Constructive Faith

Amos 5:18-24

Previously on “The Park Church,” we established that it is weird that a progressive pastor committed to climate justice is a fan of a sport that is a catastrophe of carbon-emissions and is closely associated with reactionary politics.

Not only do I watch Nascar, which closed out the ten-month long season last week, but my favorite driver is sponsored by a petro-trafficking syndicate and races for a team owner who has contributed heavily to the scariest types of politicians. 

Even more odd is the fact that I’m not actually a car guy. I mean, I mostly restored a ’69 Mustang when I was younger, and worked as an insurance inspector at a Ford assembly plant, but hot rods were my Dad’s thing, not mine. 

The through line from me to Nascar works like this: When I was a kid my family watched football. I washed out of the sport as a skeletal-thin ten year-old, and my days as an athlete were done, except for a little club cricket one summer in England. But Mom and Dad loved football, and there was no greater cause than the Washington football team now called the Commanders, the grotesque racism of the previous team name now thankfully behind us.

When Joe Gibbs retired as that team’s successful head coach, he moved to Nascar as a team owner. And my parents, loyal folks that they were, followed along, watching cars drive in a circle for hours and cheering for his drivers. I started watching Nascar while spending time with them, and since Dad cheered for one Gibbs driver, and Mom another, I took on the third. Now Dad is gone, and two of those drivers, including my favorite, race for other teams.

Something you notice about Nascar pretty much immediately is the overt display of hyper-Christianity. Despite the Nascar corporation’s talk of expanding the fanbase, every race begins with an invocation that is all Jesus, leaving no room for Jews, Muslims, the non-religious, and often excluding any Christianity that is not washed-in-the-blood Evangelical. 

Heads will be bowed and hats will be off for the invocation and national anthem, and many drivers, should they be fortunate enough to win, will pop out of the car praising their Lord and Savior as if Jesus took the wheel for that last lap. And if it is Joe Gibbs Racing, the pit crew is going to huddle in prayer before heading to Victory Lane.

But that same crowd that is praying and saluting is as likely to be chanting profanities against our current president, and those drivers are going out there aggressively pursuing that big paycheck if they win, bumping and wrecking competitors, and when the competition gets ugly, as it often does, they are busy slugging each other in pit road, or storing up grievance, ready to wreck the offending party in the next race. Let’s just say there are a whole lot of bleeps when broadcasters play what is being said on the car radio.

There is no driver in Nascar today who is more smug and entitled and dangerous behind the wheel than Ty Gibbs, the baby-faced grandson of Joe.

The Christianity of Nascar, as dangerous as it is to an open society, is performative. Not that Christianity doesn’t have room for sinners. In fact, Christianity is exactly where sinners should be! But the High Church of Nascar is about white Christian ethno-nationalism and late-stage corporate kleptocracy, not about anything to do with Jesus or the Jewish tradition that was his context.

Continue reading “Jesus Take the Wheel: 12 November 2023”

Deuteronomy 34:1-12

I would like to begin this morning with some clever and humorous on ramp that leads you into the sermon, as we celebrate both All Saints Day and the Day of the Dead tradition from Mexican and Mexican-American culture, what should be a festive occasion. Maybe I’d even use the Disney film “Coco,” for despite the companies mis-steps over the last century, it has become a champion of diversity, equality, and inclusion. 

Unfortunately, I cannot move to festivity without first acknowledging the thousands dying in the Middle East, as extremists provoke, terrorize, and slaughter. 

The fact, that I am wearing my orange “gun safety” stole instead of the traditional white stole for All Saints is a reminder that we are reeling from yet another mass casualty slaughter in America, and given that we are nearing 600 of these preventable tragedies this year, it takes a lot to make the national news. I served in Maine, and still have friends in the state. 

The exact same people who are vomiting up the excuse that this is a mental health problem refuse to support red flag laws, and refuse to fund treatment for mental illness and addiction. It is beyond sinful, their love of chaos, though it certainly profits their billionaire bully buddies. 

Like some twisted version of “The Sixth Sense,” they pull the covers up under their chin and say “I see brown people.”

So yeah, a little whirlwind of despair and anger up here in the pulpit this morning, and a reminder of something I said a couple of weeks ago. People suck. But I ended in praise, for that is how we roll, like the psalms that often turn from lament to praise.

As the great gay poet concluded in “O Me! O Life!,” the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse. Let us pray to that Divine Mystery we name as God that our particular “sound and fury” might signify something rather than nothing, unlike MacBeth’s, and that when we leave, like those celebrated on our “ofrenda,” and in our listing of our faith community’s deceased, the balance will fall on the side of love.

Of course, “I see brown people” is a twist on the title I chose for this sermon, that famous line from “The Sixth Sense,” a film that fooled most of us before hurtling toward an unexpected climax. And I do see dead people, just not in the way of screenwriters, where one show after another gives us the supernatural, with danger and drama and comedy, Beetlejuice and Ghost Whisperers and stuff too scary even for me. And I watch the evening news.

I see dead people in our stained glass, which is perfectly lovely and a bit weird at the same time, since Congregationalists traditionally abhorred that sort of thing. Early in the Zurich Reformation, Protestants stripped the churches of art, theologically justified but culturally tragic, for countless precious treasures went to the fire, reminiscent of Savanarola’s spastic “bonfire of the vanities” just a few years earlier in Firenze. 

Still, here we are, with these beautiful gifts honoring important people, those depicted and those memorialized. There is a desire, at least among some of us, that we might add to our artistic expression, incorporating images that represent the diversity of our community and historical accuracy, a whole lot more of those “brown people” when it comes to the Ancient Near East and our own American story. What would it say to the wider community to see John W. Jones immortalized in a house of worship?

Continue reading “I See Dead People: 29 October 2023”

Isaiah 45:1-7

As many of you know, there is a reason christening shares a root with Christ, and it is not because the baby is accepted into the Body of Christ, though that is true. Christ means the anointed one in Koine Greek. The baby is anointed with water, though holy oils may also be applied, while the anointing of Jesus and other important leaders in Ancient Near Eastern traditions was always with oil. 

Think about the anointing by Samuel of the youngest son, David, called in from watching the flocks, or the 23^rd Psalm, traditionally attributed to David, which includes the line “you anoint my head with oil.”

If you watched the coronation of the United Kingdom’s new old monarch, King Charles the Third, you may remember that he was anointed with oil that had been consecrated in Jerusalem, though the anointing itself was done behind a screen, out of public view.

Jesus Christ, then, is properly Jesus, or more accurately Yeshua, the Anointed One. And for the record, his middle initial is not H.

If the Israelite renewal movement surrounding Jesus understood him as the anointed one, the messiah, or deliverer, in the tradition of their faith, he was certainly not the first. Indeed, today’s second scripture reading begins “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus.” 

Translation into modern languages obscures and reflects theological bias, but if you look at the Hebrew, the word is “mashiah,” and in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures used by the Christian testament authors, you cannot help but notice that it reads “his Christ,” “tou Christos” when it describes Cyrus.

Cyrus is the messiah or Christ in a very particular historic context, so let’s do a quick run down. 

Continue reading “22 October 2023: The Persian Messiah”

15 October 2023
Exodus 32:1-14

At times, I have mentioned Martin Luther from this pulpit, one of the key figures in the development of Protestant Christianity, though with some reservation, for Luther was a raging antisemite and a political reactionary. He was willing to challenge the power of popes, but not the power of princes. 

When the poor revolted against feudalism in the 1520’s, partially inspired by his rebellion against Rome, he wrote “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” which included this instruction: “let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.” 

And smite, slay, and stab they did, with peasant deaths estimated somewhere between a hundred and three hundred thousand…

Luther’s reform was the first to have real staying power, a fact we will celebrate at the end of this month, but his idea of the two kingdoms, which separated faith from secular governance, laid the theological foundation for the Holocaust.

I have been more supportive of Luther’s contemporary, Huldrych Zwingli, the Protestant Reformer in Zurich, directly connected to our own theological trajectory as Reform and Congregational, but also not without fault. He supported Protestant Reform, and was small “d” democratic in that he operated in the Swiss system of councils and cantons, but he was an advocate of theocracy, and he might have lived a little longer if he had been a bit more pragmatic. As I have shared, he died on the battlefield. Then there was that whole murdering Anabaptists thing.

I have spent considerably less time on Jean Calvin, though he is truly the third voice so critical to our theological heritage here at the Park Church, for while Zwingli started the Swiss form of Protestantism, it was Calvin who codified it. Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and members of the German Reform movement were all expressions of what is fundamentally Calvinist Christianity.

Calvin operated in Geneva, a French-speaking Swiss canton. He was eight-years old when Luther nailed his famous Ninety-five point challenge to the door in Wittenberg, and was just barely a teen when Zwingli challenged the Lenten fast.

Like Luther and Zwingli, Calvin operated in the framework of Christian Humanism, which wasn’t entirely bad. In fact, some might accuse us of being Christian Humanists, while others believe that we aren’t even Christian. 

But Christian Humanism in the Age of the Protestant Reformation believed you could think your way to an understanding of God, with help from the biblical canon studied in the original languages. This was the start of modernity, of the scientific method. Reason gave us a powerful set of tools, but also made us a little cocky, both in assuming humans were rational, and in assuming God could be clearly understood or defined. That all came unwound in the early Twentieth Century, with the quantum and post-modernity, which still freaks people out.

Calvin, for my money, was absolutely the worst of the Reformation Christian Humanists, for it is at his feet that we must lay the TULIP, which in this case is not the flower, but is the acronym for five key points in Calvinist theology. They are: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. These all boil down to some form of what we call predestination, in all of its poisonous iterations.

Continue reading “Reluctantly Calvinist”

A local Facebook administrator intent on trolling me, called me out to make a public statement on the terror attack in Israel. Here is my response:

I was in lower Manhattan, fortunately north of the blast zone, on 9/11, so I have some idea what the people of Israel are experiencing. Hamas, like ISIS, is a terrorist organization, in this case funded by a state sponsor of terrorism, Iran. Right now, the attention should be focused on the people of Israel, and those handling the humanitarian, diplomatic, and military response, not political posturing thousands of miles away in the Southern Tier. Though I spent Sunday afternoon with Jews, Muslims, and Christian on our annual Abrahamic Path Walk.

Personally, I believe Hamas must be destroyed, and that Iran and the network of allies supporting it, including Russia, must be isolated. I also believe that a just peace will involve a sovereign territory for the Palestinians, as well as the preservation of the State of Israel.

One of the Christian martyrs who inspires me, the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, took part in an attempt on Hitler’s life, and was executed. And like so many others who have visited Auschwitz, I was deeply impacted by the visual witness to the Holocaust… especially the mountain of children’s shoes. So as a pastor and teacher relatively well-informed in both history, world religion, and current affairs, I condemn all forms of terrorism, sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Frequently these days, the victims of those crimes are actually Muslims, in Myanmar, India, and China, among other places.

But I speak only for myself. The Park Church is Congregational, which means the Church Council or Congregational Meeting makes formal decisions for the church, just as the Coordinating Committee of the Southern Tier Interfaith Coalition, which I serve as chair, makes decisions together.

Philippians 3:4b-14

Child actors don’t always make it very far into adulthood. For every Zendaya, there is a River Phoenix. 

It seems to be especially bad for the boys, with overdoses and suicide taking the lives of so many. It is refreshing, then, to see Frankie Muniz driving around the track in Nascar’s D-league, and to see a heavily-bearded Haley Joel Osment still making a living acting. 

Both appeared in a number of television series and films as boys, though it was Osment who was the most successful on the big screen, with his breakout role in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense,” for which he received an Oscar nomination, and his turn as an android in Spielberg’s “A.I.” His co-stars over the years are a “who’s who” of the top actors at the turn of the century, Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Bruce Willis, and of course, Chuck Norris.

Still, there is a whole other level when you are part of a leading trio that includes Michael Caine and Robert Duvall. Such was the case in 2003, with “Second Hand Lions,” about an awkward teen sent to live with eccentric and possibly rich uncles. I won’t offer any spoilers, but there is an actual lion involved, and the uncles do go to the “seed and feed” for bags of Lion Chow.

Now, I can’t find any reference to a real product called Lion Chow, but there are certainly stranger things in this world. Still, we know the preferred food for lions is Christians. Just spend ten minutes in the prevailing narrative about early Christianity, and there you are.

Sadly, Christians in America today are constantly persecuted. Can you imagine the horror of having someone say “Happy Holidays” right in your face? Or of having to use preferred pronouns?

So let’s spend a few minutes thinking about persecution and martyrs.

The first Christian martyr, someone killed for their faith in Jesus, was Stephen, as described in the Acts of the Apostles. But this was a mob egged on by Jewish factionalism, not an execution performed by the state. 

The Roman Empire took in a vast number of cultures and religions. Everyone was expected to participate in the imperial cult, offering sacrifices to deified emperors. This was critical, because failure could result in divine wrath, crop failure and earthquakes. In fact, if there was an inexplicable disaster, and most disasters were inexplicable, there was always a search for the responsible party.

In addition to the imperial cult, there were a large number of other religions. The Romans tolerated these, as long as they were ancient. Most people practiced religious syncretism. They might sacrifice to a deified Augustus, then participate in the mysteries of Mithras, a major religion that had spread from the eastern end of the empire. Jews were an exception. They had a long history of refusing syncretism, of serving a God who demanded exclusivity. Their literature was filled with stories highlighting this fidelity, the faithful thrown into a furnace in Babylon. The authorities mostly tolerated this obstinancy. 

Christians were originally just one more problematic group in the maelstrom of Jewish sectarianism. But after the First Jewish War in 70 C.E., it became clear that Christianity was a whole new and separate thing. Roman tolerance waned, and Christians often became scapegoats for ignorant mobs and prefects who were losing control of their jurisdiction.

One of the earliest documented persecution came before the Jewish War. Like despots in every age and place, Nero had plans to construct a massive complex in Rome, including a 30′ statue of himself. Inconveniently, people lived and did business where he wanted to build. On the night of July 18^th in the year 64 C.E., a fire broke out in Rome. When we think of ancient Rome, we think of buildings like the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the remains of the Forum, but that is because those stone structures mostly survived. In reality, most of Rome was wood, and high winds drove the fire, which burned for seven days, then flared back up for three more. Ten of ancient Rome’s fourteen districts were damaged, and three were destroyed. People immediately began to suspect Nero, meaning he needed a scapegoat, and quick. He found that scapegoat in Rome’s Christians.

Persecution of Christians, sporadic and episodic, grew during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, better known for his “Meditations.” This was when Justin the Philosopher, a convert to Christianity, became Justin Martyr. The first widespread and systematic persecution did not begin until the reign of Decius in 250. The emperor had ordered everyone to offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Jews were exempted, as an ancient religio licita, or permitted religion, but Christians were not. Those who fulfilled the requirement received a certificate, called a libellus. We know that some Christians performed the sacrifice, some refused and were martyred, and some went into hiding. Persecution of Christians would continue for the next six decades, until Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christianity religio licitastatus.

A major schism would eventually develop as a result of this brief period of persecution. The Donatists argued that sacraments performed by those who had recanted under pressure did not count. In other words, the validity of sacramental grace depended on the purity of the priest. St. Augustine would be deeply involved in that theological conflict, and the Donatists eventually died out. Today, we recognize that the church, including the clergy, is a rag-tag band of saints and sinners, with some of us being a little bit of both.

Today, ancient texts embracing and even celebrating martyrdom might seem perverse. These were not folks dying heroically to save others, rushing into a burning building or fighting against an invading army. 

Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, writes to the Christians in Rome, insisting that they not intervene on his behalf, saying “Let me be fodder for wild beasts – that is how I can get to God.” In other words, Ignatius wants to be lion chow.

This all hinged on a series of beliefs. Remember, the gods sent that drought to punish someone. You just needed to figure out who that person was and punish them yourselves. This is the most primitive form of religion, purely transactional, with divine reward and punishment in this life, not unlike today’s Prosperity Gospel heresy. But folks started to notice it didn’t always work this way, that sometimes the good suffered and the wicked thrived. They decided that in order for the system to work, there must be some existence after death where ultimate reward and ultimate punishment would occur. This is what the martyrs believed. This is what Jesus believed. Ironically, the competing Jewish sect that shared this belief was the Pharisees.

Unfortunately, the promise of eternal reward and the threat of eternal punishment has all too often been misused by the powerful. The poor were to be content in their poverty, as they would be rich in heaven. We see this in Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, in Luke’s story of poor Lazarus at the rich man’s gate, in the sale of indulgences by the medieval church, and in the lonely and elderly sending off for miracle water from some television charlatan.

But I’m agnostic about life after death, and I see neither spiritual nor evolutionary value in suffering purely for the sake of suffering. There are things I’d be willing to die for, but they better produce some real good, tangible effects, in this world, not some maybe next. I don’t need to find the holy and good in heaven when creation is already filled with holiness and goodness.

And if I believe that there is more than enough holiness and goodness in creation, then it is my job to share that holiness and goodness as widely as possible. Instead of Matthew’s Beatitude crowd hungering and thirsting for righteousness, I’ll focus on Luke’s folks who are just plain hungry.

And lest we think these are all obscure considerations from an ancient age, consider this: the moral complexity we experience around service members killed and wounded in disastrous and often misguided wars is an analog to this question. What did they die for? Justin Martyr. Ignatius of Antioch. Pat Tillman.

What will we live for?

Amen.

Philippians 2:1-13

My hometown was and still is a B- market when it comes to professional sports. 

When I was a kid, there was semi-pro football – the Norfolk Neptunes, AHL hockey – the Norfolk Admirals, Triple A Baseball, then called the Tidewater Tides, and even an ABA basketball team, before that league merged with the NBA. The Virginia Squires featured a kid from New York named Julius Erving who would go on to have a bit of success in the sport. 

But that short-lived ABA franchise was the closest we came to the majors. There were pro teams up in D.C. and Baltimore, several hours north, or all the way down to Atlanta to the south. Panthers, Hurricanes, and Hornets did not yet exist, at least not as sports franchises. So I really don’t have a “hometown” team, and even if I did, half of my life has passed since I lived in that area.

Today, my sports tastes are eclectic if not eccentric. I’m okay cheering on the Bills, though I like Toronto for hockey, and Milwaukee for basketball. The team I have rooted for the longest, though, is the New York Yankees. Yeah, about that…

What a miserable year from those multi-millionaires working for multi-billionaires! And to be honest, I just didn’t have the Baltimore Orioles winning the division on my bingo card.

I like the Orioles. I mean, they play in the same division as my preferred team, but the owner is not as repugnant as Daniel Snyder or James Dolan, the ballpark at Camden Yards is great, and most of us are old enough to remember Cal Ripken Jr.’s amazing streak of games played, 2,632 in a row. 

He was payed very well to do a job, and he did that job very well, making the All-Star team 19 times. Ripkin had a great role model with the Orioles, the legendary Brooks Robinson, who died this week at the age of 86. Playing in the age before free agency, Robinson only made $35k one year when he was the league MVP. He was an 18 time All-Star, and won the Golden Glove a remarkable 16 times in a row. He was inducted into Cooperstown in 1983, receiving 91% of the votes in his first year of eligibility.

And here’s the thing: Brooks Robinson was good. Not good at baseball, though he was remarkable at baseball. He was a good human being. 

These days, sports broadcasters spend time, maybe too much time, on what players are wearing when they enter the stadium. Half of the country seems obsessed with Traylor, the supposed match-up of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, though we all know how that love story ends. College football players change teams almost as often as their schools change conferences. So we might be romanticizing a bit, toying with that addictive drug nostalgia, but there is something to be said for athletes like Brooks Robinson.

Continue reading “1 October 2023”

Jonah 3:10-4:11

Twelve years ago, the Disney corporation premiered a television series on ABC that attempted to bring classic fairytale characters into the modern world. There were obvious tie-ins to Disney intellectual properties, since many of those fairytales had been turned into classic animated films. Characters included Cinderella by the 17^th century Italian author Giambattista Basile, though with roots in ancient Greece, and Rumpelstiltskin, collected by the Brothers Grimm in the 19^th century. 

The television series lasted seven seasons, though I grew bored and didn’t make it much past the first. I’m sure it “jumped the shark,” to use the phrase taken from “Happy Days,” probably some point after adding Pinocchio, Elsa, and Cruella DeVille.

The show was named after that classic line that starts so many fairytales, “Once Upon A Time.”

The phrase “once upon a time” serves as a marker, telling the reader or listener or couch potato that we are in the world of story. It does not mean everything you hear will necessarily be false. It just means that the narrative is the point, not the facts. The story is meant to entertain, and maybe to teach a lesson, like a fable, for good stories often depict a struggle between good and evil, and lean into the good. Except for like anything by the late Cormac McCarthy, because in his world, people mostly suck, the end, cue the fire and ashes.

The ancient Hebrew equivalent of “once upon a time” is “vayehi,” something like “and it happened,” though we are used to the more fanciful King James, which renders it as “Now it came to pass.” There are quite a few texts in scripture that bear this literary marker, entire books like Esther and Ruth, and narrative sections of other books. 

The Book of the Prophet Jonah begins with “vayehi.” And it is a story about a prophet, though I suspect it is only listed that way because the Book of the Twelve, a traditional way of thinking about the minor prophets in Hebrew Scripture, would be the Book of the Eleven without him, and “eleven” just doesn’t have the same meaning as twelve in ancient Hebrew numerology.

We are in the world of story, and a story that lends itself to Sunday School and coloring pages. Never mind that the text says “great fish,” not whale, because again, fact is not the point.

But let’s start with some facts. The Book of Jonah was probably written after the Babylonian captivity, but uses a known prophet from an earlier period, the final century of the Northern Kingdom, as a character. We see something similar happen with Daniel, a historical figure from the time of the captivity who is written into an extraordinary fiction in the 2^ndcentury before the Common Era, another coloring book classic with the prophet in the lion’s den.

The ancients did not read pious fictions like the Book of Job or the Book of the Prophet Jonah and ask themselves “did this happen.” They understood that they were reading a story, and that the proper question was “What can we learn from the world of this story?”

This particular story, the story of Jonah, resonates across all three of the great monotheisms. Originating in the Jewish Bible, the Jewish reformer Jesus of Nazareth references Jonah, and Muhammad would include Jonah in the Qur’an. Our sisters and brothers in the Rabbinic Jewish traditions will read the story of Jonah tomorrow afternoon as part of their Yom Kippur observance.

In the story, Jonah is from Israel, which was the Northern Kingdom after the once united kingdom of David and Solomon fell apart. When God calls Jonah to deliver a prophetic word in Nineveh, he flees. 

His destination is Tarshish. Biblical references to this location are unclear, but it was across some portion of the Mediterranean, and many scholars today believe it to have been Sardinia, the island off the west coast of Italy. This gives us the dramatic scene of the boat in the storm, and the sailors eventually throwing Jonah overboard, only for him to be swallowed by the previously mentioned large fish.

Cue the millions of sermons that have been delivered about God’s call, God’s very specific call. But we are not Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life” sort of folks that see God as a puppet master and our call as being extremely particular. We’re more the God’s call to love, justice, and creativity sort of folks, though we do fudge a bit at times, especially when we are trying to explain call and authorized ministry.

Let us turn for a moment to Nineveh itself. It was a major Assyrian city on the bank of the Tigris River, though maybe not quite as big as described in scripture during the time in which the story is set, the 8^th century before the Common Era. 

Today, Nineveh is part of the greater city of Mosul in Iraq, a city that had a significant Jewish population until the 1950’s, and a significant Christian population until the misguided Iraq War destabilized the region, leading to violent sectarianism, and the eventual occupation of Mosul by Daesh, a terrorist group that used rape and execution to control people in areas they occupied as they pursued fundamentalist jihad. 

Even before the Iraqi Army retook Mosul after an extended siege that destroyed most of the city, Daesh had waged its own war on the region’s cultural heritage. One of the buildings they destroyed was the Mosque of the Prophet Yunis, which is to say Jonah, which had replaced an Assyrian Christian Church, with a history and archeological connection all the way back to the age of the prophet.

Nineveh/Mosul was in Assyria, the enemy that would eventually conquer and destroy the Northern Kingdom, not in that Northern Kingdom of Israel which was home to Jonah. The prophet Amos goes from the Southern Kingdom of Judah to the Northern Kingdom to deliver the word of the Lord, but both of those kingdoms are depicted as worshipping Yahweh. Assyria does not worship Yahweh. 

Jonah was sent to proclaim the divine destruction of Nineveh because of the city’s great wickedness. And a remarkable thing happens. The people of Nineveh listen to the prophet, which doesn’t always happen in scripture. See Jeremiah in the well, or Elijah hiding in a cave.

In this story, the king and all the people observe a fast of repentance. They set aside their evil ways. And the Lord relents and forgives them. That is where we come in with today’s reading.

Jonah is infuriated. The Hebrew literally reads that he is “burning up.” He was sent to declare divine punishment, an orgy of destruction not unlike that eventually visited upon the city by Daesh, and instead, there is contrition and reconciliation. Jonah heads out of the city, in a huff, the setting for this exchange with God, in which Jonah complains about divine mercy.

And I’d like to lift up two things from this story, violating the rule that you never try to make more than one point in a sermon. So we’ll just pretend I only made one point, and you pick the one you like.

First, Yahweh is concerned about the behavior of the people in Nineveh. This is interesting and unique.

In the prophetic books, God is often said to be using other nations to punish Israel or Judah, or to be punishing other nations because they did something to Israel or Judah, but it is always about Israel or Judah. 

The sinful behavior in Nineveh is not connected in any way with the Israelites, and while it is an Israelite prophet who brings the word of God, the salvation of the people of Nineveh has nothing to do with Israel.

The dominant narrative throughout the Hebrew language scriptures and in the Judaism that is constructed after the Babylonian Captivity, often known as the Second Temple period, is framed around the idea of a divinely chosen people that is racially pure. But the text is subversive of its own claims if you are paying attention. Christian supersessionist theology, so necessary as the foundation of antisemitism, then takes this one step further, claiming that through Jesus, God transfers the exclusive covenant with the Jewish people to Christians, who are not one singular people, but are “ethne,” the nations in the Koine Greek.

But here is God pre-Jesus who cares about Assyrians. What if God was always the God of all peoples? Which, now that you mention it, makes me sound like a universalist. Because a god, lower case g, who would select only one tribe, permanently and always, a people Christian jihadis believe will be the last to convert before Armageddon, that god does not love all humans equally, and is not worthy of my worship. That is the god that works for racists and nationalists, always in competition with the god who loves some other race or nation. 

But a God, upper case G, who cares about Jerusalem and Nineveh? Now that I can get behind.

And the other thing worth noticing, the second thing which you are now free to ignore, is how mad Jonah gets. I know exactly how he feels, and I bet you do too. There is a part of me that is not interested in reconciliation. I want destruction. I want that traitor in an orange jumpsuit, humiliated. I want them all behind bars, not to prevent their continued attacks, not just as a warning to others, as deterrence, but as punishment. Would I have been part of the crowd during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror as the guillotine claimed one prize after another? I want murderers to be murdered, at least part of me does, and not the best part.

Mercy and forgiveness are hard work, while judgment is easy. And scripture says crazy thing like “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and don’t look for the splinter in your neighbor’s eye when you have a two by four in your own. 

Our story is the story of a man who calmly challenges the one who is without sin to cast the first stone, is the story of a healer who says “Your sins are forgiven. Now, take up your mat and walk.”

That doesn’t mean I want Payton Gendron, the white nationalist terrorist who murdered ten in the Buffalo Tops to go free. It does mean that I need to be honest about my own blood lust, and lean into grace, for I want God to lean into Her grace, right here in our modern day Nineveh. 

Once upon a time, there was a God, a God of grace and glory, a God who called people, all people of every nation, to a life of love justice and creativity. Once upon a time… this time… right now. Amen.

Exodus 14:19-31

Back when they still taught things like history and literature in public schools, before “no child left behind” left most children behind and white supremacists gutted public education, preferring indoctrination, I learned a little bit about English history, the Magna Carta, the War of the Roses, and their Civil War in high school World History class, though world history really only meant white history back then.

But most of what I learned about English history I learned from Shakespeare, whoever that might have been, for I am among the many who believe the guy from Stratford-upon-Avon probably didn’t write the plays.

The history plays feature memorable figures, like the evil hunchback Richard the Third and the party-boy Prince Hal who becomes the courageous Henry the Fifth over the course of three plays. The former, Richard, has been portrayed on screen by Ian McKellen and Benedict Cumberbatch, while the latter, Henry, by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, three British knights of a different kind, and one in the making.

It turns out, while Shakespeare’s history plays are great theatre, they are less than great as history. In fact, they are thinly-veiled Tudor propaganda, for the playwright’s career started during the reign of the final Tudor monarch, Elizabeth the First. Richard was not as grotesque as portrayed, the Tudor kings not nearly as righteous and wise. 

But remarkably, Shakespeare’s “Henry the Fifth” gets it right about the Battle of Agincourt.

Most of us only know of the battle, if we know of it at all, from the Shakespeare play. Americans don’t spend a lot of time on the Hundred Years War, though this particular battle is well known to military historians. 

The English had invaded France to press Henry’s claim to territory and titles in places like Brittany, Normandy, and Flanders. This was the age of chivalry, which is to say an age when a powerful few exploited the poor many, and threw lives into the buzzsaw of war for profit and for vanity. Not that that ever happens anymore…

Henry’s troops arrived in France in mid-August, already late in the season, and immediately besieged a town called Harfleur. The siege took longer than expected, and diseases like dysentery were running rampant among the English troops. 

Henry had hoped to provoke the French crown prince, the Dauphin Louis, into a decisive battle. When that didn’t happen, the English moved back toward the coast, fearing the onset of winter and the sizable French mobilization. The two armies finally clashed at Agincourt.

The English had around 8500 fighting men, the French three times as many. It should have been a slaughter, in which case we would not know Henry’s speech on the eve of battle, rallying his “band of brothers” as imagined by Shakespeare.

When the battle had ended, around 6000 French soldiers were dead, including three dukes, nine counts, and even an archbishop. The French had attacked the English baggage train, generally understood as bad form, and the English had executed French prisoners, also considered bad form, and possibly caused because the English had captured more prisoners than they could control.

Quite apart from the fact that the English were superior humans, and Henry the finest of them all, at least according to the propaganda, how did the English win?

Continue reading “17 September 2023: Agincourt”

Matthew 18:15-20

A little over a week ago, the highly-anticipated video game Starfield was released. Its success is critical to both the studio that produced it and to Microsoft’s XBox platform, which needs a new high profile game. There were articles and reviews in the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, though I suspect many of you skipped over them. I did not. You see, I am a gamer, spelled both g-a-m-e-r and g-a-y-m-e-r. 

The first personal computer I used was a friend’s Commodore 64 in the barracks while serving in the Army. The first personal computer in my home was an Apple IIc. I’ve been playing video games ever since. 

The early games were on big floppy discs, the kind that were actually floppy. School kids in those days were cyber-trekking on the Oregon Trail, though we weren’t using the term cyber yet, while I was exploring the universe in Hitchhiker’s Guide, based on the Douglas Adams novels, or engaging in more earthy explorations as Leisure Suit Larry. 

You don’t want to go there. Trust me.

Computer games back then were all text-based, nothing more than choose-your-own-adventure decision trees, though there might be some primitive graphics in blocky green and black. These days, my watch has more processing power than those early personal computers, and the top-tier games, on computer or console, are a whole new world, quite literally, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter or a galaxy of space colonies. The games are immersive and interactive entertainment with scripts and actors. 

Folks who are not gamers often imagine that all games are first-person shooters like Call of Duty, or simulation games like Sim City, but role-playing games like Starfield are plot-driven, more like movies where you change the outcome. Some games are narratives without any violence at all, and some are immersive environments with no discernible plot.

And while snowflakes in Florida are terrified that reading a book is going to make their kid gay, one of the first important characters their kids are meeting in Starfield is a gay widower. 

Today’s best role-playing games are morally complex, asking you to make tough decisions. Even in a game like Red Dead Redemption, where your character is part of a gang of outlaws, you have opportunities to do the right thing, to show compassion, and to reap the karma of your decisions.

Sometimes in role-playing games, as in real life, you are faced with a version of the Trolley Problem, a classic exercise in ethics. It comes in a number of variations, but the most common elements are this: You see a trolley coming down the track. If it continues on the current track, it will kill five people who are stuck on that track. Maybe they are tied up by some Dastardly Dan, or are stuck in a vehicle that has broken down, or are simply construction workers jackhammering away with ear plugs in and backs turned to the oncoming trolley.

But you happen to be standing next to the switch that can send the trolley to a side track, where only one person is on the track.

If you do nothing, five people die. If you take action, you will have made the decision that killed one.

There are no other choices in the exercise. This is not the Kobayashi Maru, and you are not Cadet James T. Kirk.

Continue reading “10 September 2023: Trolley Problem”