Constructive Faith

Acts 2:1-21

I learned a long time ago that the reason people say they are upset is not always the real reason they are upset. If you haven’t heard my “It’s not about the coffee” story yet, don’t worry… you will.

Unfortunately, sometimes what people say they are upset about is exactly what they are upset about. For example, when a new Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace, was released in 1999, sixteen years after the original trilogy, you would have thought fans would be pleased. This was not one more lame remake. It was an entirely new film set within the franchise canon. You’ve heard that term, canon, before for works that are authorized, accepted as part of the “true” story, even if that true story is itself a work of fiction. We have the canon of Jewish Scripture, the canon of Christian scripture, and large collections of works that were not accepted as part of the “true” story in either tradition. There is a Star Wars canon, with the new film placing many written works out of the “true” timeline. As a comic book fan, I know which Batman stories are canonical, and which fictions are fictional, if that makes a bit of sense.

That some film critics panned The Phantom Menace was not surprising. There are those critics whose every review essentially says “I could have written / cast /directed / acted in this film better than the people who were actually paid to do so.” I always knew exactly which films I’d love by reading A.O. Scott, chief film critic for the New York Times for almost twenty years. Whatever he thought, I was certain to think the opposite.

But many devoted Star Wars fans were also hostile. Though the films had always offered comic relief in the middle of the hero arc, people took exception to the character Jar Jar Binks. Cultural advances had made it easier to map various alien characters in the film to racial stereotypes, a problem still across the world of fantasy and science fiction in books, films, and games. Many fans hated Jake Lloyd, the boy actor who played young Anakin, though for no reason I’ve ever understood.

Then there are the midi-chlorians. 

In the original three films, the Jedi Order was a quasi-religious knighthood. In The Phantom Menace, it was revealed that a high count of midi-chlorians in a person’s cells made them more susceptible to The Force, and hence, more likely to be a Jedi. And while the Force itself remained mysterious and mystical, the Way of the Jedi became somewhat mundane, not unlike the genetics that makes a great baseball player, given their introduction to a Knuckleball Yoda. At worse, with genetic predisposition we get a sort of Jedi eugenics, like the pseudo-science that was used to justify racism in the United States and Nazi Germany.

There is, in this real galaxy not so far, far away, an actual class of bacteria called Midichloriaceae. What George Lucas seemed to be thinking about was actually mitochondria, an organelle in the cells of all eukaryotes, a biological category that includes all plants and animals, including us. Mitochondria evolved independently and have their own genome apart from the rest of the cell. They, along with plastids, were incorporated into the cell in a process scientists call symbiogenesis. Without this sub-cellular cooperation, we’d have no orchids, red pandas, or you. Evolved life requires cooperation.

In our universe, we’ve all got mitochondria, nicknamed the powerhouse of the cell in the 1950’s, and responsible for producing chemical energy. In the Star Wars Universe, creatures have varying amounts of midi-chlorians. It feels like a betrayal, that in this otherwise egalitarian setting, some are born more capable than others. Realistic, but a betrayal. I want Jedi Chewbacca. Or at least Chewbacca on first base. Nothing would get by him, no matter how wild the throw…

If you are already wondering why we are talking about cellular biology and Star Wars, don’t worry. It is about to get even more confusing.

As we gather this morning, another group of Christians is gathering in Horseheads and at their satellite campus in Ithaca. Their understanding of scripture and faith is very different than ours. For example, they sued the State of New York to overturn the ban on bringing firearms into a house of worship, and won, with a significant financial award. Their leader has a doctorate from an institution we would consider unaccredited and started his own degree-granting institution that we’d also consider unaccredited. It is the standard mix of Christian populist capitalism and imaginary victimization, the anti-gospel so common today. 

While I’m generally the live and let live sort, often hard when the other side does not, in fact, want to let me live, I must admit that I was taken aback when I recently read that our County Executive was attending a service that was making the pastor of this non-denominational church a bishop. Don’t get me wrong. I remind you frequently that Jesus did not have the credentials recognized in his time for religious leaders. But he never pretended to be a priest or even a Levite. His ministry of teaching and healing was the only credential he needed.

Centuries of tradition says you need three bishops to create a bishop, and you need a bishop to create a priest, or the equivalent depending on your denomination. I didn’t make these rules! 

Some churches had three or more bishops when they split with Rome, like the Church of England and the Lutherans, so they are considered to be part of the Apostolic Succession, theoretically able to trace their authority all the way back to Jesus telling Peter he was in charge. It is the Christian equivalent of the Buddhist’s dharma lineage, the equally theoretical history of master and teacher stretching back across eons.

The main Lutheran movement in America, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, wears the apostolic succession lightly, and we are in full communion with them. If Bethany Lutheran, on the other side of the river, was in a pinch, I could celebrate communion there, and it would count. If Grace Episcopal, just down the street, found themselves short a priest, I could not cover. The Episcopal Church takes the apostolic succession literally, and I don’t have the required mojo.

We do not do bishops. The only authority in the Congregational and United Church of Christ traditions is the members, and not at some national level or regional body, but right here, this people, those of you who have promised to keep covenant with one another. 

And finally, scripture, which provides two different accounts of the disciples receiving the Holy Spirit. We read the lesser known account from the Gospel traditionally attributed to John the Sunday after Easter, when Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into ten apostles, Judas being long gone and Thomas out, possibly moving the donkey leftover from Palm Sunday to avoid a parking ticket.

The more familiar account is the one we read today, in which the Spirit’s arrival is marked by tongues of fire above the twelve disciples, and tongues of many nations flowing from their lips. While it is a Christian story, it is a reminder that pre-Rabbinic Judaism was already multi-cultural, the result of centuries of diaspora. Twelve disciples here because in Acts, they have already selected a replacement for Judas in order to have the number of completeness in Hebrew numerology, and Thomas is actually in the room where it happened.

It becomes clear in later texts that the Holy Spirit is not restricted to this small group of men, but that it is a gift to the entire church.

Think back to our reading from the Book of Numbers in the Torah. Moses has gathered the authorized leaders, and God shares with them the Spirit of leadership that She had given to that great liberator. But while this is going on, the Spirit also falls on Eldad and Medad, who are back in the camp. And Moses is not bothered. In fact, he expresses his desire that all of God’s people be prophetic, filled with the Spirit.

I am not interested in how the math of the Holy Trinity maths. I am interested in the fact that the early Christians constructed a religion that places something divine and powerful in ordinary people. Mitochondria not midi-chlorians, no Jedi bishops or Jedi pastors, but just you and I together trying to call out all that is thriving and holy in one another, like Jesus, to announce the kin-dom of God that is already in the world. And even as the Empire Strikes Back, there is always a New Hope, always a Force ready to awaken. This is The Way. Amen.

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray.

Most Amazing God,
though the weather has been wacky,
it is that time of year when we clean-up,
turnover the soil,
sow seeds and plant what we have started indoors,
flowers, fruits, and vegetables
that nourish our bodies and our spirits.

Scripture and science call for sabbath years,
when fields are left fallow,
for “never enough” ultimately leads to never enough.

In the same way, we are called to sabbath,
to savor what is simple and wholesome and good,
to know when enough is actually enough,
to break bread together,
to laugh,
but…

everything in our culture is about more.

It is destroying us
and this creation.

Even in the midst of his ministry
of teaching and healing,
even with the urgency of your in-breaking kin-dom
and souls to be saved,
Jesus took time to rest and to pray,
to eat and to laugh with friends.

Slow us down.

Let us to listen for your Holy Spirit.

Remind us, as we say, that yours is the kingdom,
as we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us, saying:

Our Father…

COMMISSION AND BENEDICTION

There is the Dark Side that is obvious… racism, misogyny, greed, the sinful messaging of Madison Avenue that tells you that you never have enough, that you are never enough, but if you just buy the next new thing… We rightly resist these things. But there is another Dark Side, when our rage and bitterness consumes us, when we become joyless. That is the Dark Side that fails to see the Force of the holy and good in the world, of life and serendipitous creativity. Like a Jedi be you, Hrmmm. Amen.

Luke 24:44-53

SERMON Dude from Galilee

The Christian Century, established in 1884, remains the journal of record for Mainline Protestants in America, even as both print publications and Mainline Protestant churches have been in decline for years. 

In the May issue, the Rev. Rachel Mann, a Church of England priest and author, reflects on the Ascension of Jesus, technically last Thursday on the liturgical calendar but celebrated today in many churches, including ours. Mann finds the Ascension to contain absurdity and a bit of low comedy, and wonders if Jesus ascended slowly, smiling and waving to his disciples, or quickly, like a rocket ship or a superhero. She finds meaning in the words of the poet John Donne, whose sonnet “Ascension” includes the line “O strong Ram, which hast batter’d heaven for me!” She ends with a both/and, both absurd narrative and important theology.

Jesus as battering-ram does not improve matters for me. I cannot take the Ascension literally, and now that I have read Mann’s piece, I’ll be forever stuck with the image of Jesus slowly ascending, maybe with a thumbs up and a wink to those below, like a sky-bound Buddy Christ from Kevin Smith’s 1999 film “Dogma.” At least that movie gave us Alanis Morissette as God, every bit as plausible as Morgan Freeman or George Burns. 

The Ascension has theological meaning, as Mann points out, as captured in John Donne’s sonnet, and it solves a practical problem in the narrative, and that matters too. The story as a story has a power of its own, even if the story as we have constructed it from the four gospels and the actual historic Jesus, as best we can understand him, are not a perfect match. 

I am able to love both at the same time, the beauty of this narrative arc that runs from Incarnation to Ascension, from angels in the sky to Jesus in the sky, and the dude from Galilee preaching a Jewish reform in the tradition of the prophets who came before him, a revolutionary murdered by an occupation army and the collaborating leaders of his own people. There is Jesus, and there is the Christ, sometimes but not always the same.

Continue reading “Dude from Galilee: 17 May 2026”

Acts 17:22-31

The sanitized version of the modern American family has a two-parent household, both working, yet with time and energy to spare to run the kids to soccer matches and rehearsals for the middle school musical. 

Alas, that is far from reality, as I have mentioned before. For far too many, work is slightly terrifying, their family’s healthcare depending on employment that could disappear in a moment. If they manage to get to little Saanvi’s soccer game at all, they’ll be in the parking lot smashing zero on a phone tree, praying for an actual human to pick-up so they can deal with that inexplicable NYSEG bill or insurance claim denial. They totally missed that amazing goal which, unfortunately, little Saanvi scored for the opposing team. 

By the weekend, Mom and Mom are exhausted, and are likely not attending worship in any tradition. Little Saanvi is not growing up with stories of Moses or the Apostle Paul, Krishna or Siddhartha. And even those stressed out over-scheduled and besieged family systems are becoming a rarity, as many are opting out of marriage and kids altogether because this economy is pretty much impossible. 

Recent research shows that we at The Park Church are bucking a national trend. As we become more demographically diverse, in some ways becoming a better reflection of our surrounding community, church as a whole is as out of reach for most Americans as that eponymous dream, hard work, your own home, and a safe retirement. The Americans most likely to attend Christian worship have a master’s degree and an income somewhere between $60-100k annually. City of Elmira households, at less than $46k annually, are well below that figure, and significantly less than Chemung County residents outside of the city.

At least, before trickle-up economics, most children raised in Christian households got some basic Bible stories, even if we belonged to a church that was more liturgical than biblical. What has been missing pretty universally, even before the enshittification of America, was an understanding of the historic context of scripture. We interpret the Bible as fables when we are kids and through the lens of our own context as adults, and that simply doesn’t work. The ancient authors were writing for adults in their own context, not ours.

Today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles is an example of missing context. For some, it is just one more story of Paul’s journeys. But we don’t see texts like 2nd Athenians, or hear about a church in Athens. We might assume that Paul’s missionary activity in the home of classic Greek philosophy failed. But the story is not as simple as a clash between the gospel and classic Greek philosophy.

Continue reading “Paul vs. The Philosophers: 10 May 2026”

Acts of the Apostles 7:54-60

The ever-so functionally-named Public Broadcasting Service, better known as PBS, is currently showing an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” on Masterpiece Theater. As you may recall, the plot considers questions of identity and accountability, the titular count wrongly imprisoned under another name.

If “the Count” was a fictional mystery, two real world mysteries have supposedly been solved in recent months. Well, maybe solved. 

For the first, we travel back to New York City in the 1980’s, when graffiti evolved into what we now call “street art.” The most famous artists in that movement, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, started in the feral streets, and ended up critically acclaimed before their untimely deaths.

The heir to that tradition is undoubtedly England’s Banksy, who erected an unauthorized statue in Central London on Wednesday. Like Haring and Basquiat, Banksy has received critical acclaim and global recognition. Unlike his predecessors, Banksy has maintained the anonymity of the oft criminalized graffiti tradition. While starting in two dimensions, his guerrilla art quickly moved into three dimensions, even public performances. It has been displayed in major galleries and museums, has been monetized, both original works and licensed and unauthorized reproductions as prints, t-shirts, and tote bags. I have a reproduction of one work downstairs in the Pastor’s Study, another in my home.

Banksy began using his distinctive style, stenciling, at the turn of this century, and had his first show in a Los Angeles gallery in 2002. There has been speculation about his identity ever since. He has mounted massive multimedia works like the “DismaLand” bemusement park, had a month-long “residency” in New York City, produced pro-Palestinian public art in the West Bank. Much of his work satirizes the greedy, the powerful, and the violent.

Among those named as possibly Banksy was a member of the Trip Hop band Massive Attack. As early as 2008, the British newspaper “The Mail on Sunday” identified Banksy as another man, Robin Gunningham, born in 1974 near Bristol, England, where he attended the Cathedral School. Banksy’s representatives disputed this, though earlier this year, Reuter’s completed an extensive investigation, with newly uncovered evidence, and came to the same conclusion. So I guess now we know.

I’m not sure I needed to know Banksy’s real identity, at least not while he is still alive. Let it be a matter for historians. Though the work is still sometimes technically illegal, and I’m sure the targets of Banksy’s satire would have loved to see the artist behind bars. Those same targets now buy his art. It attracts what I think of as stupid money at auction, though it remains subversive. In 2018, one of his paintings sold at auction for more than $25 million dollars at Sotheby’s London, and immediately self-destructed. A shredder had been built into the frame.

Our second case of hidden identity has had an even greater economic impact, greater by orders of magnitude.

Continue reading “Call Me By My Name: 3 May 2026”

Luke 24:13-35

Last week, we heard the story of Evidence-based Thomas. I chose to focus on the story as it related to questions of canon, what becomes authorized, and what happens to unauthorized voices. 

I did this partly because these are questions we should and do ask as progressive adherents to a two-thousand year old religious tradition, one that rests on the shoulders of approximately twelve centuries of yet another tradition. 

I also did it because, quite frankly, the post-resurrection stories are a mess, and that is saying something, as the gospels are not exactly a model of clarity and consistency to begin with. It is no wonder that Christians spent centuries in bitter conflict over who Jesus was, what Jesus was, and why he mattered.

Let’s just flash back to last week for a moment. The entire point of the story is that Jesus has been physically resurrected from the dead, that it is the same body that spread mud on the eyes of the man born blind, the same body that was nailed to a cross and pierced in the side. Yet, Jesus appears twice in what we are told is a locked room. What? 

Beam me up, Scotty! We have a contradiction.

Earlier, also in John, Jesus appears to Mary on Easter morning, but tells her not to “hold on to him,” because he had not yet ascended. Yet, just a few verses later, he cooks bread and fish on the beach, and presumably has breakfast with his disciples.

But the real pickle comes with today’s story from the Gospel According to Luke. On the day that the resurrection is discovered, the day we have come to call Easter Sunday, two followers are on the road to Emmaus, and are joined by Jesus, who they do not recognize. 

Tradition would eventually give us an inconsistent list of twelve male disciples, in accordance with Hebrew numerology and the number of Hebrew tribes, but there were always more people in the inner circle than that, including important women like Mary Magdalene.

Jesus Incognito explains to his fellow travelers on the road to Emmaus how the events of the last week in Jerusalem, the crucifixion and the resurrection, fulfill the scriptures, starting with Moses the Liberator and Covenant Maker, and proceeding through the prophets. 

We’ll never have absolute certainty as we have no documents in his own hand, but we can reasonably conclude that there is historic memory here, that Jesus really understood himself as playing a role in a divine plan for his people, and possibly even leaning into the universalist aspects of pre-Rabbinic Judaism, a divine plan for all nations, as the scriptures had promised. Pre-Rabbinic Judaism was universalist, or at least evangelical, actively seeking converts. This only changed decades after Jesus, and under great duress.

Christianity today is often this free-floating cure-all for our existential angst, Jesus as a sort of Harry Houdini emerging from the grave, with most of the story as window-dressing on the modern brand of consumerism, WWJD bracelets and “Footprints in the Sand” plaques, but the tradition gains spiritual depth when we understand it as growing out of a particular historic context, understand the religious innovations that produce someone like Jesus, understand his own religious innovations, for in understanding that religion has always changed, always evolved, always innovated, we make room for our own holy and communal creativity.

Continue reading “Pan Pan Pan”

John 20:19-31

Muslims believe that the Qu’ran was revealed by Allah to the prophet Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel, a single text with a single author, whoever you believe that author to be. 

Mormons believe that The Book of Mormon was engraved on golden plates by ancient prophets, and revealed to Joseph Smith in what is today Manchester, New York in 1827, during a period of religious fervor we know as the Second Great Awakening. With no other hand involved, and no one else ever seeing the plates, Smith becomes either the sole author of the text, or at least the sole transmitter and translator. 

In both cases, the founder of the religion produced a single text that is authoritative.

The closest we come in the Judeo-Christian traditions is the claim that Moses wrote the Torah, which was dictated to him by God, though this is generally understood as a fiction. And the Torah is only one small but authoritative part of the Tanakh, the Jewish Scripture composed of the Torah, the Nevi’im or Books of the Prophets, and the Ketuvim or Writings, a miscellany that includes the Psalms and Proverbs. 

Interestingly, the major histories in Jewish Scripture are placed with the Prophets, while the Book of Daniel is placed in the ‘Writings.” 

Christians add a second collection of texts, a Christian Testament or Covenant. In the Christian tradition, the Jewish Scripture is re-ordered to emphasize messianic prophecy, and the two testaments together form the Bible.

All conservative forms of these religions depend on the idea of direct revelation, the claim that God revealed teachings and laws to humans, directly or through an intermediary, and controlled the formation of the texts. Some Christians even go so far as to believe that God controls the translation process, or at least controlled that process for their favorite translation in their own language. 

Continue reading “Questions of Canon: 12 April 2026”

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

SERMON “Helmets Required”

Innocent III was a powerful pope. He managed to maintain control over Europe’s kings, and ordered multiple crusades against pagans, Christians he considered heretics, and, of course, Muslims. He didn’t waste much time about it either. He became pope in January of 1198, and in August of that year he issued a papal bull declaring a crusade to retake Jerusalem. It would come to be known as the Fourth.

Things did not go well, even by the disastrous standards of the Crusades. It was agreed that rather than a slow passage by land, this Crusade would travel by boat. The Venetians, masters of the eastern Mediterranean, were hired to build a fleet of transports. But when the Crusaders arrived in Venice in 1202, they didn’t have enough to pay the agreed to sum of 85k marks. In fact, they had less than half of that. Venice’s Doge considered his options. The financial loss was considerable. The loss of prestige if he canceled Innocent’s crusade would be worse. He ultimately decided to give the Crusaders a side gig, intimidating competing ports on their way to the Holy Land. They did so, attacking Zara in Dalmatia, what is today the port of Zadar in Croatia, before they even got out of the Adriatic.

The pope was displeased, and threatened excommunication if the Crusaders attacked any other Christian neighbors. Then came Constantinople.

Continue reading “Easter Sermon 2026”

The problem with latter-day saints, as in saints of the last century, not Mormons, is that we often learn things about them we’d rather not know. 

This is certainly the case when it comes to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s marital infidelity, which qualifies as emotional abuse of his wife Coretta, though we have no evidence that there was any sexual abuse or exploitation in those adulterous relationships. 

It is the case when we consider the evidence that Thomas Merton fathered a child out of wedlock as a young man, abandoning his responsibility to the mother and child and entering the monastery. 

It is the case with the recent revelations that Cesar Chavez, an esteemed labor leader, was a rapist and child molester. 

At least the sins of ancient saints have been buried in the sands of time, even if their lives are so unlike ours that it is difficult to use them as role models.

There is no context in which I would describe the late Edward Abbey as a saint. A novelist and a nature writer though he refused that title, Abbey inspired an environmental movement. He was also married five times, was an anarchist, and loved rifles in a MAGA sort of way. He had enough hubris to anger every side of the political spectrum and just didn’t care, filling his non-fiction with aphorism like “Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.”

He is best known today for the novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” published in 1975. In it, a group of four misfits come together as a loose gang to resist the pollution and destruction of the environment, in this case the Desert Southwest. They attack bulldozers and train cars, particularly objecting to the Glen Canyon Damn, as the law closes in.

Many believe the novel radicalized a generation of environmental activists, individuals who engaged in direct action to protect the environment. Their destruction of equipment and tree-spiking in the Pacific Northwest came to be known as “monkey wrenching.” 

One of the groups that came out of this direct action movement was Earth First!, with an exclamation point, which took the monkey wrench and a hammer for its logo. When even Earth First! proved too tame for some, a splinter group called the Earth Liberation Front was formed. 

Today, there are dozens of direct action environmental groups worldwide, like the UK-based group Extinction Rebellion. Corporations continue to fund efforts to classify these groups as terrorist organizations.

The granddaddy of all environmental direct action groups is Greenpeace, founded in Canada four years before “The Monkey Wrench Gang” was published. It has taken on many environmental causes, beginning with opposition to nuclear testing. They were so effective that in 1985, the French government bombed and sank the group’s flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, killing Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.

Who exactly are the terrorists here? The environmental activists placing their boat between whalers and their prey or disrupting nuclear weapon testing on a French atoll, or the governments and corporations that arrest, brutalize, and even murder to protect their own power and wealth? The patriotic anti-fascists like me who fight for a restoration of our democracy, or the masked thugs who murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis?

Continue reading “Monkey Wrench : Palm Sunday 2026”

Ezekiel 37:1-14

SERMON Miller’s Cornfield

As I have shared in the past, I grew up in a home with three faiths: the Southern Baptist church, the problematically-named Washington Redskins, and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, so basically religious, corporate, and nationalist forms of racism. And growing up in Virginia, there was no lack of Civil War battlefields within driving distance, from Bull Run to Appomattox, where we could pay homage to our treasonous dead. That was us, smelling like a campfire with the pop-up camper behind the station wagon, Dad reading the monument to some brigade funded by the Daughters of the Confederacy, the lot of us standing before a diorama as the narration and lights walked us through the tragic battle.

But it was a Boy Scout trip that brought me to Antietam while hiking a portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Trail. While some multi-day battles saw more total casualties, September 17, 1862 at Antietam holds the horrific record as the bloodiest single day in American history, with over 22,000 dead, wounded, or missing. That is more than double the number of all Allied casualties on D-Day.

Decades later, I still remember a statement made by a National Park Service guide, that one of the three battle sites at Antietam, Miller’s Cornfield, had been leveled in the fighting, first from overhead artillery fire, then rifle fire, then a bloody slugfest of close action combat that seemed to favor first one side and then the other, eventually holding for the South, but at an impossible cost. She described the corn cut down by the bullets, even in that age before assault rifles. The only harvest that autumn was the dead.

Continue reading “Miller’s Cornfield: 22 March 2026”

John 9:1-41

SERMON The Lynching Tree

In the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, miracle stories are pretty short… encounter, magic, maybe a teaching. The authors of the Gospel traditionally attributed to John lean into the miracles, for the entire gospel is oriented around miraculous signs that Jesus is the messiah, is in fact divine. The whole show starts with Jesus as present in “the beginning” as the Word, the Logos in Biblical Greek, a term that suggested reason and order. 

Today’s reading, the healing of the man born blind as recorded in John, is detailed and lengthy, involving many characters and encounters. Because we spend more time with the three Synoptic gospels, each with a year in the lectionary cycle, we sometimes read John through that lens, missing the point of John’s longer stories entirely.

That is the case here, this story that provides the line in the beloved hymn, “I once was blind, but now I see.” It is easy to interpret this as one more conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees over the sabbath, the choice between legalism and love. That is actually incidental to the story, mentioned only in passing. But let’s start at the beginning.

Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who has been blind since birth. It seems they already know the man, who is a beggar. The disciples ask Jesus who sinned to cause the man to be blind, the man or his parents. It is sort of a dumb question, unless the man was sinning in the womb. The obvious answer should be his parents. 

Equally obvious to us in our age of genetic science is the fact that the question itself is nonsense, but they didn’t know about genetics in the First Century, and we have to accept the story in its own context. In that context, inexplicable catastrophe was often blamed on moral failure, whether it was a blind child, drought and locusts, or an invasion by a foreign army. 

Still, even in that context of pre-Rabbinic theology, the question is problematic. If there was a moral cause for the man’s blindness, it should not have been due to parental sin. Though blessings and curses pass from generation to generation in some biblical texts, Jeremiah, one of the last prophets, rejects this idea, declaring that we are each only responsible for our own sins. He’s a little muddy on collective punishment, what with Babylon invading and all, but you can’t have everything.

We despise collective punishment, but children being punished for the sins of their parents is arguably worse, though it happens every single day.

It is equally problematic that Jesus does not reject outright the idea that God makes people blind to punish them or their parents. Having been present at Creation and preaching a loving God, you’d think he’d know better, but God is often a vindictive jerk in scripture. 

Continue reading “The Lynching Tree : Lent IV 2026”