Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Exodus 20:1-17
John 2:13-22

I was a late bloomer, and went back to college at 40, so I sorta managed to keep up with popular music until about ten years ago. That was when I took a clergy friend with me to a Pearl Jam concert and realized that pretty soon, a significant percentage of the audience would be using mobility assistance devices. Folks are bringing their grandkids to Dave Matthews Band concerts, and DMB is actually a generation after me!

I guess we can’t all be Mick Jagger. 

These days, when the Grammy nominations are announced, I don’t recognize half the musicians, and if I watch the ceremony, which I have made the mistake of doing at times, I usually find a reason to be offended by the sexuality of the performances. I think they are just raunchy. And I definitely have not adjusted to the cognitive whiplash when someone is on the Disney Channel one week and swinging on a wrecking ball dressed like a dominatrix the next. 

I am now officially an old geezer. I might as well join AARP, even if I can’t afford to retire.

Of course, this happens in every generation. Jesus has words for “this generation,” and Socrates may have originated the line “kids these days.” Still, I do sometimes wonder what my own parents were thinking when it came to popular music when I was a kid. 

If I didn’t get any afternoon delight, and it turned out that tonight wasn’t the night, if Captain Jack didn’t get me high tonight, I could always just whip it good, with nods to the Starland Vocal Band, Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, and Devo, the plastic suit and flower-pot hat-wearing band on your Order of Service.

I always think about Devo’s biggest hit when we get to today’s lectionary reading, when Jesus disrupts commerce in the Temple complex, one of American Christians’ least favorite texts, right up there with that Socialist nonsense in the Acts of the Apostles where the followers of Jesus share resources. The cleansing of the Temple story is bad enough in that it suggests a connection between our religious life and our economic lives, but it also betrays the notion of Jesus as a pacifist, the Breck-shampoo model surrounded by international children and lambs, because this is Jesus absolutely going off, complete with a whip.

Maybe we can just spiritualize it and pretend it isn’t actually about religious greed and economic exploitation.

If we are honest, economic justice is a theme throughout scripture. The first labor dispute comes when Jacob agrees to work seven years for Laban in exchange for Rachel’s hand in marriage, only to lift the veil and find that he has married her sister, and has to work another seven years. The prophets of Israel and Judah spend as much time talking about economics as they do about religion. So does Jesus. He may say that there will always be poor among us, but he praises the widow who gives what she can and condemns the rich who give less than they should, he lets the righteous but rich young man walk away when he clings to his wealth, and in the parable of the other Lazarus, not the resurrected friend but the poor beggar, Lazarus ends up in heaven while the rich man who ignored him in life ends up in another place.

Continue reading “3 March 2024: Whip It Good”

Mark 8:31-38

During Lent, we are asked to repent of our sins, to grow into who we are truly meant to be. Whether you align yourself with spirituality and religion, as most of us do, or are a hardcore empiricist, viewing humans as nothing more than the evolutionary effect of an unknown cause, we humans are meaning making creatures. Most of us accept that beyond our lizard brain and biochemical impulses lies a little bit of inexplicable magic, the part of us that writes poetry, that stands in awe before a painting by Marc Chagall, and that runs into a burning building.

The dual themes of meaning making and repentance bring me to the problem of Joss Whedon. Whedon is a multi-talented creator… developing, directing, and producing television shows and films, writing comic books, composing music. Among his most successful and culturally significant works was the comic book and television character “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Whedon’s personal values align pretty well with many of the values we hold here at the Park Church. He is, for example, an outspoken feminist. He is anti-corporate and anti-authoritarian. He is also a humanist and an existentialist, but there is a little bit of that around here too.

Sadly, he is also a jerk, a workaholic whose bullying behavior does not match his professed values. Though Whedon has not been accused of sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement exposed other forms of workplace toxicity, and Whedon’s sets were toxic. He has been effectively cancelled by the film industry, and while I stand by my belief that some people deserve to be permanently cancelled, I do wonder about redemption for the repentant, one of our core Lenten themes, whether or not we really believe someone can learn and grow.

I mean, Jesus is pretty clear that he came for the sick, not the healthy, and we are a church more of sinners than of saints.

In a 2012 interview, long before his misconduct was exposed, staff from “The Guardian,” the historic progressive newspaper from Manchester, England, asked Whedon to “Tell us a joke.” 

He responded, “Your life has meaning.”

Hold that thought. We’re going to circle back.

No matter what actually happened after Jesus was executed, the early followers of Jesus, from the apostolic witness in Galilee to the converts in Rome, believed that his life had meaning. What that meaning was they were still trying to figure out. 

Continue reading “25 February 2024: Tell Me a Joke”

Above all, repentance; not wholesale repentance: “I have sinned, father, I have sinned,” or, still worse, the admission that I am wholly in sin, that I was born in sin, that every step of mine is sin. This admission, collecting, compacting all the sins in one heap, seems to separate them from me and deprives me of that inevitable spiritual use, which by the mercy of God is attached to every sin. … We have a terrible habit of forgetting,—of forgetting our evil, our sins. And there is no more radical means for forgetting our sins, than wholesale repentance. All the sins are boiled down, as it were, into one impermeable mass, with which nothing can be done. – Leo Tolstoy (1905)

Genesis 9:8-17
Joel 2:1-17

On the sports calendar, we are in that bleak period between the Super Bowl and Spring Training, though hockey and basketball carry on, and the Nascar season is supposed to start this afternoon with the Daytona 500, Florida weather permitting. 

On the civic and cultural calendar, we are a few weeks out from the MLK federal holiday, and more than half way through Black History Month. 

And on the Christian religious calendar, we are celebrating the first Sunday in Lent, which comes very early this year. And there is a thread, of sorts, that connects our first reading this morning, on repentance and from Leo Tolstoy, with the story of the African diaspora in America, though I couldn’t quite figure out how to work in the Daytona 500. Maybe Bubba Wallace will win the race.

You see, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired in his nonviolent resistance to American apartheid by Mohandas Gandhi, the revered leader of India’s independence movement who began as a civil rights activist in South Africa, and Gandhi was in turn inspired by Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded. 

Tolstoy himself was profoundly changed by his experience as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, much as Francis of Assisi was profoundly changed by his experience of war centuries earlier. Tolstoy became a Christian anarchist, though he rejected the violence traditionally associated with anarchism, self-identifying as a pacifist. Today he is mostly remembered for his novels, but he was an important Christian thinker in his time.

It is Tolstoy who gives us our first Lenten challenge, a season traditionally treated as penitential, a season to acknowledge our sins and repent. We don’t spend much time on sin in the reconstructive and progressive Christian tradition, and honestly, with good reason. It is hard to tease out a timeless concept of sin from historically-specific human systems of oppression and power. 

Even though scripture contains a deep layer of justice and admonitions for right and loving relationships, you have to jackhammer your way through ancient misogyny and oligarchy to get there, not to mention current misogyny and oligarchy.

So let’s start with the ancient problem, then circle back to sin in our own lives.

Some of the Torah was written during the First Temple period, about four centuries from the reign of King Solomon to the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians. 

The balance of the Torah was written, redacted, and given something close to final form during the Second Temple period, another six or so centuries from the return to Jerusalem authorized by the man they considered a messiah at the time, King Cyrus of Persia, until Jerusalem and the Second Temple were once again destroyed four decades after Jesus was murdered, both the execution and the destruction at the hands of the Roman Empire so lauded today by America’s white ethno-nationalists.

Like most cultures in the Ancient Near East, the culture of the Yahweh-worshipping Canaanites, broadly called Israelites or Jews depending on the year, was patriarchal, so there’s that. But more critical to this period, they believed that the human relationship with God was transactional. 

The Torah takes the form of a treaty with hundreds of clauses. In exchange for faithful observance of the contract, the people would be rewarded with prosperity and independence. And funny enough, many of those clauses had to do with making payments to the Temple. They fell into various categories of offerings and/or Temple taxes, but the bottom line was that there was this immense bureaucracy that sometimes settled civil disputes but had little other function, and it was self-serving and corrupt. Unless you take seriously the idea that God is an angry narcissist in the sky, in which case, the showier the better, so bring on the gold leaf and incense.

There was only one offering in the entire Temple system, a sin offering called a holocaust, that was completely consumed by fire. Every other form of offering supported the priests and their families. The more sins the priests could invent, the more they could demand from the increasingly impoverished people.

Continue reading “18 February 2024”

Transfiguration/Racial Justice Sunday

2 Kings 2:1-12
Mark 9:2-9

On the night of December 2^nd, 1577, a group of Carmelite friars broke into a religious community in Ávila, Spain and took another Carmelite friar, John of the Cross, prisoner. He was tortured and held in brutal conditions for eight months before he managed to escape. 

John’s crime was joining in a Carmelite reform movement led by Teresa of Ávila, a movement that would come to be called “Discalced,” meaning barefoot, as one of the matters in dispute was whether members should wear covered shoes or simply sandals.

It was all rather stupid, like so many religious disputes, but as Monty Python famously declared, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Today, few have heard of John of the Cross, unless their local parish in the Roman communion happens to be dedicated to him, for he was eventually canonized. If folks have heard of him at all, it is not due to the Battle of the Birkenstocks, but is instead for his writing, especially the poem “The Dark Night of the Soul,” composed during or immediately after his captivity.

The phrase “dark night of the soul” has become a trope, used today to mean a crisis of faith, but that is not quite what John meant. The opening stanza goes like this:

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

Note the line “Oh, happy chance!” John was a mystic, and “Dark Night of the Soul” is a love poem to God. It reflects a theological position expressed a century earlier in the anonymous work “The Cloud of Unknowing,” what theologians call the “via negativa,” where we stop trying to posit divine attributes, and instead accept God as ultimately mysterious and unknowable. Mysticism and the “via negativa” were post-modern theologies before post-modernism, or for that matter, even before modernity.

Now, hold that thought a moment, because we are going to circle back. But let’s first turn our focus to our scripture readings. The first is the story of Elijah, that great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, being taken up by a flaming chariot. Elijah is one of only two individuals in scripture who do not die. The other is Enoch, an obscure figure in Genesis. Everyone else dies, including Jesus, for you have to die in order to be resurrected.

This sets up the expectation in the Second Temple period that Elijah would play a future role in the restoration of an Israelite kingdom. There was speculation that John the Baptizer might be Elijah, or maybe Jesus was Elijah, or that it was Elijah to whom Christ called from the cross when he cried “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?,” which is actually the first line of the 22^nd psalm, and has nothing to do with Elijah.

Folk myth around Elijah was so strong that even during the medieval Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent had the eastern gate of Jerusalem walled off and a cemetery placed in front of it in the mistaken belief that Elijah was a kohen, a priest in the line Aaron, and therefore could not enter a cemetery. If no false Elijah could enter from the east, as tradition demanded, then no false messiah could follow.

It is the “not dead yet” Elijah and the very dead Moses that appear with Jesus on the mountain top in today’s gospel reading, always the last before Lent, and traditionally called the “transfiguration,” though Mark is not at all clear what he means when he says “transfigured,” other than everything becoming shiny and white.

And there is our problem, this whiteout, this idea that whiteness is good. And I get that there is a primitive fear of the dark, but the creation myth does not offer us day as good and night as evil. God creates both. We have evolved on a planet that spins on an axis, alternating periods of light and dark, and that rhythm is hard-wired and necessary for our health. Keeping the lights on is a form of torture.

Every time we hold out the idea that whiteness is good, even in this sort of abstraction, we reinforce the pernicious lie of race. And race does not even exist in the ancient context! It is a modern category that was invented to justify the enslavement of Africans and involved a lot of Enlightenment pseudo-science. 

And in the Oompa Loompa Paradox, some of America’s worst racists pride themselves in their whiteness while also spray painting themselves orange to look like healthy people of leisure.

Which is kinda nuts.

Continue reading “11 February 2024: Whiteout”

Mark 1:29-39
1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Twenty or so years ago, as prosperity gospel churches were modeling themselves on professional sports, stadium tours, and Ponzi schemes, a smaller movement in American Christianity was striving for authenticity. I was among the followers of progressive and reconstructive Christianity who engaged in ideas from this movement, sometimes called “Emergent.” 

Emergent authors like Brian McClaren wrote popular best sellers, while average Christians started reading work by scholars like John Dominic Crossan, folks who wanted to understand Jesus in context, a new wave of the historic Jesus school that has been around for a century and a half.

One interesting aspect of the Emergence movement was an emphasis on spirituality. During the last half of the 20^thcentury, the culturally and politically dominant form of American Christianity, white Mainline Protestantism, had become pretty dry, civic and social and sometimes intellectual, but with little emotion or enthusiasm, except when it came to carpet color, because nothing gets us fired up quite like minutia. 

As the new century dawned, some Mainline churches tried to create renewed energy and attract younger members by adding drum kits and guitars and praise music, while others, especially the emergents, dove deep into liturgy, into candles and contemplation and Taizé. Sometimes they’d even move out of and break away from the big old institutional church, forming “house churches.” They argued that this was how Christianity started, which is more or less correct.

But the problem with striving for an authentic original Christianity is that there is no such thing as original Christianity, just as there was no distinct single Judaism before 70 C.E. Never mind that it didn’t work because many of the pressures keeping people out of church are economic and political and beyond a local congregation’s control.

All of our original sources are biased at best, with Josephus, the closest thing we have to a historian of Galilee and Judea in the First Century, about as “fair and balanced” as Fox News. And even though some of the theological extremes were eliminated in the process of constructing the canon of Christian scripture, our earliest list of authorized texts, from late in the Second Century, is missing five books. 

The canon of scripture we have today, called by Christians “the New Testament,” is not one single text written by one single human or revealed by one single angel on or under some mountain. It is the result of centuries of religious evolution. There are plenty of contradictions in the text, and no definitive answer when it comes to what Jesus was about and how Christ saves.

Early Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Medieval Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Enlightenment Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Modern Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Post-Modern Christianity is dynamic and diverse. 

But one thing is pretty clear. Just as there are bottlenecks in biological evolution, there are bottlenecks in cultural and religious evolution. And Paul is the bottleneck in what would become early Christianity. Trying to see what Christianity would look like without Paul is like trying to imagine the sky Vincent Van Gogh was looking at when he painted “Starry Night.”

Of course, Paul didn’t know Jesus, and even though the gospels that were eventually accepted into the Christian canon pass through the Pauline bottleneck, the gospels don’t always align with that Pauline faith. 

Scripture claims that Paul’s ministry and his approach to evangelizing the Gentiles was approved by the leaders of the actual apostolic community, by a church council led by Peter, the first leader of the community after the execution of Jesus, and by James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jesus community in Jerusalem.

And as an aside, Peter was married as was made clear in today’s first reading. There is nothing in scripture that creates a celibate priesthood. And there is nothing to indicate that James the brother of Jesus is actually James the cousin of Jesus or James the half-brother of Jesus or James the generic male relative of Jesus, so work it out for yourself but full of grace or not, Mary had other kids.

But back to Paul and today’s second reading, because if we can get past the minutia, there is a big picture there. Paul tells us that he is willing to adapt to get the message across. 

If he was writing today, he might say “To the hipsters I became as a hipster in order to win hipsters. To Gen Z I spoke like Gen Z that I might share the good news. To skate punks, I appeared in a Supreme hoodie, though seriously, I cannot skate, but I was willing to look ridiculous if I could share the good news. But the skate punks were a bit cynical, and just said ‘Okay, Boomer.’”

Continue reading “4 February 2024: Good News”

Mark 1:21-28

Last Sunday, I mentioned to our Housing Justice team that I had issues with the Soup Kitchen hosted at the church I served on Long Island over a decade ago. 

First, there was the classic problem of building users forgetting who owned the building, also an issue with the pre-school coop that used church space. 

But the bigger problem was that the long-established soup kitchen and pre-school both had been impacted by the changing demographics on the South Shore. Sayville had been radically gentrified, the last large apartment complex turned into luxury condos my first year there. By 2011, the church was subsidizing childcare for folks who drove brand new Range Rovers, while the impoverished had to travel to Sayville from other communities to get their free meal, usually on an inadequate public transportation system. This was such a hassle that there were often more volunteers than there were guests.

The Soup Kitchen was politically untouchable, so I helped the church establish a second hunger ministry, one that was more appropriate to our community. There actually were families that struggled financially at times in Sayville, despite gentrification, but they weren’t going to take handouts in front of their neighbors. Instead, we established a food purchasing program where everyone could participate, regardless of income or need, removing humiliation and shame from the equation.

What I didn’t mention to that group last week was the disdain of other good liberal pastors over my desire to create a program that was more effective, disdain that turned into disgust when I mentioned that maybe the feces and discarded needles we found on church grounds were an issue when you were also hosting a preschool. I received that disdain and disgust in ALL CAPS on social media, reminding me not only of social media’s toxicity, but also of liberal self-righteousness, because nothing says party better than our circular firing squad. At one point we literally had a Narcotic Anonymous group and a drug dealer operating on the property at the same time.

I’ve seen a little of that sort of smug toxicity flare up on social media in the last couple of weeks, as it does routinely, though it is atheist self-righteousness this time around, and atheists would never use that term, of course, righteousness being a religious word.

A number of social media posters have created content showing urban churches taking action to control the impact of the unsheltered on their property. Comments are just about what you would expect, calling Christians hypocrites, asking sarcastically, often in ALL CAPS, What would Jesus do?

Now, I know many of those folks are lashing out because they suffered harm at the hands of churches, so I try to be measured when I am stupid enough to engage. But seriously, What would Jesus do? Jesus would cure the mentally ill and the addicted. He’d cast out the unclean spirits, just like he did for the Gerasene demoniac, for the man in the synagogue in today’s reading. 

We can’t do that.

Continue reading “28 January 2024: ALL CAPS”

Jonah 3:1-10

I was raised with two religions, the Southern Baptist form of Protestantism, and the Lost Cause form of mass delusion, though we did not call the latter a religion. I was taught that the “war of Northern aggression” was fought over state’s rights, and that men like Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson were great heroes reluctantly cast into an unnecessary conflict. There was no overt white supremacy, though there was certainly plenty of other racism in my wider social context.

Recent years have brought a long overdue correction. Though my matrilineal heritage includes enslavers, even members of the Lee family, I am delighted to see the statues come down. Far too many remain, of course, including that infamous mountainside carving in Georgia, but progress continues to be made.

In all of the stories of melted Confederates, you have heard no mention of Lieutenant General James Longstreet. He was one of the most important military leaders in the Confederacy, yet there have only ever been two memorials to him, a bridge named after him in his Georgia hometown, and a ground-level equestrian statue at the Gettysburg Battlefield dedicated in 1998, long after the Daughters of the Confederacy and related “Lost Cause” groups had faded into the grave. 

If you only read military history, you might think that this erasure in the Lost Cause mythology was the result of Longstreet’s role in that infamous battle at Gettysburg. He is often blamed for the Confederacy’s defeat, with particular attention paid to his performance on July 3^rd, 1863, and the disaster that was Pickett’s Charge. Longstreet would later claim that he found Lee’s strategy at Gettysburg misguided. 

But this is not a lecture on military tactics, and in the end, the disappearance of James Longstreet from the mythology of the Enslaver’s Rebellion, for it was not a civil war, had nothing to do with the war itself, and everything to do with what happened when the war was over.

In short, Longstreet accepted the defeat of the Confederacy, embraced Reconstruction, and defended emancipated former slaves, newly granted citizenship and voting rights. He joined the Republican Party, still then very much the party of Lincoln and abolition, and received government appointments, including an overseas posting as the United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

There is an irony here. President Andrew Johnson had denied Longstreet’s application for amnesty after the war, stating that he, Longstreet, along with Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, had caused the Union too much trouble. He was important enough to be in Johnson’s top three of unforgivable Confederates, yet other defeated Confederates considered him a traitor.

Do we melt down the sole statue? Rename the bridge? 

What do we do with the truly repentant, hated by both sinners and the self-righteous alike? 

Continue reading “21 January 2024: Longstreet”

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

There is more to Scottish literature than J.K. Rowling and Robert Louis Stevenson, though I tend to forget some authors are Scottish, like Arthur Conan Doyle, who I tend to place in the generic category “British.” 

One author sadly overlooked by Americans is the late Alasdair Gray, a William Blake-like figure who combined the visual and written arts over the course of his career. I first picked up a copy of his unconventional 1981 masterpiece “Lanark” while backpacking across Europe in 1993, then went on to read the then recently published “Poor Things.” Both works might be categorized as “experimental fiction,” though I think a more accurate description might be “project fiction,” the sort of books that require your full engagement.

You may have heard about “Poor Things” in recent weeks, for it has been made into a feature film and there is a whole lot of “buzz,” to use Hollywood lingo. The film stars Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Willem Dafoe, so not exactly a B-movie. 

The plot centers on conflicting accounts about Bella Baxter, who may or may not be a “Frankenstein-like” creature produced when an infant’s brain is transplanted into the body of a drowned woman. It is way more engaging than it sounds, though every bit as weird as it sounds. 

The work explores sensuality and inhibition, as well as who gets to tell the story of a woman’s sexuality, for there are two primary narrators in the text, Bella’s nominal husband and Bella herself, a framing narrative from a fictional character named Alasdair Gray, and the actual Gray who received the actual royalties. 

Not shockingly, even here, it is mostly men speaking for and about a woman.

And funny enough, “Poor Things,” the film, made the news and brought me back to “Poor Things” the novel just as we were approaching this week’s text, selected some time ago, dealing with the body, and especially fornication. Then, as sometimes happens, the Holy Spirit laughed, and I received a question about our church’s official position on polyamory.

So I guess we get a break from the hellish state of the world, and particularly the competing genocidal regimes in the Middle East, and can just focus on something simple: sex.

And for the record, we do not have an official position on polyamory. 

We believe in the right of Christian conscience, which is to say that we are prayerful in our decision making on moral issues, in dialogue with one another, with scripture, and with our tradition, but in the end, we each have to make decisions about morality for ourselves. 

There are limits, of course, around consent and violence and exploitation. And admittedly, I’m an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy who thinks two people is complicated enough and I tend to associate open relationships with cults, but I try to be a lot less judge-y and a lot more love-y. Quite apart from being gay, I watched Grandma shack-up with a partner for decades, unable to marry because of pension rules, and I have known many people who have faced loneliness as loved ones slipped into disability and dementia. I just don’t think God is that big of a jerk to punish people for seeking companionship. Though people certainly are, judgmental jerks that is.

Let me offer a quote from one of the most important figures in American culture that you might not know, Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” “Futurama,” and other generation-defining cartoons. Groening’s counsel is this: “When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.”

Jesus had siblings. It says so right there in the Bible. 

Peter was married, also in the Bible. 

Sure it was an ancient patriarchy, and the belief that blood was life created both kosher butchery and weirdness around menstruation. There is rape and revenge and miraculous babies in the Bible, just as there are in the myths of other ancient cultures. But the sum total is that the Bible is not anti-sex. That’s just Paul, and maybe not completely Paul, who famously said that we all have the same status when “in Christ,” neither male nor female, though he certainly scolded those who thought belief and grace were a hall pass for bad behavior. 

Continue reading “14 January 2024”

“Two Thousand Years at Rafah”

Matthew 2:1-18

If you were here on Christmas Eve, you might have noticed that there was no “no room at the inn,” but instead, “no room in the guestroom.” Though we have all seen countless Christmas pageants, in person and on screens large and small, this is a better translation of Luke’s text. If the census had actually happened, Joseph and Mary would likely have stayed with relatives, not at a Motel 6.

In the same way, today’s reading does not give us three kings, or even three wise men. First, there is no mention of how many traveled from the east, just the three types of “gifts.” In fact, in some Eastern forms of Christianity, they celebrate twelve travelers, possibly reflecting the twelve tribes of Israel. 

Second, they are definitively not kings. The unknown authors of Matthew use the word “Magi,” sometimes translated as “Wise Men.” We do not know whether the authors intended it in this generic way, or if they were using it with specificity. Magi were priests in the Zoroastrian religion of what is today Iran, east of Judea. Conflating the Magi with kings was certainly convenient for the church when it wanted to claim supreme authority, but it simply isn’t there in the text.

The authors of Matthew have a different agenda. They are, of course, recording the story of Jesus, who they view as the Messiah. But instead of focusing on his connection to David, as scripture, theology, and tradition often does, the authors of Matthew want you to see Jesus as a new Moses, the intermediary between God and humankind, negotiating a new covenant, for covenant and testament are translations of the same concept. You might also use the words contract or agreement or treaty. 

To that end, the authors of Matthew consolidate the teachings scattered throughout the other two synoptic gospels into five great sermons, to match the five books of the Torah. The sermon Luke describes as delivered on a plain is delivered on a mount in Matthew, to match the work of Moses on the mountain. And, relevant to today, there is a royal order to slaughter infants, just as there was so long ago under the evil Pharaoh. The Holy Family’s flight to Egypt strengthens that connection.

Though the events described in today’s reading are likely the product of holy imagination, the birth of Jesus roughly coincided with a widespread revolt against the rule of Herod the Great, a revolt that was eventually crushed with brutal violence. There is, in this text, a kernel of historic memory, a real slaughter.

What Western Christians have made of this story is a bit more complicated. Though it has assumed a different definition in modern times, in the original Koine Greek, Epiphany meant an appearance or manifestation. The visit of the Magi, who are definitively not religiously or culturally Jews, is read as salvation being made accessible to the Gentiles, often read through both the Koine Greek and Hebrew theology as “the nations.” This is a fulfillment of Hebrew testament promises, that through the children of Abraham, through the people covenanted to Yahweh, all nations would be blessed. The star appears to Gentiles, salvation is made manifest to the nations.

Unfortunately, Christians have often understood the new covenant as superseding prior covenants, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic. This was exacerbated by the dramatic events approximately four decades after Jesus was executed. Jerusalem and the surrounding region had spent most of the previous five centuries under foreign rule, often paying backbreaking taxes. The one successful revolt in the period, a century and a half before Jesus, was led by the ancient equivalent of rednecks, soon found to be completely incompetent and corrupt. The widespread rebellion around the time Jesus was born was followed about seventy years later by the First Jewish War, an utter disaster that saw Jerusalem and the Temple destroyed again.

It is after this, four decades after Jesus was executed, that what we know as Judaism today, Rabbinic Judaism, begins to form, at the same time early Christians were adapting their faith for the context of non-Jewish culture in Hellenistic and Roman-ruled regions. 

Supersessionism is the bad theology that sees Christians as replacing Jews, and plays into two thousand years of hatred, Martin Luther’s raging antisemitism, the “Blood Libel” fabricated in Russia and so like today’s Q-Anon, even the Holocaust, for while few senior Nazis publicly identified as Christians, Christian Germany was the soil in which the Final Solution grew.

And here we are, two thousand years later, and Persia, which is today Iran, funds the terrorist group Hamas, which opposes the right of Israel to exist, an existence necessitated by centuries of oppression and slaughter due to Christian and Muslim antisemitism, while extremist Jewish settlers engage in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, wiping out Muslim and Christian communities that have been there for centuries with a wink-and-a-nod from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition.

Continue reading “7 January 2024 – Epiphany “

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”