Category: Main Blog

My recent vacation combined a little tourism and a lot of family. 

The tourism part included an outstanding exhibit at Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum focused on the American artist Jacob Lawrence, a 20^th century descendent of the enslaved African Diaspora, and his connections with artists still in Africa. I also visited Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown. It was the first time in decades that I’d experienced those historic sites, so closely tied to my own family’s story in America. 

Williamsburg continues to be what it has been since the Rockefeller’s made it a personal cause, a well-funded billionaire’s philanthropy. Yorktown and Jamestown are different. Both contain historic sites managed by the National Park Service on a shoestring budget, as well as substantial educational sites and museums under the auspices of a better-funded and independent foundation. 

At Jamestown, that foundation’s museum and re-creation of the ships and the first fort are called the Jamestown Settlement, and I must admit, I was blown away. They have done a remarkable job of re-framing the story. Where once you experienced a celebration of colonialism, the Doctrine of Discovery, and white supremacy, you can now hear about the intersection and clash of three advanced cultures, the First Peoples of the continent, the English who invaded and established the colony, and the Angolan abductees whose purchase at Jamestown marked the start of our nation’s original sin.

The foundation’s museum and re-created encampment at Yorktown is not quite as nuanced, still firmly rooted in American exceptionalism and white nationalism, with barely a nod to the overwhelming majority of residents in the original colonies who were not made free by the American Revolution, indigenous populations, slaves in the African diaspora, women… 

The American Revolution is, in the Yorktown narrative, primarily about taxation without representation, which is at least partially true. It was an economic war, about the exploitative and unsustainable model of overseas colonization. But there is little mention at Yorktown or in popular patriotism of the Southern concern that England might abolish slavery, something that seemed inevitable after a 1772 decision by the Court of the King’s Bench, and a move that would invalidate a primary source of Southern wealth.

The so-called Founding Fathers are at the center of it all in Yorktown, as are those familiar patriotic tropes, “give me liberty or give me death,” and the words of Thomas Jefferson, the “unalienable right” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I was already thinking about happiness, for today’s scripture and theme were on the calendar months ago. But what the heck is happiness? And does our faith promise us happiness?

Continue reading “Unfollow Your Bliss: 23 October 2022”

The five-century old cognitive shift we call the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, or simply Modernity, produced an idealism bordering on hubris and delusion at times, the idea that humans were capable of producing a perfectly ordered society, a utopia in the writings of Sir Thomas More. The cognitive shift to post-modernity, only a century old and marked by things like relativity and uncertainty, has left us more than a little cynical about the human capacity for good, but people do still try to create just and ordered communities, sometimes called alternative or intentional community, from co-housing and housing trusts to Christian equivalents of the “kibbutz,” communities united in religious values and committed to shared endeavor.

Humans being humans, though, intentional and alternative communities rarely survive past the first generation, and are never quite as utopian as the founders intended. For example, Arden, Delaware, where I once lived, was artsy and progressive, an experiment in the economics advocated by a guy named Henry George, and influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. In Arden, you own your house, but not the land it sits on, one interpretation of George’s push to tax land, not labor. The people who initially lived in Arden, being self-governed and human, didn’t quite live up to the vision of the founders, so there were sequels, Ardentown and Ardencroft, which were like most sequels, not as good as the original, and maybe best unmade. Still, Arden exists with roughly the same principles more than a century later, which is a raging success by alternative community standards.

Georgist economics predates the digital economy, the immense value attached these days to intangible assets, predates the Ponzi scheme that is finance capitalism, and was conceived before hedge funds and private equity firms. But in an age when those hedge funds are buying up trailer parks and holding the poor hostage for extortionist rents, when so much land is under water or on fire, sometimes in rapid succession, it might be worth re-engaging questions about land, who owns it, and who it benefits. 

We begin our service every week by naming the fact that we are on stolen Seneca land, and the ancient Hebrews were in much the same position, sort of. The Books of Joshua and Judges are celebrations of a successful campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, babies brains smashed against the rocks, the same sort of thing ethnic Russians and the Russian army are doing in Ukraine these days. Fortunately, at least for those ancient Canaanites, we don’t think this really happened, at least not on what is literally a “biblical” scale, though no doubt some were dispossessed and driven out. The Hebrew culture actually appears to be a construction, weaving together Canaanite culture and migrant populations like the Levite escapees from Egypt, with the idea of a racially pure Hebrew monotheism being about as real as the idea of America as a white Christian nation, which is to say, not real and absolutely false.

Still, the idea had power, and land had emotional value far beyond agricultural output and re-sale. The Hebrews told themselves that the land, this land of milk and honey, was given to them by God, and their entire economy was built on small-hold farms and inheritance. This is why, when the King of Israel wanted his vineyard, Naboth said “No. This is my inheritance. I will not sell.” Of course, Queen Jezebel was more than willing to fabricate a false charge against Naboth, ending with the man’s death, so much like the civil asset forfeiture laws in America today, widely abused by corrupt police departments.

Continue reading “25 September 2022: Fixed Star”

There are more than one kind of Republican in the world, and I do not mean by that the split between the anti-Trumpers and their treasonous opponents, for as we were reminded this week, in most of the world, the opposite of Republican is not Democrat, it is Monarchist. 

This is not, as far as I know, a particularly divisive issue for the continental European monarchies. Monarchs in places like Holland and Sweden are generally well-behaved. There are a handful of claimants in places like Italy that generate a little buzz, though they don’t get much traction. Republicanism is a live issue in Great Britain, even more so among its former colonies, many of which still have the queen, or now king, as head of state. There are Republican movements in Australia and Canada, for example, but they are especially strong in the Caribbean and African countries of the commonwealth, countries that were the targets of particularly exploitative and racist colonial practices. The British were, after all, the chief beneficiaries of the Triangle Trade that moved slaves from Africa to the Americas. 

Still, even the most diehard Republican has been measured if not completely silent on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, possibly out of pragmatism, but also possibly out of decency, for even if the House of Windsor and the royal brand have been tarnished in recent years, she was still treasured.

This should seem baffling to Americans. After all, we fought a war to gain our independence from the British crown and soundly rejected monarchy as a model for government. Our head of state is also our head of government, sometimes, except when he isn’t, which is worth reconsidering, both the explicit “he” and the broader question of our current two-party first-past-the-post electoral system, which seems to have failed completely.

Yet, for some reason, Americans are quite attached to English royalty. It may be that the American myth was initially forged by invaders from England, the theocrats of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the Royalists in Virginia, opposite sides of an English Civil War that saw the first King Charles lose more than just his crown. 

It may be our alliances during the First and Second World Wars that strengthened the connection, where we fought by the side of the British and their colonies. 

It may be countless movies and novels and the logical overlap when literature is written in a shared language. 

An American has even married into the royal family for a second time recently, though the first time was to a racist and Nazi-sympathizer, and nothing about that story was particularly pleasant so we tend to avoid it.

My social media feeds have been filled with the late queen since she died, the new king, and all things British. I admit that while I have not watched “The Crown” or Downton Abbey, I am enough of an Anglophile to have paid attention myself, have watched some of the processions and remembrances.

Only one friend, a classmate from Divinity School, was contrarian, publicly noting that he didn’t really care about the whole thing, that he did not completely understand the American grief. And, of course, on one level, he’s right. Elizabeth Windsor was not our queen. 

Continue reading “The Prize We Pay for Love: 18 September 2022”

You have probably seen the memes on social media, a sentence made up of words that may share pronunciations or spellings but have completely different meanings, or maybe punctuation that makes the difference between whether we are calling grandma for dinner or serving her up slow-roasted on a bed of couscous. 

They all poke good-natured fun at the English language, which is, if we are honest, weird and difficult on a good day. 

English is the linguistic equivalent of a Lamborghini marrying a Volkswagen and having a Land Rover love child, part Romance, part German efficiency, part bulldozer, with good old earthy Anglo-Saxon profanity on the bumper stickers for good measure. 

Never mind the countless loan words from other cultures, absorbed as the English colonized the world, the sun never setting on the once great and horrible empire that was, in truth, the first globalization, exploitation and racism on a scale that made Imperial Rome seem like rank amateurs.

One bit of that British empire was the Indian subcontinent, many small kingdoms administratively and forcefully unified, then artificially carved up again upon release, and still reeling from that partition to this day. And there, on the west coast of what is today India, we find folks who speak Marathi, actually the tenth largest language in the world in terms of native speakers, outnumbering the entire population of Germany and then some. There is a cinema tradition, Mollywood, and a rich literary history. 

Marathi is the language that names the animal at the heart of the English colonialist classic tale “Riki Tiki Tavi” by Kipling, for mongoose is a Marathi loan word, and Riki Tiki Tavi is a courageous and loyal mongoose. 

Like so many loan words, mongoose does not follow even the Frankenstein rules of English, for the plural of mongoose is not mongeese, even if the plural of goose is geese. There are no mongeese, only mongooses.

Goose and geese, mouse and mice, sheep and … sheep.

There is no difference between one sheep and ninety-nine sheep. 

Continue reading “There Are No Mongeese: 11 September 2022”

The history of religion is filled with con artists and nut cases, including a few in our own tradition, so it can be a little tricky parsing what stories are actually constructive, more than a little tricky mining that vein of eternal truth buried in the middle of so much human muck. 

Xenu, the nuclear-armed intergalactic dictator of Scientology, and a favorite of mine, is science fiction, and not even particularly good science fiction, a billion-dollar con job that works only because it is so brazen. It reflects the historical context of the charlatan that created that cult, L. Ron Hubbard, in the years immediately after the Second World War.

Genetics confirms that Native Americans are not the lost tribes of Israel, no matter what appeared on magic tablets under the hill up the road in Palmyra. That con reflects the social context of the white colonizer’s expansion across the continent, the mass hysteria of the Great Awakening, and the misogyny inherent in polygamy. Not that we didn’t have our own brush with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery in our own tradition.

Other fictions are more benign. Take, for example, the traditional claim that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of Hebrew scripture shared by Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. He didn’t, as I’ve said before. We have a pretty good understanding of the traditions and events that led to the version of the texts we use today, texts assembled from other sources centuries after the Exodus, and including a forgery that dishonest priests claimed had been discovered in the Temple of Solomon during renovations, the long lost book we call Deuteronomy. 

Despite the obviousness of the fraud, this text that has been part of the Judeo-Christian canon for millennia, has taken on a sort of sacredness, and absolutely contains truth.

The Torah was written and revised in the years between the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the later destruction of the southern Kingdom of Judah. Refugees from the north brought their own texts and traditions, which were eventually merged with those of the south. 

Theologically, this is a critical period, for it is when the Hebrew religion moves closer to ethical monotheism, the belief that only one god, Yahweh, should be worshipped, maybe even that Yahweh is the only real god. It is when they come to believe that Yahweh is good. God the Father, as conceived by Jesus. A God of love and grace rests on this re-perception of the holy.

The socio-economic context is critical too, and one of the ways we know that Deuteronomy is not the product of escaped slaves wandering in the desert. It reflects a second transition in the social organization of day-to-day life of Canaan. The first was the move from a loose tribal confederation, the period reflected in the stories of Joshua and Judges, to a nation-state of small-hold farmers, of kings and priests. This was an age of increased urbanization and the consolidation of wealth into fewer hands. 

Every time you read about laborers in scripture, you are reading about someone who has lost their own land, is no longer a small-holder, and has therefore become vulnerable to economic exploitation. Every time you hear a reference to laborers, in Hebrew Scripture, or in the parables of Jesus recorded in the Christian Testament, you should be listening for teachings about justice, human and divine, for those lessons are there. Day laborer meant poor and vulnerable then, just as it does now.

Continue reading “4 September 2022: Day Labor”

I want to hire the P.R. person for dragons. I mean, mermaids and mermen have their moments, unicorns come and go in a poof of rainbow glitter, trolls get some screen time on occasion, but no one does it like dragons, grinding it out year after year. Sometimes they are perched on a pile of gold and incinerating local villages. Sometimes they are the ally and wise counsel to the human hero. They are the Meryl Streep of fantasy creatures, able to play any role, or maybe the Keith Richards, born old and never aging.

They are back in the cultural mix at the moment, as the prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, hits HBO. The novels in that series were bestsellers, the show a smash hit, though I admit to only making it through the “Red Wedding.” If you know, you know.

One of the popular tropes regarding dragons provides the title for this morning’s sermon. “Here be dragons” is sometimes thought to be what ancient and medieval cartographers wrote on the edges of the map, indicating unexplored territory, and there was a lot of unexplored territory back then. It turns out to be an anachronism. Cartographers did indicate the danger of the unknown with pictures of fierce beasts, including dragons, but the earliest use of that phrase, in the Latin form “hic sunt dracones,” doesn’t appear until the start of the 16^th century, on a globe now in the collection of the New York Public Library.

The unknown can be scary. But the known can be pretty scary too. And dragons don’t just hang around under the mountain or at the edge of the map. Sometimes they wear well-tailored suits and red silk ties, sometimes black robes. 

I am inclined to Neil Gaiman’s take on dragons, as you heard in our first reading. He is the award-winning multi-genre writer of groundbreaking comic books, bestselling novels, and children’s fiction, with many of his works adapted for film and television, including the new Netflix series Sandman. And it is one of his works for children, Coraline, later adapted for stop-motion animation, that provides us with that reading, the reminder that dragons can be defeated.

Continue reading “Here Be Dragons: 28 August 2022”

This summer, we have spent a significant amount of time with the Hebrew prophets. This is, of course, mostly my fault. I believe our faith must be more than spiritual anesthesia, and I’m not enamored of the passive orthodoxy that says “You’re going to heaven, and you’re going to heaven, and you’re going to heaven,” like some deified Oprah. 

I do not have the attention span to focus on an eternal paradise when I can see hell right here on earth, nor do I have the discipline necessary to tune out the cries of the sick, the poor, the frightened, for it takes tremendous discipline or true sociopathy to ignore suffering, and I just don’t have it in me. I’d never make it in a church that wants to hear “gee, aren’t you just swell” every single week, and indeed, that type of church has chewed me up and spit me out.

Which is all to say that if you know anything about the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, you should not be even slightly surprised that I selected this text from the several that were available in the lectionary today, for Jeremiah lived in troubled times, just as we do, and he was not willing to “stay in his lane” so to speak. 

No, most Christians would like religion to just focus on going to church, on micro-managing other people’s sex lives, and on controlling women’s bodies, and being a prophet, Jeremiah wasn’t having it. He wanted to talk about more than just patriarchy, personal piety, and purity. Among other things, he talked about foreign policy and military strategy.

He did so in the final years of the southern Kingdom of Judah, when Assyria was declining, and Judah found itself caught between Egypt and Babylon, with the Babylonians eventually destroying Jerusalem itself, its Temple of Solomon and its walls. While many would be carted off to Babylon for the decades we know as the Exile, Jeremiah and his scribe, Baruch, would instead flee to Egypt, where tradition has it he wrote the Book of Lamentations.

And for all of that, I am not going to deliver a sermon about doing justice, as I do frequently, or about idolatry, another frequent subject. I’m not even going to preach about false prophets, though God knows there are enough of them about, from televangelists to bishops in the Roman tradition. Though we must certainly pray about the consequences of false prophets on this week that has seen attacks by their followers.

I’m not even going to point out that sinful behavior ultimately leads to societal ruin, that we don’t need God to crush us, because greed and cruelty simply aren’t sustainable in the long-term, for the planet, for our species.

Let’s focus, instead, on the opening of the reading:
The Lord declares, Am I a God
who is only nearby and not far off?
Can people hide themselves in secret places
so I might not see them?
Don’t I fill heaven and earth?

Now, Jeremiah is focusing on punishment, but he is on to more than he realizes. For God is not only nearby, as the Hebrews would discover when the four-century-old Temple of Solomon, God’s location in their theology, was a burning pile of rubble. 

God could be with them when they prayed in Babylon, could speak to Ezekiel there, could be present with the diaspora community. They’d have to re-discover this when the Second Temple, reconstructed after the Exile and existing for centuries, was again destroyed another five centuries on, in 70 C.E., as a mad street preacher from Galilee had predicted four decades earlier. 

They’d learn that they could gather as a synagogue, and God would be as present and as real as when they slaughtered bulls on the Temple Mount, maybe more so.

Yes, Jeremiah, God does indeed fill heaven and earth. And if God fills heaven and earth, how can God ever be the God of only one tribe, one race, one nation? Indeed, how can God ever be the God of one species? 

Fine, we sentient erect primates conceive of God as being like us, for we are our only frame of reference, the stick against which we measure all things. Though scientists are beginning to imagine other ways that animals and plants and systems might think, they paradoxically can only think about that thinking from within our thinking, the same thing we have done with God since we first conceived of the mysterious has holy, as having will and agency, since we chose to think that the holy might think, just like us.

Humility requires that we be honest with ourselves. Our every utterance about the holy is a dart thrown into an ocean, never hitting the target, sinking ever further into the depths, beyond our view and imagination.

Continue reading “Cranky Jeremiah: 14 August 2022”

My original title for this morning’s sermon was “Let’s destroy Christianity.” A sermon title should provoke curiosity, and that would certainly do it. My better angels won, in the end, though the original might be more accurate, for our text this morning addresses an ancient concern that is still absolutely a concern today, the problem with religion.

So let’s start with that theological stick of dynamite. A fundamentalist view of salvation history works like this: a needy co-dependent god created two humans, then placed a temptation close by to test them. But that god made them, so they’d only fail the test if that god had created a defective product. The human creatures succumbed to that temptation, albeit with help from an evil creature also created by that god. To be specific, the woman creature succumbed to that temptation, then dragged the male creature along with her, because let’s not miss a chance to squeeze in a little misogyny.

That god stewed on that slight, which was the god’s own fault for creating creatures in that way, for a very long time. Centuries even. Finally, that god sent a part of the divine self into human form, and orchestrated something that looks vaguely like Trinitarian suicide, having the Jesus god-self executed to pay the Creator god-self back for the insult of weak and fragile creatures having actually been weak and fragile creatures. The humans in this story of divine insanity are simply pawns acting out the will of this god.

When the story is told in this way, it is little wonder that sane people have walked away. For one thing, they did not know 2500 years ago but we do know now that there was no Adam, no Eve. All humans are not descended from a single couple created in a magic garden. We are the result of thousands of years of natural selection, erect primates with big brains and imaginations, which is miracle enough. We aren’t even all completely from the primate species homo sapiens, since many of us carry Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. So even if that pissed off co-dependent god was worthy of our worship, there was no Eve to bite the forbidden fruit, no “original sin.”

Continue reading “The Problem With Religion: 7 August 2022”

Much like the ancient Hebrews, many families today have origin stories, though some are a bit suspect. Even with the possibility of exponential growth across generations, it seems unlikely that everybody in New England is descended from the 102 passengers and 30 crew members who invaded North America on the Mayflower. In the United Church of Christ, we can rightly claim to be the theological descendants of those Pilgrims, but few of us can claim biological descent.

In my native region, the big claim is to be a FFV, which stands for “First Families of Virginia,” though what it means by “first” is problematic, for the category does not include indigenous peoples, who really were first, or the majority of white invaders who didn’t have time for that upper-class nonsense. “First Families of Virginia” really just means that subset of the invaders who imagined themselves to be inconvenienced English nobility, to be better than others, with pedigrees, real or not, to prove it.

My own family has engaged in this sort of myth-making. Some of the claims are legitimate. The first family member arrived in Virginia in 1620, a year after the first African abductees were enslaved in Virginia, technically qualifying us, and those slaves, as FFVs. Though I suspect the branch that claims to be descended from a German knight who served Frederick Barbarossa may be stretching things a bit. A toothless German serf waist-deep in mud seems far more likely.

One of the more common ancestral claims among white-identified people in the US is that we are all “part Indian.” Indian here does not mean from South Asia, but instead refers to those indigenous people displaced by that European invasion, nearly destroyed by the initial unintentional genocide of disease and the subsequent intentional genocide of settler greed.

Now, race is a fiction, with no scientific basis, albeit a powerful one, and humans have relationships and produce children across imagined lines of race and tribe all the time, so many so-called white Americans probably do have non-white blood, again accepting the absurdity of those categories. But much like the Mayflower Pilgrims, we can’t all have a Cherokee great-great grandmother. 

Still, because many descendants of America’s First Peoples have a sort of “dual citizenship,” and because some tribes have leveraged their liminal legal status for profit, tribal rolls have become contested territory in recent years, with people stripped of their tribal identity because they do not have enough tribal “blood,” or, in one iteration, any at all. 

This last category includes some of the “Black Creeks” and similar groups as reported by Caleb Gayle in “We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power,” reviewed by Philip Deloria in the July 25th issue of “The New Yorker.” While I knew that there was a Venn diagram of sorts around Black identity and Native American identity, especially among East Coast tribes, the review of Gayle’s work was eye-opening. 

Continue reading “Black Creeks: 31 July 2022”

The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Testament sometimes referred to as the Pentateuch, is traditionally attributed to Moses, with an emphasis on the role of divine revelation. That is to say, for some in the Rabbinic Jewish and Christian traditions, the Torah is God’s Word as directly revealed to the putative founder of the Hebrew religion. 

This myth was dismissed long ago by scholars. Instead, the Torah was assembled in stages over a period of several centuries, taking something close to the final form we refer to as the Masoretic Text during the Persian Period, after the Babylonian Exile and at least seven centuries after Moses led a small group of rebellious slaves out of Egypt. 

The earliest written sources for the Torah come from the time of the divided kingdoms, the same period that produced the prophet Amos, the voice for economic justice we have engaged for the last two Sundays. But even further back was an oral tradition. This included stories of Abraham and the generations that followed, as well as Hebrew versions of myths shared more widely in the region, stories that were meant to explain what seemed inexplicable, stories like the great flood, Noah instead named Utnapishtim in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Today’s reading is from one of the written sources behind the Torah, a southern kingdom source known as the J text. The passage is one of three back-to-back episodes related to the sin of Sodom, and wrestles with the eternal problem of collective punishment. If God punishes the many for the sins of the few, often for generation after generation in some theologies, then is God willing to forgive the many through the righteousness of the few? This is the question Abraham puts to God. It is a lovely little moment, this human resistance to divine violence. And in the Christian tradition, the orthodox answer is yes. The One can save the many. Of course, in our progressive theology, we have serious reservations about the construction of God as co-dependent and violent, but we’re definitely cool with the redemptive power of the individual.

Instead of focusing on the miraculous mathematics of redemption, I’d like to focus on the sin of Sodom. Like the myth of the great flood, the myth of Sodom’s sin appears to have been drawn from a deeper regional tradition. Here, it is used to explain the loss of two ancient cities in the region, even ancient to the ancients that were telling the tale. While scientists offer us natural explanations for the loss of the twin cities, and evangelicals blame homosexuality, scripture tells us the sin of Sodom is the sin of inhospitality. The underlying myth, complete with inhospitality to the stranger and resulting destruction, shows up again in the Book of Judges, though instead of cities, it is the tribe of Benjamin that is inhospitable and eventually destroyed, through genocide rather than natural disaster.

But let’s rewind a bit. Immediately before this set of stories related to Sodom comes a formative moment for Hebrew identity. An elderly couple, obeying God, has migrated from the region that is today Iraq to the region that is today Palestine. They are quite old and childless, though the man, Abraham, has fathered a son with the slave girl Hagar. One day, three strangers appear. Christians might imagine this to be a proto-trinity, though such an idea would be heresy in the Hebrew tradition. Often, the three are described as angels, or messengers from God.

Continue reading “Angel Gets lost: 24 July 2022”