Category: Main Blog

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”

Now, I know Blue Hill, George Stevens Academy, and even this church, all have a real and personal connection to the blockchain and cryptocurrency, but I have to confess, I don’t really understand it. I mean, I was in the tech industry before I became a pastor, so the idea of the blockchain as a distributed technology makes sense, the economics behind cryptocurrencies, not so much. Traditional currencies like the dollar or the euro are no more than an agreed system of value and exchange, backed up originally by hard assets, and these days, at least in the case of the US dollar, by the “full faith and credit” of the United States. This is why economists panic when politicians hold that “full faith and credit” hostage, extracting political ransom to preserve the life of our economy. The dollar represents some measure of human labor and talent, some tract of land, some quantity of pork bellies.

But there is nothing that backs up cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. The whole idea is to be out of the control of governments, making it easier to move money while avoiding the watchful eyey of the IRS, the DEA, and anti-terrorism units, but that hiddenness also means there are no bailouts and no regulators preventing fraud. There is the constant danger of hackers, North Korean mostly, who have made off with billions. One corrupt regime, that of the Venezuelan despot Nicolas Maduro, has tried to sell the world on the petro, backed up, in theory, by the petroleum assets of that nation. It is as much of a sham as his Bolivarian paradise Venezuelans are fleeing by the thousands.

The value of every cryptocurrency is driven by speculation, with millions in imaginary value disappearing into the ether just this year, maybe appropriate since ethereum is another of those cryptocurrencies. Though there seems to be a new one almost every week, so I can’t quite keep up. Rather than the hip cyber geek I once was, I’m beginning to feel like a cranky old Luddite. Continue reading “Counterfeit Wampum: October 7, 2018”

On Wednesday night, in our Theology on Tap gathering, we wrestled with the Book of Joshua, with its story of divinely-sanctioned genocide. Many of us are unwilling to worship a god that would order the slaughter of innocent civilians, infants, even livestock. We struggle with both the historicity and the theology of this story, wondering how we can claim the Hebrew heritage without this notion that Yahweh is a violent and exclusive deity. The violence in the Hebrew Scriptures even led to an early Christian heresy, Marcionism, which claimed that the God of the Hebrew scriptures must be a lower deity than the loving God of Jesus.

The truth is, humankind has always had to wrestle with the past, past events, old beliefs, with interpretations of history, though it seems to be almost all we do these days. We pull down statues, change the names of buildings and streets, sometimes rushing to judgment. We want figures of the past to cohere with modern standards of equality and right conduct. For the most part, I get it. Naming the oppressor is necessary in combating oppression and taking the oppressor’s name off a building and the oppressor’s flag off the flagpole sends a powerful signal to those groups that have been oppressed. But like most everyone else, I’m not always certain exactly where to draw those lines. I wish right and wrong were always clear to me, but they aren’t.

Among the re-evaluations of past conduct that have been taking place are the scandals in the Roman church and the #MeToo movement. These have touched every aspect of modern life, from Hollywood and Congress to famous megachurches. Male power can victimize, and speaking truthfully about the ways men have used their power, their economic power, their religious power, has taken down one executive, director, bishop, and actor after another, as well as quite a few of those who enabled their misconduct.

It is hard, in the current context, to imagine that The Police won a Grammy Award in 1982 for the smash hit “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” the story of inappropriate longing between a teacher and a high school girl. It is one step short of Nabakov’s “Lolita,” a literary classic based on an actual kidnapping, a novel and a song we might now see through a very different lens. Continue reading “Don’t Stand So Close To Me: September 23, 2018”

In September 2017, fifty four weeks ago yesterday to be exact, during a burn ban caused by dry weather and high winds, a 15 year-old boy with a firecracker started a forest fire in the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon-Washington border. We’re not talking a flame thrower or a napalm bomb, just a firecracker a kid could easily lay his hands on. One hundred and fifty three hikers were trapped by the rapidly advancing flames, requiring rescue. By the time it was declared contained, two months later, more than 50,000 acres had burned and an inch of ash had fallen on Portland. Hot spots were still being discovered as recently as late May.

Wildfires occur in nature, and are part of a cycle of renewal, of death and regrowth, though they have been exacerbated in recent years by over-development, mismanagement of forests, and the effects of human-caused climate change. It seems as if the entire West Coast is on fire at times, and when the fire is finally out, the rains come and the denuded hills slide down, mud engulfing homes, businesses, and bodies.

One of the first to discover that particular wildfire, according to Forbes, was Kevin Marnell, who was hiking along Eagle Creek. Around 3:30pm, he heard a series of loud banging sounds that he at first thought might be gunfire. Then he saw the smoke.

Forest fires are loud. There is the crackle and sometimes explosive combustion as the fire’s fuel is consumed, as sap ignites and trees fall. But the burning does not cause most of the noise. Superheated air moves up and new air rushes in, bringing fresh oxygen to feed the fire. It is this air movement that we hear, effectively localized high winds. And they roar. Wildfires roar.

The author of the text traditionally known as the Epistle of James knows a thing or two about wildfires. He warns that like a firecracker thrown into a gorge, the tongue can start a blaze bringing tremendous destruction. Continue reading “Loud: September 16, 2018”

The region around the Pyrenees, the mountains that create a natural border between France and Spain, is also the home of a number of unique languages. One, Basque, is a language isolate, unrelated to other European languages. Others, like Catalan and Occitan, are derived from the romance language group, but distinct from either Spanish or French. It was in a dialect of Occitan, Gascon, that 14 year-old Bernadette Soubirous described her encounters with uo petito damizelo, “a small young lady,” or what she described simply as aquero, “that.” Those encounters, over the course of a fortnight in 1858, would come to be understood as apparitions of the Virgin Mary, for the damizelo would eventually refer to herself as the “Immaculate Conception,” a little too theologically convenient given that belief in the Immaculate Conception of Mary had only been promulgated by the Vatican four years earlier. Nonetheless, the apparitions and the spring that Bernadette discovered would become the heart of a faith-healing industrial complex at Lourdes in France, where approximately 350,000 pilgrims bathe in the waters annually, seeking cures.

Of those 350,000 pilgrims, one in ten thousand will report cures to the Lourdes Medical Bureau. Three to five of these are deemed worth investigation annually, and referred to the International Lourdes Medical Committee. That committee can deem the cure “medically inexplicable,” though only the bishop of the subject’s home diocese can declare it a miracle.

The good news is that the odds of experiencing a cure deemed medically inexplicable are almost twice as good as those of being struck by lightning. They still don’t seem that good. And remember, those who take the time and spend the money to go to Lourdes are predisposed to believe in miracles, or at least the possibility of miraculous healing.

These days, most of us are skeptical about faith healing, and with good reason. “Out demon lupus” shouts one charlatan in a recent segment of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” Snake oil is snake oil, whether or not you call it holy, and all the smoke and mirrors in the world cannot hide frauds like Benny Hinn. Continue reading “New and Improved: September 9, 2018”

Lightning bugs in a jelly jar with holes punched in the top.

Wet grass and playing in the sprinkler in the front yard.

Coppertone and beach towel lunches that put the sand in sandwich.

Twelve year old boys in a ramshackle fort in the woods, a stack of Mad magazines and that one girlie magazine Chip stole from his father, all of us uncertain, especially me.

These were the halcyon days of summer, at least as seen through the romanticized lens of the past, and that is the lens most of us use Continue reading “Lightning Bugs: August 26, 2018”

Their culture developed along the Orinoco, in what are today Venezuela and Colombia, but they sailed off, too, settling on islands in the Greater and Lesser Antilles, sharing the islands with another indigenous group, the Island Carib. The Taíno branch of the Arawak would settle one of the larger islands, the rich resources of the sea and the fertile land resulting in over 200 villages. Then Columbus arrived, naming that big island Santiago. Disease brought by the colonizers and exploitation would nearly decimate the tribal group, and the remnant would largely be displaced by slaves imported in order to grow sugar. One of the few reminders that they were ever there is the name the English gave that island, seized from the Spanish by William Penn in 1655. The Arawak had called their island Xaymaca, which in English, became Jamaica.

England would officially abolish slavery on Jamaica in 1838, importing yet another group of foreign workers, this time from Asia, but they did not abolish colonialism or racism. Abolition was no more successful in the Caribbean than it was in the United States. A century later, the frustrations of Jamaica’s former slaves would find expression in the creation of a new religion, a heady mix of the Abrahamic traditions, the Pan-Africanism of leaders like Marcus Garvey, and the cult of personality surrounding Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia. Today, Rastafarianism is best known for dreadlocks, ganja, and reggae, best known for the late great Bob Marley. And it is to Marley’s final studio album that we turn, recorded after his cancer diagnosis. It was the most religious of his recordings, and includes “Redemption Song.” “How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?” Continue reading “Redemption Song: August 19, 2018”

Rainer Zerbst, in his 2005 catalog of the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, recounts Albert Schweitzer’s visit to what would eventually become the Basílica de la Sagrada Família, that soaring masterpiece in Barcelona. Gaudí explained to the great doctor and Christian scholar that “When it became known that I was looking for a donkey as a model for the flight to Egypt, they brought me the most beautiful donkey in Barcelona. But I couldn’t use it.” The architect goes on to explain that he eventually found an appropriate donkey, “Its head hanging down, almost touching the ground,” hitched to the wagon of a woman selling scouring sand. That donkey, or at least a casting of that donkey, can be seen today on the basilica’s Portal of Hope, the story of Jesus, the refugee child, crossing a border with his mother and father. Today, he would have been seized and lost in the for-profit detention complex.

Like many other masterpieces, like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, Sagrada Família is both a blessing and a curse to the locals, the love and hate of every community that depends on tourists and visitors to drive the local economy. My last trip to Barcelona was in 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, though work on the basilica has progressed rapidly in recent years, so there is much to see when I next return. Construction was first started in 1882, but was delayed for many years by lack of funding, for this was to be a work of the common people, not of the wealthy elite. Today, thousands of international tourists and pilgrims pour through the door each day, paying fees, purchasing merchandise, and making donations. We can hope that, despite Catalan nationalism, the project will never again be delayed by politics, by civil war, for these too stood in the way.

In another life, I might have been an architect, for I love buildings, though Gaudí might seem an odd choice when compared to my other favorites, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. I am definitely more mid-century Modern than Neo-Gothic, more sweeping curves, cantilever, and clean line than the near rococo detail of Gaudí. Yet I love Sagrada Família. It may help that Gaudí drew his forms from nature, and I love nature. Or maybe it is the fact that the entire basilica is a story told in architecture, the story of salvation and Christ, every element symbolic, right down to the number of towers, every color considered carefully, and I am love story, the story of a living faith expressed with exuberance into the world. Continue reading “Simple + : August 12, 2018”

For a few years on my spiritual journey, in the early 1980’s, I fancied myself a Roman Catholic. Like many others coming out of the sometimes sterile Mainline Protestant traditions, I fell in love with the beauty, the art, and the music of the mass, of the great cathedrals, the appeal to the senses, smell and sound and color. The powerful and Spirit-full winds of Vatican II were blowing. A priest named Matthew Fox was writing about original blessing instead of original sin, developing what would come to be known as Creation Spirituality. A few brave bishops seemed to be opening the door to tolerance, if not an actual welcome, to members of the LGBTQ community. Who knew? Women priests? Married clergy?

We all know how that story ends, with reactionaries and Opus Dei and a return to the way things were, with drawing lines and deciding that those who embraced change were the enemy, though of course the world had changed anyway, whether they liked it or not. The result was that each generation since has been less and less engaged with the church, has drifted further from the faith, the rites and sacraments emptied of meaning, just an excuse for a family party. Were it not for Latinx immigrants, the Roman church would be as empty as so many Protestant churches, and with that tap seemingly squeezed shut, they can expect national declines to match those of the Baptists.

I still love the beauty of the mass, even if I no longer have room for the hocus pocus, the misogyny, the authoritarian structure. I continue to appreciate one theological development from that period, what the Vatican called its consistent ethic for human life. As articulated by the Roman church, the faithful Christian, obedient to the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” would oppose war, capital punishment, and abortion, all for the same reason. I am completely pro-choice, but I’d prefer to live in a world where access to sex education and birth control rendered abortion a rarity, for I am unsure of the mystery of life. You can’t undo an execution when you later discover that you got it wrong, and we have so many proven cases of wrongful conviction that the entire prosecutorial system looks suspect. I concede that there are circumstance where war is a necessary evil in the world as we know it, yet I dream of a world unknown where justice and love render AR-15s and weaponized drones obsolete. Like St. Martin of Atlanta, I believe that “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Continue reading “(Ten) Some (Commandments) Suggestions: July 29, 2018”

I’m not sure who came up with the idea of a dental practice exclusively for children, what big city or sophisticated suburb gave birth to that idea, but I did not grow up in the big city or a sophisticated suburb. Norfolk, Virginia was a military town, a working port shipping coal, and generally a working class sort of place, and I was from a working class family. Nonetheless, children’s dentistry was aspirational, a sign of respectability, when I was a child, and my mom was eager to get my sisters and I in to see Doctor Bernard Einhorn, who had a treasure chest with cheap toys for good little girls and boys. I wasn’t impressed. I had suffered a traumatic dental injury while I was in pre-school, and had no love for people who wanted to stick pointy metal things in my mouth.

Despite my misgivings about dentistry, I had braces as a teen, had my wisdom teeth removed while I was in the Army, have never had a cavity, and generally kept up with all things dental until the lean years, when I went back to school in New York City after 9/11 and couldn’t afford a dentist. Going to the dentist is a lot like going to church, hard to re-start once you’ve lost the habit, and I lost the habit. Continue reading “Flaming Love: July 15, 2018”