Category: Main Blog

One of the National Public Radio programs I enjoy is “Hidden Brain,” so when I heard that host Shankar Vedantam had a well-reviewed new book, I went out and bought a copy. Titled “Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain,” it tells tales that are remarkable, incredible (as in hard to believe), and sometimes horrifying. 

Take, for example, the case of surgeon Bruce Moseley at a VA Medical Center in Texas. He had served as the surgeon for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, had a remarkable track record, yet he had long questioned the efficacy of a common procedure, arthroscopic knee surgery. He wondered if the procedure itself, the mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, had a benefit, or if the actual benefit was derived from the saline wash used during the procedure. He devised a study, and a colleague convinced him to add a third group, a control group that got the incisions, but had neither the actual scraping nor the saline wash. It was not easy to get a study like this approved, but it eventually was, and Moseley found enough patients willing to be randomly assigned into the three study groups.

After two years, patients in all three groups reported marked levels of improvement. And there was no difference between those who received the actual procedure, those who only received the saline wash, and those who had what was, in truth, placebo surgery. Let me say that again. The outcome was exactly the same for those who had the traditional procedure, mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, those who only had the knee joint flushed with saline, and those who had incisions made on their knee with no actual procedure.

This is a particularly stunning example of something we know as the placebo effect. Now, if you are like me, you tend to associate placebos with hypochondriacs and the gullible. After all, you and I are way too smart to ever be duped in this way. But are we?

Continue reading “Placebo : 8 May 2022”

Time travel has been a major feature in fiction, from novels to film, since H.G. Wells introduced his “Time Machine” in 1895. It accounts for literally billions of dollars in content. 

The climax of the 23 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Avengers:Endgame,” includes time travel as the central plot device, and brought in $2.8 billion dollars at the box office worldwide. That was for that single film.

Time travel features in mega-franchises like Back to the Future, Outlander, and Lost, is on Disney Channel and Netflix, and is the central premise of a television franchise that premiered when I was an infant, the BBC classic Doctor Who. That premiere came the day after JFK was assassinated, which caused a delayed start and low viewership, so the series might have never gone anywhere, an alternate timeline many of us would prefer not to imagine. As it was, the series caught on, running until 1989, then rebooting in 2005 and still going strong.

The Doctor, “Who” is not his last name, it is only just the Doctor, is part of a species of time traveling extraterrestrials called Time Lords. They also have the ability to regenerate into new bodies, convenient for a series approaching sixty years running with one main character, Since 2017, the Doctor has been played by Jodie Whittaker, the first woman in the role. Oh, and the Doctor is unambiguously good, though sometimes flawed. I guess even time traveling extraterrestrials have their baggage.

In today’s first reading, one of the Doctor’s time traveling companions, the completely human Amy Pond, has made the decision to travel through time to be with the man she loves. She gets a message to the Doctor through her daughter, and asks him, for the Doctor was a him at that point, to travel back in time and tell her younger self a story, one filled with hope, one promising adventure.

This totally messes with the rules of time travel, of which there appear to be three, though they get broken all the time. The first is that you should never meet another version of yourself. The second is that you should never use time travel for personal gain. This is how you tell the heroes from the villains in these things. And the last is that any change you make in the past can have unexpected and sometimes catastrophic consequences in the future, including eliminating your personal future.

The Doctor does visit young Amy Pond, and the power of the story prepares her for her future adventures. 

Today’s gospel reading is also about the power of story, potentially opening us up to an alternate future for Christianity and therefore all of history, for it involves the early struggles of the church to figure out what Jesus meant.

Continue reading “Rules of Time Travel: 24 April 2022”

Tattoos were tied to socio-economic class when I was young, something for sailors and truckers and sometimes gang members. That has changed generationally. I have four tattoos so-far, a fifth planned, though only one is always visible, and mostly unnoticed.

The first tattoo I got, when I graduated from Divinity School, is a band on my left arm containing a passage from the gospel according to Luke the Physician, written in the original Koine Greek from what is accepted by serious New Testament scholars as the standard edition, the Novum Testamentum Graece frequently called the Nestle-Aland after the famous German scripture scholars critical in its development, the father and son Eberhard and Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland. The Nestle-Aland offers the consensus reading as well as the manuscript variants, for there is no official Bible, despite what you may have been told, certainly not a four century old translation into Jacobin English. 

In fact, and speaking of four, our four primary ancient manuscripts of the Bible, called codices, are from the 4th century, and in the four gospels, there are variants in more than 40% of the verses.

It might be a little geeky to have scripture in the original Greek, or at least as close as we can get to the original Greek, tattooed on my arm. 

Who am I kidding? It is full-on nerd. 

But there is a reason behind my choice. You see, the line is the one we proclaimed at the start of this service of the resurrection, the one we translate as “The Lord is risen indeed.” And that is good enough for our purposes most days. 

Continue reading “Practicing Resurrection: 17 April 2022”

The terms Christianity and Christendom have often been used interchangeably, which turns out to be a problem for at least two reasons. 

The first is the notion that there was ever a singular Christianity. There were wildly different understandings of Jesus among his followers even when he was still alive, and though Christians spent centuries trying to figure out what had happened, to hammer out authorized belief, often with the help of swords, there has always been diversity within Western Christianity, as well as movements that never fell under the sway of the Western church. 

The Coptic Christian communities of northeast Africa have existed since the beginning, and four of the five patriarchs, those in Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople, never consented to the primacy of Rome. The Western Church claimed the title “catholic” to assert that it was the only universal church, while the Eastern patriarchs described themselves as “orthodox,” meaning theirs was the only correct belief. Because humans…

Still, at our withering end of the Christian family tree, it is not uncommon for folks to say Christian and mean only this Roman branch and its off-shoots, especially those associated with the three branches of the Protestant Reformation as well as the Azusa Street movement that would become Pentecostalism.

The second reason we no longer tend to use the terms Christianity and Christendom as synonyms is that faithful Christians, gospel Christians like us, recognize that conflating the religion and the empire creates problems, not just the sort of thing that happens when the Pope tells Henry VIII “no more wives for you,” but also the sort of problem that occurs when a movement founded by an un-credentialed rabbi and focused on social and religious revolution becomes an institution that caters to the powerful, cons the poor, and does everything in its power to make sure that it has power and wealth. 

Today, we tend to use the term “Christendom” to refer to this toxic religious movement that was co-opted by empire, and remains co-opted by empire today, the Jesus-claiming movement that embraced social Darwinism’s systemic violence while denying biological Darwinism, that believes in capitalism and colonialism, the Jesus-claiming movement that is obsessed with what LGBTQ+ folks are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms while happily electing rapists and racists to higher office. Christendom was well represented among the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021.

If the idea of a singular Christianity denies history and ignores diversity, the idea of Christendom is a perversion. If I accomplish nothing more in this life than helping a handful of people encounter Jesus and break-free from the toxicity of Christendom, it will have been a life well spent. Because Jesus is awesome, and Christendom sucks.

Continue reading “Palm Sunday 2022: Good & Crazy”

I had every intention of delivering a Nerf sermon this week. You know, the kind that doesn’t go very far, and can’t hurt anybody even if it manages to hit. 

I brought the thunder last week, and promised you a Lenten season that provided more comfort than challenge. 

Alas, there was a cultural moment, one that will preach, one that is worthy of our attention as progressive Christians, that opens good questions. So not only is this NOT a Nerf sermon, I’m not even going to deal directly with the scripture reading, which is lovely, filled with hope, but not remotely connected to our topic, which is “The Slap.”

Now, there is a chance that you’ve spent the last week in a silent monastic retreat, only leaving your cell at the monastery this morning to come to church, so in case you missed it, let me recap.

Last Sunday night, during the Academy Awards, the comedian Chris Rock cracked a joke about actress Jada Pinkett Smith’s short hair. Her husband, actor Will Smith, walked onto the stage and slapped Rock, twice shouting expletives that had to be censored on U.S. broadcasts. Will Smith was asked to leave the ceremony, and refused.

Many viewed Rock’s joke as out-of-line because Jada Pinkett Smith has been very public about suffering from alopecia, a particular form of hair loss, and candid about how the condition has proven challenging in the context of traditional standards of feminine beauty and the intense spotlight she is under as a celebrity. 

This is a thing she does, sharing her own challenges, her own vulnerability, inviting people into difficult conversations, an invitation I believe leads to healing and wholeness. She is a tough and brave woman. She has to be, for women have to work ten times as hard to get half the recognition of men, and that is squared for black-identified women of color.

Alopecia has been in the news a bit more than usual in recent years. My favorite Nascar driver suffers from it, though that doesn’t really get much attention, and besides, he’s wearing a helmet or at least a ball cap most of the time in public. 

Where it has gotten a lot of attention is with U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, who represents most of Boston and Cambridge in Congress. A progressive Democrat, she is part of a group of young, diverse, and progressive women known as “The Squad,” a group constantly targeted by ethno-nationalists, for they are terrified by women and people of color with power. 

Pressley, who also suffers from alopecia, shaved her head. She is still absolutely stunning, just beautiful, which should matter exactly zippo nada zilch because she was not elected to look good. She was elected to be smart and wise. That has not prevented hateful men from mocking her appearance.

So yeah, men mocking women who are already self-conscious about hair loss. It’s a thing.

Continue reading “3 April 2022: The Slap”

Luke 13:1-9

As I’ve said before, I’ve never really understood the difference between known unknowns and unknown knowns, or whatever silliness it is that drove us into the petro-war in Iraq, but I do know a thing or two about the unknowable. In fact, you might say that is my job which is more about guessing than anything. 

Among the many mysteries on that list is what actually happened during the life and ministry of Jesus, and I’m not even talking about metaphysical questions like the nature of Trinitarian personhood and incarnation. I’m talking about basic facts on the ground, the “this happened, then this happened” sort of thing. For as I recently shared from this pulpit, our sources for his ministry and teaching were written decades after the events, none by a first-hand witness, often using other written sources, primary source material that is long lost, and always written through the lens of later events and later beliefs. Anything written after the Jewish War of 70 C.E. is distorted by the gravity of that cataclysm just as things written in the next twenty years will always be warped by the trauma of the plague and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism.

Still, we can discern some broad patterns in the gospels, a sort of shared story, we just have to temper our certainty with substantial humility.

Ever so often, however, a moment will slip through that looks like it might be historic memory, primarily because it hasn’t been smoothed over. Today’s text contains this sort of material, as well as text that may have gone through some later theological polishing.

We begin with two tragedies. Luke has Jesus reference Galileans killed by Pilate and Judeans lost in a building collapse. The first is important as evidence that, despite later attempts to portray Pilate as mostly innocent of Jesus’ execution, practically passive in the face of the mob, history tells us that he was in fact a cruel man, a racist who despised the Hebrews he thought beneath him. Letting Rome off the hook and blaming Jews has produced millennia of sin.

The latter incident, the collapsed tower, is sometimes thought to have been the result of a natural disaster, though it is just as likely to have been the result of shoddy construction. We simply don’t know.

Jesus refers to these incidents in a problematic passage in which he tells those listening that they will die “just as those did” if they do not change their hearts and minds. Is this rhetoric related to his kingdom teaching, the idea that those who opt-in will be part of God’s eternal kingdom and so never really die? Or is it a moral judgment on both Pilate’s victims in Galilee and the unfortunate Judeans?

As a call to conversion, the passage works. We are called to change our hearts and minds, to align ourselves with God’s restorative justice and overflowing grace. Try to make sense of the theodicy, the justice of falling towers and violent prefects and whether God wills for some people to die tragically, and you end up in dark and dangerous theological back alleys where nothing good is going to happen.

Continue reading “Kudzu: 27 March 2022”

“Avatar,” used here to mean a virtual representation of a computer user online or their player character in a game, has been around since 1979, though it exploded into common usage, at least among geeks like me, with Neal Stephenson’s highly influential 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash,” the same work in which Stephenson first coined the term “metaverse.”

Avatar would see a second surge in usage with the 2009 film of that name, which has grossed $2.8 billion since release, become the basis for a section of a Disney theme park in Florida, and will be followed with much-delayed sequels beginning this December.

This could lead you to believe that the word avatar is very modern, a neologism. It is, in fact, very ancient, derived from Sanskrit. In the massive and rich mythology of India, an avatar is an incarnation of a god, not exactly the same as Christ as one incarnation of Triune personhood, but with some similarities, the idea of a god who walks among humans and is, in one sense, mortal.

Avatar is most often used in association with a particular Hindu god, Vishnu, and with two important avatars of Vishnu, Krishna, a central figure in the Mahabharata, and Rama, the titular character in the Ramayana, the two great and lengthy epics of Indian literature. 

Hindus believe that Vishnu has incarnated nine times, had nine avatars, though in a huge and diverse country like India, there is no unanimity about exactly who those avatars have been, with some sects even including Buddha on the list.

Each avatar has appeared at a point in civilization where things were dire and humankind needed a “reset,” a return to decency and righteousness, at the end of an era, or a “yuga” in Sanskrit. All sects agree that the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu, called Kalki, has not yet come, but that when Kalki comes, it will be the end of the current and somewhat bleak era, the Kali Yuga. In Sanskrit, ten avatars translates as dashavatara.

The idea that Vishnu will come again to set a corrupt and violent world right should sound familiar, for it is not unlike the traditional Christian dogma of the second coming of Christ.

Continue reading “13 March 2022 “Dashavatara””

I had a clever sermon in mind, tying together the two disparate anecdotes in today’s gospel. You can tell I had something clever in mind by the first reading and my sermon title. About that…

Those who read my column for our most recent Cross Currents newsletter know that I have chosen to forego one aspect of Lent this year, the idea of giving up something like chocolate. It isn’t really part of the Reform Christian tradition, and anyway, the world feels pretty Lent-y right now without some trivial sacrifice. Scripture is filled with texts where the prophets announce that the sort of fasting God cares about is fasting from injustice. This is exactly the context of Micah 6:8, that passage so central to the Social Gospel movement. So this year, my Lent is going to include soup and prayer, but also some good books, naps on the couch, and chocolate mousse.

That does not mean that we are going to skip the whole season in worship, however. We still live in the story of the un-credentialed itinerant rabbi from Galilee. And this week’s reading marks a key turning point in how that story was recorded by Mark and copied by Luke and the unknown authors of Matthew. While Ash Wednesday is a ritual of sorts, it is from today’s reading that all eyes turn to Jerusalem. And to the events that occur in Jerusalem.

For too long, those events were framed by Christians as Jesus being killed by the Jews, with Rome being a reluctant player in the whole affair. It was a convenient narrative, especially once Christianity became the default religion of Rome. It also fueled century after century of pogrom and antisemitic violence. As a correction, enlightened and progressive Christians have emphasized in recent decades that it was Rome that actually executed Jesus.

But there is more than enough blame to go around, so let’s take a moment to look at the Jerusalem that is the destination of Jesus and his rag-tag band, the spiritual destination of our Lenten journey, from the Garden to Golgotha and on to the joy of Easter.

The entire region was occupied by Rome, a brutal and violent nation that believed it could swallow up territory at will. Jerusalem was under Roman rule, and technically under the administration of the prefect, Pontius Pilate, who, despite his portrayal in the gospels, was actually known for his cruelty.

But honestly, Pilate did not have to work that hard to maintain control. The Hebrew elite, the members of the Sanhedrin and the Temple establishment, collaborated with Roman rule. They did this for one simple reason. The money was still flowing. They were the wealthy Hebrews, and their ultimate loyalty was not to Yahweh or some ancient dream of a Davidic Kingdom. Their loyalty was to themselves, to profit. They ask the Romans to execute Jesus only after he disrupts the commercial activities in the Temple.

And back to our world. The stock market was back up at the end of the day Friday, and Berkshire Hathaway is in the black, even though innocent people are being slaughtered in Kyiv. Sure, energy prices are going to go up, impacting you and I, but that will just be an excuse for more price-gouging by corporations, and won’t really effect the wealthy, who spend only the tiniest portion of their assets on silly things like heat. I mean, its warm enough in Aruba! The toughest sanction, removal of Russia from the SWIFT system of financial transactions, has been limited to only a handful of banks and didn’t happen until last night, because that might effect the ability of Russian oligarchs to maintain luxury flats in London and Dubai, penthouses in Manhattan, might force their children out of places like Eton and Harrow, and that might actually impact the wealthy.

For when it gets right down to it, the world’s super rich are not loyal to God or country. Billionaires are only loyal to other billionaires, regardless of their nationality or crimes against humanity. Their nation is billionaire. Their religion is billionaire. Just like the wealthy members of Jerusalem’s Sanhedrin. This is what allows gay Silicon Valley denizen Peter Thiel to finance right-wing politicians who would happily round up every other LGBTQ+ person in America and put them in camps, for Thiel knows that billionaire trumps homo every time.

Continue reading “Transfiguration Sunday 2022”

[Note to Catholic friends: there is grace on the other side of the (wholly appropriate) Vatican-bashing.]

Joseph Forgives His Brothers

It is too good of a story to pass up, and so I won’t. 

Monty Python may think no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, but everyone should expect the Vatican Inquisition, which now operates under a stealth title, The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is the group of old men who have worked diligently to make sure that women know their place and homos are appropriately hated. They do this because they speak for God, because they are the gate-agents for divine grace, and you are not getting on the next flight to heaven without their permission. Or at least, so they think.

The Second Vatican Council, which created a more humane and human church, was quickly overwhelmed with a conservative backlash, spearheaded by the fervent anti-communist Pope John Paul II, and his top henchman, Joseph Ratzinger, who headed the Vatican Inquisition and would eventually become Pope Benedict. 

But there are still wings of the Roman church that believe worship is the work of the people, maybe not quite the barefoot guitar masses of the ’70s, but certainly less clerical and a bit more humble, a Nuns on the Bus sort of spirituality, though they too have been targeted by the Inquisition.

I’m not sure he’d describe himself in that way, but Father Andres Arango probably fits well in the low-clerical tradition. So it was, for more than twenty years, he baptized infants with the words “We baptize you,” thousands of infants in heavily Catholic Arizona.

Except, in June of 2020, while the world around them, including Italy itself, was on fire with Covid-19, people locked in their homes, loved ones dying alone in hospitals, the Congregation issued a ruling that this phrasing, “we baptize,” is not only incorrect, but that it renders the baptisms themselves invalid. And because every other Catholic sacrament hinges on baptism, every subsequent sacrament received by those Catholics is also invalid, as the Diocese of Phoenix recently declared in regard to Father Andres. Every marriage. Every communion. Every confession. 

By the logic of this group of church bureaucrats, there are certainly some people who are now in hell because, and pick any of these: a) their sins were not forgiven because their confession was invalid because they were not baptized, b) they were adulterers because their marriage was not valid because they were not baptized, c) they improperly received communion because they were not baptized, etc. etc. 

Father Andres was certainly not the only priest in the world to use a more humble wording of the rite, to remove himself from the role of God-proxy, so there are likely millions more who are, according to the Vatican, damned.

An American Jesuit, Father Thomas Reese, warned that the decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was going to create this sort of chaos and pastoral crisis back in October of 2020, though no one that mattered listened apparently. 

This is not the sort of publicity the Roman Communion needs right now, and contributes to the widespread perception that Christians generally are focused on the wrong things.

The good news is that most Catholics will just roll their eyes at this news, having realized long ago that the Church is not the old men that run it, and while we may want to push-back on that point, now might not be the best time, and besides, God’s grace is greater than human stupidity, in all of its infinitely creative forms, both the grace and the stupidity. 

Continue reading “20 February 2022: Membrane”

Luke’s Sermon on the Plain

One of the buzzwords among fundamentalists is “inerrancy.” By this, they mean the Bible is without error, that every word is directly inspired by the Holy Spirit ( an idea that presumably extends to the act of translation), and that every single word in the Bible is literally true and should be applied directly to modern life. Of course, they then blithely ignore whole sections of the text they find inconvenient, the contradictions, the things about economic justice, about immigrants, about not judging others.

Progressive Christians, on the other hand, understand that the Bible is a human document that seeks to interpret one ancient people’s experience of holy mystery. We know, for example, that the four gospels cannot all be literally true, for they contradict one another, though they can all contain truths. And today is a perfect example of this reality, for Luke’s version of this great teaching is different from Matthew’s more familiar version in several important ways. And we simply don’t have the source text Matthew and Luke shared, commonly known as “Q,” to see which one is right, which one best reflects historic memory.

So while you may tire of my attempts to place scripture in context, I ask you to stick with me. We are going somewhere, somewhere relevant to today as the sermon title suggests, we’re just getting there on the slow boat.

To the early Christian community that produced the gospel attributed to Matthew, it was important that Jesus be understood as a new Moses, the one who establishes a new covenant. It is why they created the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, and packed the Holy Family off to Egypt, as we discussed last Sunday. It is also why in Matthew we get a Sermon on the Mount, for Moses received the Ten Commandments on a mountain. Luke sets this exact same sermon on a plain, “a large area of level ground” in the translation we are using this morning.

The differences go beyond the physical location. The authors of Matthew give us spiritualized Beatitudes. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Luke is concrete. “Happy are you who hunger now, because you will be satisfied.” This is true throughout the two gospels. Luke focuses on those at the margins and without power: women, shepherds, the poor. Jesus being on the plain makes more sense in the Lucan context than Jesus delivering the word from on high, for this Jesus is one with us.

Needless to say, those with power have always preferred Matthew’s version. After all, the Lord of the Manor didn’t have to worry that the peasants were going to take up their pitchforks and seize his storehouse of righteousness by force. Continue reading “13 February 2022: Race Theory is Critical”