Constructive Faith

Luke 6:17-26

Jeremiah 17:5-10

SERMON “The LeRoy Scandal”

Long before Barbara Kingsolver gave us “Demon Copperhead,” there was another harrowing tale of a boy from West Virginia growing up in an environment of addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and prostitution. 

Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, better known as J.T. LeRoy, began writing for high-profile publications like the Oxford American and McSweeney’s just before the turn of the century. In 2000, his autobiographical novel “Sarah” was published to rave reviews, the paradox of autobiographical and novel not withstanding. 

“Sarah” was followed by “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” a collection of short stories also based on LeRoy’s childhood and borrowing a title from today’s reading in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. This second text became a 2004 film.

And so one evening, I left my office in lower Manhattan and headed over to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, where LeRoy was going to do a reading, accompanied by some of his celebrity supporters. The celebrities were there. LeRoy was a no-show.

LeRoy would eventually make some public appearances, always in sunglasses and a wig, described as reclusive or eccentric.

He, the person who made the public appearances, was she, 25 year-old Savannah Knoop. She, who wrote the various articles and three books, was Laura Albert, Knoop’s sister-in-law. 

There have been two documentaries on the case, and if I am honest, I still don’t completely understand the why and how of it all, how so many people, including some who manufactured personas for a living, were duped.

The thing is, the writing was good. Laura Albert could have had a great career. Instead, she was found guilty of fraud for signing a contract in LeRoy’s name. Which all goes to show that as the prophet warned, the heart really is deceitful above all things.

Jeremiah, the prophet not the fictional West Virginia boy, was writing as the Kingdom of Judah was in its final years. His word is about faith and practice, but it is also about geopolitics. Religious leaders calling out despots for corruption and unrighteousness has been a thing for a long time, long before this year’s interfaith prayer service in Washington. 

Like works by Kingsolver and Albert, the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah is a harrowing read. There is child sacrifice. There is the destruction of Jerusalem. There are crimes against humanity, not unlike the crimes against humanity happening in the same region today, including the displacement of entire populations through mass deportation. There is even a little bit of constructive or adaptive theology.

Essentially, however, the prophet Jeremiah holds to the tradition of transactional faith. You do good by God, and God will do good by you, you personally, your house or tribe, your nation. If you are suffering, you must have done something to deserve that suffering.

Despite 3500 years of evidence to the contrary, people still sell that same snake oil. 

Continue reading “The LeRoy Scandal: February 16, 2025”

Luke 5:1-11

Isaiah 6:1-13

SERMON “Still Not Feet”

Though cats domesticated humans, the process usually works the other way around. Homo sapiens established sometimes symbiotic, sometimes exploitative relationships with countless other species of plants and animals, often modifying them through unnatural selection. It is fair to say we would not be the species we are without the enhanced nutrition made possible by settled agriculture.

We also attempt, unsuccessfully, to domesticate the holy. We project our own image on to a placeholder we call God, stuffing God into a box and making the unknowable all too much like us, assigning to the divine our worst traits, jealousy and fury. 

We’ve done the same thing to angels. They were a fairly late development in pre-Rabbinic Judaism, members of the divine council that got a demotion as the tradition moved from a form of polytheism to ethical monotheism. 

You might occasionally see the Archangel Michael with a sword, but generally angels are depicted as pretty, feminine in appearance, human, of course, and white in the Western European tradition. They can sometimes be found loitering at the top of Christmas trees, lurkers long before that stupid elf. 

We’ve invented for angels a sort of caste system, including cherubs who are bizarrely depicted as flying infants, confused with the Cupid of Greek mythology. Seriously, if you start to think about it, it is all just a little bit weird.

Today’s text, Isaiah’s call narrative, implies angels with basically human physiology, since the angel uses tongs to carry a coal from the altar, though the two wings with which we are most familiar are replaced with six wings here, two covering their faces, two used to fly, and two covering their feet. 

And as we discussed when reading from the Book of Ruth recently, these are still not feet. The ancient authors used feet as a euphemism for genitals.

Honestly though, we should just run with Isaiah’s six-winged crotch-covered angels. The prophet Ezekiel, writing from Babylon over a century later, sees cherubim that are definitely not flying infants. They are metallic and have four wings, calf’s hooves, and four faces: human, lion, ox, and eagle.

Neither the Tanakh nor the Christian Testament employs angels to keep you from stubbing your toes, or to help your team win the big game. Their role is that of divine messengers. They bring their terrifying six-winged or four-faced word to the prophets, and the prophets brief the rest of us.

And that word, the Word of God, is generally not “Swell job guys! Keep up the good work.” 

Sometimes it is “Ya’ll need to shape up!” and sometimes it is “God loves you! Now shape up.” But it always requires change. “Same old, same old” is just not how God works. We know this because “same old, same old” is just not how creation works. The holy is constant creativity and change and unfolding, and we can reasonably expect that the traits we see in the created reflect the traits of the Creator.

Continue reading “Still Not Feet: 9 February 2025”

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-30

SERMON “Time Bandits”

During Coffee Hour last Sunday, I mentioned to Rose and Monica one of the particular complexities in dealing with the Christian scriptures we call the “New Testament.” Not only do we only have bad copies of bad copies centuries removed from the supposed original sources and no two manuscripts alike, but those texts are written in a way most of us have never experienced. 

They are in Koine Greek, a variation on Classical Greek that we understand fairly well, as it was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean from the Hellenistic Age until the early Byzantine Age, about 900 years, so we have many texts. It is one of three languages found on the Rosetta Stone, which proved to be the key to understanding Egyptian heiroglyphics.

Koine Greek would be easier to understand if you could just separate the words, for it was written in all capital letters with no punctuation and no spaces between words or sentences. Scholars are often left guessing what word is intended, where one word or thought ends and another begins. It would be a thousand years before the text was divided into chapters, another three centuries after that before verse numbers were added.

Never mind the whole problem of translation.

This means that every single Bible you have ever used is an act of human interpretation. 

Even the Nestle-Aland, on the shelf in my study, the go-to version of the most commonly received text, is an act of interpretation, with upper case and lower case letters, word and paragraph breaks, and even chapter and verse. 

The Tanakh, the Hebrew Scripture sometimes erroneously called the “Old Testament” is just as difficult, if not worse. Modern Hebrew was a 20th century invention. Ancient Hebrew was a dying language even in the time of Jesus, used almost exclusively in the synagogue. Jesus would have taught in Aramaic. Given his interactions with Romans, he was probably fluent in Koine Greek. And we know he could read scripture in Hebrew.

The entire enterprise of scriptural interpretation is like an ancient Finnegans Wake, the notoriously impenetrable novel by James Joyce, though few would claim for that work ultimate questions, the matter at hand with scripture.

Continue reading “2 February 2025: Time Bandits”

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4:14-21

SERMON “What Is Yours?”

We are less than a week into the new administration in Washington, and they already find themselves defending a “Sieg Heil” performed by Elon Musk during the inauguration. It is not exactly a secret that Musk is a Nazi in all but name. He supports Germany’s modern-day incarnation of the Nazi Party, the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, and interfered in Britain’s political system with blatant race baiting. Never mind the 13 children he has fathered by three different women. Nothing to look at… no eugenics going on here.

Musk wants you to believe that he is a genius who is entitled to his wealth because of his hard work and talent. He does not want you to believe he was born rich in a family made wealthy under the structural racism of apartheid as operators of South African emerald mines. His father Errol said they had “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe.” 

In the same way, Donald Trump wants you to think about his self-proclaimed genius, not his countless bankruptcies, not the hundreds of contractors he has defrauded over the years, not the fact that he was born rich and that he and his late-father are both racists, structurally and specifically.

Also on the dais last week were Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Zuckerberg continued to rake in money from Facebook even as his own staff warned him that the algorithms were dangerous, a threat to health, safety, and democracy. Bezos drove the entire industry of retail bookstores to the edge of extinction, and continues to profit as a platform for cheap Chinese goods manufactured under exploitative conditions. And most of us still help put money in both of their pockets.

Each of these men would want you to think that they have earned every dollar they have, through hard work and genius, that they are entitled to power due to their inherent superiority and hard work.

And then Jesus unrolls the scroll and read from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Continue reading “What Is Yours? 26 January 2025”

John 2:1-11

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” 1968

Many know the prophetic final lines from “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our reading comes from earlier in that same sermon:

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. 

One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. 

You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. 

Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.

SERMON “Handling Snakes”

We will not be the only church to have read the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in worship this morning. Many will turn, as I have, to the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop Speech,” while others will read excerpts from “I Have a Dream.” Some might even be courageous enough to use material from his most famous speech opposing the Vietnam War. 

Few will have placed King’s words in a spot usually reserved for scripture, as we have done, and fewer still use material from sources outside of the Bible every single week, as we do.

One reason churches shy away from non-biblical sources is that few sources would pass muster under today’s critical glare. King himself was a prophet and a pastor and a philanderer. But something more than the cynical destruction of all heroes is at play when we insist on only using texts that are almost two thousand years old. 

You see, the powerful like their prophets long dead, so it is best to keep the canon of inspirational texts closed. Better still if God is also dead, as dead gods make no new demands. 

We do not believe in a dead God, in a religion that has been frozen since some arbitrary council or schism centuries ago. We believe that God is alive and active, that, as the marketing campaign says, God is still speaking, and I dare say, God is still evolving, for change is the nature of the universe God created, creation being a reflection of the divine.

Why not, then, trust that we can find the sacred in work outside of the ancient canon? Why not accept that even an adulterer can speak inspired and holy words?

And speaking of holiness, let us turn for a moment to the Holiness Movement, a semi-Pentecostal offshoot of Methodism that believed a second work of grace after rebirth cleansed the Christian of original sin, allowing them to live in holiness, without sin. The theology doesn’t really matter for our purposes this morning. What matters is that Holiness churches are mostly rural, mostly located in Appalachia, and a small subset of Holiness churches is known for handling snakes, venomous snakes, during worship.

The practice is based on one verse in the Gospel According to Luke, one verse in the longer ending to the Gospel According to Mark, and the fact that Paul was bitten by a snake and lived, as reported in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. 

Snake handling during worship is in decline, thankfully, with only an estimated two dozen congregations still engaged in the practice in the United States, but it was a big deal a century ago.

The biggest proponent of snake handling was George Went Hensley from Grasshopper Valley in Tennessee. Hensley was originally a preacher in the Church of God. He left that denomination, which soon dropped the practice. 

That didn’t stop Hensley. He traveled Appalachia throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War as a revival preacher, finally settling down to form the “Dolly Pond Church of God with Signs Following” in 1945.

That is a lot of rattlesnakes and a lot of years, all of which came to the completely expected ending in 1955, when Pastor Hensley died of snakebite. And so it goes. Jamie Coots, a snake-handling preacher featured in a 2013 National Geographic series called “Snake Salvation” died in 2014.

It turns out, handling venomous snakes does not make Paul’s list of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, unless it falls under the “working of power deeds” category, which would be really useful, for as Christians who believe in living love into the world, we find ourselves in the position these days of needing to handle some snakes. They just happen to be the type with legs.

Continue reading “Handling Snakes: 19 January 2025 (MLK Weekend)”

Acts 8:14-17

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

There are at least four solid sermons in this morning’s gospel reading. You’ll be glad to know I am only preaching one of them.

Last Sunday was an anniversary remembered only by Christians in the Anabaptist tradition. It was on that date, January 5th, 1527, that Felix Manz was executed by drowning in Zurich. His crime was re-baptizing adults. He is considered the first Anabaptist martyr.

This week we consider baptism, as the liturgical calendar turns to the baptism of Jesus. It is one of only two sacraments recognized in Protestant Christianity, and like communion, resulted in early and permanent divisions within the Reformation.

We start with Pre-Rabbinic Judaism. Like some continuing movements in modern Judaism, it followed a purity code. Any number of things could make an individual ritually unclean, including menstruation or touching a dead body. Immersion in a ritual bath called a mikveh was required in order to restore a state of purity. Purity was especially important in a Temple-based system.

Immersion to cleanse a state of sinfulness was an innovation of John the Baptizer. Followers of Jesus would come to interpret John as a forerunner to Jesus, a latter-day Elijah, for tradition said Elijah would return to announce the arrival of the Messiah. 

The gospels report that John and Jesus are cousins, that some of the disciples are drawn from the community surrounding John, and that Jesus himself was baptized by John, as we heard in Luke’s account.

We have no way of verifying the historicity of these various claims, though both John the Baptizer and Jesus are historic figures, both executed as a threat to the ruling class. The two movements were in competition with one another as well as other popular movements of the time. Connections between the two movements opens a world of possibilities best explored in Bible study.

What we can say is that Jesus does not baptize during his active ministry. He announces the Kingdom of God, heals and teaches and feeds. People are made clean through his word. If immersion baptism and the closed repentance community is a fitting symbol for John’s movement, the radically open table fellowship seems fitting for the Way of Jesus.

Continue reading “Dunkin’ – Baptism of Jesus”

Matthew 2:1-12

Ephesians 3:1-12

SERMON

In many churches this morning, worshippers will hear cute tales about the Three Wise Men or Three Kings and their gifts, carefully woven fictions designed to keep the privileged comfortable and the marginalized anesthetized.

Of course, we do not know that the visitors in the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew are three in number, or that they are in fact men, and they most certainly are not kings. Besides, it is the job of the preacher to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, not to be a spiritual anesthesiologist.

Some pastors will lean into the theme of the star and light and white, the liturgical color of the day, in their sermons and homilies. 

Humans have always been afraid of the dark, as we are afraid of what we do not know and cannot control. Among other species, predators are at work in the dark, but human predators are just as likely to be at work in the day, often from the corner office. 

A celebration of lightness all too easily becomes a celebration of whiteness, when the dark is a reality of creation, a productive zone that is a biological and spiritual necessity, one we should embrace. Known unknowns should not be a problem, for God is utterly unknowable. We are called to be mystics.

Still other congregations will hear the traditional theology of good news for the Gentiles, the idea that this moment in the Christ story means that salvation will be available to those who are not Jewish. 

Jesus seems to embrace the cosmopolitan character of Palestine in the early First Century and Pauline Christianity would burn like a wildfire across the Roman roads and around the globe, but to suggest that Christianity is the only correct spiritual path leads us back into the trap of antisemitism and notions of a petty god who is most certainly not good, to a god too small to embrace all of humankind, never mind all of creation.

If those are the stories and themes you need this morning, you might want to go online this afternoon, for I am not the only pastor who posts material on the internet. Surely you will find your serving of spiritual porrige.

I am more interested in the part of the story we leave out of the Christmas pageants, the part that comes after our reading, the slaughter of the male babies of Bethlehem and the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt.

Continue reading “Epiphany 2025”

When Johnny Cash sang about a “boy named Sue,” I’m betting Joyce Hall could relate. 

When his parents named him after the Methodist Bishop Isaac W. Joyce, they could have gone with Isaac. Instead, he spent his life going by his initials, J.C. 

When he was seven, his father, a Methodist pastor, died, and at eight he started selling products door to door. He would go on to create a business empire, first with postcards and wrapping paper, then moving into media with the “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” By the time he died, he was a billionaire in today’s dollars. And while I am generally not a fan of billionaires and private wealth. Lord knows I am not a fan of billionaires this year! But Hallmark is fairly benign as these things go. 

We can joke about their formulaic Christmas movies, but Hallmark, along with other Christmas movie producers like Netflix, have slowly embraced the 21st century. You’ll see more mixed race couples, more queer characters, and even the occasional queer romance. 

And of course, the quaint old inn will be saved, the wicked developer will have a change of heart, and the kind old man turns out to be Santa, because in the universe of Hallmark, old is good, the big city is (mostly) bad, and kids are always precocious.

Continue reading “Christmas Eve Homily 2024”

22 December 2024 – Advent IV

First Reading – Nikki Giovanni, The Women and The Men (1970)

if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious
which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say

Second Reading – Micah 5:2-5a

Third Reading – Luke 1:39-55

Sermon

We are the blessed stewards of an amazing pipe organ, and the blessed partners with an amazing Music Director and Organist, so I do not begrudge the sermon-free Sundays of Lent III and Advent III. In fact, preachers in liturgical settings missed Advent III for decades, as this was the week traditionally sacrificed to Christmas Pageants. Still, Gaudete Sunday, with its pink candle and theme of joy, is unique, and worthy of our attention, so I am going to attend to our week four theme, love, while also leaning into last week’s theme. And we’ll start with our reading from the Gospel According to Luke the Physician, Mary visiting Elizabeth, and giving us the lines that came to be known as the Magnificat, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” and so on.

We could embrace our not particularly well-hidden cynicism, and problematize the entire story, that of an unwed teen who either lies about her virginity or is involuntarily impregnated, by the divine or a cad of the more common variety. Neither approach offers a promising start to a story of salvation. 

But I understand why early Christians came to believe in the virgin birth, how it fit into their pre-scientific understanding of purity and sacrifice and a transactional god, how they were interpreting the ancient prophets. I just don’t believe in that transactional god, and I’m not sure Jesus believed in that transactional god, so I’m not ready to let salvation hang on the two Nativity narratives. 

Jesus saves by changing the way we understand God and therefore the way we understand ourselves, blows right past all of the traditional Jewish notions of who is in and who is out, who is clean and who is untouchable, and replaces judgment with grace. This is a rather important detail, for drawing lines and pursuing retributive justice are the most human things to do, and pre-rabbinic Judaism had always responded to cultural pressure by doubling down on what set them apart, on odd practices in diet and dress and worship. The weirder they seemed to others, the more they felt themselves, much like today’s rich and famous.

Jesus didn’t do that, didn’t care about in-group and out-group, and for all we might criticize Paul, the evangelist to the Gentiles, the end result of his mission is a religious community defined by choice, not race or ethnicity.

Still, some want Mary to be a virgin, choose Matthew’s kings and Luke’s manger, even want the brutality at the end of Christ’s life to be rendered a “Good Friday,” and if that works for you, hey… go for it. 

Jesus and John as cousins makes sense, miracle babies leaping in the womb maybe less so. Though I can totally roll with Mary’s words about divine reversal, the rich and powerful brought down, the lowly lifted and filled. The meme that circulates every year about this time nails it… these two pregnant women are sitting around talking about a revolution.

Joy might be excessive in describing Mary’s situation. Relieved that she hasn’t been stoned in the street seems more likely. And we are mindful that while some expectant mothers are joyful, like Elizabeth, many women who find themselves pregnant are not joyful, and even in that ancient context, they could make decisions about their own bodies.

And again, joy might make sense through the lens of a post-resurrection theology, but let’s not forget that there are dead bodies everywhere in this story, from the slaughtered toddler boys of Bethlehem in Matthew’s nativity narrative to the head of Elizabeth’s son on a plate, to Mary’s son brutally tortured and publicly executed.

I want to suggest that joy is appropriate and is an incredibly subversive and a necessary spiritual practice, one that reflects something at the heart of a progressive and reconstructive Christianity. 

Continue reading “Disruptive Joy”

Baruch 5:1-9

Occasionally, a sequel is better than the original, as was the case with “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.” “I’ll be back, baby.”

Occasionally. 

Horror films seem quite good at milking the franchise, and there are the epic multi-film adaptations of literary classics, but even they can go wildly wrong, like “The Hobbit” film franchise that turned a 300 page novel into what felt like 300 hours of film.

If critics are to be believed, the recently released “Gladiator II” has jumped the shark, in the Fonzi on the motorcycle sort of way. The film is apparently a mess, complete with CGI sharks.

The original Ridley Scott film, from the turn-of-the-century, was widely regarded as a masterpiece. That film begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 C.E., traditionally used by historians as a marker for the end of the Pax Romana or Roman Peace. This was a period of two centuries that began with the rise of Augustus, and was marked with relative peace, prosperity, and colonial expansion.

About that…

There were countless wars and conflicts during the Pax Romana. 

If a town in the colonies could not pay the backbreaking Roman taxes, it might be burned to the ground, the inhabitants enslaved. If a slave rebelled, he or she would be crucified, as would be anyone else who was troublesome or inconvenient. 

Crucifixion was far from a one-off, nor was it the relatively quick affair we find in the gospels. Romans were creative in their brutality, using a variety of methods and configurations in crucifixion: upside down, crossbar, no crossbar, X. Death could take hours or days, and though it has been commonly believed that asphyxiation was the primary cause of death, this notion has been challenged. 

Especially important was the fact that bodies were not removed for burial. The entire point of crucifixion was deterrence. The wails of the dying and the decomposing corpses drove home the point that this could happen to you if you caused trouble.

It was peaceful, alright. Peaceful like Auschwitz.

This is the sort of peace the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. calls a “negative” peace in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he describes as the absence of tension, not the presence of justice. 

King wrote his letter in response to “A Call for Unity,” a gaslighting epistle by seven white clergy people and a rabbi critical of direct action for civil rights. King’s letter not only introduced the concept of “negative peace” as the opposite of justice, but also gave us the now famous quote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Gaslighting in the guise of calls for unity didn’t go away with the Rev. King’s epistle.

Continue reading “8 December 2024: Highway Department”