Category: Main Blog

You may or may not believe in the virgin birth. It isn’t a box you have to check to be in this place. You might explain away the appearance of walking on water, the feeding of the five thousand, the acts of healing and exorcism, even the ways in which the disciples experienced Jesus as still present after they had seen him executed. There is no reasonable way to explain away the story of the Transfiguration, today’s gospel text from Matthew. It is possibly the least probable of the miracle stories, not the glowing white part, not even the voice of God part, but the appearance of Moses and Elijah, one dead for twelve centuries, the other for seven. If we grant this one, we might as well go all in on the miracles, water into wine and passing through locked doors and the whole shebang, and we are way too sophisticated for that sort of thing, right?

But even if we discount the historicity of the lesson, the physical reality of Moses and Elijah joining Jesus on a mountain-top, we must not discount the importance of the story. Even as the pious fiction it probably is, it tells us something about how the early Christian communities understood themselves in relation to the Pharisaic movement, the dominant form of Hebrew religious practice that would become Rabbinic Judaism, and how they understood Jesus, the Jewish reformer they followed. Those early Christians were taking the raw stuff of their experience of Jesus as being more than, being extraordinary, and cooking it up into a religion, and we are the distant heirs to that tradition, keepers of one version of that family recipe, so we are called to look past the creative and imaginative bits where we might stumble, look past them to the meaning, for the meaning is the treasure. Continue reading “Giannis is Giannis: February 23, 2020”

Video: https://vimeo.com/391926665

In the beginning was mystery. What am I? Why does the earth shake? Why does the rain fall sometimes, and not at other times? What happens when the body is no more? So the amazing fearful creative bipedal primate with opposable thumbs made up stories, projecting on to the universe the map of its own mind, stories of magical forces and gods that looked and acted like things they knew, mostly like themselves, though sometimes they would stretch, posit gods who were other, better, beyond.

This premodern world of stories gave meaning and structure to their lives, and they had discovered that structure was necessary, that the efficiencies of civilization, mutuality, led to thriving. The stories were not perfect, but neither were they.

This premodern way of interacting with the world would not disappear as new ways developed. It would simply become one dimension, one axis, and we still inhabit that space. We trivialize story, call it entertainment, but the great stories still speak of ultimate truth and mystery, of the power of love, of the struggle between good and evil, Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, Hamlet and Krishna, our other selves, working out the wheres and whats of the world.

But human knowledge mostly adds rather than replaces, and as we came to understand more, to record more, to build a critical mass of learned and recorded knowledge, we started to see natural patterns. We convinced ourselves that with careful observation that we could understand everything, absolutely everything, and so the great Enlightenment project, modernity, was born. We test and measure and dissect, answered many of those great questions asked by our ancestors, the whats and whys of earlier ages. Meteorologists explain the flood and drought, the surging seas and raging fires, even if the rapacious powers deny what has been discovered, documented. Continue reading “Choices: February 16, 2020”

It has been a heck of a week. At least no one shot up an elementary school, movie theater, or synagogue in the United States, at least as far as I know, so I’m going to score that as a win, though there was the shopping mall in Thailand. Everything else felt very much too much, the chaos in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, enough to fuel conspiracy theories on the right and on the left for years to come, the trauma of impeachment and retribution, neither of which I’m going to touch, a pastoral third rail sure to leave someone burned, probably me..

It started Sunday night. I confess to having watched the Super Bowl. It was the first time in years. My concerns about the devastating injuries on the field and the long term effects of brain damage off the field have not changed, and I’m not sure it is a problem that can be fixed. Nor has there been any movement on the systemic racism in the National Football League, from the hateful name of the Washington franchise to the notion that billionaire white owners can be political, but millionaire black players cannot. Still, I love the sport, one of only two team sports I’ve ever played, and the Super Bowl is as much a cultural event as it is a sporting event.

I was also on my laptop, which may be why I didn’t quite get everything that was going on in the halftime performance. I was thrilled that two powerful Latinx women were the stars of the show, that the Puerto Rican flag made an appearance with a blunt reminder that the territory is part of the United States and its people are our people. I was less thrilled with the bumping and grinding and general sexual acting out in what should be an inter-generational space, but then again, I’m an old prude who doesn’t like that sort of behavior when it happens in Pride parades either, and I am told in every case that I’m not culturally sensitive nor am I a good feminist when I suggest a little more discretion, from Shakira or Mick Jagger.

I totally didn’t get the children in cages thing that was going on until I read about the harsh clap back from white nationalists, who insist that only their politics are acceptable in the secular religious space of sports capitalism. Continue reading “City on a Hill: February 9, 2020”

Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict, stunned the world, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, when in 2013 he announced he would step down as head of the Roman church. Historians quickly pointed out that it had been done before, and was a possibility created by a Medieval pope, Celestine the Fifth, who served just five months at the end of the 13th century, stepped down, and then was imprisoned for the rest of his life by his successor, Boniface the Eighth.

The times being what they were, Boniface didn’t end so well himself. He was a proponent of papal authority, not just in the affairs of the church, which had experienced the Great Schism between east and west just three centuries earlier, but also papal authority in temporal affairs, meddling in the business of kingdoms and kings. Philip the Fourth, ruler of the emerging nation of France, took issue with papal interference, leading to heated dispute, an excommunication, and the eventual capture and beating of the pope, by French agents. Boniface died soon thereafter.

French kings would force a frightened church into a series of French popes and the relocation of the Papal Court to the French city of Avignon, a period that some call the Babylonian Captivity of the Roman church, after the ancient captivity of the Hebrews. It was a conflict-filled age that would see popes and anti-popes, and even a posthumous trial of Boniface’s corpse, which was disinterred for the occasion. Continue reading “William of Ockham: February 2, 2020”

A respected colleague, author, and friend recently posted on social media that President X was worse than President Y. He based this purely on body count, and by that measure, he was correct, but it seemed to me a bit like saying the Black Death was worse than Ebola, which might be true as long as you are a scholar and don’t happen to live in the Congo, where you might actually die from Ebola, but are unlikely to contract Bubonic Plague. I tried to gently remind him that better and worse are a matter of perspective, measured from our own location. A female colleague was rather less gentle, posting that his statement was an extreme example of white male privilege. She was, of course, correct. Our colleague has every single mark of privilege in our culture except extreme wealth, but he has a good education and a good job and does okay.

Fortunately, he is also capable of listening, so while social media isn’t exactly an ideal platform for this sort of dialogue, he was able to hear that some of us feel remarkably less safe today then we did X number of years ago, especially those of us in communities all too often the victim of hate crimes, Jews, African-Americans, Latinx, and LGBTQ folks among them.

Now, I’m not interested, at least in the context of Sunday morning worship, in debating the relative merits of politician X versus politician Y, nor am I particularly interested in a debate about identity politics. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, a radicalized political correctness that makes us afraid to speak at all or those who have privilege and still refuse to admit it, who deny that identity can matter when it comes to opportunity and to justice. At this point you have to attribute the latter to willful ignorance, akin to the NBA player who insists that the world is flat and those who deny the global climate chaos we see on the news every night.

I am, however, very much interested in this idea of division and unity and location, that last the great mantra of every business person and real estate agent. And we’ll get there, not to a particular location but to an idea, by way of Paul and his position as a follower of the Hebrew religious tradition. Continue reading “Location, Location, Location: 26 January 2020”

As a child, I had a mental image of John the Baptizer in the River Jordan with Jerusalem on a height in the background. I don’t know if this was based on some illustration in a book of Bible stories for children, on felt-board Jesus, because we all loved felt-board Jesus, or if it was pure fabrication, but I was pretty committed to the idea that the river was near the ancient city, no longer a real capital in the time of Jesus but still the center of the Hebrew religion, with its great Temple. My mental image was completely wrong. The River Jordan is a full twenty one miles from Jerusalem, which makes it much more dramatic when we read about the crowds coming from Jerusalem to take part in John’s repentance revival, for there were no cars or buses, not even good hiking boots from Patagonia.

Once they got to the river, they would hear John proclaim that they were sinners who needed to be cleansed. One by one, they would step into that river, where they would be dunked, then pronounced a part of the repentance community, their sins washed away. Baptism felt like a fresh start, and if John was right and the Day of the Lord, was indeed at hand, a day of judgment and wrath, better to be prepared than sorry.

John’s baptism was a religious innovation in his context. The Hebrew religion had the Mikveh, the ritual bath used to cleanse impurity, but it was not used for abstractions like sin. We might be skeptical about the concept of ritual purity and the idea that uncleanliness contracted from things like menstruation and dead bodies was contagious, but to the ancient Hebrews, this was real and physical, so they had mechanisms for cleansing.

Spiritual impurity, sin, was handled by burnt offerings at the Temple, and was not contagious though it could be communal. This thing John was doing was new, this untamed prophet with his dire warnings, exciting to some, scary to others, and deeply offensive to many. By what right did he announce the forgiveness of sins? Only the priests had that right.

While the Baptizer was unique in the Hebrew tradition, and his baptism would eventually be coopted by the Jesus movement, the idea of washing away sins in the river is not unique to Christianity. An ancient Hindu text called the Brahmanda Purana written three centuries before John the Baptizer states that “Those who bathe at Ganga at least once in its pure water are protected from thousands of dangers forever and get rid of sins of generations and are purified immediately.”

Of course, you take your life in your own hands bathing in the Ganga, or Ganges River, today. It isn’t so pure, the level of fecal coliform bacteria more than a 100 times the safe level, though countless thousands still ritually bathe in it every year in great and crowded festivals. The Jordan isn’t thriving either, polluted and diverted for agriculture, at times little more than a filthy ditch. We continue to destroy the planet faster than it can heal itself, threatening our own existence, and our great rivers are no exception to our madness, but that is a sermon for another day.

Churches around the world turn to the baptism of Jesus on this day, the rhythms of church life a tenuous connection between us in an age of so much division. Some will focus on the theophany, that moment when the voice of God is heard, declaring Jesus to be God’s son. Some Christians believe this is a moment of adoption, others a clear signal that Jesus was sent from somewhere else, maybe not the future of our first reading, but possibly from some eternal and heavenly reality separate from our own, one where the things that feel so broken in our world are whole.

Others will focus today on the idea of community as created by the rite of baptism, and baptism is generally still considered a requirement for membership in a Christian church. So central is baptism to Christian self-understanding that denominations as far apart as the Roman church and the United Church of Christ have formal agreements to recognize the validity of one another’s baptisms, the reason I still use traditional language when performing the rite despite my use of inclusive language everywhere else. In many houses of worship, even some of our own, congregants will be asked to renew their baptismal vows this morning.

As someone raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, I was not baptized as an infant, for we claimed a “believer’s baptism,” the notion that you needed to be old enough to understand that you were a sinner in need of God’s grace and salvation in order for baptism to be effective. Like those who trekked down to the River Jordan, baptism was a choice in my childhood, one I made at the age of ten after an extended stay in the hospital. It was filled not just with the symbolism of cleansing, but also with the language of death, dying to the old sinful self, being born again, just as it is in every church and in scripture, even when infants are involved.

Coming into our United Church of Christ tradition, which still baptizes infants, I wrestled with the meaning of the rite. So much did it trouble me that I wrote my Master of Divinity paper on the topic, looking at the history in scripture, theology, and practice. I learned that infant baptism was a sort of fudge, a relic of a time when entire households would convert at once, as we see in the writings of Pal and of Luke, that the idea of original sin, and by extension things like limbo, were manufactured to justify a practice that didn’t make sense in the context of the historic Jesus, for the Hebrew faith had moved away from the idea of inherited guilt by the time of the prophet Jeremiah.

I learned that the Reform branch of Christianity of which we are a part abandoned the idea of original sin though it remains so pervasive that many still think it a core belief. That is worth repeating. Though we have room for theological diversity in the United Church of Christ, our theological heritage is not one that accepts that babies are born into the world stained with sin and pre-condemned, and though those at the font may well believe they are saving the baby from damnation, I suspect very few pastors share in that belief.

I learned that confirmation was meant to address this fudge of infant baptism, for it is fully titled Confirmation of Baptism, in case you ever wondered what it is exactly we are confirming. It is the point where the young person takes on responsibility for their own baptismal vows, stewarded for them for so many years by parents, godparents, and the community of faith, that moment when the young person says “Yes, I choose to be a Christian” in a way that makes sense to them and to their faith community.

And for all of my work, historical, critical, theological and constructive, I still felt I was far from what was happening in the River Jordan and in so many churches around the world every single week, for I miss the urgency, the hunger, the brokenness that was at the heart of John’s baptism and is at the heart of so many baptisms today.

I wanted baptism to have that sense of salvation we read in the work of Ann Lamott, the urgency and relief when the drunk dies in that water and comes up a new person, the tears of joy when someone who feels they are not worthy of love, not their own, not god’s not anyone’s, suddenly feels new.

Religion is not meant for those who think everything is fine. People did not go down to the Jordan because everything was just hunky-dory in their lives and in their world. They didn’t drop their nets and follow Jesus because life was just rolling along.

Religion is for the broken and the wounded, for those who see the brokenness and woundedness of the world. Religion is for those who hunger for the might-be of love and longing and connection, who feel the gravitational pull of the divine. Religion, every religion, is for those who cannot live without it. It is no wonder that the most energetic worship is found in the most broken places.

We have bled our faith dry of any vitality with our logic and skepticism and most of all with our manners, for religion is raw and not always bothered with refinement. It is that bearded prophet standing in the Jordan. And I need it to be real and I need it to be for messy people, because I am a mess. I need this man who is proclaimed to be the son of God to be snarky with James and John, to lose his temper with Peter, to weep in despair in the garden, for I will do those things too. And if he can love when love seems impossible, maybe, just maybe, I can too.

Even that best loved of sermons, the sermon that basically just says “aren’t you swell,” attends to a hole, for there is that small little corner of your soul that is not sure you are swell, not sure you are safe, not sure that you are worthy of God’s love, and no number of “likes” and Instagrams and “snaps” are going to fill it up.

We need to be reminded that we are loved, that we are amazing, that we have original blessing instead of original sin, but we also need a place to put the brokenness and the fear. We need to believe in the might be, for ourselves, and for our world, a world filled with lonely people, scared people, people who do not love themselves, who do not believe they are worthy of love.

Even secularists like Eddie Vedder and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam know the feeling, writing in “Amongst the Waves”:

But I am up riding high amongst the waves
Where I can feel like I
Have a soul that has been saved
Where I can feel like I’ve
Put away my early grave
I gotta say it now
Better loud than too late

Come to the water, the river, the font, the lake, the sea. Feel the waves of holy love wash over you. Better now than too late.

Amen.

Latin is generally referred to as a dead language. You may be surprised to know that it wasn’t exactly that vibrant to begin with. The Romans may have had a mighty empire, but they were all roads and legions, not culture, which generally came from the Greeks. It was Greek, not Latin, that was the lingua franca of the eastern half of the Empire, including the province of Judea where Jesus lived and died.

While we go to great lengths to paint Jesus as a rustic, if there are echos of history to be found in the gospels, then the historic Jesus was likely a polyglot, speaking Hebrew, the language of his religious tradition, Aramaic, the language of the streets, and Greek, for he interacts with a significant number of Gentiles, including Roman soldiers.

The generation of Jesus followers that would record the story and spread the faith throughout the empire read and wrote in a form of Greek known as Koine, even reading the Hebrew holy texts in translation, and sometimes importing mistranslations into their new covenant with God. They also imported Greek ideas into their new faith, soon called Christianity, pulled by the gravity of Platonic thought and later by Neo-Platonism.

And so it is that we come to Epiphany. In truth, Epiphany is tomorrow, the 12th day of Christmas, though Mainline Protestants, if we celebrate it at all, tend to do so on a convenient Sunday.

It is all Three Kings, though the text never gives a number and never calls them kings. I suppose “Some unknown number of Persian Scientists” Sunday doesn’t fit on the church calendar, though it is probably more accurate, for these astrologers certainly thought of themselves as rigorous scientists.

Epiphany is, of course, a Koine word, a root that comes in many forms with multiple prefixes, but that generally means in the verb form to make known, to show or to make manifest. An inscription from a little over a decade after the execution of Jesus reads “theon epiphane sotera,” which translates as “god revealed, savior,” though the inscription refers not to Jesus, but to the Roman emperor Claudius.

Traditional Christian thinking celebrates Epiphany as the revelation of Jesus as the Christ to the Gentiles. This one particular branch of the Hebrew religion understood itself as radically open, no longer bound by race or tribe, and it would spread first and most quickly among Gentiles who were already attracted to Hebrew belief, who were attached to synagogues throughout Asia Minor and Greece and who were known as “theophobes,” or God-Fearers, which had a much more positive connotation at the time than it might have today.

This might be though of as a second form of Hebrew “universalism.” First came the critical move when they stopped thinking of their tribal god as one among many, something called henotheism, and began to believe that there was only one universal God, creator of heaven and earth. Their ethical monotheism was hard won, later making them resistant to Christian claims about the divinity of Jesus. Still, the Hebrews believed they were a privileged people, specially chosen by that singular creating God. The Christian cult would throw open those doors, erasing that sense of privilege, an opt-in faith.

Universalism as a framework, an idea of inclusiveness, would reappear many times throughout history. The form that would eventually be expressed in the Unitarian Universalist movement is one such expression, but probably not at all what you think. That Universalism was a rejection of a particular Calvinist doctrine, that of predestination. Named after a second generation leader in the Reform Branch of Christianity, Calvinists might have gone a bit too far in trying to figure out God, though they were not the first nor would they be the last to make that mistake.

They had decided that since God knew everything and was all-powerful, God must already know who would be saved and who would be condemned. This meant that from the moment you were created, you were either among the elect or doomed through no choice of your own. Never mind the ways this doesn’t square with the idea of freewill, the simple truth is that many would consider a god who created sentient beings predestined to eternal torment a monster. The Universalists argued that a God of Love would have to make salvation universally available. While our heritage springs from Calvinism, we were not particularly hardliners, and we have long since accepted this form of Universalism.

A more recent form of Universalism created shockwaves in some Christian communities during the last decade. Rob Bell came from a fairly Conservative Christian tradition, and was the founding pastor of a mega-church in Michigan. But Bell had a problem with a certain point of Conservative Christian belief, the notion that only those who fit within a fairly narrow definition of “saved” Christian would know eternal life. Like the anti-predestination Universalists, Bell objected to the god this created. As he wrote in his 2011 bestseller “Love Wins”:

Many have heard the gospel framed in terms of rescue. God has to punish sinners because God is holy, but Jesus paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.

Let’s be very clear, then: we do not need to be rescued from God. God is the one who rescues us from death, sin, and destruction. God is the rescuer.

He would go on to write that:

We shape our God, and then our God shapes us. A distorted understanding of God, clung to with white knuckles and fierce determination, can leave a person outside the party, mad about a goat that was never gotten, without the thriving life Jesus insists is right here, all around us, all the time.

Arguing that love wins and God is good, Bell proclaimed the doors of heaven to be open to Muslims and Hindus and all good people. Needless to say, his universalist salvation was resoundingly denounced by many other Christians.

Now, I don’t care if you buy Bell’s universalism, the anti-Calvinist universalism, the universalist salvation that takes in all who believe that we traditionally celebrate on Epiphany, or even the universalism of the ancient Jews who decided that there could only be one God, and that God must be good. They all happen to work for me, but maybe not for all of you.

Our tent is built wide enough to take in universalists of all stripes as well as atheists and doubters and those who check all of the boxes of the traditional creeds. But our tent is built that wide precisely because of something we see taking place in each of these moments of universalism, the ability to re-examine old ideas, to think creatively.

Hope United Church of Christ exists as it does precisely because of the sort of open heads and open hearts we see in each of these moments of universalism, because of a willingness to go deep into our tradition and bringing it into conversation with new experiences, new contexts. Hope exists as it does because when John Robinson said goodbye to the Pilgrims at Leiden, Holland 500 years ago this July, he gave them permission to continue to think, to learn, to critically engage their faith, proclaiming that there was “yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word.”

Light. Truth. Made manifest. Revealed. Epiphany.

We call this “continuing testament,” the radical notion that no single generation gets to shackle all that follow, for every generation brings new gifts, new ideas, new experiences and encounters with the divine. We sometimes express this as “God is Still Speaking,” though we should immediately add “and We are Still Speaking Back.”

The good people of Hope wanted a Baptist in 1881, but they chose Congregationalism in 1883, inspired by this church’s first pastor, the Rev. Mr. George Prescott. They chose a denomination that ordained women when no other Christian denomination would ordain a woman. They chose a denomination that upset a whole lot of folks when it spoke out against slavery.

Ninety years ago, just as Hope was celebrating its first fifty years as a Congregational Church, the Congregationalist movement itself joined with another movement known simply as Christian. From them we learned the right of Christian conscience, the idea that the individual Christian must decide for themselves what they did and did not believe, that if, after study and prayer, their conscience demanded that they reject a belief, dogma, or practice, that was okay.

When this combined and open-minded Congregationalist and Christian Church later merged with the German Evangelical and Reform Church, well represented here in Wisconsin, to form the United Church of Christ, we carried forward this tradition of open-minded and open-hearted engagement with our traditions and the world around us, as well as a commitment to being a church in the world, a church committed to changing lives and a society that did not value all lives equally.

This is our living tradition, this is the extravagant hospitality of the United Church of Christ and of Hope. It is not a consumer product, not a pick-and-choose religion that misappropriates other cultures and tells us only what we want to hear. It is an arduous journey across the desert, bearing gifts, following the light, driven by hope, open to what might be revealed.

So while the entire Three Kings story might be a myth, and that seems more than likely than not, let us listen to it with open hearts for the light and truth that might yet break forth from this story, the truth that anyone can opt-in to the Kingdom of God, a kingdom defined not by dogma, not by creed, not by race, but by love, a love that will always win in the end. Let there be light.

Unless you live under a rock, you know that unto us a child is born, a powerful and mysterious child that disrupts everything. Not in Bethlehem, you silly goose, but in a galaxy far, far away. Even if you don’t watch The Mandalorian, a Star Wars universe television series streaming on Disney+, you’ve probably seen the memes, so I’m not giving away a whole lot when I say “the Child,” and that is the only name we have at this point, is wrinkly, green, and has big ears.

For a certain group of Star Wars fans, those who fell in love with the series during the first trilogy, from 1977 to 1983, this is probably yet one more disappointment, for nothing can compare to that first feverish encounter. We humans do this all too often, holding things up against some idealized whirlwind affair, when true love actually grows and morphs until it is no longer dependent on time and place, produces something more powerful than endorphins. Or maybe we aren’t as good at the hard work of love anymore, for it takes too long for Instagram or Snapchat in a world of outraged tweets about paper straws.

I am fortunate that I did not fall in love with Star Wars as a 14 year-old, when the first film came out. I was a geek, but a nerd of a different color. A whole rainbow of nerdy colors. I only came to appreciate the series in the run up to the second trilogy, for I was consulting with Hasbro, the company making all of the tie-in toys, and wanted to know more about the incredible secrets to which I was privy. These days, I’m still well short of a Jedi Master, though I’ve most certainly joined the Resistance, and yes, I’ve seen the new film, and no, there won’t be any spoilers in this sermon.

But stars and a baby. Seems like the right night.

So here’s the thing. The Baby Yoda memes are not the story. The story, at least on The Mandalorian, is more complex, people from a variety of species and planets with competing interests, unique and amazing in their own ways, no small amount of conflict and violence. In other words, exactly like the Nativity story.

For the most part, our engagement with the Nativity story, actually stories, for there are two and they contradict one another on several important points like the stable, our engagement with the Nativity is often superficial. We harmonize the two versions, gloss over the rough parts or cut them out altogether. Conservative Christians still understand incarnation as connected to crucifixion, resurrection, and redemption, but the church that is secularized and social has mostly lost that thread, cannot see Golgotha for the immensity of the manger, never mind the big jolly guy, elves and reindeer.

This baby, this messiah, is disruptive. You can’t have the healing and miracles and not have turning over tables and whipping the merchants on the Temple. You can’t have the words of forgiveness and comfort and not have the demanding and challenging words about sin. You can’t cut away half of everything and expect what is left to be alive, to be a living faith. This sweet baby was going to make people so mad that they would ask their enemies, the occupying army, to kill him.

Because that is real. Bad stuff happens in this world. The stories we love, from Star Wars and Harry Potter to this baby we celebrate tonight, all of these stories involve struggle, just like most real lives. The stories have the power to inspire and shape our lives precisely because there are Sadducees in our lives that are willing to compromise their values in exchange for comfort. Because most of us contain the Force, but we also contain a little of the Dark Side. Because “He who shall not be named” is filled with hatred and rage.

The victory of love is not passive. Go to Bethlehem, for unto you a child is born. Follow a star, for a great king has been born. Flee to Egypt, for you must protect the child.

The little green child re-orders the priorities of the Mandalorian and all who surround him. The little child of Bethlehem re-ordered the priorities for all of those who surrounded him. Sing the carols, enjoy the bright eyes of the children, the family feast, the afternoon nap. Then, with that first cup of Thursday coffee, rejoice also in the disruptive child. Rejoice that it isn’t all quaint talking animals and cooing, because your life is not all quaint talking animals and cooing. But for tonight…

For tonight, tidings of comfort and joy. For tonight, angels singing, in the sky and right here in this room. For tonight, peace on earth, goodwill… for tomorrow, laughter and love. Then, then, after a winter’s sleep, the real work begins. May the Force be with you.

It is not surprising that those of us in the Abrahamic religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have constructed an understanding of God that is both anthropocentric, that is, centered on humanity, and anthropomorphic, that is, shaped like a human. We understand the world through the lens of our experience of it, so it makes sense. We can’t think like a squirrel, because we are not squirrels, though our friends on the reincarnating wheel of samsara maybe have been a squirrel in some previous life.

We do the same thing with other creatures, projecting on to them human traits and feelings. We do it with our pets, like my Oscar, and with wild animals too, even squirrels. One story that touched the hearts of many a few years back, especially members of the LGBTQ community and their allies, was that of the “gay” penguin couple, Roy and Silo, who co-parented a chick at the Central Park Zoo at the end of the last century. One couldn’t help but see them as an expression of love and longing in another species, even if projecting the term “gay” onto penguins seems a bit absurd. The more we learn, the more we understand that we are not so unique when it comes to emotion, to grief and what looks like love, that there is a continuum of emotional depth across species, which can be both eye-opening and in some ways deeply disturbing.

Roy and Silo were not as unique as some thought at the time. Same-sex coupling has been recorded in more than 1500 animal species. This has been a stumbling block for biologists since it was first observed. The scientific framework articulated by Charles Darwin holds that every trait and adaptation is measured against the survival of the species, either provides a reproductive advantage or disappears. Darwin’s ideas are a fairly late expression of a world-view that reached an apex with the physics of Isaac Newton, the idea of an orderly and mechanistic universe, a universe with rules we could figure out, that made sense, that humans could dec-code. Scientific understanding of physics has changed radically since the time of Newton. Scientific understanding of evolution, of natural selection, while a bit more nuanced than it was in the mid-19th century, is still primarily mechanistic, reductionist, so every time same-sex behavior is observed in other species, researchers go to extraordinary lengths to explain it away.

The November 30th issue of The Economist reported on a recent paper in another journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution, which took a radically different approach to same-sex behavior in animal species. Instead of arguing that it was an energy wasting failure to reproduce, and therefore an aberration, the authors suggested that as animals evolved, genders were not always well differentiated, and sensory organs not particularly well developed, so attempts at mating were pretty haphazard, a bit chaotic, that same-sex behavior was not a weird development in some species. Evolution is, to indulge in a bit of anthropomorphism, inherently bisexual and non-binary.

This new research is pretty awesome in a way, but still sort of reductionist, mechanistic, still grounded in the world of reason and rules, and that just isn’t how the world really works. For example, human intellect and adaptation have given us amazingly efficient linguistic skills, languages a bit like a Lego kingdom, made up and built up of small little bits, combining in a way that makes them capable of expressing almost anything that comes into our heads. Yet that efficiency doesn’t explain a Shakespeare sonnet, despite the attempts of my undergraduate Shakespeare professor to lecture on the formula and meaning. Sure meter and form help make some poetry work, but many poems don’t use meter and form, and all poetry relies on the slipperiness of language. A good poem is an electric eel, charged and uncontrollable.

There is a magic in creation, an exuberance. Some of us may name that magic holiness, see it as the result of some first cause, whether we see that first cause as anthropomorphic and anthropocentric or see that first cause in newer and more ambiguous ways. My late teacher Gordon Kaufman understood God as serendipitous creativity. I understand that holy magic as love, think the ancient authors got closer than they realized when they described God as love. Some of you may not even be willing to go to the point of first cause, may not see themselves reflected in the slowly unfolding story of a Hebrew and Christian thought that is so grounded in radical love, but I hope that you can at least see that there is this magic, this force, this state of being toward and for the other, that is worthy of celebration, that is worth cultivating.

That doesn’t mean love is easy. Nothing could be further from reality. We are, each of us, an imperfect and glorious tangle of flesh and spirit, of fear and courage, of selfishness and sacrifice. It is sometimes hard to embrace our whole selves, the whole selves of others.

Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself, in that order. This is the greatest commandment in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, love, love, and love. The ancient texts we have received are a thousand year long love story between the Hebrew people and the power they named Yahweh, a love story with fights and near break-ups, with blessings and great joy. It isn’t two-dimensional, easy. But it is oh so very real, resonates with our own experience of relationship.

The very particular story we celebrate this season isn’t just Nativity and a babe in a manger, for our tradition says this part of the story is meaningless without the other half of the story. The story is not just that God’s love is with us, not just the acts of healing and teaching, but is also the story that reminds us that all of the worst we humans can muster, all of the worst pettiness, self-righteousness, and violence we could inflict on this human embodiment of love, could not defeat it.

Love is in Bethlehem, but love is also on Golgotha. Love appears suddenly in a locked room and says “It’s true, Thomas. Hate didn’t win.” The campfire on the beach came after the Via Delarosa, the way of sorrow and sacrifice, sunrise and fish for breakfast.

Love is sticking in there. It is forgiving. And it is worth it, for only in the triumph of love do we discover our true selves.

Almost every wedding I’ve officiated in a decade of ministry has included 1st Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous love passage, and though it is out of season it is worth repeating. It reminds us that:

“Love is patient; love is kind,” which is a great start, all warm and fluffy. But then it describes some traits that are harder to pull off. “Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” And especially hard in this age of constant outrage, “It does not insist on its own way.”

Boy, in this day and time… let’s just say the world could do with a lot more love, a lot less insistence, and a whole mess less hubris. Jimi Hendrix nailed it when he said “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.”

Two thousand years after Paul and a few decades after Jimi Hendrix and we still sing about love, write stories about the power of love, for the power of love is there if you are willing to see it. What saves Harry Potter? A magic greater than any magic that can be taught in a Hogwarts classroom. Harry is saved by the power of love. That is a magic I can choose. Harry is the boy who lived, and if we read the Nativity narrative in Matthew honestly, the same could be said of this babe we are preparing to celebrate.

Love is the magic found in the Buddhist call to compassion. It is the magic found in the Jewish call to radical hospitality and justice for those at the margins of society. It is the magic found in the Third Pillar of Islam, charity. It is the magic expressed in the words of Hindu faith we read as we lit our Advent candle, Rabindranath Tagore reminding us that “In love, loss and gain are harmonized. In its balance-sheet, credit and debit accounts are in the same column.”

Explain it away with science all you want. Reductionists can have at altruism as an evolutionary imperative, have art and music and poetry as some bizarre misfiring of neurons. I could be totally wrong. Maybe we are just an accident, random and impossible. Maybe that works for them. I don’t think I could live that way.

Love is my chosen magic, whether I’m projecting it onto some cold-climate birds in a zoo in Manhattan, hearing it in the cadences of poetry by Walt Whitman or Audre Lorde or some Elizabethan playwright, experiencing it in the hard and messy work of being in relationship, of not insisting on my own way. I choose to believe that a crocus will shoot up from the frozen ground, love made real in the power of life itself.

Paul tells us that faith, love, and hope abide, and the greatest of these is love. May it always be so.

Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

Matthew 3:1-12
Isaiah 11:1-10

Cultural divides are not exactly new, no matter what we might think. The nation was torn apart during the Vietnam War, just one example, people not speaking to one another, fights at the holiday dinner table, and worse. It is easy to romanticize the past, but we do well to remember the shootings at Kent State University, the innocent victims, how everything was us vs. them in those days. We’ve been here before, and for many of us, in our own lifetimes. The man in the White House at that time was engaged in an ongoing series of criminal activities, targeting and smearing his perceived enemies, including one lad from Liverpool who had held protests against the war the year before, along with his partner, bed-ins for peace in Montreal and Amsterdam. Nixon wanted John Lennon deported in the worst possible way, any way it could be made to happen. And all Lennon was saying, as the song reminds us this season, is give peace a chance.

Another big but slightly less important cultural divide for that generation existed between the pro-Yoko and anti-Yoko folks, and I am definitely in the latter group. I tend to see post-Beatles Lennon as an emotional and psychological hostage, Stockholm Syndrome if you will, yet we cannot disentangle the bearded Lennon laying in the bed next to Yoko from his powerful voice against the war, and against the institutions that supported it. I totally get the impulse behind his “Imagine,” as anti-religious as it is, for religion has often been an agent of warfare and destruction rather than a force for peace, co-opted by political and nationalist agendas. But there have been Christian voices for peace as well, not only the pacifist branches of Protestant and Anabaptist Christianity, but also notable individuals, Father Daniel Berrigan, the Rev. Dr. King…

And here we sit, on this Second Sunday in Advent, speaking of peace. But what does peace mean? What does it mean in scripture? What does it mean for the progressive Christian, and particularly in our own theological trajectory? Continue reading “Sharknado Redux: December 8, 2019”