Category: Main Blog

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”

Philippians 3:4b-14
Psalm 126
John 12:1-8

In the Flood myth, Noah the ark-builder had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth, Presumably, they helped their father build that ark, though after the flood, one son, Ham, would be cursed when he discovered his father drunk and naked. Slave-holding Christians took one line in this story, “lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers,” to justify their barbarity, claiming that the descendants of Ham became the modern day Africans, and therefore the Bible sanctioned slavery. Little did they know that we are all descended from Africans.

More recently, another man named Ham played a key role in the construction of an ark. Ken Ham, originally from Australia, but now living in the US, is paradoxically someone trained in science and a Creationist, responsible for both the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, tourist attractions located in Kentucky. A fanatic in the heresy of selective literalism, he and his foundation promote fundamentalism with the help of generous tax subsidies.

His 510′ long ark is just one example of the age-old fascination with the Flood story. An image of Noah and the ark appears in a two-thousand year-old catacomb, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in Medieval miracle plays and in Benjamin Britten’s one-act opera “Noye’s Fludde.” The disgraced comedian Bill Cosby famously uttered the phrase “What’s a cubit?,” and Steve Carell played a modern day Noah, a congressman who didn’t exactly practice creation care, in “Evan Almighty.”

But of all of these cultural references to the myth, only the 2014 Darren Aronofsky film makes mention of one of the Bible’s great mysteries. Among the challenges Russell Crowe, action-hero Noah, faces are beings described in the first four verses of Genesis 6:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.

Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

Noah’s Ark has been a Sunday School staple since Sunday Schools were invented at the turn of the 19th century, but I don’t think very many of them really discussed the “sons of God” going “in to the daughters of humans,” those daughters giving birth to a race of demi-gods. It is one of the many texts we skip because they make no sense, are nonsense, or are simply disgusting.

The Bible is full of mysteries, for miracle is mystery, but even accepting those miracles at face value, we are often left with unanswered questions and confusing narratives. One mystery that has periodically captured the attention of Christians is the character of Judas, at the center of today’s reading. Continue reading “Judas: April 7, 2019”

2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Psalm 32
Luke 15:1-32

Once upon a time, the National Guard was mobilized and sent to the Mexican border, and no one protested or called it a political stunt. It all started just over one hundred and three years ago, on March 9, 1916, though maybe you could say it really all started at the Battle of Puebla on Cinco De Mayo, fifty-four years earlier, for long before folks were drinking fancy margaritas Cinco de Mayo was a day for celebrating Porfirio.

On that first Cinco De Mayo, General Porfirio Diaz became a national hero as he led Mexican troops against a French intervention. He would ride that celebrity for decades, all the way to the presidency, and with the exception of one four year term, would serve as Mexican president from 1877 to 1911, pretty good for someone who originally ran as an opponent of presidential re-election. Resistance to his continued rule built slowly over the decades, erupting into civil war in 1910, though some prefer the term revolution, depending on which side you pick and which historian you read.

Whether it was a civil war or a revolution, one thing is clear. It was a horrible mess, not a people throwing off a colonial power, a native despot, or even an oppressive economic system, but instead a game of factions and shifting sides, often with little ideology but much naked ambition, greed, and personal animosity.

When a nation become lawless, the lawless thrive. So it was that a bandit from Durango became a revolutionary. Born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, you know him by his adopted name, Pancho Villa. As commander of the División del Norte, he proved himself an able strategist and leader, if not a particularly faithful ally. He would help overthrow one president, but then turn on the one he helped put in power.

Early on he had been depicted as a flamboyant hero in the American press and even caught Hollywood’s eye. But in 1915, he and his army were defeated at the Battle of Celaya in April, and again at the Second Battle of Agua Prieta in November. Villa and his forces became nothing more than a rag-tag guerrilla force from that point on, desperate for supplies. So it was that one morning in March 1916 would find them on the outskirts of Columbus, New Mexico, three miles into US territory. Continue reading “Chasing Pancho: March 31, 2019 Lent 4”

Genesis 15:1-18
Psalm 27
Luke 13:22-35

As we gathered to celebrate my grandmother’s life last November, several of us recalled the character “Nurse Fox” from a children’s book Gram read to us when we were small. A vixen serving as an R.N. seemed perfectly normal to us as kids, our world already chock full of anthropomorphized talking animals, though it turns out nursing does not exactly fit the fox archetype. Foxes are traditionally thought of as clever, sneaky, chicken-stealing scoundrels, truly wily unlike that hapless coyote. You see a hint of this in Disney’s Zootopia, where a petty criminal, the fox Nick Wilde, is one of the co-protagonists. It is Disney, of course, so Nick has to turn out to be a good guy by the time the credits and the blooper reel roll.

It was not Disney’s first animated fox by any means. There was Br’er Fox in “Song of the South,” a 1946 mixture of live action and animation that is today seen as racist. Almost three decades later, Disney’s 21st animated feature, “Robin Hood,” had a fox in the title role, sparring with the Sheriff of Nottingham depicted as a wolf. The message is that if foxes are tricksters and steal your chickens, wolves are truly to be feared, for they will eat you. Fear of wolves is, of course, ancient.

The animated “Robin Hood” actually combined the classic tale of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor with elements of another Medieval tale, that of the fox trickster Reynard, where the opponent was also a wolf. Disney had considered making a film about Reynard and Chanticleer the Rooster in the mid 1930s, around the same time as Snow White, and the character was considered for projects again and again for the next two decades. The tales of Reynard originated in the historically-contested territory of Alsace in the 12th century and spread throughout Western Europe. So popular was the character that reynard became the French word for fox, replacing the previous word, goupil.

There are several species of fox in Palestine, so it is not surprising that Jesus refers to Herod as a fox in today’s gospel lesson. Continue reading “The Fox: March 17, 2019 (Lent 2)”

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91
Luke 4:1-13

Like Donny and Marie Osmond, pop singers from an earlier era and part of a band of entertaining siblings, I grew up a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. My first concert was a long-forgotten country musician named Charlie Rich, and Dad listened to WCMS, the local country station. By the time I reached high school, I had moved to other regions of the radio dial, speeding way past pop and onto what is these days called album rock or classic rock, with a little Southern rock added to spice it up a bit, a musical alphabet from Allman Brothers to Zeppelin. There were exactly two FM stations to choose from for rock and rollers in my hometown, FM99 and K94. It was as if we had teams, and everyone knew which side you were on at 9:00pm, when one station played Free Bird and the other played Stairway to Heaven. Every. Single. Night. We took turns as we cleaned up at the Chief Petty Officer’s Club where I worked.

What you didn’t hear on either of those stations was the Grateful Dead. Despite their massive cult following, the Dead never cared that much about radio airplay, just as well as their jam-band style didn’t really work on a three minute single. Now if you had thirty minutes, they could give you a song… They finally did have a hit single with “Touch of Grey” in 1987. The song had been performed in concert since 1982, but had finally made it on to the album “In the Dark.”

Grateful Dead fans are well known as Deadheads, following the band from concert to concert, each event a sort of pop-up Haight-Ashbury circa 1968. Longtime Deadheads were not particularly happy with the sudden influx of new fans in 1987, many of them decades younger. It was as if there was a limited supply of music, and the newcomers were going to use it all up, or that you had to have protested the Vietnam War and burned your draft card to qualify for a spot in the crowd, and we were just too darned young. We were still a couple of decades away from great rock bands selling Cadillacs and Viagra, something we couldn’t foresee even in ’87. Continue reading “A Touch of Grey: March 10, 2019”

Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
Luke 9:28b-43a

Political nerds and policy wonks always meant the District of Columbia when they used the letters D.C. but the rest of us are there as well these days, obsessively watching or studiously avoiding the news of the latest horror to come out of Washington. It takes some work to top our Maine state author, Stephen King, but they somehow manage to produce a fresh hell in almost every 24-hour news cycle.

For electricians and science nerds, DC means direct current, as opposed to alternating current, or AC, with a rather contentious if surprising history, electricity wars if you will, involving partisans, propaganda, and personalities, characters like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The two together, of course, form a rock band… AC/DC that is, not Edison and Tesla.

In the Venn diagram of Nerdom, some of those political and science nerds would overlap with those who understand DC to stand for Detective Comics, one of the two great comic book universes still standing. Continue reading “Superman vs. Wolverine: March 3, 2019”

Luke 6:27-38
Psalm 37
Genesis 45:3-15

If we learned nothing else from the Ken Burns and Kim Novak documentary series on the Vietnam War, we certainly learned that the body count of enemies killed was a political fiction. Generals and politicians wanted to convince the American public we were winning a misguided war that we were losing, and badly. Even if they had been tempted toward integrity, they would have still faced the challenge of knowing who was and who was not an enemy in any particular hamlet, for dead bodies are even less likely to give up their secrets than living prisoners. War is by definition chaos and confusion, and while we can pretend to have an exact number for our own dead, a wall of names, the Defense Department still considers 1600 to be missing, and that after an additional thousand remains have been returned to the US since relations with Vietnam were normalized.

If it is hard to count our own dead, impossible to count enemy dead, it is even harder still to calculate civilian casualties, especially in the regions where wars tend to take place, regions with poor infrastructure and poor records. Take, for example, the invasion of Iraq, a war that was questioned by my predecessor from this very pulpit, a war that many continue to question in light of the results. In October of 2006, a team led by an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and a physician at Baghdad’s Al Mustansiriya University published a paper in The Lancet, a medical journal, estimating the number of excess deaths as a result of the war, that is deaths above the normal mortality rate, at 650,000 in the three years to that point. It created a firestorm at a moment when public opinion was already turning against the war. The World Health Organization would do a survey of its own two years later, drastically reducing that number to 151,000 excess deaths during that same period. While some might say, “Well gosh, 499,000 less deaths, so we’re alright then…” me, not so much, for even if the WHO was right, that is still 151,000 deaths that would not have happened, 151,000 sons and mothers and best-friends. Dr. Riyadh Lafta, the Iraqi physician who co-authored the study, has refused to play a formal role in subsequent studies because of death threats. He is worried about the safety of his family. But lest you should write that off as the result of living in a lawless war zone, you should remember that members of the country music group The Dixie Chicks received death threats right here in the US for speaking out against the war, and saw their careers effectively ended. Continue reading “A Problem Like Maria: February 24, 2019”

Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
Luke 6:17-26

One of the cooler parts of my years in the tech industry was getting to know James Walsh and the folks at Threshold Music, a recording studio in Manhattan. Once upon a time, I created their web site, integrating some technology that was pretty cutting edge stuff at the time, and made friends, hanging out, breaking bread, even watching a few recording sessions. I know how incredibly time consuming the recording, engineering, and production process can be, how much attention to detail. Then there is Jamaican vocalist Carl Douglas’ greatest hit, which is the exact opposite of all that time-consuming attention to detail. It is the classic one-hit wonder and a perfect example of riding the zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment.

They were recording a disco single, and needed something for the B-side, back when there were 45’s pressed on vinyl. With ten minutes left in the session, they did only two takes. That B-side throwaway went on to be a number one hit in twelve countries including the United States and Britain. Forty-five years later, and it still shows up in memes and even on t-shirts. Despite the doubters, it is clear that “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting.” Continue reading “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: February 17, 2019”

Luke 5:1-11
Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13

Somewhere between the 24/7 Law and Order Channel and the Extreme Basement Swimming Pool Rehab Channel, you’ll find a set of cable channels showing television series from decades ago, things like The Loveboat, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Daniel Boone. I admit to having indulged in that trough of nostalgia, though not without trepidation. The depictions can be jarring, shocking really given our increased sensitivity to misogyny and sexual harassment, to homophobia, to systemic racism and demeaning depictions of minority populations. In fact, no network, however obscure and located in the highest numbered cable channels, would show a program with a performer in black-face, yet they regularly feature Euro-American actors portraying Asians, yellow-face if you will, and still very much a problem today. Red-face, white actors portraying Native Americans, was once common, and those programs are still judged as acceptable for re-broadcast. Rick Vallin, a European immigrant and character actor, appeared in more than 150 films and shows, many Westerns, and regularly in red-face, from 1942’s “Perils of the Royal Mounted” to two separate appearances on the Lone Ranger, first as the not-particularly menacingly-named Blue Feather, then a couple years later with the much more frightening moniker Crazy Wolf.

For many of us, our understanding of Native American culture was shaped by these Hollywood depictions, by the red-face actors on Daniel Boone, by the nightmare of the violent savage. If we are lucky, these misrepresentations were challenged by historic accounts of the Native American genocide at the hands of European settlers, by books like “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” by the late Dee Brown, though these too prove problematic. Even if we rejected the worst stereotypes, we were subjected to romanticized stereotypes of Native Americans in children’s literature, to the crying chief in the anti-litter campaign of decades gone by, to the “we use every part of the bison” trope. We have this idea that the First Peoples were these little clusters of hunters and gatherers without advanced civilization, one moment scalping everyone in sight, the next communing with nature and dancing in fields with a grizzly.

The idea that the continent was mostly empty before European explorers arrived was the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery, since renounced by our United Church of Christ, which in turn justified the land grab and destruction that would follow. If hardly anyone, at least anyone civilized, is on the land, why not just take it? If we can make the other two-dimensional, less-than-human, than we need not do them justice.

But even if we strip away the pernicious myths about Native Americans, we are still completely wrong-headed when it comes to their presence in this hemisphere. The Americas were not sparsely populated. Scientists now believe that there were as many as sixty million indigenous people living here before 1492. Columbus did not discover anything, he simply opened the door for new diseases and slaughter. By the time English settlers arrived in Jamestown, more than a century after Columbus, ninety percent of the indigenous population in the Americas had died, civilizations had collapsed, and massive amounts of cultivated agricultural land had been lost to fast-growing forests, so much so, that Alexander Koch and colleagues recently published a scientific paper that blames the depopulation of the Americas and subsequent mass re-forestation for the Little Ice Age that occurred starting in the 16th century, for that new growth forest captured enough carbon dioxide to cause climate change. Continue reading “Unreal: February 10, 2019”

New Testament Luke 4:22-30
Hebrew Psalm Psalm 71
Hebrew Scripture Jeremiah 1:4-10

We are defined by stories, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape our culture, the stories of our faith, for we emphasize the story of salvation over minutia and legal codes. Some stories double back on themselves, stories reflecting other stories, like Jesus and the Last Supper with his disciples, an echo of Passover and the paschal lamb, which becomes our common feast of broken bread and the shared cup, a story we will re-tell again this morning. The traditional Nativity story, a mash-up of two overlapping stories, becomes the locus of countless other stories, Saint Nicholas become The Santa Clause, Rudolph with his nose-so-bright, George Bailey and It’s a Wonderful Life, and most of all, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and Ghosts, that timeless tale.

For a story that focuses on Christmas, that has the holy feast itself in the title, A Christmas Carol is remarkably free of explicit religion. There is no midnight service, no babe in a manger. Charles Dickens’ Christmas feels secular and civic, long before we had watered down Christianity to social convention. The young Scrooge is not seen in worship, but instead at Fezziwig’s party. In fact, you could be excused if, like some scholars, you came to the conclusion that Dickens was irreligious or anti-religious. It is true that you can find a powerful critique of certain forms of Christianity in his work’s, from Arthur Clennam’s four wretched Sundays in Little Dorrit to three obnoxiously Christian characters of Bleak House, held in contrast to the quietly Christian conduct of Esther Summerson. But you would be wrong in your assessment, wrong in stripping Dickens of his Christian commitment. Dickens is critical of two things: the stern and gloomy religiosity of those who would be called dissenters and non-conformists in his day, the hellfire and damnation type; and the showy religiosity of those who would save the souls of the poor with no interest in saving their bodies, his age’s equivalent of the supposedly righteous that walk by the beaten man in the ditch. This critique of showy but empty religion goes right back to Jesus, and Dickens only follows where Christ has already been in his story of the Good Samaritan. Continue reading “Who will buy? February 3, 2019”