Category: Main Blog

Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6, Psalm 72, Matthew 2:1-12

Our Jewish sisters and brothers dance with the Torah scroll once a year, in a celebration called Simchat Torah. It marks the end of a yearly cycle, a schedule of readings that takes them through that foundational text. The formal Torah is, of course, only the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, Genesis to Deuteronomy, so much easier to get through in a year than the entire Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures we re-order and erroneously call the Old Testament. Christians have a more complicated task, for not only must we read the Hebrew Scriptures because Jesus makes little sense outside of the Jewish trajectory that runs from Moses to Maccabees, but we must also read about the life and ministry of Jesus himself, about the growth of the early church, and about the early and evolving understanding of what Jesus meant, an understanding that would continue to evolve long after the formal canon was closed, that continues to evolve to this day as we humans learn more, experience more.

Eventually, many Christians settled on a three-year cycle of readings, a combination of the Hebrew Scripture, always including a psalm, of non-gospel New Testament texts like Paul’s letters, and a gospel, combined in a three-year rotation. The version used by twenty-three denominations and Christian movements in North America is called the Revised Common Lectionary. The United Church of Christ is part of the organizing body, the Consultation on Common Texts, that developed and manages this schedule. We do not, however, dance with our Bibles at the end of our three year cycle, though maybe we should.

The lectionary schedule allows us to feel part of a broader movement of Christianity, and brings a certain discipline to preaching, forcing preachers to deal with texts we might otherwise avoid like a biblical plague. But the lectionary has flaws as well. Because it is based on ancient church customs around feasts and holy days, it can jump around in ways that feel random, even without the wild card of a moving Easter. Last week we had twelve year-old Jesus, this week he is a toddler. Because few of us read all of the assigned texts for any given day, and few attend worship every Sunday anymore, things can feel even more erratic. And then there is John, the oddball gospel, that doesn’t even get a year of its own, instead interrupting when it contains a story we love that is absent in the other three gospels, and there are many of those.

Worst of all, at least to me, is the fact that the lectionary often lifts texts out of their broader context, edits readings removing parts that are inconvenient. If we had been true to the lectionary, we would have never mentioned the sons of Eli in last week’s reading about the boy Samuel, the idea that God was determined to kill them, for we don’t like that ancient understanding of God, a God who punishes. Like fundamentalists, we have our own form of pick-and-choose Christianity. Continue reading “The Rest of the Story: January 6, 2019”

While there is disagreement on the numbering of the Ten Commandments, there is no argument about the first commandment, “I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other God’s before me.” The Hebrew scriptures tell the story of a people who abandon child sacrifice, the worship of idols, of objects, of the “high places” and Asherah poles. Christianity took this further still, declaring that God’s presence was not located in Jerusalem’s Temple, a building destroyed during the lifetime of that first Jesus community, but that God’s presence was to be found where followers broke bread together, and in the face of neighbors, of the poor and of the oppressed.

There is some irony, then, to the ready embrace of idols by a certain segment of Christians, the American flag, statues of men who committed treason as they defended the sin of slavery. But the greatest irony of all is that some worship the very book that tells them not to worship anything but God. They worship the Bible, believing that this human-made jumble of ancient texts is inerrant, despite the countless contradictions, the glaring errors. Some go further still, making the Jacobin-era editors of the Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James, conduits for divine translation. Their God is stuck four centuries in the past, for while the language is sometimes poetic, it is often wildly inaccurate.

I could speak for days about this heresy, and particularly about the hypocrisy of selective literalism, in which some texts, especially those that make women subservient to men and condemn members of the LGBTQ community, are to be taken literally, while we are not meant to take other texts, about shrimp and mixed fibers and tithing and feeding hungry people, literally.

But I don’t need to go there this morning, for the greatest lie the Bible ever told is right there in today’s text. “Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.” Continue reading “Smells Like Teen Spirit: A Homily for December 30, 2018”

[This sermon contains spoilers for the video game Red Dead Redemption 2]

One of the ways I know that I am finally getting old is that I have never played two of the most popular video games. Minecraft has been around since 2011 and has sold 122 million copies, inspired t-shirts and toys and even books.

Fortnite is just over a year old, has over 125 million players, and earns hundreds of millions of dollars every month. It has proven so addictive that some describe it in terms usually reserved for heroin, and the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks have banned it during road trips, as the young players would rather sit in their hotel rooms playing the game than bonding with teammates. Some parents have lost all control and all hope, sending their Fortnite-addicted kids into video game rehab as originally reported by Bloomberg and picked up by dozens of other news outlets.

Fortnite is, to me at least, the more problematic of these two games, and not just because it has proven so addictive. While Minecraft has some combat, it is primarily a game of creativity and crafting suitable for young players. You build and you problem-solve. Fortnite, and particularly its most popular version, while still attracting many children, is primarily a game of violence, though to be fair, not as graphic as some. There is a far less popular creative module to the game, and it is possible to form teams in Fortnite, but neither of these creative and cooperative elements is the focus of the game.

A typical round is a “battle royale,” a fight-to-the-death that starts with 100 players and ends with a single survivor, sort of a mega-Thunderdome for those familiar with the film Mad Max 2. The term “battle royale,” now widely used for this format, originated with a controversial and dystopian Japanese film centered on a death match between junior high students. The Hunger Games in American Suzanne Collins’ series of novels for young adults is a “battle royale,” though the novels themselves do not embrace this every-person-for-themselves mentality. Altruism, sacrifice, and love are the virtues celebrated, not survival and individualism.

I grew up at that moment when arcades and pizza parlors were switching from pinball machines to video games, like Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Joust. Too late for the Baby Boom and too early for Gen X, I was a young adult as we started playing games on early personal computers. I remember how cool it was when a friend in the barracks got a Commodore 64. Like most folks, I have a certain nostalgia for that period in my life, the reason I love the award-winning novel “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, an online techno-future in a virtual world filled with nostalgia for ’80’s pop culture, though the movie was sort of meh, to use a term from the internet.

Today’s young parents all grew up with video games. Many played them. Many still do. Continue reading “Notorious RPG: December 16, 2018”

Word geeks will know that acronyms are a subset of the larger category of abbreviations. An abbreviation can be any shortened word. The “Dr.” before the name of your physician, therapist, or literature professor is an abbreviation for “doctor.” An acronym is an abbreviation formed in a very particular way, by taking the first letter or letters from multiple words. Our government is full of thousands of acronyms, like the infamous three-letter agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA, letters that carry full meaning without needing to be spelled out, and programs to address childhood poverty like SNAP and CHIP. Sometimes an acronym becomes a word in its own right, like scuba, which actually stands for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.

The first iterations of the internet had very low bandwidth, so everything had to be as abbreviated as possible, giving rise to an internet and messaging culture of acronyms. Today, when someone posts something funny, I “LOL,” or if it is super funny, I might even “ROFLOL,” which stands for “rolling on floor laughing out loud.” And when they post something stupid or racist or cruel, I “SMH,” which stands for “shake my head.”

When we are posting online or sending a text message, acronyms and abbreviations might be in all caps, though there are often no caps at all, with everything in lower case, since caps means an extra press of the fingers and might slow us down. Speed texting and tweeting can be a bit of a problem, and not just because people often respond before they think and the internet never forgets.

Depending on familiarity and skill, it might be hard to decode a text message that is all lower case, acronyms and emojis. Emoji itself is one of those “new words” of our internet age and only coincidentally similar to the english word “emotion” since it is actually Japanese for “picture character.” Though you have to wonder about Takeshi Kishimoto and his employers at Google, who, as they created a cross-platform emoji standard, chose to include the poop character that originated in an anime series.

So in our texts and tweets we can have smilies and other emojis, , tons of abbreviations and acronyms, and some caps or no caps, but all caps is always bad, is always considered shouting. This is semiotics in real time, the evolution of symbol and meaning in our own lifetime. Go offline for a week and you might miss a new way of communicating.

Acronyms have been a part of Christian life since the beginning of our movement. The fish symbol used by early Christians was a visual form of the acronym derived from “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior,” which happened to form the word for fish in Koine Greek, IXTHYS, a nice coincidence considering the gospel call for the disciples to be fishers for humans. Continue reading “ALL CAPS: December 9, 2018”

Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller founded the It Gets Better Project in 2010 to give hope to LGBTQ teens, a population that experiences bullying and that has a suicide rate more than double that of the general population. That extraordinarily high rate is based only on cases where teens were self-identified or identified by surviving family members as LGBTQ, so the real number is probably higher. It follows a similar project in the late 1990’s called the Trevor Project. The suicide rate is higher still, eight times as high, among those subjected to “conversion therapy,” a scam in which evangelical extremists convince anxious parents that they can “straighten out” their kids. The legislature failed last year to have Maine join the fourteen US states that currently ban the practice, though we have great hopes for the coming term.

The late Harvey Milk talked about hope all the time. Referring to gay teens like the boy who called him from Altoona, Pennsylvania, Milk said “You got to give them hope. Hope for a better world. Hope for a better tomorrow.” The It Gets Better Project offers hope to the frightened.

Hope is the theme for this first week in Advent. We need hope during the inevitable time between, the time between recognizing the need to ban a cruel practice like the brainwashing and self-hatred that is conversion therapy or to address a wrong like systemic racism, and the eventual realization of justice and love as the result of selfless service by those who dream of a better world. Continue reading “For the Time Being: December 2, 2018”

A challenging sermon on Christ the King in an age of Caesars…

While life in the United States is still far from normal, whatever normal is, there was a bit less buzz this year about tense stares and heated arguments over plates of turkey and stuffing. I don’t know if that is because people have learned what subjects to avoid, if hearts have really been changed, or if people simply are not sitting down in the same configurations they did two years ago when we felt so very divisible, if folks have actually been disinvited. It is probably a little bit of all of the above. Even this year though, there were surely more than a few who would have preferred to be anywhere except where they were on Thursday. For some, it was wanting to be somewhere specific, the “your family or my family” that is always a part of holiday negotiations. Others simply wanted to be in two places at once, not because they wanted to be under a different roof, but because they could not be in the kitchen and watching the parade at the same time, could not be at the dinner table and watching the big game.

If only we had the gift of Isidore. A Spaniard who lived into the 12th century, he is referred to as a “labrador,” which can be confusing in translation, for it does not mean laborer as we might guess. That word would better be translated “obrero” or “trabajador.” “Labrador” meant specifically a farm worker, and not the landowner, but the hired hands. Isidore was the sort of person Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers would represent centuries later, often poor and exploited. Nonetheless, he is the patron saint of both farmers of all kinds, and of Madrid, the gleaming Spanish capital filled with wealth he could have never imagined. Two US cities are named San Ysidro after him. He was renowned for his piety, something that got him in trouble with his fellow “labradors,” who accused him of missing work to attend mass. Continue reading “Isidore: November 25, 2018”

Claiming to be the messiah can get you killed in a terrible and violent way, and not just in ancient Palestine. It happened in Texas in 1978, when George Roden murdered Wayman Dale Adair with an axe bow to the head. You may not remember this particular incident, but it was one part of a larger story you do know. George Roden had been locked in a struggle for several years with the much younger lover of his late mother, who had served as head of their breakaway sect of a breakaway sect of a breakaway sect of a… well, you get the idea.

It all starts during the Second Great Awakening, early in the 19th century, when a Baptist preacher became maybe a little too focused on the parousia. The word parousia is Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, and was most frequently used in secular texts of that age to indicate the arrival of an important person, like an official from the imperial court. In the New Testament, parousia appears twenty-four times, with seventeen of those referring to the second coming of Jesus. During that same age, coins were struck to commemorate Nero’s visit to Corinth, coins that carried the inscription Adventus Augusti Corinth, for advent was the Latin word used for parousia. Advent meant arrival or coming. When we celebrate Advent, we are celebrating the first coming of Christ. Continue reading “Golden Gate: November 18, 2018”

He was born in a Commonwealth nation, and got rich in the newspaper business, including ownership of tabloids in England. Because of laws with which he did not agree, he is no longer a citizen of his native land. Deeply conservative, he used his platform as a publisher not just to report news, but to push a partisan agenda.

You probably think I am speaking of Rupert Murdoch. If so, you are wrong. I am speaking of the Right Honorable Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, though the honorable part is somewhat suspect after his years in a US penitentiary.

Whether or not you agree with his politics and his business ethics (or alleged lack thereof), few will argue with the fact that the man is brilliant. Among his side projects while running a media empire have been a number of books, including massive and respected biographies of both Richard Nixon and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This last may seem surprising, and not just because it is odd for a Canadian with British citizenship to be that engaged in the American presidency. Why would a conservative write a biography of the president that gave us the New Deal and laid the foundation for the safety net that today protects the poor and the elderly? Black is, somewhat begrudgingly, an FDR fanboy. He notes the man’s birth into a wealthy family, and his wholly unremarkable career prior to assuming the presidency. Continue reading “Fear Itself: November 11, 2018”

The verb to build has many synonyms, including to construct and to fabricate. You can build a ship or an airplane, a bonfire or a house, but only the last of these structures qualifies as the gerund, the form of the verb that functions as a noun. To be a building, something must be constructed with a roof and walls and, according to some definitions, must also be meant for permanent use. A sukkah, a temporary structure used during the Jewish holiday Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, would not qualify. You might build a lean-to out of brush as you camp along the trail, but what you are building is not a building, since it is not permanent, and even if it was, it has but one wall, albeit one that is also a roof.

Is the Statue of Liberty, that sign of America’s past welcome to immigrants, a building? It is constructed, it is meant to be permanent, but it does not have a roof or walls as such. Sure, you can walk around inside, ascend to the torch, but you are inside of a sculpture that was constructed as a sculpture.

I ask the same question about one of Gustave Eiffel’s other great constructions, his eponymous tower in Paris. In fact, if you read Wikipedia’s article on the tower, you will notice that it does not refer to it as a building, though it compares it to an 81-story building. The Eiffel Tower is permanent, and there are roofs and walls on portions of the three platforms, yet it feels to me like the difference between a skeleton and a body. It is the logical framework, minus so much that protects and decorates.

Human logic can feel a little like the Eiffel Tower at times too, all wiring and framework, no decoration and protection. This is, for me, why reason alone is not enough for a fulfilling human life, why a reductionist approach that makes us nothing but wiring and framework is not enough for meaning. Continue reading “This Sentence Is False: November 4, 2018”

Like most moments in history, the Protestant Reformation was not the singular act of nailing the Ninety Five Theses to the church doors of Wittenberg on October 31st of 1517, though we tend to pick that date, and that singular man, Martin Luther, for the sake of simplicity.

In truth, the seeds of the Reformation were being planted for at least two centuries before the German monk declared “Here I stand,” seeds planted by prophets like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, tended by many great thinkers of the Northern Renaissance like Erasmus, the Dutch priest and older contemporary to Luther, a groundbreaking translator of scripture, and a leading humanist.

Erasmus, probably best known for his devastating work “In Praise of Folly,” would be associated with many of the important figures of his age, including the English Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, later canonized, and Henry the Eighth, the ruler whose break with the Roman church led to More’s execution. In his recent dual biography of Erasmus and Luther, Michael Massing describes the dutchman’s visit to Rome in 1509, painting a picture of a church and a city in advanced decay. The Roman forum was a cow pasture, the great Capitoline a hill of goats not of emperors. Continue reading “Weekend at Bernie’s: October 28, 2018”