Constructive Faith

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 

Though my father never finished high school and my mother never went to college, I grew up in a household that loved learning. There were books, magazines, two newspapers a day, and the evening news, back when there were only three evening news broadcasts and truth still mattered. 

I read about endangered species and life in a Soviet republic, watched news reports on the 1972 Managua earthquake and the related death of baseball great Roberto Clemente, so it should be no surprise that I also followed reports of the revolutions in Central America as a young adult, while serving in the Army and after discharge. I eventually made it to liberated Nicaragua, though that liberator is a despot these days. 

The civil war in El Salvador was still raging in the mid-1980’s when I was in the region, though the assassination of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was already history.

Most of you know how much I admire Romero, a nerd the Vatican selected because he would not upset the privileged. Radicalized by the murder of his close friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, he went on to cause what the late John Lewis called “good trouble,” and paid for it with his life, gunned down while celebrating mass in a hospital chapel.

In 1997, the Roman Catholic pope, John Paul II, allowed a “cause for beatification” to begin, the first step toward being declared a saint. That process stalled under that pope and his successor, both deeply conservative, theologically and politically, both shaped by Cold War “anti-communism.” The beatification process was revived under the current pope, himself a Latin American, and concluded with Romero’s canonization in 2018. He is now Saint Óscar Romero of San Salvador in the Roman church.

The bureaucratic process of declaring Romero a saint in that tradition is an example of the very messy human role in deciding who is considered holy in any particular historical and cultural context, saint, sanctuary, and sacred all meaning set aside as holy.

So let’s place the idea of sainthood in our particular context, as a church of mostly religious refugees in the Protestant, Reform, Congregational, and United Church of Christ traditions, then look at how we might benefit from the idea of saints in our own lives and that of this community.

Continue reading “Saints Ain’t: 3 November 2024”

Job 38:1-7, 34-41

It is an amazing gift and maybe a little bit of a curse that we homo sapiens are creatures who desire meaning. I learned a long time ago, long before I was an elected official, that if people don’t know what is going on, don’t understand what is going on, they’ll simply make stuff up. This is one of the primary drivers of religion and politics.

In our postmodern age of social media, this can be terrifying, but in premodern times this myth-making was not inherently bad. Rather than live in constant anxiety about the many things that are unknowable and uncontrollable, people lived in comfortable fictions. It kept us sane. Well, sort of…

One of those fictions was that deities, or a single deity, micromanaged the mundane, decided which fields got rain, which diseases got cured, which army won the war.

Of course, we are more sophisticated now, right? We wouldn’t ask God to lead our favorite football team to victory, then thank Him, always a “Him,” for that victory. 

We wouldn’t expect that an arbitrary and capricious god would heal some who are sick while choosing not to heal others, possibly tallying up the number of prayers or “get well” cards as a quantitative measure of worthiness, and then insisting the outcome was God’s plan.

We wouldn’t tell anxious children that the latest school shooting happened because God needed new angels, bad theology and bad policy, except that many do tell exactly this kind of repulsive lie, ask for divine intervention, thoughts and prayers, projecting onto God human will and agency, and thereby reducing God to human-size while avoiding human responsibility. 

The Book of Job, the source of today’s reading, is a pious fiction from a myth-making age. It intends to make meaning, to answer the question at the heart of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1981 book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Kushner was reeling from the death of his 14 year-old son, who suffered from the genetic disease progeria, when he took on this question, known in theological circles as theodicy.

The Book of Job may be a pious fiction, and if I am honest, I no longer believe it has value to our faith. God and the Adversary are basically super-sized omnipotent humans, sociopaths toying with human lives. Sure, Job comes out on the other side of this divine terror okay, but his family does not. 

My answer to the questions God asks Job would be “No. I didn’t create all things and have all power. That’s you, not me. So why are you being a jerk?”

Continue reading “20 October 2024: Sweet Spot”

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15

We rightly start our services at the Park Church with an acknowledgement of historic injustices committed against the indigenous people of the Americas and the kidnapped and enslaved people of Africa. The actions of the ancestors of so many of us of European descent can only be described under the contemporary category of crimes against humanity. But the first catastrophe to strike Native Americans was unintentional. The Europeans brought with them new diseases that may have killed as much as 90% of native populations. So massive was the reforestation of formerly cultivated fields that the earth experienced a mini-ice age.

This was not the end of the catastrophe, which continues to unfold today. Europeans claimed to have discovered the Americas, describing the native people as few and primitive. Population and societal collapse between first contact in 1492 and the establishment of the first English colony in 1607 left a wasteland that did not represent the historic reality of advanced cultures and thriving cities. The United Church of Christ has officially repudiated this Doctrine of Discovery, which does not really make up for our complicity in the settler colonialism that pushed ever westward, displacing Native Americans from any land that was even marginally valuable.

Most of us know the stories, the Trail of Tears, the cycle of broken treaties and wars, massacres at places like Sand Creek.

It was in this context of ethnic cleansing and genocide that a Northern Paiute religious leader named Wovoka had a vision during the solar eclipse on New Year’s Day, 1889. In the vision, God promised that if the people danced a new five-day dance they would accelerate the day when evil was swept away and the earth was renewed. There was significant Christian content in Wovoka’s vision, including the Second Coming of Jesus and a reunion with the dead. 

This new non-violent spiritual movement spread quickly among a people who felt powerless against the forces of white settlers and a white government. They called it “Dance in a Circle,” and it was adapted by other North American tribes. It was the Lakota version, called Spirit Dance, that led to the name sensationalized by the press and the military. White folks called it the Ghost Dance.

It also seems to have been the Lakota that developed the Ghost shirt, which supposedly repelled bullets. This may have been inspired by Mormon temple garments, which are believed to protect the wearer from evil. 

“Dance in a Circle” arrived in South Dakota at the same time the United States government was breaking yet another treaty with the Lakota people, taking most of their territory and forcing the tribe onto five small reservations with poor land, where they were expected to farm. The Lakota turned to the Ghost Dance, alarming the white agents representing the occupation forces. Bureau of Indian Affirs agents asked for more troops, which in turn increased the oppression and violence in a cycle that ended first in the murder of Sitting Bull, and eventually to the massacre at Wounded Knee. 

The Ghost Dance vision is a perfect example of apocalyptic belief, the idea that the world is so broken and corrupt that only the divine can restore it. Apocalyptic is always dramatic, sometimes violent. 

Continue reading “13 October 2024: Ghost Dance”

1 Corinthians 11:17-26

I sometimes wonder about the slow process of humans figuring out food. I mean, who looked at a tree on the Indian subcontinent and thought “You know, the inner bark might be tasty,” giving us cinnamon, one of my favorite flavors. 

Sushi made from fugu, a pufferfish, is a delicacy in Japan. It is a little tingly since the fish contains a deadly neurotoxin. In fact, chefs need years of training to be licensed to serve it. So how did they figure all of that out? By feeding portions to Granny until she fell over? 

“Oh yeah. Let’s not eat that bit!”

Cooking made these huge brains possible, but who looked at maize and thought “That will be safer, tastier, and more nutritious if we soak it and cook it in limewater before we grind it”? And yet, that is the ancient process civilizations here in the Americas developed, leading to the tortilla and “Taco Tuesday.”

Sometimes, I suspect it was all just one happy accident after another. Even today, some traditional sour beers depend on airborne wild yeast and bacteria to fall into shallow vats to begin fermentation. 

Yeast, so incredibly tiny, was passed on and preserved as starters, much like that sourdough starter so many created during Covid-19 lockdowns, long before we could buy little packets of Fleischmann’s at the grocery store. Well, for that matter, before grocery stores.

A little crush, a little mash, something sweet, something salty, yeast wild or domesticated, heat before or after, and badda-bing, as they say, a hot loaf of bread, a cold mug of beer or a glass of wine. 

I mean, you can eat grapes right off of the vine, but to get the full nutritional value out of most grains, you need pressure and heat. Transformation is necessary but not necessarily easy.

If beer or wine or even bread are not your thing, chocolate is the end result of a fermentation process too. And if you don’t do beer, wine, bread, or chocolate, why are you even alive?

Ingredients are brought together under the right conditions, magic happens, and they become something else.

And since we are a refugee church, picking up spiritual hitchhikers from the highways and byways of faith, since today is World Communion Sunday, it might be good to talk about another bit of magic, what we think does and does not happen when we come together at Christ’s table.

Continue reading “6 October 2024: Magic Happens”

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

You may occasionally notice me trip over the best term for the portion of our Bible sometimes called the Old Testament. There are many reasons for this, not the least being that calling it “old” suggests that the Christian Testament, called “new,” replaces it, Christianity therefore superseding Judaism. This is theologically problematic, insulting to followers of Rabbinic Judaism, and has contributed to centuries of antisemitism. 

Calling it the Hebrew Bible is more accurate, since most though not all of the texts were composed in that ancient language, not to be confused with Modern Hebrew. 

I sometimes refer to it as the Tanakh, using the Jewish designation for the texts, though Christians organize the texts quite differently. Jewish Bible seems most neutral, though what we think of as Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, doesn’t develop until several decades after the execution of Jesus.

At least references to the first portion of this Bible are pretty clear. The Torah, also referred to as the Pentateuch, is the heart of Judaism, both pre-Rabbinic and modern.

Though there are myths and legends of the time before King Saul, the overwhelming majority of the text focuses on a period of about eight hundred years, from the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to the reconstruction of the walls and the Temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Captivity. The Persians defeated the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., sending the captives home. This moment is captured in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. 

There are additions to the Jewish Bible after this date, but they are mostly presented as earlier texts. For example, the Book of Daniel claims to be a work from the Captivity, but is actually written more than three centuries later.

Today’s reading from the Jewish Bible is unique in several ways. 

First, it represents events during a period that is barely mentioned, that almost 350 years between the reconstruction of the Temple and the Maccabean Revolt of 167 B.C.E. 

Second, the events do not happen among the main body of the Jewish people, who are understood to have returned to Canaan, but instead take place in the diaspora, people who, due to dislocation or immigration, live among other cultures. In this case, the story of Esther takes place in Persia a generation or two after the Persians liberated the Jews. 

Third, and the real clincher, is that the Book of Esther does not have a single mention of God, nor does it contain any typical Jewish themes like Law or justice.

Continue reading “29 September 2024: Hanging Haman”

James 3:13 – 4:8 

Hey! Hey Hey! That’s what I say.

For younger folks, well if you know, you know. For older worshipers, you had to expect me to go there.

But let’s not start with the Rolling Stones. Let’s start with another kind of quaking and shaking.

Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Jordan Kisner on the last two Shakers. You may have read it. 

Brother Arnold, at 67 years old, is still active in the administration of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, while Sister June, 86, has withdrawn from public life.

As many as 4000 individuals might have belonged to the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the formal name of the movement, around the mid-19th century. They started as an offshoot of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. They were called Shaking Quaker, hence the name.

While the story of both movements is fascinating, as are the theological resonances with our own Social Gospel tradition, it may not have been particularly strategic for the Shakers to embrace celibacy, making it hard to recruit. Needless to say, no one was really born a Shaker, though they historically took in foundlings.

Today, the Shakers are best known for two things other than slowly going extinct. Hard work and craft were at the center of their faith practice, and they produced remarkable furniture and architecture known for simplicity and utility. And every musician and most church folks know a Shaker tune, Simple Gifts, which was adapted by Aaron Copeland for the score of the Martha Graham ballet “Appalachian Spring.” 

Simplicity and hard work seem like pretty good values these days, when bitter envy and selfish ambition, the topic of our reading from the letter attributed to James the Lesser, seem like the norm, and in some circles are even lauded. So let us once again spend some time on fear, desire, and that pervasive sense of worthlessness that eats at so many souls.

Continue reading “22 September 2024: Can’t Get No”

Epistle Traditionally Attributed to James the Lesser 3:1-12

The New York Times recently published an article on the use of gestures by apes. The behavior was first observed by Jane Goodall in the 1960’s. Apes turn out to have more than 80 meaningful gestures, most common across species, like reaching out when they want something, or signaling the young to climb up on the mother’s back. The earliest theories fell in line with bad science and bad theology, the idea that this was not true communication, but was instead habit or genetics. To me this felt like the now discredited idea that animals could not have empathy or anything resembling emotions. 

Last month, a trio of researchers introduced a new theory on the origin of these gestures. While not really addressing the issue of empathy and emotion, they acknowledge that apes have an innate ability we might consider communication, and that the development of common gestures across species is based on a shared physiology. It is a sort of ASL, in this case Ape Sign Language.

Helen Keller developed a set of about 60 meaningful gestures or signs during her childhood, though there can be little doubt that empathy and emotion were part of that landscape. Most of us know her story. Rendered deaf and blind as a small child by what doctors today believe was meningitis, she found the right teacher and companion in Anne Sullivan, and would go on to graduate from Radcliffe, which was then the women’s college at Harvard. She had a long career as a writer and public intellectual, and even has a connection of sorts to the Park Church, for she was a founding member of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, co-founded by Crystal Eastman, and now known as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Scientists have come to believe that plants communicate in a way, though few have suggested what we think of as thought and will. Animals communicate, send alarms when a predator approaches, dance off directions to a field of clover. Communication is critical for life in any collective, in a pack or a herd or a small city. And because humans are walking repositories of accumulated knowledge, because we are only human as we are in relation to other humans, communication is absolutely critical. First language, and then writing, allowed us to collect collective interest on the discoveries of earlier generations. The most radical libertarian holed up with an AR-15 in the woods did not invent that AR-15 or for that matter go from newborn to lunatic without a lot of communication, help, and socialization along the way.

We read from the Letter traditionally attributed to James this week, as we did last week. The James in question is James the brother of Jesus, not James the disciple. The disciple is sometimes called “the Greater” while the brother is identified as “the Lesser” or sometimes “James the Just.” Neither actually wrote the letter. 

It does not appear in a document we call the “Muratorian Canon,” the earliest known list of Christian Testament books, dated to the latter half of the Second Century. The first reference to the Epistle of James and the earliest known manuscripts of it are from the Third Century.

The text’s unknown authors provide some guidance on communications to the early church, for where two or more are gathered in Christ’s name, there Christ is also. Where three or more are gathered in Christ’s name, the first two are talking about the third. 

Gossip is so incredibly human, and can be so incredibly toxic. “Haitian immigrants are killing and eating pets.” This is not actually happening, but it has gone from gossip to truth in the minds of some because it has been amplified by political candidates and spread on social media by racists who want us to believe all brown-skinned immigrants are a threat, even when they are legal, as is the case in Springfield.

When a network de-platforms someone for hate speech, we hear immediate cries about the First Amendment by people who do not understand the First Amendment, which only applies to government restrictions on speech. The Constitution does not protect Rosanne Barr’s right to use network television to spew lies and hate.

Communication styles trip us up almost as often as communicated content. We think someone who rarely speaks is very wise or incredibly dumb. Internal processors get steam-rolled by verbal processors, while verbal processors get lambasted for provisional steps in the thought processes they often and maybe unwisely share aloud.

So I want to spend a few minutes talking about talking, communicating about communication, speaking about speaking, with all of the attached irony. I mean, one of the best things about being a “childless dog gentleman” is that Oscar never talks back, but congregants, constituents, and random social media users all do. I am thankful that at least I don’t have the stress of being in a P.T.A. or homeowners association!

Continue reading “15 September 2024 “This Is A Sign””

James 2:1—17

The first three books in the Christian Testament are known as the “synoptic gospels,” gospel in that they proclaim the good news about the life and ministry of Jesus, synoptic in that they tell that story in roughly the same way. 

This is a little misleading. For one thing, Luke wrote a single work which was broken into two parts and separated in the Biblical canon, so that we have Luke’s gospel, then the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, then Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Luke-Acts is meant to be one work, and should be read that way. 

Also, only Matthew and Luke have Nativity narratives, and they are wildly different, despite what we remember from centuries of one mashed-up version in our children’s pageants. 

Finally, the authors of Matthew are busy trying to turn Jesus into a new Moses, a covenant maker, so they re-arrange some things, re-locate others, and have that whole bit about dead toddlers and the flight to Egypt. 

So maybe we should call the three the “sort of” synoptic gospels.

Scholars agree that both Matthew and Luke draw on Mark as a source. They also both use a source we have lost, one that we call Q after the German word for “source.” We know this because both gospels contain parallel text not contained in Mark. 

Maybe one day we’ll dig up a copy of Q, something that really happened when the Gospel According to Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

Mark does not claim to be a firsthand witness to the life and ministry of Jesus. There is a remarkable third century reference to a second century document which claims Mark was a follower of Peter after Jesus was murdered. In the same way, Luke is writing as a historian, and is associated with Paul, so he also does not claim to have witnessed the ministry of Jesus.

But the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew is represented as a firsthand account. The Matthew of the title is Matthew the tax collector who becomes a disciple. On the plus side, as a tax collector he was likely one of the few disciples who was literate. On the negative side, why would someone who was actually there need to draw on Mark, a secondary source? Even if we throw out the consensus on Q, assuming that Luke is using Matthew as a source, we still haven’t solved the problem of Mark.

The answer is simple. The Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew was not written by Matthew, former tax collector and disciple of Jesus. It is a pseudographic work, which is to say a work attributed to someone who did not actually write it. 

This was a common practice in ancient times, before copyright, before journalism, before history was transformed from communal story telling to academic discipline. 

Moses did not write the Torah. Much of the Book of Isaiah was written long after Isaiah Bin Amoz was dead. Several of the letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul.

Most of you know this, but it bears repeating. Biblical texts were written, redacted, and accepted into the canon in very specific historic contexts and those contexts matter. 

This morning, we are going to wrestle with how the failure to place scripture in context has influenced Protestant Christianity, and how we might move beyond a pernicious false binary.

Continue reading “8 September 2024: Faith Works”

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18

Ephesians 6:10-20

SERMON “Saturday Mornings”

Maybe I was already a little gay boy, who knows? I don’t remember anything wrong with the Saturday morning cartoon “The Herculoids,” which included a blond boy in a loin cloth, but apparently it was too violent, as were other programs like “Space Ghost.” Concerned parents organized a campaign, as they do, and Saturday Morning Television got a complete makeover in 1969. 

Be careful what you ask for. 

Among the new offerings was “H.R. Pufnstuf,” a live action show with oversized puppets that made you wonder exactly what stuff was being puffed. 

One cartoon premiered that went on to become a media franchise and a part of popular culture. “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” featured four teenage detectives and their Great Dane, Scooby Doo. The team would roll into town in their psychedelic van, the Mystery Machine, to solve cases involving swamp monsters and ghosts and zombies and the like. The mysterious monsters almost always turned out to be a human bad guy in disguise.

In the original series, the four teens were all white. In the most recent reboot, an adult animated series that launched a year and a half ago on HBO Max, Fred Jones remains the white high school jock stereotype, but the Shaggy character become Norville Rogers, who is African American, Daphne Blake is an East Asian-American, and Velma Dinkley, the star of the new series, is South Asian-American and bisexual. Scooby is nowhere to be seen, nor were the fans. Let’s just say it was not a hit.

Paul proclaims a mystery in today’s reading from the letter traditionally attributed to him and assigned to the church at Ephesus, buried under a lot of militaristic imagery. But there is no pulling off the mask moment here, and even if there was, I’m not sure Paul’s “mystery of the gospel” sometime around 55 C.E. would be our mystery of the gospel today. After all, Paul interpreted Jesus through the lens of the Temple and a transactional understanding of God in a pre-scientific age. There are some Christian communions that are still transactional, considering transactions like communion to contain mysterious transformations of bread into flesh, but that isn’t really our gig. Like the four kids and a canine in the original Scooby-Doo, we tend to pull off the mask to find just another human. And though there are some Christians that cling to the pre-scientific, We science around here.

What is the mystery of the gospel that Paul rightly identifies in other texts as foolishness to non-believers? If not popes and purgatory, what is it that we proclaim? 

Let’s start with a sort of anthropology, “anthro” itself tipping our hand, as it means human. Orthodoxy insists that humans are a unique order, distinct and apart from all other living beings in this context we know, this blue-green planet circling a star. Science contradicts this, telling us that we are not apart from our context, and our only distinction is being the current state in the evolution of one trajectory of bipedal apes. 

Still, Homo Sapiens makes meaning in a way we have not yet witnessed in other species, and transmits meaning to one another. This library of human knowledge continues to grow, though at times we must discard volumes and entire sections, and we still have the problem of people ending up in the wrong section, deep in horror fantasy when they think they are in non-fiction.

Our ancestors faced the great mysteries and created a placeholder they called God. In and of itself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Many of us still use the word God to describe the something instead of nothing, the ways in which chaos becomes complexity and complexity creates beauty and even the fact that we can encounter something and assign it the term beauty.

But we are finite and our context is finite, so we fit God into human categories, assign personhood to that placeholder. This is useful as long as we don’t confuse the placeholder with the reality. 

When the strongest and most brutal rose to the top of human tribes, God was the strongest and most brutal among many gods. When societies became complex enough that there was a new need for law and order, God became the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner. And if God was justice, then disaster must be just, punishment well-deserved, nations destroyed as divine will, lives destroyed as divine will, even unto the seventh generation, as the not-always-good book says.

Earlier prophets laid the ground work for the gospel’s radical re-envisioning of God. The Israelite and Judahite prophets still conceptualized God as human, but maybe a little transactional. Prophets like Hosea began to imagine God as a scorned but patient lover. 

Jesus moved God even further from that first conception of divine co-dependence, even from that second conception of divine judgement, for while judgment remains, grace abounds. It is never too late to be forgiven. Resurrection isn’t an Easter morning magic trick. It is an every day occurrence, as people forgive themselves, get clean and sober, embrace a gift long suppressed, break free from the prison of social constructs of gender and sexuality, and sometimes just plain old get out of prison. 

We are finite, fragile, fickle, and often fearful. This naturally leads to a sort of defensiveness, a bunker mentality, hoarding of more than we need. Being born-again has been co-opted by toxic forms of Christianity, but it is the heart of our faith, that your tomorrow need not be determined by your yesterday. 

There may be constraints on your body. There are constraints on your body. Context matters. A kid in Gaza right now is probably not going to take up ski jumping. It is miracle enough if that kid manages to survive the genocidal maniacs on all sides of that war.

Disease and tragedy are realities. But your soul, your spirit, has a reset button. You can choose to live love any time. Your internal universe is yours.

The gospel is exactly the opposite of human smallness. Be not afraid. Go. Serve. Be bigger than you imagine you are, more expansive than you are now, forgiving and loving, and know that the reward for this outwardness will be greater than whatever we put into it, greater than the sacrifices we make, for what we will find is our true selves. 

Lizards are lovely, but you are not called to be a lizard and that tiny little primal part of your brain should not be driving the bus…

So the mystery is not so much mystery as it is paradox, is cosmic reversal, is call to resist walling ourselves in, choosing instead to go out. 

Love your neighbor. Who is my neighbor? Everyone.

Feed, heal, and clothe the sacred, for the sacred is the vulnerable and oppressed. 

Glorify God always, pray always, by choosing to see the miracle, the quantum entanglement and weirdness and mysterious beauty. 

Be still and know God.

Paul proclaims the mystery and paradox of our faith from his location, at the brutal intersection of the Pharisaic movement in Pre-rabbinic Judaism and the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Roman Empire two thousand years ago. The Christianity we have received contains Neo-Platonism and Romanticism and a hundred other flavors, many still detectable to the discerning palate.

We are called to proclaim the mystery/paradox of our faith from our location, as participants in a socio-economic system we seek to unwind, in brutal late stage neo-liberal capitalism at the tail end of settler-colonialism and genocide, in a world where toxic patriarchy is still a noxious weed, reduced but not yet eradicated.

But hey, we’re getting there. The arc of the universe could bend toward justice a little bit faster, hopefully before we destroy the planet.

Paul’s mystery of the gospel was his mystery of the gospel, and our mystery of the gospel is ours. That on the whole, the something instead of nothing is good, that the source of that something that includes us is good, that as small as our individual lives may be, they are amazing, and that in the story of Jesus, we learn a way of living in the world that makes the most good of what we have been given, learn a way to love and serve that is our best selves.

We’re not going to war. We are calling people from war. Put on the safety vest of love. Don the hardhat of humility. Pick up the shovel of service. Out, out into the streets, out into the mysterious universe. Scooby-Dooby-Do.

Amen.

Psalm 111
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14

Okay, let’s start with the de-construction, because we are the sort of people that can handle a little complexity and messiness.

Most folks have two, maybe three things in their memory bank about King Solomon. First, and foremost is the story of the two women claiming the same infant. Second is that God asked Solomon what he wanted, and he chose wisdom. Third is that he was responsible for construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem.

But if you were paying attention to the verse numbers in our reading, you might wonder what we skipped. And what we skipped was a bloodbath. 

Solomon slaughtered everyone who might challenge him for the throne or support a challenger, including an older brother. He even murdered folks who had offended his father, but that his father had pledged to spare. Joab, a general mentioned in last week’s reading, seeks sanctuary in the tent where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, for the temple hadn’t been built yet. Solomon orders hims executed right there next to the altar.

This is the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor. The Lectionary, the rotation of readings shared by many churches, curates scripture. I am often more interested in the bits that are left out.

And as you know, I think the carefully curated Children’s Bible version of Christianity is of little use to us as we do not live in a Children’s Bible world. 

Solomon did some good things. 

Solomon did some bad things. 

There are construction projects, several murders, and real housewives, so basically a Tuesday in New Jersey.

Continue reading “18 August 2024: Cutting Room Floor”