Constructive Faith

Readings
Matthew 25:1-13
Amos 5:18-24
“Tidal,” The Rev. R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)

Sermon

I had planned to focus this week on divine mercy, as evidenced in my decision to use the poem “Tidal” by the Welsh poet and priest R. S. Thomas as my second reading. But sometimes the world demands a different sermon, and only the most stubborn preacher refuses the Word when it arrives. So let me just start with this: how about that election!

Now, I am not naive enough to believe the outcome was driven by some sudden return to virtue. Americans demonstrated their tolerance for corruption, racism, and misogyny when they re-elected Mr. Trump. As much as I’d like to think that seeing Americans shot in the street by masked agents was enough, it was actually selfishness that drove many people to the polls, the fact that the bottom has dropped out of the economy for 90% of us. But still, a whole lot of very bad people received their pink slip on Tuesday night. And while Stephen Miller, our modern-day Reinhard Heidrich, was actually promoted, life just got a lot harder for them.

Tuesday was a “Day of Judgment” of sorts, and as much as our first branch of government may choose to focus on economic justice and affordability, there will certainly be some Days of Judgment along the way. Besides, there is zero evidence the bad guys learned anything this week. In fact, Google, which has spent so much time ensuring that its Chromebook hardware was in as many schools as possible, announced that any schools that refuse their AI will be denied access to their services, essentially holding billions of dollars in hardware hostage in what amounts to an epic cybercrime.

I hope we are like the wise bridesmaids in the parable from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, prepared, for the bridegroom has arrived in the form of a Muslim doctor and a Paralympic athlete and a Presbyterian seminarian and a woman from America’s First Peoples. I hope we have some fuel and some fire left.

And, you know, maybe it actually is perfect that Amos was the passage assigned to this week, the one I selected months ago for this Sunday, oblivious to the fact that it would fall on the Sunday after the election. And nowhere in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen the joy and tears I saw on MSNow as the results came in Tuesday night.

Amos was a border-crossing troublemaker. A native of the Southern Kingdom, known as Judah, he understood Yahweh as calling him to proclaim judgment on the corrupt elite of the Northern Kingdom, called Israel. He was pretty promptly deported, like some modern-day college student with the audacity to declare that Palestinians are humans.

Continue reading “Lions and Bears and Snakes!”

The heretics of America’s Christian Nationalist movement are quick to claim that they are being persecuted when they are not allowed to persecute others. Would that they knew real persecution!

Though actual persecution of early Christians in the Roman empire was sporadic before Constantine legalized the faith in 313 C.E., violent persecution was very real at times. So we have the seven surviving letters from Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, traditionally believed to have been a follower of the disciple John. The letters were written to supporters after his arrest in the year 110. Like Paul, a Roman citizen, Ignatius was sent to Rome to stand trial and face possible execution. Along the way, he discouraged any attempts to free him or to pursue his acquittal. In one letter, he writes: “I would rather that you fawn on the beasts so that they may be my tomb and no scrap of my body be left.” He goes on. “Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil – only let me get to Jesus Christ!”

In a few short years, there has been a dramatic shift, from Paul’s belief that the Second Coming would take place at any moment, God’s just and caring realm initiated on earth, to this glorification of martyrdom, this belief that martyrs for the faith would receive a special place in heaven. This echoes the Revelation to John of Patmos, written about fifteen years earlier and three decades after the death of Paul. John of Patmos, like Ignatius of Antioch, lived through a spasm of anti-Christian persecution, for John under the Roman Emperor Domitian, while Ignatius died during the reign of the better known Emperor Trajan.

The desire for martyrdom can also be found in the story of St. Christopher. Most know the bucolic bit, the gentle giant carrying travelers across the river, the child traveler who gets heavier and heavier that turns out to be Jesus in disguise. Few will remember the deeper legend, Christopher with the head of a dog from a tribe of cannibals, his faith that leads others to convert, his survival of multiple attempts to execute him, and his eventual embrace of martyrdom, with a final death toll of 201 soldiers, two prostitutes, a thousand or so citizens converted then martyred, and Christopher himself.

Many of you will know my own small cadre of admired saints, Bonhoeffer, King, Milk, and Romero, will know that each of them was murdered, and assume that I have a thing for martyrs, a fetish for holy death. I do not. I have a thing for courage.

And honestly, two of the men, Bonhoeffer and Romero, were nerdy scholars who found themselves in moments of crisis, while a third, Milk, while not a Christian, displayed selfless courage as a gay man and elected official, so I have an affinity for all three, being a nerd if not a scholar, gay, and unexpectedly, an elected official.

That only leaves King, and I don’t think I need to make a case for him as a saint of the 20th century.

It would be easy to conclude that dying for the faith is a glorious thing, which might have some merit if you believe in either a post-mortem existence or a God that only saves a select few. But I am not so sure about either of those things, and certainly don’t believe in eternal torment, as much as I’d like to nominate some candidates for a modern re-casting of Dante’s Inferno.

Continue reading “On the Banks of the Little Pigeon: All Saints 2026”

Matthew 22:15-22

Henry David Thoreau is best known for two things: his year living on Walden pond, and his night spent in jail. The first inspired a small book, the latter an essay titled “Resistance to Civil Government,” though it is more commonly referred to as “Civil Disobedience.” The contested matter was several years of poll tax that Thoreau refused to pay, objecting to the Mexican-American War and to the continuing evil of slavery. It might have been more than one night had not someone paid the tax on his behalf but against his will.

Thoreau was not the first tax resistor in history, nor would he be the last, and I am not talking about the assault weapon-toting anti-government lunatics associated with states like Idaho and Texas. During the latter years of the Cold War, and again during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, faithful progressives found ways to avoid paying their taxes. While I was sympathetic with their causes, that was never really an option for me. As a disabled Army veteran, I receive money from the Federal government every month, so they’d just deduct what they think I owe.

Admittedly, there are moments, like now for example, when I am not aligned with our government’s priorities and wish that I could place my tax money in escrow, as if the Federal government were a delinquent landlord. Most of the time, however, I’m actually happy to pay my taxes. I know it sounds silly, but I like things like fire trucks and public schools and health inspectors.

Taxes were a big deal in Galilee and Judea in the time of Jesus. The idea of taxes themselves was not the problem. Though there was always a certain amount of grumbling about corruption in the Temple, people generally offered both money and agricultural products, from bread and beer to whole lambs, to maintain the sacrificial cult. Even Jews in the Diaspora paid a Temple tax.

Taxes paid to Rome were another matter altogether.

Continue reading “Multiple Choice: 18 October 2026”

Isaiah 25:1-9

During a recent visit to Dublin, Donald Trump expressed support for a unified Ireland, which is to say, for the Protestant-majority British region of Northern Ireland to be absorbed into the Roman Catholic-majority Republic of Ireland. There is no way of knowing whether this was meant to troll the British Prime Minister or was simply the constant babbling of a lunatic. In any case, Northern Ireland’s “Unionists,” who actually oppose reunification, were outraged.

The Troubles, as the late 20th century conflict in Northern Ireland is known there, began in the 1960’s as a civil rights movement, the Catholic minority calling for an end to systemic discrimination. It escalated into a campaign of sectarian violence, primarily in Northern Ireland but spreading to the Republic as well as the British home island.

The Republic of Ireland itself had only achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1922. The world continues to pay for Britain’s colonialist follies, nowhere more so than in the former Palestinian mandate.

Northern Ireland’s Troubles officially came to an end with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and while the terms of the agreement have sometimes been dysfunctional in practice, violence has been limited. Hopefully, people on both sides will be wise enough to ignore Mr. Trump.

It was in the Republic during the Troubles when four lads, Paul, David, Adam, and Larry, formed a band in 1976. All had been raised in Dublin, though David was born in England to Welsh parents, and Adam’s family came to Ireland when his father left Britain’s Royal Air Force and took as job as a pilot for Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline. David would adopt a stage name, calling himself The Edge, while Paul would adopt the moniker Bono. And the rest is Rock and Roll history.

U2 did well from the start, but they were not immediate superstars. It was really their third album, War, that made them a worldwide sensation. They chose to put a child’s face on the cover. The image of Peter Rowen, younger brother of a friend, remains among the most iconic album covers of all time.

To say the album was a success might be the ultimate understatement. It opens with “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” a reference to a 1972 incident when British troops shot and killed 14 unarmed civil rights protesters. The other great single from the album, “New Years Day,” was inspired by Poland’s Solidarity movement. The album ended with the band’s rendition of the 40th Psalm.

Vinyl is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, partially fueled by Taylor Swift’s release of albums in limited-edition colors, and while that is some super toxic consumerism right there, it means I don’t have to provide too much context for younger worshippers when I say the “B-side” of the album opened with a song called “The Refugee.” The refugee is a young woman in a nation at war with America as a one-day promise of safety.

I’d been old enough to understand our defeat in Vietnam, the helicopters taking off from the embassy roof and the welcome we extended to Vietnamese nationals fleeing the Communist takeover. Then, in 1980, the Mariel boatlift saw an estimated 125,000 Cubans flee that island for Florida. We were a country that welcomed refugees, but as a young soldier trained for when the Cold War suddenly went hot, everything was seen through that lens of the Red Menace. It would be years before I connected enough of the dots to see a pattern of migration and displacement.

At least I got there before we faced the mass migrations caused by climate change as well as our misadventures in the Middle East.

Continue reading “Refugee: October 11, 2026”

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

In her 2021 book “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness,” historian Elizabeth Samet challenges the near religious framing of the Second World War, especially after Tom Brokaw and other media personalities turned the fiftieth anniversary of that war into a celebration of what they framed as a simpler and better time. We saved Private Ryan and fought with a Band of Brothers, trying not to talk about our own sins, including the racist internment of Japanese-American citizens.

Samet’s book is an example of one simple fact: the past is always seen through the lens of the present. Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s “Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II,” which challenges the hero myths surrounding Allied leaders like Churchill, Montgomery, and MacArthur, was written in the context of the bad wars of the 20th century, the strategic failure in Iraq, the utter defeat in Afghanistan.

And now, we are at war with Iran, a war we are meant to believe isn’t truly dangerous because we have no “boots on the ground.” I’d say “tell that to the families of those killed in action,” except Pete “Testy” Hegseth is doing his best to prevent the public from knowing the true toll, “Testy” because he is obsessed with morning woodies and the testosterone levels of all service members, even the women, when he should be obsessed with the drones and missiles that are killing our troops.

Using “boots” to represent women and men in uniform is an example of a synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is meant to represent the whole. Another example is when unionized laborers refer to corporate executives as “the suits.” 

And I want to suggest that when we speak about God, the words we use are a bit like a synecdoche, Divine Mystery so great, so transcendent, that we imagine and speak of a part, not the whole. But first, let’s go back to our reading.

In the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, the first five books of scripture, called the Torah, are normative. They contain 613 rules for Jewish life, referred to as mitzvot. Though tradition says all five books were written by Moses, we know that texts referring to the Temple cult and priesthood come after they were established, certainly no earlier than the reign of King Solomon. We know that the Book of the Law, “discovered” by the High Priest Hilkiah during restoration of the Temple during the late 7th century B.C.E. is what we now call Deuteronomy, one of two sources for the Ten Commandments. The other, the one we read this morning from the Book of Exodus, is of uncertain origin.

If you are like me, you were taught that there is only one god, and that the Jewish people only ever believed in one god. You were probably also taught that the Israelites and Judahites often fell into the sin of worshipping false gods represented by idols. Generations of orthodox Christians, orthodox with a lower case “o,” would have us believe that there is one straight line from Abraham and Sarah to Moses, from Moses to David, from David to Jesus, from Jesus to Peter, and on to that White Sox fan in Rome. Protestants see that same trajectory until Martin Luther rebels in the early 16th century. Any pretense of a single trajectory falls apart for Protestants after that.

In reality, the earliest layers of scripture are polytheistic. Yahweh is conflated with the Sky-god head of the Canaanite pantheon, El, and worship of other Canaanite gods, including El’s consort, Asherah, continued for centuries after the reigns of David and Solomon. It was in Israel, the Northern Kingdom and the first to be destroyed, that the Yahweh cult became exclusive. Refugees from that kingdom found their way to the surviving Southern Kingdom of Judah, where their belief eventually took hold, leading to a series of reforms, and putting early Judaism on a path to what we know today, an ethical monotheism.

The Ten Commandments land somewhere in the middle of this trajectory. They represent the human role in constructing belief, but also the evolutionary pressures on belief, for belief must contribute to thriving in its current context to survive, even if that is only thriving for a powerful subset of the population.

Continue reading “Synecdoche: 4 October 2026”

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32

Last week, we considered Jonah on the hillside, having a tantrum because Nineveh had not been destroyed. In the folktale, the people of Nineveh repent of their sins, fasting, praying, wearing sackcloth and ashes. And by people, I mean everyone from the king to the cattle. It certainly makes you wonder about the personhood of livestock!

Now, the leader of the city would actually not have been a king, but that doesn’t matter when it comes to the lesson. And the lesson is one of collective guilt and collective punishment, or more accurately in this case, collective repentance.

This is often the way things work in the Jewish Scripture. Children suffer for the sins of their parents, generation after generation, a mirror image of the covenant blessings promised to the descendants of David, unearned rule generation after generation, in both cases undeserving.

Yahweh decides that the Neo-Assyrian Empire should conquer the Northern Kingdom of Israel as punishment for something or the other, worshiping other gods, worshiping on the wrong mountain. Definitely economic injustice as reported by the Prophet Amos. Yahweh decides that Babylon should conquer the Southern Kingdom of Judah as punishment, again for worshiping other gods, again for economic injustice. Yahweh decides that Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, will be the Messiah who conquers Babylon to set the Jewish captives free, because God is forgiving.

Never mind that some of those Israelites might be innocent and faithful, some Judahites righteous, some Babylonians not part of the oppressive regime, some good people who happened to have lousy mothers or fathers or great-greats or lived under a lousy king. Not that we would know anything about living under a lousy despot.

Fortunately, there is a counter-narrative in scripture. There is almost always a counter-narrative in scripture, whether because there are competing voices, or because the theology evolved.

Today’s reading is an example of the counter-narrative around collective guilt and collective punishment. God, through Ezekiel, proclaims a new system of divine justice. Going forward, you are only responsible for your own sins. For those who live in sin, iniquity will be their ruin. And maybe that doesn’t even need a puppet master god. Maybe ruin is the ultimate consequence of iniquity.

But, and this is huge, those who repent are saved.

Continue reading “Mara Wendigo: September 27, 2026”

Jonah 3:10-4:11

The Book of the Prophet Jonah is not actually a book of prophecy. It is a folktale about a prophet from an earlier age, similar to the Book of the Prophet Daniel, which starts with a folktale, and ends with apocalypse.

We rarely remember more than the belly of the whale from Jonah, actually a great fish, and gloss over the backend of the story, where there is an important second lesson. The first, of course, is don’t be a Jonah. Do what you are called to do or you might get thrown off the boat.

That lesson gets into some squishy theology, since we are uncomfortable with the idea of God as a puppet master in the sky, but there is a sort of deep truth there. We have all heard stories of people who have chosen their path based on the expectations of others, have been forced into the family business, or even some role prescribed by gender, some direction that has left them miserable, at sea, trapped in the belly of a beast that seems inescapable.

But before we turn to the second lesson, let’s do a bit of a recap. Jonah is called by God to travel to Nineveh and announce the destruction of the city due to the sins of the people. We’re never told what those sins are, and with Yahweh it could be worship of other gods or economic injustice.

Today, Nineveh is a section of Mosul, a city in Iraq that was destroyed by the Islamic State, with the loss of thousands of lives and the city’s rich cultural heritage, in both cases sometimes intentional destruction and sometimes collateral damage.

The Ancient Jewish people controlled more territory under King David than at any other point in their history, incorporating portions of modern day Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. At no point did they control Mesopotamia, home of the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers, center of powerful kingdoms. In fact, Jewish identity begins with the myth of God calling Abraham and Sarah out of that region, calling them to Canaan.

By the period when Jonah is set, Nineveh was part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the same kingdom that would eventually destroy Jonah’s home state of Israel.

Yet here is Yahweh, concerned about the sins of Nineveh. Do the authors of the Book of the Prophet Jonah consider Yahweh to be the only god? A universal god? The ruling god of a pantheon of gods? There is evidence for all of these ideas in the Jewish Bible.

The belief that ultimately dominated, became orthodox, was that Yahweh is the name of the only god, and that while Yahweh has a special covenant with one tribe, the descendants of Abraham, and one family, the House of David, Yahweh is, in fact, universal.

And as I mentioned, Jonah resists the call to go to Nineveh and inform the residents that Yahweh plans to destroy their city because they are sinful. He jumps on a boat bound for Tarshish. Scholars have theories about the location of ancient Tarshish, but honestly, we have no clue.

Then we get the huge storm, the superstitious sailors, and Jonah identified as the one who has offended the holy, chucked overboard, and swallowed by big fish.

This is enough for Jonah. He reluctantly agrees to complete the mission.

Continue reading “Strike Four: 20 September 2026”

Romans 14:1-12

Sermon

He was born in the Netherlands, apprenticed at Twinings in London, and worked in the tea industry in the Dutch East Indies before immigrating in 1955, settling in the San Francisco Bay area.

He was appalled by the quality of coffee here, and a decade later, opened his first coffee shop serving dark roast and espresso grade coffee in Berkeley. Alfred Peet’s apprentices took his technique, with his blessing, to Seattle, founding Starbucks.

And just like that, the ten-dollar cup of coffee was born.

Peet would eventually distance himself from Starbucks over ultra-dark roasts, and I would eventually get over the novelty and choose medium roasts. Truth be told, if I am buying coffee out, I’m more likely to choose Dunkin, due to both convenience and because Starbucks has become notorious for union-busting. And I’m a union sort of a guy, especially in this time of vulture capitalism when the billionaires exploit workers and destroy entire industries.

If I did go into a Starbucks, I could go to the counter and order a Barbie Frappuccino, a drink you will not see on the board above the baristas. It is part of what they call a “secret menu,” a pink Vanilla Bean Crème Frappuccino with dragonfruit and berry purée. Before Instagram and TikTok, we just called these special orders.

Secret menus are not quite as secret these days, often accessible through the apps on our phones that keep us tied to the consumer matrix, a true false consciousness. But with or without the Starbucks app on my phone, I cannot go into a Starbucks and order a ribeye… medium rare, with a baked potato and broccoli.

Continue reading “On the Secret Menu: 13 September 2026”

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”