Category: Main Blog

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”

John 20:19-31
Psalm 150
Acts 5:17-32

Horatio Alger Jr., the son of a Unitarian minister, made a name for himself in the last half of the 19th century writing stories of teenage boys who, through hard work, pluck, and a generous helping of luck, escaped poverty. Originally set in East Coast cities, he would eventually expand his palette to include the American West, that landscape of rugged white individualism. Alger’s name remains synonymous with this form of rags-to-riches tale.

These days, we have a love-hate relationship with these narratives. We want to be able to celebrate hard work and talent, but also realize that many who work hard all their lives remain trapped in multigenerational poverty, that there are structural and systemic barriers, that our supposed safety net is often a series of hoops and silos that diminish and demean. When we rightly celebrate those who escape poverty, we run the risk of blaming those who are still poor for being poor.

My own father experienced grinding poverty during his childhood. His father, a Norfolk cop, developed tuberculosis. A meagre pension and relocation to a sanitarium in Albuquerque left the family dependent on a local soup kitchen. Dad was determined that his own children would never experience that sort of hunger. He had huge vegetable gardens, and worked non-stop, 24 hours on as a firefighter, 24 hours off, then with a second job on his weekdays off-shift. Mom worked for much of my childhood too, various clerical and sales jobs. Amazingly, my sisters and I were not feral, but always supervised. I was not untethered and wild until I was a teen, but that is a different sermon.

Mom and Dad would have laughed at parents scheduling a date night, which wasn’t a thing for working class folks in the 1960’s and ’70’s. Didn’t happen. The best they could manage was to have friends over for cards every other Friday night. But somehow, when I was eight and my sisters were still toddlers, Mom and Dad managed to schedule an actual anniversary date.

And there, in that giant cinema of an earlier age, the curtains opened, the screen came to life, and my little butt was in the seat between them. Continue reading “Date Night: April 28, 2019”

History buffs may have realized that our reading from Isaiah is the same one quoted by George Washington in his Farewell Address. I’d like to tell you that I am smart enough to know Washington’s address, but what I really know is the musical “Hamilton.” In fact, the season of Lent is over, so it may seem strange to start my Easter sermon with a confession, but I have one. I wish I was smarter than I am. At the very least, I wish I was nearly as smart as some people seem to think I am.

I can read about the first third of the journal Nature, the newsy part, but when I get to the main content, the actual science, I am lost. I love James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Finnegan’s Wake is gobbledygook, even with a guide. And while I think some twentieth century poetry, like T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” is definitely worth the effort, I am convinced that some of those poets we were forced to decipher in high school and college were writing simply to prove to themselves how smart they were. I mean, could Ezra Pound just stick to one, maybe even two, languages? For all of his crankiness, I’ll take Robert Frost any day, poetry that ordinary people understood.

While I may not be quite as smart as I want to be, I am often smart enough to catch continuity errors in novels, films, television shows. Several weeks ago I mentioned attention and sometimes the lack of attention around continuity in the storylines of the DC and Marvel comic universes, which can be challenging when characters like Batman have been around for decades, in the hands of sometimes hundreds of writers and editors across multiple titles, not to mention television and film franchises, each written to a specific cultural context, World War II, the Red Scare, Black Power, even the LGBTQ equality movement.

In the genre-defining television series “Lost,” the moments before the crash are replayed in flashback again and again. The problem is that the flight attendant’s announcement that the seatbelt sign was on has at least three completely different versions, the captain, the pilot, illuminated, turned on, you get the idea. Continue reading “Continuity: April 21, 2019”

Maundy Thursday

A recent issue of the Economist reported on a dramatic discovery, a fossil record of what precisely happened when a giant asteroid smashed into the Yucatan peninsula approximately 66 million years ago. Geologist Walter Alvarez, along with his father Luis, a physicist, both of UC Berkeley, first proposed the asteroid impact theory in 1980, and Walter was on hand recently, almost 40 years later, as archaeologists analyzed perfectly preserved fish discovered in a single day’s deposit of 1.3 meters of debris in North Dakota. The fish were fossilized all facing the same direction, into a massive wave. There was the asteroid’s telltale layer of iridium as well as other evidence of the impact. The event was, as reported, hellfire on earth, and this is tangible evidence, as dramatic as the ruins of Pompeii, a cataclysm frozen in time.

The Alvarez’s and colleagues believed the event marked the end of the age of the dinosaur. There are competing theories, not about whether an asteroid impact created a planet-wide catastrophe, which seems certain, but about whether that was the single cause of the mass extinction. In any case, the dominant and arguably most evolved life forms on the planet went nearly extinct in a relatively short period of time. What was left of dinosaurs evolved into birds, while mammals took off, resulting in, among other things, us.

Things evolve and change, though for most of human history, this goes on without people really noticing. To be sure, there are times when massive shifts happen within one or two generations, and we happen to live in such a time, but generally, we think the way things are is the way things have always been. It is at best a comfortable fiction. Continue reading “Homilies for the Triduum 2019”

Any decent bookstore is chock full of great detectives. There, lingering on the shelves, you will find Miss Marple, Precious Ramotswe, Kurt Wallander, countless others, each the invention of a gifted writer, and many appearing on our television screens. One of those fictional detectives, the mostly forgotten Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, has found a unique niche in university history departments, of all places, where I first encountered him several decades ago. He appears in six novels by the late Josephine Tey, but it is only one of these, “The Daughter of Time,” that has consistently appeared near the top of lists of the greatest mystery novels of all time, placed as high as number one during the 1990’s.

In the novel, Grant, rehabilitating from an injury, uses his time to investigate a centuries old mystery, the fate of the Princes in the Tower, England’s King Edward V and his brother, Richard of Shrewsbury. The book asks a fundamental question: who gets to write history? It is a question we still ask, or at least should still ask, both of near history, of far history, even of scripture.

The two boys disappeared during the reign of their uncle, Richard III, around the turn of the 16th century, and people have speculated ever since. Shakespeare, whose patrons were the Tudor usurpers, would portray Richard as a hunchbacked monster. His bones have been found under a carpark in Leicester and his reputation somewhat rehabilitated by historians, but the remains supposed to be those of the two boys, interred in Westminster Abbey, have never been tested, so their identity remains unproven. We do not know who may or may not have murdered them, nor even know with certainty that they were actually murdered. Tey, through her character Grant, argues that it was the Tudor, Henry VII, not Richard, who had reason to commit the crime and eliminate rivals with better claims to the throne.

You might say that this is ancient history, but lost royalty and not-so-lost royalty have been the subject of more energy than seems quite fitting for a country that worked so hard to throw off a monarchy. Hucksters traveled America in the 19th century pretending to be displaced royalty or selling people, at high price, the lie that they themselves were displaced royalty. Much ink and airtime went to the question of Anastasia during the 20th century, the supposedly escaped daughter of the last Russian tsar, and it might still be the subject of debate had not the bodies of she and her brother Alexie been found. Continue reading “Kings: April 14, 2019”