Category: Main Blog

There is an irony in the fact that New England is one of the most secular regions of our nation, right behind the Left Coast, while my home state of Virginia is populated by religious charlatans and wanna-be authoritarians. Exactly the opposite was true during the Colonial era, when New England had theocratic leanings, while the Cavaliers of Virginia were often escaping the Puritan takeover of England.

Despite all of that, the fervor of the Great Awakenings, countless conmen with their golden tablets, lost tribes, and intergalactic dictators, (for who can forget Xenu!), America was never really quite as pious as it likes to think. That has been even more true since the Second World War, when church became as much a social and civic space as a religious space. Belief mattered less and less, as we peddled spiritual goods and services, fluff and feel-good and a get-rich gospel, or maybe just a place to hold a potluck and play bridge. No wonder folks are buying into goop and crystals. As least they are asked to believe something, even if absurd and lazy.

But belief matters. Purpose, vision, values, belief… all of these matter. We make decisions every day based on what we believe. The last four years, and the pandemic especially, have been a vivid reminder of how important belief is, from kids in cages and seditionists in the House to hundreds of thousands dead… dead!… that did not need to die from a pandemic that could have been better managed but was instead politicized.

So today, we are going to speak of core belief, not just an abstract consideration of the baptism of Jesus, but a living theology, then look at an analog in a very real problem in our nation, the problem of policing. Continue reading “Original Blessing: 9 January 2022”

Some Sundays are like that valley in Ezekiel’s prophetic vision. You look at the texts assigned by the Lectionary and see nothing but dry bones, just nothing that’s gonna preach, and you pray for the Spirit to blow in and put some flesh on things, to bring what looks dead to life.

Then there are the Sundays like today that offer an embarrassment of riches, even if we choose to focus narrowly on the Feast of the Epiphany, the “Twelfth Day of Christmas” that actually falls on Thursday, for that feast is both the immediate story, from the gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, is a broader and crucial declaration of universalism, is an overture toward the theology of gift in the tradition of Christianity, and is a lesson in civil disobedience. And rather than choose, I’ve just decided to preach them all, and trust that you will choose the one message you need to hear this morning.

But let’s just start with the story.

The idea of these kings, really a tiny part of our narrative, is all that we import from Matthew into our sometimes syrupy telling of the Nativity as children’s pageant, into the plaster or plastic creche we install on the mantle for a few weeks each year. Continue reading “Sunday Celebration of Epiphany 2021”

Christmas Eve

There have been some great Christmas films over the years… It’s A Wonderful Life… Home Alone… Die Hard. I recently watched one of the dozens of new holiday movies that came out this year. This one purported to tell the story of Christmas, its origins. You know, the Elvish holiday a medieval boy in Finland introduced to humans.

Not the origins of Santa Claus, mind you. Not some reindeer with an incandescent bulb for a nose. The actual holiday itself, even the name of the holiday.

Now, I am not the kind to clutch my pearls about the secularization of Christmas. I’m okay with red coffee cups that simply say “Happy Holidays,” and I’m down with including a menorah in our civic holiday displays or forgoing those displays altogether. I’m not a huge fan of the crass commercialization, or of carols before we’ve even disposed of the jack-o-lanterns, but I have little time for the culture wars. Still, this movie really is the ultimate in taking the Christ out of Christmas. And Christ in Christmas is worth keeping. Continue reading “Homilies for Christmas Eve and December 26th”

Many years ago, I did what was once called the “Grand Tour,” most of a year spent backpacking around Europe. It was both and education and an escape from a stuck place, a reset button in the game of life. While there, I discovered a particular jest, often in the form of coffee mugs and t-shirts, that went something like this:

In heaven, the English are the police, the French are the chefs, the Germans are the mechanics, the Italians are the lovers, and the Swiss organize everything.

In hell, the Germans are the police, the English are the chefs, the French are the mechanics, the Swiss are the lovers, and the Italians organize everything.

Like all good comedy, it is funny because it contains some truth. I’m all for Fish and Chips, but have you ever actually had “bubbles and squeak”? Or tried to keep a Renault on the road?

Nations develop reputations, sometimes to their shame, sometimes a matter of great pride. The Romans took great pride in their reputation, not for their roads or architecture, not for their philosophers or historians. No, what the Romans were particularly proud of was their brutality. Their empire did not stretch from England to Persia because they were kind and everyone wanted to be part of the team. Their parasitic colonial enterprise existed because they were cruel. Continue reading “5 December 2021: Advent 2 – Peace”

Though he was Swiss, born in Basel, the Reform Protestant Theologian Karl Barth was teaching in Bonn, Germany when Adolph Hitler rose to power. Barth lost his position there when he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Führer, and went on to be the primary author of the Barmen Declaration, the theological argument against making the German churches subservient to the Third Reich. At that point a persona non grata, he returned to Switzerland, where he taught in Basel until retirement in 1962, the same year he was featured on the cover of Time magazine, not too shabby for an academic theologian.

His retirement freed him to travel, including a lecture tour of America’s top theological institutions. It was at one of these schools, the University of Chicago, that he was asked by a student if he might summarize his theology in one sentence.

Now, brevity was not exactly Barth’s forte. His “Church Dogmatics,” unfinished at the time of his death, comprised four volumes, but each volume was too large to be bound in a single book, so there were thirteen in all, each of the thirteen a physically and theologically dense doorstop. So yeah, summarize that in a single sentence… Continue reading “28 November 2021: Advent 1 – Hope”

I am too young to be a hippie, too old to be a hipster, and I’m not quite at the broken hip stage of things yet, but I have always tried to be a little hip, have always had a slightly funky edge, despite my upbringing in the Stars and Bars-waving working-class South.

As a young adult, I managed to lay my hands on a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, about as granola and Birkenstock as you can get, and even had a copy of Buckminster Fuller’s “Critical Path,” published the year I graduated from high school and the source text for today’s first reading. Though I’ve often yearned for the comfort and respectability of the establishment, which is to say for the benefits of being a white male in a racist patriarchy, I just wasn’t wired that way, so when someone like Bucky talked about a better world, I was ready to listen. I am still sometimes tempted by that comfort and respectability, by privilege, and I’m still not wired that way.

Fuller is an interesting figure. He’s best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, though a German inventor beat him by more than a quarter century. In fact, he invented little that was of real use despite a slew of patents. His Dymaxion houses and Dymaxion cars look like something from the Jetsons rather than the real world. Comparing him to someone like Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, well… there isn’t really a comparison in terms of impact. Berners-Lee gave us Amazon one-click ordering and the rise of Donald Trump and neo-fascism. Fuller gave us some odd buildings and a way of thinking, one rarely used by most folks.

But this latter, this new way of thinking, turns out to be his real legacy, for synergetics was one of the earliest expressions of “whole systems” thinking, complexity science before we called it complexity science, the first real understanding that there was an actual world wide web, not just electrons and light pulses pushing data, but invisible and mysterious connections between all things. This is why people are still talking about him, at least some people, why he was given the label “futurist.”

He also left us some really great quotes, some real zingers, another of which you’ll hear at the benediction.

Fuller’s gift was looking at the current situation as a whole, discerning patterns, and suggesting paths forward. He operated at the intersection of values, intuition, and reason. Like every human who has significantly advanced the human project, he was someone who was dissatisfied with the “is” and striving for the “might be,” much like the figure and feast we celebrate this particular day.

Because satisfaction does not change the world. Comfort does not change the world. And while fear may change the world, and often does, it is never for the better. But discomfort and dissatisfaction can change the world in a good way. In fact, wanting the world to be a better place and believing that you can actually contribute to that goal requires a healthy dose of both hubris and humility, the former to believe your vision is the right one, the latter to realize it might not be. Continue reading “21 November 2021: Christ the King/Reign of Christ/Kin-dom of God”

We were a couple of hours into a journey that would take most of the day, a ferry down the Rio Escondido toward Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

From our position near the bow, I looked back at our guide, and past her to the machine gun nest on the boat’s roof. We had been invited to these best of seats, she explained, not only because Americans who were violating the U.S. embargo by even being in Nicaragua were assumed to be the “good guys,” but also because U.S.-backed terrorists frequently attacked the ferry. They would not attack if they saw gringos on the boat for fear of bad publicity. Our visibility was protection for the locals, and indeed, the only American who had been shot while making the journey up to that point was an African-American, for descendants of enslaved Africans live on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, so he looked like a local.

Being the “good guys,” we felt righteous and smart, that great vice of educated white liberals, the temptation of the savior complex. After all, we were there to learn, but our very presence also showed support for the government that had thrown off a brutal dictatorship, the victorious Sandinista movement that was rewarded with a resounding victory in the nation’s first free election in decades. We were meeting with top Sandinista officials, even attended an event with the president of the country.

Last Sunday, the leader of that great struggle for liberation, for literacy and freedom and opportunity, cemented his autocratic rule of Nicaragua.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Daniel Ortega is simply Anastasio Samoza redux, the corrupt head of an evil dynasty.

And lest we should be tempted by that same self-righteousness my fellow travelers and I were feeling on that eastbound ferry, let us remember that the United States put the Samoza dictatorship in power, and U.S. Cold War paranoia about creeping communism created a state of perpetual threat in Nicaragua, laying the foundation for the Ortega dictatorship.

Bullets and bombs and children dropped out of helicopters, for dropping their children from helicopters we supplied was one of the ways the Samoza regime interrogated prisoners in the 70’s.

I don’t see why we have a need for a metaphysical hell. We seem more than capable of creating hell right here. Continue reading “14 November 2021 “Swords and Bullets, Bombs and Drones: A Faithful Response to Human Violence.””

Moving is never fun, even when you are moving somewhere you want to go. Things get lost… my old Scout and Army uniforms disappeared in a move years ago. Stuff gets broken. Mostly, it is just stuff, like the cheap Target lamp that didn’t survive the trip to Elmira. Our lingering sense of loss over material things should serve as a check on our privilege and sense of vulnerability, our Buddhist sisters and brothers having a thing or two to say about attachment. But sometimes, we have things that are truly precious because they are physical manifestations of our deep story, the way we locate ourselves and make meaning.

One of the most precious physical objects in my household is a small wooden side table. It is not much to look at, not even slightly fancy, more the sort of thing a freshman might make in wood shop, if wood shop still exists in an education system chasing scores on standardized corporate tests.

This little amateur table was made by my grandfather, a man I never knew, for he died when my own father was still a child. He’d been a police officer like his father before him, but back then there wasn’t any effective treatment for tuberculosis, so he was pensioned off and sent out west, to a sanatorium in Albuquerque. There, the family lived in late Depression poverty, sometimes with little more to eat than a potato and a piece of fatback, or whatever was available at the soup kitchen.

This experience had a profound impact on my father, who as an adult worked non-stop until his body would not let him work any longer, that body that was a container for all of his fear of poverty and of hunger. And just as trauma becomes embodied, is mysteriously and genetically passed down through the generations, so too is that anxiety about poverty passed on, that work ethic that says go until you can go no more. I have it. So do each of my sisters. My half-brother, adopted and only re-discovered five years ago, never knew Dad, but he grinds it out like the rest of us.

So when I think about money, I know that the weight, the gravity in my family history, distorts things, the event horizon of a black hole of hunger and fear. I probably get angrier with those who benefit from unearned wealth than is completely appropriate, and am more judgmental of those who are unwilling to work than grace requires. I have little tolerance for those who steal, whether the robbery is committed by a thug with a gun or a private equity firm. Like the Seven Social Sins developed by Canon Frederick Lewis Donaldson and popularized by Mohandas Gandhi, I consider “wealth without work” to be an evil, a cancer on the moral fabric of civilization.

Continue reading “Your Money’s Worth: 7 November 2021”

Back in the olden days, when we used to go to the cineplex… You remember movie theaters, right?

Back in the olden days, when we used to go to the cineplex, there would be movies in some of the other little boxes that I didn’t particularly want to see, but at least I knew what they were, knew that someone was going to see “My Little Pony: The Revenge of Spike” or “Friday the 13th: Escape from Mar-a-Lago,” knew what films were part of the broader cultural conversation. Or not.

These days, we’re all in our own homes streaming Netflix or Hulu, a trend that started even before the pandemic made public gatherings dangerous. And what we see when we open Netflix is what the algorithm decides we should see based on demographics and what we have watched in the past, another little part of the Matrix I discussed two weeks ago. But every so often, a program or film still breaks through into the broader cultural conversation. This has been true recently for the Korean series Squid Game, a smash hit with a serious promotional campaign.

Now, I’m delighted at this one aspect of globalization, not so much with moving all manufacturing to nations with no environmental protection and slave-like working conditions, but definitely with the multiculturalism. I remember feeling sophisticated and even a little smug when I went to the art house cinema to watch a French film back in the ’80’s. Now, I can and do routinely watch programming from Germany and France, India and Korea, at home. Though to be honest, I’m still not quite down with telenovelas yet.

Squid Game, however, is not my favorite import. I’m clearly just not that cool, but you probably knew that. The premise of the series is that hundreds of poor people are tricked into playing a set of children’s games, though with this twist: the losers are killed, the winners get some money. And the whole enterprise is entertainment for the truly rich. It is part Hunger Games, part Battle Royale, and thoroughly grim. Continue reading “Squid Game and Ted Lasso: 31 October 2021”

It is a sign of our extreme peril that when I speak of Siwanatorz, Beliebers, and the Beyhive, I must explain, but I can say “Just the facts, ma’am,” and almost everyone in the room is old enough to know I am referencing Joe Friday on Dragnet, a television program that broadcast its last episode a half century ago. Nonetheless, we start our engagement with today’s gospel reading with “Just the facts.”

The three male disciples we get to know best in the gospels are Peter, James, and John. Peter, of course, is traditionally understood as the leader of the movement after the public torture and execution of Jesus. Like James and John, he has a brother in the movement, though Andrew is at best a minor character.

James, the disciple, brother of John, and son of Zebedee, should not be confused with James, the brother of Jesus, who becomes a follower only after the death of Jesus and is the head of the church in Jerusalem. John, the disciple, brother of James, and son of Zebedee, should not be confused with John who receives the revelation on Patmos, despite the tradition that conflates the two. And none of the three likely wrote any of the texts given their name in the New Testament.

Peter is actually a nickname, given to Simon by Jesus, Simon the Rock, flatteringly “upon which Christ will build the church,” more likely, because he could be a bit thick at times. James and John also earned a nickname, for they were rowdy, and were called “the Thunder Brothers.” And it is the Thunder Brothers who take center-stage in our reading, for they ask Jesus if they can sit, one at his left and one at his right, when he comes into glory.

In the dialogue that follows, Jesus teaches his disciples about servant-leadership, a concept at the absolute heart of the Christian faith and of our United Church of Christ understanding of ministry, a belief first articulated in the Suffering Servant passages of Isaiah. But Jesus also says it is not for him to decide who will sit at his left and at his right.

This is important, and a reminder that we always err when we isolate pieces of the story, when we have neglected our Bible, for this left side and right side is meant to point forward to that moment when there is someone at his left side and someone on his right side, when he is on the Cross, certainly an odd way to come into your glory. Today’s reading should end with “to be continued,” for the meaning will be revealed in later chapters.

In the same way, the question Jesus asks, whether James and John will drink the cup he drinks and receive the baptism he receives is a pointer to the Passion, for it is in Gethsemane that he prays “Abba, take this cup away from me, though thy will, not mine, be done.” And that cup is the cup of crucifixion.

The Man in Black, the Dread Pirate Roberts, not Johnny Cash, once said “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Well, I’m not quite that grim. I mean, life is also beauty and joy. But it is absolutely true that pain comes to all of us at times, often as a result of or prompt toward growth, and it is a non-negotiable truth that discipleship, the Way of Love and Justice, is going to cost you something. Grace may be freely given, but it is not cheap, not in the traditional theology of costly grace, and not in any modern interpretation, for once you have eyes to see the brokenness of the world, you cannot pretend you haven’t seen. Life may not be pain, Highness, but it is always a risk, a flicker of love at risk of going out. Continue reading “17 October 2021: Escaping the Matrix”