Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

I can’t even imagine. One minute you’re doing what folks in Galilee, that remote outpost of the equally remote province at the edge of the empire, you’re doing what you do, which is just barely scraping by, and the next you’re following a man so charismatic that he is able to pull you away from everything you know with crazy promises. I can show you life in full. God’s just and caring realm is here. I will make you a fisher of people. And they did it, at least some did. Sure, some listened to him preach and then went back to serving the Romans, struggling to eat. But a small few made a decision to lead a radical itinerant lifestyle of preaching and healing. And that was exactly where things were when, suddenly, the charismatic man was gone, executed, and yet present, and then gone again, and he had given you no real clue how you were supposed to live in the world after he was gone. As much as they believed, and they did believe, the followers of Jesus must have been simply terrified in those first years. Jesus called them out of normal life, asked them to form a radical new community, and then, Holy Spirit or not, he left them in a world that didn’t work quite the way he asked them to live. Continue reading “In or Of?”

You are an awesome God
and there is power in this place.
Remind us of the perilous task we undertake
like the ancient priests
entering before holiness
drowning in blessing.
Remind us of the passion of that night in Jerusalem
terror and love co-mingling
at table
in a garden
during a trial.
Remind us of the dancing flames
of Pentecost ablaze
of prophecy and tongues.
We confess that we have made a routine of your work
have beat it into a familiar shape
sometimes dull.
Forgive us, renew us, transform us.
Amen.

Two weeks ago, at the start of our current sermon series, we attempted to speak of God the Creator, or more properly to un-speak of God, for we had to admit that we are at one end of three thousand years of God-talk going back at least to the earliest psalms, and that we humans have always struggled, when we try to make God accessible, with the risk of turning God into a false God, a version of ourselves writ cosmic, but at least we can locate ourselves on a theological trajectory, there is an ample body of scripture and tradition we can use to frame the conversation. Continue reading “Alchemy”

The second sermon in a series on the basics of a belief that is marked as progressive, postmodern and Protestant.

In the year 451 of the common era, there was some serious fighting going on in the church. No mere whining about the the quality of coffee hour, these folks were arguing over the question “Was Jesus human or god?” and there wasn’t just cutting criticism, there was real cutting, with swords and all. The emperor was involved, as were the five traditional patriarchs of the church, with outright hostility existing between the sees of Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria. The Patriarch of Rome and the Emperor Marcian were determined to stop the fighting and restore unity in the church, so an ecumenical council, that is a meeting of all the bishops, was called and held in a  town named Chalcedon, in what is today Turkey. Under much duress, the 520 gathered bishops hammered out an agreement on how Jesus was both human and God. The council declared that Jesus was: Continue reading “Get Low”

Jesus, you are the one we name, in our fanciful pageants, in our solemn rites. You have become a commodity, an idea, a stock figure in the grand play that is our culture. You are used to justify nationalism, division, oppression.

Blessed Savior, we believe that this named Jesus, this Jesus of ceremony and grandeur, is false. And so we ask you this morning, be with us. Be real. Remind us of dirty aching feet that walked paths of love, of hardened hands that brought healing and hope, remind us that you ate and laughed and drank like us, that you lost your temper, like us.

Jesus, be present with us, be real with us, that we might be real with one another, might drop our masks and step out of the stories in which we pretend to live. As you were both messy human and Messiah, God-with-us and God-for-us, may we be in you and for you, made holy, sanctified, not by your myth, but by your reality. Amen.

This sermon is the first in a series designed to introduce some basic concepts of a theology that is progressive, postmodern and Protestant.

So first you go to the store… Home Depot maybe, or Father Nature, or some other nursery, and you buy the various things you need for the garden that season, lime and mulch and seeds, and in some cases flats of plants that have already been started. This was my first year gardening on my own, but I’ve seen my parents do this year after year, so I’m pretty confident about what happens next. For, you see, as you start putting in the plants, you realize you have more than you need, and some of the little tags that identify the plants have probably come out, and when it is all said and done, you have a handful of plants left over that may or may not be a mystery. Continue reading “Constructing God”

a sermon delivered on September 4, 2011

I realize that in this day and age, when marriage has failed as a consumer product because it requires attention to the other, is not sufficiently self-centered to meet the standards of our culture, it may seem a bit rude to complain about one’s own childhood. After all, when my father died eighteen months ago, he and my mother had been faithfully married to one another for fifty years. And he had lived a rather long time, for at seventy-five he was well past the sell-by date of most retired firefighters. So truly, it may look like bad form to complain. But I will anyways.

You see, when I was a child, Dad worked 24 hours on and 24 hours off. Well, sort of. Actually he worked 24 hours at the fire station, then he got off in the morning and went to another job, as partner in a painting and home improvement company. And when he got home, often well after sundown, he was exhausted. So my childhood experience of my father was largely limited to holidays and vacations, to every other Sunday when he wasn’t working in someone’s home. My grandfather was also a firefighter and served the same municipality. Continue reading “No, seriously; or, it’s not Dickens”

delivered on August 7, 2011 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

During the extended period that began with the Enlightenment, the guiding premise for modern thinkers was that human reason and the scientific method alone could create a better world. In many ways reason was deified, attained the status of a god, with many abandoning the notion of salvation in Christ for the notion of the self-salvation of humanity. This became the great project of modernity, to create a better world through reason and enlightened self-interest. Mathematics and the physical sciences began to kick the legs out of the edifice of the Enlightenment before the First World War, with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity adding uncertainty to what had seemed known. But it was the First World War itself that killed modernity, as well as countless millions of humans. For it was science and reason that produced the weapons of mass destruction and terrible killing machines used in the conflict. If the Enlightenment was not discredited after the First World War, it certainly would be after the Second, with the use of science in the Manhattan project and the birth of nuclear weapons. Continue reading “Shoes to die”

delivered on July 31st, 2011

They say you can’t really get more than one point across in a sermon, and they are probably right, but I was on a tear this week and there are way too many in this one, so I figured I’d tell you what they were so you could choose which one to listen for… if you choose an early one, you might even squeeze in a nap. Here they are: everything before Moses is probably a folktale, Christians played a key role in the abolition of slavery, Anabaptists are kinda cool, we’ve got to do something about economic slavery, and children are starving right now, right here in the U.S. In fact, now that you know what I’m going to say, maybe I should just sit down and get us all to the beach that much sooner. Or maybe not… Continue reading “Icebergs to Melt”

Everyone knows Amy Winehouse died, that the NFL lockout has ended, that a Christian terrorist slaughtered innocent children in Norway, that right-wing extremists are holding the US economy hostage in their attack on the Christian value of caring for the poor and vulnerable. But few will know that a great Christian thinker died last week. Even though I had been expecting it, even I didn’t know until I read the Harvard Divinity Dean’s “Year in Review.”

Gordon Kaufman was a Christian in the Anabaptist tradition, and shared that tradition’s commitment to non-violence. But he was also a thoroughly post-modern theologian. His “Essay on Theological Method” established the program for constructive theology. His “In Face of Mystery” was the closest thing to a summa that can exist in the discipline. His last two works, “In the beginning… creativity” and “Jesus and Creativity” gave evidence that he was still pondering the mysteries of God in his last years.

I was blessed to complete a one-on-one class with Professor Kaufman, and then to have him as my M.Div. paper adviser. It was under his tutelage that I became committed to the constructive task of building the new church. I would not have that commitment to the practical and lived experience of the people of God if not for the rigorous thinking Professor Kaufman taught me.

I pray for his family and for all he touched, and encourage those who have not studied his works to take this opportunity to do so.

Blessings,
Gary