Constructive Faith

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”

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just this week, a major study that fueled skepticism of the Covid-19 vaccine was retracted.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

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

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

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

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

Genesis 37:3, 12-28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “The Pursuit of Happiness”

1 Kings 3:5-12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “Sin-icism: 26 July 2026”