Category: Main Blog

Matthew 5:13-20

In 1986, the United States Supreme Court delivered a decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. In a 5-4 ruling, the majority affirmed the right of the state to criminalize consensual sexual activity between adults in the privacy of a home. And lest there be any confusion, this was about one thing and one thing only. Many states, including my own Commonwealth of Virginia, had sodomy laws on the books in order to criminalize homosexuality.

I had only been out as a gay man for a couple of years at that point, and only partially out, for if my Army Reserve unit asked and I told, I risked a dishonorable discharge despite having completed my Active Duty obligation, and even faced the possibility of a court martial and time at Fort Leavenworth, the military’s prison in Kansas.

Seventeen years later, the ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick was reversed in Lawrence v. Texas. Of course, marriage equality was still years away, as was protection in employment and housing. By the time the LGBTQ+ community had basic civil rights, I’d moved north, out of the so-called Bible Belt, a region that has subsequently abandoned the Bible and aligned with a heretical cult.

Every week, we remind ourselves here at Park that law and righteousness are not necessarily the same thing, that the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, while the Underground Railroad was criminal, and we are proud to be heirs of the criminally righteousness.

The Supreme Court’s reversal on privacy and sodomy laws aligns well with an oft repeated quote from Thomas Jefferson, carved into the wall of his memorial in Washington, D.C. and taken from a letter he wrote to Samuel Kercheval, a Virginia lawyer and author. Jefferson wrote:

“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Of course, we look back at Jefferson, so critical in the development of our democracy, and see an enslaver, and by some standards, a rapist, for not only did we mostly cast off slavery as a nation, but we problematize consent when there is an enormous power differential, as there was between Jefferson and his slave and mistress, Sally Hemmings. To quote Hamlet, Jefferson is “hoisted by his own petard,” being cast as a barbarous ancestor.

Lawfulness and lawlessness are part of our national conversation these days, a lawless regime engaged in ethnic cleansing of opposition party enclaves while claiming those they target due to ethnicity and national origin are the actual lawless ones, presumably including five year-old Liam Conejo Ramos. 

Law and authority were very much part of the national conversation in the time of Jesus as well, and later in the time of Paul, inflection points when it comes to following Jesus and religious law, and following Jesus and civil law. And I’d like to suggest that we come to opposite conclusions.

Continue reading “Our Barbarous Ancestors: 8 February 2026”

Matthew 5:1-12

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, we started Year A in the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle of readings shared by many Protestant denominations. The vast majority of our gospel readings this year will come from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew. Years B and C in the cycle focus on Mark and Luke, the three grouped together as the Synoptic Gospels because they are very similar. 

The Fourth Gospel, John, has unique stories that get distributed throughout the lectionary cycle. For example, the Sunday after Easter always includes John’s story commonly known as “Doubting Thomas,” a story that is not found in the synoptics.

We’ll do a deep dive into Matthew tomorrow night in Monday School, though it is my least favorite gospel. It is also the one with which many are most familiar. It is Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer that we recite. In today’s reading, we find the version of the Beatitudes we know, part of the Sermon on the Mount, probably the only sermon by Jesus you could name. In it, we hear that “blessed are those who hunger and third for righteousness,” as opposed to Luke’s version, which declares “blessed are those who are hungry now.” 

Jesus lived in a time of backbreaking extractions from Rome, a time of famine and drought. I am inclined to believe Luke’s version is the more authentic, consistent with that gospel’s focus on those at the margins. Luke also pair’s the blessings with “woes,” verses like 6:24 which declares “But how terrible for you who are rich, because you have already received your comfort,” which again, feels consistent with First Century Galilee and other aspects of the prophetic tradition, a tradition with which Jesus identified.

Part of Matthew’s agenda is to cast Jesus as thoroughly Jewish, which he was, and particularly as a new Moses, which he probably wasn’t. That is why this sermon is on a mount, meant as an echo of Mount Sinai where Moses encountered God and received the Ten Commandments. In Luke, this text is part of a Sermon on the Plain. 

It was not uncommon to think of God in connection to high places, especially on a flat earth. The Temple in Jerusalem is built on a “mount.” Jesus is “transfigured,” revealing his divine nature to the three accompanying apostles, on a mountain. Jesus ascends into the heavens by soaring up into the sky, and will, according to Paul, return at the Second Coming from the sky.

But I grew up on a coastal plain, where the tallest hill was literally a pile of trash, and the water table was just below the surface. I experienced the holy not on the mountain top, but in the ocean. This morning, I want to suggest that the Holy Mystery we name as God is just as present in the level and low places, physical and spiritual, as in the high, whether you are a faithful Trinitarian experiencing the divine as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or an adventurer in the land of the uncharted diaphanous. God is there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, even in the Pit of Despair, even if you are being chased by the Brute Squad.

Continue reading “Pit of Despair: 1 February 2026”

Matthew 4:12-23

SERMON Hippo What?

The process of forming and authorizing someone for a Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the United Church of Christ, the kind of ministry that generally requires ordination, is complicated. Someone needs to feel a call to ordained ministry, a call that is affirmed by their own congregation, by the Committee on Ministry of the local association, by an Ecclesiastical Council representing all of the congregations in the local association, and a body, a congregation or a chaplaincy, that calls the candidate into service. There are many other boxes to check along the way, educational and clinical, but these are the theologically essential checkpoints, this shared sense of a call.

There are guidelines from the national setting’s Office of Ministerial Excellence, Support, and Authorization, MESA, but implementation is local, because we are congregational and covenantal. Some local associations have a reputation for being harder than others, including Metro Boston, where I was ordained. Though somewhat reduced with the closure of two of the local theological schools, there are still way too many academics serving in the Boston area who find their way onto the authorization committee.

So it was that I found myself sitting before the Metro Boston Association Committee on Ministry’s session to determine if I was theologically prepared for ministry. I had submitted my ordination paper, one of many gateway texts I was churning out those days, and the committee was asking questions, when a hotshot newly-minted university chaplain began a long rambling question that contained the words “hypostatic union.” One committee member, a local church pastor, was knitting through the meeting, but I did catch her eye roll. 

When bright young chaplain finished his question, indicated by silence, I tried to figure out exactly what it was he wanted to hear from me, if anything, or if he really just wanted to hear from himself, so I asked him to repeat the question. Cue a subtle snicker from our knitter. There followed another long-winded exploration of theological minutia. 

Finally, I responded. “I think you are asking if I have a low Christology. Yes, I have a low Christology.”

I am sure it was grace that carried that local church pastor, knitting needles in hand, though my response, as she did not fall out of her chair or put out an eye. The very smart young chaplain was possibly flummoxed, though I did ultimately pass that portion of the screening process.

Now, to be honest, a better question for someone who intended to serve a local church might have been “What will you do when the organist quits on Saturday night and the coffee pots fails on Sunday morning?” Local church ministry has always been practical, even without our particular Park Church emphasis. 

Continue reading “25 January 2026 ( A Snow Day )”

Isaiah 49:1-7

The Golden Globe Awards were at one time credible though controversial, the work of a Hollywood Foreign Press Association that was mostly blind to the systemic racism in America. In 2023, the enterprise was bought out by a privately-held company called Eldridge Industries. They own all or portions of many American companies and media platforms, the awards now basically billionaires celebrating the achievements of production companies owned by other billionaires.

We’ve always had foreign journalists in the United States, especially since the Second World War. And just as tapes that had been in a basement for half a century became the remarkable 2021 Questlove documentary “Summer of Soul,” about 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, so coverage of America’s Black Power movement by Swedish reporters in the 1960’s and ‘70’s was re-discovered and became the 2011 documentary “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.” 

There is footage of the Rev. Dr. King, of course, though not much, as he was assassinated just one year into the video archive. Other well-known figures of the era featured in the documentary include Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, and Stokely Carmichael. 

It is Carmichael, a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who says on this found footage:

“Dr. King’s policy was, if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

We celebrate King, and there is much to celebrate, though his critics were not limited to white supremacists, witch-hunting anti-communists, and the military industrial complex. Carmichael and Malcom X were Black critics on one side, while there were also Black voices on the other side, concerned that the time was not right to pursue equality, that the non-violent tactics of King and his followers were too confrontational, that any effort to address longstanding oppression would result in greater oppression. 

The 20th century prophet we have turned into a saint, despite his well-documented moral failings, was assailed from all sides.

Continue reading “Sword Mouth – 18 January 2026”

Matthew 3:13-17

Dogmatic Christianity defines heresy as incorrect belief, claiming that there is such a thing as a correct belief that has been directly revealed to humans by God, through a burning bush, prophetic visions, or the actions of the Holy Spirit. 

Constructive Christianity brings skepticism to the table, inclined to believe heresy simply indicates the side that lost, with orthodoxy the result of popularity, violence, or political interference. Those deemed heretics and their texts often felt the flame, not of hellfire, but of our more conventional murder and book burning. 

We do not know if the works of Marcion, a Second Century Christian heretic, were actually burned, but we sure don’t have them. What we do have is Tertullian’s five-volume rebuttal, Adversus Marcionem, allowing us to reconstruct the original heresy, as least as Tertullian understood it.

In short, Marcion claimed that the good and loving god who sent Jesus into the world could not be the same as the malevolent creator god named Yahweh. He rejected the Hebrew Scriptures entirely, and developed his own canon of texts, made up of a shortened version of Luke, and ten of the letters attributed to Paul.

I do not agree with Marcion, but I certainly understand how he got there. If the Jewish Bible is read as an absolute and accurate record of a deity who punishes in an arbitrary and capricious manner, who orders genocide, it is most certainly not great news. That god would be as predictable and as good as your average domestic abuser, neither rhyme nor reason behind the violence and manipulation, the victims, in this case us, trying to justify our own suffering. In fact, some of the prophetic texts do exactly that, attempting to justify what they perceive as divine punishment, invasions and slaughter.

Continue reading “Unoriginal Sin: 11 January 2026”

Matthew 2:1-12

Christmas has a fixed date every year, even if it is most certainly not the actual date for the birth of Jesus. That means Epiphany has a fixed date every year too, January 6th, at least for most of us. Some Orthodox traditions as well as some Middle Eastern Christians still use the Julian calendar for religious purposes, which places the feast on January 19th.

If you are keeping score, that makes January 5th the Twelfth Day of Christmas in our tradition, leaving you on Epiphany Eve with swans a’ swimming and lords a’ leaping and so on, retail value just north of $218 thousand and considerable maintenance costs, the geese and maids not producing quite enough milk and eggs to feed all of those pipers. 

Like many churches these days, we choose to celebrate Epiphany on the first Sunday after the New Year, not really being “holy day of obligation” sort of folks.

Easter moves, as you know. It is the Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox, which changes from year to year. There is even a Latin term for identifying the date of Easter, the Computus Paschalis. Though again, traditions using the Julian calendar for religious purposes often arrive at a different date.

Christianity is not alone in having movable observances. Not surprisingly, the calculation for determining the date of Passover, the feast that brought Jesus to Jerusalem and led to the climactic events in his story, is similar to the Computus Paschalis, “paschalis” derived from “pesach,” ancient Hebrew for the infinitive “to pass over.” 

Passover begins at sundown on the night of the first full moon after the Spring equinox. Except the Hebrew calendar is lunisolar and has to add in leap months seven out of every nineteen years, which can sometimes force Passover to the second full moon after the equinox, most recently in 2016.

For Muslims, the holy month of Ramadan begins on February 18th this year. Well, maybe, depending on whether you accept the date decreed by the Saudis, or insist on a local sighting of the first crescent moon, the traditional method. And because the Muslim calendar is strictly lunar rather than solar, with no leap months, it falls between ten and eleven days short of a solar year annually, meaning everything, including Ramadan, moves in relation to fixed calendars.

Many religious observances are still based on the time of day, which was not precise in ancient times, before modern science and the powerful computers we all carry in our pockets. For example, the Ramadan fast is from dawn to sundown. For Jews, it mattered whether you had time to finish plowing and get back to the house and cleaned up before the sun went down, marking the start of sabbath. 

To help people figure out when exactly it was dawn, the rabbis taught that “It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that it is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.”

Continue reading “Daybreak”

Four weeks ago, on the first Sunday in Advent, we started a new liturgical year, and with it, a focus on the Gospel Traditionally Attributed to Matthew. You may notice that this is not the gospel we read this evening. We’ll turn to Matthew for Epiphany, for the Three Kings who are neither three nor kings, but that is a sermon for another day. Tonight it is an inn that is not an inn and a stable that is not a stable, angels in the sky, because why not? And shepherds, of course. It is all very sweet, not at all murdery, like Matthew.

But here’s the thing: only some of us have made it to the end of this year’s Hallmark Christmas movie, or maybe the Hallmark Hanukkah movie, because that’s a thing now. Some are still waiting for the real estate developer to have a change of heart, for the hometown girl to stay in her hometown. Others are dragging a bag of grief through the season: a raw anniversary, a first Christmas without a loved one, a difficult diagnosis. 

Then there is the world writ large, which feels way more Matthew at the moment than Luke. Give me lambs and shepherds, and even that annoying little drummer boy. If I want Herod, I can turn on the evening news.

But here’s the thing: it is Christmas in Khartoum too. And in Kyiv. There are displaced women giving birth in temporary shelters, families fleeing across borders. The Nativity did not change the world in an instant, no matter what you believe about incarnation. And to be honest, I’m not sure Good Friday did either. 

What Christmas is supposed to change is us, so maybe it is sort of like those Hallmark movies after all, or “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a film that was a bit of a flop when first released, and now considered a classic, one of the great Christmas films, right up there with “Die Hard.”

Let’s not forget that the year after “Wonderful Life” was released, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. issued a memo about the film’s Communist leanings, noting its negative portrayal of bankers. Imagine if we’d had a twit tweeting on Untruth Social back then, had the Ellison billionaires controlling film production.

Christmas is supposed to change us, turn despair into hope, resignation into resistance. It may feel like Pottersville, but the movie ain’t over. George Bailey produced another reality, actual reality, through courage and kindness, small acts that accumulated, a compound interest of righteousness, the exact opposite of Henry Potter’s usury. John McClane is still alive somewhere in Nakatomi Tower. There is a baby in a manger who will make the wounded and sin-sick whole. And you, just plain old you sitting here this evening, can throw a bit more onto the good side of the scale, the side of love. It may feel so small, so insignificant. It’s not. There a bookstore to save, a war to prevent, and family that needs to be hidden from a murdery king. Let’s get to work.

Amen.

Matthew 1:18-25

Please pull down your lap bar. Once the sermon begins, please remain seated and keep your arms and legs inside of the sermon at all times. 

We’re heading toward the Advent Four theme of Love, but we are beginning with Plato, and I’m not talking about Sal Mineo’s character in “Rebel Without A Cause,” for the geezers and classic film buffs who know that movie. I’m talking about the ancient Athenian dude that died three and a half centuries before Jesus was even born. 

Plato is still studied, though his influence has waned slightly since elite schools abandoned the study of “the Classics,” and by classics, I mean old texts in old languages. Even Neoplatonism was not so “neo” anymore by the Middle Ages, and yet here we are. I’ve argued that trying to shove Holy Mystery into a God-shaped box, which is to say a super-sized human-shaped box, has created a monster, and that box was created using Platonic blueprints.

Specifically, Plato suggests that every thing has behind it some absolute and ideal form. Some thing that does not and cannot change. Consider the impossibility of a perfect circle, abstract mathematics the most precise tools cannot ever achieve, atoms being squirmy little things.

Another example: we might see hundreds of different dogs in our lifetime, but Plato’s theory of forms suggests there is another realm of being where there is an absolute dog, the perfect embodiment of dog-ness. While originating in the Pre-Modern Age, the idea fit the project of the Enlightenment rather well. Isaac Newton and his lot convinced us that we could dissect and experiment and measure our way to knowledge, believed that there was such a thing as absolute truth, bowed at the altar of human reason.

While the tools of modernity are still useful, the project itself went a little belly-up just over a century ago with the science of quantum mechanics and the reality that human reason did not lead us to utopia, but instead has brought us to the brink of self-destruction, a precipice upon which we still perch. People looked at the dead in Flanders Fields, technology turned deadly, and figured out that we were not going to think our way out of hate, and that even before the horrors of World War II.

Which brings us back to dog.

In the postmodern age, we no longer appeal to some Platonic idea of “dog.” When I take my puppy to City Hall, most folks gush about how cute he is, which is absolutely true, and critical to his survival when he is barking in the crate at 2:00 am or chewing on a chair leg. But there is one court officer who backs away. She is trained, armed, and scared of Harvey.

“Dog” may be a set of genetic markers for one mostly-domesticated species, but in practice, dog is the sum of all of your previous encounters with dogs. There was a reason the first fire-rescue I remember my grandfather bringing home was called Snapper, a reason I learned about stooping down to pick up rocks while walking the backroads of Saipan, where packs of wild dogs were not uncommon. 

There are wild dogs, working dogs including service dogs, and companion animals. I recognize their intelligence, acknowledge the hubris of those who claim they experience nothing like our emotions, especially love that goofy perfect breed developed by Sir Dudley Marjoribanks at his estate in Scotland. 

“Dog” is not a particularly complicated concept. I mean, it does seem a little remarkable that a Great Dane recognizes a Chihuahua as a dog from a hundred yards away, but they do. 

If every one of us has a unique and sometimes contextual definition of dog, how much more complex is defining something abstract, something like America, or today’s Advent theme, love.

Continue reading “Dog Is Good: 21 December 2025”

Matthew 3:1-12

Isaiah 11:1-10

In 1995, the world marked the Fiftieth Anniversary of the end of World War II, a conflict that raged from 1939 to 1945. 

There were events marking V-E Day, the final defeat of the German Fascist regime by anti-Fascist Allied Forces, and V-J Day, the final defeat of Japan’s brutal colonizing forces, by the equally colonialist Allied Forces. The Japanese surrender only came after atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a catastrophic declaration of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.

Yet, even as the world marked that solemn anniversary, there was violent conflict in Europe. Ethnic battles in the former Yugoslavia included more crimes against humanity, including the Srebrenica Massacre that July, when nationalist Serbian forces slaughtered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

In the fifty years that had followed the Second Word War, United States forces fought three “hot” wars, the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate, the Vietnam War, which we lost decisively, and the brief Gulf War, restoring a brutal monarchy. 

It felt good, in that context, to reminisce about a “good war,” where we were the “good guys” and actually won, even if that required a bit of selective memory. 

An entire World War history II industry followed, books and television series and group tours. Tom Brokaw, a national news anchor, wrote a bestselling book profiling those who came of age during the war, titled “The Greatest Generation,” a term coined decades earlier by World War II General James Van Fleet. Every other generation was apparently not quite so great.

“Band of Brothers,” a hit mini-series profiling a single airborne company, was followed by “The Pacific,” focusing on Marine Corps campaigns against Japan, and more recently, “Masters of the Air,” covering Army Air Corps bombing missions over Europe. The effort to focus on this distant “good war” continued to play out as our post-9/11 wars found us in yet another quagmire, an Afghanistan that has chewed up one foreign power after another, and in an unnecessary and unjustified war in Iraq, where we destabilized an entire region, leading to terrorism and yet more genocide. Along the way, we became the same sort of war criminals we vowed to pursue rather than the moral center we so arrogantly claimed.

The “good war” narrative with its necessary adjunct of national unity is a lie. More than half of those who served in the American military during the Second World War were drafted, and the almost 50,000 who deserted were largely part of a sub-group, men who were drafted and sent into combat. We can’t ignore the military’s ability to manufacture cohesion and consensus, or at least a camaraderie of survival. We also cannot ignore the terror and trauma.

There were other voices. In his 1984 work of oral history titled “The Good War,” Studs Terkel includes the voice of Dellie Hahne, who said:

“World War Two being called a good war is a horrible thing… If they had said to me, Look… we’ll all get our arms and legs blown off but it has to be done, I’d understand. If they didn’t hand me all this shit with the uniforms and the girls in their pompadours dancing at the USO and all those songs – ‘There’ll Be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’ – bullshit!…

Maybe you have to get people to fight a war, maybe you have to lie to them.”

Hahne, who lost a brother in a training accident before he ever saw combat, may well have been right.

Today, we still reminisce about the Second World War, even as our American despot charges toward yet another petroleum war with lies and misinformation, imaginary weapons of mass destruction replaced by Trump with imaginary narcotics, even as he pardons prominent narco-traffickers. His racist tirade against Somali-Americans certainly reminds us that one of the first steps in white-washing violence is to turn your enemy into an “other,” an object.

And here we are, with our Advent Two theme of peace. About that… 

Continue reading “A Good War? : Advent Two 2025”

Matthew 24:36-44

Isaiah 2:1-5

SERMON Another World

Scholars generally consider the prophetic age to coincide with the Jewish kingdoms, before Palestine was reduced to colony-status by a succession of foreign invaders. The first of these independent realms was the singular kingdom established under the warlord, Saul, expanded by the usurper, David, and maintained by his son, Solomon. After Solomon, age old resentments between tribes re-surfaced, resulting in the period of two kingdoms, the Northern Kingdom, generally called Israel, and the Southern Kingdom, called Judah. The prophet was always the outsider, challenging priests and kings.

There are prophets we know only from the histories, like Nathan and Elijah, the latter one of the most significant in the Jewish imagination. 

There are twelve minor prophets, giving us powerful texts like Micah 6:8, at the heart of my personal faith, our congregational identity, and the Social Gospel movement. It calls us to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. 

Then there are the three major prophets, Isaiah, both the original prophet as well as the school of prophecy that expanded that text across generations and contexts, as well as Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Today’s readings, one from the Jewish Bible and one from the Christian Testament, come from the prophetic tradition. 

As we begin a new lectionary year focused on the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, we find Jesus speaking about an apocalyptic re-ordering of creation, an event that begins with the arrival of a figure called the Son of Man. This is easily confused with the phrase Son of God, though these are very distinct figures. 

The Son of Man is drawn from the Book of the Prophet Daniel, a combination of folktales about a character during the Babylonian Captivity and an apocalyptic text written in the Second Century B.C.E. The Book of the Prophet Daniel has the distinction of being the only text partially composed in Aramaic, the same language Jesus would have spoken with others in Galilee.

These ancient languages were gendered, and pre-Rabbinic Judaism was patriarchal, so translators have defaulted to the masculine with Son of Man, but we might better translate the phrase as The Human One, an archetypal “every” person, or maybe as a fulfillment of human possibility. 

Our reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah is from the original prophet of that name. He was active during the final years of the two kingdoms, and saw the fall of Israel to the invading Neo-Assyrian army. These events took place more than seven centuries before Jesus was born, more than five centuries before the Book of the Prophet Daniel was written, more than two centuries before the Babylonian Captivity. 

The gap between Isaiah Bin Amoz and Jesus is difficult to wrap our heads around. We cannot think of it in terms of cultural continuity. For example, there was neither an American culture nor Protestantism seven centuries ago. We’d even be on the far side of the Black Death, the devastating Medieval bubonic plague. 

And yet, despite this massive contextual gap, Isaiah and Jesus share one thing in common: an absolute belief that the society in which they lived was suboptimal. In other words, things don’t have to be like this. 

Continue reading “Another World : Advent One”