Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Isaiah 58:1-12

Today’s scripture reading comes late in the tradition of Isaiah, long after the original prophet, and possibly even after the Israelite elite had been freed from the Babylonian Captivity and allowed to return to Jerusalem, rebuilding their city under the good rule of the Persians. At least that is the official version of events. That would make it around the late 6^th century B.C.E.

The passage echos key prophetic themes from before the catastrophe, themes of earlier prophets like Amos and Micah, themes written into the Torah itself that would later be central in the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus. In a nutshell, it comes down to two points: 1) What was important to the Israelites in their religious practice, showy displays like public fasting and Temple sacrifices, were not what was important to God. God did not need their burnt offerings and attention-seeking acts of public devotion. 2) What was important to God was justice.

The passage closes with a call to help those already oppressed, to provide food and shelter to the destitute, but this comes only after the call to establish justice. 

In fact, the passage first calls out the mistreatment of workers, making clear that it is not bad luck that has left people hungry and homeless, not locusts or drought or plague. Those who are suffering are suffering because of human decisions, and not the decisions of some foreign invader, but the decisions of their own people, seemingly religious people. God, as voiced by the prophet, is a labor activist.

Then there are these four direct commands. Loose the bonds of injustice. Undo the thongs of the yoke. Let the oppressed go free. Break every yoke.

The yoke, of course, is y-o-k-e, the wooden crosspiece used to bind two animals to one another in order to pull a plow or wagon. Think of a pair of oxen. 

Yoke is in there twice, and that might be worth considering. Undoing the thongs of the yoke is enough to allow the oxen to run free. Breaking the yoke means eliminating the possibility of anyone else ever being placed in the yoke again. It is a preventative measure.

But then, we get to the gospel, and circle back to the yoke, for just as Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross and follow, so too does he use the language of the yoke, encouraging his followers to voluntarily accept the light yoke of discipleship.

So which is it? Are we the pro-yoke party or the anti-yoke party?

Continue reading “Liberty Is A Lie: 5 February 2023”

It is possible, probable in fact if you have been in these pews more than a handful of times in the last year and a half, that you have heard me call crypto-currency a con job, a Ponzi scheme, or a criminal enterprise. I mean, I’m not all that bright most days, but I just can’t see that it is based on anything real, never mind the libertarian sociopathy that inspired the whole scam.

A bunch of hot computers solving math problems does not create value in a world where hungry kids can’t eat math problems, where things like actual sunflower oil and actual clean drinking water matter. Call me crazy, but non-fungible tokens don’t seem to be feeding much of anyone. At least you can eat real fungus, on your pizza right there with the pepperoni.

If you are asking, yes, I told you so, and yes, I’m sinfully smug about recent events.

Among the string of recent crypto-implosions is FTX, an exchange and hedge fund headed by Sam Bankman-Fried, now facing federal criminal charges in connection with the collapse. It is estimated that clients lost more than $8 billion, though to be honest, I’m not sure anyone knows how much of that was real money and how much was phony money, crypto backing crypto. If it doesn’t make any sense to you, good, because it doesn’t make any sense.

Continue reading “Dust and Sweat and Blood: 29 January 2023”

The text we know as First Corinthians is generally considered to be mostly authentic. You’ll note a double hedge in there. Some scholars will question the authenticity of anything, which accounts for the “generally,” and pretty much everyone who prefers scholarship over misogyny agrees that the verse directing women to “sit down, shut-up, and put on a hat” is a late alteration to the text inconsistent with Paul’s actual teaching, which accounts for the “mostly.”

There are all sorts of wonkish reasons people think this letter is the real deal, authentically Paul, but I’m not interested in most of those this morning, which would be more lecture than sermon. The main thing for me is that it feels real, feels like real human, especially that “who I baptized” bit. Every time I read it, in my head, I hear Paul as a gangster. 

“I didn’t baptize none ‘a yous guys. Oh, except for Joey Three-Fingers. And Little Vinnie and his crew. Maybe some other guys, I don’t know. But I didn’t baptize all ‘a yous.”

Could that tent-making thing have been a front, with a little numbers racket at the back of the shop? What’s the over/under on the number of people the Romans will crucify today?

But seriously, Paul’s letter begins with an appeal for unity. The Corinthian church is already divided into factions, and can I just note that there are still folks walking around who actually knew Jesus, and already there are these divisions, within the church at Corinth, as well as between Paul’s growing flock of Gentile Jesus-followers and the original Jewish Jesus movement. 

Paul is all “I’m not in competition with Apollos or Peter” here in the opening of the epistle, but then spends almost the entire rest of the letter trying to convince his readers that he is right and Apollos and Peter are wrong. Because Paul is actually human.

It is easy to lose this humanity, Paul’s humanity, the humanity of any of the authors of scripture, because the fundamentalist heresy insists every word in the Bible is holy utterance. If God is writing the text, then the humanness found in the text is a con, mere artifice. 

Continue reading “22 January 2023: Gangster Paul”

Isaiah 49:1-7

Understanding the Hebrew Bible can be complicated at times. For one thing, it was written over a span of several centuries in very different cultural, technological, and political contexts. To put it in perspective, at the most conservative end, we’d be looking at a text completed today but started when Columbus first reached the Americas. At the far end of the range, it would be a text with its earliest material written when William conquered England. That’s a long time.

It contains legal codes, some self-help, poetry and hymns, polemic and history, and a generous amount of pious fiction, myths and stories designed to help one particular tribe understands its place in the world, a tribe caught on hardscrabble land between two great river valleys that produced more powerful armies. It is the imperfect but mostly well-intentioned human encounter with holy mystery.

Today’s reading comes from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, a text that combines material from that named 8th century prophet with material created two centuries later, during and soon after the Babylonian Captivity. We don’t know who wrote that later material, and can only guess at the process that formed the book as we have it today. We might think of it less as the work of “the” prophet, singular, and more as work in the tradition of the prophet, carrying important themes across contexts and centuries the same way we here at the Park Church carry forward themes from the Abolitionist movement that inspired the founders of our congregation, understanding that Black Lives Matter and “Say Their Names” are in continuity with that great history of resistance and courage.

As the saying goes, the author of today’s text has ninety-nine problems. After years of being caught between Egypt and the various civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, the once great Israelite Kingdom was gone. First it broke in two due to in-fighting, then Assyria crushed and de-populated the Northern Kingdom, the time period of the First Isaiah. As the author we call Second Isaiah is writing two centuries later, there are still some alive who remember Jerusalem as the thriving capital of the Southern Kingdom, Judah, but that too is gone. The Babylonians leveled the walls, destroyed the great Temple of Solomon, and took the elite and skilled as captives, the context of the pious fiction of the Book of Daniel.

They aren’t exactly slaves in Babylon, but they aren’t exactly free either. They want to go home, but home is a smoking ruin. Worst of all, they are having to re-examine everything they believed about their own identity, the story they had told themselves about who they were. They thought they were the special chosen people of the Creator, the god they called Yahweh, who they were coming to believe was the only god. Maybe they weren’t so chosen after all. Or maybe they were chosen, and had screwed up so bad that this was punishment. Maybe this was all their own fault.

So yeah, a lot going on, and the prophet was hard at work trying to construct new theologies that made sense in their current context, to offer hope and inspire action.

This could be all about the Israelites. But it isn’t.

Continue reading “Dare to Dream: MLK Weekend 2023”

I am going to begin this morning by going a little “meta,” and by that I don’t mean Zuckerberg’s civilization-destroying company. What I mean by “meta” is zooming out and looking at how the proverbial sausage is made, thinking about how we think about Epiphany.

Like other dates on the liturgical calendar, Epiphany wasn’t really a Congregational thing. Those Puritans and Pilgrims were a dry and cranky lot, only interested in the basics. Remember, they outlawed Christmas at one point. Thankfully that didn’t last too long. But there were plenty of ancient feasts and practices they still considered “Papist,” including Epiphany.

It was only a century ago, when the ecumenical spirit was in the air worldwide, that we started re-examining and restoring some of the Christian traditions we had thrown off, especially important as we grew closer to parts of the German church in America that were as much Lutheran as they were Reform.

Unlike the Feast of Christ the King, a 20th century fabrication, there is at least a real tradition, actual scripture, around Epiphany. It is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, as in the proverbial partridge in a pear tree and all that, and the date associated with today’s reading from Matthew, the arrival of wise people from the East at the home (not manger!) of Joseph and Mary.

The word “Epiphany” itself comes from the Biblical Greek for an appearance or manifestation, and so shares somewhat with the word “apocalypse,” which simply means to reveal or make known. Both lean into seeing as a way of knowing.

In particular, Christians have traditionally connected the story of the wise travelers with the gospel message to the Gentiles, that is, to people who were not ethnically or religiously connected to the tribe of Israel. Which is kind of important, because no good news for the Gentiles means no us, no Sistine Chapel, no Mozart Requiem, no Azusa Street revival.

Because there is that star, because there is that message to the Gentiles, pastors all-too-often slip into the sin of supersessionism, the wrong-headed theology that claims Christians replaced the Israelites in covenant with God, contributing to centuries of antisemitism, to Auschwitz and the Tree of Life Massacre. 

Just as often pastors lean into the language of light, connecting to old tropes that equate good with whiteness and evil with darkness, not only paralleled in racism, but also ignoring the very real and important role darkness plays in life, in rest, in mystery. Christmastide, the season from the Christmas Eve service through Epiphany, as well as Eastertide, the season from Easter Sunday until Pentecost, are assigned white as the liturgical color, because white is assumed to be good.

It is not that all of those pastors are intentionally racist or antisemitic. It is simply that we have this slow construction of story, a soup of ancient superstition and scientific knowledge.

So let’s ignore those old tropes, and, as they might say on a television police procedural, let’s just stick to the story, ma’am.

Continue reading “The Burning World: 8 January 2023”

If the local New Year’s baby this year was a boy, odds are it was named Liam, currently the most popular name for boys according to babycenter.com, one top search engine hit for baby names, though the site doesn’t make clear how they compiled their data or what regions it supposedly covers.

Liam, short for William, is not found in the Bible, though most of the popular boys names are. Biblical names are not popular at all for girls, maybe because there are fewer women named in scripture. 

For boys, the Hebrew Testament names Levi and Asher make the list, as well as variant forms of Luke and Matthew, half of the evangelists. John, however, doesn’t even crack the top 50, the closest being the derivative “Jack” found in the 22nd spot.

Gen Z parents are pretty keen on ex-presidents, with Carter at 30 and Lincoln at 40. Maverick is up there. I’m disappointed that “Texas Ranger” didn’t make the list. 

Poor John, that dying breed.

There is no shortage of Johns in the Christian Testament, even if you believe that John the Disciple was the author of the gospel, the three epistles, and the revelation received on Patmos. At the very least, there is John the Baptizer and John the Disciple, brother of James and especially loved by Jesus. 

Continue reading “1 January 2023: A Vote, Not A Veto”

If Jesus were born sometime in the wee hours of Christmas morning in South Korea, by the time everyone woke up with their New Year’s hangovers, he’d be two years-old. This is due to one of the three ways Koreans use to determine someone’s age. In one traditional method, you are born age one, and an additional year is added every New Year, regardless of your actual date of birth. Using this method, you are older than you think, though I doubt I can sell this to the Social Security Administration.

It can be quite confusing, and Korean culture has yet another traditional method, as well as sometimes determining age the way we do. They are working to adopt the single standard method used in much of the rest of the world, born zero years old and one year added on each birthday. Nothing wrong with tradition, even tradition that doesn’t fit our logic, but we live in an inter-connected world, with people and goods flowing across cultures and borders, and it sometimes helps to have shared standards. Just don’t ask an Englishman whether he wants a liter of ale… 

That’s a pint, thanks, mate…

Continue reading “Older Than You Think: Christmas Eve 2022”

The Gospel according to Mark begins in media res, which is just a fancy Latin way of saying “in the middle of the story.” Honestly, every story begins in the middle of some other story, beginnings being arbitrary things and all…

Specifically, the Gospel according to Mark begins with John the Baptizer. Jesus is a grown up, not the “Sweet Baby Jesus” Ricky Bobby likes so much in “Talladega Nights.”

The Gospel traditionally attributed to John (the Disciple not the Baptizer) begins at the beginning, and by beginning I mean cosmic-before-Creation beginning, but then moves on to the concrete story of John the Baptizer, essentially the same starting spot as Mark.

It is only in the two gospels traditionally attributed to Matthew and according to Luke the Physician that we find Nativity narratives. Both are late gospels, using the Gospel according to Mark as a primary source, as well as another document, a long lost gospel that we call Q. And since they share these two primary sources, you’d think that their Nativity stories would be much the same or at least pretty close. You’d be wrong.

Continue reading “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: 18 December 2022 (Advent4)”

We don’t really treat Advent as a penitential season anymore. It was hard to be a penitent at an office Christmas party with Barney’s “special” egg nog, and all of those holiday movies have happy endings… 

The Christmas Tree Farm gets saved, the pageant happens when the retired rock star returns to her home town and belts out a perfectly operatic Ave Maria while reconnecting with her high school sweetheart, and the blizzard breaks just in time for that donated kidney to get through as the Christmas star shines in the sky. And puppies, just because.

But I’m going to start this morning with a confession anyway. I may read and collect DC Comics, that is to say Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman, but I prefer the Marvel movies, like Ironman, which, I’m sorry to say, are just better. 

And I’m pretty sure that is some sort of violation of the Geek Code, akin to saying that Jean-Luc Picard commanded the Millennium Falcon. If you know, you know.

Continue reading “4 December 2022: The Dude Abides”

While a certain type of American blowhard is blathering on about “wokeness” and defunding libraries, the rest of us have been quietly getting on with the life-long process of learning. 

For example, while my theology and historical understanding of the Pharisees has been appropriately nuanced over the years, a recent conversation with Rabbi Oren from Kol Ami has led me to tweak my Communion Rite, and begin reading a new book on the Pharisaic movement. 

I grew up learning about and talking about “slaves.” It is only recently that I have come to understand how that term essentializes and reduces the humanity of those held in bondage. I now try to avoid the term slave, for they were people, not objects. I lean into “enslaved people,” and similar terms, making clear that slavery did not define who they were, it is something that was done to them. 

For years, I’ve pushed back against the term “sexual preference” as applied to members of the LGBTQI+ community, as if everything about us was reduced to what happens in bed and being gay was a choice, like say Rocky Road ice cream instead of Vanilla. I’ve tried any number of alternatives, but in the end, gay, lesbian, and all of those other letters gets to where we need to be and reflects the diversity of folks who do not fit the majority culture constructs and gender and relationship.

There is, however, one word that triggers a certain type of privileged American that still leaves me scratching my head. I mean, they make a big deal out of Memorial Day, go on and on about “The Greatest Generation” as if no other generation was ever great. But say the word “antifascist,” and they have you pegged as a cop-killing communist. And shorten it to “antifa,” and they just about explode.

I don’t think we need to redefine or abandon the term antifascist. I am proudly Antifa. You know, like my grandfather, part of that supposedly “Greatest Generation.” 

Continue reading “Fascist Killing Hope Machine: 27 November 2022”