Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

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”

My original title for this morning’s sermon was “Let’s destroy Christianity.” A sermon title should provoke curiosity, and that would certainly do it. My better angels won, in the end, though the original might be more accurate, for our text this morning addresses an ancient concern that is still absolutely a concern today, the problem with religion.

So let’s start with that theological stick of dynamite. A fundamentalist view of salvation history works like this: a needy co-dependent god created two humans, then placed a temptation close by to test them. But that god made them, so they’d only fail the test if that god had created a defective product. The human creatures succumbed to that temptation, albeit with help from an evil creature also created by that god. To be specific, the woman creature succumbed to that temptation, then dragged the male creature along with her, because let’s not miss a chance to squeeze in a little misogyny.

That god stewed on that slight, which was the god’s own fault for creating creatures in that way, for a very long time. Centuries even. Finally, that god sent a part of the divine self into human form, and orchestrated something that looks vaguely like Trinitarian suicide, having the Jesus god-self executed to pay the Creator god-self back for the insult of weak and fragile creatures having actually been weak and fragile creatures. The humans in this story of divine insanity are simply pawns acting out the will of this god.

When the story is told in this way, it is little wonder that sane people have walked away. For one thing, they did not know 2500 years ago but we do know now that there was no Adam, no Eve. All humans are not descended from a single couple created in a magic garden. We are the result of thousands of years of natural selection, erect primates with big brains and imaginations, which is miracle enough. We aren’t even all completely from the primate species homo sapiens, since many of us carry Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. So even if that pissed off co-dependent god was worthy of our worship, there was no Eve to bite the forbidden fruit, no “original sin.”

Continue reading “The Problem With Religion: 7 August 2022”

Much like the ancient Hebrews, many families today have origin stories, though some are a bit suspect. Even with the possibility of exponential growth across generations, it seems unlikely that everybody in New England is descended from the 102 passengers and 30 crew members who invaded North America on the Mayflower. In the United Church of Christ, we can rightly claim to be the theological descendants of those Pilgrims, but few of us can claim biological descent.

In my native region, the big claim is to be a FFV, which stands for “First Families of Virginia,” though what it means by “first” is problematic, for the category does not include indigenous peoples, who really were first, or the majority of white invaders who didn’t have time for that upper-class nonsense. “First Families of Virginia” really just means that subset of the invaders who imagined themselves to be inconvenienced English nobility, to be better than others, with pedigrees, real or not, to prove it.

My own family has engaged in this sort of myth-making. Some of the claims are legitimate. The first family member arrived in Virginia in 1620, a year after the first African abductees were enslaved in Virginia, technically qualifying us, and those slaves, as FFVs. Though I suspect the branch that claims to be descended from a German knight who served Frederick Barbarossa may be stretching things a bit. A toothless German serf waist-deep in mud seems far more likely.

One of the more common ancestral claims among white-identified people in the US is that we are all “part Indian.” Indian here does not mean from South Asia, but instead refers to those indigenous people displaced by that European invasion, nearly destroyed by the initial unintentional genocide of disease and the subsequent intentional genocide of settler greed.

Now, race is a fiction, with no scientific basis, albeit a powerful one, and humans have relationships and produce children across imagined lines of race and tribe all the time, so many so-called white Americans probably do have non-white blood, again accepting the absurdity of those categories. But much like the Mayflower Pilgrims, we can’t all have a Cherokee great-great grandmother. 

Still, because many descendants of America’s First Peoples have a sort of “dual citizenship,” and because some tribes have leveraged their liminal legal status for profit, tribal rolls have become contested territory in recent years, with people stripped of their tribal identity because they do not have enough tribal “blood,” or, in one iteration, any at all. 

This last category includes some of the “Black Creeks” and similar groups as reported by Caleb Gayle in “We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power,” reviewed by Philip Deloria in the July 25th issue of “The New Yorker.” While I knew that there was a Venn diagram of sorts around Black identity and Native American identity, especially among East Coast tribes, the review of Gayle’s work was eye-opening. 

Continue reading “Black Creeks: 31 July 2022”

The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Testament sometimes referred to as the Pentateuch, is traditionally attributed to Moses, with an emphasis on the role of divine revelation. That is to say, for some in the Rabbinic Jewish and Christian traditions, the Torah is God’s Word as directly revealed to the putative founder of the Hebrew religion. 

This myth was dismissed long ago by scholars. Instead, the Torah was assembled in stages over a period of several centuries, taking something close to the final form we refer to as the Masoretic Text during the Persian Period, after the Babylonian Exile and at least seven centuries after Moses led a small group of rebellious slaves out of Egypt. 

The earliest written sources for the Torah come from the time of the divided kingdoms, the same period that produced the prophet Amos, the voice for economic justice we have engaged for the last two Sundays. But even further back was an oral tradition. This included stories of Abraham and the generations that followed, as well as Hebrew versions of myths shared more widely in the region, stories that were meant to explain what seemed inexplicable, stories like the great flood, Noah instead named Utnapishtim in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Today’s reading is from one of the written sources behind the Torah, a southern kingdom source known as the J text. The passage is one of three back-to-back episodes related to the sin of Sodom, and wrestles with the eternal problem of collective punishment. If God punishes the many for the sins of the few, often for generation after generation in some theologies, then is God willing to forgive the many through the righteousness of the few? This is the question Abraham puts to God. It is a lovely little moment, this human resistance to divine violence. And in the Christian tradition, the orthodox answer is yes. The One can save the many. Of course, in our progressive theology, we have serious reservations about the construction of God as co-dependent and violent, but we’re definitely cool with the redemptive power of the individual.

Instead of focusing on the miraculous mathematics of redemption, I’d like to focus on the sin of Sodom. Like the myth of the great flood, the myth of Sodom’s sin appears to have been drawn from a deeper regional tradition. Here, it is used to explain the loss of two ancient cities in the region, even ancient to the ancients that were telling the tale. While scientists offer us natural explanations for the loss of the twin cities, and evangelicals blame homosexuality, scripture tells us the sin of Sodom is the sin of inhospitality. The underlying myth, complete with inhospitality to the stranger and resulting destruction, shows up again in the Book of Judges, though instead of cities, it is the tribe of Benjamin that is inhospitable and eventually destroyed, through genocide rather than natural disaster.

But let’s rewind a bit. Immediately before this set of stories related to Sodom comes a formative moment for Hebrew identity. An elderly couple, obeying God, has migrated from the region that is today Iraq to the region that is today Palestine. They are quite old and childless, though the man, Abraham, has fathered a son with the slave girl Hagar. One day, three strangers appear. Christians might imagine this to be a proto-trinity, though such an idea would be heresy in the Hebrew tradition. Often, the three are described as angels, or messengers from God.

Continue reading “Angel Gets lost: 24 July 2022”

Last week, we considered the dire warnings of the prophet Amos. We asked if God was actually in the business of destroying nations, and if ancient laws and out-dated constitutions should bind us in a completely different technological and societal context, or if we should instead focus on the spirit of those laws and constitutions. 

I stated that love and liberty are more important than the particular rules that governed misogynist and racist cultures, in Hebrew-ruled Palestine of three thousand years ago, of Roman-occupied Palestine of two thousand years ago, of the white colonialist America of two centuries ago. I’d go so far as to say that even the Ten Commandments, while reflecting some values that are universal and eternal, are a product of a particular time and a particular place, the southern Kingdom of Judah somewhere around 2600 years ago.

This week, we will turn to the spirit of the prophet’s words and find that some of them are incredibly concrete and relevant to our lives today, for bad business is bad business, in ancient theocratic oligarchies and in modern neo-liberal oligarchies.

But first, let’s recap. The prophetic ministry of Amos takes place when there are two Hebrew states. The prophet, from the southern Kingdom of Judah, hears God’s call to speak for the poor in the northern Kingdom of Israel. He is a border-crossing trouble-causer who speaks out against the rich and powerful, complete with that “Real Housewives” moment when the aristocratic women in Bethel bellow for drinks.

In today’s reading, Amos focuses specifically on the merchants. He notes that they observe the religious rules, closing for the new moon festival and the sabbath, but that as soon as they re-open for business, they cheat their customers. They make the containers smaller and use false weights and scales, offering poor quality product and cheating the needy and the helpless.

Dishonesty in business is a consistent theme in the Hebrew Testament, also mentioned by the prophets Hosea and Micah, included in the Torah in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and in the wisdom literature of the Book of Proverbs, where it is denounced four times. 

Corrupt business practices are as old as the market itself, and when it comes to wickedness, there is nothing new under the sun. Selling smaller quantities for the same amount of money? Happens every time we go to the grocery store. Exploiting the needy and helpless? Let’s talk about the 9.1% inflation year-on-year reported on Wednesday. Corporate media and neo-liberal politicians blame this on supply chain disruption and labor costs, or more recently, on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Continue reading “Better Business: 17 July 2022”

As I have shared in the past, I was once part of the on-stage child audience on the Jim and Tammy show. I was a youth counselor when the Billy Graham Crusade came to town. I graduated from high school just down the road from Pat Robertson’s global headquarters. When I talk about the heresy of fundamentalism, I know. 

The good news is that I’m not buying Jim Bakker’s doomsday prepper supplies, though between plague, war, and white men with guns, I’m starting to wonder if its not a good idea. I’m not an Islamophobic ethno-nationalist like the Rev. Graham’s son, Franklin, the con-man and liar. And unlike Robertson and others of his ilk, I do not believe that God sends hurricanes to punish the United States for marriage equality.

But let’s start with today’s reading. The prophetic ministry of Amos took place during the couple of centuries when there were two Hebrew kingdoms. In the south, the Kingdom of Judah was centered around Jerusalem and the great Temple of Solomon. In the north, the Kingdom of Israel was centered around worship at Bethel. This kingdom was sometimes called Samaria, and the residents of this region, Samaritans.

Amos feels called to deliver God’s word of justice to the people of Israel. And justice is the theme of the most famous verse from the text, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” The thing is, Amos isn’t even from Israel. As he reports in our reading, he’s a shepherd and arborist from Judah. So not only is he aggravating as all heck, he isn’t even a local. 

Many folks read today’s passage and the doom-and-gloom condemnation of the prophets generally as proof text, confirmation of their version of God the punisher. These are the folks that link homos and hurricanes, who want to believe that those who don’t follow God’s law suffer in this life. 

But as we established a couple of weeks ago, it simply doesn’t work that way. Bad things happen to good people, sometimes, and bad people and bad nations do just fine, at times. I wish doing good things produced good karma, but I don’t do good things in order to get rewarded. I don’t do good things to get a golden ticket to some maybe heaven. I do good things because goodness, compassion, life, are the natural order of God’s good creation, because I am most myself when I am aligned with all that is goodness and Godness.

Continue reading “Homos and Hurricanes: 10 July 2022”

Friday marked a year as pastor and teacher here at the Park Church. It has been a good year, but then again, I have a pretty low bar. I mean, no one has stood up during “joys and concerns” to deliver a full length rebuttal to the sermon, and no council member has threatened to punch me, both things that have actually happened.

Still, there is no course in Divinity School on preaching into catastrophe. And make no mistake, we are in the middle of catastrophe, a plague that has killed millions, a war between nations in Europe, and the collapse of our democracy.

But let’s start with the text, an Aramean general sent to the northern kingdom of Israel for a cure. Those pastors who actually preach the text this morning, those preachers who do not opt for the idolatry of religious nationalism, will likely approach this text as a lesson in the power of faith, even when such faith seems unreasonable. But, you know, that’s just not me.

You will notice that the text includes abduction and slavery. There is nothing negative about abduction of slavery in the text. They are givens in the ancient world. Yes, the Exodus story is one of liberation for the Hebrew slaves, but we are to read that as liberation for the Hebrews specifically, for a people that convinced themselves that they were specially chosen by either the only God, if you lean into monotheism, or the chief God, if you accept the widespread belief of the time. We are not meant to read this as a condemnation of slavery generally, for it continued to be practiced throughout the entire biblical age. There are rules about how to treat slaves in scripture. Paul accepts slavery as a given, and his letter to Philemon was read well into the 19^th century as endorsing the practice. Of course, tradition tells us Paul also thought his Roman citizenship would protect him, and if we are to believe tradition, that didn’t work out the way he expected.

Few openly seek biblical-style slavery in today’s world. Most of us understand that this was a practice of our barbarous ancestors. Yet there are those who seek to enforce other primitive beliefs and regimes in our world. Not only has the Supreme Court stripped women of control over their own bodies, retracting a civil liberty for the first time in American history, but Clarence Thomas opened the door and Texas Republicans are moving ahead with efforts not only to overthrow marriage equality, but also to reintroduce the barbaric sodomy laws that were used to terrorize the LGBTQ+ community for generations. And one of the chief funders of this evil is a gay billionaire, because billionaires are only loyal to other billionaires and their own money, never to God, never to country. But Peter Thiel is not alone in his evil. In fact, the petro-trafficking Koch brothers have been working to undermine our American democracy for decades, using a radicalized minority of Evangelicals as their instrument.

And that group made clear with the Gingrich revolution of 1994 that they were willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way, to force their theocracy on the American people. When I warned friends in 2016 that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, people snickered. When I warned that he could win the general election, people told me I was wrong. When I warned what might happen when he took office, people told me that the office would temper him. When the office did not temper him, and I warned of a threat to our democracy itself, I was told the institution was strong. Yet here we are, with a radical minority imposing its hate-filled will on a tolerant majority and a Supreme Court that has promised in the next term to overthrow our republic.

Continue reading “Revolution: 3 July 2022”

I was never a snake person anyways, but the copperhead that slithered out of the tree roots as my teenage self hung in the hammock pretty much sealed the deal. I do not like snakes. Yes, snake-loving folks have encouraged me to hold their baby boa, and no, it did not change my mind. I can appreciate the role of a cobra in the ecosystem without wanting to cuddle up with it.

For me, it is snakes. For a close friend, it is bears. No Paddington, no Pooh, just teeth and terror.

That friend would not love today’s text. Or maybe that friend would love today’s text, after all, it acts as confirmation of their worst fears.

The text does not actually say that the two bears ate all forty-two children. Even the hungriest bear might have a hard time getting down twenty kids. This isn’t exactly Joey Chestnut at Coney Island shoveling in the hot dogs. But still, mangled or mauled, the two most common English translations, is bad enough. I mean, it is just possible that the punishment did not fit the crime. And if it did, that is some serious instant karma.

Continue reading “26 June 2022: Karma is a …”