Constructive Faith

Two weeks ago, at the start of our current sermon series, we attempted to speak of God the Creator, or more properly to un-speak of God, for we had to admit that we are at one end of three thousand years of God-talk going back at least to the earliest psalms, and that we humans have always struggled, when we try to make God accessible, with the risk of turning God into a false God, a version of ourselves writ cosmic, but at least we can locate ourselves on a theological trajectory, there is an ample body of scripture and tradition we can use to frame the conversation. (more…)

The second sermon in a series on the basics of a belief that is marked as progressive, postmodern and Protestant.

In the year 451 of the common era, there was some serious fighting going on in the church. No mere whining about the the quality of coffee hour, these folks were arguing over the question “Was Jesus human or god?” and there wasn’t just cutting criticism, there was real cutting, with swords and all. The emperor was involved, as were the five traditional patriarchs of the church, with outright hostility existing between the sees of Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria. The Patriarch of Rome and the Emperor Marcian were determined to stop the fighting and restore unity in the church, so an ecumenical council, that is a meeting of all the bishops, was called and held in a  town named Chalcedon, in what is today Turkey. Under much duress, the 520 gathered bishops hammered out an agreement on how Jesus was both human and God. The council declared that Jesus was: (more…)

This sermon is the first in a series designed to introduce some basic concepts of a theology that is progressive, postmodern and Protestant.

So first you go to the store… Home Depot maybe, or Father Nature, or some other nursery, and you buy the various things you need for the garden that season, lime and mulch and seeds, and in some cases flats of plants that have already been started. This was my first year gardening on my own, but I’ve seen my parents do this year after year, so I’m pretty confident about what happens next. For, you see, as you start putting in the plants, you realize you have more than you need, and some of the little tags that identify the plants have probably come out, and when it is all said and done, you have a handful of plants left over that may or may not be a mystery. (more…)

a sermon delivered on September 4, 2011

I realize that in this day and age, when marriage has failed as a consumer product because it requires attention to the other, is not sufficiently self-centered to meet the standards of our culture, it may seem a bit rude to complain about one’s own childhood. After all, when my father died eighteen months ago, he and my mother had been faithfully married to one another for fifty years. And he had lived a rather long time, for at seventy-five he was well past the sell-by date of most retired firefighters. So truly, it may look like bad form to complain. But I will anyways.

You see, when I was a child, Dad worked 24 hours on and 24 hours off. Well, sort of. Actually he worked 24 hours at the fire station, then he got off in the morning and went to another job, as partner in a painting and home improvement company. And when he got home, often well after sundown, he was exhausted. So my childhood experience of my father was largely limited to holidays and vacations, to every other Sunday when he wasn’t working in someone’s home. My grandfather was also a firefighter and served the same municipality. (more…)

delivered on August 7, 2011 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

During the extended period that began with the Enlightenment, the guiding premise for modern thinkers was that human reason and the scientific method alone could create a better world. In many ways reason was deified, attained the status of a god, with many abandoning the notion of salvation in Christ for the notion of the self-salvation of humanity. This became the great project of modernity, to create a better world through reason and enlightened self-interest. Mathematics and the physical sciences began to kick the legs out of the edifice of the Enlightenment before the First World War, with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity adding uncertainty to what had seemed known. But it was the First World War itself that killed modernity, as well as countless millions of humans. For it was science and reason that produced the weapons of mass destruction and terrible killing machines used in the conflict. If the Enlightenment was not discredited after the First World War, it certainly would be after the Second, with the use of science in the Manhattan project and the birth of nuclear weapons. (more…)

delivered on July 31st, 2011

They say you can’t really get more than one point across in a sermon, and they are probably right, but I was on a tear this week and there are way too many in this one, so I figured I’d tell you what they were so you could choose which one to listen for… if you choose an early one, you might even squeeze in a nap. Here they are: everything before Moses is probably a folktale, Christians played a key role in the abolition of slavery, Anabaptists are kinda cool, we’ve got to do something about economic slavery, and children are starving right now, right here in the U.S. In fact, now that you know what I’m going to say, maybe I should just sit down and get us all to the beach that much sooner. Or maybe not… (more…)

Everyone knows Amy Winehouse died, that the NFL lockout has ended, that a Christian terrorist slaughtered innocent children in Norway, that right-wing extremists are holding the US economy hostage in their attack on the Christian value of caring for the poor and vulnerable. But few will know that a great Christian thinker died last week. Even though I had been expecting it, even I didn’t know until I read the Harvard Divinity Dean’s “Year in Review.”

Gordon Kaufman was a Christian in the Anabaptist tradition, and shared that tradition’s commitment to non-violence. But he was also a thoroughly post-modern theologian. His “Essay on Theological Method” established the program for constructive theology. His “In Face of Mystery” was the closest thing to a summa that can exist in the discipline. His last two works, “In the beginning… creativity” and “Jesus and Creativity” gave evidence that he was still pondering the mysteries of God in his last years.

I was blessed to complete a one-on-one class with Professor Kaufman, and then to have him as my M.Div. paper adviser. It was under his tutelage that I became committed to the constructive task of building the new church. I would not have that commitment to the practical and lived experience of the people of God if not for the rigorous thinking Professor Kaufman taught me.

I pray for his family and for all he touched, and encourage those who have not studied his works to take this opportunity to do so.

Blessings,
Gary

delivered on July 24th, 2011 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

I looked at Connie earlier this week and asked her, “Who the heck came up with this week’s theme?” For I chose what I thought was a Summer theme of celebration, one that matched our values as a progressive Christian covenant community, I chose Summer of Love, but some of these Sundays are, quite frankly, a challenge. Its easy enough to find Christian prophetic witness in the struggle against slavery, what stronger grounding can you have than the story of the Exodus people fleeing slavery? And its not so hard to find a Christian basis for equality and justice for women, for despite the centuries-long efforts by some traditions to deny it, women were clearly important equal partners in the ministry of those who followed Jesus, patriarchy be damned! It’s not even that hard to find scriptural support for worker’s rights, and therefore for the Christian commitment to labor justice, something Scott Walker and the Koch brothers might want to keep in mind. But it is pretty difficult to find a direct connection between the Christian faith and disabled rights. There are historical reasons for this. (more…)

delivered June 26, 2011
at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

If you are paying any attention at all, you cannot help but be outraged. Unchecked greed has wrecked our economy, crippled our democracy, turned the financial industry into a vast criminal enterprise, and destroyed countless lives here and abroad. Political extremists use the same tricks, the same language, that were used by the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930′s. This week I went into our local auto repair shop / gas station, just down the street, and found racist images of the president and vile right-wing hatred. And these are just a couple of examples of the evil we face, and it is not personified evil, it is not the work of a Satan, it is us and our neighbors and the things we support when we spend our money… it is enough to drive us to despair! (more…)

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: (more…)