Constructive Faith

Matthew 18:15-20
Ezekiel 33:7-11

In August 2023, an emaciated twelve year-old boy with duct tape around his extremities and deep woulds from rope restraints knocked on a stranger’s door in Ivins, Utah and asked for help. Police would discover his ten year-old sister in the home from which the boy escaped, and two days later arrested the homeowner, Jodi Hildebrandt, and the children’s mother, Ruby Franke. The two women were business partners and parenting “influencers” on social media, though Hildebrandt had been engaged in therapeutic malpractice and cult-like control of client couples for years before she cultivated Franke as an acolyte.

You may have seen the story on the news, on one of several documentaries, or on the Lifetime movie “Mormon Mom Gone Wrong,” where Heather Locklear played Hildebrandt. Though both women were convicted on multiple charges, Utah’s system of indeterminate sentencing means they could be out in as little as four years or serve as many as thirty.

Hildebrandt and Franke believed their behavior was discipline, not child abuse, and was justified by their faith. 

In fact, tough love, as you might label it, actually became a faith of sorts in the 1970’s and ‘80’s when the teen drug rehabilitation program Synanon incorporated as a tax-exempt religion. Synanon was really the pioneer in a for-profit troubled teen industry that started with drug abuse treatment, but grew to take in rebellious teens scapegoated in the satanic panic at the end of the last century, and the conversion therapy concentration camps of this century, camps that still terrorize LGBTQ+ youths, driving many to suicide.

Troubled teen wilderness programs are particularly notorious for deaths, though almost all companies in this industry engage in forms of confinement and abuse that would be criminal if the victims were adults.

There is a long history of failed attempts to regulate reckless youth, from Shakespeare’s fictional Romeo and Juliet to Scared Straight, a program that took teens and pre-teens into prisons, often with broadcast rights included. Let’s not forget the school-based DARE programs that were so incredibly effective in glorifying drug use and teaching children exactly how those drugs were to be used, a failed program that was intended to stigmatize and frighten.

There is another end of the spectrum of course, a cruelty that comes from a lack of discipline, that comes from not setting boundaries, from creating a sense of entitlement that is going to meet a harsh reality with the arrival of adulthood, if those pampered and protected kids make it that far.

Every generation since before Jesus, including Jesus, and to this very day, bemoans the generations that follow. 

Continue reading “Tough Love: 6 September 2026”

Exodus 3:1-15

We tend to lose the personality of historic figures as we reduce them to stereotypes, to either villain or hero. Few discuss the playfulness of the Rev. Dr. King, though I have been blessed to meet some of his colleagues in the prophetic ministry of the Civil Rights movement and have heard talk of pillow fights and laughter, very human ways of dealing with the incredible stress and daily fear.

In the same way, we tend to celebrate his loftiest speech and ignore the snarky, but that was there too, on occasion. For example, in 1967 the Rev. Dr. King said:

“A few theologians are trying to say that God is dead. And I’ve been asking them about it because it disturbs me to know that God died and I didn’t have a chance to attend the funeral. They haven’t been able to tell me yet the date of his death. They haven’t been able to tell me yet who the coroner was that pronounced him dead.”

King was responding to a theological movement that was quite old, but first took modern form with the publication of Syracuse University professor Gabriel Vahanian’s book “The Death of God” in 1961. The idea moved from the academy to popular consciousness when an April 1966 cover of Time Magazine asked “Is God Dead?,” white letters on a plain black background.

This question, asked by theologians, was provoked by rapid secularization, the loss of religion as a central organizing principle of life for most Americans. We have a history of peaks of religious fervor and participation, periods known as Great Awakenings, and though few historians saw it at the time, the period after the Second World War was one such period, the result of an anti-communist hysteria and the role of the church as a “third good place” for women as men returned to traditional roles in the workforce.

Two decades later, as so many Americans came to question the anti-communist war we were losing in Vietnam, that fervor had cooled. It would peak again by the end of the Twentieth Century with the rise of the mega-church, the perfect marriage of mass media and religious consumerism, Godliness measured in knick-knacks and cheap jewelry, ironically manufactured in Communist China.

Continue reading “Lost in Translation: 30 August 2026”

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8

At the start of this century, the World Health Organization declared measles eliminated in the United States.

This April, public health officials declared an end to a six-month long measles outbreak in South Carolina with 997 confirmed cases. The United States is now averaging more than 300 confirmed cases of measles a month. A case was confirmed in neighboring Tioga County on Thursday. So, you know, maybe not so much eliminated.

The anti-vaccination movement as we know it today didn’t originate in the United States. It started with Richard Barr, a British lawyer looking to gin-up a class action lawsuit. He hired a scientist named Andrew Wakefield, who then became the lead author on a fraudulent research paper published in “The Lancet,” a highly respected British medical journal. The study had only twelve subjects, but was emphatic in its claim that the measles vaccine caused colitis, and colitis caused autism.

Even if the sample size had been adequate and random, and it was not, even if Wakefield’s conflict of interest had been disclosed, and it was not, it still turned out on investigation that Wakefield had faked much of the data. The paper was eventually fully-retracted, and the organization that licenses medical practitioners in Britain found that Wakefield both violated scientific ethics and medically abused the twelve developmentally disabled children in the study.

I love the internet. I hate the internet. And it is absolutely true that nothing dies on the internet, though lots of things die because of the internet.

The fraudulent claim that the measles vaccine causes autism has metastasized, becoming hundreds of other false claims about all sorts of vaccines. Polio vaccination teams are routinely murdered in Pakistan, one of three countries that harbors the disease like the fugitive serial killer that it is. 

Little lies can become big sins, and people die as a result.

This is all relevant, of course, timely with Anthony Fauci being scapegoated by Trump and his allies in Congress, by RFK Jr. and the anti-vaxxer lunatic fringe.

Just this week, a major study that fueled skepticism of the Covid-19 vaccine was retracted. One of the key authors of that retracted paper, Dutch pediatric oncologist Saskia Mostert, testified before a Congressional committee in June as part of the current witch hunt.

Physician and global health scientist Peter Hotez estimates that during the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine misinformation and hesitancy was responsible for more than 200,000 deaths in the United States alone.

But measles also connects with a quote related to the core topic of our reading from Isaiah and of this sermon. In a 1929 profile in the Saturday Evening Post, Albert Einstein said:

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

Continue reading “The Measles of (Hu)mankind: 16 August 2026”

Genesis 37:3, 12-28

In 2002, the air was leaking out of the DotCom bubble, and we were embarking on two disastrous wars of misdirected vengeance that would destroy countless lives and further fan the flames of terrorism around the globe. In the anxiety of our post-9/11 culture, many searched for meaning, and Rick Warren, pastor of a conservative megachurch in California was willing to offer it. His book, “The Purpose Driven Life,” would sit on the New York Times bestseller list for 90 weeks, and sell 32 million copies over the next ten years.

The premise of the book is simple. In fact, the book opens with the words “It’s not about you…” Warren’s theology is that God put you, as in you individually, on earth with a purpose. Your job, according to Warren, is to figure out what that purpose is, then to live it, to have a purpose-driven life.

This is the ultimate micro-managing god, not content to give life at large a purpose or to give a species a purpose or even to give a specially-chosen people a purpose, but to have a purpose for each individual human life. There is no mention of the purpose of the woodchuck that breaks into my yard like a stunt double from Mission Impossible, though I am convinced his, or maybe her, purpose is to destroy my cucumbers. This is anthro-centric theology, with no real attention to the rest of the interdependent web of creation.

You will not be surprised to know that I find this claim of individual divine purpose for humans theologically untenable.

This is the sort of god who heals Sally because enough people prayed for her, who let’s a gunman slaughter children in a school because he wants new angels, which is crazy even in that crazy system since angels are not dead children. This god, if such a god existed, would bear responsibility for horrors, global and personal, would be arbitrary and capricious, and not worthy of our worship.

And even if we were to concede all of these points and worship this malignant and omnipotent being, we’d still face the reality that divine purpose erases individual freedom, falling into a trap much like predestination. No wonder adherents of this form of the Fundamentalist heresy align so easily with fascist politicians. Their god is a Fascist.

Continue reading “You May Say I’m a Dreamer: 9 August 2026”

Isaiah 55:1-5
Genesis 32:22-31

Common lectionaries were one of the last outcomes of 20th century ecumenism, a half century more or less when Christians sought unity rather than division. Our United Church of Christ, and similar denominations in other countries, were also an expression of that commitment.

The Revised Common Lectionary, which I and many other UCC pastors use in worship planning, was the third iteration of this schedule of readings, hence the name “Revised.” It follows the traditional liturgical seasons of Advent/Christmastide and Lent/Eastertide, then fills in ordinary time with a three-year cycle of texts intended to balance sequential and thematic reading. It is not always successful, especially when a pastor is faced with more readings than they intend to use, as is the case this morning. So we arrive at two seemingly dissimilar readings, one from Genesis and one from Deutero-Isaiah.

Let us begin with Genesis, which seems appropriate all things considered.

Genesis is a patchwork of at least two separate traditions, along with additions from the editors who combined the texts, and a couple of centuries of later redactors with different agendas. The result is a book with duplications, contradictions, and a disjointed narrative.

Today, we find ourselves in the middle of the story of Jacob, the third great patriarch of the Jewish faith after his grandfather, Abraham, and his father, Isaac. It is an episode in which Jacob wrestles with God who, in this text, is in the form of a man. Because this comes from what we know of as the Elohim source, God is never called Yahweh, as that name remains unknown to the Jewish people until Moses encounters the burning bush.

This is a story that is meant to explain, in this case the origin of the name of the nation. It is a little bit of myth dropped into a larger framing narrative about blessing and resources.

Jacob is a trickster, an archetype that occurs in many other religious traditions, including the broad category we call “indigenous” religion, which snobbishly means anything not from Eurasia.

Jacob’s mother prefers him over the first-born twin Esau, a burly redhead, and conspires to help Jacob steal his brother’s rightful blessing as the eldest. Or maybe Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils. Doesn’t matter. This is all about scarcity.

Esau promises to kill Jacob in revenge as soon as their father dies, so his mother sends Jacob away to the house of her brother, Jacob’s uncle Laban. There, he falls in love with his cousin, and asks for her hand in marriage in exchange for seven years of labor. His uncle agrees, but on the wedding night, swaps out his older daughter Leah. The trickster is tricked, and there is an agreement that he can marry his intended, Rachel, in exchange for seven more years of labor.

By the time we get to the God-wrestling story, Jacob has fathered eleven children by his two wives and their two handmaidens, which is to say slaves. He would eventually have at least twelve sons who will nominally become the twelve tribes of Israel. There is also one named daughter.

Having completed fourteen years of service and accumulated his own wealth in flocks and servants, Jacob is returning to Canaan, and this wrestling with God is inserted pretty randomly in the middle of yet another conflict between brothers, the third in Genesis to this point. In this case, the brothers are reconciled, and both become prosperous. The scarcity that drove the conflict was never real, and no one is murdered, like Abel, or cast out, like Ishmael. We will see the same pattern again with Jacob’s youngest son, Joseph with his coat of many colors, betrayed by his brothers and sold off into slavery, only to reconcile with his brothers and save their people, another tale of scarcity as famine drives the Jews to seek relief in Egypt. But that is a story for another day.

If this story is about scarcity, birthright, heirs, divine blessing, all in short supply, our reading from Isaiah promises the exact opposite.

Continue reading “The Pursuit of Happiness”

1 Kings 3:5-12

Today, even with DNA testing, it might be complicated by surrogacy and in vitro fertilization, no longer just birth mothers and adopted mothers but also womb mothers and egg mothers. And even if a court could sort it all out, there would be the four-part Netflix special, Dateline or 20/20, as well as thousands of YouTube videos and Instragram posts offering every conceivable conspiracy theory and even a few that are inconceivable, a word that may not mean what you think it means. This is Jerry Springer’s world. We just live in it.

None of that technology was available when King Solomon was confronted with two mothers, when he ordered that a baby be sliced in two, split evenly between the two claimants.

It is the tale that is meant to illustrate Solomon’s great wisdom, a tale many of us heard as children ourselves, not just a tale of wisdom, but a macabre depiction of deception, albeit without any of the critical cultural context.

Spoiler: the baby is not split in two. Solomon discerns that the real mother is the one who prefers that the baby live, even if in the care of a child abductor.

Our reading today precedes that classic illustration of the wisdom of Solomon. It reveals the source of that great wisdom, when God offers the newly crowned king a boon, like a genie from a lamp, but offering only one solitary wish.

We are told the things Solomon might have requested, but does not: longevity, wealth, the death of his enemies. What Solomon does request and receive is “an understanding mind” and the ability “to discern between good and evil,” that he might better govern the people of Israel.

As is so often the case, the biblical tale of Solomon is more complicated than we care to remember, and undermines itself. He is born of a union that begins with rape and murder. His mother is one of at least eight wives of King David, with more than a dozen sons senior to Solomon. More rape, more murder, a son leading an attempted coup d’etat, a son attempting to seize the throne before David is even dead, and the maneuvering of Nathan and Bathsheba to put Solomon on the throne, then his reign begins with an ancient equivalent of the Night of Long Knives, when anyone who might threaten Solomon’s power is murdered.

Which explains why he didn’t wish for the death of his enemies, since there are none left.

Coercion and murder are not actually an auspicious beginning for a reign characterized by great wisdom.

Historically, Solomon would continue the expansion of the kingdom that David had created, and Israel would know a time of economic prosperity. He would build the first great Temple on Mount Zion. But Solomon’s reputation would come under attack by later religious reformers. He was accused of breaking covenant with Yahweh by marrying foreign wives who brought worship of other gods into the royal household, though he appears to have done so for diplomatic reasons. His son and successor, Rehoboam, was a man of bad character who would fail to keep the kingdom whole. The ten northern tribes broke off and declared their independence, setting in motion a decline that would end centuries later with the destruction of Jerusalem.

But that is the biblical history, and we are interested in the biblical story, for the story is meant to teach us something about God and about ourselves. And it turns out that while the story of the two mothers gives us justice, Solomon choosing the right mother, this passage also provides a model for the other two pillars of a faithful life.

Continue reading “Sin-icism: 26 July 2026”

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

There is this one version of Christian history where Jesus comes to establish a new religion, replacing the covenant with the Jews with a New Testament with the Gentiles, is executed as a divine plan to pay off a debt of honor to God the Father, and leaves Peter in charge after he, Jesus, is resurrected and bodily ascends into heaven, which is up. Well, at least up from Jerusalem.

In that story, Peter ends up in Rome, and ultimate earthly authority in matters of the only true faith has been passed down to Peter’s successors generation after generation for almost two thousand years.

In reality, papal infallibility was not the dogma of the Roman communion until the First Vatican Council issued “Pastor aeternus” in 1870. Yet, even in that tradition of authority, the work of an ecumenical council takes precedence over the declarations of a pope, as made clear by the fact that it was an ecumenical council that decided on papal infallibility.

There has only been one Catholic ecumenical council since 1870, the last century’s Vatican II, which was considered to have been the 21st such gathering. The breakaway Society of St. Pius X, which rejects the results of Vatican II, has once again faced a wave of excommunications in recent weeks, apostates in the eyes of Rome.

In most expressions of our Protestant faith, there has been no direct revelation, no direct infallible word from God, since John of Patmos recorded his fever-dream apocalypse on Patmos in the late First Century, and many of us find even that rather suspect. 

Protestants do generally accept the work of pre-Reformation ecumenical councils, theological battles royale which gave us the orthodox definitions of things like the Trinity and the nature of Christ.

Papal infallibility may not work for Protestants, but deliberative bodies are okay. In fact, Protestantism is a product of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment leaned into the newly rediscovered ancient Greek practice of democracy.

One of the most radical expressions of faithful democracy, faithful direct democracy, is Congregationalism, and as I shared two weeks ago, many of our nation’s founders were Congregationalists.

The church often takes on the forms of the world, the monarchical church in the Middle Ages, the democratic church in the Enlightenment, and the corporate church today. But if we take the Acts of the Apostles seriously, early Christians did not, in fact, defer exclusively to Peter. They made decisions together.

Continue reading “Not Quantum : 19 July 2026”

Isaiah 55:10-13

You would think that if your Mama co-wrote Elvis Presley’s first number one hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” you’d go into some other profession, given that impossibly high bar. But Hoyt Axton, in addition to a successful career as an actor, was a respectable singer-songwriter.

His greatest songwriting credit appeared on Three Dog Night’s 1970 album, “Naturally.” Sometimes known by the opening line, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” it is properly titled “Joy to the World.” It promised “joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea. Joy to you and me.” It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, making Hoyt Axton and his mother Mae the first mother and son to write number one hits, albeit a generation apart. 

Folks could use some joy in 1970. The multiple crises of 1968, including the Tet Offensive, the assassination of King, the chaos of a presidential race that included the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, these were all still very fresh. Young men were still being drafted for a war we were losing, and just months before the album came out, the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State University, killing four people.

The single release of “Joy to the World” went gold, and the song was nominated for a Grammy. It didn’t fix the world. The Pentagon Papers were about to come out, and Watergate was just around the corner. But a little joy, a little hope, were good. It should come as no surprise that John Lennon’s “Imagine” was a top hit that same year.

They needed a little joy, a little hope, in the 6th Century Before the Common Era, the context that gave us today’s reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. It was not written by Isaiah, the original son of Amoz, long dead at the point. It wasn’t even written in the same country. So let’s wrestle a bit with where they were and what it meant.

The Jewish people understood themselves to be a chosen people, their kingdom and their king recipients of a divine promise. But they had not been truly independent for a while, caught between shifting regional powers. Then came the armies of Babylon, their own wishy-washy king, and utter defeat. Jerusalem lay in ruins, the Temple of Solomon and the city walls destroyed.

Skilled craftsmen and the elite had been hauled off in a couple of deportations to Babylon, and while they were safe and even economically successful, some were concerned that they were becoming assimilated, would cease to exist as a separate chosen people. Those left behind in Judah, those of no special value to Babylon, not only had to live in amid the ruins of their nation, but they faced raids and banditry from neighboring regions like Edom, eager to despoil their powerless former enemies.

Even those who wanted to remain faithful were starting to ask themselves if they had been wrong all along. Maybe Yahweh wasn’t that powerful. Maybe they weren’t actually chosen. Maybe the House of David was not forever.

Continue reading “Joy to the Fishes: 12 July 2026”

Romans 7:15-25a

Two hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, fifty six white men signed a declaration of their independence from another white man, the King of Great Britain. 

Those original signers held a range of beliefs, as would be expected given the religious diversity even among those first thirteen colonies. But most were nominally Christian and Protestant. Among them were twenty five from our Reform Christian tradition, twelve Presbyterians and thirteen Congregationalists.

There is a particular irony in Reform Christians of that era declaring themselves to be free. After all, they believed in predestination, the idea that God, because He (and God was a He to them)… because He knew everything, He must already know who would and would not be saved, and therefore must have predestined all for either salvation or damnation. Not much freedom there, and a reprehensible theology to boot…

One of America’s great myths is that religious freedom played a major role in the nation’s founding. That claim is a bit exaggerated. Both antecedent movements to our Congregationalist tradition wanted the freedom to practice their own religion and to impose it on others. This was never really a practical thing for the Pilgrims, but was a reality for the Puritans in their Boston-based colony, at least for awhile. Their plan was to create a continental theocracy.

Farther south, the first wave of Virginia settlers came for largely economic reasons, because England was and still is an oligarchy, and while there is some small room for advancement today, there was none in the 17th century. Younger sons who would not inherit and the great mass of the poor were more than willing to take their chances with starvation and disease in a new land. The second wave of English immigrants to Virginia were Cavaliers fleeing after the Puritans won the English Civil War.

Only in Pennsylvania was religious liberty important, a core value for the colony’s founder, the Quaker William Penn. Religious freedom would eventually find its way into the Bill of Rights, for there was that diversity to deal with, and holy wars in Europe were not such a distant memory back in those days, just as holy war remains in the living memory of most of us today, after the sectarian wars that have been raging in recent decades.

Continue reading “A Semiquincentennial Sermon”

Genesis 22:1-14

Twentieth Century Germany produced the aberration that was the German Christian movement, a Nazi-aligned religion that looked very much like today’s MAGA evangelicals. And yet, Germany was also the center of biblical scholarship for more than a century, led primarily by Protestant scholars.

One important understanding that emerged from that scholarship was what is now known as the Documentary Hypothesis, “documentary” in this case referring to documents, not journalistic filmmaking. Though the foundation was laid a century earlier, the idea became part of the scholarly mainstream in the late 1870s through the work of Julius Wellhausen.

The Documentary Hypothesis identifies multiple source texts and traditions in the Torah, the first five books of the Jewish Bible, often falsely attributed to Moses. In fact, the Torah was assembled over the course of several centuries by combining at least four text traditions, including story arcs believed to have come from the Northern Kingdom, Israel, already destroyed by Assyria at that point, and from the Southern Kingdom, Judah, which would fall to Babylon. This is particularly noticeable in the Book of Genesis, where there are narrative duplications, couplets, that are slightly off, for example, two stories of creation.

These texts were likely assembled, edited, and added to by a school associated with the Book of Deuteronomy and many of the historic texts like 1st and 2nd Kings, as well as by the caste of priests who had a vested interest in seeing priestly authority attributed to Moses.

There is debate over exactly how many source texts can be identified, and what historic period each represents, but no serious scholar disputes the idea of multiple sources.

While those of us who read in translation may notice things like inconsistencies in the story and the narrative couplets, we rarely notice significant differences in the underlying ancient Hebrew. For example, the tradition we know as the “E” text, derived from the Northern Kingdom, uses the generic term Elohim for God until the divine name is revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush, while the “J” text, from the Southern Kingdom, uses Yahweh, sometimes written as Jehovah, throughout.

This is all wonky and technical, but hopefully interesting when it comes to thinking about how pre-Rabbinic Judaism constructed its religion over the course of centuries. After all, in the United Church of Christ, our right of Christian consciences makes us responsible for constructing our own theologies.

Continue reading “Hungry Gods: On the Binding of Isaac”