Author: The Rev. J. Gary Brinn

Romans 8:12-25

The opening weekend for the 1987 film “The Princess Bride” was arguably a disaster. It cost around $16 million to make, and brought in a fraction over $200 thousand in the U.S. and Canada. Of course, ticket prices were a lot lower then, but so was the cost of making the film. It would go on to be a modest success during its cinema run, taking in about $30 million worldwide, but those numbers do not tell the whole story, for more than three decades later, many of us can quote lines from the film, for the 1987 script based on William Goldman’s 1973 novel was simply brilliant, and you can find t-shirts, home décor, and memes aplenty based on the movie. Just search Etsy. It is a priceless intellectual and cultural property.

The cast was star-studded, including Billy Crystal as Miracle Max, called on the revive the seemingly dead Westley, which brings us to one of those classic lines: “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”

The Roman Empire was mostly dead at the start of the Common Era’s fourth century when Constantine and Licinius signed what came to be known as the Edict of Milan, granting religious freedom in the regions they controlled. This was a crucial moment in the history of Christianity, for there had been widespread persecution in the preceding years. 

In the pop-history version of the story, Constantine has a vision of a cross and becomes a Christian himself. This is late propaganda. Like all warlords and powerful men, what Constantine worshipped was Constantine, and his engagement with a growing Christianity was self-serving. Some things never change.

The Edict of Milan also marked an important turning point theologically, for while the early church had spent most of three centuries fighting over the faith, now it was in the interest of the state to resolve these battles, for they were not confined to councils and venomous epistles, but often spilled out into mob violence. So rulers became arbiters of doctrine, arbiters with troops, as partisans fought over and fabricated new ideas and beliefs, like how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could be three persons and one God, of one substance, using words in ways they had never been used, or how Jesus could be both fully human and fully God at the exact same time. Among those bitter disputes was what came to be the heretical view that Christ was less than the Father and the first created thing, as well as the opposing ideas that Christ was more human than divine or more divine than human, neither being deemed acceptable.

The holy is beyond our knowing, and Hebrew scripture calls us to a theological humility, but that didn’t stop the ugly fights of that age, fights that were to the contestants a matter of eternal life or eternal damnation. 

Continue reading “Sanctification: 23 July 2023”

Romans 7:15-25

Today’s Unitarian Universalist movement in America is diverse, a mixture of individuals from different faiths and no faith, and sometimes a compromise for an interfaith marriage. Much like the United Church of Christ, members are bound together by a personal commitment to a local congregation, and in the UUA, to a core set of Seven Principles, crazy ideas like “the inherent worth and dignity of all people” and “the democratic process” in decision-making.

There are many parallels and connections. Unitarian Universalism, like the UCC, is the result of a merger between different theological traditions. The Unitarian part of their heritage is partially the result of a schism within Congregationalism, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address.” Historically, many New England towns had a First Parish and a First Church, one now part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the other now part of the United Church of Christ, all depending on who won in that particular town, for the church building, silver, and graveyard were at stake, not to mention souls and damnation, which were secondary to the property, of course.

We have so much in common with Unitarian Universalists, share so much in our worldview, that there are churches that belong to both denominations. This is possible mostly because folks have mellowed, and when I say folks, I mean our Puritanical Congregationalist heritage, and some of the more rabid Atheist Humanists that dominated the UUA a half century ago.

But I’d like to turn to the other half of the Unitarian Universalist heritage, and to a modern day schism of sorts.

We’ll begin in the Biblical Age, as we do. The Israelite faith did not originally include a notion of life after death. Fidelity, pleasing God, resulted in blessings in this life. Except that didn’t always happen. Sometimes bad things happened to good people, and vis-a-versa, leading the ancient theologians to one of two strategies. One was to blame the victim. If bad things are happening to you, you must not be all that good. We see this a lot in the ancient prophets. The Assyrians are invading because of injustice, or because the Northern Kingdom wasn’t worshipping properly. This primitive theology of blessings and curses in this world is at the heart of today’s Prosperity Gospel heresy, co-mingled with the heresy of Fundamentalism.

The second strategy was the growing belief that if what we might think of as karma didn’t play out in this life, then there must be a future life, where the good would be rewarded and the bad punished.

Continue reading “9 July 2023: What sort of God?”

Romans 6:12-23

When Disneyland opened in 1955, the Tomorrowland section of the park was futuristic, if a little kitsch. After all, Sputnik was still in the future, and the few computers that existed took up entire rooms. They most certainly did not fit in our pockets.

It was intended that Tomorrowland, both the California version and the later iteration in Florida, would always point to the future, would have to be updated constantly. That didn’t happen. They added things here and there, but those are iterations of the company’s intellectual properties, showcasing Buzz Lightyear or Stitch. It would not be surprising to see an “I Like Ike” button in the crowd, though prices are exponentially higher.

Maybe technology just moved too fast for them to keep ahead. Or maybe our tech-future is just too terrifying for children. Terminator 2, when the A.I. SkyNet goes to war against humankind, just doesn’t give that family fun vibe, if you know what I mean. Hasta la vista, baby.

While science fiction and futuristic classics look almost comical as the years pass, a few continue to hold their own. One of those is Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a 1992 classic novel in the genre of techno-futurism called cyberpunk. Some of the imagined technology has come to pass, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes horrifically. Fortunately, the ability of a computer virus to infect our own wetware hasn’t happened, though maybe it has, since social media has been the carrier of mass psychosis.

But it is the social commentary that seems especially prescient. In “Snow Crash,” the government has largely faded into irrelevance. Instead, our daily lives are carved up into competing corporate franchises, and gated enclaves. It is a capitalist utopia, where humans exist solely for the purpose of the bottom line, where tribe is pitted against tribe, and people spend way too much time down the rabbit hole, because the virtual is better than the physical.

This is some people’s idea of freedom, a daily “Battle Royale.” No wonder the winner-take-all video game “Fortnite” spread like wildfire. The competitive violence in the game reflects the values so many kids hear at the dinner table, or more likely, in the backseat while eating their “Happy Meals,” a zero-sum world where you can only win if someone else loses, preferably fatally.

And I am not okay with it. I don’t accept that the biggest jerk wins, Congressional elections aside.

Continue reading “2 July 2023”

Matthew 9:9-26

Jesus existed. That may sound like a bit of a no-brainer. After all, you are sitting in a Christian church on a Sunday morning when you could be eating a bagel and watching “Meet the Press,” because we are a “Meet the Press” sort of crowd. But a church president, not ours, once told me that Jesus was completely made-up. Not that she didn’t believe specifically in the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection or the whole walking on water thing. She was throwing out the baby, the bath water, the whole darned tub, and the Sea of Galilee for good measure. I had a lot of questions that I chose not to ask.

Adam and Eve? You can have them. Totally a myth. Satan in the desert? Yeah, and Elvis at the donut shop. But there are certain figures in the Bible that reek of historicity, that it is reasonable to believe existed, if not in the exact same form as the later stories about them. 

For example, while certain smug scholars spent years claiming that King David was a myth, others were digging away in the hard dirt of Palestine, where thirty years ago they discovered that a wall at the site of the ancient Israelite city of Dan included re-used stone from an earlier monument, in a style called a stele. The site is called a tel, archeologist speak for the mound created by centuries of ancient settlement on the same site, so the stone became known as the Tel Dan Stele. 

The inscription on the Tel Dan Stele, in Aramaic, claims that the person who erected the stele killed King Jehoram of Israel, son of Ahab, which is remarkable enough, because we have all these stories about Ahab and Jezebel. But the stele adds that the victor defeated both the army of Israel, the northern kingdom, and the army of Israel’s ally, the House of David, what we know as Judah or the southern kingdom.

The stone is dated to the 9^th century B.C.E., and Jehoram died in the 9^th century B.C.E., sometime around 842. Jehoram and his nephew, King Ahaziah of the House of David, were defeated by Hazael, the Aramean king, who of course spoke Aramaic.

This gives us material evidence of David’s existence pretty close to when he existed. But we didn’t need archeology to tell us David was real. The story in scripture, messy as it is, feels real.

Continue reading “Love or Anger: 11 June 2023”

Matthew 28:16-20

It is a busy day on the church calendar, what with Trinity Sunday, Pride Sunday, and Communion Sunday for us once-a-month types. Even though we are more Reform than Lutheran, I’m going to fall back on Martin Luther’s admonition against preaching on Trinity Sunday, and just not preach on that. Hey, two out of three ain’t bad…

I like sports, as you all know. Unfortunately that includes ice hockey, which hasn’t worked out so well for me this year. The Maple Leafs, my favorite NHL team, made the playoffs, again, because they pretty much always do, then promptly collapsed, which they pretty much always do. I mean, when they last won the Stanley Cup, I was four. 

Then there is that train wreck in the money pit across the street. I mean, I’m gonna root for the hometown team every time, but the Elmira Mammoth were pretty awful if we’re being honest, with constant player turnover, and now the whole enterprise seems to have failed, as the team could not attract enough fans to pay the bills.

Now, if you love hockey like I do, you know a particular end-of-game strategy, called “empty net.” This happens when a team is down by one goal near the end of the game. In desperation, they pull the goalie to get another attacker on the ice. I mean, a loss by one goal is no different than a loss by two goals, which is often what happens anyway. 

All the leading team needs to do is snatch the puck and send it down to the other end of the ice, where there is a big fat nobody standing in goal. Then, with seconds left on the clock and the opponent now up by two goals, the goaltender comes back. 

This past season, only one NHL team scored more goals than they gave up when they pulled their goalie. Our closest team, the Buffalo Sabres, tried empty net 33 times. They scored the tying goal three times. They gave up an additional goal 17 times. And if you are doing the math, 13 times, neither team scored.

Those are not great odds.

And as ineffective as pulling the goalie is in the NHL, it is still wildly successful compared to attempts to explain away the anti-gay passages in scripture. I’ve watched both scholars and amateurs try it, twisting themselves into knots trying to make scripture not say what it so clearly says.

Continue reading “Pride Sunday 2023: Queer Saints”

Acts 2:1-21

It is easy, in an age of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, an age when neo-Fascists are working hard to erase the story of Black America and to drive the LGBTQI+ community back into hiding, when small-government hypocrites insert themselves between a doctor and their patient, to forget how far we have actually come in pursuit of safety and equality. 

Take, for example, the 2006 Academy Awards, when the gay-themed “Brokeback Mountain” was expected to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Some in the gay community, including me, had a love/hate relationship with the film. Seeing queer characters on television and in film was still relatively rare, so there was the positive of any representation, but it was still tragic representation. 

For decades, we were usually depicted as criminally insane. If we were not monsters, then we were victims, dying of AIDS, tortured by unrequited love, mourning a lover who died tragically. Queer characters couldn’t just be, they had to be pathetic. Even if society did not punish them with incarceration, murder, or apathy, the universe would, some deus ex machina, a meteorite from the sky. 

Today, there are same-sex couples on the Disney Channel and in Hallmark Christmas Movies, but in 2006, the Academy could not quite give an Oscar to a film about queer love, so the Best Picture controversially went to the Paul Haggis film “Crash.” 

It is not that “Crash” was a bad film, though its exploration of racism in America has been critiqued as shallow by folks like Ta-Nehisi Coates. In fact, “Crash” might be seen as the high-point of a particular style of filmmaking that exploded in the first decade of this century, the networked narrative that tied seemingly disparate stories together. That same year, another film in the genre reached theaters, one that took as a theme the biblical story that starts this morning’s exploration of Pentecost. 

“Babel” was about an American couple on vacation in Morocco when the wife is shot. It is about the Moroccan boys who are supposed to be using the rifle to protect the goats, not to shoot tourist buses. It is about the deaf and mute daughter of the Japanese hunter who brought the rifle to Morocco. It is about the Mexican nanny, working illegally in the United States, who is caring for the children of the American couple on the bus. Most of all, it is about the many ways we fail to understand one another, with a healthy dose of the “Butterfly Effect,” where one small act has unpredictable and life-changing impacts far, far away.

Continue reading “Pentecost 2023: Out of Control”

21 May 2023

Acts 1:1-11

Once again this week, we encounter a text we need to read as story rather than as history. I mean, maybe Jesus floated up into the sky, but as John Lennon famously sang, there is no hell below us, above us only sky, and then a solar system and a galaxy and a universe. So where did he float off to? 

Which is not to deny the possibility of heaven, because creation is cool and weird and who knows … just not that, Yahweh in a big chair up in the clouds and Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Besides, surely we can come up with some better bling these days than pearls, classic as they may be. I mean, if there are bedazzled gates, I sure hope they’re rhinestone when Dolly Parton gets there.

Even the most diehard Christians have accepted that we are not the center of the universe, at least not spatially, and the Roman church has sort of conceded they were wrong about that whole heresy and house arrest thing against Galileo, albeit 350 years too late. 

Yet, the religious imagination still holds on to this weird sort of “up” because we haven’t found new language for our confidence in the eternal goodness of God’s love. We might want to work on that. 

And some live in the cognitive dissonance of a heaven that is up somewhere even as they (mostly) accept that we have landed on the moon and sent probes to Mars.

Some cling to primitive belief despite the evidence, either ignoring contradictions like, you know, the actual universe, or simply pretending facts aren’t true, like natural selection and evolution. It is as if one horse gets out of the barn, and the whole herd will get loose, a stampede of deconstructed myths and fractured fairy tales. Though given the number of horses that died at Churchill Downs this year, the on-going destruction of those animals in the cruelty of horse racing, I’m all for getting horses out of some barns, literal and theological.

Barns always remind me of a short poem by the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bash?, who wrote: “My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.”

But this isn’t a sermon about having a positive attitude, as important as that is. It is about that barn and what happens when the doors come off, because folks, they are off and laying in the pasture. Things we thought were true or pretended were true are glaringly untrue.

Continue reading “The Barn Door”

7 May 2023

1 Peter 2:2-10

The folks who constructed Israelite identity in the ancient Near East crafted a story emphasizing racial purity, the idea that all members of their tribe were descended from the twelve sons of Jacob. They often located neighboring people as the children of those cast out of the tribe, of Ham, disgraced son of Noah, or of Ishmael, discarded son of Abraham. 

They celebrated a narrative of ethnic cleansing and genocide as recorded in the Books of Joshua and Judges, of burning cities and dead babies. Their holy texts were filled with polemic against inter-marriage and multiculturalism, against Jezebel and her priests. When the Israelite elite returned from the Babylonian Captivity, they convinced themselves that the lower classes who had been left behind were no longer pure, justifying the expropriation of their land. 

That version, of course, is utterly false, historically and theologically. Scripture provides several examples of people and groups absorbed into Israel, Ruth and Rahab among them. Modern scholarship is pretty clear that there was not a widespread campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide when the small group of escapees from Pharaoh’s Egypt settled in Canaan, the Promised Land, but that instead that small group, possibly only those who came to be known as the Levites, forged this new collective identity while merging with the existing Canaanite population. Their understanding of the holy, which they believed was the result of direct revelation, was formed over centuries, absorbing elements of Midianite and Canaanite belief.

Then, just like today, there were people who insisted that there was an “us” and there was a “them” that was defined by birth, that identity was a fixed thing.

So intense was the sense of tribal competition that when city dwellers in Jerusalem started adopting modern customs from the Greek culture that dominated the eastern Mediterranean, becoming Hellenized, rural residents of Judea rose up in armed rebellion, led by religious fundamentalists in what is known as the Maccabean or Hasmonean rebellion. 

Today, this is celebrated as a victory for monotheism, for Jewish identity and the worship of Yahweh, but if we are honest, it was no different than the “us” versus “them” in the United States today, the insane racist paranoia of “replacement theory” propagandists, the narrative of a metropolitan and cosmopolitan elite at odds with “real America,” real America defined as racially-segregated and white dominated patriarchy.

Continue reading “7 May 2023: Now A People”

30 April 2023: WWJD?

Acts 2:42-47

Much like us, they were Congregationalist and Abolitionist. After the Enslavers Rebellion had ended and Reconstruction had subsequently failed, plunging the South back into the abyss of exploitation and racism, their frontier congregation moved on to other tasks of life together in Christian community. 

In 1889, with a growing population, they decided to plant a new church. This is something that happened until fairly recently, until traditional churches started collapsing and megachurches started opening satellite campuses, and by satellite, I mean the pastor beaming in live from the main campus. 

Which we were all pretty snarky about right up until the pandemic, when we suddenly wished we had their production skills. 

So it was that Central Congregational Church was established in Topeka, Kansas. They called the Rev. Charles Sheldon, a native of Wellsville, New York, just a couple of counties west of here, then still in his early thirties and serving a congregation in Vermont. He was no radical. A graduate of Philips Academy and Brown University, he was comfortable and respectable. That was until he experienced that first winter in Topeka.

Poverty comes in many forms, from the manipulative images of humanitarian appeals on television to American elders who have to choose between food and medicine. Whatever it looked like in Topeka in 1889, it was enough to radically change Charles Sheldon. He spent less time in the pulpit discussing doctrine and personal salvation, and a whole lot more preaching Christianity as a way of living, preaching the practice of the Way of Jesus. He framed this with a simple question: “What would Jesus do?”

Sheldon would be appalled at what has become, his question, his message, reduced to a brand, “WWJD?”, and emblazoned on rubber bracelets and t-shirts and mylar balloons, products manufactured by functional slaves in an overseas authoritarian state, ashamed that “WWJD?” would become a generational mantra for people who focused on personal salvation as if it were a consumer product. Who, if they could fit the poor into their prosperity gospel at all, did so in the toxic form of tourism mission trips that cost thousands of dollars. 

Aren’t they just “blessed”?

Continue reading “30 April 2023: WWJD?”

Earth Day Sermon

23 Aril 2023

I am not going to stand up here this morning and tell you we need to stop destroying the planet, because duh! If you are here, you already know that. 

I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that neoliberal capitalism is a dumpster fire that was built on colonialism and slavery and that it is still based on exploitation and violence and has absolutely nothing to do with following Jesus. You don’t need to be ashamed of your privilege. It isn’t your fault. But you absolutely need to use your privilege to lift up others. But again, if you’ve been here more than a few times, you’ve already heard me say that.

Instead of preaching to the choir this morning, though it is a might fine choir up there, I am going to offer a challenge and name the theological task that is before us if we are going to save our species and our planet. And I start with the human brain. 

It is simply miraculous. We know way more about how it works now than we did even twenty years ago thanks to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, also known as fMRI. We know more about a lot of things, from the human genome to the Higgs boson. And yet, we are completely clueless about how the brain makes you you. We are more than a little terrified when we hear and sometimes witness how traumatic brain injury and diseases of the brain can make someone into another someone entirely. Being is mystery.

We are bipedal self-aware primates in search of meaning, fragile, finite, and fickle, and it is only natural that we begin with what we know, moving outward, the baby who discovers their own hand and slowly understands it as part of themselves.

We construct meaning, sometimes through discoveries, sometimes just making stuff up, which is totally okay, though sometimes that made up stuff needs to be adjusted for the discoveries. Which is exactly where we find ourselves today as Christians in a world on fire.

Continue reading “Earth Day Sermon 2023”