Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Cooking was having a cultural moment even before the number of media platforms went haywire. There are still traditional cookbooks, selling like hotcakes to people who allegedly don’t even cook. Then there are the 23 or so cooking channels on your cable box or streaming service. And let’s not get started on the websites and the YouTube channels, the significant ink given over to cooking in our newspapers of record like the New York Times. There are films, from Jon Favreau’s aptly named “Chef” to “Julie and Julia,” based on the real life work of Julie Powell, who shockingly died just over a week ago.

Cooking even gets featured in current affairs, from the tragic suicide of the chef and adventurer Anthony Bourdain to the humanitarian work and political daring of Jose Andreas, the native Spaniard, naturalized American, whose work includes World Central Kitchen and a pugilistic relationship with our last president. Since 2010, World Central Kitchen has responded to countless natural disasters, set up kitchens during the pandemic, and is currently operating eight sites on the border between Poland and Ukraine. 

Meanwhile, Ievgen Klopotenko is cooking away at his restaurant in Kyiv. As reported by Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian, he was first known for cultural openness, a sort of Ukrainian Jamie Oliver trying to make school lunches more nutritious and more appealing, including the introduction of foreign dishes like curry, shepherd’s pie, and mac and cheese. Today, he focused on native dishes, and fighting Putin’s attempt to erase Ukrainian culture the best way he knows how, from the kitchen.

For all of its problems, and there are plenty of them, one of the gifts of globalization has been culinary diversity. I have the French cookbook on the shelf, but it is joined by books full of curries, Moroccan dishes, street food from African and Asia, and of course, the American South. We’ve come a long way since Julia Child premiered her show “The French Chef” the year I was born.

Home cooking has largely evolved with technology, as storage and transportation allowed us access to foods we might have never encountered, much less attempted on our own. Restaurant cooking had one major revolution, when Auguste Escoffier brought his military experience to bear on the organization of the kitchen at César Ritz’s Savoy in London, creating the “brigade de cuisine” that is still used to this day, more than a century later. Escoffier was thoroughly corrupt and absolutely genius, so significant a figure in the culinary world that he becomes Auguste Gusteau in Pixar’s 2007 film “Ratatouille.”

Of course, food is a faith issue, and I’m not just talking about to sometimes quirky dietary restrictions that developed in ancient times or the notion that gods eat and therefore require food sacrifices, whether the one God of the monotheisms or the many gods of polytheistic and ancestor-worshipping religions. Though I do always get a kick out of the suggestion that the original grain offering to Yahweh was actually beer.

Continue reading “Food, Glorious Food: 13 November 2022”

You know, sometimes things are just too easy. Like today’s scripture reading, from what we think of as Paul’s Second Letter to the church at Thessaloniki, a text that says the end times can’t come until the lawless one appears, a self-promoting man who will convince people to believe total lies. Yeah, about that… 

Maybe we’d better start packing, ’cause we’re about to be raptured, or, if God is really the complete jerk some seem to believe, get sent off on a very warm and very permanent vacation. Like SPF 5 million sunscreen and asbestos board shorts type of vacation. Happy Armageddon, Y’All!

The good news is that people have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time, and the evil men and women who are setting fire to our democracy are not the first cult leaders to sell the snake oil of mass delusion. The world hasn’t ended yet, though we’re doing our level best, what with human-caused climate change and all.

In other ways, today’s text is far from being easy. My favorite biblical commentary uses words like delusion, disorientation, and dismay when describing this chapter.

So what are we to make of this passage and more broadly of what we call biblical eschatology, of all the texts that suggest some form of divine re-ordering, whether that take the form of a Day of the Lord that establishes an earthly order that matches the divine will or an apocalyptic destruction in which the sheep and the goats get divided and earthly life ceases? The whole “Left Behind” scenario, or maybe the Omen series… 

And let’s answer that before we come back to the challenge the late Madeleine Albright offers, what to do with politicians who view texts like the Revelation to John of Patmos as an operations manual for domestic and foreign policy, who have enough hubris to believe they are guaranteed a spot in heaven. Besides making sure we never give them the nuclear codes.

Continue reading “Happy Armageddon, Y’All: 6 November 2022”

It may seem like so very long ago, but it was really only the Year One B.C. (that is, before Covid) when the great Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris burned. I remember the tears in the eyes of one congregant in the church I was serving at the time when she thought about all that was lost, art and architecture, and I suspect, as we recently experienced with the death of Queen Elizabeth, a sense of continuity, a sense of the world as it had been for all of her life. In fact, the congregant grieving the loss of the great cathedral was a native of England, so I can only imagine her sense of discontinuity these days with a new king and the Prime Minister of the month.

The Notre Dame fire was made worse by the fact that the fire brigade was not called until more than thirty minutes after the first alarm went off. First they sent a guard to see if the alarm was right. They were not ready to accept that there was a fire. Except they sent the guard to the wrong place, the wrong attic. By the time they looked in the right place and believed the fire was real, it was way too late.

After the fire, there was immediate discussion of what comes next, of rebuilding the cathedral. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, suggested an openness to a “contemporary architectural gesture.” As you might expect, heads exploded. Humans are nothing if not reactionary.

In the end, the French National Assembly passed a law requiring that the structure be rebuilt in a way to “preserve the historic, artistic and architectural interest of the monument.” 

Let’s bracket our American expectations about whether a national government should be controlling the reconstruction of a building it plans to give back to the Roman Catholic church, and for a moment, let’s even bracket the backwardness that insists that only the past is worthy of our attention. 

Let’s instead admit one simple fact: no matter what they do after the fire, it will not be the same as it was before the fire, and what was there before the fire itself had evolved and changed since it was originally completed in the 13th century, so which “before” should the reconstructionists even choose? 

Continue reading “After the Fire: 30 October 2022”

My recent vacation combined a little tourism and a lot of family. 

The tourism part included an outstanding exhibit at Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum focused on the American artist Jacob Lawrence, a 20^th century descendent of the enslaved African Diaspora, and his connections with artists still in Africa. I also visited Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown. It was the first time in decades that I’d experienced those historic sites, so closely tied to my own family’s story in America. 

Williamsburg continues to be what it has been since the Rockefeller’s made it a personal cause, a well-funded billionaire’s philanthropy. Yorktown and Jamestown are different. Both contain historic sites managed by the National Park Service on a shoestring budget, as well as substantial educational sites and museums under the auspices of a better-funded and independent foundation. 

At Jamestown, that foundation’s museum and re-creation of the ships and the first fort are called the Jamestown Settlement, and I must admit, I was blown away. They have done a remarkable job of re-framing the story. Where once you experienced a celebration of colonialism, the Doctrine of Discovery, and white supremacy, you can now hear about the intersection and clash of three advanced cultures, the First Peoples of the continent, the English who invaded and established the colony, and the Angolan abductees whose purchase at Jamestown marked the start of our nation’s original sin.

The foundation’s museum and re-created encampment at Yorktown is not quite as nuanced, still firmly rooted in American exceptionalism and white nationalism, with barely a nod to the overwhelming majority of residents in the original colonies who were not made free by the American Revolution, indigenous populations, slaves in the African diaspora, women… 

The American Revolution is, in the Yorktown narrative, primarily about taxation without representation, which is at least partially true. It was an economic war, about the exploitative and unsustainable model of overseas colonization. But there is little mention at Yorktown or in popular patriotism of the Southern concern that England might abolish slavery, something that seemed inevitable after a 1772 decision by the Court of the King’s Bench, and a move that would invalidate a primary source of Southern wealth.

The so-called Founding Fathers are at the center of it all in Yorktown, as are those familiar patriotic tropes, “give me liberty or give me death,” and the words of Thomas Jefferson, the “unalienable right” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I was already thinking about happiness, for today’s scripture and theme were on the calendar months ago. But what the heck is happiness? And does our faith promise us happiness?

Continue reading “Unfollow Your Bliss: 23 October 2022”

The five-century old cognitive shift we call the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, or simply Modernity, produced an idealism bordering on hubris and delusion at times, the idea that humans were capable of producing a perfectly ordered society, a utopia in the writings of Sir Thomas More. The cognitive shift to post-modernity, only a century old and marked by things like relativity and uncertainty, has left us more than a little cynical about the human capacity for good, but people do still try to create just and ordered communities, sometimes called alternative or intentional community, from co-housing and housing trusts to Christian equivalents of the “kibbutz,” communities united in religious values and committed to shared endeavor.

Humans being humans, though, intentional and alternative communities rarely survive past the first generation, and are never quite as utopian as the founders intended. For example, Arden, Delaware, where I once lived, was artsy and progressive, an experiment in the economics advocated by a guy named Henry George, and influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. In Arden, you own your house, but not the land it sits on, one interpretation of George’s push to tax land, not labor. The people who initially lived in Arden, being self-governed and human, didn’t quite live up to the vision of the founders, so there were sequels, Ardentown and Ardencroft, which were like most sequels, not as good as the original, and maybe best unmade. Still, Arden exists with roughly the same principles more than a century later, which is a raging success by alternative community standards.

Georgist economics predates the digital economy, the immense value attached these days to intangible assets, predates the Ponzi scheme that is finance capitalism, and was conceived before hedge funds and private equity firms. But in an age when those hedge funds are buying up trailer parks and holding the poor hostage for extortionist rents, when so much land is under water or on fire, sometimes in rapid succession, it might be worth re-engaging questions about land, who owns it, and who it benefits. 

We begin our service every week by naming the fact that we are on stolen Seneca land, and the ancient Hebrews were in much the same position, sort of. The Books of Joshua and Judges are celebrations of a successful campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, babies brains smashed against the rocks, the same sort of thing ethnic Russians and the Russian army are doing in Ukraine these days. Fortunately, at least for those ancient Canaanites, we don’t think this really happened, at least not on what is literally a “biblical” scale, though no doubt some were dispossessed and driven out. The Hebrew culture actually appears to be a construction, weaving together Canaanite culture and migrant populations like the Levite escapees from Egypt, with the idea of a racially pure Hebrew monotheism being about as real as the idea of America as a white Christian nation, which is to say, not real and absolutely false.

Still, the idea had power, and land had emotional value far beyond agricultural output and re-sale. The Hebrews told themselves that the land, this land of milk and honey, was given to them by God, and their entire economy was built on small-hold farms and inheritance. This is why, when the King of Israel wanted his vineyard, Naboth said “No. This is my inheritance. I will not sell.” Of course, Queen Jezebel was more than willing to fabricate a false charge against Naboth, ending with the man’s death, so much like the civil asset forfeiture laws in America today, widely abused by corrupt police departments.

Continue reading “25 September 2022: Fixed Star”

There are more than one kind of Republican in the world, and I do not mean by that the split between the anti-Trumpers and their treasonous opponents, for as we were reminded this week, in most of the world, the opposite of Republican is not Democrat, it is Monarchist. 

This is not, as far as I know, a particularly divisive issue for the continental European monarchies. Monarchs in places like Holland and Sweden are generally well-behaved. There are a handful of claimants in places like Italy that generate a little buzz, though they don’t get much traction. Republicanism is a live issue in Great Britain, even more so among its former colonies, many of which still have the queen, or now king, as head of state. There are Republican movements in Australia and Canada, for example, but they are especially strong in the Caribbean and African countries of the commonwealth, countries that were the targets of particularly exploitative and racist colonial practices. The British were, after all, the chief beneficiaries of the Triangle Trade that moved slaves from Africa to the Americas. 

Still, even the most diehard Republican has been measured if not completely silent on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, possibly out of pragmatism, but also possibly out of decency, for even if the House of Windsor and the royal brand have been tarnished in recent years, she was still treasured.

This should seem baffling to Americans. After all, we fought a war to gain our independence from the British crown and soundly rejected monarchy as a model for government. Our head of state is also our head of government, sometimes, except when he isn’t, which is worth reconsidering, both the explicit “he” and the broader question of our current two-party first-past-the-post electoral system, which seems to have failed completely.

Yet, for some reason, Americans are quite attached to English royalty. It may be that the American myth was initially forged by invaders from England, the theocrats of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the Royalists in Virginia, opposite sides of an English Civil War that saw the first King Charles lose more than just his crown. 

It may be our alliances during the First and Second World Wars that strengthened the connection, where we fought by the side of the British and their colonies. 

It may be countless movies and novels and the logical overlap when literature is written in a shared language. 

An American has even married into the royal family for a second time recently, though the first time was to a racist and Nazi-sympathizer, and nothing about that story was particularly pleasant so we tend to avoid it.

My social media feeds have been filled with the late queen since she died, the new king, and all things British. I admit that while I have not watched “The Crown” or Downton Abbey, I am enough of an Anglophile to have paid attention myself, have watched some of the processions and remembrances.

Only one friend, a classmate from Divinity School, was contrarian, publicly noting that he didn’t really care about the whole thing, that he did not completely understand the American grief. And, of course, on one level, he’s right. Elizabeth Windsor was not our queen. 

Continue reading “The Prize We Pay for Love: 18 September 2022”

You have probably seen the memes on social media, a sentence made up of words that may share pronunciations or spellings but have completely different meanings, or maybe punctuation that makes the difference between whether we are calling grandma for dinner or serving her up slow-roasted on a bed of couscous. 

They all poke good-natured fun at the English language, which is, if we are honest, weird and difficult on a good day. 

English is the linguistic equivalent of a Lamborghini marrying a Volkswagen and having a Land Rover love child, part Romance, part German efficiency, part bulldozer, with good old earthy Anglo-Saxon profanity on the bumper stickers for good measure. 

Never mind the countless loan words from other cultures, absorbed as the English colonized the world, the sun never setting on the once great and horrible empire that was, in truth, the first globalization, exploitation and racism on a scale that made Imperial Rome seem like rank amateurs.

One bit of that British empire was the Indian subcontinent, many small kingdoms administratively and forcefully unified, then artificially carved up again upon release, and still reeling from that partition to this day. And there, on the west coast of what is today India, we find folks who speak Marathi, actually the tenth largest language in the world in terms of native speakers, outnumbering the entire population of Germany and then some. There is a cinema tradition, Mollywood, and a rich literary history. 

Marathi is the language that names the animal at the heart of the English colonialist classic tale “Riki Tiki Tavi” by Kipling, for mongoose is a Marathi loan word, and Riki Tiki Tavi is a courageous and loyal mongoose. 

Like so many loan words, mongoose does not follow even the Frankenstein rules of English, for the plural of mongoose is not mongeese, even if the plural of goose is geese. There are no mongeese, only mongooses.

Goose and geese, mouse and mice, sheep and … sheep.

There is no difference between one sheep and ninety-nine sheep. 

Continue reading “There Are No Mongeese: 11 September 2022”

The history of religion is filled with con artists and nut cases, including a few in our own tradition, so it can be a little tricky parsing what stories are actually constructive, more than a little tricky mining that vein of eternal truth buried in the middle of so much human muck. 

Xenu, the nuclear-armed intergalactic dictator of Scientology, and a favorite of mine, is science fiction, and not even particularly good science fiction, a billion-dollar con job that works only because it is so brazen. It reflects the historical context of the charlatan that created that cult, L. Ron Hubbard, in the years immediately after the Second World War.

Genetics confirms that Native Americans are not the lost tribes of Israel, no matter what appeared on magic tablets under the hill up the road in Palmyra. That con reflects the social context of the white colonizer’s expansion across the continent, the mass hysteria of the Great Awakening, and the misogyny inherent in polygamy. Not that we didn’t have our own brush with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery in our own tradition.

Other fictions are more benign. Take, for example, the traditional claim that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of Hebrew scripture shared by Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. He didn’t, as I’ve said before. We have a pretty good understanding of the traditions and events that led to the version of the texts we use today, texts assembled from other sources centuries after the Exodus, and including a forgery that dishonest priests claimed had been discovered in the Temple of Solomon during renovations, the long lost book we call Deuteronomy. 

Despite the obviousness of the fraud, this text that has been part of the Judeo-Christian canon for millennia, has taken on a sort of sacredness, and absolutely contains truth.

The Torah was written and revised in the years between the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the later destruction of the southern Kingdom of Judah. Refugees from the north brought their own texts and traditions, which were eventually merged with those of the south. 

Theologically, this is a critical period, for it is when the Hebrew religion moves closer to ethical monotheism, the belief that only one god, Yahweh, should be worshipped, maybe even that Yahweh is the only real god. It is when they come to believe that Yahweh is good. God the Father, as conceived by Jesus. A God of love and grace rests on this re-perception of the holy.

The socio-economic context is critical too, and one of the ways we know that Deuteronomy is not the product of escaped slaves wandering in the desert. It reflects a second transition in the social organization of day-to-day life of Canaan. The first was the move from a loose tribal confederation, the period reflected in the stories of Joshua and Judges, to a nation-state of small-hold farmers, of kings and priests. This was an age of increased urbanization and the consolidation of wealth into fewer hands. 

Every time you read about laborers in scripture, you are reading about someone who has lost their own land, is no longer a small-holder, and has therefore become vulnerable to economic exploitation. Every time you hear a reference to laborers, in Hebrew Scripture, or in the parables of Jesus recorded in the Christian Testament, you should be listening for teachings about justice, human and divine, for those lessons are there. Day laborer meant poor and vulnerable then, just as it does now.

Continue reading “4 September 2022: Day Labor”

I want to hire the P.R. person for dragons. I mean, mermaids and mermen have their moments, unicorns come and go in a poof of rainbow glitter, trolls get some screen time on occasion, but no one does it like dragons, grinding it out year after year. Sometimes they are perched on a pile of gold and incinerating local villages. Sometimes they are the ally and wise counsel to the human hero. They are the Meryl Streep of fantasy creatures, able to play any role, or maybe the Keith Richards, born old and never aging.

They are back in the cultural mix at the moment, as the prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, hits HBO. The novels in that series were bestsellers, the show a smash hit, though I admit to only making it through the “Red Wedding.” If you know, you know.

One of the popular tropes regarding dragons provides the title for this morning’s sermon. “Here be dragons” is sometimes thought to be what ancient and medieval cartographers wrote on the edges of the map, indicating unexplored territory, and there was a lot of unexplored territory back then. It turns out to be an anachronism. Cartographers did indicate the danger of the unknown with pictures of fierce beasts, including dragons, but the earliest use of that phrase, in the Latin form “hic sunt dracones,” doesn’t appear until the start of the 16^th century, on a globe now in the collection of the New York Public Library.

The unknown can be scary. But the known can be pretty scary too. And dragons don’t just hang around under the mountain or at the edge of the map. Sometimes they wear well-tailored suits and red silk ties, sometimes black robes. 

I am inclined to Neil Gaiman’s take on dragons, as you heard in our first reading. He is the award-winning multi-genre writer of groundbreaking comic books, bestselling novels, and children’s fiction, with many of his works adapted for film and television, including the new Netflix series Sandman. And it is one of his works for children, Coraline, later adapted for stop-motion animation, that provides us with that reading, the reminder that dragons can be defeated.

Continue reading “Here Be Dragons: 28 August 2022”

This summer, we have spent a significant amount of time with the Hebrew prophets. This is, of course, mostly my fault. I believe our faith must be more than spiritual anesthesia, and I’m not enamored of the passive orthodoxy that says “You’re going to heaven, and you’re going to heaven, and you’re going to heaven,” like some deified Oprah. 

I do not have the attention span to focus on an eternal paradise when I can see hell right here on earth, nor do I have the discipline necessary to tune out the cries of the sick, the poor, the frightened, for it takes tremendous discipline or true sociopathy to ignore suffering, and I just don’t have it in me. I’d never make it in a church that wants to hear “gee, aren’t you just swell” every single week, and indeed, that type of church has chewed me up and spit me out.

Which is all to say that if you know anything about the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, you should not be even slightly surprised that I selected this text from the several that were available in the lectionary today, for Jeremiah lived in troubled times, just as we do, and he was not willing to “stay in his lane” so to speak. 

No, most Christians would like religion to just focus on going to church, on micro-managing other people’s sex lives, and on controlling women’s bodies, and being a prophet, Jeremiah wasn’t having it. He wanted to talk about more than just patriarchy, personal piety, and purity. Among other things, he talked about foreign policy and military strategy.

He did so in the final years of the southern Kingdom of Judah, when Assyria was declining, and Judah found itself caught between Egypt and Babylon, with the Babylonians eventually destroying Jerusalem itself, its Temple of Solomon and its walls. While many would be carted off to Babylon for the decades we know as the Exile, Jeremiah and his scribe, Baruch, would instead flee to Egypt, where tradition has it he wrote the Book of Lamentations.

And for all of that, I am not going to deliver a sermon about doing justice, as I do frequently, or about idolatry, another frequent subject. I’m not even going to preach about false prophets, though God knows there are enough of them about, from televangelists to bishops in the Roman tradition. Though we must certainly pray about the consequences of false prophets on this week that has seen attacks by their followers.

I’m not even going to point out that sinful behavior ultimately leads to societal ruin, that we don’t need God to crush us, because greed and cruelty simply aren’t sustainable in the long-term, for the planet, for our species.

Let’s focus, instead, on the opening of the reading:
The Lord declares, Am I a God
who is only nearby and not far off?
Can people hide themselves in secret places
so I might not see them?
Don’t I fill heaven and earth?

Now, Jeremiah is focusing on punishment, but he is on to more than he realizes. For God is not only nearby, as the Hebrews would discover when the four-century-old Temple of Solomon, God’s location in their theology, was a burning pile of rubble. 

God could be with them when they prayed in Babylon, could speak to Ezekiel there, could be present with the diaspora community. They’d have to re-discover this when the Second Temple, reconstructed after the Exile and existing for centuries, was again destroyed another five centuries on, in 70 C.E., as a mad street preacher from Galilee had predicted four decades earlier. 

They’d learn that they could gather as a synagogue, and God would be as present and as real as when they slaughtered bulls on the Temple Mount, maybe more so.

Yes, Jeremiah, God does indeed fill heaven and earth. And if God fills heaven and earth, how can God ever be the God of only one tribe, one race, one nation? Indeed, how can God ever be the God of one species? 

Fine, we sentient erect primates conceive of God as being like us, for we are our only frame of reference, the stick against which we measure all things. Though scientists are beginning to imagine other ways that animals and plants and systems might think, they paradoxically can only think about that thinking from within our thinking, the same thing we have done with God since we first conceived of the mysterious has holy, as having will and agency, since we chose to think that the holy might think, just like us.

Humility requires that we be honest with ourselves. Our every utterance about the holy is a dart thrown into an ocean, never hitting the target, sinking ever further into the depths, beyond our view and imagination.

Continue reading “Cranky Jeremiah: 14 August 2022”