Constructive Faith

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”

There is no one Christian view on war. It is impossible to extrapolate a universal theology from the context of the historic Jesus, a man executed by an occupation army in an exploited colony. The “Day of the Lord” trope in the Christian Testament and the apocalyptic fever dream of John of Patmos can be read as acts of divine violence, while the good news that the kin-dom of God is already present in the world seems to undermine that narrative. 

Some Christians have embraced violence, committing acts of unimaginable heroism and of horrific evil, all in the name of God and country. Others have embraced non-violence, and even pacifism.

One of my personal heroes, St. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, struggled with violence both generally and in particularity, struggled with the morality of his small role in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler, an act of individual violence intended to prevent a greater violence.

I wrestled with some of these issues in the early 1980s as a young soldier in a unit that suddenly found itself training to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield, not at all what I had intended when I enlisted. 

I struggled with a desire for vengeance after the horrors of 9/11, the metallic smell, shared terror, and eerie silence of the walk from Lower Manhattan to my apartment in Queens. I wrestle with it still. 

Like the late Israeli author Amos Oz, I identify as a “peacenik,” not as a pacifist. For me, doing limited violence to prevent greater violence seems justified when there is no other option, for it is always the “least among us” on the receiving end of state violence.

Continue reading “A Pastoral Letter on the Current War”

John 3:1-17

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

We occasionally use the work of the 13th century Sufi mystic Jal?l al-D?n Mu?ammad R?m?, commonly known simply as Rumi, in worship. When we do so, we do so in translation, as we are not as a whole fluent in Medieval Persian. 

Rumi has been popular in recent decades, especially in translations by Coleman Barks, who died earlier this week. The problem is that Barks stripped the poetry of its Islamic context, often suggesting human romance where the ancient author expresses love of God. Secularizing and popularizing is great for sales, and more accurate translations are criticized as inaccessible, but we are left with a thing that is not the real thing, a sort of fraud that has been critiqued as literary colonialism.

If Rumi remains exotic even in Westernized translation, the Bible has been wholly domesticated, from the familiar cadences of the Authorized Version translated in late Renaissance England to colloquial translations like the Good News Bible and even the scholarly standard, the New Revised Standard Version, recently in an updated edition. Few Christians question the translations themselves, much less the theological lens through which we read them. 

We should.

Today’s reading from the gospel traditionally attributed to John is a textbook example of mistranslation. Ironically, the exchange with Nicodemus depends on wordplay, a double-meaning in Greek. But, if this represents historic memory, the two men would have spoken in Aramaic.

The Koine Greek word “anothen” can be translated two different ways, as I’ve mentioned in the past, as “again” and as “from above.” There is a hint of humor here, as Jesus proclaims that one must be born “from above,” while Nicodemus hears that one must be “born again.”

American fundamentalists do mental gymnastics trying to make this ancient text, written across centuries in different political, social, and religious contexts, say only one thing, this transactional relationship with the divine. They turn to today’s passage again and again. And because they are not fluent in Biblical Greek, they neither recognize the wordplay involved, nor do they realize that these words that they insist are literally true cannot possibly be, for there is zero chance a Pharisee on the Sanhedrin and a street-prophet from Galilee spoke to one another in Greek. 

And that is only the start of the problem. In the beloved singular line, tattooed as chapter and verse number 3:16 on so many Christians today, God’s love is the trigger, the result is eternal life. Except that is not what the text actually says, and what we think it means is most certainly not what it means. This text does not read life after death. Jesus is not the golden ticket that ushers us into some Wonka-like heaven with angels instead of Oompa-Loompas.

The Greek phrase traditionally translated as eternal life is more accurately rendered “life of the ages.” This is in contrast to “life as lived in this age,” a frequent trope in the teachings of Jesus. It sounds very much like life in this age equates to the Marxist idea of false consciousness. Salvation, as later revealed in this same gospel, is living in relationship with God. John begins not with a nativity story, but with a Christological account that draws on Greek philosophy: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God. We’ll leave why Jesus is the Word and what the Koine Greek term “logos” implies for another day.

Continue reading “Grace 2.0”

Matthew 4:1-11

Two days before Christmas 1972, an earthquake registering 6.3 on the Richter Scale hit Managua, Nicaragua. The city lost all four hospitals, and every piece of firefighting equipment. Thousands were killed and wounded, over 300,000 left homeless. 

The international response was immediate and mostly ineffective. One problem was large donations of things that were not useful in a tropical climate, like winter clothes and frozen TV dinners. All too often, this is the second disaster after every disaster, warehouses of used underwear and broken toys.

The other problem after the Managua earthquake was distribution, hard enough when essential infrastructure is lost and roads are choked with debris, made worse by the fact that the country was controlled by Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a dictator in a dynasty installed by the United States decades earlier, and by his corrupt cronies who stole from the relief efforts.

Baseball superstar Roberto Clemente, who had already sent three plane loads of supplies, was concerned, and decided to accompany the fourth flight. The overloaded plane went down moments after takeoff from Puerto Rico on New Year’s Eve, Clemente’s body never recovered.

Seven years later, the Somoza dictatorship would finally fall, after years of war against a rebel coalition led by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, known to us as the Sandinistas. They were named after Augusto César Sandino, who we heard in our first reading, an earlier revolutionary who had resisted the occupying U.S. Marine Corps and was assassinated in 1934. 

The Sandinistas were divided into three main factions, including a hardcore Marxist wing, and a more moderate and pragmatic wing led by Daniel Ortega. He would serve as head of the transitional junta until elections were held, when he won the presidency outright.

I had a chance to visit Nicaragua in the mid-1980’s. Downtown Managua looked like a war zone or a disaster zone, and of course, it was both. The Sandinistas had inherited $1.6 billion in national debt, three quarters of a million people homeless or displaced, and a literacy rate of 20%. 

By the time I visited, less than a decade later, the illiteracy rate was 20%. Somoza family holdings had been nationalized, but the economy was primarily driven by worker cooperatives. I visited a few, and have had a fondness for coops ever since. Though Ronald Reagan was waging an immoral and illegal war against the country, part of his paranoia about creeping Communism, Nicaragua was recovering and stabilizing. Much like the United States, Nicaragua is multi-ethnic and multi-racial, including members of the African diaspora and indigenous people, as well as descendants of the Spanish colonizers. The Sandinistas were committed to building a nation for all where racism had reigned.

Today, Daniel Ortega, hero of the revolution, a leader who helped lift so many out of poverty, is a brutal and corrupt dictator, every bit as bad as the man he ousted.

Lead us not into temptation.

The devil offered Jesus worldly kingdoms. Jesus resisted. His followers have not. And not just the absolute perversion that is White Christian Nationalism.

There are those who claim to speak for God, claim to be proxies for God, pastors and leaders who demand loyalty, all too often claiming power only to abuse, physically, sexually, emotionally. 

In a time of chaos and confusion, in the ruins of Managua or the ruins of our constitutional order, what are we willing to do to take power? What will we do with that power once we have it? For I believe in the moral arc of the universe, bending toward justice, the good outnumbering the bad, love winning in the end.

In refusing the temptations offered by the Devil, Jesus defeats him. Having defeated the master, he is then able to defeat the servants, casting out demons through his ministry. But we see real power when he stands before the Sanhedrin, before Herod Antipas, before Pontius Pilate, when he is brutally beaten and slowly killed, and offers only forgiveness, never wavering in his message of an alternative kingdom, where those who misuse power are brought low, where the lowly are lifted up. 

We see real power when the risen Christ turns over the movement to his followers, entrusts them to the Holy Spirit, and ascends into the sky, though that feast is weeks away. 

Lead us not into temptation. 

We can read the time Jesus spends in the desert as an analog to the initiation rites of some indigenous cultures, the walkabout of the Aborigine, the vision quest of some Native American tribes. The desert is a thin place, deprivation and isolation tests and reveals. 

We have no way of knowing long how long he might have stayed out there, or if the story even represents historic memory. A far better question is what we are meant to learn from the story. And we best understand that through the lens of the radical theological thread that runs through pre-Rabbinic Judaism, the notion that the only worthy king is God. 

Is there a personified evil, and Adversary that has earthly power? What sort of God would be cool with that?

In the context of the story, the ministry of Jesus begins with rejecting an earthly kingdom, and ends with the man being executed under a sign that reads “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

Lead us not into temptation.

It is not that hard to believe that a sociopath can rise to power in an evil system, harder to understand when sociopaths rise to power in free societies. But what makes a man like Daniel Ortega, who was once so worthy of our praise, who risked his life to free the prisoners and feed the hungry and clothe the poor, that is to say to do things commanded by the prophets, what is it that corrupts? Is it as simple as that famous phrase coined by the English historian and peer John Dalberg-Acton in 1887, that absolute power corrupts absolutely?

I think we might find an answer closer to home, in the paradox that was this nation’s first president. Though he enslaved others, denying their essential humanity, the nation that he helped create was a radical experiment in equality in the context of European culture, one that would catch fire but then fail in France, but would successfully sweep across much of the Americas. His 1796 farewell address, popularized in the lyrics of the musical “Hamilton,” contains these words:

“Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend.”

It seems to me that it is not power that corrupts after all, but arrogance, self-righteousness, hubris, the notion that you are irreplaceable. The passion that fires the revolutionary leader always risks becoming a conflagration that leaves behind ash and bone where justice once bloomed. And it is not just political leaders. It happens when a football coach or pastor refuses to let go. There is even a trend these days, promoted in the cesspool of social media, of American parents forcing their young adult children to sign documents granting them broad powers to micromanage their lives, threatening to make the teens homeless or to withhold educational funds. 

It is probable that I may have committed many errors. Lead me not into the temptation of believing I am right.

St. Thomas Merton of Gethsemane Abbey wrote a prayer that continues to resonate seventy years after it was first published. It begins:

“I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.”

This Lenten season, consider keeping the chocolate, and giving up, instead, certainty Lean into the mystery. Walk humbly with your God, in the Palestinian desert, across Managua’s Plaza de la Revolución, everywhere you encounter the holy, for you encounter the holy everywhere. Amen.

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer

This week, the man we have known for most of our lives as Prince Andrew of Great Britain was arrested in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. But he was not arrested in connection with the sex trafficking of young women, often minors. Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested for potentially sharing details of secret trade negotiations with Mr. Epstein. The crimes that mattered enough were the ones that threatened the wealth of white men.

Let us pray.

Most Amazing God,
your prophets promised that the powerful would be brought low,
the lowly lifted up.

Jesus, a rabbi and prophet in that same tradition,
announced the same thing,
this in-breaking kin-dom of justice and love.

Yes, please.

Then again, you called us,
called immigrants from Ur,
called a fugitive in Midian,
called the youngest son, a shepherd in a field.

Jesus didn’t call priests
or members of the Sanhedrin.
He chose brothers in a boat,
a collaborator with empire,
the woman called Magdalene.

We pray for the victims,
of Jeffrey Epstein,
of Neo-nationalism,
of corporate greed,
pray for ourselves,
that we might have enough certainty to act,
enough humility to do so carefully,
to accept change,
to confess when needed.

Crucified as a false king,
we pray as Jesus taught us, saying:

Our Father…

Matthew 17:1-9

This weekend, congregations across the country and across multiple faith traditions are celebrating Religion and Science Weekend. The movement started as Evolution Sunday and coincided with the birthday of Charles Darwin. I’m not quite ready to place Darwin in my canon of alternative saints, so maybe I should refer to him as “Nearly Saint Charles.” After all, it took courage, arrogance, or both for Darwin and other scientists of the 19th century to challenge literal interpretations of the Biblical Creation myth.

It took courage in 2004 for pastors in Wisconsin to challenge the selective literalists who insisted that the two creation myths in Genesis must be read literally, though they generally pretend there is only one, along with the Flood myth pre-rabbinic authors borrowed from Mesopotamian culture. Their push to teach their anti-science Christian heresy in public schools was a warning of what was to come, and indeed has come.

Three years after that campaign to keep real science in the schools, Evolution Sunday evolved into Evolution Weekend as Jewish communities joined the movement for Shabbat. In 2023, after the Covid-19 pandemic showed just how widespread and dangerous the anti-science movement was, it became Religion and Science Weekend.

The theme this year is “Truth Matters,” and wow, is that obvious, as our nation has been overtaken by several oddly aligned cults: a personality cult around a rapist and racist; a wellness cult selling 21st century snake oil, the logical intersection of end-stage capitalism and self-help; and of course, white Christian nationalism, a perversion that twists the words of Jewish and Christian scripture in ways we have not seen since the fall of the Third Reich. All funded by the billionaires who own the media, and increasingly, our government. But we science in this church, and though only two of us took an ordination vow to speak the truth with love, truth telling is in our congregational DNA.

I could try to approach the topic from the science side, but I’d most certainly get a lot of it wrong, especially if I tried to discuss quantum mechanics, which I find fascinating and mysterious. I have the exact same experience of God, fascinating and mysterious, but at least in that case I know the fancy words that might convince you, on some days, that I’m not completely clueless. So let’s go with that.

Ancient humans, faced with existential angst and encountering the mysterious and transcendent, created placeholders for powers unknown and uncontrollable, gods with a small “g.” The Yahweh cult of ancient Israel was incredibly innovative, moving from polytheism to monotheism, from idols to a God that could not be depicted, from a God that behaved like a human despot to a God that was compassionate, always forgiving and seeking reconciliation with God’s chosen people. Jesus, as unique as he would turn out to be, would not be possible without the theological entrepreneurship of the Jewish prophets.

Ancient humans … created placeholders for powers unknown and uncontrollable, gods with a small “g.”

The followers of Jesus, all Jews, experienced something in him that felt God like. The official feast for this day, Transfiguration, represents as theophany, a manifestation of the divine. His followers experienced him as still present to them even after they had seen him tortured and executed. The movement that followed went through many theological contortions and a fair amount of bloodshed to make sense of how God could be God and Jesus could also be God and a human and God could still be present as the spirit that animated Christians and their congregations. But every iteration of God was understood as a person, with will and agency like a human person, communicating with human persons.

That constructed understanding of God got warped by Hellenistic philosophy, imperial authorization, and institutionalization. In Christianity, God became this paradox, unchanging and all-knowing, while also a puppet master in the sky, still a backstop for the unknown and transcendent.

The thing is, culture allows humans to transmit knowledge across tribes and generations. Culture changes. Even more critically, human knowledge routinely reached a tipping point when sudden surges in knowledge occurred. The biologists who recognized and named the process of natural selection represent one moment in that trajectory. The physicists of the first half of the 20th century and the geneticists of the latter half were other iterations of that pattern, and today there is zero doubt that life evolved from a common ancestor, that we humans are bipedal primates with an inflated sense of our own importance, and that human chauvinism is not only wrong, but also dangerous.

Continue reading “Religion and Science Weekend 2026”