Constructive Faith

Mark 13:1-8

When I arrived at the Park Church a little over three years ago, I was surprised to see Roger Williams and Albert Schweitzer enshrined in the stained glass. They are not normally among the dead white guys in the gallery of dead white guys you’ll find in every church in the Congregationalist tradition. 

I mean, Williams was a leading Baptist, and the Baptist Church was across the street! And Schweitzer played an important role in how United Church of Christ pastors think about Jesus, but few outside of the academy would know that. 

Then I was told that while he was an important religious thinker and a Nobel Peace Laureate, Schweitzer was there for his contributions to music. Which makes sense given Bach on the opposite side of the sanctuary. Still, you’re going to hear about the Jesus part, not the music part, because I am definitely a pastor and definitely not a musician.

Schweitzer was an early leader in what is sometimes called “the quest for the historical Jesus.” New discoveries have been made since that quest started over a century ago, new ways of thinking including postmodernism have risen to prominence, but the fundamental question has remained the same. If we strip away all of the later theology and dogma, who was the real man who led a religious reform movement in Galilee and eventually died in Jerusalem?

This is difficult because we have no first hand accounts of Jesus, and only two brief mentions of him outside of Christians texts, one in “The Antiquities of the Jews” written by Josephus in 94 C.E., and one in “Annals” by the Roman senator and historian Tacitus around 116 C.E. Neither has much detail, and Josephus is notoriously unreliable, an ancient and self-serving turncoat. And we know how unreliable turncoats are, people who criticize demagogues one moment and praise them the next 

The gospels themselves were also written decades after the execution of Jesus. What we think is the earliest of the four canonical gospels, the Gospel According to Mark, may have been written around 70 C.E., and tradition tells us the author was a follower of Peter, writing down the stories with no certainty about the chronology, and possibly little knowledge of the geography. 

Since Mark serves as a source for Luke and the unknown authors of Matthew, any errors in that text are likely duplicated in the other two. And that is before you add on decades and eventually centuries of theological interpretation, in which people see in scripture what they have been told they will see in scripture, whether it is actually there or not, or translate the ancient languages based on what they want them to mean.

When Mark was written might matter, especially in regard to today’s text. In 66 C.E., Jews rebelled against Rome. This was the third time Jerusalem was the center of a violent rebellion against an occupying power. The first, against Babylon, was a disaster, resulting in the destruction of the city and Temple and the period we call the Babylonian Captivity.

The sequel, a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire, resulted in a surprising victory, though the rural outsiders who took over as high priests and kings proved corrupt and inept, and their independent Jewish state would soon fail, for nations don’t always survive their bad rulers.

This third installment was much like the first, no victory, not even in the short-term. Jewish factions kept bickering among themselves, failing to focus on Rome, the common enemy. They even managed to burn their own food supply in a besieged Jerusalem. In 70 C.E., the city fell yet again, the Temple once again destroyed, never to be rebuilt.

It is possible that Jesus did predict this second destruction of the Temple. After all, there was precedent, and the situation was at a breaking point. In the years after the execution of Jesus, the region suffered severe drought, reported in both the Christian Testament and the historical record. That was one of the sparks that lit the conflagration, along with greed in an unjust economic system and unhinged leaders in Rome.

Continue reading “17 November 2024: The Sequel”

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

Six centuries ago, if you attended a church service in Europe, the rites were in a language you did not understand. Much of it occurred with the officiant’s back to you. And there were no pews, which explains the short sermons. 

Don’t get any ideas.

If you knew the Bible at all, it was from a sort of street religion of mystery plays and festivals. 

Then, everything changed. First came Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press. Not that the average serf was out there buying a Bible, but the texts were more widely available and no longer strictly under church control. 

Then came Erasmus. If Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli were the parents of the Reformation, Erasmus was the grandparent, a Catholic priest and Dutch humanist who, among other things, encouraged better translations of scripture. Working from the oldest manuscripts in the original languages, he laid the foundation for what is today called the “textus receptus,” the received text, though even that foundational work notes the constant disagreement between the oldest biblical manuscripts. There is no such thing as “the Bible,” just Bibles, plural.

Spin this out a bit, and it did spin out quite a bit, and you end up with a paradox at the heart of the Protestant faith. On the one hand, we want and claim direct access to scripture, not scripture mediated through popes and priests. 

The most extreme expression of this is the idea that any person should be able to open the Bible as translated into their own language and interpret it properly.

At the other pole of the paradox, you have the idea that scripture is worthy of our study, and that it does require study. And though some lay people buy commentaries and study the text on their own, it often falls on what my alma mater calls “learned clergy” to place scripture in context.

Today’s reading from the Book of Ruth offers a little at both edges of this paradox. On the most basic level, the Book of Ruth is the story of widows, often vulnerable in the ancient Near East, and of a fidelity shown across traditional tribal lines. On the other hand, there is a bit of “if you know, you know” going on, because the ancients often used coded language in exactly the same way we do today, so when Ruth uncovers the feet of Boaz… well let’s just say, that’s not a foot. 

Though before you panic, when Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, they really are feet. 

Continue reading “Not A Foot: 10 November 2024”

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”