Category: Main Blog

Transfiguration/Racial Justice Sunday

2 Kings 2:1-12
Mark 9:2-9

On the night of December 2^nd, 1577, a group of Carmelite friars broke into a religious community in Ávila, Spain and took another Carmelite friar, John of the Cross, prisoner. He was tortured and held in brutal conditions for eight months before he managed to escape. 

John’s crime was joining in a Carmelite reform movement led by Teresa of Ávila, a movement that would come to be called “Discalced,” meaning barefoot, as one of the matters in dispute was whether members should wear covered shoes or simply sandals.

It was all rather stupid, like so many religious disputes, but as Monty Python famously declared, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Today, few have heard of John of the Cross, unless their local parish in the Roman communion happens to be dedicated to him, for he was eventually canonized. If folks have heard of him at all, it is not due to the Battle of the Birkenstocks, but is instead for his writing, especially the poem “The Dark Night of the Soul,” composed during or immediately after his captivity.

The phrase “dark night of the soul” has become a trope, used today to mean a crisis of faith, but that is not quite what John meant. The opening stanza goes like this:

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

Note the line “Oh, happy chance!” John was a mystic, and “Dark Night of the Soul” is a love poem to God. It reflects a theological position expressed a century earlier in the anonymous work “The Cloud of Unknowing,” what theologians call the “via negativa,” where we stop trying to posit divine attributes, and instead accept God as ultimately mysterious and unknowable. Mysticism and the “via negativa” were post-modern theologies before post-modernism, or for that matter, even before modernity.

Now, hold that thought a moment, because we are going to circle back. But let’s first turn our focus to our scripture readings. The first is the story of Elijah, that great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, being taken up by a flaming chariot. Elijah is one of only two individuals in scripture who do not die. The other is Enoch, an obscure figure in Genesis. Everyone else dies, including Jesus, for you have to die in order to be resurrected.

This sets up the expectation in the Second Temple period that Elijah would play a future role in the restoration of an Israelite kingdom. There was speculation that John the Baptizer might be Elijah, or maybe Jesus was Elijah, or that it was Elijah to whom Christ called from the cross when he cried “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?,” which is actually the first line of the 22^nd psalm, and has nothing to do with Elijah.

Folk myth around Elijah was so strong that even during the medieval Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent had the eastern gate of Jerusalem walled off and a cemetery placed in front of it in the mistaken belief that Elijah was a kohen, a priest in the line Aaron, and therefore could not enter a cemetery. If no false Elijah could enter from the east, as tradition demanded, then no false messiah could follow.

It is the “not dead yet” Elijah and the very dead Moses that appear with Jesus on the mountain top in today’s gospel reading, always the last before Lent, and traditionally called the “transfiguration,” though Mark is not at all clear what he means when he says “transfigured,” other than everything becoming shiny and white.

And there is our problem, this whiteout, this idea that whiteness is good. And I get that there is a primitive fear of the dark, but the creation myth does not offer us day as good and night as evil. God creates both. We have evolved on a planet that spins on an axis, alternating periods of light and dark, and that rhythm is hard-wired and necessary for our health. Keeping the lights on is a form of torture.

Every time we hold out the idea that whiteness is good, even in this sort of abstraction, we reinforce the pernicious lie of race. And race does not even exist in the ancient context! It is a modern category that was invented to justify the enslavement of Africans and involved a lot of Enlightenment pseudo-science. 

And in the Oompa Loompa Paradox, some of America’s worst racists pride themselves in their whiteness while also spray painting themselves orange to look like healthy people of leisure.

Which is kinda nuts.

Continue reading “11 February 2024: Whiteout”

Mark 1:29-39
1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Twenty or so years ago, as prosperity gospel churches were modeling themselves on professional sports, stadium tours, and Ponzi schemes, a smaller movement in American Christianity was striving for authenticity. I was among the followers of progressive and reconstructive Christianity who engaged in ideas from this movement, sometimes called “Emergent.” 

Emergent authors like Brian McClaren wrote popular best sellers, while average Christians started reading work by scholars like John Dominic Crossan, folks who wanted to understand Jesus in context, a new wave of the historic Jesus school that has been around for a century and a half.

One interesting aspect of the Emergence movement was an emphasis on spirituality. During the last half of the 20^thcentury, the culturally and politically dominant form of American Christianity, white Mainline Protestantism, had become pretty dry, civic and social and sometimes intellectual, but with little emotion or enthusiasm, except when it came to carpet color, because nothing gets us fired up quite like minutia. 

As the new century dawned, some Mainline churches tried to create renewed energy and attract younger members by adding drum kits and guitars and praise music, while others, especially the emergents, dove deep into liturgy, into candles and contemplation and Taizé. Sometimes they’d even move out of and break away from the big old institutional church, forming “house churches.” They argued that this was how Christianity started, which is more or less correct.

But the problem with striving for an authentic original Christianity is that there is no such thing as original Christianity, just as there was no distinct single Judaism before 70 C.E. Never mind that it didn’t work because many of the pressures keeping people out of church are economic and political and beyond a local congregation’s control.

All of our original sources are biased at best, with Josephus, the closest thing we have to a historian of Galilee and Judea in the First Century, about as “fair and balanced” as Fox News. And even though some of the theological extremes were eliminated in the process of constructing the canon of Christian scripture, our earliest list of authorized texts, from late in the Second Century, is missing five books. 

The canon of scripture we have today, called by Christians “the New Testament,” is not one single text written by one single human or revealed by one single angel on or under some mountain. It is the result of centuries of religious evolution. There are plenty of contradictions in the text, and no definitive answer when it comes to what Jesus was about and how Christ saves.

Early Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Medieval Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Enlightenment Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Modern Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Post-Modern Christianity is dynamic and diverse. 

But one thing is pretty clear. Just as there are bottlenecks in biological evolution, there are bottlenecks in cultural and religious evolution. And Paul is the bottleneck in what would become early Christianity. Trying to see what Christianity would look like without Paul is like trying to imagine the sky Vincent Van Gogh was looking at when he painted “Starry Night.”

Of course, Paul didn’t know Jesus, and even though the gospels that were eventually accepted into the Christian canon pass through the Pauline bottleneck, the gospels don’t always align with that Pauline faith. 

Scripture claims that Paul’s ministry and his approach to evangelizing the Gentiles was approved by the leaders of the actual apostolic community, by a church council led by Peter, the first leader of the community after the execution of Jesus, and by James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jesus community in Jerusalem.

And as an aside, Peter was married as was made clear in today’s first reading. There is nothing in scripture that creates a celibate priesthood. And there is nothing to indicate that James the brother of Jesus is actually James the cousin of Jesus or James the half-brother of Jesus or James the generic male relative of Jesus, so work it out for yourself but full of grace or not, Mary had other kids.

But back to Paul and today’s second reading, because if we can get past the minutia, there is a big picture there. Paul tells us that he is willing to adapt to get the message across. 

If he was writing today, he might say “To the hipsters I became as a hipster in order to win hipsters. To Gen Z I spoke like Gen Z that I might share the good news. To skate punks, I appeared in a Supreme hoodie, though seriously, I cannot skate, but I was willing to look ridiculous if I could share the good news. But the skate punks were a bit cynical, and just said ‘Okay, Boomer.’”

Continue reading “4 February 2024: Good News”

Mark 1:21-28

Last Sunday, I mentioned to our Housing Justice team that I had issues with the Soup Kitchen hosted at the church I served on Long Island over a decade ago. 

First, there was the classic problem of building users forgetting who owned the building, also an issue with the pre-school coop that used church space. 

But the bigger problem was that the long-established soup kitchen and pre-school both had been impacted by the changing demographics on the South Shore. Sayville had been radically gentrified, the last large apartment complex turned into luxury condos my first year there. By 2011, the church was subsidizing childcare for folks who drove brand new Range Rovers, while the impoverished had to travel to Sayville from other communities to get their free meal, usually on an inadequate public transportation system. This was such a hassle that there were often more volunteers than there were guests.

The Soup Kitchen was politically untouchable, so I helped the church establish a second hunger ministry, one that was more appropriate to our community. There actually were families that struggled financially at times in Sayville, despite gentrification, but they weren’t going to take handouts in front of their neighbors. Instead, we established a food purchasing program where everyone could participate, regardless of income or need, removing humiliation and shame from the equation.

What I didn’t mention to that group last week was the disdain of other good liberal pastors over my desire to create a program that was more effective, disdain that turned into disgust when I mentioned that maybe the feces and discarded needles we found on church grounds were an issue when you were also hosting a preschool. I received that disdain and disgust in ALL CAPS on social media, reminding me not only of social media’s toxicity, but also of liberal self-righteousness, because nothing says party better than our circular firing squad. At one point we literally had a Narcotic Anonymous group and a drug dealer operating on the property at the same time.

I’ve seen a little of that sort of smug toxicity flare up on social media in the last couple of weeks, as it does routinely, though it is atheist self-righteousness this time around, and atheists would never use that term, of course, righteousness being a religious word.

A number of social media posters have created content showing urban churches taking action to control the impact of the unsheltered on their property. Comments are just about what you would expect, calling Christians hypocrites, asking sarcastically, often in ALL CAPS, What would Jesus do?

Now, I know many of those folks are lashing out because they suffered harm at the hands of churches, so I try to be measured when I am stupid enough to engage. But seriously, What would Jesus do? Jesus would cure the mentally ill and the addicted. He’d cast out the unclean spirits, just like he did for the Gerasene demoniac, for the man in the synagogue in today’s reading. 

We can’t do that.

Continue reading “28 January 2024: ALL CAPS”

Jonah 3:1-10

I was raised with two religions, the Southern Baptist form of Protestantism, and the Lost Cause form of mass delusion, though we did not call the latter a religion. I was taught that the “war of Northern aggression” was fought over state’s rights, and that men like Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson were great heroes reluctantly cast into an unnecessary conflict. There was no overt white supremacy, though there was certainly plenty of other racism in my wider social context.

Recent years have brought a long overdue correction. Though my matrilineal heritage includes enslavers, even members of the Lee family, I am delighted to see the statues come down. Far too many remain, of course, including that infamous mountainside carving in Georgia, but progress continues to be made.

In all of the stories of melted Confederates, you have heard no mention of Lieutenant General James Longstreet. He was one of the most important military leaders in the Confederacy, yet there have only ever been two memorials to him, a bridge named after him in his Georgia hometown, and a ground-level equestrian statue at the Gettysburg Battlefield dedicated in 1998, long after the Daughters of the Confederacy and related “Lost Cause” groups had faded into the grave. 

If you only read military history, you might think that this erasure in the Lost Cause mythology was the result of Longstreet’s role in that infamous battle at Gettysburg. He is often blamed for the Confederacy’s defeat, with particular attention paid to his performance on July 3^rd, 1863, and the disaster that was Pickett’s Charge. Longstreet would later claim that he found Lee’s strategy at Gettysburg misguided. 

But this is not a lecture on military tactics, and in the end, the disappearance of James Longstreet from the mythology of the Enslaver’s Rebellion, for it was not a civil war, had nothing to do with the war itself, and everything to do with what happened when the war was over.

In short, Longstreet accepted the defeat of the Confederacy, embraced Reconstruction, and defended emancipated former slaves, newly granted citizenship and voting rights. He joined the Republican Party, still then very much the party of Lincoln and abolition, and received government appointments, including an overseas posting as the United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

There is an irony here. President Andrew Johnson had denied Longstreet’s application for amnesty after the war, stating that he, Longstreet, along with Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, had caused the Union too much trouble. He was important enough to be in Johnson’s top three of unforgivable Confederates, yet other defeated Confederates considered him a traitor.

Do we melt down the sole statue? Rename the bridge? 

What do we do with the truly repentant, hated by both sinners and the self-righteous alike? 

Continue reading “21 January 2024: Longstreet”

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

There is more to Scottish literature than J.K. Rowling and Robert Louis Stevenson, though I tend to forget some authors are Scottish, like Arthur Conan Doyle, who I tend to place in the generic category “British.” 

One author sadly overlooked by Americans is the late Alasdair Gray, a William Blake-like figure who combined the visual and written arts over the course of his career. I first picked up a copy of his unconventional 1981 masterpiece “Lanark” while backpacking across Europe in 1993, then went on to read the then recently published “Poor Things.” Both works might be categorized as “experimental fiction,” though I think a more accurate description might be “project fiction,” the sort of books that require your full engagement.

You may have heard about “Poor Things” in recent weeks, for it has been made into a feature film and there is a whole lot of “buzz,” to use Hollywood lingo. The film stars Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Willem Dafoe, so not exactly a B-movie. 

The plot centers on conflicting accounts about Bella Baxter, who may or may not be a “Frankenstein-like” creature produced when an infant’s brain is transplanted into the body of a drowned woman. It is way more engaging than it sounds, though every bit as weird as it sounds. 

The work explores sensuality and inhibition, as well as who gets to tell the story of a woman’s sexuality, for there are two primary narrators in the text, Bella’s nominal husband and Bella herself, a framing narrative from a fictional character named Alasdair Gray, and the actual Gray who received the actual royalties. 

Not shockingly, even here, it is mostly men speaking for and about a woman.

And funny enough, “Poor Things,” the film, made the news and brought me back to “Poor Things” the novel just as we were approaching this week’s text, selected some time ago, dealing with the body, and especially fornication. Then, as sometimes happens, the Holy Spirit laughed, and I received a question about our church’s official position on polyamory.

So I guess we get a break from the hellish state of the world, and particularly the competing genocidal regimes in the Middle East, and can just focus on something simple: sex.

And for the record, we do not have an official position on polyamory. 

We believe in the right of Christian conscience, which is to say that we are prayerful in our decision making on moral issues, in dialogue with one another, with scripture, and with our tradition, but in the end, we each have to make decisions about morality for ourselves. 

There are limits, of course, around consent and violence and exploitation. And admittedly, I’m an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy who thinks two people is complicated enough and I tend to associate open relationships with cults, but I try to be a lot less judge-y and a lot more love-y. Quite apart from being gay, I watched Grandma shack-up with a partner for decades, unable to marry because of pension rules, and I have known many people who have faced loneliness as loved ones slipped into disability and dementia. I just don’t think God is that big of a jerk to punish people for seeking companionship. Though people certainly are, judgmental jerks that is.

Let me offer a quote from one of the most important figures in American culture that you might not know, Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” “Futurama,” and other generation-defining cartoons. Groening’s counsel is this: “When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.”

Jesus had siblings. It says so right there in the Bible. 

Peter was married, also in the Bible. 

Sure it was an ancient patriarchy, and the belief that blood was life created both kosher butchery and weirdness around menstruation. There is rape and revenge and miraculous babies in the Bible, just as there are in the myths of other ancient cultures. But the sum total is that the Bible is not anti-sex. That’s just Paul, and maybe not completely Paul, who famously said that we all have the same status when “in Christ,” neither male nor female, though he certainly scolded those who thought belief and grace were a hall pass for bad behavior. 

Continue reading “14 January 2024”

“Two Thousand Years at Rafah”

Matthew 2:1-18

If you were here on Christmas Eve, you might have noticed that there was no “no room at the inn,” but instead, “no room in the guestroom.” Though we have all seen countless Christmas pageants, in person and on screens large and small, this is a better translation of Luke’s text. If the census had actually happened, Joseph and Mary would likely have stayed with relatives, not at a Motel 6.

In the same way, today’s reading does not give us three kings, or even three wise men. First, there is no mention of how many traveled from the east, just the three types of “gifts.” In fact, in some Eastern forms of Christianity, they celebrate twelve travelers, possibly reflecting the twelve tribes of Israel. 

Second, they are definitively not kings. The unknown authors of Matthew use the word “Magi,” sometimes translated as “Wise Men.” We do not know whether the authors intended it in this generic way, or if they were using it with specificity. Magi were priests in the Zoroastrian religion of what is today Iran, east of Judea. Conflating the Magi with kings was certainly convenient for the church when it wanted to claim supreme authority, but it simply isn’t there in the text.

The authors of Matthew have a different agenda. They are, of course, recording the story of Jesus, who they view as the Messiah. But instead of focusing on his connection to David, as scripture, theology, and tradition often does, the authors of Matthew want you to see Jesus as a new Moses, the intermediary between God and humankind, negotiating a new covenant, for covenant and testament are translations of the same concept. You might also use the words contract or agreement or treaty. 

To that end, the authors of Matthew consolidate the teachings scattered throughout the other two synoptic gospels into five great sermons, to match the five books of the Torah. The sermon Luke describes as delivered on a plain is delivered on a mount in Matthew, to match the work of Moses on the mountain. And, relevant to today, there is a royal order to slaughter infants, just as there was so long ago under the evil Pharaoh. The Holy Family’s flight to Egypt strengthens that connection.

Though the events described in today’s reading are likely the product of holy imagination, the birth of Jesus roughly coincided with a widespread revolt against the rule of Herod the Great, a revolt that was eventually crushed with brutal violence. There is, in this text, a kernel of historic memory, a real slaughter.

What Western Christians have made of this story is a bit more complicated. Though it has assumed a different definition in modern times, in the original Koine Greek, Epiphany meant an appearance or manifestation. The visit of the Magi, who are definitively not religiously or culturally Jews, is read as salvation being made accessible to the Gentiles, often read through both the Koine Greek and Hebrew theology as “the nations.” This is a fulfillment of Hebrew testament promises, that through the children of Abraham, through the people covenanted to Yahweh, all nations would be blessed. The star appears to Gentiles, salvation is made manifest to the nations.

Unfortunately, Christians have often understood the new covenant as superseding prior covenants, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic. This was exacerbated by the dramatic events approximately four decades after Jesus was executed. Jerusalem and the surrounding region had spent most of the previous five centuries under foreign rule, often paying backbreaking taxes. The one successful revolt in the period, a century and a half before Jesus, was led by the ancient equivalent of rednecks, soon found to be completely incompetent and corrupt. The widespread rebellion around the time Jesus was born was followed about seventy years later by the First Jewish War, an utter disaster that saw Jerusalem and the Temple destroyed again.

It is after this, four decades after Jesus was executed, that what we know as Judaism today, Rabbinic Judaism, begins to form, at the same time early Christians were adapting their faith for the context of non-Jewish culture in Hellenistic and Roman-ruled regions. 

Supersessionism is the bad theology that sees Christians as replacing Jews, and plays into two thousand years of hatred, Martin Luther’s raging antisemitism, the “Blood Libel” fabricated in Russia and so like today’s Q-Anon, even the Holocaust, for while few senior Nazis publicly identified as Christians, Christian Germany was the soil in which the Final Solution grew.

And here we are, two thousand years later, and Persia, which is today Iran, funds the terrorist group Hamas, which opposes the right of Israel to exist, an existence necessitated by centuries of oppression and slaughter due to Christian and Muslim antisemitism, while extremist Jewish settlers engage in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, wiping out Muslim and Christian communities that have been there for centuries with a wink-and-a-nod from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition.

Continue reading “7 January 2024 – Epiphany “

24 December 2023 Advent IV Sermon

Luke 1:26-38 “Meating God”

Someone listening to me preach for the first time, and maybe even the twenty-first time, lifting portions of sermons out of context, might think I do not believe in God. They would be wrong. I have no doubts about God or the goodness of God. I’m a lot less certain when it comes to the goodness of my fellow humans.

We construct religions, but God is always bigger than any one religion, despite the exclusive truth claims of almost every tradition, including our own, which suggests some spiritual humility might be in order. 

That religion is a human construct does not mean that our efforts to understand holy mystery are wrong. Just because Moses did not write the Book of Exodus does not mean that particular great liberating event did not happen, led by Moses, nor does it in any way diminish the idea that the divine leans into liberation. The human soul is transcendent, and nature is non-stop “cup runneth over,” exuberant and resilient. If nature is a reflection of the glorious chaotic complexity of the divine, then liberation is holy.

The Christian Testament text called 2nd Peter might not have been written by Peter, but the person who actually wrote it was earnest and faithful, and also flawed, and besides, authorial integrity was a little more fluid back then. 

Progressive and Reconstructive Christians take scripture seriously enough to look for the overstory, the story beyond the royalist propaganda that supported the idea of a Davidic monarchy or the transactional faith that funded the lifestyles of the rich and priestly.

Our 4th Sunday in Advent theme is love, and of course it is also Christmas Eve, so I want to spend some time this morning on incarnation as an act of love. And I’ll start by bracketing the two specific Nativity stories, for only two of the four gospels describe the birth of Jesus, and they differ on some important details. 

I understand why the early Christians believed Mary had to be a virgin, and I am fine with whatever you decide to believe. I do not need Mary to be a virgin in my system of belief because I don’t believe Jesus saves by being an unblemished sacrifice to a blood thirsty deity.

I do not know or need to know exactly how Jesus may or may not have been divine, and let me assure you, there are many theological rabbit holes there, and that is even before you move from the specifics of Christology and on to Trinitarian theology, where you get to problems like patripassionism, the maybe/maybe not heresy that says that if Jesus is God and Jesus suffered on the cross, then God suffered, which some find completely unacceptable.

I am more interested, as I noted earlier, in the overstory. The details, the tools of historic context and the study of religion, those are just rungs on the ladder that get me to that overstory sort of like that planned Canopy Walk at Tanglewood Bill Bishop described during a recent adult forum. The overstory of the Christian testament is summarized in the concept of Emmanuel, God-with-us, which I read as a love story.

Continue reading “Advent IV and Christmas Eve 2023”

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a

Somewhere around 315 C.E., the Roman Emperor Constantine wrote a document professing his own Christian belief, and granting Pope Sylvester a number of offices, including control over Rome and pretty much the western half of the Roman Empire. Known as “The Donation of Constantine,” it was important hundreds of years later in Catholic claims against the rival Orthodox Christian movement in the east. It made the pope a king just as people like Charlemagne were building post-Roman kingdoms. And it was as legitimate as the resume of former U.S. Representative George Santos.

The same can be said of many biblical texts, at least when it comes to author authenticity. Tradition tells us that Moses wrote the Torah, which is certainly untrue. It tells us that David wrote the psalms, and while a handful of psalms may date back to that era, most were composed centuries later. 

In the Christian Testament, the Gospel According to Mark is probably mostly by Mark who was a random dude in the community connected with Peter, and the Gospel According to Luke is probably mostly Luke, full-time physician and amateur historian, but the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew was not written by Matthew the tax collector, and the Gospel traditionally attributed to John was not written by John, the brother of James and follower of Jesus. 

Some of the letters attributed to Paul contain varying amounts of actual Paul, and some none at all. And then we come to what are called the Pastoral Epistles, a handful of texts wedged in between the letters attributed to Paul and the feverish revelation to John of Patmos, who may or may not be assumed to be the same John or maybe a different John who didn’t write the gospels or the three Pastoral letters with that name.

The Pastoral Epistles are genuine in the sense that they reflect the concerns of early Christianity. But they were not written by James, or John the Disciple, or in this case Peter the Fisher of People, he who denied Christ three times. Not only were 1^st and 2^nd Peter not written by Peter, they weren’t even written by the same person. 

Whoever wrote what we call 2^nd Peter had one problem in mind. The first generation of Christians believed they would live to see the Second Coming of Christ or something along those lines, the “Day of the Lord” or the descent of the “Human One.” But they were all dying and that simply hadn’t happened. The author tries to explain the delay, and encourages the people to wait in peace, this week’s Advent theme, co-existent with last week’s theme, hope, neither of which should be confused with passivity.

The author of Deutero-Isaiah, our first reading this morning, was in a similar situation. The author, writing in the tradition of Isaiah, is part of the hostage community in Babylon. Jerusalem had been left a smoldering heap filled with bodies, not unlike Gaza and the Israeli Kibbutzim near its borders. Judah had been a religious nation-state. Now the nation-state was gone and the Temple at the center of their faith had been destroyed. They were in a foreign land with a different language and different customs, and faced pressure to worship foreign gods. In an age when few lived past thirty years of age, they were captive for more than fifty years.

The prophet/author delivers an oracle promising that God will restore the people and their nation. The flock, those held captive and those who had fled to places like Egypt, would be gathered once again. But first, the people had a task to complete.

If you are looking for some holy hocus-pocus, you won’t find it here. It does not say God is going to clear a path from Babylon westward to Jerusalem. It calls on the people to serve as that holy road crew.

Continue reading “Road Crew: 10 December 2023”

Mark 13:24-37

Our sisters and brothers in the Rabbinic Jewish tradition read the entire Torah over the course of the year, ending with Simchat Torah, a holiday when they read the last portion of Deuteronomy and the first part of Genesis, starting the cycle all over again, then celebrate by dancing and singing and carrying the Torah Scroll around the Sanctuary seven times.

We are not nearly that focused, disciplined, or reverential when it comes to scripture. Our sisters and brothers in more liturgical traditions, including the Roman, Anglican, and Lutheran communions, tend to have more readings on Sunday, and to treat the reading with more ceremony, while we aspire, at our best, to do fewer readings but to dive a little deeper.

I mention this because the first Sunday in Advent is also the first Sunday of a new cycle for those using the Revised Common Lectionary, something I loosely follow in planning worship here at Park. Today, we begin a year when our primary gospel texts will come from Mark. Matthew and Luke also get a year in the three year cycle, while the unique stories in John get distributed throughout.

So I’m going to begin this morning with an introduction to the Gospel According to Mark, then tighten the focus to today’s particular passage and its genre, and then connect it back to the theme for this first Sunday in Advent, which is “hope.” Which is sort of a lot, so just pick the thing you like.

The Christian Testament begins with the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We call the first three “synoptics,” for they contain many of the same elements. There is a reason for this. Mark, the shortest of the synoptics, is clearly one of the sources used by Luke the Physician and the unknown authors of Matthew in constructing those other two gospels. 

The authors of Matthew and Luke also use another source, one we no longer have, but can identify from the passages they share that are not found in Mark. We call this lost text “Q” after the German word for “source.” 

Finally, the Gospels according to Luke and attributed to Matthew each contain unique material, not found in Mark, Q, or the other synoptic. For example, the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke are very different.

The copies we have of Mark come from roughly the same version of the gospel. This matters, because they did not have a printing press and there was no such thing as copyright or even something resembling authorial integrity. Several letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul, and a significant portion of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah, and so it goes. 

Mistakes were made by scribes copying texts, and sometimes they altered or amended texts simply because they could, inserting their own agenda or attempting to clarify things. We are pretty certain this is how the infamous line in 1st Corinthians, the instruction for women to put on a hat, sit down, and shut up, got inserted, something inconsistent with everything else we know about Paul’s ministry and the role of women.

There were other versions of the Gospel according to Mark, longer versions. We don’t know if material was added to the version we now have, or if what we have is a reduced version of the longer text, sometimes referred to as “Secret Mark.” If you decide to go down that rabbit hole, be careful who you join for tea, because some of the folks debating “Secret Mark” are mad as a hatter.

Early Christian legend identifies Mark as someone in Peter’s inner circle, someone who wrote down what he remembered Peter teaching, though never certain about the order of events. Rather than thinking of the Gospel According to Mark as a first-person history, we should think of it as a collection of anecdotes.

Our reading this morning comes from the 13th chapter of Mark, which is unique in its own way. It is often called the Marcan apocalypse, one of three texts in that genre in the Christian canon. These include the last six chapters of the Book of Daniel, a text we mentioned last week as the origin of the figure sometimes called the “Son of Man” or the “Human One.” The second apocalyptic text is this chapter in Mark. The third and final, and by final I mean final, is the Apocalypse to John of Patmos, for “apocalypse” is simply Koine Greek for “revelation.”

While other texts speak of the “Day of the Lord,” these three are descriptions of a divine, violent, even catastrophic re-ordering of the world. 

And as we have discussed before, while the Book of Daniel represents itself as being about a figure from the Babylonian Captivity, it was actually composed several centuries later.

The Israelites were a loose confederation intermingled with non-Israelite cities, then a homogenous kingdom under David, who conquered the non-Israelite cities, and his son Solomon, who built the first temple. 

After Solomon, the Israelites broke into two kingdoms often at odds with one another. The glory days had lasted for less than a century. Some today aspire to recreate the borders of this early Iron Age kingdom. The northern half, the larger portion of the former Davidic Kingdom, fell in the 8th century, the southern portion, surrounding Jerusalem, in the 6th, with the elite and skilled artisans held captive in Babylon. 

A Persian victory allowed a return to Jerusalem under foreign rule, with the Temple’s High Priest acting as a de facto leader of the Jewish people. The Persians were replaced by the successor states to Alexander the Great’s empire, first the Egyptian remnant, then the Greek remnant, known as the Seleucids.

Greek culture, referred to as Hellenistic, dominated the entire eastern Mediterranean. Greek was the lingua franca, used for commerce and governance, well into the Roman age. The Jewish elite embraced Hellenistic culture, even proposing a Greek gymnasium to train young men in the holy city, complete with nude wrestling. 

This was also a period when the High Priesthood was spectacularly corrupt. Jason bribed the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, to make him the High Priest, replacing his own brother, Onias. History records the bribe as 300 talents, which you may remember was a huge sum, for each talent was more than an average laborer might earn in a lifetime. To cover the sums involved, Jason demanded backbreaking Temple taxes from the people. 

A few years later, Jason found himself dismissed when Antiochus accepted a larger bribe. Eventually the struggle between those who followed Jason and those who followed the new high bidder, Menelaus, broke out into open warfare. Antiochus viewed this as a revolt against his rule, brutally suppressed the conflict, and banned Jewish religious practice.

While all of this was going on in the city, folks in the countryside were in economic distress, and angry that they were losing their culture. They had believed that if they kept covenant with Yahweh, Yahweh would keep covenant with them, insuring their independence and prosperity. When that hadn’t happened in the past, they’d blamed themselves. But something different happened this time. They didn’t blame themselves. They didn’t even blame Yahweh. Instead, they decided to burn it all down.

This happened both theologically and literally. The former was the development of apocalyptic belief, the idea that the world was too broken to be repaired, that God would intervene in history in spectacular ways. The latter saw a peasant uprising, led by a family of country priests called the Hasmoneans. Sadly, they proved just as corrupt as everyone else, and by the time of Jesus, the Romans had seized control and installed puppet rulers like Herod Antipas who were not even Jews.

Because we tend to very narrowly read the story of Jesus, we often miss the brutality of that age. When one group protested Hasmonean rule, hundreds, thousands according to the ancient historian Josephus, were hung on crosses, then their wives and children were brought out and slaughtered in front of them, with the men then left to die. If the rulers, Hasmonean or Roman, demanded extraordinary taxes to pay for some palace or war, and a city failed to pay, the residents would be taken as slaves, and the city razed. The Romans would burn it all down, quite literally. The preachers of apocalypse wanted to burn it all down, Roman rule, the corruption and greed of the Temple elite.

We know a thing or two about folks so frustrated, feeling so powerless, that they want to burn it all down. It has been the most powerful movement in U.S. politics in recents years.

Which brings me back to our Advent theme of hope. So many Christians are stuck in the apocalyptic mindset, this small little subset of Jewish and Christian expectation. They expect to be raptured out of their gas-guzzling SUVs, which may or may not involve the conversion of all Jews to Christianity and re-construction of a Temple on that mount in Jerusalem, a belief system that continues the shameful history of Christian antisemitism and complicates U.S. policy in a region already entrenched in cycles of terrorism and war, including the current catasrophe.

Ultimately, I believe apocalyptic theology is a failure of imagination. 

Most of us choose to believe that holiness, creativity, and love are the driving force not only of our faith, but of creation itself, hard-wired into this amazing mystery we call life and in the complex positive chaos that calls it forth. 

We are not only called to see holy vulnerability in the “least of these,” as we were reminded last week, but to also see holy potentiality. Let me say that again. When we see Christ in our neighbor, we see not only Christ crucified, we see ahead to Christ resurrected.

Maybe belief for you is pregnant virgins and zombie Lazarus, but for me belief is that the holy is bigger than our stories, as awesome as they might be, and that love wins in the end. I do not need to hope God is good. I know God is good. 

My hope is that I can live into my holy potential, that you can live into your holy potential, that humankind can live into our holy potential, today, for as long as our hearts beat, and as long as this globe continues to spin in the sweet spot around that bright star in our sky. My faith is that God is with us, this day in the Chemung River valley, and on the other side of the world, where angels sang to shepherds on a clear and starry night. Amen.

Matthew 25:31-46

Last Sunday, we studied the teaching immediately before today’s reading from the gospel attributed to Matthew, a passage traditionally known as the Parable of the Talents, which gives us the line so often lifted out of context, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Of course, the servant was actually a slave, and I confessed in last week’s sermon that I am not sure what we are supposed to learn from that parable, something that was reinforced as I prepared for today’s text.

Specifically, the Parable of the Talents looks a lot like the late-stage neoliberal capitalism of our 21st century economy, profit without production, and that simply doesn’t make sense in the historic context. 

The Israelite culture was founded as small hold farm communities loosely organized by clan. Given the climate, it was a tenuous existence even at the best of times, and the times were rarely the best. The small hold family might manage a surplus some years, but there was the constant threat of drought and locusts, instability and war, and the demand for tithes and taxes from the Temple authorities and occupying armies. Even more important, however, is something captured in our reading from Ezekiel, and in today’s Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

Western culture deifies the individual. We might sometimes frame this as “enlightened self-interest,” but in the end, it is just selfishness, worshipping the god in the mirror, a religion encoded in the writing of Ayn Rand and in the perverse syncretic forms of Christianity that incorporate that idolatry. 

Economic activity during the late Second Temple period, the time of Jesus, was still pretty rudimentary, and where it occurred, it was communitarian. In fact, it is the deviation from this communal norm that both Ezekiel and Jesus are critiquing.

There were always some few who could not satisfy their greed. We have the famous story of Naboth’s vineyard in the Hebrew Scriptures, of the wicked king who wanted to benefit from his neighbor’s years of hard work cultivating a vineyard, and the wicked queen who was willing to arrange a murder. 

The Torah system of liberating and communal economics wasn’t perfect, and could be tested at times. During the life and ministry of Jesus, it was fraying, with a growing number of Jewish people losing their small hold farms in Judea and Galilee, often working as share croppers on land they once owned. The majority of the population in Galilee and much of the population in Judea were peasants. Thirty six years after Jesus was tortured and executed, things exploded in the First Jewish War, which would lead to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Judaism would re-invent itself in a way distinct from the Temple cult, while Christianity would continue to grow as an egalitarian and diverse movement.

Our first reading this morning, from Ezekiel, is one I believe is a bit neglected when it comes to social gospel teachings. The prophet, a Jewish priest held captive in Babylon, records the word of the Lord, where God judges between members of her flock. 

Here, sheep and goats are treated as one class, and judgment is on individual sheep and individual goats who take advantage of their size, literally throwing their weight around, abusing those smaller and weaker, fouling communal assets they do not need themselves, the pasture and the water. 

They “take,” in one sense, more than they need. God judges, then sets up a shepherd to protect the herd going forward, using David as an archetype for this new leader, for David’s reign was the foundational story for the Israelite kingdom, and David’s story starts as the shepherd boy called in from the pasture, anointed by Samuel.

This reading also provides an important context in our work around creation care and climate justice.

Continue reading “27 November 2023: Goat Liberation Army”