Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Dear Scott,

You asked how the African-American Christian families of those slaughtered by a White Christian Terrorist could, just a couple of days after the attack, state that they forgive the attacker, suspecting that they offer forgiveness in court, then scream and curse when they get home. You’re probably right, though this is not an either/or, and given the deep faith of this community, I am sure the cursing looks less like profanity and more like lament. But the bigger question is, what is forgiveness to these people. Continue reading “An Open Letter to a Friend on Massacre and Forgiveness”

At the beginning of this week I asked myself one simple question. “Why worship?” Given that one of the most important roles I play in community is to lead worship, you would think I’d already answered this question for myself, but you’d be wrong. I have a heart for worship, every bit of my being longs to worship, like prayer I feel that I am right with God when I worship, I even have some notion of a desired outcome of worship, but I had, before this week, never sat down and constructed a theology of the specific act of communal worship. I’m not sure I have even now, for the answer I have reached this week feels more like a waypoint on a journey than a final destination, provisional, so I offer you a tour, not an answer, a trip through my heart and my head.

It all began with this week’s psalm, classified as a psalm of praise. In fact, praise psalms provide the text for this second Sunday, as well as the sixth and final Sunday, of this series. The first line of the psalm is a directive, Praise the Lord! We more often hear it in its Hebrew form, or some derivative of that form, where it is simply this: Hallelujah! Hebrew spelling, Latin version, doesn’t matter, it is always an instruction. Praise the Lord! Continue reading “Why Worship?”

The dramatic fall of Brian Williams, the television journalist for NBC News, was not the result of the Chinook helicopter in which he was riding being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, for alas it wasn’t. It was all about the act of remembering. We are often under the illusion that our memories are books or photo albums on which the past is safely stored, when, in fact, the past is constantly rewritten through the lens of the present. Memory is unstable, alive. Williams violated a basic rule of reporting when he became part of the story, though if we have learned anything in the post-modern age, the age of the quantum and the cat that is at once both alive and dead, it is that the mere act of observation changes the reality. Continue reading “Free-range Hope: A Palm Sunday Sermon”

I love me some geeks. In fact, I have a few geek merit badges myself. Back in the day there was Dungeons and Dragons. I’m an interfaith nerd, as I like both Star Wars and Star Trek, though I must admit to being an expert in neither. I like the guy in the little blue box who makes time go a little wibbly-wobbly. And my comic book collection is fairly large, at about 5000 issues, about half of its size at its peak.

So trust me when I say that there is not fight like a geek fight. The heated discussions at a Comic-con seem suspiciously like something one might have heard in the Inquisition, blistering and accusatory, and mostly about a bunch of made up nothing. Just ask a geek who would win in a fight, Wolverine or Superman. Continue reading “Pitching Yeast: Sermon for February 1, 2015”

In today’s world, Satan seems superfluous. Who needs an eternal being, divine but corrupted, to be the source of evil, when we are so capable of evil on our own. Sand Creek, Nanking, Auschwitz, Memphis, 9/11, Paris… We do not need Satan, and indeed, many progressive Christians no longer believe, even if Jesus saw himself as in conflict with this dark power. Then again, Jesus was in conflict with someone, and usually multiple someones’ throughout his ministry. He cast out demons, chastised Pharisees, challenged Roman authority, and even called Peter “Satan” at one point. Still, there is this story, the formative story. So what are we to do with this passage, this threshold that marks the beginning of Jesus’ active ministry? Continue reading “Sermon for the Temptation in the Wilderness”

Of the many ancient Christian texts that did not make it into the scriptural canon, the Gospel of Thomas is the most famous, for we had the name but not the actual text for centuries before it was rediscovered after the Second World War. Sharing the name of the apostle, but otherwise completely unrelated, is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a document that has more in common with the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew in that it is written after the split between the early Christians and proto-Rabbinic Judaism, so casts Jesus as antagonistic to Jews, never mind that he was one. Like the birth narrative of Matthew, the Infancy Gospel is a fiction and an argument, trying to position Jesus in the Hebrew religious trajectory while also projecting developing understandings of Jesus back onto his boyhood. So you get this: Continue reading “Alien”

While it is true that many strands of Protestant Christianity came together to create the rainbow tapestry that is today’s United Church of Christ, the first of these strands, and the one that gives shape to our own church history, is the Congregational tradition of New England. Those brave souls were seeking religious freedom, but they also had a very specific idea of who and what they wanted to be. Their goal? To be a City on a Hill. This formulation comes from the 5th Chapter of the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, and is part of a string that calls those who would follow Jesus the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world.” Continue reading “A Christmas Message: A City on a Hill”

Here in these disunited states, we continue to struggle with a pernicious racism, even though race itself is an artificial construct with no basis in biology. This fault line through our national conscience is nowhere more clear than in our relationship with our president. This week, Tea Party protesters stood in front of the White House calling for Obama to be lynched, and who can forget the “Put the white back in the White House” tee-shirts from the 2012 election. We’ve clearly got work to do, and while these problems may seem distant to us, Selma was a long way from the South Shore of Long Island. And yet, our pastor of blessed memory…

Dividing folks, us vs. them, by color of skin, ethnicity, how we celebrate communion, this is both incredibly human, and incredibly wrong. Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, touched on this theme more than once. Butter-side up or butter-side down?

It is then, with some trepidation, that I suggest dividing people neatly into three categories, but here goes… Continue reading “I do not think it means what you think it means…”

God of Work and God of Rest,
You call us to sabbath,
But all too often
church is just one more box to be checked
another obligation
a source of guilt.

Help us discover You
in song
in word
in silence.

Help us discover ourselves in You
and turn chore
into celebration.
Amen.

Back when I was young, you learned cursive writing. I barely use it anymore, except when I have to sign something, and as I understand it, fewer and fewer kids are learning it. It was part of the three “r’s,” reading, writing and ‘rithmetic… clearly spelling was not one of the “r’s,” since the “a” at the beginning of arithmetic was viewed as optional. Today, we are teaching a new set of “r’s,” reduce, re-use and recycle. And its a good thing, given the accelerating pace at which the human animal is destroying the ability of the planet to support life. But we’ll get back to the doom and gloom.

In truth, humans have been historically good at the “three “R’s” of reduce, re-use and recycle right up until the Industrial Age. Most humans had to re-use and recycle, poverty and limited supply meant it was what you did to get by, long before the fashionable term “upcycle” was even coined. And we didn’t just recycle hand-me-down clothing and stale bread. We recycled bits of culture too, stories, snippets of music. Britten uses Purcell in his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Joyce turns Odysseus into an Irish Jew wandering the streets of Dublin. Warhol turns the Mona Lisa into serialized pop screen prints in neon hues. We add and reconfigure and appropriate. It is good, creative, holy. It is what we do. Continue reading “Not in the expected form”