Category: Main Blog

Colossians 1:1-14
Psalm 25
Luke 10:25-37

Bacteria have been a bit of a thing in recent weeks. Last week our lectionary readings included the story of Naaman, the Aramean general who seeks healing in Israel. Naaman is afflicted with leprosy, a disfiguring and contagious condition, something we hear a lot about leprosy in scripture. But the term was used for any disfiguring or unsightly skin condition, so we don’t know for sure exactly what Naaman suffered. Still, it is sometimes actual leprosy, what we today call Hansen’s Disease, and it is bacterial.

Several weeks earlier, I spoke about the human microbiome, the symbiotic bacteria that inhabit our guts and other parts of our body, that we increasingly understand as essential and even formative of our sense of self, with an unhealthy biome contributing to depression and autism spectrum disorder, among other things.

This is a bit of a paradigm shift, for we have been primarily focused on the eradication of all bacteria. We’ve belatedly come to realize that this has been a mistake, this demonizing of entire class of life form. For example, only bacteria and a family of similar single-cell organisms called archaea can synthesize B12, a vitamin essential to metabolism and DNA synthesis, so without bacteria, there is no us, there is no this, no advanced multi-cellular life forms at all. From your yogurt to C-diff, we find bacteria everywhere, contributing to human culture and sometimes taking lives.

It should not be surprising, then, that scientists continue to study this microscopic life that is part of our lives. So it was that geneticist Rotem Sorek and his team at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science began an experiment focusing on bacterial response to a viral infection. Continue reading “Viral: July 14, 2019”

2 Kings 5:1-14

It is probably not wise to shock people right out of the gate, but I’m a pretty straight-forward sort of guy, so here goes: I like okra. Now I know some folks think it is slimy, but that’s just because they don’t know how to cook it. I make a mean gumbo, and breaded and fried, okra is just dandy, not slimy at all.

You want slimy, how about squash, eggplant, raw tomato? So those who know French cooking will not be at all surprised that ratatouille is not one of my favorite dishes. It is a whole dish of baked slime, slices of eggplant, zucchini, squash, and tomato. But Ratatouille sure is a great movie.

For those who are not Disney fans, or who have not been forced to sit through countless hours of Disney with kids or grandkids, Ratatouille was a 2007 Disney-Pixar film set in the Parisian restaurant scene. In it, a rat with culinary aspirations uses a kitchen boy as a front. Much hilarity, drama, and pest control ensue. The main lesson, for there is always a main lesson, is one that appears regularly in children’s literature and film. You can be anything you want to be, even if you are a rat who wants to be a chef.

Now I’m cynical enough to know that isn’t completely true. Nature and nurture do sometimes work to narrow our field of possibility. My childhood dreams did not include Olympic curling, for example, because Virginia Beach was not a real hotbed for winter sports, with or without a broom. Or at least it wasn’t when I was a kid. These days one of the top players in the NHL is from Arizona, so all bets are off. Continue reading “Ratatouille: July 7, 2019”

Galatians 5:13-25
Psalm 16
2 Kings 2:1-14

When we think of prophets, we might think of the Big Three, the named books we encounter most frequently in worship and Sunday School: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We might think of the Book of the Twelve, the minor prophets, sometimes named, sometimes fictional. We might think of other prophets named in the histories that did not leave behind a text, people like Elijah and his student Elisha in today’s reading. But we almost always think of prophets in particularity, mostly singular. Ezekiel isn’t hanging with his homies breaking pots and having seizures. Prophecy is not thought of as a group activity.

This singular conception of the prophet is the result of tradition, our declining familiarity with our scriptures, and our mental tendency to flatten, to simplify. Individual prophets have a name, the groups do not. But Isaiah was not really just Isaiah, but an entire school of religious thought and prophecy that would produce new work in the prophet’s name for at least two centuries after the death of Isaiah Bin Amoz. Jeremiah was closely associated with a major Jewish reform in the decades before Jerusalem was conquered and destroyed by the Babylonians, a reform movement that would produce much of the Hebrew scripture, including the history we read today, and that would continue to expand the book written in the prophet’s name for at least another four centuries. And then there are the unnamed prophets, like those that seem to taunt Elisha in today’s reading, one group numbered in the text as fifty men. Our narrow definition of prophecy does not fit the textual and historical evidence. Continue reading “Lion Bait: June 30, 2019”

Luke 8:26-39
Psalm 42
Galatians 3:23-29

We humans, bipedal thinking animals that we are, operate in one particular time and space, and while we may know that things are often more complex than they seem, we tend toward a mental Occam’s Razor, choosing the easiest and simplest construct whenever possible. So it is that we eat Italian food, take vacations in Italy, maybe brush up on our Italian on the plane, all while thinking that Italian is a thing. But Italy as we have understood it in our lifetimes, is fairly new, emerging during the Risorgimento, the consolidation of many small states, that was not completed until 1871. Even the language we think of as Italian is a construct of that era, drawn from a form of Tuscan that was primarily literary and spoken by the upper class. Neapolitan and Sicilian are not dialects of Italian but instead distinct languages, distant cousins evolved from the same street Latin root. Spain, France, Germany, each was formed as a nation, as an identity, as a language, by distinctly human forces. God forbid I should say it, but the same is true for the United States, what is in and what is out.

If nations can be brought together by force of will, so too can they fall apart. Today, the word used for the dissolution of a nation into small and competing tribes is thought of as Balkanization, something we tend to associate with the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, with horrific war, with genocide, and with the Dayton Accords. In fact, the term first referred to the break-up of portions of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires a century earlier.

The modern nation-state of Israel is a construct. Some of you were even alive when it happened. The ancient state that shapes our thinking and comes to mind isn’t quite what real either We tend to conflate Israel and Judah, to assume the contours of the Holy Land where Jesus taught and healed were roughly analogous to the contours of the Kingdom of David and Solomon. But that kingdom existed for a mere hundred years. Conquest, exile, and immigration made for no clear borders, for cosmopolitanism in some places and for segregation in others.

Our first reading, Jesus and the man possessed, appears in all three synoptic gospels. In Matthew, it takes place in Gadara, a town six miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee in what we think should be Jewish territory. In fact, the town was part of the Decapolis, a set of ten prominent Gentile cities in the region, and had been given to Herod by Augustus. Mark, the source of the story, and Luke, who follows Mark, places it in Gerasa, also part of the Decapolis and a further 27 miles southeast. Gerasa was larger, more grand, and though founded by Alexander the Great, by the time Jesus got there, it was thoroughly Roman.

Of course, we might have known that it was not a Jewish town, whichever town it was, because… well, you know… pigs. Continue reading “Balkanization: June 23, 2019”

Proverbs 8:22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5

J. Robert Oppenheimer would later recount that on seeing the results of his greatest achievement, the world’s first atomic blast, words from the Bhagavad Gita immediately came to mind. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” But Hinduism was not the only religion on Oppenheimer’s mind, for the test itself was code-named Trinity. When asked why, he stated that he had been thinking of John Donne, the great 17th century English poet, dean of St. Paul’s, and member of Parliament.

Though the verses on Oppenheimer’s mind when asked to name the project made no specific reference to the Trinity, Donne was explicitly Trinitarian in his thought and theology. The poem normally listed as number 14 in his Holy Sonnets begins:

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

And there it was, on July 16, 1945, a mushroom cloud breaking, blowing, and burning in the desert, the destroyer of worlds. It is fitting that the desert in which the test site was located was known locally as Jornado del Muerto, the journey of the deadman.

If it is unclear how Oppenheimer, who had poetry and myth and a tremendous amount of science running through his brain, landed on this key term of Christian theology at that precise moment when he was asked for a name, it is equally unclear how we landed on the idea of Trinity itself, though it may be fitting that you cannot look directly at an atomic blast, which would be blinding, and we cannot look directly at the Trinity, despite two thousands years of attempting to put Divine Mystery in a tidy box, for the bow never stays tied. Continue reading “Bomb, Satellite, Guts: June 16, 2019”

Romans 8:14-17
Psalm 104
Acts 2:1-21

When I crossed the Queensborough Bridge on 9/11, it was a Muslim merchant who handed me a cold bottle of water from his inventory. This was the reality of that day, not the cheering Muslim crowds in Jersey City of the infamous lie. Still, it is true that fundamentalist versions of Islam have sometimes had difficulty in societies that are diverse, free, and open, for fundamentalism of any kind makes an enemy of tolerance and peace, is always destructive, whether it is the fundamentalism of American Christians, our very own red, white, and blue Taliban, or the fundamentalism of Hindu nationalists in India, even the fundamentalism of atheist extremists who rage against the existence of churches. It is no surprise that fundamentalism often goes hand in hand with racism and nationalism, for they all violently pursue a mythical and pure past. Still, just as there are moderate and open-hearted forms of patriotism, there are moderate, even progressive, open-hearted forms of Islam, of Christianity, of Hinduism. We like to count ourselves among the most open-hearted of Christian movements.

One of the challenging paradoxes of our age comes when a free and open society welcomes fundamentalists who object to the sort of free and open society that would welcome them. Nowhere has this question been messier than in the Netherlands, where the nation’s tradition of radical welcome resulted in the large-scale immigration of Muslim fundamentalists who objected to Dutch liberalism, to the equality of women, of the LGBTQ community. In November of 2004, one of those Islamic fundamentalists murdered a Dutch film director who had, working with a Dutch-Somali member of the Netherlands’ House of Representatives, created a controversial short film about the treatment of women in Islam. The victim achieved more fame in death than in life, though he carried a rather famous name, for he was Theo van Gogh, great-grandson of Vincent’s brother, an art dealer also named Theo.

Like Einstein, who we discussed last week, Vincent van Gogh has become a cultural icon, movies and songs, Kirk Douglas in “Lust for Life,” Don McLean’s ballad “Vincent,” an episode of Doctor Who, and of course his ubiquitous works, Sunflowers and Starry Night on shirts and bedsheets, umbrellas and underwear.

It may be gauche to love van Gogh, but I do. There may be some snobbish grace in the fact that I can take or leave Monet, prefer Donatello’s David to Michelangelo’s, that I think Cezanne was a prude and Picasso was better before Cubism. But in the end, I just like van Gogh’s use of color, of distortion, his choice of subjects. Continue reading “Theo, Theo, and Vincent: June 9, 2019”

Ephesians 1:15-23
Psalm 47
Luke 24:44-53

There is a powerful monument in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, a window into a below ground chamber of empty bookshelves, for this was the site of the most infamous Nazi book-burning. In the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, one can find a plaque commemorating the site where the vicious Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola met his fiery end in 1498, the same site where he had earlier burned books, paintings, including work by Sandro Botticelli, in the Bonfire of the Vanities.

There is no memorial, however, to the destruction of works of art, specifically religious images, during the 8th and 9th centuries in the iconoclast controversy, though the physical evidence is everywhere in what is present and what is absent in the eastern Mediterranean region. Cultural evidence of iconoclasm exists in the final split between the Western form of the church, which would come to call itself Catholic, or universal, and Eastern forms of the church, who would take for themselves the title Orthodox, for “right belief,” both evidence of chauvinism and hubris.

Today, an iconoclast is anyone who attacks a cherished belief or institution, though it originally meant specifically someone who destroyed images, eikon in the Greek, for that was the spiritual spasm that erupted in the Byzantine empire. In fact, modern iconoclasts might paradoxically become an icon themselves, someone like Albert Einstein, who challenged basic understandings of the universe in his day and age. Think, for a moment, how weird it is that we instantly recognize the image of a man who worked in the field of theoretical physics and died more than a half century ago. Not only do we recognize his image, but we can readily repeat his most famous equation, E=MC2, and name his most famous theory, relativity, though I suspect that I am not alone in knowing these things without really understanding them, for we often know what we don’t really understand.

While the last half of the 20th century would see tremendous leaps in technology, much like the last half of the 19th, the first half of the 20th would see massive shifts in human knowledge, in human thinking, not experienced since the Enlightenment. You don’t have to be a scientist or a geek to know some of the names and theories of scientists and thinkers from that age, Gödel’s Incompleteness, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, Einstein’s Relativity, and Schrödinger’s cat, which has taken on cultural icon status all of its own. Continue reading “Schrödinger’s Jesus: June 2, 2019”

John 5:1-9
Psalm 66
Acts 16:9-15

Mater and Anger are friends.

Well, that’s not exactly right, though what is exactly right is about as improbable as a friendship between these two characters in two very different Disney-Pixar worlds. Mater is a beat up old tow-truck in the Cars franchise, a series of films, spin-offs, and products featuring anthropomorphized motor vehicles that is right in the wheelhouse of a six year old. Anger is one of the personified emotions inside of Riley, a young girl, in the film “Inside Out” with a focus on pre-teens. The actors who provide these voices are respected comedians, though I’m not sure respected is a word that is particularly accurate, nor do I think either comedian would want to be described as respectable, for Mater is voiced by the comedian Daniel Whitney, better known as Larry the Cable Guy, while Anger is voiced by Lewis Black, better known as Lewis Black.

Though they share a career, they are culturally and politically opposites. Black, the elder of the two, is a fiery liberal, a social critic, and has served as an ACLU “ambassador for voting rights.” Larry the Cable Guy? He’s part of the Jeff Foxworthy “You Might Be a Redneck” school of comedy. Let’s just say he’s more likely to show up at a Monster Truck jam than at an ACLU rally. Despite these differences, they remain close friends, something remarkable in the current climate where we are all deep inside our ideological and cultural bunkers.

While I am more aligned with Black’s world view, I grew up among white Southern working class men. This is my native culture, so I need no translator to understand Larry the Cable Guy’s humor. My late father, in the garage with a television above his workbench, would have fit perfectly in Larry-land, though Dad hated comedians that poked fun at his tribe, jokes that came a little too close to the truth, funnymen like that other Disney voice actor, Tim Allen, aka Buzz Lightyear. Though Dad might have disliked Larry’s stand-up, he’d have loved his catch phrase, “Git-R-Done!” My dad was all about getting it done.

Both of today’s readings are about getting it done. Neither text is particularly complex or mysterious, nor is there much in the way of complicated theology. I mean, there is theology, of course, it is the Bible after all, but the focus is on the narrative action. Man needs healing, no one helps him, Jesus skips the intermediary step of getting the man into the pool, instead declaring that the healing has already happened. “Stand up, take your mat, and walk,” says the healing rabbi, and the man does. Boom, mic drop… Continue reading “Mater and Anger: May 26, 2019”

Revelation 21:1-6
Psalm 148
Acts 11:1-18

During my years in the corporate world, at the intersection of technology and design, I worked with Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, governmental and non-governmental organizations. I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement when I was consulting with Hasbro, for they were developing toys for Star Wars films that had not yet been released,. I went out to lunch at “interesting” places with United Auto Workers members in Detroit, not the sort of places I would regularly eat lunch. I walked the streets of San Francisco. But most of my clients were right there in the Big Apple, and among them was the New York Police Department’s CompStat Unit.

Comp and Stat are the giveaways. This is the department’s big data team, before we were using the term big data. Today you can find CompStat online at the NYPD’s website. You will see, at least as of Wednesday, that crime is down again this year in almost every category, with the exception of sex crimes, and that category is always challenging because of variables and delays in reporting.

You wouldn’t know it by listening to the 24-hour news cycle, which feeds on hysteria, nor by listening to politicians, for fear has reliably been the best tool for manipulating and deceiving voters, but the simple truth is that like illegal immigration, crime has been going down for years. It has been going down for so long and there is so much data, that there is now a serious scientific debate about the factors that led to the decline Continue reading “Tipping Point: May 19, 2019”

John 10:22-30
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17

Bastardizing both Shakespeare and Latin, I recently posted to social media the phrase “Et tu, Derby?” It is, of course, a reference to the Bard’s account of the death of Julius Caesar, when his friend Brutus joined the assassins and Caesar uttered the phrase “You too, Brutus?”, as well as to this year’s Kentucky Derby, when the apparent winner was disqualified. It isn’t that I need to have an opinion on horse racing, a subject in which I have zero expertise, and I certainly don’t need to tweet out my ignorance. I knew weeks before the Derby about the twenty-three horses that have died at the Santa Anita track since Christmas, something that has brought unwanted attention to what many perceive as cruelty and endangerment in horse racing, and since the Derby, I have had the opportunity to listen to people who actually do know a thing or two about the sport explain why the entangled legs of racing thoroughbreds are a bad thing. Really, I just posted “Et tu, Derby?” because I’m tired of everything being politicized and divisive. What is the purpose of getting people riled up, political and angry about the Kentucky Derby?

Also while I was away, the Khaleesi had a latte. It was during an episode of the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” set in a mythical and ancient land of dragons and magic and extreme violence, the violence mostly though not exclusively directed at women, one of the reasons I gave up the show several seasons back. The show runners have been notoriously obsessive about detail. For example, they make the teen actor who plays Bran remain in place between takes so that the fur in his costume won’t move. Yet somehow, they allowed what looked like a Starbucks cup to remain on set and to actually appear on screen during last Sunday’s episode, spotted by the sort of super nerds who analyze every aspect of the show for clues, the Reddit crowd. As you can imagine, the internet had a field day, with memes about what sort of latte the mother of dragons would drink. Personally, I view it as further evidence that Starbucks, along with Amazon, Apple, Tencent, and Alibaba, are taking over the world. Not satisfied with their marketshare in real life, they’ve invaded fictional worlds as well. They’ll be opening branches in Mordor and Hogwarts any day now.

And here, at the juncture of dragons, fiction, horsemen, and assassinated emperors, we find today’s reading. Continue reading “Mother of Dragons Latte: May 12, 2019”