Category: Main Blog

Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

Matthew 3:1-12
Isaiah 11:1-10

Cultural divides are not exactly new, no matter what we might think. The nation was torn apart during the Vietnam War, just one example, people not speaking to one another, fights at the holiday dinner table, and worse. It is easy to romanticize the past, but we do well to remember the shootings at Kent State University, the innocent victims, how everything was us vs. them in those days. We’ve been here before, and for many of us, in our own lifetimes. The man in the White House at that time was engaged in an ongoing series of criminal activities, targeting and smearing his perceived enemies, including one lad from Liverpool who had held protests against the war the year before, along with his partner, bed-ins for peace in Montreal and Amsterdam. Nixon wanted John Lennon deported in the worst possible way, any way it could be made to happen. And all Lennon was saying, as the song reminds us this season, is give peace a chance.

Another big but slightly less important cultural divide for that generation existed between the pro-Yoko and anti-Yoko folks, and I am definitely in the latter group. I tend to see post-Beatles Lennon as an emotional and psychological hostage, Stockholm Syndrome if you will, yet we cannot disentangle the bearded Lennon laying in the bed next to Yoko from his powerful voice against the war, and against the institutions that supported it. I totally get the impulse behind his “Imagine,” as anti-religious as it is, for religion has often been an agent of warfare and destruction rather than a force for peace, co-opted by political and nationalist agendas. But there have been Christian voices for peace as well, not only the pacifist branches of Protestant and Anabaptist Christianity, but also notable individuals, Father Daniel Berrigan, the Rev. Dr. King…

And here we sit, on this Second Sunday in Advent, speaking of peace. But what does peace mean? What does it mean in scripture? What does it mean for the progressive Christian, and particularly in our own theological trajectory? Continue reading “Sharknado Redux: December 8, 2019”

Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

Matthew 24:36-44
Romans 13:11-14

The term Black Friday is not as new as you might think. At one point, it was schoolhouse slang for the day when most tests were given. In 1951, a manufacturing industry publication used Black Friday in specific relation to the day after Thanksgiving, but it had to do with employee absenteeism, not retail accounting. In the 1960’s, police in Philadelphia took up the same term for the same day, pure coincidence. They were irked at the terrible traffic, pedestrian and vehicular congestion, that made the day difficult. It wouldn’t be until the 1980’s before Black Friday took on the meaning we give it today, the day when retailers supposedly go from being “in the red” to being “in the black,” that is, when they begin to net a profit. I’m not even sure this is financially true, but it is a fine example of how meanings change, and especially about how we create stories to explain things we don’t understand. I don’t remember Black Friday being a thing when I was a kid, certainly not something that was on the evening news for a week, and Cyber Monday? Yeah, not so much. My telephone had a cord attached, and I was an adult before personal computers became affordable.

Of course, Black Friday is no longer the start of the Christmas season. Plastic trees and inflatable reindeer can be spotted while we still have jack-o-lanterns on the porch. Christmas itself has changed. New traditions are invented, sometimes for profit, like that creepy little voyeur who sits on the shelf and spies on our children. That sort of behavior can get you arrested in some jurisdictions.

Advent is, for us at least, the start of the preparation for Christmas. This was not always so. Congregationalism comes from the merger of the Pilgrims and Puritans in the New England colonies, no longer divided at that point by their relationship to the Church of England, which seemed pretty irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. Puritans, the far larger of the two, not only didn’t celebrate Christmas, they made it illegal to do so for decades, punishing offenders. They found no scriptural warrant for the celebration, associated it with pagan rites and debauchery. And the pagan rites are there, as is, if tales from office Christmas parties are to be believed, the debauchery.

While the Congregationalists relented and got on board the Yuletide train by the early 18th century, we probably get most of our Advent impulse from the German side of our UCC heritage, especially the Evangelical and Reform branch, which had managed to retain a sense of liturgy and the seasons of the church. We get things like paraments, the cloths on the altar, and vestments, the alb I am wearing, from that more liturgical side of the family. But given that Advent is an adopted tradition for most of us, we can still get it wrong, or at least, like the explanation of Black Friday, make a meaning for ourselves that was not originally intended. Continue reading “Hope: December 1, 2019”

Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

Luke 23:33-43
Jeremiah 23:1-6

Last Sunday, rap performer and semi-Kardashian Kanye West stood on the stage of a megachurch in Houston and told the crowd that the greatest artist God had ever created was now on God’s team. He meant himself, of course, apparently missing the Micah 6:8 memo on walking humbly with your God. In that, he was in the right place, there in a former NBA arena, for he was standing next to Joel Osteen, charlatan of the prosperity gospel, who chooses to ignore everything that Jesus said about the challenges of following the Way, all of that inconvenient stuff about being attacked for your faith. Osteen’s idea of damnation and suffering is fabric upholstery in the private jet instead of leather and off-the-rack suits.

The two are about as far from that itinerant rabbi on the dusty streets of Galilee as they could be, even further from Calvary. Jesus did not offer a get-rich-quick scam in ancient Palestine, and wealth is not a measure of righteousness. We all know or know of good people who barely get by and truly awful people who are wealthy. There simply is no correlation between faith and wealth. The reward for righteousness comes in other forms.

West, Osteen, and Paula White are a reminder to us of the captivity of the church in every age. Today’s Prosperity Jesus may be one particularly egregious example, particularly flagrant, but this is by no means our only sin. A perversion occurs every time we try to domesticate Jesus, turning him into a puppet that says what we want to say and hates who we already hate, or into a cartoon Jesus that is all “be not afraid” and “you are loved,” but that never asks for anything, no sacrifice.

This latter can be an opioid Jesus, sometimes needed in the short-term, but all too often numbing and doing more harm than good. Worse still is partisan Jesus, nationalist Jesus, racist Jesus, a blue-eyed European doppelganger for that swarthy Middle Eastern prophet.

And it is not my Jesus, for my Jesus is not mine. My Jesus belongs to a God I cannot control. My Jesus is a Jesus that gives me hope, but also a Jesus that unsettles and challenges. Continue reading “Kanye: November 24, 2019”

Isaiah 65:17-25
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

There may be Canadians who do not like hockey. I’m not sure about that, for I’ve never met one as far as I know. And of course, there are people who like hockey who are not Canadian, though I confess to personally supporting a Canadian team, so I’m a bit iffy on all that. But if you did a Venn diagram of hockey fans and Canadians, I think we can all agree that there would be a whole lot of overlap.

If you are Canadian or a hockey fan, you have heard of Don Cherry. This past week, many people heard of Don Cherry who belonged to neither group, for he made the news. Even the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.

Cherry, known for his flamboyant suits among other things, is eminently Canadian, descended from a founding member of the Mounties and from one of the Home Children, the United Kingdom’s infamous child emigration scheme. He had a long career in minor league hockey as a player and a middling career as a coach in the minors and in the NHL. He’s done some laudable work for charitable causes over the years, including organ donation, children’s homes, and animal welfare. He is a Canadian patriot, as long as by patriot, you mean loudmouth bigot and worshipper of a glorious past that was glorious only for white males like Don Cherry.

He got very rich as a hockey analyst, including 37 seasons of a segment called “Coach’s Corner.” As Shireen Ahmed writes in the Guardian, “Cherry was appreciated for being brash and propagating a retrograde ‘rock’ em sock’ em’ type of hockey that glamorized fighting, peppered with unapologetic vitriol directed at “Francophones, newcomers, women, racialized minorities, and Indigenous peoples” and anyone with an appreciation for humanity and justice whom he labeled ‘left-wing pinkos’.”

He lost his job this week, resigned if you accept the official version, after criticizing Canadian immigrants for supposedly not wearing “Remembrance Day” poppies. And by Canadian immigrants, what he really meant was anyone not white like him.

Most Canadians take pride in their nation’s hospitality, diversity, immigration policies. They did not appreciate Cherry once again revealing his racism, creating division, and attaching it to Queen and Country. Social media exploded with images of “non-white” Canadians who have served in that nation’s military, who were and are proud Canadian patriots. The real kind. Of course, only in polite Canada can you lose your job for racism and have people still thank you for your contribution. Continue reading “Sweat Equity: November 17, 2019”

Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

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1 Kings 22:29-38
Job 7:7-15

He appeared as a spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam’s Pythonesque 1977 film Jabberwocky, the movie inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem of the same name, but the actor behind the spaghetti was a poet in his own right off screen. Christopher Logue, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, was many things actually, including screenwriter, ex-con, and pacifist. Joan Baez sang his words, set to music by Donovan, on her eponymous first album.

Logue is known as much though for what he did not accomplish as for what he did. When he died in 2011, he left behind an unfinished modernist retelling of Homer’s Iliad titled “War Music.” Some portions had already been published, the slow and painful delivery of what looked to be a masterpiece. The poet’s death before the work was complete was a bit like when one of those new puzzle television series is abruptly cancelled and we never get the answers, but for the literary set. At least we know how the Iliad actually ends!

What was complete at the time of his death, those previously published portions of “War Music,” and what could be reconstructed from Logue’s notebooks, was posthumously published in a single volume in 2015. Early in, we find Antenor counseling the Trojan king, advising the return of Helen, the woman central to the decade-long siege of Troy. Antenor asks.

‘My King,
The winners of a war usually get
Something out of it.
What will we get?
Their camp. Their ditch. And who wants those?
Only Lord Koprophag, the god of filth.’

He continues:

Impatient now:

‘Stand Helen on a transport floored with gold,
And as they rumble through the Skean Gate
Let trumpets from the terracing
Bray charivari to her back’s bad loveliness.”

Logue uses the unusual word charivari, which means a noisy and mocking serenade. Let’s just say Antenor is not a slave to Helen’s legendary beauty. He’d be happy to see her gone.

While Logue’s version may be new and modernist, he has not altered one bit the mood of the ancient poem, which begins in medias res, that is to say, in the middle of the action. The Iliad was written at about the same time the Assyrians were destroying the northern portion of the divided kingdom, the portion known as Israel or Samaria, or in today’s second reading, Shomron, where they take the body of the wicked King Ahab, immoral and corrupt. His character is made clear by the ancient author who has Ahab enter battle in disguise, abandoning his allies when he is wounded. Continue reading “War Music: November 10. 2019”

Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

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Sermon Reading Isaiah 1:10-18 (The First Testament: A New Translation)

He was a man out of time, much like his magician advisor, the actual king at the turn of the 6th century unsuccessfully defending Britain against invading Saxons. Arthur’s story would be fictionalized, lifted from that context, and reset in the Middle Ages, all knights and chivalry, though with a hint of druids and witches to remind us of the ancient. We can see this anachronism in John Boorman’s 1981 film “Excalibur,” in T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” required school reading for my generation, in Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” and above all in the greatest Arthurian masterpiece ever, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which includes a scene where Arthur rides through a town ravaged by the Black Death, the classic macabre scene where the carter cries “Bring out your dead!”

In this swirling space of All Hallow’s Eve, of ghosts and ghoulies, and of Reformation Sunday, commemorating that singular expression of the shift from the medieval to modernity, it seems right to revisit the Black Death, the first and greatest episode of the Bubonic Plague to hit Europe, dropping the world population by an estimated 100 million people during the 14th century. To celebrate the end of the Black Death, Florence, in what is today Italy, decided on new doors for their Baptistry. A grand competition was held, with seven sculptors entering, and Giovanni de’ Medici as the judge. Lorenzo Ghiberti won the competition. Many of us have gazed on those very doors, on Ghiberti’s work, in that city filthy with masterpieces.

One of the other contestants was Filippo Brunelleschi, who, it turns out, was not a particularly graceful loser. His entry drew particular attention, can still be seen today as a Renaissance masterwork in Florence’s Il Bargello. He might have gone on to be a legendary sculptor, but he refused to work in that medium ever again. Instead, he would focus on architecture and optics, designing the groundbreaking dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence’s Duomo. If that is one particular piece in one particular place, his other great gift to humankind is everywhere, still impacts us today, for he is considered the inventor of linear perspective, that art of creating the illusion of three dimensions in a two dimensional drawing or painting, of using technique to invoke more.

Six centuries later, another approach to multiple dimensions rendered in the flat space of drawing and painting would contribute to the development of cubism, the reduction of objects to basic shapes, often seen from multiple angles at once. It was inspired by Paul Cezanne, who was a living bridge between Impressionism and new forms, his paintings attempting to represent three-dimensional form. The Cubist style took its name from words by Henri Matisse, who described a painting submitted for exhibition by Georges Braque as being made of little cubes. Braque, along with Pablo Picasso, would be most closely associated with the style.

There were folks who despised Cubism, still are folks who despise Cubism, and if I am honest, I personally prefer pre-Cubist Picasso, the Blue Period and the Rose period, but you can already see the trajectory, flat spaces creating angles, even there. There were folks who despised Impressionism too. The Académie des Beaux-Arts had no room for the work of the Impressionists at its annual juried art show, the Salon de Paris, so the young artists eventually showed their work at the Salon des Refusés, the Salon of the Refused.

We know how that story ends. The Impressionists included Renoir, Sisley, Manet, Pissarro, and the artist who painted the painting that would give name to the movement, Claude Monet. Paintings by these “refused” artists rarely come up for sale, so the prices reflect the economic insanity of a particular moment, but Monet’s “Meules,” not one of his best known works, sold for $110 million in May, while Picasso’s cubist “Les Femmes de l’Alger” sold for $179 million in 2015.

Then again, Vincent Van Gogh died broke, so maybe folks aren’t always so good at seeing what is happening, appreciating innovation and vision, in the moment. Continue reading “Brunelleschi to Braque: November 3, 2019”

Hope United Church of Christ – Sturgeon Bay

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Ephesians 1:11-23

They include Wang Zhiming, a clergy person who fell victim to China’s Cultural Revolution, that conflagration of Maoist purity that killed only a million or so, far fewer than the 30 million that died five years earlier in the Great Leap Forward, and not really that big of a deal since authoritarian communism takes a utilitarian view human life, no inherent worth, just use.

Then there is Esther John, a Pakistani Christian nurse, Elizabeth, a Russian Grand Duchess, and Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda. Others are better known, like Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who gave his life in place of another at Auschwitz. Archbishop Óscar Romero is there, as is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

They are in a class we might hope to never join, martyrs for their faith, ten men and women of the Twentieth Century carved above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey.

Some have been officially recognized as saints by denominations that have a formal process for that sort of thing, while others are considered saints informally. Lutherans, Anglicans and other Protestant riff-raff like, you know, us, considered Romero a saint long before the Vatican got around to it, that recognition blocked in Rome by conservatives who suspected him of commie pinko leanings, or worse still, of believing in a liberating God, the core concept in the theology that bears that name.

Ironically, Romero was chosen as Archbishop of San Salvador because he was conservative, a milquetoast of a man who would ruffle the feathers of neither the twelve families that controlled all of El Salvador’s arable land nor the assassins and thugs they employed in the nation’s military. His spirituality was heavily influenced by Opus Dei, a Catholic movement with close ties to the Fascist regime of Spain’s Francisco Franco. He was anything but a commie pinko.

But Romero was able to maintain friendships with people who had different opinions on things, something few manage these days. It was the assassination of one of his close friends, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, that opened the Archbishop’s eyes to the human rights abuses taking place in his country, to the incredible poverty all around him. He went first and always to scripture, to Jesus, was a pastor before all else, and it made him radical, at least in the eyes of the corrupt and powerful. He spoke about justice, was clear that God’s law superseded any earthly power. So those with earthly power did what they did, what they always do.

On March 24, 1980, as he celebrated mass at the Hospital de la Divina Providencia, Archbishop Óscar Romero, like his friend Padre Grande, was assassinated.

He was an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances who found strength in prayer and scripture, a most improbable saint. Continue reading “St. Phyllis: October 27, 2019”

Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

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2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

Like churches, corporations do not always notice the world changing before it is too late. Just ask Polaroid. Oh, you can’t…

Now, on a scale that includes Purdue Pharma, the opioid pushers, razor blade companies are fairly innocent small fry. But a couple of decades ago, the industry entered a sort of arms race. More blades, more gel strips, more skin guards, every feature the latest in technology guaranteeing the smoothest shave, each promise about as real as the ridiculous line of 3D toothpaste being peddled in the super market, as if brushing your teeth in only two dimensions were an option.

At each step, the price of razor blades went up.

Then two things happened to put a dent in that market. Hipsters started growing beards, which became cool. I don’t know whether it was irony, cost efficiency, laziness, or some combination of the above, but razor sales started dropping. In the meantime, folks like me started looking for alternatives. I chose an old fashioned safety razor. I’ve probably saved more than a thousand dollars in the last five years, even if it has cost me a little blood.

Entrepreneurs figured out that consumers were rebelling, and started cost efficient direct to consumer sales on a subscription model. One such company was Harry’s, founded in 2013. The next year they purchased their own razor factory in Germany so they could control the whole process from factory to consumer. In May, the company sold for $1.4 billion, ironically enough, to one of the traditional razor manufacturers.

Alas, I have not figured out how to escape the cost insanity of electric toothbrush heads. I know I could just get an old-school toothbrush, but they just aren’t as effective, and I like having teeth. So it was that I was out spending a ridiculous amount on a new head for my Sonicare toothbrush recently, when I decided to wander over to the book section. And there, filed under non-fiction, I discovered the Bible.

Now, in actual brick and mortar bookstores, the shelf would be labeled Bibles, or Inspiration, or something, anything, may God help me, besides non-fiction. But there it was, as I prepared to preach today’s text about scripture. It was enough to stop a thinking pastor in her tracks, and it did stop this pastor in his. At least I had enough sense not to find an hourly employ and suggest it be moved. Continue reading “Like Literally, Dude – October 20, 2019”

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, 11

Video at : https://vimeo.com/366618954

There has been a running joke of many years that I am just about the least “gay” gay man ever. Now, I take issue with this fake news. It is true that some question my fashion judgment, that I prefer a beer to a Cosmo, that I watch sports, and by that I don’t mean figure skating… and that I go to bed early. But are we really going to traffic in base stereotype? Besides, I always thought it was a one question application, and that question was not about brunch entrees or Judy Garland.

At least I get one thing right. I do like musical theater and opera, no doubt the result of a childhood where Camelot, Fiddler on the Roof, and Mario Lanza played on the giant console record player in the living room. I especially like it when musical theater crashes into other musical genres, because I love nothing more than a good mash-up. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I love Hamilton, where history and hip-hop collide with musical theater, because I like history and hip-hop too. In the years B.H., that is before Hamilton, there were other beautiful collisions, notably Jonathan Larson’s smash hit Rent, which opened on Broadway in 1996 and ran for twelve years, grossing over $280 million.

Rent is a modern reimagining of “La Boheme,” Puccini’s classic opera, which premiered exactly a century earlier, conducted by a young Arturo Toscanini. In Rent, the Latin Quarter becomes lower Manhattan, the scourge of tuberculosis becomes AIDS, but the issues are still the same: art on the precipice, love among the wreckage, exploitative economics, and the constant specter of death. The protagonists do not know what comes next, so time and the moment are major themes. The second act begins with one of the show’s enduring anthems, “Seasons of Love,” which reminds us that a common year is “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes.” Another is the refrain, included in the finale, that tells us:

There’s only us, there’s only this
Forget regret, or life is your’s to miss
No other path, no other way
No day but today

The people in Jeremiah’s time knew a thing about anxiety too. The prophet’s attention was primarily drawn to the macro, to matters religious and political, rather than to the domestic, but people certainly still loved and grieved, suffered disease and hunger and the sort of constant anxiety that comes from one piece of wretched news after another. Continue reading “Present Tense: October 13, 2019”

Sermon delivered at Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

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1 Samuel 21:1-9

Monday was my last day of freedom, though freedom might be a bit prosaic considering I’ve spent several weeks moving halfway across the country, unpacking, and generally setting up a household, which is mostly, but not completely, done, all while taking three classes online. I’m delighted to be here, of course, but gosh, moving is hard work. So there I was on Monday, one day left, with errands to run, a few minor projects I could reasonably hope to check off before starting work Tuesday morning, and I found myself at Target, considering those storage cubes, then walking by the clearance rack.

And Lo! There appeared on the clearance rack bed sheets in a size I needed. “Stranger Things” bedsheets to be exact, a product tie-in with that very successful Netflix series. I’ve slept on them now for several nights expecting totally jacked-up dreams, but not so much, at least not yet.

You see, “Stranger Things,” is an homage to the pop culture of my teen and young adult years, and it is a wicked creepy sci-fi horror, hence my concern that the sheets, one of the last things I see as the lights go out at night, might plant nightmarish seeds, visions of demi-gorgons dancing in my head.

At the start of the first episode of “Stranger Things,” four of the central characters, boys on the cusp of adolescence, are playing Dungeons and Dragons. I know a thing or two about that game. I started playing back when the rules were still in a set of small paperback volumes that might have come from a ditto machine, and were most certainly laid out on a manual typewriter.

It was a game where you could be anything except the nerd that you probably actually were if you were playing D&D. You might be an Elven mage, a Halfling rogue, or a stout Dwarven warrior with his trusted battle-axe.

And this was my conception of a battle-axe, something from fantasy, D&D and Conan the Barbarian, not a weapon real warriors used. Except, it turns out, they did. Continue reading “Battle-Axe: October 6, 2019 World Communion Sunday”