Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Two Homilies for 19 July: AM online worship, PM outdoors Vespers

Online Worship:

I understand it happens in other cities as well, though I never experienced it in New York City. That may be due to “alternate side of the street” parking rules and, well, the immensity of New York City. It might happen somewhere like Staten Island, or the furthest reaches of Queens. But it seemed new and odd to me those first winters in the metro Boston area, these lawn chairs in the street in January.

Now, some of you know exactly where I am going, but country folks and suburbanites may never have experienced it. You see, in Boston, and some other big cities with street parking, when someone digs their car out after a snow storm, they place a lawn chair or some similar object in the space to hold their parking space while they are gone. Moving someone’s lawn chair, or floor lamp, or stolen traffic cone, moving whatever is there as a placeholder to park your car in an available spot on a public street is considered a breach of the social contract. It can also lead to a breach of your personal space, a fat lip and a bloody nose. Continue reading “Lawn Chairs in the Snow: Two Homilies for 19 July 2020”

I have read my share of improvement books over the years, books about self, business, and community organizing. My shelves proverbially and literally runneth over. So I have no idea exactly what book and when, but at some point, years ago, I got in my head the idea that I should have a purpose, a mission statement of sorts. I embraced an idea from the English sculptor Henry Moore:

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

I’m not going to pretend that I bring every minute of every day to some great and noble task. Sometimes I just want to get the laundry done or stay cool in the summer heat. But generally, I keep my mission in mind. When I was Director of Learning for a new media firm in Manhattan, that purpose was to give people tools that would increase their creativity and happiness. My purpose as a minister isn’t that much different, still the same basic idea of tools for creativity and happiness, though those are now spiritual tools. Specifically, while being formed for ministry, I was able to name, for myself and those I served, a threefold mission. Continue reading “The Sower: July 12, 2020”

The victims were burned, electrocuted, and sexually assaulted. They were part of an ethnic minority, and many confessed under the torture. Some were sentenced to death.

This did not occur in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, not in Idi Amin’s Uganda, not in Myanmar or China. The victims were not Palestinians in yet another apartheid interrogation. This occurred primarily in the Area 2 Precinct Building on the South Side of Chicago, though it was not limited to this single precinct. And while one villain, John Burge, played an organizing role, he was not alone in believing that brutal violence was required to control black Chicago. These acts, globally understood as crimes against humanity, went on until 1991.

Let me say that again. African-American men were routinely tortured for almost twenty years by commanders and officers of the Chicago Police Department in what was referred to by insiders as the “Vietnamese Treatment.” Some of the living victims are younger than me. How can anyone wonder that many of the residents of the city’s mostly black South Side look on the department as violent and abusive? Continue reading “Confession: July 5, 2020”

Richard Rohr is an unlikely Christian superstar. He doesn’t have a megachurch or a private jet or thousand dollar suits. In fact, he has taken a vow of poverty as a Franciscan friar, so he is the opposite of all of those things, the bright lights and the glamor. Yet his dozens of books and daily mediations have a wide following, and while he has managed to stay inside of the Roman church since his ordination in 1970, no small feat for sure, he has also been an ally to the LGBTQ+ community and to ecumenical and progressive Christians of all stripes. I have several of his volumes on my study shelves, and some of you read his daily missives.

There is a quote attributed to him in Anthony B. Bartlett’s 2018 course book on a nonviolent reading of the Bible, though Bartlett doesn’t provide a citation, and a Google search fails to produce one either. Nonetheless, it sounds like Rohr, and even if it is not him, the words are wise and necessary.

Many Christians have to go through a time and experience of atheism, because the God we have been taught to believe in does not exist.

Now, some of you are part of the Hope family for precisely this reason, because the “god” you were taught to believe in as a child no longer made sense. Some of you have moved past that initial rejection, discovering new ways of encountering and understanding God, or better yet, of not understanding God and being okay with that. Some are still in that initial atheism, rejecting that traditional God and yet not quite willing to let go of that definition of what it is to be God. And some just like the music and the company, which is just fine too, though I do hope the wonder I have found in new ways of seeing the holy will rub off on you a bit.

If you have listened even this far into the sermon, then you have probably listened to other sermons as well, and already know that I like Rohr’s quote precisely because I had to live through that process myself, grieving even as I chose to break-up with the abusive God of my childhood, tip-toeing into new relationships, a few dates here, a few there, until I met the right God.

Today’s reading? As traditionally interpreted, that is the abusive God I had to leave behind. Reconfigure this tale ever so slightly, “if you love me you will do this thing that will destroy your soul,” and you have a textbook example of domestic abuse, domestic violence, Abraham with Stockholm Syndrome. Continue reading “God Does Not Exist: June 28, 2020”

Legend tells us that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, which would make them the oldest texts in our Judeo-Christian tradition. There are a few problems with this, the most obvious being that Moses, forbidden by God from entering the Promised Land, dies alone on a mountain and is buried in a secret location by God. Great. Who wrote that part?

In truth, some portions of the psalms appear to be the earliest surviving texts, dated at least two centuries after the Exodus event. The Torah itself is a product of a later age, mostly the years between the destruction of the “Northern” Kingdom of Israel in 720 B.C.E. and the destruction of the “Southern” Kingdom of Judah a hundred and thirty eight years later. A big portion of the Torah, including the entire Book of Deuteronomy, dates to a major religious reform under King Hezekiah.

The Book of Genesis is the most striking of these five books when it comes to textual history, for we can see very clearly how two very different traditions have been cobbled together, giving us parallel accounts of Creation and the Great Flood, two traditions, one from the lost Northern Kingdom and one from the South. It is not clear if the great patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, represent a single shared tradition, or if they too are the result of blending, a conscious effort to create a single shared story that takes in both traditions, that respects both.

We see a repeated pattern in Genesis, brothers are pitted against one another, including the two oldest sons of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, from different mothers, and the twin sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob. In both cases, the younger son usurps the rightful place of the elder.

Muhammed, in creating Islam, would appropriate the Ishmael tradition, claiming descent and therefore a shared Abrahamic heritage. But there is more that is going on with these texts than what later religious leaders would make of them. There is the central question of why. Why did the authors and redactors of a later time create these tales of brothers becoming tribes that would end up in competition with one another? Continue reading “Changing Stories: June 21, 2020”

I was never a fan of “That 70’s Show,” though I suspect that was more about timing than anything, for it aired during years when almost every day was a sixteen work hour day for me. I just didn’t watch much television, leaving a lacuna in my personal cultural memory. I did know that Ashton Kutcher was near the top of the celebrity heap, and recognized him when I saw the 2004 film “The Butterfly Effect.” Classified by some as science fiction, it was really more supernatural fiction, and named after a notion from chaos theory and complexity science. We’ll circle back to that in a bit.

Kutcher’s character, Evan, is part of a trio of friends who experience a series of traumas during childhood. In each instance, Evan blacks out. As an adult, he realizes that he can travel back in time to those blacked out moments and change his actions. The film deals with the consequences of these seemingly small changes, each resulting in a completely different life. A decision made in a critical moment at the age of twelve forever changes the future.

It is actually a pretty good film, as the genre goes, though it isn’t for everybody. Critics hated it, but the public seemed to love it, and it made $96 million on a $13 million budget. It is, at least, a lot less weird than a similar film, “Donnie Darko,” which came out three years earlier. Trust me, Donnie Darko probably is not your thing… Continue reading “Butterfly Effect: June 14, 2020”

At the start of the week, I was feeling a little sorry for myself. Can we just have one national crisis at a time, please? That’s what I was thinking.

My better angels caught up with me quickly, as they always do. I think my angels follow the motto of the legendary Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser. They walk softly but carry a big stick. I may have only been facing one crisis, but Americans of color were up to their necks in crisis long before the Covid-19 pandemic was a thing, and even that disease could not slow down the murder of African-Americans, in the street and in their beds. It could not stop the constant harassment by white citizens who feel they have a right to stop and challenge any person of color anywhere, demanding to know why they are where they are, something they would rarely if ever do to another white American, something increasingly caught on camera..

So it is just as well that Martin Luther advised preachers to stay silent on Trinity Sunday, for I cannot preach on the Mysterious Trinity this Sunday. In fact, to do so would be a dereliction of duty, for the gospel is not the gospel of some distant age, nor is it detached from our lives. The gospel is life. It is the gospel of now, and now demands our attention. Continue reading “I Can’t Breathe: June 7, 2020”

In a Wednesday Zoom meeting, a colleague from up county mentioned the odd juxtaposition of a Holy Day all about the Holy Spirit as “pneuma,” as breath and wind, literally breathed into the disciples by Jesus in John’s gospel, and the moment in which we find ourselves, where we are masked up and distanced and doing everything to avoid death by breath, for breath can be deadly. What immediately popped into my head? Not sophisticated theology, oh no, but rather that smash hit by the Police, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” which came out during my Senior Year in high school. Because, you know, I love you, but don’t stand so close to me…

And here, the Holy Spirit. I love Pentecost, for despite being totally formed by European Enlightenment thinking, Modernity’s religion of reason and the scientific method, I believe in the Holy Spirit. Not that I’m going to drop to the floor or start speaking in tongues, though speaking in tongues is something we are going to discuss.

No, I believe in the Holy Spirit because I believe that Divine Mystery we name as God is not an absentee landlord, but is real and present in creation, that God as Spirit is the unsolvable X in every single equation, the real world wide web, that the world is full of the hidden and the magical, that the more our European Enlightenment reason and scientific thinking discovers, the less we know and the more we realize that the world is freaky and strange, but in a good way.

I believe that mysterious X is the same force that draws us out of ourselves and that draws us to thin places and to one another, a spiritual quantum that right now is breaking your heart, for the thing that makes us images of God, the synergy and synchronicity that is relationship, is the very thing that can kill us right now. This too shall pass, but not nearly soon enough. Continue reading “Don’t Stand, Don’t Stand: May 31, 2020”

As a pastor and as a preacher, I try to balance comfort and challenge, because you preach what you need to hear, and because I believe we all need a bit of both things in our lives. It isn’t always a 50/50 split, just depends on the scripture, the Spirit, and the context, the world in which we live, where the congregation is as a people of God journeying together. During the first eight weeks of our time as a church in diaspora, I leaned hard into comfort on my almost daily video check-ins, and challenge for many of the sermons, though some check-ins were challenging, and some sermons were comforting, or at least so I tell myself.

Last week, Bob offered a word of comfort, one many of us, me included, needed to hear. Thank you, Bob. This week? Well, let’s just say I’ve been in touch with my Baptist roots. The good news is that there are plenty of worship options out there, so if you really just need comfort today, you can find it. Because, as I write this sermon, I feel like the news anchor Howard Beale in the 1976 film “Network.” In his infamous on-screen meltdown and rant, he encourage viewers to shout out “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Well, I am as mad as hell, but mostly at myself.

The story starts some weeks ago, when I told Shirley that I was going to try to order out more, for curbside and delivery, because I still have a job, and I want to support local businesses and workers that are struggling. She directed me to a Facebook group where local restaurants are posting their offerings. I’ve followed along, ordered some of the specials.

On Monday, with many local businesses talking about re-opening, I made a post in the group. I thanked our restauranteurs for their hard work and innovation. I also reminded them that many in the community are still at-risk or might not feel safe in a public setting, so encouraged them to maintain some level of curbside and delivery service. The initial response to my post was positive, with folks saying “Yes, please keep providing this service,” and some business owners saying they were still trying to figure out how to be safe, that they would continue to do curbside and delivery for some time. Then I closed Facebook and logged onto Zoom for a meeting. Continue reading “Mad As Hell: May 24, 2020”

In this time when we are speaking so much about China and disease, I’d like to turn the dial back to before Covid-19, to ancient China, at least to ancient China as understood through the very Western eyes of Benjamin Hoff and mapped onto a classic literary character in the 1982 bestseller “The Tao of Pooh.” Well into that book, we find this paragraph:

A saying from the art of Chinese medicine would be appropriate to mention here: “One disease, long life; no disease, short life.” In other words, those who know what is wrong with them and take care of themselves accordingly will tend to live a lot longer than those who consider themselves perfectly healthy and neglect their weaknesses. So, in that sense, at least, a Weakness of some sort can do you a big favor, if you acknowledge that it’s there. The same goes for one’s limitations, whether Tigger knows it or not – and Tiggers usually don’t. That’s the trouble with Tiggers, you know: they can do everything. Very unhealthy.

There is another whole sermon in that last bit, about Tiggers, and possibly politicians, who don’t know their own limitations, a homily about hubris and humility. But we’re going to focus on that ancient Chinese saying about disease and attention, for in the end, it is attention that makes the difference. The person who is aware of their vulnerability pays more attention. Continue reading “Foundation: May 10, 2020”