Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

The Protestant Reformation made the faith less transactional and less sacramental, centering covenant in structure, and word in worship. Despite this, the German reformer Martin Luther cautioned against preaching on one particular Sunday, Trinity Sunday, suggesting that there was nothing sensible that a pastor could say. For once, I am taking that advice. Sort of. I’m preaching, just not on the Trinity.. 

Besides, I am agnostic about the Trinity, or more accurately apophatic, believing humans have no business speaking about the ultimate nature of God. At best, we can describe our experiences of the holy. All else is guess work, a pebble of maybe thrown into an ocean of mystery.

Instead, let us think about bodies, given Paul’s hostility toward the flesh and Nicodemus’ confusion when Jesus starts talking about being born again. 

We have all heard the trope that claims we are not bodies that have a soul, but rather are souls temporarily housed in a body. And that may be true. There are certainly enough credible accounts of supernatural weirdness for me to know that I don’t know. 

What we do know is our lived experience as embodied humans, and that can be weird enough. A pregnant mother with influenza in the second trimester means an increased risk that the child will develop schizophrenia as a young adult. Adults who get strep are more likely to become hoarders. Your gut biome, if out of balance, can contribute to depression. Most of us know that a urinary tract infection can have a cognitive impact, never mind more dramatic events like traumatic brain injury or brain tumors. 

It is hard to know how we are who we are when things that are not us can make us someone else. And that doesn’t even take into consideration relativity, the cognitive type rather than the quantum. It does not matter one bit if what “they” believe is lunacy if they believe it is real and operate in the world as if it is real. 

There may be no such thing as government bioengineering using “chemtrails” from aircraft, but that did not stop Tennessee from outlawing them. There are no microchips in Covid-19 vaccinations, but try telling that to those who refused vaccination, risking their own lives and sometimes helping kill others in the process.

And this is just the recursive loop of “I,” of our constant re-creation of self, never mind that the body has a will and a life of its own, is an energy system coded for self-preservation, and ultimately coded for self-destruction as part of the evolutionary process. 

We do not will our hearts to beat, do not manage the process of digestion, and may barely think about it once the meal is done unless it goes wrong. We do not negotiate treaties with the entire nations of bacteria that make us us. We rarely think about breathing, except when we can’t. 

This weekend, “I can’t breathe” has a special resonance, for yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a body damaged and ultimately destroyed by the slave master’s whip, for the legacy of the lash and the lynching tree are still real in our economic, social, and judicial systems, in the way policing is done in so many urban communities, a paramilitary occupation force at war with civilians.

Continue reading “26 May 2024: Bodies Everywhere”

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Acts 2:1-21

I grew up in a beach town. Among my childhood memories are countless days at the beach. My mom, Arlene, and either or both of the Shirleys would pack some combination of a dozen kids into some combination of vehicles and sometimes just one vehicle packed like a clown car, and head off to the public beaches, where we would eat sandy sandwiches, get stung by jellyfish, and otherwise have a grand old time, even when “Jaws” hit the theaters and made everyone else afraid of the water. In fact, maybe especially then, since the beach was less crowded.

We never lived close enough for me to bike to the beach like a real surf rat, but beach culture was always there. When “Margaritaville” came out in 1977, it went right into high rotation on local radio stations, and I have been a bit of a Jimmy Buffett fan ever since, despite not liking Margaritas. In fact I was never really a full-fledged “Parrothead,” as his most diehard fans were known, for like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and the Dave Matthews Band, loving Jimmy Buffett is almost a religion, traveling from show to show all summer. One thing is for sure, though. I know a lot of his songs, from Come Monday to Cheeseburger In Paradise. Buffett died from cancer last September.

During his long career, Jimmy Buffett collaborated with some of my other favorite artists, including other beach-culture musicians like Jack Johnson and Kenny Chesney. But it was a traditional country music artist that collaborated on the song that provides the title for this morning’s sermon, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” a reminder that the day job may drive you to day drinking.

I always think of this song when we get to Pentecost because I find Peter’s words in our scripture reading both incredibly human and incredibly amusing, the sort of text that makes me believe in the historic core at the heart of the text. 

“They’re not drunk,” Peter proclaims. “It’s only the third hour of the day!,” which is what he actually would have said because 9:00am is not how they told time back then. And all I can think is, you know, “It’s the eleventh hour somewhere!,” though the eleventh hour, too, has taken on a completely different cultural meaning. In any case, the time of day has never stopped a committed drunk.

The disciples, having returned to Jerusalem after hanging out with Jesus in Galilee, must have sounded drunk. I mean, sure there was the language thing. Luke makes a big deal out of the language thing, emphasizing how cosmopolitan Jerusalem was, cataloging as many as fifteen regions represented. But honestly, that isn’t the miracle that impresses me.

It isn’t the resurrection that impresses me. Love won, the grave was emptied, and embodied/not embodied Jesus ate fish, walked through closed doors, and helped his followers understand what had just happened, but then he disappeared again, “touchdown Jesus” ascending. 

They had the Holy Spirit, come down like tongues of flame, but the Holy Spirit was not like some demon possessing a body. They were the bodies, those bumpkin followers. They were the bodies who had the audacity to continue to proclaim an alternative to the brutality of Rome and the greed and corruption of the Sanhedrin, even after their leader had been tortured and killed. Fifty days later, and you know what had changed in the world of Roman-occupied Judea? Zilch, nada, nothing. Nothing, that is, except them.

Call it the Holy Spirit. Sure. But it was more than a little crazy to keep telling people that better was possible, better government, better business, better community, even better selves, because God was better than they had ever imagined. They knew this for a fact, for they had experienced it in a better man who made the broken feel whole.

It was a little crazy to say that good was on the move, and that they, women and men from the sticks, completely un-credentialed in the ways of that ancient time, were the vectors that were taking it viral, to anyone who could hear the good news, regardless of their language or culture. There was room for Nicodemus, an Ethiopian eunuch, a wealthy woman in Corinth.

Continue reading “Five O’Clock Somewhere: 19 May 2024”

Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

When Jesus was asked who a re-married widow would be married to in the afterlife, he said she wouldn’t, that heaven doesn’t work that way. This is a passage that is mostly ignored, even by the selective literalists of fundamentalism, as we imagine reunions at the Pearly Gates with loved ones and pets of the past. I am agnostic on the matter, my faith being more about living than dying. Dying seems to take care of itself, while living takes considerable effort, at least done well.

Post-mortem marriage is the sort of very practical question that comes up when we try to map our certain existence in this life onto our unknowable existence in the next. It is not unlike the body problem, which comes in two parts. 

The first is the problem of our particular bodies. The theology that developed in certain strands of pre-Rabbinic Judaism and carried over into Christianity was one of bodily resurrection. This is why, for example, certain traditions were resistant to cremation. No body, nor resurrection. There might have been a case for embodied resurrection in the first generation after Jesus, but two thousand years later, countless bodies are simply gone, and if I were to die tomorrow, or even more dramatically if the rapture were to occur and I made the short-list, who would get this particular set of atoms that comprise my body? For surely everything that is in me today has been part of something or someone else, even the microplastics.

The same sort of sticky questions arose right out of the gate for Christianity, the second form of body problem, when the followers of Jesus claimed he had been bodily resurrected. They claimed guards at the tomb so no one could accuse them of stealing the body. The authors of John have Thomas touch the wound where the spear entered the side of Jesus, hastening his death due to the Passover. Jesus eats post-resurrection, and presumably does the things that result from eating. Yet he passes through locked doors, so maybe they weren’t really clear about the story they meant to tell. In fact, Christians fought over the body of Jesus, pre and post resurrection, for centuries after his execution.

If you’ve got a resurrected body, then you have to account for that body, and they couldn’t exactly kill him again. Fortunately, there was precedents of sorts, two prior individuals who did not die. The first is less familiar, a patriarch in the Book of Genesis before the Great Flood named Enoch. Ancient languages are always a little uncertain in translation, but scholars mostly believe the text describes Enoch being taken to heaven alive.

The second immortal is better known, a tale we tell often in worship. The prophet of the Northern Kingdom named Elijah is taken up in a flaming chariot, which just goes to show you can get to heaven by being fabulous and flamey.

The early believers and gospel authors deal with the “beam me up” body of Jesus by doing just that, arms up and ascending like “touchdown” Jesus. Heaven is up, as is traditional, though I am not sure if that is a fixed up located over Jerusalem, an up that encircles the globe but is invisible, or maybe just some quantum slip in time and space. 

Our Christian story is that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, though we progressives are a difficult lot when it comes to gender, so maybe the left hand of the Mother, and besides, Jesus can’t always be up there because he is so often down here leaving footprints in the sand on some beach or another.

Jesus was real, and his life and ministry improbably changed the world. In my personal theology, the one constructed out of the parts of ancient Christianity worth I find saving, Jesus is historical, a man in a particular context, an occupied land filled with corruption, despair, and violence, but Christ is timeless. Christ is a continuation of Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the way that the gospels say Jesus promises to be with us. Those are soft categories, of course, as God seems to hate being put in boxes.

Continue reading “12 May 2024: APB Wally aka Waldo”

1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

Coming from the aspirational working class, my cultural tastes are a mix of high brow and low brow, from the Daytona 500 to The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, a contemporary opera super relevant to recent events. Then add in a little generation-straddling, and you never know what you’ll get. 

In movies, however, I am decidedly low-class. I have zero need to see another Meryl Streep melodrama. Give me a good adventure or caper film any day. I probably know almost as many quotes from Gen X films as I do from scripture, from “You’re killing me, Smalls!” to “I don’t think that means what you think that means.” 

But some of my favorite films are filled with memorable lines inappropriate for use in a pulpit, and barely suitable for a pool hall. Almost everything that comes out of John Goodman’s mouth in his role as Walter Sobchak in “The Big Lebowski” is profane. But there is that one G-rated quote relevant to today’s scripture: 

“This isn’t ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”

And gosh are there rules. Rabbinic Judaism, which formed after the Jewish War in the First Century, claims 613 commandments in the Law of Moses. Then there were the smooth-talkers who interpreted the rules like latter-day contortionists, “smooth talker” a derogatory term in that context.

Both the gospel traditionally attributed to John but certainly not written by John and the first letter claimed to have been written by John but certainly not written by John tell us to obey God’s commandments, which seems good counsel despite the dubious authorship. But what are God’s commands? That list of 613 reasons you are probably a sinner?

Jesus states very clearly that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. But his interpretation of the law is far from smooth… it is demanding. When asked to summarize the Law, he said “Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as you love yourself,” which by the way also means you can’t hate yourself. Jesus is then asked “Who is my neighbor?,” leading him to tell the story of the Good Samaritan.

So what is it? The Law of Selflessness and Love? Or the minutia and nit-picking the gospel writers would attribute to the Scribes and Pharisees?

It is a sort-of eternal question. So let me tell you a more contemporary story.

Continue reading “5 May 2024: “Sobchak””

Acts 8:26-40

The United Methodist Church made the news again this week as their General Conference convened in Charlotte, North Carolina. Though a significant number of churches and districts have left the denomination in recent years, somewhere around a quarter of local congregations, they are still fighting over LGBTQI+ clergy and same-sex marriage. I find this frustrating, for while Methodism was never a stop on my particular spiritual journey, there is much to be admired in their theological heritage, never mind all those Wesleyan hymns, which are awesome. For one thing, their understanding of grace is way better than that of our Calvinist tradition, though that is a bit “in the weeds” for our purposes this morning. Besides, we’ve been ordaining LGBTQI+ folx for more than half a century.

So I guess that, given their queasiness about queerness, I should not have been surprised at what I discovered in my Bible commentary on the Acts of the Apostle this week as I was doing my sermon prep. That particular volume in the “Interpretation” series is authored by Methodist theologian and Bishop Will Willimon. I generally like Willimon, but he is off base when he states in his commentary that the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s reading was not necessarily castrated, and therefore not necessarily excluded from the Temple community. He then goes on to blatantly ignore that elephant in the room, going to absurd lengths to interpret the text.

So let’s be really clear, and really in-context. This story is weird and very radical. 

Philip is a sort-of B-league apostle, not one of the inner four, but not among those we forget or that change depending on the gospel you are reading. He is a transfer from the movement surrounding John the Baptizer. He comes from the same town as Peter and Andrew, yet his name is Greek, and he is the one who connects with the Greeks at the door who wish to meet Jesus. We can assume that this conversation, between the Ethiopian court official and Philip, took place in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire.

The Ethiopian is a castrated court official, something that was not uncommon in that age and region, especially among royal courts that kept harems. And let’s just park all of the misogyny of harems, because it is obvious enough, and not the point of the story.

Willimon wants us to believe Luke is using the term “eunoxos” to mean court official, but that term, “dynastes,” is also in the passage. In the same way, Willimon wants to conflate “Eithiop” with otherness generally, but again, Luke has chosen all three descriptors. This man is what the text says he is, despite efforts to straight-wash him.

Castrated men were excluded from participation in the religious assembly. Look at Deuteronomy 23:1. We may know that the Book of Deuteronomy is a late and priestly fabrication, not something written by Moses, but Philip, the character within the framework of our story, and Luke, the author of this historical account of the early church, absolutely believed Deuteronomy to be the authentic rule of God. 

Continue reading “28 April 2024: A Very Queer Caravan”

I figured I had been fired, though it was the sort of firing I didn’t particularly mind. The clock was ticking down to the global climate justice teach-in, and for the last two years, I have spent part of that day on a panel at Elmira College. Maybe they were looking for some fresh voices? That was certainly reasonable, and I’m a little busy these days. 

Then, pretty last minute, I got an invitation to be a panelist. Turned out I was right. Professor Stoker had tried to populate the panel with new folx, including indigenous voices, and they had one by one canceled. So he turned to old reliable here, for I may be boring, but I am definitely reliable.

The professor was prepared to speak as well, only if needed, though that looked to be the case. I was there, what passed for Christian representation, and there was a swami from a local Hindu community that was going to connect spiritual vegetarianism with climate action, but the rabbi was late. Thankfully, he finally made it, flustered that he could not find bicycle racks to park his bike at an event on climate change. I thought to point out that there were snow squalls outside, but the man is Canadian after all.

The problem, the reason I had no FOMO (fear of missing out), is not that I have nothing to say about Climate Justice. I would not be this congregation’s pastor and teacher if I did not share your core commitments. The problem is that to get to the theological basis of our climate activism, you have to bulldoze your way past a whole lot of traditional Christian beliefs that we hold loosely if we hold them at all. The question for us is how must we live now, knowing what we know now, having experienced what we have experienced, in the face of holy mystery, and not how to live under ancient and pre-scientific paradigms.

Letting God be God, letting God be at the center of Creation rather than seeing ourselves at the center of Creation, is admittedly pretty radical. And those college kids in the audience, if they thought about Christianity at all, had either experienced it or perceived it in the traditional men-at-the-center blood-of-Jesus form, still dominant if in decline. At best, they might know of liberal do-gooder Christianity, without knowing the “why” behind it.

Why, for example, move beyond traditional Christian understandings of homo sapiens as having dominion over the earth and all of the life upon it, even beyond modern Christian understandings of homo sapiens having stewardship responsibility for the earth and all the life upon it, an improvement but still not all the way there, to the notion that homo sapiens as just one more evolved species and not the center of the known universe? And to do so on a one-time panel and deal with all of the existential angst when we start to ask difficult questions?

For example, I might have shared an anecdote from Barbara J. King’s “Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion.” A chimpanzee, Tina, has been killed by a leopard. Brutus, the group’s alpha male, guards the body for five hours. He only allows one other chimp to approach the corpse, Tina’s little brother. This moves beyond the already controversial notion that animal grieve. This looks a lot like empathy, looks like Brutus understands that Tina’s little brother had a unique relationship with her. Which makes you look at that bacon a little differently and start to wonder if the swami is right after all, and bring on the tofu!

And if that notion, that humans are the god-shaped reason for creation itself, is emptied, then what other theologies fall by the way side? And do the new theologies we construct have the power to give shape and comfort in the haphazard holiness and harm of existence in these finite bodies?

Continue reading “21 April 2024: Climate Justice Sunday”

Luke 24:36-48

1 John 3:1-7

As most of you know, I am pretty firmly committed to letting God be God, beyond our human constructions of the holy, the well-intended but rickety little shacks we want to house mystery. Thinking of God along human lines of being, as rooted in time and space with will and agency like ours, can be useful, as long as we don’t confuse the limits of our own imagination with limits on God.

To that end, I routinely try to shift language, freeing God from embodied gender and socially-constructed notions of gender. On occasion, I even reverse tradition, using female pronouns or neutral pronouns. In other words, I am the MAGA-Christians’ worst nightmare, and quite proud of it.

So you may ask yourself why our reading from the first letter attributed to John was full of “He” and “Him.” And this is where we get a little nerdy, but only a little, because this text is one of the few places in scripture where we do not know the antecedents to the pronouns. The correct question in First John is “He who?” The author writes about God, then seems to shift to writing about Jesus, but there is no proper noun to signal that shift. Some and probably all of the he/him references are Jesus, and we have no reason to doubt that Jesus was biologically and socially male in that ancient patriarchal context, as much fun as it might to be to imagine otherwise, so I am hesitant to start messing with the pronouns in this passage.

The other interesting thing about this passage is that it says “we will be like him,” which leads me to believe they hadn’t gotten to a particularly high Christology yet, since the Jesus we get to after they hammered out orthodoxy, and hammered one another in the process, was barely human at all, making it incredibly hard for us to imagine that we might become like him. I have a hard enough time becoming like me, or at least the me I want to be.

“He who?” is not the only question for First John, because we might also fairly ask “We who?” And for that, I’m going to suggest we turn to the gospel reading, which comes from Luke, but is echoed in the “Great Commission” found in Matthew. That version is a command to baptize and make disciples of all nations. Luke’s version has Jesus describing his role as Messiah, commanding “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

And this is where I land. We honestly don’t know how Jesus felt about non-Jews. A pre-rabbinic Judaism existed throughout the empire, from Babylon to Rome, and people not ethnically descended from the Israelites could be found around synagogues. 

As I recently shared with you, Jesus taught and healed in a multi-cultural context. But the social movement that gathered around Jesus took uniquely Jewish forms. Did he, the rabbi executed on Golgotha, anticipate a movement made up primarily of non-Jews? For that matter, did he really anticipate any movement at all? He proclaimed the right rule of God as an in-breaking heavenly kingdom, and early Christians held on to this idea that some sort of divine intervention in creation was immanent. And either it arrived in the form of a new way of thinking about God and living in the world, or it didn’t happen at all, because the anti-Christ did not show up in 33 C.E., and wasn’t born in 1946 either, despite evidence to the contrary.

What we do know is that the gospel we received was universalist, though that word can mean many things.

Continue reading “He who? 14 April 2023”

Acts 4:32-35

During the second year of my professional degree program, I completed a major paper on prayer. I particularly wanted to explore what prayer could mean once you moved beyond human constructions of a puppet-master God who was arbitrary and capricious, who granted some miracles and denied others. 

As part of that process, I spent some time on the Lord’s Prayer, which is problematic despite the fact that it is still central to our collective and individual lives. Does God really expect us to wait passively to receive daily bread, or has God already given us the gifts we need to produce our own bread, and to provide bread to those who cannot? 

What sort of God would lead us into temptation? This is something members of the Catholic clergy have been wrestling with in European language versions in recent years.

None of this is helped by the fact that Jesus would have likely spoken the prayer that went from oral tradition to gospel in Aramaic, but the gospels were written in Koine Greek, and for the Roman church, the authoritative text comes from a third layer of translation, in Latin.

One of the most difficult passages to translate is the reason we have multiple versions of the prayer in the English language tradition. The Greek word “opheil?” refers to a legal and financial obligation in ancient Greek literature as well as in the Greek translation of the Hebrew language scriptures, and this is the only word used in Matthew’s version, the one we recite. But Luke, using the same Q source as the authors of Matthew, asks God to forgive sins, “amartias,” while commanding us to forgive those indebted to us, “opheilontí.” Luke can do this because by the time the gospels were written, “opheil?” was most frequently used to mean a moral obligation, something also reflected in the changing use of the Aramaic root in Rabbinic Literature. 

In the end, neither “trespasses” nor “debts” alone will suffice. We should be asking forgiveness for our sins, and forgiving both the financial obligations and moral wrongs of others.

Now multiply this debate by a million doctoral dissertations, and you have a sense of the challenge of translation, and that only of the text itself, never mind the need to translate practice and theology across wildly different intellectual, conceptual, and cultural frameworks. 

Continue reading “7 April 2024”

This beautiful and difficult building was constructed when you still needed a place to keep the horses that pulled the buggies that brought the people to church. There is flood mud in the basement from 1972, more than a dozen electrical boxes throughout the building, and the “former parsonage” on the fourth floor at the Gray Street end is like something right out of a Stephen King novel. 

Much of the building is inaccessible to those with mobility challenges, including our office space, and even if we manage to fund an elevator, figuring out where to put it is a challenge since the floors in the three sections of the building do not line up. 

Even this worship space has gone through a radical transformation, the organ and choir moved from the front to the back, the single central pulpit replaced with the pulpit and lectern model common in more liturgical churches. And can we talk about the mid-20th century craze for light wood and Scandinavian design? I cannot tell you how many Mid-Atlantic and New England churches I have been in that have a mismatch of chancel and sanctuary.

Historic preservationists, sometimes more hysteric preservationists as someone recently noted, want old buildings to exist in a mythical never-time, but this simply isn’t reality. Any building that is in active use changes because humans change the world and are changed by the world. If you want a building that does not change as fast, look to a mausoleum, where residents are less inclined to demand updates, though time still takes a toll.

Christianity, being so much older than the Park Church, is also filled with creepy corners, weird wiring, and things that just don’t line up. Much like this building, we’ve learned to live with this suboptimal situation, but it is easy to get lost. 

For example, the unknown authors of Matthew want you to see Jesus as the new Moses, yet they share Luke the Physician’s view that Jesus is a king descended from the House of David, and all of the gospels dabble in the idea that Jesus is a blood sacrifice in accordance with the transactional nature of worship in the Second Temple. 

Don’t even get me started on the figure of the Human One, a point of self-identification for Jesus picked up from the Book of Daniel, sometimes translated as the Son of Man, which definitely is not the Son of God. 

You’d be forgiven if you found it all a little confusing, forgiveness being the point of much of our theology.

So many Christians embrace sacrificial and transactional interpretations of Easter because that is how the human brain is wired, but I want to suggest that the Holy Mystery we name as God is not a giant human in the sky with human wetware, so the victory of Easter is to be found not in burning the sin mortgage on our souls, but rather in the liberation from our own violence. 

Jesus is in Jerusalem for Passover, and it is Passover, not the Kingdom of David, that should inform us here.

The Passover story is a story of liberation. When the eleven brothers of Joseph joined the former slave in Egypt, they were welcomed and celebrated. But over the years, as generations thrived in the new country, native Egyptians became envious, slowly clamping down on the immigrant population until they were once again enslaved as Joseph had once been.

Their liberator turned out to be a stuttering fugitive, ethnically Israelite, culturally Egyptian. The mythic struggle included a series of disasters, the plagues the Israelites believed were sent by God, culminating in the Passover, in which the first born male of every household not marked with blood on the doorposts was killed. Notably, the lamb or goat butchered to mark the door of the Israelite homes on that night was not a sacrifice, but was nourishment for the journey. Let me say that again: the Passover or Paschal Lamb is not a sacrifice.

We might discount the more extravagant and miraculous claims of the Exodus story, but there is a strong case to be made for a core historicity. And asking ourselves what we can learn from the story yields a rich harvest. 

The Israelites in their “Promised Land” do not replace one monarch, Egypt’s pharaoh, with a new monarch, Moses or otherwise. In fact, Moses isn’t even there as they live into their new covenant, just as Jesus would not be present 1200 years later as his followers live into their new covenant. The twelve escaped tribes have only one true ruler, a God they experience in the world, but who cannot be depicted, no idols with human or animal faces, no deified human on a throne.

Later Christology would try to shove Jesus back into the role of priest or king, but he is only truly a prophet in the Israelite tradition of troublemakers, good troublemakers, who challenge and unwind human systems of oppression. 

Jesus leads us on a new Exodus, out of the sin of human violence, out of the sin of our fear and scapegoating. We humans create rules and systems of violence, convince ourselves that the victims of our violence deserve our violence, even as we declare that the violence of others directed toward us and those we love is without merit. 

And there is Jesus, tried and convicted and executed at the request of the religious through the legal authority of the state, and the murder is not justified. The scapegoat is and always has been completely innocent. That Jesus did nothing to warrant execution is obvious. That he would return from the dead was not. The Exodus escapees pass through a desert on their journey to a new life, and Jesus, having passed through a desert and temptation at the start of his ministry, now passes through death itself, through human violence at the very worst, for they have seen him destroyed at the hands of church and state, and yet they experience him as still present, as having returned from the grave.

Easter morning is liberation from Rome, liberation from the Sanhedrin, liberation from the transactional God, for God no longer requires slaughtered bulls, indeed… She never did. God is no more nor less than mysterious and loving Creator, calling us into being and surrounding us with grace.

The Promised Land is not some ethnically-cleansed re-creation of a three thousand year old kingdom under the warlord usurper David. It is not a kingdom at all. It is many tribes sharing the same land, tribes that practice jubilee, that cares for vulnerable elders, orphans, and the poor, that does justice, just not the transactional and retributive justice of humans, for the stone has been rolled away, and we are called to practice resurrection justice, the righting of wrong, restorative justice. Let evil and death feed the gaping maw of evil and death, for it always does. We, this body gathered, we are an Easter people, and though we are surrounded by the worst, we are loved by the best.

The floors might not line up, and some pews are cracked, and some parts of the structure may need to be reconstructed in order for this to be a house for all people. And while we are working on retrofitting our theology, we might take a crack at the building as well.

May you experience Easter freedom, this day and always. Amen.

Mark 11:1-11

I am an old nerd. I started playing computer games when they consisted of green text on a terminal screen. We’ve come a long way since then. I can play a gunslinger seeking redemption on my Xbox in full color with vast regions to explore and NPCs, non-player characters, who respond to my player character’s decisions. 

Recently, I’ve been playing the console version of Baldur’s Gate 3, the newest digital iteration of the ancestor of all roleplaying games, Dungeons and Dragons. I started playing D&D before it was even published in book form, back when it was still a series of pamphlets produced on a mimeograph machine, and players gathered around a table with graph paper, dice in a variety of shapes and colors, and every conceivable form of snack food, Cheetos fingers on everything.

Folks still gather to play the old book and dice version, as I did before the pandemic, but the electronic version offers entertainment when you can’t manage a regular gathering of six to eight players. And at least in one way, Baldur’s Gate 3 reminds us that the game is meant to be analog, for when you have to check to see if you’ve succeeded in using a skill, the game rolls an on-screen version of a twenty-sided die, known as a D20. And just as in the paper and junk food version of the game, rolling a 20 on a D20 is a “critical success,” and rolling a 1 is a “critical failure,” the outcome exaggerated at both extremes. Rolling a one is swinging your sword, missing the monster completely, and tripping over your own bootlace in the process.

By D&D standards, old school or new school, the events of Holy Week, the next five days, are a critical failure, a 1 on a D20. Not only does Jesus end up dead, he ends up dead in a very public way, tortured and put on display as an example to others who might contemplate disrupting a system that was benefiting colonizer and collaborator. 

Of course, we don’t see the events of Holy Week as a critical failure because we know how the story will end. But we also miss a tremendous amount of what is going on, miss the emotional, social, and even political context because we read Jesus through the lens of later Christology, as wholly unique and part of a divinely-scripted intervention in creation. And I’d like to ask you to park that this Holy Week and just let events unfold as they would have, in a time of unrest and violence, of resistance and rebellion.

The entry into Jerusalem is just one half of the story. The gospels do not mention the other half. 

Tiberius Caesar’s governor in Judaea, Pontius Pilate, did not live in Jerusalem. The governor’s residence was in Caesaria Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast. He despised the locals and was in Jerusalem for one reason only. The region was historically unstable, the Jewish peasantry notoriously resistant to foreign rule, and Passover was a religious celebration of an ancient rebellion. If trouble was going to break out, if the oppressed Jewish peasants were going to rise up, it would all happen in Jerusalem at Passover. So the governor would travel to the city in the days before Passover began, arriving from the west at the head of a legion and mounted on a horse. 

Jesus enters the city from the east, from Jericho, riding on a donkey, at the head of a rag-tag group, some fishermen, a former tax collector, some folks he had healed, people with nothing really to lose.

The Jewish Council, the Sanhedrin, is not happy he is in the city. We have no reason to doubt reports that they were plotting against him. Earlier prophets and reformers faced hostility as well. But by all accounts, the Palm Sunday Protest March was not really a threat. Sure some local residents got in the spirit of things, waving branches and chanting “Hosanna,” but not enough to matter, not enough to rise up and throw off the shackles of Roman rule, not enough to drive corruption and greed out of the Temple that served as the center of their religious tradition. 

There is certainly something to be said for prophetic witness, for offering an alternative to Roman Empire, even to being a martyr if necessary, but can we talk a little about effectiveness?

Again, don’t read it backwards. Read it like we might have lived it. 

Read it like those of us who watched as, the day before Palm Sunday six years ago, students and supporters gathered around the nation for a March for Our Lives, and yet today, there are more guns than ever, and a decidedly un-Supreme Court that seems hell-bent on turning our nation into an apocalyptic war zone somewhere between Mad Max and modern day Haiti. 

Read it like it is real life, not a movie.

It is a little crazy to operate as if good can overcome evil. It is a little crazy to believe love and grace are bigger than judgment and vengeance. It is a little crazy to believe that the realm of God is a way of living, not some foreign place, and that victory is not a pile of gold, but a legacy of love, of co-creating with the first creator, as artist and parent and farmer. 

It is a little crazy to believe that it is the game that counts, not the trophy, that we are called to give our all during this bright shiny moment we call life, and that life itself is meant to be the gift, though we must work together to cultivate joy.

It was a little crazy to believe that the false god of the priests was never really God, that God was not to be found in the gold and smoke and finery, not to be found in the holy places and religious manipulation, but could instead be found hoping someone could help him into the healing pool, hoping a child would stop having seizures. God could be found hanging on a cross, a roll of 1 on a D20 in every way.

It is a little crazy to sit in the middle of conflict and chaos and to believe still, to see still the goodness deep down things.

But we believe all sorts of crazy things every day. So why not choose the good ones? The ones that give you hope and grit and enough strength to get to the coffee pot. 

Because there is a pack of goblins out there, and you’re going to need a little caffeine and a good roll of the D20 to hit’em with a fireball spell and save the day. May the dice be in your favor. Amen.