and ponytails everywhere. Today, Jojo Siwa has 36.4 million followers on TikTok, the short format video platform, 10.9 million followers on Instagram, primarily a photo platform, and 12.3 million subscribers on YouTube, that now-aged platform for long-format video.

Even if the Venn diagram of people following Jojo on multiple platforms is substantial, we’re still talking about tens of millions of people following a young “influencer,” to use today’s term. Her hardcore fans are known as Siwanatorz. Once primarily tweens, Siwanatorz are increasingly diverse. Tweens become teens, whether we like it or not, and Siwa, who recently turned eighteen, has attracted a lot of attention by coming out as a lesbian and, as of Monday, joining the cast of “Dancing with the Stars” with a same-sex dance partner.

So far, Jojo Siwa’s fans have been benign, a crowd rather than a mob. The same cannot be said for the fans of Beyoncé, known as the BeyHive. Continue reading “Siwanatorz and the BeyHive: 26 September 2021”

The world is divided into two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. Or so the people who divide the world into two types of people would have us all believe.

Take, for example, the famous division between those who see the glass as half empty and those who see the glass as half full, the supposed unbridgeable chasm between pessimists and optimists.

Except you have that dude who drinks directly from the milk carton, with no glass involved, probably your grandson. Then there is me. Like an infamous t-shirt, I neither see the glass as half full nor as half empty. I just think “Goody! Room for more wine!”

And here, in a nutshell, you have a part of my core theology. The other part comes from the country song that declares “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.” But we’ll leave that for another day.

And seriously, before you start to think I might have a problem, I can assure you that I drink more milk than anything else, just not directly from the carton. And lots of coffee. Possibly too much coffee, if that is a thing. Continue reading “More Wine: 19 September 2021”

When I was a kid, Saturday morning was for cartoons, and every other week, hot donuts that my dad picked up on his way home from the fire station. That was in the days before Fox and Adult Swim made cartoons an acceptable form of adult entertainment here in the U.S., pre-South Park and The Simpsons, back when only kids bought comic books down at the Five and Dime, when Archie and Veronica were goofs rather than the angsty young adults now on a steamy television network.

Americans only knew Japanese animation from the rare instances when they penetrated the U.S. children’s market, characters like AstroBoy. Even Hello Kitty wasn’t yet a thing…

But animated films and television programs, called anime, and comic books, called manga, had always been platforms for serious adult entertainment in Japan, something I learned in the mid-90’s.

At a time when there was little queer representation in U.S. Media, and what representation existed was either tragic or psychopathic, the Japanese had an entire genre of positive queer romance in manga and anime. Often, these romances would tie back in to more mainstream productions, which is how I first discovered the series “Neon Genesis Evangelion.” Continue reading “Shinji’s New Genesis: September 19, 2021”

It has been a hell of a week, a phrase I am getting very tired of using. I’d offer a fine whine this morning, but I’m betting you have some whining to do as well. I struggled with the sermon, with texts I chose weeks ago so the rest of the team could plan, and with that decision every pastor faces in a time of church decline and social chaos, whether to offer spiritual chemotherapy or spiritual palliative care, to try to re-energize our life together, or write it off as a loss.

So despite waffling about this sermon, which I re-wrote again this morning, I’ve made my choice. I’m not a quitter. And I’m not going down without a fight.

And speaking of fighting…

When the last administration legitimized the Taliban and announced a unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, it set in motion the calamitous events we have seen unfold in the last several weeks, the collapse of the undermined Afghan government, and the restoration of Afghanistan as a terrorist state.

But if we are honest, the former president is not alone. There is plenty of blame to go around.

There was never a realistic plan, not a year ago, not twenty years ago. Rural Afghans share the Taliban’s core values, and we can’t manage our own urban-rural divide, so how were we supposed to manage theirs? Continue reading “Swoosh: 29 August 2021”

It was both heartbreaking and sweet, as love so often is. On March 3rd, 2017, the New York Times “Modern Love” essay was written by Amy Krause Rosenthal, a prolific and successful author. In it, she announced that she was dying of ovarian cancer, and offered a dating profile for her husband, soon to be a widower with three kids. Ten days later, she was gone.

Among her many works, across different genres and even media, was a 2009 children’s book titled “Yes Day!” This March, it made it to the silver screen. Well, to be more accurate, it made it to the little screen, for the film “Yes Day,” starring Jennifer Garner, was produced for Netflix.

The idea, of the book and of the screenplay, is that parents spend an awful lot of time saying “no,” and maybe, once in awhile, there should be a day when they say “yes.”

Within reason, of course. Yes Day does come with guardrails. The ten year old isn’t going to drive the car. And no one is going out to buy a pony. But, as blogger Dawn Booth reports, root beer floats for breakfast are a definite yes. Playing in the rain is also a yes. Playing hide-and-seek with your parents is a yes. Even doing a parent’s make-up and nails is a yes, which seems particularly brave.

It seems to me that, like parents, religion has a “no” problem, and while we can point to fundamentalists, we’d do well to look in the mirror, for “no” comes in many forms, wears many disguises, but in whatever form, it sucks the vitality right out of our faith, out of our leaders and our volunteers. It can come in the form of micromanaging and second-guessing, of stalling and delaying.

No is using process to stop progress.

No is the legalism that Jesus so despised when he spoke of the Scribes and Pharisees.

But here’s the thing: God is “yes.”

Earlier this week, a colleague and I were chatting over coffee about the texts and themes we were bringing to the pulpit this morning, for he also uses the Revised Common Lectionary, and he too is preaching on Joshua. I mentioned my sermon title, “God is yes,” and he reminded me that even in God’s no is a yes. For example, thou shalt not kill is really a yes to life.

Now, you already know me well enough to know that I don’t believe every rule in the Hebrew and Christian Scripture comes from God by way of divine revelation. Far from it.

Some rules are clearly needed for a well-ordered society, but I believe most rules are created by those with power and are primarily about preserving that power. Some put no in the mouth of a god made in their own image who wants what they want and hates who they hate. That’s just not God.

If God was no, then why is there anything? Seriously, the easiest thing to control is nothing. But God spoke something into being, and here we are. Creation is a glorious yes mess…

My late teacher Gordon Kaufman thought of God as serendipitous creativity. The late Templeton Prize winning scientist and mathematician Freemason Dyson put it this way:

I do not claim any ability to read God’s mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.

I’m with Dyson. Seriously, look at the platypus! Should we add a flat tail, like a beaver? Yes! What about a bill like a duck? Absolutely! How about venom, like a snake? Why not?

The duck-billed platypus is yes on steroids!

It is only in recent decades that scientists like the great minds at the Santa fe Institute have come to identify the yes hard-wired into creation in the form of complexity, the way discreet units, from particles to tribes, self-organize in surprising ways that create unexpected results, so that everything is always more than the sum of the parts, and attempts to break things down to those constituent parts is always deadly, destructive…

I can talk all day about the exuberance of God, of serendipitous creativity, of natural selection, of the ways life breaks through the hard stuff, about Maya Angelou and Mozart. But I don’t have to.

Because if you are inclined to see the cup that runneth over, you will. If you are inclined to see only the mess made where the cup runneth over, you will, for believing is seeing.

Believing is seeing. So be careful about what you believe.

No comes from fear. The desire to control comes from fear. No is fear distilled.

Sometimes that fear is completely rational. Listen, kid, wear the helmet while you’re out on that skateboard. I’ve seen people who suffered traumatic brain injury, and it ain’t worth it. Wear your mask and get the vaccine. Covid-19 is a gruesome way to die.

But mostly, we are afraid of things we can’t control. As our bodies age and get smaller, so to do our spirits. No comes to our lips faster than yes. We sit on the dark, on piles of gold, alone, afraid to fly for fear that one small bauble might go missing, refusing to truly to live. There is a reason the dragon became an archetype of greed, the wasted power, the wasted potential.

No is the human dragons that think they can kill vulnerability under mountains of gold, when no amount of gold can ever make us invulnerable, for our vulnerability is part of our beauty.

Yes is writing a dating profile for your husband as you lay dying, rather than insisting that he never love again. No is thinking that the love, of the spouse you leave behind, of the kids you leave behind, is zero-sum, and that love for someone else means less love for you.

No nails people to a cross. Yes raises them from the grave.

May we, like Joshua, say yes to a God who says yes to us every day…

Amen.