Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

It is a sign of our extreme peril that when I speak of Siwanatorz, Beliebers, and the Beyhive, I must explain, but I can say “Just the facts, ma’am,” and almost everyone in the room is old enough to know I am referencing Joe Friday on Dragnet, a television program that broadcast its last episode a half century ago. Nonetheless, we start our engagement with today’s gospel reading with “Just the facts.”

The three male disciples we get to know best in the gospels are Peter, James, and John. Peter, of course, is traditionally understood as the leader of the movement after the public torture and execution of Jesus. Like James and John, he has a brother in the movement, though Andrew is at best a minor character.

James, the disciple, brother of John, and son of Zebedee, should not be confused with James, the brother of Jesus, who becomes a follower only after the death of Jesus and is the head of the church in Jerusalem. John, the disciple, brother of James, and son of Zebedee, should not be confused with John who receives the revelation on Patmos, despite the tradition that conflates the two. And none of the three likely wrote any of the texts given their name in the New Testament.

Peter is actually a nickname, given to Simon by Jesus, Simon the Rock, flatteringly “upon which Christ will build the church,” more likely, because he could be a bit thick at times. James and John also earned a nickname, for they were rowdy, and were called “the Thunder Brothers.” And it is the Thunder Brothers who take center-stage in our reading, for they ask Jesus if they can sit, one at his left and one at his right, when he comes into glory.

In the dialogue that follows, Jesus teaches his disciples about servant-leadership, a concept at the absolute heart of the Christian faith and of our United Church of Christ understanding of ministry, a belief first articulated in the Suffering Servant passages of Isaiah. But Jesus also says it is not for him to decide who will sit at his left and at his right.

This is important, and a reminder that we always err when we isolate pieces of the story, when we have neglected our Bible, for this left side and right side is meant to point forward to that moment when there is someone at his left side and someone on his right side, when he is on the Cross, certainly an odd way to come into your glory. Today’s reading should end with “to be continued,” for the meaning will be revealed in later chapters.

In the same way, the question Jesus asks, whether James and John will drink the cup he drinks and receive the baptism he receives is a pointer to the Passion, for it is in Gethsemane that he prays “Abba, take this cup away from me, though thy will, not mine, be done.” And that cup is the cup of crucifixion.

The Man in Black, the Dread Pirate Roberts, not Johnny Cash, once said “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Well, I’m not quite that grim. I mean, life is also beauty and joy. But it is absolutely true that pain comes to all of us at times, often as a result of or prompt toward growth, and it is a non-negotiable truth that discipleship, the Way of Love and Justice, is going to cost you something. Grace may be freely given, but it is not cheap, not in the traditional theology of costly grace, and not in any modern interpretation, for once you have eyes to see the brokenness of the world, you cannot pretend you haven’t seen. Life may not be pain, Highness, but it is always a risk, a flicker of love at risk of going out. Continue reading “17 October 2021: Escaping the Matrix”

Birth is a crap shoot. No one chooses their family of origin, their gender assignment at birth, the nation-state of which they are a citizen, or worse still, being born state-less, as is true for the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar and a growing number of Muslims in India who are being stripped of their citizenship by Narendra Modi’s racist Bharatiya Janata Party, better known as the BJP.

Expected gender roles, class and caste, race? Socially constructed fictions with no basis in biology, though powerful fictions to be sure. And on this weekend when we celebrate the Indigenous People of North America, organized into tribes and nations, we are mindful that this traditional notion of tribe was itself an accident of birth, leading to tremendous modern conflict over who makes it onto the tribal roll.

But there is another understanding of tribe, one that is in line with the early Christian experience, one based on affinity and choice. You might be one of Justin Bieber’s “Beliebers,” for they are a tribe of sorts. Red Sox fans are definitely a tribe. Members of the evil death cult that refuse to get vaccinated or to wear a mask are definitely a tribe, and a dangerous one at that, bonded together by insane belief and toxic values. Like the Crips, the Bloods, and MS-13, members of the white supremacist affinity tribes have markings and signs to identify one another, the white power hand sign and special hats. But then again, the early Christians used the fish as a sign, and then there are the Masons with their rings. Belonging in and of itself is not bad. In fact, belonging is essential for our health as social creatures. It is what we choose to join that matters. Continue reading “10 October 2021”

“I’m OK – You’re OK” was a 1967 self-help book by Thomas Anthony Harris. You may have read it. Heck, it may have changed your life. Me? I’m more Gen X than Baby Boom, more Nirvana than Beatles, so not really my thing. Besides, I’m more like my esteemed colleague The Rev. Otis Moss III, who is beginning a sermon series titled “I Am NOT Okay.”

I mean, that cabin off the grid is looking better and better. The news is often terrible. Far too many of the neighbors I am supposed to love are complete idiots, and how exactly do you speak THAT truth with love? Things in general are way too complex, and I’m not just talking about that password that needed a number and a letter and a special character and three words in Esperanto that I’ve completely forgotten, or the difficulty of finding a plumber or a rental car. I’m talking about moral issues and conflicting values.

Take, for example, U.S. immigration policy, in the news and historically driven by white supremacy, sometimes, but not always, overt, as I have stated from this very pulpit. I am rightly disgusted by this history, and embrace the United States we are trying to build together, diverse and beautiful. I love Taco Tuesday and the music of Bollywood, African prints and Japanese animation, jazz and gumbo.

At the same time, I believe in a just and equitable economy and in addressing exploitative economics here and abroad, in being honest about the terrible legacies of slavery and colonialism and the ways these evils have made us rich as a nation while impoverishing others. I believe in the form of reparations that seeks to build capacity in the nations we have manipulated and exploited, that we have drained of resources and people or that we have used as proxies in ideological wars.

So I have been troubled in my spirit by the flood of refugees at the border. I have no problem rejecting the intentional cruelty of the last administration, for cruelty was a feature, not a bug, in their system. But I also don’t believe in unregulated borders. When a doctor from Ghana is driving a taxi in Brooklyn, that is one less doctor in Ghana. The problem is not that we cannot take in others so much as it is that the drain on poor nations, not just the brain drain but also the loss of hustle and drive, creates an un-virtuous cycle, where those nations become poorer and less capable with every wave of emigres.

And I worry that what I consider to be a fairly progressive and nuanced position on immigration, justice, and reparations is impossible to surgically remove from our sordid history of white supremacy.

One person who had little interest in nuance and even less in American white supremacy and neoliberal imperialism was the late celebrity chef and traveller Anthony Bourdain. In fact, he attracted controversy when, featuring Houston on a 2017 episode of his program “Parts Unknown,” he gave producers a simple edict: “No white people.” The result was good television that lived up to the name of the program, a look at the diverse cultures within Houston that were largely unknown to Anglos with privilege. Continue reading “3 October 2021: World Communion Sunday – Dangerous Food and Good Booze”

Jojo Siwa was a second-tier cast member on a second-tier reality show, Dance Moms, on a second-tier network, Lifetime. That’s like sixth-tier or something, which should amount to a whole lot of nothing. But Jojo was only second-tier when it came to dancing. When it came to personality, she was cream-of-the-crop, and she sure had that hustle…

Over the next several years, Jojo and her sparkly candy-colored wardrobe and upbeat anti-bullying message became a brand, all glitter and bows and ponytails everywhere. Today, Jojo Siwa has 36.4 million followers on TikTok, the short format video platform, 10.9 million followers on Instagram, primarily a photo platform, and 12.3 million subscribers on YouTube, that now-aged platform for long-format video.

Even if the Venn diagram of people following Jojo on multiple platforms is substantial, we’re still talking about tens of millions of people following a young “influencer,” to use today’s term. Her hardcore fans are known as Siwanatorz. Once primarily tweens, Siwanatorz are increasingly diverse. Tweens become teens, whether we like it or not, and Siwa, who recently turned eighteen, has attracted a lot of attention by coming out as a lesbian and, as of Monday, joining the cast of “Dancing with the Stars” with a same-sex dance partner.

So far, Jojo Siwa’s fans have been benign, a crowd rather than a mob. The same cannot be said for the fans of Beyoncé, known as the BeyHive. Continue reading “Siwanatorz and the BeyHive: 26 September 2021”

The world is divided into two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. Or so the people who divide the world into two types of people would have us all believe.

Take, for example, the famous division between those who see the glass as half empty and those who see the glass as half full, the supposed unbridgeable chasm between pessimists and optimists.

Except you have that dude who drinks directly from the milk carton, with no glass involved, probably your grandson. Then there is me. Like an infamous t-shirt, I neither see the glass as half full nor as half empty. I just think “Goody! Room for more wine!”

And here, in a nutshell, you have a part of my core theology. The other part comes from the country song that declares “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.” But we’ll leave that for another day.

And seriously, before you start to think I might have a problem, I can assure you that I drink more milk than anything else, just not directly from the carton. And lots of coffee. Possibly too much coffee, if that is a thing. Continue reading “More Wine: 19 September 2021”

When I was a kid, Saturday morning was for cartoons, and every other week, hot donuts that my dad picked up on his way home from the fire station. That was in the days before Fox and Adult Swim made cartoons an acceptable form of adult entertainment here in the U.S., pre-South Park and The Simpsons, back when only kids bought comic books down at the Five and Dime, when Archie and Veronica were goofs rather than the angsty young adults now on a steamy television network.

Americans only knew Japanese animation from the rare instances when they penetrated the U.S. children’s market, characters like AstroBoy. Even Hello Kitty wasn’t yet a thing…

But animated films and television programs, called anime, and comic books, called manga, had always been platforms for serious adult entertainment in Japan, something I learned in the mid-90’s.

At a time when there was little queer representation in U.S. Media, and what representation existed was either tragic or psychopathic, the Japanese had an entire genre of positive queer romance in manga and anime. Often, these romances would tie back in to more mainstream productions, which is how I first discovered the series “Neon Genesis Evangelion.” Continue reading “Shinji’s New Genesis: September 19, 2021”

It has been a hell of a week, a phrase I am getting very tired of using. I’d offer a fine whine this morning, but I’m betting you have some whining to do as well. I struggled with the sermon, with texts I chose weeks ago so the rest of the team could plan, and with that decision every pastor faces in a time of church decline and social chaos, whether to offer spiritual chemotherapy or spiritual palliative care, to try to re-energize our life together, or write it off as a loss.

So despite waffling about this sermon, which I re-wrote again this morning, I’ve made my choice. I’m not a quitter. And I’m not going down without a fight.

And speaking of fighting…

When the last administration legitimized the Taliban and announced a unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, it set in motion the calamitous events we have seen unfold in the last several weeks, the collapse of the undermined Afghan government, and the restoration of Afghanistan as a terrorist state.

But if we are honest, the former president is not alone. There is plenty of blame to go around.

There was never a realistic plan, not a year ago, not twenty years ago. Rural Afghans share the Taliban’s core values, and we can’t manage our own urban-rural divide, so how were we supposed to manage theirs? Continue reading “Swoosh: 29 August 2021”

It was both heartbreaking and sweet, as love so often is. On March 3rd, 2017, the New York Times “Modern Love” essay was written by Amy Krause Rosenthal, a prolific and successful author. In it, she announced that she was dying of ovarian cancer, and offered a dating profile for her husband, soon to be a widower with three kids. Ten days later, she was gone.

Among her many works, across different genres and even media, was a 2009 children’s book titled “Yes Day!” This March, it made it to the silver screen. Well, to be more accurate, it made it to the little screen, for the film “Yes Day,” starring Jennifer Garner, was produced for Netflix.

The idea, of the book and of the screenplay, is that parents spend an awful lot of time saying “no,” and maybe, once in awhile, there should be a day when they say “yes.”

Within reason, of course. Yes Day does come with guardrails. The ten year old isn’t going to drive the car. And no one is going out to buy a pony. But, as blogger Dawn Booth reports, root beer floats for breakfast are a definite yes. Playing in the rain is also a yes. Playing hide-and-seek with your parents is a yes. Even doing a parent’s make-up and nails is a yes, which seems particularly brave.

It seems to me that, like parents, religion has a “no” problem, and while we can point to fundamentalists, we’d do well to look in the mirror, for “no” comes in many forms, wears many disguises, but in whatever form, it sucks the vitality right out of our faith, out of our leaders and our volunteers. It can come in the form of micromanaging and second-guessing, of stalling and delaying.

No is using process to stop progress.

No is the legalism that Jesus so despised when he spoke of the Scribes and Pharisees.

But here’s the thing: God is “yes.”

Earlier this week, a colleague and I were chatting over coffee about the texts and themes we were bringing to the pulpit this morning, for he also uses the Revised Common Lectionary, and he too is preaching on Joshua. I mentioned my sermon title, “God is yes,” and he reminded me that even in God’s no is a yes. For example, thou shalt not kill is really a yes to life.

Now, you already know me well enough to know that I don’t believe every rule in the Hebrew and Christian Scripture comes from God by way of divine revelation. Far from it.

Some rules are clearly needed for a well-ordered society, but I believe most rules are created by those with power and are primarily about preserving that power. Some put no in the mouth of a god made in their own image who wants what they want and hates who they hate. That’s just not God.

If God was no, then why is there anything? Seriously, the easiest thing to control is nothing. But God spoke something into being, and here we are. Creation is a glorious yes mess…

My late teacher Gordon Kaufman thought of God as serendipitous creativity. The late Templeton Prize winning scientist and mathematician Freemason Dyson put it this way:

I do not claim any ability to read God’s mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.

I’m with Dyson. Seriously, look at the platypus! Should we add a flat tail, like a beaver? Yes! What about a bill like a duck? Absolutely! How about venom, like a snake? Why not?

The duck-billed platypus is yes on steroids!

It is only in recent decades that scientists like the great minds at the Santa fe Institute have come to identify the yes hard-wired into creation in the form of complexity, the way discreet units, from particles to tribes, self-organize in surprising ways that create unexpected results, so that everything is always more than the sum of the parts, and attempts to break things down to those constituent parts is always deadly, destructive…

I can talk all day about the exuberance of God, of serendipitous creativity, of natural selection, of the ways life breaks through the hard stuff, about Maya Angelou and Mozart. But I don’t have to.

Because if you are inclined to see the cup that runneth over, you will. If you are inclined to see only the mess made where the cup runneth over, you will, for believing is seeing.

Believing is seeing. So be careful about what you believe.

No comes from fear. The desire to control comes from fear. No is fear distilled.

Sometimes that fear is completely rational. Listen, kid, wear the helmet while you’re out on that skateboard. I’ve seen people who suffered traumatic brain injury, and it ain’t worth it. Wear your mask and get the vaccine. Covid-19 is a gruesome way to die.

But mostly, we are afraid of things we can’t control. As our bodies age and get smaller, so to do our spirits. No comes to our lips faster than yes. We sit on the dark, on piles of gold, alone, afraid to fly for fear that one small bauble might go missing, refusing to truly to live. There is a reason the dragon became an archetype of greed, the wasted power, the wasted potential.

No is the human dragons that think they can kill vulnerability under mountains of gold, when no amount of gold can ever make us invulnerable, for our vulnerability is part of our beauty.

Yes is writing a dating profile for your husband as you lay dying, rather than insisting that he never love again. No is thinking that the love, of the spouse you leave behind, of the kids you leave behind, is zero-sum, and that love for someone else means less love for you.

No nails people to a cross. Yes raises them from the grave.

May we, like Joshua, say yes to a God who says yes to us every day…

Amen.

The Revised Common Lectionary, the schedule of worship readings shared by many Mainline Protestant churches, can be a valuable tool. Preaching resources are often aligned with the text, and many clergy groups use it for discussion and prayer. Worshippers can reasonably expect that friends in other Mainline churches, Presbyterians and ELCA Lutherans and Episcopalians and so on, probably heard some of the same readings on Sunday morning, if anyone actually heard a sermon worth remembering. More than anything, the Lectionary keeps us from getting into a rut and forces us to take in the whole story, making it harder to preach only what we want to believe or congregants want to hear. After all, as much as folks want every sermon to end with “You’re just swell,” that isn’t exactly faithful or reality-based. Sometimes, we are not just swell…

But the Lectionary is not perfect. There are more readings on any given Sunday than most of us are willing to read, so there is still a bit of pick-and-choose going on. Because readings tend to be short, they often rip incidents and teachings out of important context. And sometimes, the team that put together the schedule of readings simply didn’t like part of the text, so they skipped over it, as happens with today’s portion from the Second Book of Samuel. If you have ever heard the story of David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, you most certainly did not hear the portion where Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark when the oxen stumble. You would not have heard that Uzzah’s reward for coming to the rescue was to be struck down, killed by an irrational and violent God.

Pastors don’t like preaching that part of the text, for it is a reminder that Man made God in his own image, masculine intentional here. That is not to deny the reality of that divine mystery we name as God. It is an insistence that we always remember and name that our experience of the holy, of the sacred, is mediated through our own experience of the world, as upright primates and creative miracles, fearfully and wonderfully made. God, in order to be God, must be beyond our capacity.

Even reading the skipped parts, as we did today, deprives us of context and perspective, for we need to know why moving the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem is a thing David would want to do, and given David’s importance in the Christian understanding of Jesus, the ancient king’s every move is interpreted as a part of a holy plan, from the possible defeat of Goliath to the murder of Uriah.

So let’s take a minute to look at the story on its own merits.

For approximately two centuries after a small group escaped slavery in Egypt, the Hebrew people in Canaan operated as a loose confederation of tribes. Legend has it that the Ark of the Covenant contained artifacts from that escape. Following Hebrew numerology, we are told that there were Twelve Tribes, all equal in importance, and the Ark rotated between those tribes.

About three thousand years ago, the Hebrew people, worried about the growing threat of Philistines on the coast, and envying their powerful neighbors to the southwest and northeast, chose a warlord named Saul to be their king. Despite the story of divine choosing, the reality on the ground is that the crown should go to Saul’s son, David’s dear friend Jonathan. It does not. David engages in rebellion against Saul, and eventually takes the crown for himself.

David, that great king that is so important to the Christian understanding of Jesus, is a usurper. Many of his actions are about consolidating power and proving his legitimacy. Much of the story we receive in scripture is royal propaganda in the exact same way Shakespeare’s history plays are Tudor propaganda.

Claiming the Ark is the second step in consolidating his power. The first is conquering and claiming a city that does not belong to any tribe to insure that he is not beholden to any single tribe. He chooses a Canaanite city dedicated to the Canaanite god of dusk, Shalim, which becomes Jerusalem. Once he has established his new capitol, he seizes the Ark.

It might well confer some sort of blessing, as the text informs us it has done for Obed-edom. What it certainly does is confer power, for the Ark is sacred to the Hebrew Yahweh cult, so the whole of that cult turns toward the king’s new capitol, to the new mount where a Temple will eventually stand. The Ark of the Covenant will be placed in the innermost chamber of the Temple of Solomon, the “Holy of Holies” where the high priest can communicate with God. Whether the Ark was a sort of divine location or more like a holy walkie talkie is unclear.

The sacred object creates a sacred place, and David, in claiming it, is shaping a sacred story. The object, the place, the story, are all bigger than this one man and his schemes.

We can experience a sort of transcendent moment when we connect with something bigger than ourselves, when we stand amidst sequoias or in the cavernous space of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, when Britten’s War Requiem reaches a crescendo, or Simone Biles stands at the top of the medal platform. We can experience being part of something bigger than ourselves when we understand ourselves as part of an unfolding story, of this odd little progressive branch of Protestant Christianity, of this particular story of Park and Elmira and antiracism, when we honor our obligation to do not what we like and we want, but to do what is right, what honors our past by building our future.

But the sacred is more than transcendence. Germans experienced transcendence at the Nuremberg Rallies. Being part of a bigger story, being drawn out of ourselves and into something bigger, is only good if we are drawn out of our fear and all of the things that spring from our fear, greed and power. Being connected to something bigger than ourselves, a place, a story, is only good if it is good, which means thriving for both us and those things with which we are entangled, family, community, creation… well, everything really… Except mosquitos. There should be no thriving for mosquitos.

The sacred is not some box containing some tablets, a staff, and some magic bread. It is not some room filled with gold and incense wafting up towards a ceiling ever so far above.

The sacred is whatever aligns with God’s good purpose, which is continuous divine artistry, is the cycle of life, is this one bright gem of a world circling on sparkler of a son in the grand fireworks display that is creation.

Holiness is not deadly. The sacred is not deadly despite today’s text, despite the screenplay of the first Indiana Jones film, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which is a great film, just wrong about what it means to touch the holy. That gold box didn’t have any mysterious magic that would have helped Hitler or the Allies. God is not an irrational and violent abuser. God never was, despite thousands of years of bad press. God is good. The holy is here, if we choose it, if we align ourselves with all that is beautiful, is living, is yes.

There is nothing inherently wrong with taking care of yourself, your family. But love has to go beyond what serves you. It is only really love if it is selfless. There is nothing inherently wrong with precious objects and precious places, but they are not ours.

So what of that Ark? That sacred object?

It never appears in scripture again after the First Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians. Some claim it was hidden, eventually transported to Ethiopia. If we are to believe Dr. Jones, it has been lost in some U.S. Government warehouse. Seems just as well…

Let you soul swim in the sacred, in living stories and amazing places and in life, in creativity, in next…

Amen.

To make room for Christmas Eve prep, we are standardizing some re-usable worship elements. One is our “Prayers of the People.” Here is what I have for the four Sundays of Advent:

We come before God with our questions and our concerns, our joys and our sorrows.

Let us pray.

Most Amazing God,
You speak light,
holy data that takes form as all of Creation,
billions of flickering lights unfolding and expanding.

And there,
circling one of those lights you speak into existence,
are lives, flickering and beautiful, unfolding and expanding,
the green grass, the grazing sheep, the watchful shepherds.

And there, in that moment when love hung in the balance,
when times felt dark, light’s promise smothered by human fear,
you spoke love again,
as raw as a newborn’s cry.

Speak love into our moment.
Speak joy and hope and peace.
Speak mystery and truth.
Speak as we speak,

Bringing before you, our one author and source,
these our joys and concerns.
(Pause)

Because you are one with us in Christ,
Your Word spoken into this world,
we boldly pray as He taught us, saying:
Our Father…