Category: Main Blog

Somewhere in the space between villains and martyrs are ordinary people like us, neither completely holy nor completely wicked. Teasing out where someone lies on that continuum can be tricky. Sometimes wonderful and horrible things are done by the exact same person. The #MeToo movement has been a sickening and exhausting reminder of this complexity, though we’ve always known that it is sometimes hard to stick people in the hero box or in the villain box and expect them to stay there. The Rev. Dr. King was a courageous faith leader and an adulterer, and one of the greatest American theologians of the last century, from the non-violent Mennonite tradition, was revealed as a serial predator, using his prestige and power in ways that amounted to coercion and sexual harassment. Can his theological thinking be separated from his misconduct?

Figuring out good guys and bad guys can be especially difficult when a whole nation is swept into madness, the banality of evil, questions of complicity.

Let us consider the story of two brothers from Bavaria, born at the turn of the last century. Their father worked in a shoe factory, and when the younger of the two, Adolph, returned from serving in the Great War, he started making athletic shoes in the family kitchen. Several years later, older brother Rudolph got involved, and they named their growing company Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory. Both men joined the Nazi party in the 1930’s, though Rudi is believed to have been the more ardent supporter. Adi Dassler would serve in the military again, a year at the start of the Second World War, before returning home to produce boots for the Wehrmacht, the German Army, at Dassler Brothers. Continue reading “Sneakers: June 17, 2018”

It seems like a lifetime since it mattered whether comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her on-screen alter-ego were or were not lesbian, would or would not come out on her sitcom, “Ellen,” or in real life. Of course, it’s been almost twenty years since Oprah played a role in both the character and the performer coming out. Today, at least for the majority of Americans, whether a performer or character is LGBTQ is a non-issue. Who cares?

Personally, I never watched the show. Ellen’s subsequent talk show has been successful and a great platform for new talent, but I’ve always had a day job, so daytime television really doesn’t get on my radar much either. I do, however, absolutely love Ellen’s character in Disney-Pixar’s 2003 animated hit “Finding Nemo,” a role she reprised in the recent sequel, “Finding Dory.” Continue reading “Dory Speaks Whale: June 10, 2018”

Last week, I mentioned the efforts of many, including me, to make it too expensive to be a racist, at least a public racist. This week, we saw that sort of thing, the cost of being a racist, play out over the course of several days, dominating the headlines for a whole 24 hours. Unfortunately, there were a lot of innocent victims, employees who lost their jobs, when ABC decided to stop purchasing a television program from the Carsey-Werner Company. While I agree with the Disney Corporation’s decision, I must admit that I am getting tired of it all. I want to see equal opportunity for people regardless of their ethnic origin or skin color, regardless of their gender or gender expression, regardless of who they love, but we’re getting nowhere with everyone yelling and tweeting at one another. Especially the tweeting. We, as followers of Jesus, are called to be agents of change, for he was an agent of change, but also to be agents of peace and love, swords into plowshares and all that. The Way of Jesus is about reconciliation and renewal, about refusing to throw the first stone, so much so that forgiving others is a pre-condition for being forgiven by God, and those who hold grudges heap the searing coals of sin upon themselves. That right there is about as close as I’m ever going to come to fire and brimstone. Continue reading “Götterdämmerung: June 3, 2018”

There isn’t a whole lot I can do about the fact that Gaza is a giant open-air concentration camp in which legitimate baddies mingle with the innocent, or that Israel is engaged in a brazen act of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. The Sunni Muslim states that have thrown the Palestinians under the bus as a price that they are more than willing to pay in their sectarian war with Shiites don’t seem to care what I think, nor do American evangelicals, who are cheerfully chasing apocalypse, the end of the world, which doesn’t really work for me, because, you know, I sort of like this world most days. I can vote for people who want peace and justice in the Middle East, but this isn’t the only issue I care about, and others have a more direct impact on my life, your lives, the lives of my family and friends. Besides, given the amount of money Sheldon Adelson contributes to genocidal politicians, I’m not sure my vote matters that much. Continue reading “Encryption: May 27, 2018”

It is an aerial shot. To the upper left, lava, the burning roof of a home. To the lower right, the aquamarine of an in-ground pool, another home, lava steadily approaching. This photo, one of the week’s 15 “best” according to the Washington Post’s website, is not a happy picture. We may know that the earth moves and shakes, that volcanoes are the very reason those beautiful islands exist, but cleansing fire doesn’t feel quite so cleansing when it is your home going up in flame, your neighborhood experiencing the slow motion disaster of Kilauea’s most recent eruption, though in truth, that volcano has been continuously active since 1983. It destroyed most of the nearby town of Kalapana in 1990, burying the church, the local store, and 100 homes under 50 – 80 feet of lava.

Scripture warns against building your house on sand. It should also warn against building your house on a volcano, and the Big Island is nothing more than five volcanos. Or it might warn against building your house anywhere that is low and flat. Or anywhere that is dry, like the entire West Coast of the United States. Or anywhere that the rain we need and the wind that cools us can become a hurricane or a tornado. Or pretty much anywhere,, really, because this planet is a moving shaking swirling ball of chaos on a good day, and that ignoring the approximately 7.6 billion humans on the planet, the apex predator that has proven capable of disrupting the planet’s most basic systems. Continue reading “Wind and Fire: May 20, 2018”

Nothing good ever happens after the words “Hold My Beer” are spoken. For those not in the know, this phrase usually proceeds some idiotic stunt, possibly a trip to the emergency room, and are most often spoken by under 30 members of one gender, mine to be exact, though not always. Women and old men can, at times, have a “hold my beer” moment. Hold my beer means a burn or a broken bone, if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, it could well result in a Darwin Award.

Started in 1993, the Darwin Awards claim to:

[…] commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives: by eliminating themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chance of long-term survival. In other words, they are cautionary tales about people who kill themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race.

A Darwin is not awarded, however, if your stupidity kills others, nor do things like drinking and driving or texting and driving qualify, for that is ordinary idiocy, nothing extraordinary about it.

I’ve never really known how to feel about the Darwin awards. Death is not funny, and someone is left grieving, yet humans have always told cautionary tales, and these are indeed cautionary tales. Scripture is full of cautionary tales too, as are fairy tales and fiction. But to be honest, I’m probably not a good judge of what is funny, as I’m not a huge fan of slapstick. I even get uneasy with things like the “funniest home video” program, where all too often we are asked to laugh at someone being injured. Continue reading “Hold My Beer: May 13, 2018”

“What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world?”

These are not the words of some contemporary church leader looking at decades of declining participation in religious life, at churches turned into brewpubs and condos, at the decline of a learned clergy. These are, in fact, the words of letter written 74 years ago from Tegel Prison, in Berlin, part of the correspondence between the prisoner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his dear friend, Eberhard Bethge. Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian in prison, struggled in his correspondence to understand what might come next for the faith he cherished, not because the churches of Germany were already empty, though they would certainly become vast and empty edifices in the decades after the war, desiccated husks of what had once been alive. No, he was concerned that German Christianity had been emptied of Christ, had become a secular nationalist cult that was swallowed whole by the Nazi hate machine. It was an anxious time for those Christians of the Confessing Church, that group that refused Nazi ideology and control. It was an anxious time for Bonhoeffer, no doubt, in prison for his own role in a conspiracy against Hitler, against the Nazi hate machine, and Allied bombers filled the sky above, so that death might come from the drop of a bomb or from the hangman’s drop. Continue reading “Anxious: May 6, 2018”

There was a seismic event in the music world this week when the Pulitzer Prize for music composition went to the rap artist Kendrick Lamar for his album DAMN. The music Pulitzer is traditionally awarded to some obscure, rarified work, almost always classical, rarely jazz, not ever something that regular people might actually hear, that might sell. I really do listen to Lamar’s complex and charged hip-hop, as do millions of others.

The music Pulitzer can feel like an after-thought, always the last category listed. The other twenty awards are given for journalism, including photojournalism, and writing, both fiction and non-fiction. The focus on journalism and writing makes sense, as Joseph Pulitzer established the prizes through provisions in his will, and he made his fortune in publishing, though he never would have received his own prize, since Pulitzer was probably the foremost practitioner of fake news in his time, is regarded as the father of yellow journalism. Continue reading “DAMN: April 22, 2018”

This may come as a shock to you, but subtle isn’t always my strong suit. Sometimes big flashing lights are needed to get my attention, neon everywhere, a spiritual Times Square. The good news is that the Holy Spirit, or the universe if that’s what you prefer to call divine mystery, while sometimes subtle, can also sometimes smack you upside the head to get your attention. This was the case for me on Monday.

First thing in the morning, the Rev. Rob McCall stopped by the Pastor’s Study for one of our periodic chats. During the conversation, he suggested a book, “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us,” by Robert O. Prum. At lunch in the Parsonage, I opened the most recent copy of “The Christian Century” to a book review of “Humanism and the Death of God: Searching for the Good After Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.” Then I started researching this week’s text, about Paul and conversion and stories of conversions, which immediately brought me to Darwin’s infamous deathbed conversion, at which point I looked up and said “Okay, I get it.” Continue reading “Darwin: April 15, 2018”

On the night of September 14, 1927, one of the most famous dancers of that age got into a Amilcar CGSS, a low-riding model of a French sports car that won the Monte Carlo Rally the same year. The woman’s trademark was her beautiful flowing scarves, and it was her scarf that did her in that night, for these were the days of open-wheeled vehicles, and the scarf she was wearing caught in the passenger side rear wheel, pulling her from the vehicle and breaking her neck. While the accident happened in Nice, her cremains ended up in Père Lachaise, the Paris Cemetery that contains a who’s who of famous artists and thinkers, both French and international, for Paris has long attracted the creative, the brilliant, the dissolute, the mad, the city of lights and lovers and artists.

So there, along with that dancer, Isadore Duncan, you can find tombs that hold or once held the remains and cremains of Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Maria Callas, Édith Piaf, dozens of others. I was wandering in Père Lachaise one bright spring day, guidebook in hand, looking for the tomb of Oscar Wilde, when I was stopped by another tourist, one who was clearly having a very good time, maybe too good of a time to be strictly legal if you know what I mean. “Dude, you’re going the wrong way. It’s over there,” he informed me, gesturing off in exactly the opposite direction. He was directing me not toward the great Irish writer, but toward the grave of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, and a source of consternation for the families of others in the cemetery. Continue reading “Wait For It: Easter 2018”