Constructive Faith

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91
Luke 4:1-13

Like Donny and Marie Osmond, pop singers from an earlier era and part of a band of entertaining siblings, I grew up a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. My first concert was a long-forgotten country musician named Charlie Rich, and Dad listened to WCMS, the local country station. By the time I reached high school, I had moved to other regions of the radio dial, speeding way past pop and onto what is these days called album rock or classic rock, with a little Southern rock added to spice it up a bit, a musical alphabet from Allman Brothers to Zeppelin. There were exactly two FM stations to choose from for rock and rollers in my hometown, FM99 and K94. It was as if we had teams, and everyone knew which side you were on at 9:00pm, when one station played Free Bird and the other played Stairway to Heaven. Every. Single. Night. We took turns as we cleaned up at the Chief Petty Officer’s Club where I worked.

What you didn’t hear on either of those stations was the Grateful Dead. Despite their massive cult following, the Dead never cared that much about radio airplay, just as well as their jam-band style didn’t really work on a three minute single. Now if you had thirty minutes, they could give you a song… They finally did have a hit single with “Touch of Grey” in 1987. The song had been performed in concert since 1982, but had finally made it on to the album “In the Dark.”

Grateful Dead fans are well known as Deadheads, following the band from concert to concert, each event a sort of pop-up Haight-Ashbury circa 1968. Longtime Deadheads were not particularly happy with the sudden influx of new fans in 1987, many of them decades younger. It was as if there was a limited supply of music, and the newcomers were going to use it all up, or that you had to have protested the Vietnam War and burned your draft card to qualify for a spot in the crowd, and we were just too darned young. We were still a couple of decades away from great rock bands selling Cadillacs and Viagra, something we couldn’t foresee even in ’87. Continue reading “A Touch of Grey: March 10, 2019”

Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
Luke 9:28b-43a

Political nerds and policy wonks always meant the District of Columbia when they used the letters D.C. but the rest of us are there as well these days, obsessively watching or studiously avoiding the news of the latest horror to come out of Washington. It takes some work to top our Maine state author, Stephen King, but they somehow manage to produce a fresh hell in almost every 24-hour news cycle.

For electricians and science nerds, DC means direct current, as opposed to alternating current, or AC, with a rather contentious if surprising history, electricity wars if you will, involving partisans, propaganda, and personalities, characters like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The two together, of course, form a rock band… AC/DC that is, not Edison and Tesla.

In the Venn diagram of Nerdom, some of those political and science nerds would overlap with those who understand DC to stand for Detective Comics, one of the two great comic book universes still standing. Continue reading “Superman vs. Wolverine: March 3, 2019”

Luke 6:27-38
Psalm 37
Genesis 45:3-15

If we learned nothing else from the Ken Burns and Kim Novak documentary series on the Vietnam War, we certainly learned that the body count of enemies killed was a political fiction. Generals and politicians wanted to convince the American public we were winning a misguided war that we were losing, and badly. Even if they had been tempted toward integrity, they would have still faced the challenge of knowing who was and who was not an enemy in any particular hamlet, for dead bodies are even less likely to give up their secrets than living prisoners. War is by definition chaos and confusion, and while we can pretend to have an exact number for our own dead, a wall of names, the Defense Department still considers 1600 to be missing, and that after an additional thousand remains have been returned to the US since relations with Vietnam were normalized.

If it is hard to count our own dead, impossible to count enemy dead, it is even harder still to calculate civilian casualties, especially in the regions where wars tend to take place, regions with poor infrastructure and poor records. Take, for example, the invasion of Iraq, a war that was questioned by my predecessor from this very pulpit, a war that many continue to question in light of the results. In October of 2006, a team led by an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and a physician at Baghdad’s Al Mustansiriya University published a paper in The Lancet, a medical journal, estimating the number of excess deaths as a result of the war, that is deaths above the normal mortality rate, at 650,000 in the three years to that point. It created a firestorm at a moment when public opinion was already turning against the war. The World Health Organization would do a survey of its own two years later, drastically reducing that number to 151,000 excess deaths during that same period. While some might say, “Well gosh, 499,000 less deaths, so we’re alright then…” me, not so much, for even if the WHO was right, that is still 151,000 deaths that would not have happened, 151,000 sons and mothers and best-friends. Dr. Riyadh Lafta, the Iraqi physician who co-authored the study, has refused to play a formal role in subsequent studies because of death threats. He is worried about the safety of his family. But lest you should write that off as the result of living in a lawless war zone, you should remember that members of the country music group The Dixie Chicks received death threats right here in the US for speaking out against the war, and saw their careers effectively ended. Continue reading “A Problem Like Maria: February 24, 2019”

Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
Luke 6:17-26

One of the cooler parts of my years in the tech industry was getting to know James Walsh and the folks at Threshold Music, a recording studio in Manhattan. Once upon a time, I created their web site, integrating some technology that was pretty cutting edge stuff at the time, and made friends, hanging out, breaking bread, even watching a few recording sessions. I know how incredibly time consuming the recording, engineering, and production process can be, how much attention to detail. Then there is Jamaican vocalist Carl Douglas’ greatest hit, which is the exact opposite of all that time-consuming attention to detail. It is the classic one-hit wonder and a perfect example of riding the zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment.

They were recording a disco single, and needed something for the B-side, back when there were 45’s pressed on vinyl. With ten minutes left in the session, they did only two takes. That B-side throwaway went on to be a number one hit in twelve countries including the United States and Britain. Forty-five years later, and it still shows up in memes and even on t-shirts. Despite the doubters, it is clear that “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting.” Continue reading “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: February 17, 2019”

Luke 5:1-11
Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13

Somewhere between the 24/7 Law and Order Channel and the Extreme Basement Swimming Pool Rehab Channel, you’ll find a set of cable channels showing television series from decades ago, things like The Loveboat, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Daniel Boone. I admit to having indulged in that trough of nostalgia, though not without trepidation. The depictions can be jarring, shocking really given our increased sensitivity to misogyny and sexual harassment, to homophobia, to systemic racism and demeaning depictions of minority populations. In fact, no network, however obscure and located in the highest numbered cable channels, would show a program with a performer in black-face, yet they regularly feature Euro-American actors portraying Asians, yellow-face if you will, and still very much a problem today. Red-face, white actors portraying Native Americans, was once common, and those programs are still judged as acceptable for re-broadcast. Rick Vallin, a European immigrant and character actor, appeared in more than 150 films and shows, many Westerns, and regularly in red-face, from 1942’s “Perils of the Royal Mounted” to two separate appearances on the Lone Ranger, first as the not-particularly menacingly-named Blue Feather, then a couple years later with the much more frightening moniker Crazy Wolf.

For many of us, our understanding of Native American culture was shaped by these Hollywood depictions, by the red-face actors on Daniel Boone, by the nightmare of the violent savage. If we are lucky, these misrepresentations were challenged by historic accounts of the Native American genocide at the hands of European settlers, by books like “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” by the late Dee Brown, though these too prove problematic. Even if we rejected the worst stereotypes, we were subjected to romanticized stereotypes of Native Americans in children’s literature, to the crying chief in the anti-litter campaign of decades gone by, to the “we use every part of the bison” trope. We have this idea that the First Peoples were these little clusters of hunters and gatherers without advanced civilization, one moment scalping everyone in sight, the next communing with nature and dancing in fields with a grizzly.

The idea that the continent was mostly empty before European explorers arrived was the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery, since renounced by our United Church of Christ, which in turn justified the land grab and destruction that would follow. If hardly anyone, at least anyone civilized, is on the land, why not just take it? If we can make the other two-dimensional, less-than-human, than we need not do them justice.

But even if we strip away the pernicious myths about Native Americans, we are still completely wrong-headed when it comes to their presence in this hemisphere. The Americas were not sparsely populated. Scientists now believe that there were as many as sixty million indigenous people living here before 1492. Columbus did not discover anything, he simply opened the door for new diseases and slaughter. By the time English settlers arrived in Jamestown, more than a century after Columbus, ninety percent of the indigenous population in the Americas had died, civilizations had collapsed, and massive amounts of cultivated agricultural land had been lost to fast-growing forests, so much so, that Alexander Koch and colleagues recently published a scientific paper that blames the depopulation of the Americas and subsequent mass re-forestation for the Little Ice Age that occurred starting in the 16th century, for that new growth forest captured enough carbon dioxide to cause climate change. Continue reading “Unreal: February 10, 2019”

New Testament Luke 4:22-30
Hebrew Psalm Psalm 71
Hebrew Scripture Jeremiah 1:4-10

We are defined by stories, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape our culture, the stories of our faith, for we emphasize the story of salvation over minutia and legal codes. Some stories double back on themselves, stories reflecting other stories, like Jesus and the Last Supper with his disciples, an echo of Passover and the paschal lamb, which becomes our common feast of broken bread and the shared cup, a story we will re-tell again this morning. The traditional Nativity story, a mash-up of two overlapping stories, becomes the locus of countless other stories, Saint Nicholas become The Santa Clause, Rudolph with his nose-so-bright, George Bailey and It’s a Wonderful Life, and most of all, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and Ghosts, that timeless tale.

For a story that focuses on Christmas, that has the holy feast itself in the title, A Christmas Carol is remarkably free of explicit religion. There is no midnight service, no babe in a manger. Charles Dickens’ Christmas feels secular and civic, long before we had watered down Christianity to social convention. The young Scrooge is not seen in worship, but instead at Fezziwig’s party. In fact, you could be excused if, like some scholars, you came to the conclusion that Dickens was irreligious or anti-religious. It is true that you can find a powerful critique of certain forms of Christianity in his work’s, from Arthur Clennam’s four wretched Sundays in Little Dorrit to three obnoxiously Christian characters of Bleak House, held in contrast to the quietly Christian conduct of Esther Summerson. But you would be wrong in your assessment, wrong in stripping Dickens of his Christian commitment. Dickens is critical of two things: the stern and gloomy religiosity of those who would be called dissenters and non-conformists in his day, the hellfire and damnation type; and the showy religiosity of those who would save the souls of the poor with no interest in saving their bodies, his age’s equivalent of the supposedly righteous that walk by the beaten man in the ditch. This critique of showy but empty religion goes right back to Jesus, and Dickens only follows where Christ has already been in his story of the Good Samaritan. Continue reading “Who will buy? February 3, 2019”

Texts: Acts of the Apostles 8:14-17, Psalm 29, Luke 3:15-22

There is a reason Whole Foods has the nickname “whole paycheck.” Healthy eating can be expensive. We still live in an age when processed food is often cheaper, when urban and minority communities still find themselves in food deserts where there are fast food chains and bodegas but no full-service grocery stores with fresh produce, and when the locavore movement hasn’t quite figured out how I can get bananas and bell peppers in Blue Hill in January. Alas, I am unwilling to live on a winter ration of potatoes, cabbage, and venison jerky.

The most mindful among us walk a daily tightrope between aspirational eating and the practical, might consider the carbon footprint of those bell peppers from another continent, the tremendous water cost for that glass of almond milk, and how much is left in our bank account after a trip to the health food store. Eating is complicated enough, and then we face the heated debates over evolution and paleo-this and raw-that, one fad diet after another.

The science and often pseudoscience around evolution and diet is interesting. The transition from Australopithecus to Hominid, and we humans are hominids, coincides with two developments in diet, an increased consumption of meat, and the development of cooking. Continue reading “Baked: January 13, 2019”

Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6, Psalm 72, Matthew 2:1-12

Our Jewish sisters and brothers dance with the Torah scroll once a year, in a celebration called Simchat Torah. It marks the end of a yearly cycle, a schedule of readings that takes them through that foundational text. The formal Torah is, of course, only the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, Genesis to Deuteronomy, so much easier to get through in a year than the entire Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures we re-order and erroneously call the Old Testament. Christians have a more complicated task, for not only must we read the Hebrew Scriptures because Jesus makes little sense outside of the Jewish trajectory that runs from Moses to Maccabees, but we must also read about the life and ministry of Jesus himself, about the growth of the early church, and about the early and evolving understanding of what Jesus meant, an understanding that would continue to evolve long after the formal canon was closed, that continues to evolve to this day as we humans learn more, experience more.

Eventually, many Christians settled on a three-year cycle of readings, a combination of the Hebrew Scripture, always including a psalm, of non-gospel New Testament texts like Paul’s letters, and a gospel, combined in a three-year rotation. The version used by twenty-three denominations and Christian movements in North America is called the Revised Common Lectionary. The United Church of Christ is part of the organizing body, the Consultation on Common Texts, that developed and manages this schedule. We do not, however, dance with our Bibles at the end of our three year cycle, though maybe we should.

The lectionary schedule allows us to feel part of a broader movement of Christianity, and brings a certain discipline to preaching, forcing preachers to deal with texts we might otherwise avoid like a biblical plague. But the lectionary has flaws as well. Because it is based on ancient church customs around feasts and holy days, it can jump around in ways that feel random, even without the wild card of a moving Easter. Last week we had twelve year-old Jesus, this week he is a toddler. Because few of us read all of the assigned texts for any given day, and few attend worship every Sunday anymore, things can feel even more erratic. And then there is John, the oddball gospel, that doesn’t even get a year of its own, instead interrupting when it contains a story we love that is absent in the other three gospels, and there are many of those.

Worst of all, at least to me, is the fact that the lectionary often lifts texts out of their broader context, edits readings removing parts that are inconvenient. If we had been true to the lectionary, we would have never mentioned the sons of Eli in last week’s reading about the boy Samuel, the idea that God was determined to kill them, for we don’t like that ancient understanding of God, a God who punishes. Like fundamentalists, we have our own form of pick-and-choose Christianity. Continue reading “The Rest of the Story: January 6, 2019”

While there is disagreement on the numbering of the Ten Commandments, there is no argument about the first commandment, “I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other God’s before me.” The Hebrew scriptures tell the story of a people who abandon child sacrifice, the worship of idols, of objects, of the “high places” and Asherah poles. Christianity took this further still, declaring that God’s presence was not located in Jerusalem’s Temple, a building destroyed during the lifetime of that first Jesus community, but that God’s presence was to be found where followers broke bread together, and in the face of neighbors, of the poor and of the oppressed.

There is some irony, then, to the ready embrace of idols by a certain segment of Christians, the American flag, statues of men who committed treason as they defended the sin of slavery. But the greatest irony of all is that some worship the very book that tells them not to worship anything but God. They worship the Bible, believing that this human-made jumble of ancient texts is inerrant, despite the countless contradictions, the glaring errors. Some go further still, making the Jacobin-era editors of the Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James, conduits for divine translation. Their God is stuck four centuries in the past, for while the language is sometimes poetic, it is often wildly inaccurate.

I could speak for days about this heresy, and particularly about the hypocrisy of selective literalism, in which some texts, especially those that make women subservient to men and condemn members of the LGBTQ community, are to be taken literally, while we are not meant to take other texts, about shrimp and mixed fibers and tithing and feeding hungry people, literally.

But I don’t need to go there this morning, for the greatest lie the Bible ever told is right there in today’s text. “Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.” Continue reading “Smells Like Teen Spirit: A Homily for December 30, 2018”

[This sermon contains spoilers for the video game Red Dead Redemption 2]

One of the ways I know that I am finally getting old is that I have never played two of the most popular video games. Minecraft has been around since 2011 and has sold 122 million copies, inspired t-shirts and toys and even books.

Fortnite is just over a year old, has over 125 million players, and earns hundreds of millions of dollars every month. It has proven so addictive that some describe it in terms usually reserved for heroin, and the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks have banned it during road trips, as the young players would rather sit in their hotel rooms playing the game than bonding with teammates. Some parents have lost all control and all hope, sending their Fortnite-addicted kids into video game rehab as originally reported by Bloomberg and picked up by dozens of other news outlets.

Fortnite is, to me at least, the more problematic of these two games, and not just because it has proven so addictive. While Minecraft has some combat, it is primarily a game of creativity and crafting suitable for young players. You build and you problem-solve. Fortnite, and particularly its most popular version, while still attracting many children, is primarily a game of violence, though to be fair, not as graphic as some. There is a far less popular creative module to the game, and it is possible to form teams in Fortnite, but neither of these creative and cooperative elements is the focus of the game.

A typical round is a “battle royale,” a fight-to-the-death that starts with 100 players and ends with a single survivor, sort of a mega-Thunderdome for those familiar with the film Mad Max 2. The term “battle royale,” now widely used for this format, originated with a controversial and dystopian Japanese film centered on a death match between junior high students. The Hunger Games in American Suzanne Collins’ series of novels for young adults is a “battle royale,” though the novels themselves do not embrace this every-person-for-themselves mentality. Altruism, sacrifice, and love are the virtues celebrated, not survival and individualism.

I grew up at that moment when arcades and pizza parlors were switching from pinball machines to video games, like Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Joust. Too late for the Baby Boom and too early for Gen X, I was a young adult as we started playing games on early personal computers. I remember how cool it was when a friend in the barracks got a Commodore 64. Like most folks, I have a certain nostalgia for that period in my life, the reason I love the award-winning novel “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, an online techno-future in a virtual world filled with nostalgia for ’80’s pop culture, though the movie was sort of meh, to use a term from the internet.

Today’s young parents all grew up with video games. Many played them. Many still do. Continue reading “Notorious RPG: December 16, 2018”