Constructive Faith

Friday marked a year as pastor and teacher here at the Park Church. It has been a good year, but then again, I have a pretty low bar. I mean, no one has stood up during “joys and concerns” to deliver a full length rebuttal to the sermon, and no council member has threatened to punch me, both things that have actually happened.

Still, there is no course in Divinity School on preaching into catastrophe. And make no mistake, we are in the middle of catastrophe, a plague that has killed millions, a war between nations in Europe, and the collapse of our democracy.

But let’s start with the text, an Aramean general sent to the northern kingdom of Israel for a cure. Those pastors who actually preach the text this morning, those preachers who do not opt for the idolatry of religious nationalism, will likely approach this text as a lesson in the power of faith, even when such faith seems unreasonable. But, you know, that’s just not me.

You will notice that the text includes abduction and slavery. There is nothing negative about abduction of slavery in the text. They are givens in the ancient world. Yes, the Exodus story is one of liberation for the Hebrew slaves, but we are to read that as liberation for the Hebrews specifically, for a people that convinced themselves that they were specially chosen by either the only God, if you lean into monotheism, or the chief God, if you accept the widespread belief of the time. We are not meant to read this as a condemnation of slavery generally, for it continued to be practiced throughout the entire biblical age. There are rules about how to treat slaves in scripture. Paul accepts slavery as a given, and his letter to Philemon was read well into the 19^th century as endorsing the practice. Of course, tradition tells us Paul also thought his Roman citizenship would protect him, and if we are to believe tradition, that didn’t work out the way he expected.

Few openly seek biblical-style slavery in today’s world. Most of us understand that this was a practice of our barbarous ancestors. Yet there are those who seek to enforce other primitive beliefs and regimes in our world. Not only has the Supreme Court stripped women of control over their own bodies, retracting a civil liberty for the first time in American history, but Clarence Thomas opened the door and Texas Republicans are moving ahead with efforts not only to overthrow marriage equality, but also to reintroduce the barbaric sodomy laws that were used to terrorize the LGBTQ+ community for generations. And one of the chief funders of this evil is a gay billionaire, because billionaires are only loyal to other billionaires and their own money, never to God, never to country. But Peter Thiel is not alone in his evil. In fact, the petro-trafficking Koch brothers have been working to undermine our American democracy for decades, using a radicalized minority of Evangelicals as their instrument.

And that group made clear with the Gingrich revolution of 1994 that they were willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way, to force their theocracy on the American people. When I warned friends in 2016 that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, people snickered. When I warned that he could win the general election, people told me I was wrong. When I warned what might happen when he took office, people told me that the office would temper him. When the office did not temper him, and I warned of a threat to our democracy itself, I was told the institution was strong. Yet here we are, with a radical minority imposing its hate-filled will on a tolerant majority and a Supreme Court that has promised in the next term to overthrow our republic.

Continue reading “Revolution: 3 July 2022”

I was never a snake person anyways, but the copperhead that slithered out of the tree roots as my teenage self hung in the hammock pretty much sealed the deal. I do not like snakes. Yes, snake-loving folks have encouraged me to hold their baby boa, and no, it did not change my mind. I can appreciate the role of a cobra in the ecosystem without wanting to cuddle up with it.

For me, it is snakes. For a close friend, it is bears. No Paddington, no Pooh, just teeth and terror.

That friend would not love today’s text. Or maybe that friend would love today’s text, after all, it acts as confirmation of their worst fears.

The text does not actually say that the two bears ate all forty-two children. Even the hungriest bear might have a hard time getting down twenty kids. This isn’t exactly Joey Chestnut at Coney Island shoveling in the hot dogs. But still, mangled or mauled, the two most common English translations, is bad enough. I mean, it is just possible that the punishment did not fit the crime. And if it did, that is some serious instant karma.

Continue reading “26 June 2022: Karma is a …”

Scowling Simon Cowell, the criminal Chrisley’s, and “Love After Lock-Up” are not what critics have in mind when they call this a “Golden Age” of television. They are actually speaking about the serials, both comic and dramatic, that have been a staple of the traditional networks, premium channels, and streaming services in recent years, shows like “Lost,” “The Wire,” and “Ms. Marvel.”

You know, the sort of show that starts with “Previously on ‘We Own This City’”… which, by the way, is both a great non-fiction book and a great fictionalized serial on HBO.

I sometimes feel like we need that sort of thing in worship, that season recap. We are way over-scheduled and over-stimulated on a good day, and we don’t invest as much time as maybe we should in the study of scripture, then we come to church and get a ten line excerpt without any context. 

And that is exactly where we are this week. Thousands of preachers will focus on God being present not in the storm, the earthquake, or the fire, but instead being present in the silence, drawing Elijah from the cave. And that will preach though I’m not always sure what exactly it preaches. Some will focus on God providing for Elijah, caring for him when he seems incapable of caring for himself. That, too, will preach, for we sometimes need care, human and divine, when we cannot care for ourselves. But why is Elijah off in the wilderness and hiding in a cave to begin with? So…

Previously on Kings, Season One: Ahab, the King of Israel, is in an interfaith marriage with Jezebel, who worships Melqart, also called Baal Shamem. Elijah, a prophet in Ahab’s Hebrew tradition, challenges Jezebel’s court priests to perform a miracle by lighting a sacrificial fire through prayer. When they fail, Elijah performs the miracle, and having impressed the crowd and called them back to Yahweh, Elijah orders that the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal be taken to a dry river bed and murdered.

So this is why Jezebel is angry, why she promises to have Elijah killed, because he has caused a mass casualty event, has ordered the slaughter of people because they were from a different nationality with a different religion. Elijah is wanted for murder, for what we would consider today a crime against humanity.

The prophet is a fugitive from justice, but we’re supposed to take his side. Elijah the Prophet, hero of our scripture tradition. Yay us! Right? If this is our religion, this violence and intolerance, the Fundamentalists can have it.

Continue reading “Wanted for Murder: Elijah 19 June 2022”

The content on this site is copyrighted intellectual property and not for re-publication or re-distribution without written permission.

American racists misrepresented the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s preaching by taking lines out of context. American Christian extremists misrepresent the Hebrew and Christian tradition by taking lines out of context.

If we have learned anything during the difficult “online” preaching of the pandemic, it is that preaching is not a solo act, but is a relationship, both in the moment between the preacher and the congregation, and in the broader sense between the servant leader and those she/he/they serve.

Finally, I pray for those trapped in the idolatry of a false god, and trust that God’s grace is always bigger than human hate.

You would have thought that America had enough on its mind in January of 1964. People were still grieving for JFK, white supremacists were ramping up their violence to combat the continuing Civil Rights movement, and the war in Vietnam was growing by the day. But culture warriors being what they are, what was on the mind of Indiana governor Matthew E. Welsh was the lyrics to Louie Louie. 

They made his ears tingle he said, and he determined that they were obscene. It didn’t help that the version climbing the pop charts featured the incomprehensible mumblings of Jack Ely fronting The Kingsmen.

Even the FBI got involved. In reality, the lyrics to the song were innocuous. Written in 1955 by Richard Berry, they told of a sailor returning home to his love in Jamaica. No obscenity.

It is not the worst case of a text being misunderstood, even of a song being misunderstood. Take, as another example, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” a 1986 hit by Timbuk 3. It became a prom theme, a graduation anthem, when it is actually about the risk, especially high back then, of nuclear annihilation, the bright future being an atom bomb. 

While that was the band’s biggest hit, they also recorded a song about marriage equality, “Legalize Our Love,” and a prescient takedown of white Christian nationalism, 1989’s “Standard White Jesus.”

And that is the Jesus I knew as a kid, the white guy with shampoo commercial hair and the creepy eyes that were looking at you no matter where you went in the room. If we’d done Mary in the Southern Baptist church, she’d have been pretty standard and white too, but we only acknowledged Mary at Christmas. Anything more was practically papist. 

God, of course, was also a white male, not only in appearance as rendered by Michelangelo, but also in attitude. In fact, and I’m sure this is just pure coincidence, but in that church where older white men had absolute power, God acted like an older white man with absolute power, an older white man with absolute power and a shocking fragility, for despite God’s supposed omnipotence, he was constantly offended that humans were not properly stroking his ego or following the rules he had implemented to micro-manage our lives. The culmination of his rage was the ultimate act of domestic violence, conspiracy to murder his only child.

Talk about misunderstanding a text. Geez.

Continue reading “A New Spirit: 5 June 2022”

She is beautiful and tall, this European woman sculpted by Joseph Hugues-Fabisch in 1864 and placed in a grotto in the Pyrenees, not short and Middle Eastern, as we might expect. But this was the Mary that Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen, the statue that still stands in Lourdes, the great shrine that has been caricatured by some as the Disneyland of the Roman Church. 

In normal times, about 350,000 of the desperately ill will bathe in the waters of Lourdes during the pilgrim season from Easter to All Saints Day, each seeking a miraculous cure. Countless others will visit the shrine, drinking water from the taps and purchasing what the late English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called “tawdry relics, the bric-a-brac of piety.”

Now, we can dissect everything from Bernadette’s claimed visions to the scant seventy miraculous healings recognized by the Roman communion since the shrine opened as a pilgrim site in 1860, but I’m not sure that gets us very far. We’re skeptics by nature and we like science, but sometimes something becomes holy simply because enough people decide it is holy, and even the most hard-core rationalists among us recognize the mysterious power in art and music and love, the mystery of being itself, and especially the weirdness that happens at the intersection of our brains and our bodies. Miracles are real, but the category “miracle” is a human one.

It is Lourdes that comes to mind when we read today’s gospel, which comes from the tradition associated with the apostle John. On the surface, it is just one more healing miracle among the many healing miracles of Jesus, and in the context of John, which offers us signs that Jesus is the Messiah, it is just one more sign. But there is a bit more depth to the healing stories in the gospels, to this story in particular.

Continue reading “Stirred Up: 22 May 2022”

The final book in the Christian Testament is a problem generally, and especially in the context of the English-speaking United States, where white Christian nationalists view its violence as a literal game plan. 

Among the problems, for example, is the name. It is often called “Revelations” or “The Book of Revelations,” when it is actually the revelation, singular, “to or of” John, the “to or of” being unclear in the ancient manuscripts and Koine Greek, and maybe not really that important. 

The English translation revelation is itself a problem, for in Koine Greek it is “apocalypse,” and the English cognates have diverged, with apocalypse no longer meaning what is revealed, but instead referring specifically to this vision of destructive re-ordering, of catastrophe. These days, a revelation, say that a politician is corrupt, is not an apocalypse. Its just Tuesday.

And which John? We almost all know more than one person by that name in real life, but when it comes to the Bible story, we engage in a sometimes absurd reductionism. It doesn’t help that it was accepted practice at that time to write and publish fraudulently in the name of someone with authority, the reason new texts were produced in the prophet Isaiah’s name centuries after the son of Amoz was dead, the reason we have texts written in the name of Peter and Paul that were definitely not written by Peter or Paul. There are multiple Marys in the gospels, but somehow fundamentalists insist on only one John.

The Gospel traditionally attributed to the actual disciple John, the brother of James, the three letters attributed to John, and this “revelation” to or of John are not from the same author, nor from the same decade or region. It is unlikely that the fisherman from Galilee actually wrote any of them, though the gospel at least seems to have come from a community associated with him. 

It is best to refer to the author of this text, the revelation, as John of Patmos, the Greek island off the coast of modern-day Turkey that the author identifies as the site of his visions.

And all of that before we even get to the content of the revelation, this fever-dream of a great battle between good and evil, good being the followers of Jesus, of course, evil being both Rome and Jews. The text has helped fuel centuries of Christian antisemitism, and plays rather well with the greatly exaggerated narrative of Christian victimization, especially popular with America’s white Christian nationalists who believe having to compete on an equal footing with others makes them victims. 

Continue reading “New Jerusalem: 15 May 2022”

Friends, my installation as the 15th Pastor and Teacher at the historic Park Church will be this coming Sunday at 4:00pm Eastern. The Rev. Paul Nixon will be preaching from his home in Southern California. The service will be available on Zoom: account ID: 868 590 2067, meeting pass code 246753. You can dial (929) 436-2866, or click: https://zoom.us/j/8685902067?pwd=R2h4bkNpblNyRTVYS1VGNGR0SXVzQT09

One of the National Public Radio programs I enjoy is “Hidden Brain,” so when I heard that host Shankar Vedantam had a well-reviewed new book, I went out and bought a copy. Titled “Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain,” it tells tales that are remarkable, incredible (as in hard to believe), and sometimes horrifying. 

Take, for example, the case of surgeon Bruce Moseley at a VA Medical Center in Texas. He had served as the surgeon for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, had a remarkable track record, yet he had long questioned the efficacy of a common procedure, arthroscopic knee surgery. He wondered if the procedure itself, the mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, had a benefit, or if the actual benefit was derived from the saline wash used during the procedure. He devised a study, and a colleague convinced him to add a third group, a control group that got the incisions, but had neither the actual scraping nor the saline wash. It was not easy to get a study like this approved, but it eventually was, and Moseley found enough patients willing to be randomly assigned into the three study groups.

After two years, patients in all three groups reported marked levels of improvement. And there was no difference between those who received the actual procedure, those who only received the saline wash, and those who had what was, in truth, placebo surgery. Let me say that again. The outcome was exactly the same for those who had the traditional procedure, mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, those who only had the knee joint flushed with saline, and those who had incisions made on their knee with no actual procedure.

This is a particularly stunning example of something we know as the placebo effect. Now, if you are like me, you tend to associate placebos with hypochondriacs and the gullible. After all, you and I are way too smart to ever be duped in this way. But are we?

Continue reading “Placebo : 8 May 2022”

Time travel has been a major feature in fiction, from novels to film, since H.G. Wells introduced his “Time Machine” in 1895. It accounts for literally billions of dollars in content. 

The climax of the 23 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Avengers:Endgame,” includes time travel as the central plot device, and brought in $2.8 billion dollars at the box office worldwide. That was for that single film.

Time travel features in mega-franchises like Back to the Future, Outlander, and Lost, is on Disney Channel and Netflix, and is the central premise of a television franchise that premiered when I was an infant, the BBC classic Doctor Who. That premiere came the day after JFK was assassinated, which caused a delayed start and low viewership, so the series might have never gone anywhere, an alternate timeline many of us would prefer not to imagine. As it was, the series caught on, running until 1989, then rebooting in 2005 and still going strong.

The Doctor, “Who” is not his last name, it is only just the Doctor, is part of a species of time traveling extraterrestrials called Time Lords. They also have the ability to regenerate into new bodies, convenient for a series approaching sixty years running with one main character, Since 2017, the Doctor has been played by Jodie Whittaker, the first woman in the role. Oh, and the Doctor is unambiguously good, though sometimes flawed. I guess even time traveling extraterrestrials have their baggage.

In today’s first reading, one of the Doctor’s time traveling companions, the completely human Amy Pond, has made the decision to travel through time to be with the man she loves. She gets a message to the Doctor through her daughter, and asks him, for the Doctor was a him at that point, to travel back in time and tell her younger self a story, one filled with hope, one promising adventure.

This totally messes with the rules of time travel, of which there appear to be three, though they get broken all the time. The first is that you should never meet another version of yourself. The second is that you should never use time travel for personal gain. This is how you tell the heroes from the villains in these things. And the last is that any change you make in the past can have unexpected and sometimes catastrophic consequences in the future, including eliminating your personal future.

The Doctor does visit young Amy Pond, and the power of the story prepares her for her future adventures. 

Today’s gospel reading is also about the power of story, potentially opening us up to an alternate future for Christianity and therefore all of history, for it involves the early struggles of the church to figure out what Jesus meant.

Continue reading “Rules of Time Travel: 24 April 2022”