Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

You may be one of those odd people who likes winter. Certainly for those who retired here from away, that would make sense. Personally, if I’m going to hurtle down the face of something at high speeds, I’d just as soon it be a wave, though I’ll admit there are slightly fewer sharks on the ski slopes. And go ahead and strap on those snowshoes and head off into the woods. Me? Not so much. Oh sure, I love the look of the fresh snowfall, the hushed quiet, but give it a couple of days until everything is gray, when there is a seven inch puddle sloshing over the top of your boots where there was only two inches of space. It seems to me that snow melt falls into the realm of the impossible quantum, defying the laws of space and time.

Now, I attended Divinity School in Massachusetts, and my last church was in New York, so I’ve learned to adjust, even to the dark and the mud, but I do not rejoice in winter. I get the need for fallow time, for dark time, for the changing seasons in creation and in our lives, and even if I didn’t get it, that whole spinning planet thing is going to happen anyway, so I might as well accept it, but I truly rejoice in late spring. Continue reading “Good Being: December 11, 2016”

In a book review in the Mainline Protestant magazine The Christian Century, reviewer Marcia Z. Nelson writes that “Heaven is not a place where Jesus rides a pony with a rainbow mane.” This will come as bad news to some Bronies. You may have never heard of Bronies, the name itself a portmanteau of “Bro” and “pony.” It is a self-identification used by adult fans of the My Little Pony franchise, tech-savy, often male. Weird? Yeah, maybe.

You might remember My Little Pony, a Hasbro brand introduced in the 1980’s when America was trying to feel good again, to turn its back on the complexities of the Sixties and Seventies by dividing the world into a simple binary of good guys, with a white-hatted cowboy in charge, and bad guys, a new Red Scare with commies and pinkos and homos around every corner. It was the decade I went from apple pie, Boy Scouts and Go Army to being one of those Commie Pinko Homos. Continue reading “Bronies: December 4, 2016”

I had learned enough to know that I had better leave my cell phone in the rental car, so as I rode Space Mountain, as I joined the Foolish Mortals in the Haunted Mansion, I had no idea that my phone was, as the saying goes, blowing up. It was only many hours after the fact that I discovered dozens of voicemails, emails, and text messages, all sent to me while I was away on vacation, all over whether or not the soup kitchen could adjust its serving time by fifteen minutes so the church could have an after school program.

Boundaries are important. Knowing how to take sabbath, when to disconnect, is important for everybody, especially those who care for and support others. Technology has made this even harder, these personal communicators right out of Star Trek that beep and ping and do everything except beam us up. But I imagine keeping good boundaries is hardest of all for Jesus, who must be exhausted from watching Facebook on his smartphone all night to see when a post hits ten thousand shares so someone’s disease can be cured… Continue reading “72″ Happiness: November 27, 2016”

Disney’s The Lion King is sort of Hamlet with a lot more music and a little less angst. Which is to say, that like so many stories told for as long as humans have told stories and organized themselves into tribes and states, The Lion King is a tale about the conflict over who is properly to be in charge of earthly affairs. Simba, the cub who would be king, has it a lot better off than some kings.

The Fisher King, a central figure in the Arthurian Legend and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” is tied to the fertility of the land, his wounded-groin infertility everyone’s infertility, as crops fail, nothing falls from the sky, all is stillborn. Indeed, in some primitive cultures, the king himself would be sacrificed, his blood drained into the soil to appease the gods and insure a return of fertility. Only then, only with the blood of the king, spoke the thunder.

In other cultures we might consider civilized, or at least on the road to civilization, earthly rulers were divine, half-breed demigods and those elevated to the pantheon. Take the Caesars, that Julio-Claudian Dynasty that ruled from the Thames to the Tigris at the time of Jesus. W.H. Auden writes “Great is Caesar: He has conquered Seven Kingdoms.” The poet goes on in his Christmas Oratorio, “For the Time Being,”: Continue reading “Time Being: November 20, 2016”

There was never a single Hebrew religion anymore than there was ever a single Christianity, despite the prevailing myths in both traditions. Jesus taught in an age when there were many sects and divisions among his people, not only the traditional divisions between tribes, but also theological differences and differences of opinion about how to deal with the Roman Occupation, that brutal colonial power making things a living hell for so many Jews.

The Sadducees, a group that included most of the Levites and the Aaronite priesthood, were still fairly safe and well off under Roman rule, lived in a bubble of social and economic privilege, so they decided that the Romans weren’t all bad, that the thousands strung up on crosses must have done something to deserve it, and figured, “Hey, it is better to work with the Romans, right?” Continue reading “My Freak Flag”

The English call deep-fried sticks of potato “chips.” Yeah, I know. But this is important if you ever go to England, as many of us have, because deep-fried slices of potato are called crisps, not chips, the name we use here, and the English certainly don’t call chips “French Fries,” which is just as well, as they appear to actually be Belgian in origin, at least from the French-speaking portion of what is today Belgium, where they are called “pommes frites.”

The English of the late 15th century would have been disingenuous if, in the middle of yet another dispute with France, and there was always a dispute with France, they had taken to calling chips “Freedom Fries,” what with there not actually being anything like freedom in England at the time. After all, the Magna Carta, over 250 years old even back then, really only created a type of freedom for the nobility. Continue reading “Covenant”

Globalization was well underway. New technology allowed ideas to cross borders and social classes, information more available to more people than ever before. Science was starting to challenge superstition.

The institutional church looked increasingly out of touch, disconnected from every day reality, more concerned with wealth and power for the few than with anything a poor itinerant rabbi from Galilee, committed to reforming his faith, a man that was executed by those with wealth and power, might have taught.

But really, that rabbi’s follower in those changing times centuries later didn’t intend to start a revolution. He just meant to open a debate about one particular practice, to pursue reform from within. The more effort they put into quashing him and his ideas, the further they drove him out. What started as a debate on 95 theological points about paid indulgences ended with the Lutheran Reformation. Continue reading “Phoenix Affirmations & Reformation Sunday”

I suppose pretty much every immigrant community ever has worried that younger generations would lose their culture and their language. There is some basis for this concern.

I mean, we can challenge the notion of an American Melting Pot. We can look at a clear history of discrimination and oppression. After all, Columbus wrote is his journal of 1498 that “From here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold …,” beginning a long history of terror, a red, white and blue of hatred… blue cavalry hats at Sand Creek, white hoods at the lynching tree, red baseball caps chanting anti-immigrant slogans. Continue reading “Statement of Faith”

It took a lot for me to learn to love Paul.

He was a persecutor of Jesus followers before his conversion, even participating the extrajudicial execution of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. He became a dynamic apostle. The texts traditionally attributed to him often contradict themselves. In his letters, he is abrasive, passive-aggressive at times, and not-so-passively at others. His ego seems to have been easily bruised. He never knew the living Jesus, and in many places he seems to miss the point entirely, placing too much emphasis on the cross as a sin sacrifice, ignoring the actual hands-on ministry and social teachings of Jesus that we find in the gospels. It is easy to see him as a poor lens distorting the pure light of Christ. Continue reading “On the Barmen Declaration”

There is no fight quite like a fight between siblings. Not that I ever fought with my siblings, of course. But I hear, second-hand, of course, that sisters and brothers know exactly where to hit you, know where all of your buttons are located, because they watched as they were installed, had their own buttons installed by the same craftspeople. Proximity produces ferocity.

And while all war is terrible, civil war seems particularly vicious. Not at all civil, but rather a war within the civitas, Latin for “the body of citizens,” civil war has produced the Reign of Terror, the Killing Fields, Guernica, the Republic of Suffering. Continue reading “Changing Lives”