Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Matthew 3:13-17

Dogmatic Christianity defines heresy as incorrect belief, claiming that there is such a thing as a correct belief that has been directly revealed to humans by God, through a burning bush, prophetic visions, or the actions of the Holy Spirit. 

Constructive Christianity brings skepticism to the table, inclined to believe heresy simply indicates the side that lost, with orthodoxy the result of popularity, violence, or political interference. Those deemed heretics and their texts often felt the flame, not of hellfire, but of our more conventional murder and book burning. 

We do not know if the works of Marcion, a Second Century Christian heretic, were actually burned, but we sure don’t have them. What we do have is Tertullian’s five-volume rebuttal, Adversus Marcionem, allowing us to reconstruct the original heresy, as least as Tertullian understood it.

In short, Marcion claimed that the good and loving god who sent Jesus into the world could not be the same as the malevolent creator god named Yahweh. He rejected the Hebrew Scriptures entirely, and developed his own canon of texts, made up of a shortened version of Luke, and ten of the letters attributed to Paul.

I do not agree with Marcion, but I certainly understand how he got there. If the Jewish Bible is read as an absolute and accurate record of a deity who punishes in an arbitrary and capricious manner, who orders genocide, it is most certainly not great news. That god would be as predictable and as good as your average domestic abuser, neither rhyme nor reason behind the violence and manipulation, the victims, in this case us, trying to justify our own suffering. In fact, some of the prophetic texts do exactly that, attempting to justify what they perceive as divine punishment, invasions and slaughter.

Continue reading “Unoriginal Sin: 11 January 2026”

Matthew 2:1-12

Christmas has a fixed date every year, even if it is most certainly not the actual date for the birth of Jesus. That means Epiphany has a fixed date every year too, January 6th, at least for most of us. Some Orthodox traditions as well as some Middle Eastern Christians still use the Julian calendar for religious purposes, which places the feast on January 19th.

If you are keeping score, that makes January 5th the Twelfth Day of Christmas in our tradition, leaving you on Epiphany Eve with swans a’ swimming and lords a’ leaping and so on, retail value just north of $218 thousand and considerable maintenance costs, the geese and maids not producing quite enough milk and eggs to feed all of those pipers. 

Like many churches these days, we choose to celebrate Epiphany on the first Sunday after the New Year, not really being “holy day of obligation” sort of folks.

Easter moves, as you know. It is the Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox, which changes from year to year. There is even a Latin term for identifying the date of Easter, the Computus Paschalis. Though again, traditions using the Julian calendar for religious purposes often arrive at a different date.

Christianity is not alone in having movable observances. Not surprisingly, the calculation for determining the date of Passover, the feast that brought Jesus to Jerusalem and led to the climactic events in his story, is similar to the Computus Paschalis, “paschalis” derived from “pesach,” ancient Hebrew for the infinitive “to pass over.” 

Passover begins at sundown on the night of the first full moon after the Spring equinox. Except the Hebrew calendar is lunisolar and has to add in leap months seven out of every nineteen years, which can sometimes force Passover to the second full moon after the equinox, most recently in 2016.

For Muslims, the holy month of Ramadan begins on February 18th this year. Well, maybe, depending on whether you accept the date decreed by the Saudis, or insist on a local sighting of the first crescent moon, the traditional method. And because the Muslim calendar is strictly lunar rather than solar, with no leap months, it falls between ten and eleven days short of a solar year annually, meaning everything, including Ramadan, moves in relation to fixed calendars.

Many religious observances are still based on the time of day, which was not precise in ancient times, before modern science and the powerful computers we all carry in our pockets. For example, the Ramadan fast is from dawn to sundown. For Jews, it mattered whether you had time to finish plowing and get back to the house and cleaned up before the sun went down, marking the start of sabbath. 

To help people figure out when exactly it was dawn, the rabbis taught that “It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that it is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.”

Continue reading “Daybreak”

Four weeks ago, on the first Sunday in Advent, we started a new liturgical year, and with it, a focus on the Gospel Traditionally Attributed to Matthew. You may notice that this is not the gospel we read this evening. We’ll turn to Matthew for Epiphany, for the Three Kings who are neither three nor kings, but that is a sermon for another day. Tonight it is an inn that is not an inn and a stable that is not a stable, angels in the sky, because why not? And shepherds, of course. It is all very sweet, not at all murdery, like Matthew.

But here’s the thing: only some of us have made it to the end of this year’s Hallmark Christmas movie, or maybe the Hallmark Hanukkah movie, because that’s a thing now. Some are still waiting for the real estate developer to have a change of heart, for the hometown girl to stay in her hometown. Others are dragging a bag of grief through the season: a raw anniversary, a first Christmas without a loved one, a difficult diagnosis. 

Then there is the world writ large, which feels way more Matthew at the moment than Luke. Give me lambs and shepherds, and even that annoying little drummer boy. If I want Herod, I can turn on the evening news.

But here’s the thing: it is Christmas in Khartoum too. And in Kyiv. There are displaced women giving birth in temporary shelters, families fleeing across borders. The Nativity did not change the world in an instant, no matter what you believe about incarnation. And to be honest, I’m not sure Good Friday did either. 

What Christmas is supposed to change is us, so maybe it is sort of like those Hallmark movies after all, or “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a film that was a bit of a flop when first released, and now considered a classic, one of the great Christmas films, right up there with “Die Hard.”

Let’s not forget that the year after “Wonderful Life” was released, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. issued a memo about the film’s Communist leanings, noting its negative portrayal of bankers. Imagine if we’d had a twit tweeting on Untruth Social back then, had the Ellison billionaires controlling film production.

Christmas is supposed to change us, turn despair into hope, resignation into resistance. It may feel like Pottersville, but the movie ain’t over. George Bailey produced another reality, actual reality, through courage and kindness, small acts that accumulated, a compound interest of righteousness, the exact opposite of Henry Potter’s usury. John McClane is still alive somewhere in Nakatomi Tower. There is a baby in a manger who will make the wounded and sin-sick whole. And you, just plain old you sitting here this evening, can throw a bit more onto the good side of the scale, the side of love. It may feel so small, so insignificant. It’s not. There a bookstore to save, a war to prevent, and family that needs to be hidden from a murdery king. Let’s get to work.

Amen.

Matthew 1:18-25

Please pull down your lap bar. Once the sermon begins, please remain seated and keep your arms and legs inside of the sermon at all times. 

We’re heading toward the Advent Four theme of Love, but we are beginning with Plato, and I’m not talking about Sal Mineo’s character in “Rebel Without A Cause,” for the geezers and classic film buffs who know that movie. I’m talking about the ancient Athenian dude that died three and a half centuries before Jesus was even born. 

Plato is still studied, though his influence has waned slightly since elite schools abandoned the study of “the Classics,” and by classics, I mean old texts in old languages. Even Neoplatonism was not so “neo” anymore by the Middle Ages, and yet here we are. I’ve argued that trying to shove Holy Mystery into a God-shaped box, which is to say a super-sized human-shaped box, has created a monster, and that box was created using Platonic blueprints.

Specifically, Plato suggests that every thing has behind it some absolute and ideal form. Some thing that does not and cannot change. Consider the impossibility of a perfect circle, abstract mathematics the most precise tools cannot ever achieve, atoms being squirmy little things.

Another example: we might see hundreds of different dogs in our lifetime, but Plato’s theory of forms suggests there is another realm of being where there is an absolute dog, the perfect embodiment of dog-ness. While originating in the Pre-Modern Age, the idea fit the project of the Enlightenment rather well. Isaac Newton and his lot convinced us that we could dissect and experiment and measure our way to knowledge, believed that there was such a thing as absolute truth, bowed at the altar of human reason.

While the tools of modernity are still useful, the project itself went a little belly-up just over a century ago with the science of quantum mechanics and the reality that human reason did not lead us to utopia, but instead has brought us to the brink of self-destruction, a precipice upon which we still perch. People looked at the dead in Flanders Fields, technology turned deadly, and figured out that we were not going to think our way out of hate, and that even before the horrors of World War II.

Which brings us back to dog.

In the postmodern age, we no longer appeal to some Platonic idea of “dog.” When I take my puppy to City Hall, most folks gush about how cute he is, which is absolutely true, and critical to his survival when he is barking in the crate at 2:00 am or chewing on a chair leg. But there is one court officer who backs away. She is trained, armed, and scared of Harvey.

“Dog” may be a set of genetic markers for one mostly-domesticated species, but in practice, dog is the sum of all of your previous encounters with dogs. There was a reason the first fire-rescue I remember my grandfather bringing home was called Snapper, a reason I learned about stooping down to pick up rocks while walking the backroads of Saipan, where packs of wild dogs were not uncommon. 

There are wild dogs, working dogs including service dogs, and companion animals. I recognize their intelligence, acknowledge the hubris of those who claim they experience nothing like our emotions, especially love that goofy perfect breed developed by Sir Dudley Marjoribanks at his estate in Scotland. 

“Dog” is not a particularly complicated concept. I mean, it does seem a little remarkable that a Great Dane recognizes a Chihuahua as a dog from a hundred yards away, but they do. 

If every one of us has a unique and sometimes contextual definition of dog, how much more complex is defining something abstract, something like America, or today’s Advent theme, love.

Continue reading “Dog Is Good: 21 December 2025”

Matthew 3:1-12

Isaiah 11:1-10

In 1995, the world marked the Fiftieth Anniversary of the end of World War II, a conflict that raged from 1939 to 1945. 

There were events marking V-E Day, the final defeat of the German Fascist regime by anti-Fascist Allied Forces, and V-J Day, the final defeat of Japan’s brutal colonizing forces, by the equally colonialist Allied Forces. The Japanese surrender only came after atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a catastrophic declaration of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.

Yet, even as the world marked that solemn anniversary, there was violent conflict in Europe. Ethnic battles in the former Yugoslavia included more crimes against humanity, including the Srebrenica Massacre that July, when nationalist Serbian forces slaughtered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

In the fifty years that had followed the Second Word War, United States forces fought three “hot” wars, the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate, the Vietnam War, which we lost decisively, and the brief Gulf War, restoring a brutal monarchy. 

It felt good, in that context, to reminisce about a “good war,” where we were the “good guys” and actually won, even if that required a bit of selective memory. 

An entire World War history II industry followed, books and television series and group tours. Tom Brokaw, a national news anchor, wrote a bestselling book profiling those who came of age during the war, titled “The Greatest Generation,” a term coined decades earlier by World War II General James Van Fleet. Every other generation was apparently not quite so great.

“Band of Brothers,” a hit mini-series profiling a single airborne company, was followed by “The Pacific,” focusing on Marine Corps campaigns against Japan, and more recently, “Masters of the Air,” covering Army Air Corps bombing missions over Europe. The effort to focus on this distant “good war” continued to play out as our post-9/11 wars found us in yet another quagmire, an Afghanistan that has chewed up one foreign power after another, and in an unnecessary and unjustified war in Iraq, where we destabilized an entire region, leading to terrorism and yet more genocide. Along the way, we became the same sort of war criminals we vowed to pursue rather than the moral center we so arrogantly claimed.

The “good war” narrative with its necessary adjunct of national unity is a lie. More than half of those who served in the American military during the Second World War were drafted, and the almost 50,000 who deserted were largely part of a sub-group, men who were drafted and sent into combat. We can’t ignore the military’s ability to manufacture cohesion and consensus, or at least a camaraderie of survival. We also cannot ignore the terror and trauma.

There were other voices. In his 1984 work of oral history titled “The Good War,” Studs Terkel includes the voice of Dellie Hahne, who said:

“World War Two being called a good war is a horrible thing… If they had said to me, Look… we’ll all get our arms and legs blown off but it has to be done, I’d understand. If they didn’t hand me all this shit with the uniforms and the girls in their pompadours dancing at the USO and all those songs – ‘There’ll Be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’ – bullshit!…

Maybe you have to get people to fight a war, maybe you have to lie to them.”

Hahne, who lost a brother in a training accident before he ever saw combat, may well have been right.

Today, we still reminisce about the Second World War, even as our American despot charges toward yet another petroleum war with lies and misinformation, imaginary weapons of mass destruction replaced by Trump with imaginary narcotics, even as he pardons prominent narco-traffickers. His racist tirade against Somali-Americans certainly reminds us that one of the first steps in white-washing violence is to turn your enemy into an “other,” an object.

And here we are, with our Advent Two theme of peace. About that… 

Continue reading “A Good War? : Advent Two 2025”

Matthew 24:36-44

Isaiah 2:1-5

SERMON Another World

Scholars generally consider the prophetic age to coincide with the Jewish kingdoms, before Palestine was reduced to colony-status by a succession of foreign invaders. The first of these independent realms was the singular kingdom established under the warlord, Saul, expanded by the usurper, David, and maintained by his son, Solomon. After Solomon, age old resentments between tribes re-surfaced, resulting in the period of two kingdoms, the Northern Kingdom, generally called Israel, and the Southern Kingdom, called Judah. The prophet was always the outsider, challenging priests and kings.

There are prophets we know only from the histories, like Nathan and Elijah, the latter one of the most significant in the Jewish imagination. 

There are twelve minor prophets, giving us powerful texts like Micah 6:8, at the heart of my personal faith, our congregational identity, and the Social Gospel movement. It calls us to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. 

Then there are the three major prophets, Isaiah, both the original prophet as well as the school of prophecy that expanded that text across generations and contexts, as well as Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Today’s readings, one from the Jewish Bible and one from the Christian Testament, come from the prophetic tradition. 

As we begin a new lectionary year focused on the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, we find Jesus speaking about an apocalyptic re-ordering of creation, an event that begins with the arrival of a figure called the Son of Man. This is easily confused with the phrase Son of God, though these are very distinct figures. 

The Son of Man is drawn from the Book of the Prophet Daniel, a combination of folktales about a character during the Babylonian Captivity and an apocalyptic text written in the Second Century B.C.E. The Book of the Prophet Daniel has the distinction of being the only text partially composed in Aramaic, the same language Jesus would have spoken with others in Galilee.

These ancient languages were gendered, and pre-Rabbinic Judaism was patriarchal, so translators have defaulted to the masculine with Son of Man, but we might better translate the phrase as The Human One, an archetypal “every” person, or maybe as a fulfillment of human possibility. 

Our reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah is from the original prophet of that name. He was active during the final years of the two kingdoms, and saw the fall of Israel to the invading Neo-Assyrian army. These events took place more than seven centuries before Jesus was born, more than five centuries before the Book of the Prophet Daniel was written, more than two centuries before the Babylonian Captivity. 

The gap between Isaiah Bin Amoz and Jesus is difficult to wrap our heads around. We cannot think of it in terms of cultural continuity. For example, there was neither an American culture nor Protestantism seven centuries ago. We’d even be on the far side of the Black Death, the devastating Medieval bubonic plague. 

And yet, despite this massive contextual gap, Isaiah and Jesus share one thing in common: an absolute belief that the society in which they lived was suboptimal. In other words, things don’t have to be like this. 

Continue reading “Another World : Advent One”

Though Harper Lee was born and raised in Monroeville, Alabama, and I was born and raised in the Tidewater area of Virginia, we were most certainly distant cousins, as we shared descent from the Lee family of Virginia, enslavers, patriots, and traitors, though only she got the name, my descent being matrilineal. 

I knew none of this when I was assigned to read “To Kill A Mockingbird” in high school, a shocking assignment actually, given the hold the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy had on Virginia curriculums all those decades ago. But there it was, this instant classic published just a couple of years before I was born, a book that was anti-racist and woke before those words meant what those words have come to mean.

“Mockingbird” is the rare “bildungsroman,” or “coming of age” tale, written from the perspective of a female character. Scout Finch, her older brother Jem, and neighboring summer-visitor Dill, watch events unfold as her attorney father, Atticus, is assigned to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. It is a trope all too common among white supremacists, imagining men and women of the African diaspora as bestial, impulsive, and hyper-sexual, a trope that watered the deep roots of the lynching tree.

I’d later learn that the character Dill was inspired by real life seasonal neighbor Truman Capote. I’d learn that the future authors maintained close ties well into adulthood, with Lee accompanying Capote to Kansas to research “In Cold Blood” while “Mockingbird” was in production. The relationship withered and died when “Mockingbird” became a Pulitzer Prize-winning success, though the perpetually petty Capote was himself already wildly successful. 

I watched in dismay as an earlier draft of “Mockingbird” was controversially released as “Go Set a Watchman” in 2015, just months before Lee died at the age of 89. Everything about that affair was tawdry and tainted and undoubtedly exploitative.

I will not describe much of the novel’s plot. Many folks have read the book, while many others have seen the 1962 Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck, that year’s Best Actor. If you have done neither, I urge you to do so. It is sadly relevant to the time in which we live.

Continue reading “Reign of Christ: 23 November 2025”

Isaiah 65:17-25

Most of you know I care about available, affordable, and accessible housing. It is a primary focus of my other job. I have this crazy idea that an able-bodied person of working age who has a full-time job should be able to afford a roof over their head. Crazy, right? Next thing you know, I’ll go all Zohran Mamdani on the good people of Elmira, and suggest something totally Communist like affordable childcare, or lifesaving healthcare that doesn’t force people into bankruptcy.

Given that, you would think I’d love today’s reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. After all, what isn’t to love about people enjoying the fruit of their own work, literally in the case of vineyards, figuratively when it comes to living in the house you built. And that would be the easy way out for a sleep-deprived pastor with a new puppy in the house. Deliver some Sunday morning fluff, and let everyone head to coffee hour.

There is only problem with that plan. That problem is me.

Because there is another story, one that is important. One that involves context. 

There are three distinct historic periods represented in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, maybe better titled the Book of the Isaiah School of Prophecy. The earliest, a slight majority of the book, likely comes from the time of the original prophet, Isaiah bin Amoz, which is to say Isaiah the son of Amoz, because surnames were not a thing. You were known by your tribe, village, and father.

Continue reading “Tangled: 16 November 2025”

Luke 20:27-38

In our century, G.K. Chesterton, is best known by the PBS crowd as the English author of the Father Brown mysteries, a series of stories he admittedly churned out quickly for pay. There were fifty stories published during his lifetime, with three more discovered after his death in 1936. There have been many adaptations of the series for film, radio, and television, with the most recent BBC television series airing its 130th episode in March of this year. 

I can only assume that fifty stand-alone stories producing that many television episodes is down to a miracle akin to Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fishes, or maybe some serious theological mathematics. After all, Christian theologians routinely turn one into three.

During his lifetime, Chesterton was practically a one-man publishing house, producing eighty books, more than a hundred and fifty short stories outside of the Father Brown series, and thousands of essays. He was a public intellectual, and on the side of the angels in opposing imperialism and eugenics, as well as supporting an economic model that landed justly between capitalism and communism. In our time, it is especially notable that he was an early and vocal critic of Hitler.

A convert to the Roman communion, some have even suggested that Chesterton be named a saint in that tradition. He does not quite make my list.

In a 1909 essay, he wrote:

Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Dragons have been around a long time. John of Patmos describes Satan as a dragon in the apocalypse that concludes the Christian canon. Shakespeare mentions them in “Richard III” and “King Lear.” They appear in countless fantasy series written for children and adults, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” to Cressida Cowell’s “How to Train Your Dragon” series. Films have been made of all of these works.

I personally love the meme, found on t-shirts and bumper stickers, that advises against meddling in the affairs of dragons, reminding us that “you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”

Chesterton conflates the bogey and the dragon, both representing our fears, chaos and the unknown, the darkness that has a shape in the imagination of a child, particularly terrifying in recent decades in the writing of Stephen King, Pennywise in the storm drain. But most humans outgrow the bogey of darkness, and grow into the bogey of death, the ultimate unknown, for the monster in the dark is the deathbringer.

Continue reading “Defeat of Bogey: 9 November 2025”

Luke 6:20-31

You already know the Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Benediction of Judaism, though you likely do not know it by that name. It is:

May the Lord bless you, and keep you;
May the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
May the Lord lift up His face to you, and give you peace.

The text is found in the Book of Numbers in the Torah, and if a Kohanim is present for synagogue worship, he delivers the blessing, just as he has precedence in delivering the “aliyah,” or first reading from the Torah. This special Jewish caste, the Kohanim, is recognized to this day and claims patrilineal descent from the Ancient Israelite priesthood. Specifically, the Kohanim claim descent from Aaron, brother of Moses. Because this caste is based on patrilineal descent, Kohanim generally have one of five last names, the most common being Cohen.

Trekkies routinely use a version of the hand-gesture associated with the blessing, adapted by Leonard Nimoy as the Vulcan salute. Millions of people received the full Birkat Kohanim blessing from Eliezer ben Nisan ha’Cohen. He delivered it at the end of his concerts, the singer-songwriter performing under his common name, Leonard Cohen.

Some of you may know that Leonard Cohen spent years studying Zen Buddhism, and was ordained as a monk of the Rinzai School in 1996. He was also quite fond of Jesus. But he remained faithfully Jewish his entire life, and when he died in 2016, he was laid to rest in a simple pine box in the Jewish cemetery of his hometown in Quebec.

So what does a priestly-Jewish Zen Buddhist Jesus-fanboy have to tell a bunch of semi-Protestant heterodox religious refugees about sainthood? 

Continue reading “Monsters of Love: 2 November 2025”