Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

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 …”

Scowling Simon Cowell, the criminal Chrisley’s, and “Love After Lock-Up” are not what critics have in mind when they call this a “Golden Age” of television. They are actually speaking about the serials, both comic and dramatic, that have been a staple of the traditional networks, premium channels, and streaming services in recent years, shows like “Lost,” “The Wire,” and “Ms. Marvel.”

You know, the sort of show that starts with “Previously on ‘We Own This City’”… which, by the way, is both a great non-fiction book and a great fictionalized serial on HBO.

I sometimes feel like we need that sort of thing in worship, that season recap. We are way over-scheduled and over-stimulated on a good day, and we don’t invest as much time as maybe we should in the study of scripture, then we come to church and get a ten line excerpt without any context. 

And that is exactly where we are this week. Thousands of preachers will focus on God being present not in the storm, the earthquake, or the fire, but instead being present in the silence, drawing Elijah from the cave. And that will preach though I’m not always sure what exactly it preaches. Some will focus on God providing for Elijah, caring for him when he seems incapable of caring for himself. That, too, will preach, for we sometimes need care, human and divine, when we cannot care for ourselves. But why is Elijah off in the wilderness and hiding in a cave to begin with? So…

Previously on Kings, Season One: Ahab, the King of Israel, is in an interfaith marriage with Jezebel, who worships Melqart, also called Baal Shamem. Elijah, a prophet in Ahab’s Hebrew tradition, challenges Jezebel’s court priests to perform a miracle by lighting a sacrificial fire through prayer. When they fail, Elijah performs the miracle, and having impressed the crowd and called them back to Yahweh, Elijah orders that the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal be taken to a dry river bed and murdered.

So this is why Jezebel is angry, why she promises to have Elijah killed, because he has caused a mass casualty event, has ordered the slaughter of people because they were from a different nationality with a different religion. Elijah is wanted for murder, for what we would consider today a crime against humanity.

The prophet is a fugitive from justice, but we’re supposed to take his side. Elijah the Prophet, hero of our scripture tradition. Yay us! Right? If this is our religion, this violence and intolerance, the Fundamentalists can have it.

Continue reading “Wanted for Murder: Elijah 19 June 2022”

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American racists misrepresented the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s preaching by taking lines out of context. American Christian extremists misrepresent the Hebrew and Christian tradition by taking lines out of context.

If we have learned anything during the difficult “online” preaching of the pandemic, it is that preaching is not a solo act, but is a relationship, both in the moment between the preacher and the congregation, and in the broader sense between the servant leader and those she/he/they serve.

Finally, I pray for those trapped in the idolatry of a false god, and trust that God’s grace is always bigger than human hate.

You would have thought that America had enough on its mind in January of 1964. People were still grieving for JFK, white supremacists were ramping up their violence to combat the continuing Civil Rights movement, and the war in Vietnam was growing by the day. But culture warriors being what they are, what was on the mind of Indiana governor Matthew E. Welsh was the lyrics to Louie Louie. 

They made his ears tingle he said, and he determined that they were obscene. It didn’t help that the version climbing the pop charts featured the incomprehensible mumblings of Jack Ely fronting The Kingsmen.

Even the FBI got involved. In reality, the lyrics to the song were innocuous. Written in 1955 by Richard Berry, they told of a sailor returning home to his love in Jamaica. No obscenity.

It is not the worst case of a text being misunderstood, even of a song being misunderstood. Take, as another example, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” a 1986 hit by Timbuk 3. It became a prom theme, a graduation anthem, when it is actually about the risk, especially high back then, of nuclear annihilation, the bright future being an atom bomb. 

While that was the band’s biggest hit, they also recorded a song about marriage equality, “Legalize Our Love,” and a prescient takedown of white Christian nationalism, 1989’s “Standard White Jesus.”

And that is the Jesus I knew as a kid, the white guy with shampoo commercial hair and the creepy eyes that were looking at you no matter where you went in the room. If we’d done Mary in the Southern Baptist church, she’d have been pretty standard and white too, but we only acknowledged Mary at Christmas. Anything more was practically papist. 

God, of course, was also a white male, not only in appearance as rendered by Michelangelo, but also in attitude. In fact, and I’m sure this is just pure coincidence, but in that church where older white men had absolute power, God acted like an older white man with absolute power, an older white man with absolute power and a shocking fragility, for despite God’s supposed omnipotence, he was constantly offended that humans were not properly stroking his ego or following the rules he had implemented to micro-manage our lives. The culmination of his rage was the ultimate act of domestic violence, conspiracy to murder his only child.

Talk about misunderstanding a text. Geez.

Continue reading “A New Spirit: 5 June 2022”

She is beautiful and tall, this European woman sculpted by Joseph Hugues-Fabisch in 1864 and placed in a grotto in the Pyrenees, not short and Middle Eastern, as we might expect. But this was the Mary that Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen, the statue that still stands in Lourdes, the great shrine that has been caricatured by some as the Disneyland of the Roman Church. 

In normal times, about 350,000 of the desperately ill will bathe in the waters of Lourdes during the pilgrim season from Easter to All Saints Day, each seeking a miraculous cure. Countless others will visit the shrine, drinking water from the taps and purchasing what the late English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called “tawdry relics, the bric-a-brac of piety.”

Now, we can dissect everything from Bernadette’s claimed visions to the scant seventy miraculous healings recognized by the Roman communion since the shrine opened as a pilgrim site in 1860, but I’m not sure that gets us very far. We’re skeptics by nature and we like science, but sometimes something becomes holy simply because enough people decide it is holy, and even the most hard-core rationalists among us recognize the mysterious power in art and music and love, the mystery of being itself, and especially the weirdness that happens at the intersection of our brains and our bodies. Miracles are real, but the category “miracle” is a human one.

It is Lourdes that comes to mind when we read today’s gospel, which comes from the tradition associated with the apostle John. On the surface, it is just one more healing miracle among the many healing miracles of Jesus, and in the context of John, which offers us signs that Jesus is the Messiah, it is just one more sign. But there is a bit more depth to the healing stories in the gospels, to this story in particular.

Continue reading “Stirred Up: 22 May 2022”