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Today’s scripture reading, the dedication of the infant Jesus in the Temple, can only occur in the gospel written by Luke the Physician. Neither Mark, the author of the oldest gospel, nor the unknown authors of John, the weirdest, give us an infancy narrative.

The gospel that does offer an alternative infancy narrative, traditionally attributed to Matthew, shares with Luke the miraculous conception and the location of the birth, but Matthew is so busy trying to turn Jesus into a new Moses that he manufactures a slaughter of the male babies of Bethlehem and packs the Holy Family hurriedly off to Egypt, just in case you had missed the point.

So this story in Luke set in the Temple is unique in the biblical tradition.

The story serves a strategic purpose. Jesus led a Hebrew religious reform movement, and the increasingly Gentile expansion of that movement insisted on the continuity and legitimacy of their faith. Checking the boxes of Hebrew religious observance was important to them, proving to themselves and hopefully to others that they were not some new cult invented by a charlatan from Tarsus, but were in fact an expression of the Creator’s ancient and expanding covenant with all of human kind.

There is much to unpack here: Simeon who has the Holy Spirit decades before Pentecost, the statement that Jesus will be the source of conflict, and the cryptic message about a sword piercing Mary, and on the “feel-good” side of the ledger, a female prophet, Anna, who recognizes in Jesus the redemption of the Hebrew people.

But let’s leave all the metaphysics aside for a moment, and look at the event that drives the narrative. We are told that dedication of the first-born son at the Temple, along with the blood sacrifice of the two pigeons, or as I like to call them, sky rats, is the standard religious practice. Continue reading “Democracy of the Dead: 6 February 2022”

I am old enough to remember the legendary sportscaster Red Barber chatting with Bob Edwards on NPR’s Morning Edition every Friday for over a decade beginning in 1981. If Fridays were for Red, Wednesdays were for Frank, that other great sports journalist, Frank Deford, who continued on NPR for several more decades.

It was Deford that we heard in today’s first reading, on loyalty to our hometown sports franchises, a test I fail miserably. I grew up in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, the closest major sports franchises located in the District of Columbia, but Major League Baseball’s Senators, the second version of the Senators, for the old Senators had already become the Twins, would also be gone by the time I was eight, off to Texas, and besides Mom was and is a Dodgers fan, her loyalty heading west with that team from Brooklyn. NHL and NBA franchises came to D.C. a couple of years later, but my family wasn’t that interested in hockey or basketball.

No, the only professional sports team followed in our house was the Washington Football Team, then known by their former racist slur of a name. And even with that name changed, I’d have no reason to be loyal to a franchise with such toxic and predatory ownership, for we must remember that professional sport is a billionaires game, an increasingly, an oligarch’s game.

No, by and large, I’ve been willing to cheer for the local team wherever I lived, except for the three years I was at Divinity School, because, you know, the Red Sox.

Though Big Papi is cool. Continue reading “The Bills Were Robbed: January 30, 2022”

I did not preach this past Sunday, 23 January, but expect to be in the pulpit every Sunday from now until Eastertide I, barring a breakthrough infection. Please feel free to join us on Zoom, or to continue to read my better sermons here. Zoom info below, all times Eastern.

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It was the lie told in a thousand forms, uttered by a thousand voices, by generals, politicians, journalists, and activists. The Taliban was some alien thing, an aberration. True Afghanis shared our Western values, especially around women’s rights. We could win the war by defeating the Taliban.

How did that work out?

While it is true that our “allies” in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia played (and continue to play) a key role in supporting fundamentalist Islamist terrorists in the region, the dirty secret was always that the Taliban reflected the actual values of many if not most Afghanis, especially in the vast majority of the nation that is rural and under-developed.

The misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance is who they are. Of course these things are not in their own best interest, socially or economically. But sometimes, you can’t stop people (or a people) from choosing the path of self-destruction. Poland has fallen to an intolerant autocratic patriarchy. As has Texas and Florida.

America’s social, economic, and political progressives have been telling the same lie in a thousand forms for the last half decade. Trump and the movement that brought him to power does not reflect who we are.

It is exactly who we are. And who we have always been. Continue reading “Commentary: 20 January 2022”

People sometimes ask why I insist that the word “the” be placed in front of the word “Reverend.” It is partly just grammar OCD, the same reason I use the Oxford comma. “Reverend” is an adjective, not a title, similar to the way a judge is called “the Honorable,” but the title is actually “judge.” My title, in the United Church of Christ tradition, the office to which I was ordained, is Pastor and Teacher.

Of course, we’re all about the priesthood of all believers in the UCC, not particularly fond of hierarchy, so neither the adjective nor the title gets used very often.

But this is just our informality, not an act of intentional erasure. The same cannot be said for the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., for the adjective is almost always dropped by those who wish to turn King into a secular saint, an analog to Thoreau at best, Gandhi if necessary, forgetting that the latter’s non-violent resistance to British colonialism was rooted in his Hindu faith.

King was not secular. He frequently noted that people thought of him as a civil rights leader, but really he was just a Baptist preacher.

You cannot surgically remove religion from King, from his story, from his legacy. The things he says make no sense outside of the context of Christianity, specifically Protestant Christianity, and especially that beautiful tapestry that is the Black Church tradition. Continue reading “Feast of St. Martin of Atlanta 2022”

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”