Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

24 December 2023 Advent IV Sermon

Luke 1:26-38 “Meating God”

Someone listening to me preach for the first time, and maybe even the twenty-first time, lifting portions of sermons out of context, might think I do not believe in God. They would be wrong. I have no doubts about God or the goodness of God. I’m a lot less certain when it comes to the goodness of my fellow humans.

We construct religions, but God is always bigger than any one religion, despite the exclusive truth claims of almost every tradition, including our own, which suggests some spiritual humility might be in order. 

That religion is a human construct does not mean that our efforts to understand holy mystery are wrong. Just because Moses did not write the Book of Exodus does not mean that particular great liberating event did not happen, led by Moses, nor does it in any way diminish the idea that the divine leans into liberation. The human soul is transcendent, and nature is non-stop “cup runneth over,” exuberant and resilient. If nature is a reflection of the glorious chaotic complexity of the divine, then liberation is holy.

The Christian Testament text called 2nd Peter might not have been written by Peter, but the person who actually wrote it was earnest and faithful, and also flawed, and besides, authorial integrity was a little more fluid back then. 

Progressive and Reconstructive Christians take scripture seriously enough to look for the overstory, the story beyond the royalist propaganda that supported the idea of a Davidic monarchy or the transactional faith that funded the lifestyles of the rich and priestly.

Our 4th Sunday in Advent theme is love, and of course it is also Christmas Eve, so I want to spend some time this morning on incarnation as an act of love. And I’ll start by bracketing the two specific Nativity stories, for only two of the four gospels describe the birth of Jesus, and they differ on some important details. 

I understand why the early Christians believed Mary had to be a virgin, and I am fine with whatever you decide to believe. I do not need Mary to be a virgin in my system of belief because I don’t believe Jesus saves by being an unblemished sacrifice to a blood thirsty deity.

I do not know or need to know exactly how Jesus may or may not have been divine, and let me assure you, there are many theological rabbit holes there, and that is even before you move from the specifics of Christology and on to Trinitarian theology, where you get to problems like patripassionism, the maybe/maybe not heresy that says that if Jesus is God and Jesus suffered on the cross, then God suffered, which some find completely unacceptable.

I am more interested, as I noted earlier, in the overstory. The details, the tools of historic context and the study of religion, those are just rungs on the ladder that get me to that overstory sort of like that planned Canopy Walk at Tanglewood Bill Bishop described during a recent adult forum. The overstory of the Christian testament is summarized in the concept of Emmanuel, God-with-us, which I read as a love story.

Continue reading “Advent IV and Christmas Eve 2023”

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a

Somewhere around 315 C.E., the Roman Emperor Constantine wrote a document professing his own Christian belief, and granting Pope Sylvester a number of offices, including control over Rome and pretty much the western half of the Roman Empire. Known as “The Donation of Constantine,” it was important hundreds of years later in Catholic claims against the rival Orthodox Christian movement in the east. It made the pope a king just as people like Charlemagne were building post-Roman kingdoms. And it was as legitimate as the resume of former U.S. Representative George Santos.

The same can be said of many biblical texts, at least when it comes to author authenticity. Tradition tells us that Moses wrote the Torah, which is certainly untrue. It tells us that David wrote the psalms, and while a handful of psalms may date back to that era, most were composed centuries later. 

In the Christian Testament, the Gospel According to Mark is probably mostly by Mark who was a random dude in the community connected with Peter, and the Gospel According to Luke is probably mostly Luke, full-time physician and amateur historian, but the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew was not written by Matthew the tax collector, and the Gospel traditionally attributed to John was not written by John, the brother of James and follower of Jesus. 

Some of the letters attributed to Paul contain varying amounts of actual Paul, and some none at all. And then we come to what are called the Pastoral Epistles, a handful of texts wedged in between the letters attributed to Paul and the feverish revelation to John of Patmos, who may or may not be assumed to be the same John or maybe a different John who didn’t write the gospels or the three Pastoral letters with that name.

The Pastoral Epistles are genuine in the sense that they reflect the concerns of early Christianity. But they were not written by James, or John the Disciple, or in this case Peter the Fisher of People, he who denied Christ three times. Not only were 1^st and 2^nd Peter not written by Peter, they weren’t even written by the same person. 

Whoever wrote what we call 2^nd Peter had one problem in mind. The first generation of Christians believed they would live to see the Second Coming of Christ or something along those lines, the “Day of the Lord” or the descent of the “Human One.” But they were all dying and that simply hadn’t happened. The author tries to explain the delay, and encourages the people to wait in peace, this week’s Advent theme, co-existent with last week’s theme, hope, neither of which should be confused with passivity.

The author of Deutero-Isaiah, our first reading this morning, was in a similar situation. The author, writing in the tradition of Isaiah, is part of the hostage community in Babylon. Jerusalem had been left a smoldering heap filled with bodies, not unlike Gaza and the Israeli Kibbutzim near its borders. Judah had been a religious nation-state. Now the nation-state was gone and the Temple at the center of their faith had been destroyed. They were in a foreign land with a different language and different customs, and faced pressure to worship foreign gods. In an age when few lived past thirty years of age, they were captive for more than fifty years.

The prophet/author delivers an oracle promising that God will restore the people and their nation. The flock, those held captive and those who had fled to places like Egypt, would be gathered once again. But first, the people had a task to complete.

If you are looking for some holy hocus-pocus, you won’t find it here. It does not say God is going to clear a path from Babylon westward to Jerusalem. It calls on the people to serve as that holy road crew.

Continue reading “Road Crew: 10 December 2023”

Mark 13:24-37

Our sisters and brothers in the Rabbinic Jewish tradition read the entire Torah over the course of the year, ending with Simchat Torah, a holiday when they read the last portion of Deuteronomy and the first part of Genesis, starting the cycle all over again, then celebrate by dancing and singing and carrying the Torah Scroll around the Sanctuary seven times.

We are not nearly that focused, disciplined, or reverential when it comes to scripture. Our sisters and brothers in more liturgical traditions, including the Roman, Anglican, and Lutheran communions, tend to have more readings on Sunday, and to treat the reading with more ceremony, while we aspire, at our best, to do fewer readings but to dive a little deeper.

I mention this because the first Sunday in Advent is also the first Sunday of a new cycle for those using the Revised Common Lectionary, something I loosely follow in planning worship here at Park. Today, we begin a year when our primary gospel texts will come from Mark. Matthew and Luke also get a year in the three year cycle, while the unique stories in John get distributed throughout.

So I’m going to begin this morning with an introduction to the Gospel According to Mark, then tighten the focus to today’s particular passage and its genre, and then connect it back to the theme for this first Sunday in Advent, which is “hope.” Which is sort of a lot, so just pick the thing you like.

The Christian Testament begins with the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We call the first three “synoptics,” for they contain many of the same elements. There is a reason for this. Mark, the shortest of the synoptics, is clearly one of the sources used by Luke the Physician and the unknown authors of Matthew in constructing those other two gospels. 

The authors of Matthew and Luke also use another source, one we no longer have, but can identify from the passages they share that are not found in Mark. We call this lost text “Q” after the German word for “source.” 

Finally, the Gospels according to Luke and attributed to Matthew each contain unique material, not found in Mark, Q, or the other synoptic. For example, the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke are very different.

The copies we have of Mark come from roughly the same version of the gospel. This matters, because they did not have a printing press and there was no such thing as copyright or even something resembling authorial integrity. Several letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul, and a significant portion of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah, and so it goes. 

Mistakes were made by scribes copying texts, and sometimes they altered or amended texts simply because they could, inserting their own agenda or attempting to clarify things. We are pretty certain this is how the infamous line in 1st Corinthians, the instruction for women to put on a hat, sit down, and shut up, got inserted, something inconsistent with everything else we know about Paul’s ministry and the role of women.

There were other versions of the Gospel according to Mark, longer versions. We don’t know if material was added to the version we now have, or if what we have is a reduced version of the longer text, sometimes referred to as “Secret Mark.” If you decide to go down that rabbit hole, be careful who you join for tea, because some of the folks debating “Secret Mark” are mad as a hatter.

Early Christian legend identifies Mark as someone in Peter’s inner circle, someone who wrote down what he remembered Peter teaching, though never certain about the order of events. Rather than thinking of the Gospel According to Mark as a first-person history, we should think of it as a collection of anecdotes.

Our reading this morning comes from the 13th chapter of Mark, which is unique in its own way. It is often called the Marcan apocalypse, one of three texts in that genre in the Christian canon. These include the last six chapters of the Book of Daniel, a text we mentioned last week as the origin of the figure sometimes called the “Son of Man” or the “Human One.” The second apocalyptic text is this chapter in Mark. The third and final, and by final I mean final, is the Apocalypse to John of Patmos, for “apocalypse” is simply Koine Greek for “revelation.”

While other texts speak of the “Day of the Lord,” these three are descriptions of a divine, violent, even catastrophic re-ordering of the world. 

And as we have discussed before, while the Book of Daniel represents itself as being about a figure from the Babylonian Captivity, it was actually composed several centuries later.

The Israelites were a loose confederation intermingled with non-Israelite cities, then a homogenous kingdom under David, who conquered the non-Israelite cities, and his son Solomon, who built the first temple. 

After Solomon, the Israelites broke into two kingdoms often at odds with one another. The glory days had lasted for less than a century. Some today aspire to recreate the borders of this early Iron Age kingdom. The northern half, the larger portion of the former Davidic Kingdom, fell in the 8th century, the southern portion, surrounding Jerusalem, in the 6th, with the elite and skilled artisans held captive in Babylon. 

A Persian victory allowed a return to Jerusalem under foreign rule, with the Temple’s High Priest acting as a de facto leader of the Jewish people. The Persians were replaced by the successor states to Alexander the Great’s empire, first the Egyptian remnant, then the Greek remnant, known as the Seleucids.

Greek culture, referred to as Hellenistic, dominated the entire eastern Mediterranean. Greek was the lingua franca, used for commerce and governance, well into the Roman age. The Jewish elite embraced Hellenistic culture, even proposing a Greek gymnasium to train young men in the holy city, complete with nude wrestling. 

This was also a period when the High Priesthood was spectacularly corrupt. Jason bribed the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, to make him the High Priest, replacing his own brother, Onias. History records the bribe as 300 talents, which you may remember was a huge sum, for each talent was more than an average laborer might earn in a lifetime. To cover the sums involved, Jason demanded backbreaking Temple taxes from the people. 

A few years later, Jason found himself dismissed when Antiochus accepted a larger bribe. Eventually the struggle between those who followed Jason and those who followed the new high bidder, Menelaus, broke out into open warfare. Antiochus viewed this as a revolt against his rule, brutally suppressed the conflict, and banned Jewish religious practice.

While all of this was going on in the city, folks in the countryside were in economic distress, and angry that they were losing their culture. They had believed that if they kept covenant with Yahweh, Yahweh would keep covenant with them, insuring their independence and prosperity. When that hadn’t happened in the past, they’d blamed themselves. But something different happened this time. They didn’t blame themselves. They didn’t even blame Yahweh. Instead, they decided to burn it all down.

This happened both theologically and literally. The former was the development of apocalyptic belief, the idea that the world was too broken to be repaired, that God would intervene in history in spectacular ways. The latter saw a peasant uprising, led by a family of country priests called the Hasmoneans. Sadly, they proved just as corrupt as everyone else, and by the time of Jesus, the Romans had seized control and installed puppet rulers like Herod Antipas who were not even Jews.

Because we tend to very narrowly read the story of Jesus, we often miss the brutality of that age. When one group protested Hasmonean rule, hundreds, thousands according to the ancient historian Josephus, were hung on crosses, then their wives and children were brought out and slaughtered in front of them, with the men then left to die. If the rulers, Hasmonean or Roman, demanded extraordinary taxes to pay for some palace or war, and a city failed to pay, the residents would be taken as slaves, and the city razed. The Romans would burn it all down, quite literally. The preachers of apocalypse wanted to burn it all down, Roman rule, the corruption and greed of the Temple elite.

We know a thing or two about folks so frustrated, feeling so powerless, that they want to burn it all down. It has been the most powerful movement in U.S. politics in recents years.

Which brings me back to our Advent theme of hope. So many Christians are stuck in the apocalyptic mindset, this small little subset of Jewish and Christian expectation. They expect to be raptured out of their gas-guzzling SUVs, which may or may not involve the conversion of all Jews to Christianity and re-construction of a Temple on that mount in Jerusalem, a belief system that continues the shameful history of Christian antisemitism and complicates U.S. policy in a region already entrenched in cycles of terrorism and war, including the current catasrophe.

Ultimately, I believe apocalyptic theology is a failure of imagination. 

Most of us choose to believe that holiness, creativity, and love are the driving force not only of our faith, but of creation itself, hard-wired into this amazing mystery we call life and in the complex positive chaos that calls it forth. 

We are not only called to see holy vulnerability in the “least of these,” as we were reminded last week, but to also see holy potentiality. Let me say that again. When we see Christ in our neighbor, we see not only Christ crucified, we see ahead to Christ resurrected.

Maybe belief for you is pregnant virgins and zombie Lazarus, but for me belief is that the holy is bigger than our stories, as awesome as they might be, and that love wins in the end. I do not need to hope God is good. I know God is good. 

My hope is that I can live into my holy potential, that you can live into your holy potential, that humankind can live into our holy potential, today, for as long as our hearts beat, and as long as this globe continues to spin in the sweet spot around that bright star in our sky. My faith is that God is with us, this day in the Chemung River valley, and on the other side of the world, where angels sang to shepherds on a clear and starry night. Amen.

Matthew 25:31-46

Last Sunday, we studied the teaching immediately before today’s reading from the gospel attributed to Matthew, a passage traditionally known as the Parable of the Talents, which gives us the line so often lifted out of context, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Of course, the servant was actually a slave, and I confessed in last week’s sermon that I am not sure what we are supposed to learn from that parable, something that was reinforced as I prepared for today’s text.

Specifically, the Parable of the Talents looks a lot like the late-stage neoliberal capitalism of our 21st century economy, profit without production, and that simply doesn’t make sense in the historic context. 

The Israelite culture was founded as small hold farm communities loosely organized by clan. Given the climate, it was a tenuous existence even at the best of times, and the times were rarely the best. The small hold family might manage a surplus some years, but there was the constant threat of drought and locusts, instability and war, and the demand for tithes and taxes from the Temple authorities and occupying armies. Even more important, however, is something captured in our reading from Ezekiel, and in today’s Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

Western culture deifies the individual. We might sometimes frame this as “enlightened self-interest,” but in the end, it is just selfishness, worshipping the god in the mirror, a religion encoded in the writing of Ayn Rand and in the perverse syncretic forms of Christianity that incorporate that idolatry. 

Economic activity during the late Second Temple period, the time of Jesus, was still pretty rudimentary, and where it occurred, it was communitarian. In fact, it is the deviation from this communal norm that both Ezekiel and Jesus are critiquing.

There were always some few who could not satisfy their greed. We have the famous story of Naboth’s vineyard in the Hebrew Scriptures, of the wicked king who wanted to benefit from his neighbor’s years of hard work cultivating a vineyard, and the wicked queen who was willing to arrange a murder. 

The Torah system of liberating and communal economics wasn’t perfect, and could be tested at times. During the life and ministry of Jesus, it was fraying, with a growing number of Jewish people losing their small hold farms in Judea and Galilee, often working as share croppers on land they once owned. The majority of the population in Galilee and much of the population in Judea were peasants. Thirty six years after Jesus was tortured and executed, things exploded in the First Jewish War, which would lead to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Judaism would re-invent itself in a way distinct from the Temple cult, while Christianity would continue to grow as an egalitarian and diverse movement.

Our first reading this morning, from Ezekiel, is one I believe is a bit neglected when it comes to social gospel teachings. The prophet, a Jewish priest held captive in Babylon, records the word of the Lord, where God judges between members of her flock. 

Here, sheep and goats are treated as one class, and judgment is on individual sheep and individual goats who take advantage of their size, literally throwing their weight around, abusing those smaller and weaker, fouling communal assets they do not need themselves, the pasture and the water. 

They “take,” in one sense, more than they need. God judges, then sets up a shepherd to protect the herd going forward, using David as an archetype for this new leader, for David’s reign was the foundational story for the Israelite kingdom, and David’s story starts as the shepherd boy called in from the pasture, anointed by Samuel.

This reading also provides an important context in our work around creation care and climate justice.

Continue reading “27 November 2023: Goat Liberation Army”

Matthew 25:14-30

I choose texts in advance, sometimes several months in advance, allowing Charlotte to plan music. Mostly that works out, sometimes in spooky ways that I attribute to the Holy Spirit. Then there are days like today. 

At first glance, the parable of the talents looks like a perfect match for this season when we focus on stewardship. But those second and third glances are problematic. 

For one thing, we lack important context. We can know intellectually that there were enslavers and the enslaved in the Roman Empire and Ancient Near East, but we have no direct experience of slavery ourselves, and I fear we err when we map the cruel slavery with which we are most familiar, that of the African captives in America, onto the Galilean, Judean, and Roman context. Slaves in the ancient Near East retained some legal rights. Debt slavery could be temporary, and while chattel slavery was often the result of war, it was not inherently racial in those times. Race, as weaponized in recent centuries, didn’t exist as a category.

The word talent leads many preachers to conflate this ancient term of weights and currency with today’s use of the word, the idea of special gifts and abilities, but the parable was likely delivered by Jesus in Aramaic, and written down in Koine Greek. 

Few understand the economic scales involved. The lowest value of the monetary unit “one talent” was as much as a day laborer would make in twenty years if they found work every single day, which they often didn’t. Given the lifespans of that age, we could fairly say “one talent” amounted to several lifetimes of labor. This parable deals in extraordinary sums.

It is also all too easy to map this story of wise investment onto our own experience of late-stage neoliberal capitalism, of speculation, irrational exuberance, and corporate kleptocracy. Not only is that not the context for the ministry of Jesus, interpreting the parable through that lens flies in the face of pretty much everything else Jesus teaches, from the Sermon on the Mount in this same gospel to countless calls for sacrificial kindness. 

Jesus and his disciples were Jews, with the Torah at the heart of their faith, and the Torah called for loan forgiveness, for decent wages, for economic justice. This parable is immediately followed by the parable of the sheep and the goats, when the Son of Man declares that “what you have done to the least of these, you have also done to me.” It demands that we care for the most vulnerable among us.

It isn’t even completely clear that we are supposed to side with the master in the story, though that makes the most sense. Are we supposed to accept the claim that God is the master, and therefore that God is cruel? No thanks!

Continue reading “19 November 2026”

Amos 5:18-24

Previously on “The Park Church,” we established that it is weird that a progressive pastor committed to climate justice is a fan of a sport that is a catastrophe of carbon-emissions and is closely associated with reactionary politics.

Not only do I watch Nascar, which closed out the ten-month long season last week, but my favorite driver is sponsored by a petro-trafficking syndicate and races for a team owner who has contributed heavily to the scariest types of politicians. 

Even more odd is the fact that I’m not actually a car guy. I mean, I mostly restored a ’69 Mustang when I was younger, and worked as an insurance inspector at a Ford assembly plant, but hot rods were my Dad’s thing, not mine. 

The through line from me to Nascar works like this: When I was a kid my family watched football. I washed out of the sport as a skeletal-thin ten year-old, and my days as an athlete were done, except for a little club cricket one summer in England. But Mom and Dad loved football, and there was no greater cause than the Washington football team now called the Commanders, the grotesque racism of the previous team name now thankfully behind us.

When Joe Gibbs retired as that team’s successful head coach, he moved to Nascar as a team owner. And my parents, loyal folks that they were, followed along, watching cars drive in a circle for hours and cheering for his drivers. I started watching Nascar while spending time with them, and since Dad cheered for one Gibbs driver, and Mom another, I took on the third. Now Dad is gone, and two of those drivers, including my favorite, race for other teams.

Something you notice about Nascar pretty much immediately is the overt display of hyper-Christianity. Despite the Nascar corporation’s talk of expanding the fanbase, every race begins with an invocation that is all Jesus, leaving no room for Jews, Muslims, the non-religious, and often excluding any Christianity that is not washed-in-the-blood Evangelical. 

Heads will be bowed and hats will be off for the invocation and national anthem, and many drivers, should they be fortunate enough to win, will pop out of the car praising their Lord and Savior as if Jesus took the wheel for that last lap. And if it is Joe Gibbs Racing, the pit crew is going to huddle in prayer before heading to Victory Lane.

But that same crowd that is praying and saluting is as likely to be chanting profanities against our current president, and those drivers are going out there aggressively pursuing that big paycheck if they win, bumping and wrecking competitors, and when the competition gets ugly, as it often does, they are busy slugging each other in pit road, or storing up grievance, ready to wreck the offending party in the next race. Let’s just say there are a whole lot of bleeps when broadcasters play what is being said on the car radio.

There is no driver in Nascar today who is more smug and entitled and dangerous behind the wheel than Ty Gibbs, the baby-faced grandson of Joe.

The Christianity of Nascar, as dangerous as it is to an open society, is performative. Not that Christianity doesn’t have room for sinners. In fact, Christianity is exactly where sinners should be! But the High Church of Nascar is about white Christian ethno-nationalism and late-stage corporate kleptocracy, not about anything to do with Jesus or the Jewish tradition that was his context.

Continue reading “Jesus Take the Wheel: 12 November 2023”

Deuteronomy 34:1-12

I would like to begin this morning with some clever and humorous on ramp that leads you into the sermon, as we celebrate both All Saints Day and the Day of the Dead tradition from Mexican and Mexican-American culture, what should be a festive occasion. Maybe I’d even use the Disney film “Coco,” for despite the companies mis-steps over the last century, it has become a champion of diversity, equality, and inclusion. 

Unfortunately, I cannot move to festivity without first acknowledging the thousands dying in the Middle East, as extremists provoke, terrorize, and slaughter. 

The fact, that I am wearing my orange “gun safety” stole instead of the traditional white stole for All Saints is a reminder that we are reeling from yet another mass casualty slaughter in America, and given that we are nearing 600 of these preventable tragedies this year, it takes a lot to make the national news. I served in Maine, and still have friends in the state. 

The exact same people who are vomiting up the excuse that this is a mental health problem refuse to support red flag laws, and refuse to fund treatment for mental illness and addiction. It is beyond sinful, their love of chaos, though it certainly profits their billionaire bully buddies. 

Like some twisted version of “The Sixth Sense,” they pull the covers up under their chin and say “I see brown people.”

So yeah, a little whirlwind of despair and anger up here in the pulpit this morning, and a reminder of something I said a couple of weeks ago. People suck. But I ended in praise, for that is how we roll, like the psalms that often turn from lament to praise.

As the great gay poet concluded in “O Me! O Life!,” the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse. Let us pray to that Divine Mystery we name as God that our particular “sound and fury” might signify something rather than nothing, unlike MacBeth’s, and that when we leave, like those celebrated on our “ofrenda,” and in our listing of our faith community’s deceased, the balance will fall on the side of love.

Of course, “I see brown people” is a twist on the title I chose for this sermon, that famous line from “The Sixth Sense,” a film that fooled most of us before hurtling toward an unexpected climax. And I do see dead people, just not in the way of screenwriters, where one show after another gives us the supernatural, with danger and drama and comedy, Beetlejuice and Ghost Whisperers and stuff too scary even for me. And I watch the evening news.

I see dead people in our stained glass, which is perfectly lovely and a bit weird at the same time, since Congregationalists traditionally abhorred that sort of thing. Early in the Zurich Reformation, Protestants stripped the churches of art, theologically justified but culturally tragic, for countless precious treasures went to the fire, reminiscent of Savanarola’s spastic “bonfire of the vanities” just a few years earlier in Firenze. 

Still, here we are, with these beautiful gifts honoring important people, those depicted and those memorialized. There is a desire, at least among some of us, that we might add to our artistic expression, incorporating images that represent the diversity of our community and historical accuracy, a whole lot more of those “brown people” when it comes to the Ancient Near East and our own American story. What would it say to the wider community to see John W. Jones immortalized in a house of worship?

Continue reading “I See Dead People: 29 October 2023”

Isaiah 45:1-7

As many of you know, there is a reason christening shares a root with Christ, and it is not because the baby is accepted into the Body of Christ, though that is true. Christ means the anointed one in Koine Greek. The baby is anointed with water, though holy oils may also be applied, while the anointing of Jesus and other important leaders in Ancient Near Eastern traditions was always with oil. 

Think about the anointing by Samuel of the youngest son, David, called in from watching the flocks, or the 23^rd Psalm, traditionally attributed to David, which includes the line “you anoint my head with oil.”

If you watched the coronation of the United Kingdom’s new old monarch, King Charles the Third, you may remember that he was anointed with oil that had been consecrated in Jerusalem, though the anointing itself was done behind a screen, out of public view.

Jesus Christ, then, is properly Jesus, or more accurately Yeshua, the Anointed One. And for the record, his middle initial is not H.

If the Israelite renewal movement surrounding Jesus understood him as the anointed one, the messiah, or deliverer, in the tradition of their faith, he was certainly not the first. Indeed, today’s second scripture reading begins “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus.” 

Translation into modern languages obscures and reflects theological bias, but if you look at the Hebrew, the word is “mashiah,” and in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures used by the Christian testament authors, you cannot help but notice that it reads “his Christ,” “tou Christos” when it describes Cyrus.

Cyrus is the messiah or Christ in a very particular historic context, so let’s do a quick run down. 

Continue reading “22 October 2023: The Persian Messiah”

15 October 2023
Exodus 32:1-14

At times, I have mentioned Martin Luther from this pulpit, one of the key figures in the development of Protestant Christianity, though with some reservation, for Luther was a raging antisemite and a political reactionary. He was willing to challenge the power of popes, but not the power of princes. 

When the poor revolted against feudalism in the 1520’s, partially inspired by his rebellion against Rome, he wrote “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” which included this instruction: “let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.” 

And smite, slay, and stab they did, with peasant deaths estimated somewhere between a hundred and three hundred thousand…

Luther’s reform was the first to have real staying power, a fact we will celebrate at the end of this month, but his idea of the two kingdoms, which separated faith from secular governance, laid the theological foundation for the Holocaust.

I have been more supportive of Luther’s contemporary, Huldrych Zwingli, the Protestant Reformer in Zurich, directly connected to our own theological trajectory as Reform and Congregational, but also not without fault. He supported Protestant Reform, and was small “d” democratic in that he operated in the Swiss system of councils and cantons, but he was an advocate of theocracy, and he might have lived a little longer if he had been a bit more pragmatic. As I have shared, he died on the battlefield. Then there was that whole murdering Anabaptists thing.

I have spent considerably less time on Jean Calvin, though he is truly the third voice so critical to our theological heritage here at the Park Church, for while Zwingli started the Swiss form of Protestantism, it was Calvin who codified it. Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and members of the German Reform movement were all expressions of what is fundamentally Calvinist Christianity.

Calvin operated in Geneva, a French-speaking Swiss canton. He was eight-years old when Luther nailed his famous Ninety-five point challenge to the door in Wittenberg, and was just barely a teen when Zwingli challenged the Lenten fast.

Like Luther and Zwingli, Calvin operated in the framework of Christian Humanism, which wasn’t entirely bad. In fact, some might accuse us of being Christian Humanists, while others believe that we aren’t even Christian. 

But Christian Humanism in the Age of the Protestant Reformation believed you could think your way to an understanding of God, with help from the biblical canon studied in the original languages. This was the start of modernity, of the scientific method. Reason gave us a powerful set of tools, but also made us a little cocky, both in assuming humans were rational, and in assuming God could be clearly understood or defined. That all came unwound in the early Twentieth Century, with the quantum and post-modernity, which still freaks people out.

Calvin, for my money, was absolutely the worst of the Reformation Christian Humanists, for it is at his feet that we must lay the TULIP, which in this case is not the flower, but is the acronym for five key points in Calvinist theology. They are: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. These all boil down to some form of what we call predestination, in all of its poisonous iterations.

Continue reading “Reluctantly Calvinist”

A local Facebook administrator intent on trolling me, called me out to make a public statement on the terror attack in Israel. Here is my response:

I was in lower Manhattan, fortunately north of the blast zone, on 9/11, so I have some idea what the people of Israel are experiencing. Hamas, like ISIS, is a terrorist organization, in this case funded by a state sponsor of terrorism, Iran. Right now, the attention should be focused on the people of Israel, and those handling the humanitarian, diplomatic, and military response, not political posturing thousands of miles away in the Southern Tier. Though I spent Sunday afternoon with Jews, Muslims, and Christian on our annual Abrahamic Path Walk.

Personally, I believe Hamas must be destroyed, and that Iran and the network of allies supporting it, including Russia, must be isolated. I also believe that a just peace will involve a sovereign territory for the Palestinians, as well as the preservation of the State of Israel.

One of the Christian martyrs who inspires me, the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, took part in an attempt on Hitler’s life, and was executed. And like so many others who have visited Auschwitz, I was deeply impacted by the visual witness to the Holocaust… especially the mountain of children’s shoes. So as a pastor and teacher relatively well-informed in both history, world religion, and current affairs, I condemn all forms of terrorism, sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Frequently these days, the victims of those crimes are actually Muslims, in Myanmar, India, and China, among other places.

But I speak only for myself. The Park Church is Congregational, which means the Church Council or Congregational Meeting makes formal decisions for the church, just as the Coordinating Committee of the Southern Tier Interfaith Coalition, which I serve as chair, makes decisions together.