(Ten) Some (Commandments) Suggestions: July 29, 2018

For a few years on my spiritual journey, in the early 1980’s, I fancied myself a Roman Catholic. Like many others coming out of the sometimes sterile Mainline Protestant traditions, I fell in love with the beauty, the art, and the music of the mass, of the great cathedrals, the appeal to the senses, smell and sound and color. The powerful and Spirit-full winds of Vatican II were blowing. A priest named Matthew Fox was writing about original blessing instead of original sin, developing what would come to be known as Creation Spirituality. A few brave bishops seemed to be opening the door to tolerance, if not an actual welcome, to members of the LGBTQ community. Who knew? Women priests? Married clergy?

We all know how that story ends, with reactionaries and Opus Dei and a return to the way things were, with drawing lines and deciding that those who embraced change were the enemy, though of course the world had changed anyway, whether they liked it or not. The result was that each generation since has been less and less engaged with the church, has drifted further from the faith, the rites and sacraments emptied of meaning, just an excuse for a family party. Were it not for Latinx immigrants, the Roman church would be as empty as so many Protestant churches, and with that tap seemingly squeezed shut, they can expect national declines to match those of the Baptists.

I still love the beauty of the mass, even if I no longer have room for the hocus pocus, the misogyny, the authoritarian structure. I continue to appreciate one theological development from that period, what the Vatican called its consistent ethic for human life. As articulated by the Roman church, the faithful Christian, obedient to the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” would oppose war, capital punishment, and abortion, all for the same reason. I am completely pro-choice, but I’d prefer to live in a world where access to sex education and birth control rendered abortion a rarity, for I am unsure of the mystery of life. You can’t undo an execution when you later discover that you got it wrong, and we have so many proven cases of wrongful conviction that the entire prosecutorial system looks suspect. I concede that there are circumstance where war is a necessary evil in the world as we know it, yet I dream of a world unknown where justice and love render AR-15s and weaponized drones obsolete. Like St. Martin of Atlanta, I believe that “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Continue reading “(Ten) Some (Commandments) Suggestions: July 29, 2018”

Flaming Love: July 15, 2018

I’m not sure who came up with the idea of a dental practice exclusively for children, what big city or sophisticated suburb gave birth to that idea, but I did not grow up in the big city or a sophisticated suburb. Norfolk, Virginia was a military town, a working port shipping coal, and generally a working class sort of place, and I was from a working class family. Nonetheless, children’s dentistry was aspirational, a sign of respectability, when I was a child, and my mom was eager to get my sisters and I in to see Doctor Bernard Einhorn, who had a treasure chest with cheap toys for good little girls and boys. I wasn’t impressed. I had suffered a traumatic dental injury while I was in pre-school, and had no love for people who wanted to stick pointy metal things in my mouth.

Despite my misgivings about dentistry, I had braces as a teen, had my wisdom teeth removed while I was in the Army, have never had a cavity, and generally kept up with all things dental until the lean years, when I went back to school in New York City after 9/11 and couldn’t afford a dentist. Going to the dentist is a lot like going to church, hard to re-start once you’ve lost the habit, and I lost the habit. Continue reading “Flaming Love: July 15, 2018”

Destroying Westworld: July 8, 2018

I was not the oldest student in my Divinity School class. There were plenty of second career and late career folks. Sheila, who beat me for the preaching prize, was a grandmother from Brooklyn. Even so, I was well above the average age of my classmates, and frequently marveled at their youthful stamina. Or maybe they were just way smarter and could do the coursework in a fraction of the time it took me. It was all I could do to complete the reading and writing required while working two part-time jobs. They seemed to have time for all that, jobs, a social life, and even must-see TV. And so it was that they faithfully watched the ABC series, Lost, beginning its second season the year I arrived at Harvard. Continue reading “Destroying Westworld: July 8, 2018”

61727-054: July 1, 2018

Today’s first reading, from the 4th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, belongs in that very large category of biblical texts we don’t like and try to avoid. We don’t like the story of Ananias and Sapphira because it speaks to the issue of money and giving, both closely tied to our insecurity and fear and therefore to the most pedestrian of our sins. We also don’t like this story because a God who strikes people down like this isn’t really the God we want, despite the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time in the Hebrew scriptures. This God is the God connected to corrupt and greedy church leaders and a bullying fear. We want the forgiving parent God of Jesus. Even more, we want a God who demands nothing and provides everything, a God we can neglect most of our lives, but also a God that will ride in with a miraculous cure when the diagnosis is bad. We want zero consequence, go to heaven, go directly to heaven, do-not-pass-go sort of a God, which requires us to cut out pretty much all of scripture, repeating the same old anodyne texts again and again. Continue reading “61727-054: July 1, 2018”

Nineveh: June 24, 2018

You can be in more than one place at the same time. Well, okay, to be fair, you cannot be physically located in more than one place at the same time, at least not if you are intact, but you can be cognitively in more than one place, culturally in more than one place. We often find ourselves in the overlapping kingdoms of the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern ways of thinking, where science and story co-exist. We live in a universe that is at one and the same time Newtonian and Quantum which is completely impossible and completely true. Jesus tells us that we are here and that at the very same time we can opt-in to the Kingdom of God, and most of us could sure use a bit more of the latter. Not only do our spiritual, social, and physical worlds refuse to be constrained to a neat set of binaries, they don’t even seem to want to stay on a single axis. Multidimensional weirdness and entanglement are the rule, not the exception, in this glorious insane creation.

The Freudian subconscious and Jungian archetype both co-exist with the science of neurochemistry, all manufactured ways of understanding the ways we manufacture understanding. Dreams mean something or don’t mean something or predict the future or are simply cognitive static, and maybe all of these things are true. Some people dream the same thing again and again, and some dreams, like flying dreams, seem to be almost universal. Continue reading “Nineveh: June 24, 2018”

A Prayer for Koko

Divine Artist,
Amazing Creator,
we thank you for ordinary miracles,
not magic
but simply your work,
the unexpectedness of creation
that sometimes stuns us into wakefulness
for a moment.

In an age when humans of African descent are still called apes,
we remember an ape of African descent
who pushed against the boundaries of the human,
a gorilla that loved and learned,
Koko with her kittens,
Koko weeping, mourning,
signing “frown, cry, frown, sad.”

We remember Koko and wonder about that story we have told ourselves,
the apex predator so brutal to members of our own species,
with such disregard for other animals,
how we are so different than them,
how what we do to them does not matter,
how they do not count.

Frown, cry, frown, sad.

We wonder about souls,
about gorilla that had more love than some humans we know,
and are troubled.

Rub off, we pray, our layers of lies,
leaving us raw to the experience of life,
to life in every form,
to the interconnectedness of all things.

Trouble us.

Trouble our easy certainties.

Teach us to walk gently on the earth.

Teach us to walk gently with one another.

For you are the God of gorillas,
the God of Koko,
of children at the border,
of giant fish in the mighty deep,
and sometimes
just sometimes
of churches.

Trouble us. Teach us.

Amen.

Sneakers: June 17, 2018

Somewhere in the space between villains and martyrs are ordinary people like us, neither completely holy nor completely wicked. Teasing out where someone lies on that continuum can be tricky. Sometimes wonderful and horrible things are done by the exact same person. The #MeToo movement has been a sickening and exhausting reminder of this complexity, though we’ve always known that it is sometimes hard to stick people in the hero box or in the villain box and expect them to stay there. The Rev. Dr. King was a courageous faith leader and an adulterer, and one of the greatest American theologians of the last century, from the non-violent Mennonite tradition, was revealed as a serial predator, using his prestige and power in ways that amounted to coercion and sexual harassment. Can his theological thinking be separated from his misconduct?

Figuring out good guys and bad guys can be especially difficult when a whole nation is swept into madness, the banality of evil, questions of complicity.

Let us consider the story of two brothers from Bavaria, born at the turn of the last century. Their father worked in a shoe factory, and when the younger of the two, Adolph, returned from serving in the Great War, he started making athletic shoes in the family kitchen. Several years later, older brother Rudolph got involved, and they named their growing company Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory. Both men joined the Nazi party in the 1930’s, though Rudi is believed to have been the more ardent supporter. Adi Dassler would serve in the military again, a year at the start of the Second World War, before returning home to produce boots for the Wehrmacht, the German Army, at Dassler Brothers. Continue reading “Sneakers: June 17, 2018”

Dory Speaks Whale: June 10, 2018

It seems like a lifetime since it mattered whether comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her on-screen alter-ego were or were not lesbian, would or would not come out on her sitcom, “Ellen,” or in real life. Of course, it’s been almost twenty years since Oprah played a role in both the character and the performer coming out. Today, at least for the majority of Americans, whether a performer or character is LGBTQ is a non-issue. Who cares?

Personally, I never watched the show. Ellen’s subsequent talk show has been successful and a great platform for new talent, but I’ve always had a day job, so daytime television really doesn’t get on my radar much either. I do, however, absolutely love Ellen’s character in Disney-Pixar’s 2003 animated hit “Finding Nemo,” a role she reprised in the recent sequel, “Finding Dory.” Continue reading “Dory Speaks Whale: June 10, 2018”

Götterdämmerung: June 3, 2018

Last week, I mentioned the efforts of many, including me, to make it too expensive to be a racist, at least a public racist. This week, we saw that sort of thing, the cost of being a racist, play out over the course of several days, dominating the headlines for a whole 24 hours. Unfortunately, there were a lot of innocent victims, employees who lost their jobs, when ABC decided to stop purchasing a television program from the Carsey-Werner Company. While I agree with the Disney Corporation’s decision, I must admit that I am getting tired of it all. I want to see equal opportunity for people regardless of their ethnic origin or skin color, regardless of their gender or gender expression, regardless of who they love, but we’re getting nowhere with everyone yelling and tweeting at one another. Especially the tweeting. We, as followers of Jesus, are called to be agents of change, for he was an agent of change, but also to be agents of peace and love, swords into plowshares and all that. The Way of Jesus is about reconciliation and renewal, about refusing to throw the first stone, so much so that forgiving others is a pre-condition for being forgiven by God, and those who hold grudges heap the searing coals of sin upon themselves. That right there is about as close as I’m ever going to come to fire and brimstone. Continue reading “Götterdämmerung: June 3, 2018”

Encryption: May 27, 2018

There isn’t a whole lot I can do about the fact that Gaza is a giant open-air concentration camp in which legitimate baddies mingle with the innocent, or that Israel is engaged in a brazen act of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. The Sunni Muslim states that have thrown the Palestinians under the bus as a price that they are more than willing to pay in their sectarian war with Shiites don’t seem to care what I think, nor do American evangelicals, who are cheerfully chasing apocalypse, the end of the world, which doesn’t really work for me, because, you know, I sort of like this world most days. I can vote for people who want peace and justice in the Middle East, but this isn’t the only issue I care about, and others have a more direct impact on my life, your lives, the lives of my family and friends. Besides, given the amount of money Sheldon Adelson contributes to genocidal politicians, I’m not sure my vote matters that much. Continue reading “Encryption: May 27, 2018”