Constructive Faith

John 9:1-41

A year later he would end up dead in his City Hall office, assassinated with the same gun that was used to murder Harvey Milk, but in 1977, George Moscone was still the mayor of San Francisco. 

That April, advocates for people with disabilities occupied federal offices around the country, demanding that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 be implemented. The legislation prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities by any organization receiving federal funds.

San Francisco rallied to the cause. Mayor Moscone sent mattresses to the activists occupying the office of Joseph Maldonado, the regional director for what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The local Black Panther Party sent ribs and fried chicken.

Twenty three days later, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano signed off on the implementation of 504. It would take another thirteen years before the Americans with Disabilities Act would extend protection for those with disabilities to all public spaces.

Judy Heumann, who died earlier this month, was one of the young activists in the San Francisco office. She would go on to serve in the Clinton Administration, and as an inspiration to many. It is hard to imagine, today, that she was turned away from school as a young child, called a “fire hazard.” Some in this room were alive when people with disabilities were routinely hidden away, institutionalized and warehoused, considered a family’s shame. 

Discrimination against those with disabilities is a cross-cultural phenomena. The Nazis perfected the art of mass killing with Aktion T4, the state slaughter of the physically and mentally disabled in 1939. Though initial reports in the West found over 70k victims, the discovery of archival material in the former East Germany suggests the actual death toll was three to four times that amount.

Today’s reading, from the gospel traditionally attributed to John, often gets glossed over, the tie to that classic hymn “Amazing Grace” providing the preacher with an excuse to avoid a long and difficult subject. If a preacher does dare to dig into the text at all, they might mistakenly focus on the sabbath violation, or on the general antagonism between Jesus and the group identified in this text as Jews, though the former would be to miss the point and the latter would be to misuse it. 

We, on the other hand, are going to take it head on, hoping to discover why this story is so unique, different than the numerous healings we find in the four gospels.

Continue reading “Born Blind: 19 March 2023”

John 3:1-17

The anti-Fascists breached the defenses at several points, and stormed through. 

I am, of course, speaking about D-Day, not January 6, 2021, for despite the misinformation and propaganda of Fox News and other corporate and white supremacist media outlets, anti-Fascists, known today as “Antifa,” were not present during the attempt to overthrow our democracy a little over two years ago. The accusation, as sinful and evil as it is, is that “woke” folk staged a “false flag” operation on that day. Though, as I’ve said, “Antifa” was certainly present on the beaches of Normandy.

The term false flag originates in the 16^th century, in the age of unsanctioned criminal piracy and the state-sanctioned piracy of privateers, an age when the false flag involved was the literal flag identifying a ship as being from another nation. Today, “false flag” refers to any covert operation where people misidentify themselves in order to provoke conflict, especially meant to provoke a backlash against the alleged, but false, perpetrators of an attack.

False flag operations have been used throughout history as a way to start wars or, and this is especially heinous, to set up pogroms and riots targeting oppressed minorities. Think here of the slaughter of Jews in Europe or the destruction of Black communities here in the United States. Russian agents have been repeatedly accused of false flag operations in neighboring countries in recent years as Vladimir Putin attempts to re-create a Soviet-sized sphere of influence. 

Many of us first heard the term “false flag” in relation to the most noxious cases here in the United States, a sort-of double negative when those who manufacture lies claim that mass casualty shootings are false flag operations designed to justify government seizure of redneck rifles. 

This is where you get the horror stacked upon horror of parents first losing their children in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, then finding themselves harassed and threatened by idiots who have been convinced that the shooting was a charade and that the parents are “crisis actors” working for the left. Recent civil judgments against the diabolic Alex Jones, while satisfying, cannot remove the embodied trauma, first of losing a child, and second of being hounded and harassed and threatened. “Oops, sorry” or “I didn’t really mean it” just doesn’t cut it.

I think there is a sort of “false flag” operation going on in some forms of Christianity too. They go on and on about being “saved,” saved by Jesus who is one person in the Trinitarian godhead, person here a technical theological terms that has no connection with reality. But who is Jesus saving them from when they are born again, to use the language Nicodemus misunderstands in today’s reading? It turns out, God in Jesus is saving the born-again crowd from God in the Father, the traditional masculine preserved here intentionally.

Continue reading “5 Match 2023: False Flag”

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 4:1-11

Protestants celebrate Reformation Day on October 31st, the date when an Augustinian friar mailed (with an “m”) a ninety-five point academic challenge to the Archbishop of Mainz. He may or may not have nailed them (with an “n”) to church doors in Wittenberg that day, though the coloring book version of history makes that act, and that man, the revolutionary start of Protestantism. 

Other Protestant reformers are seen as secondary to Martin Luther, including Huldrych Zwingli, our theological ancestor in the Reform tradition. In truth, Luther’s call for reform was not the first in the Western Church governed by Rome, and neither Luther nor Zwingl was the true spark that lit the fires of the Protestant Reformation. That honor goes to Erasmus, a Dutch Humanist and Catholic priest who brought rigor to the study of scripture, and so inspired both men.

Instead of October 31st, Reform folks like us might well celebrate March 9th as Reformation Day, marking the date five hundred and one years ago when Zwingli joined a group that ate sausage during Lent. It may seem a small thing to us today, but it was a big thing at the time, such a big thing that Zwingli was there, intentionally, but did not eat the sausage himself, instead preparing and delivering a sermon that made clear the lack of biblical support for Lenten fasting and defending Christoph Froschauer, who had hosted the event and was later arrested.

Like Luther, Zwingli would go on to challenge many other of the traditions and canon laws of the Roman church, including clerical celibacy and the sale of indulgences, and would eventually break with Rome altogether. His was a uniquely de-centralized reformation, for he was Swiss and patriotic and so thought in terms not of the rightful rule of king and pope, but in the confederate and semi-democratic style of the Swiss cantons. In Zurich, the bicameral City Council ruled. 

You probably don’t know these things because we have been historically embarrassed – that Zwingli died on the battlefield, that he was as willing to use violence to enforce his vision of the reform as were his opponents, that just as the Roman church was trying to suppress him, he was busy trying to suppress the even more radical reform of the Anabaptists. He is hard to clean-up and market, was a messy human. But who isn’t?

Zwingli was correct when he said that Lenten fasting is not biblical. Lent itself isn’t biblical. And abolishing dietary restrictions plays a central role in the struggle that would eventually allow for a Gentile church, for our church. Paul famously preached that non-Jews could follow Jesus without becoming Jews, meaning no circumcision, no need to adhere to the more than six hundred laws in the Mosaic code, including definitions of which food was clean and which unclean, prohibitions on mixing certain things like meat and dairy. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles gives us the dramatic story of Peter, who was an observant Jew in his context, receiving divine instruction to ignore dietary restrictions when dining with Gentiles. Paul would win, with his Jesus movement becoming the distinctive and dominant form of Christianity.

So why do some Christians fast during Lent? And for that matter, what is Lent, this church season that begins this week and is not universally observed among Protestants?

Continue reading “26 February 2023 Hard and Dry: Lent I”

Matthew 17:1-9

Six men on a mountain… Jesus “My Last Name Isn’t Christ and my Middle Initial Isn’t H”, Simon re-named Peter which is really just Rocky, so “Yo, Adrian…”, the rowdy Thunder Brothers, James and John, taking time off from Friday Night Smackdown, and two surprise guests, Moses and Elijah, one dead for more than five centuries, the other for more than a millennium, so yeah, kinda surprising.

It is quite the scene we are asked to take in on this last Sunday before Lent begins, this Transfiguration of Christ where Jesus shines and a voice in the sky claims him as Son, demanding that people listen to him. 

Classic theology treats this as a theophany, an experience that reveals Jesus as God, which is absolutely not in the text, and probably isn’t even part of Matthew’s understanding. The Doctrine of the Incarnation is at least a hundred years in the future when this gospel is written, and no one is even near thinking about a Trinity.

Good skeptics that we are, our question is not “Is it true?” It isn’t even logical. What, Moses showed up with a name-tag that said “Hello, My Name Is” with Moses in faded marker underneath? 

Because you know that using dried up markers is a commandment of some sort. 

Or maybe John recognized Elijah from Tik-Tok? “Yo, dawg… let me get a selfie!”

Of course it didn’t happen. Not that I am against miracles. They happen every day. But sometimes the miracle is in the perception rather than the reality.

The question we should be asking is what were we supposed to learn from this story? Whether Peter, James, and John thought they saw Moses and Elijah with Jesus or the entire episode is pure fiction, the bottom line is that people made the decision to preserve this story, to write it down and to transmit it, because it served a purpose, because it had meaning for them, meaning before the overwrought interpretation of the Christ event as some divine suicide with humans as supporting actors.

Though, you know, Peter does establish himself as the true founder of the church, for he immediately proposes a building. No doubt there is a capital campaign consultant down at the base of the mountain, mixed in with the other disciples.

What was the meaning of this story when it was included in Mark, the first of the Synoptic gospels? 

What was the meaning when it was picked up by the unknown authors of Matthew and by the historian and physician Luke? 

How did the early Christians understand it if they didn’t have the lens of those later theologies?

Continue reading “Transfiguration Sunday”

12 February 2023

Faith and Science Sunday

1 Corinthians 13:9-12

The visiting scholar asked us to engage a question at the intersection of faith and science. Essentially, it came down to this: what changes, if any, would be required of our theologies if life was discovered elsewhere in the universe, if there were extraterrestrials? 

Now let me just start by saying that I am agnostic when it comes to extraterrestrial life. I have read explanations saying it is mathematically inevitable and others saying it is mathematically improbable, but most days I’m just focused on more mundane matters, like getting that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube… I never got to galaxy-level math in school.

But yes, life elsewhere in the universe would certainly challenge the claims of traditional Judeo-Christian theologies, that center this planet, this species, one single tribe of our species, and one household in that tribe.

It was a breakfast gathering for interfaith clergy at Kol Ami, and the conversation was lively and informed, until… Well, you know humans! We suddenly found ourselves being scolded by a store-front preacher for misusing the term “fundamentalist.” The term, according to him, referred to a desire to read and interpret scripture in the original or fundamental languages.

Those who know me well may be surprised and maybe even a little disappointed that I managed to keep my mouth shut, leaving this unchallenged, but everyone else at the table already knew it was untrue, and the one who said it, who was reprimanding the professional clergy at the table, wasn’t capable of hearing the truth.

The reality, the real reality, is that Fundamentalism took its name from a series of tracts published between 1910 and 1915, reprinted endlessly, and funded by the California oil baron Lyman Stewart and his brother Milton. They were the early 20^th century version of David Green and family, the treasonous owners of Hobby Lobby and funders of the Jesus Gets Us ad campaign, for like Hobby Lobby, Lyman Stewart used religion as a cover for an agenda that ultimately served to protect his wealth and power. 

The Fundamentalist tracts were written by conservative Protestant clergy. As far as I can tell, of the sixty-four authors, sixty-four were white, and sixty-three were male.

The project denounced anything that might offer an alternative way of seeing the world, that de-centered white males or privilege and power, things like the Social Gospel of our progressive Christian tradition, scripture scholarship and historic context in the interpretation of the Bible, organized labor, which Stewart considered socialism, and of course, science, especially Darwin’s articulation of natural selection and evolution. 

From the start, Fundamentalism was at war with science, scholarship, truth, and justice. Things haven’t really changed.

Continue reading “Faith and Science Sunday: 12 February 2023”

Isaiah 58:1-12

Today’s scripture reading comes late in the tradition of Isaiah, long after the original prophet, and possibly even after the Israelite elite had been freed from the Babylonian Captivity and allowed to return to Jerusalem, rebuilding their city under the good rule of the Persians. At least that is the official version of events. That would make it around the late 6^th century B.C.E.

The passage echos key prophetic themes from before the catastrophe, themes of earlier prophets like Amos and Micah, themes written into the Torah itself that would later be central in the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus. In a nutshell, it comes down to two points: 1) What was important to the Israelites in their religious practice, showy displays like public fasting and Temple sacrifices, were not what was important to God. God did not need their burnt offerings and attention-seeking acts of public devotion. 2) What was important to God was justice.

The passage closes with a call to help those already oppressed, to provide food and shelter to the destitute, but this comes only after the call to establish justice. 

In fact, the passage first calls out the mistreatment of workers, making clear that it is not bad luck that has left people hungry and homeless, not locusts or drought or plague. Those who are suffering are suffering because of human decisions, and not the decisions of some foreign invader, but the decisions of their own people, seemingly religious people. God, as voiced by the prophet, is a labor activist.

Then there are these four direct commands. Loose the bonds of injustice. Undo the thongs of the yoke. Let the oppressed go free. Break every yoke.

The yoke, of course, is y-o-k-e, the wooden crosspiece used to bind two animals to one another in order to pull a plow or wagon. Think of a pair of oxen. 

Yoke is in there twice, and that might be worth considering. Undoing the thongs of the yoke is enough to allow the oxen to run free. Breaking the yoke means eliminating the possibility of anyone else ever being placed in the yoke again. It is a preventative measure.

But then, we get to the gospel, and circle back to the yoke, for just as Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross and follow, so too does he use the language of the yoke, encouraging his followers to voluntarily accept the light yoke of discipleship.

So which is it? Are we the pro-yoke party or the anti-yoke party?

Continue reading “Liberty Is A Lie: 5 February 2023”

It is possible, probable in fact if you have been in these pews more than a handful of times in the last year and a half, that you have heard me call crypto-currency a con job, a Ponzi scheme, or a criminal enterprise. I mean, I’m not all that bright most days, but I just can’t see that it is based on anything real, never mind the libertarian sociopathy that inspired the whole scam.

A bunch of hot computers solving math problems does not create value in a world where hungry kids can’t eat math problems, where things like actual sunflower oil and actual clean drinking water matter. Call me crazy, but non-fungible tokens don’t seem to be feeding much of anyone. At least you can eat real fungus, on your pizza right there with the pepperoni.

If you are asking, yes, I told you so, and yes, I’m sinfully smug about recent events.

Among the string of recent crypto-implosions is FTX, an exchange and hedge fund headed by Sam Bankman-Fried, now facing federal criminal charges in connection with the collapse. It is estimated that clients lost more than $8 billion, though to be honest, I’m not sure anyone knows how much of that was real money and how much was phony money, crypto backing crypto. If it doesn’t make any sense to you, good, because it doesn’t make any sense.

Continue reading “Dust and Sweat and Blood: 29 January 2023”

The text we know as First Corinthians is generally considered to be mostly authentic. You’ll note a double hedge in there. Some scholars will question the authenticity of anything, which accounts for the “generally,” and pretty much everyone who prefers scholarship over misogyny agrees that the verse directing women to “sit down, shut-up, and put on a hat” is a late alteration to the text inconsistent with Paul’s actual teaching, which accounts for the “mostly.”

There are all sorts of wonkish reasons people think this letter is the real deal, authentically Paul, but I’m not interested in most of those this morning, which would be more lecture than sermon. The main thing for me is that it feels real, feels like real human, especially that “who I baptized” bit. Every time I read it, in my head, I hear Paul as a gangster. 

“I didn’t baptize none ‘a yous guys. Oh, except for Joey Three-Fingers. And Little Vinnie and his crew. Maybe some other guys, I don’t know. But I didn’t baptize all ‘a yous.”

Could that tent-making thing have been a front, with a little numbers racket at the back of the shop? What’s the over/under on the number of people the Romans will crucify today?

But seriously, Paul’s letter begins with an appeal for unity. The Corinthian church is already divided into factions, and can I just note that there are still folks walking around who actually knew Jesus, and already there are these divisions, within the church at Corinth, as well as between Paul’s growing flock of Gentile Jesus-followers and the original Jewish Jesus movement. 

Paul is all “I’m not in competition with Apollos or Peter” here in the opening of the epistle, but then spends almost the entire rest of the letter trying to convince his readers that he is right and Apollos and Peter are wrong. Because Paul is actually human.

It is easy to lose this humanity, Paul’s humanity, the humanity of any of the authors of scripture, because the fundamentalist heresy insists every word in the Bible is holy utterance. If God is writing the text, then the humanness found in the text is a con, mere artifice. 

Continue reading “22 January 2023: Gangster Paul”

Isaiah 49:1-7

Understanding the Hebrew Bible can be complicated at times. For one thing, it was written over a span of several centuries in very different cultural, technological, and political contexts. To put it in perspective, at the most conservative end, we’d be looking at a text completed today but started when Columbus first reached the Americas. At the far end of the range, it would be a text with its earliest material written when William conquered England. That’s a long time.

It contains legal codes, some self-help, poetry and hymns, polemic and history, and a generous amount of pious fiction, myths and stories designed to help one particular tribe understands its place in the world, a tribe caught on hardscrabble land between two great river valleys that produced more powerful armies. It is the imperfect but mostly well-intentioned human encounter with holy mystery.

Today’s reading comes from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, a text that combines material from that named 8th century prophet with material created two centuries later, during and soon after the Babylonian Captivity. We don’t know who wrote that later material, and can only guess at the process that formed the book as we have it today. We might think of it less as the work of “the” prophet, singular, and more as work in the tradition of the prophet, carrying important themes across contexts and centuries the same way we here at the Park Church carry forward themes from the Abolitionist movement that inspired the founders of our congregation, understanding that Black Lives Matter and “Say Their Names” are in continuity with that great history of resistance and courage.

As the saying goes, the author of today’s text has ninety-nine problems. After years of being caught between Egypt and the various civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, the once great Israelite Kingdom was gone. First it broke in two due to in-fighting, then Assyria crushed and de-populated the Northern Kingdom, the time period of the First Isaiah. As the author we call Second Isaiah is writing two centuries later, there are still some alive who remember Jerusalem as the thriving capital of the Southern Kingdom, Judah, but that too is gone. The Babylonians leveled the walls, destroyed the great Temple of Solomon, and took the elite and skilled as captives, the context of the pious fiction of the Book of Daniel.

They aren’t exactly slaves in Babylon, but they aren’t exactly free either. They want to go home, but home is a smoking ruin. Worst of all, they are having to re-examine everything they believed about their own identity, the story they had told themselves about who they were. They thought they were the special chosen people of the Creator, the god they called Yahweh, who they were coming to believe was the only god. Maybe they weren’t so chosen after all. Or maybe they were chosen, and had screwed up so bad that this was punishment. Maybe this was all their own fault.

So yeah, a lot going on, and the prophet was hard at work trying to construct new theologies that made sense in their current context, to offer hope and inspire action.

This could be all about the Israelites. But it isn’t.

Continue reading “Dare to Dream: MLK Weekend 2023”

I am going to begin this morning by going a little “meta,” and by that I don’t mean Zuckerberg’s civilization-destroying company. What I mean by “meta” is zooming out and looking at how the proverbial sausage is made, thinking about how we think about Epiphany.

Like other dates on the liturgical calendar, Epiphany wasn’t really a Congregational thing. Those Puritans and Pilgrims were a dry and cranky lot, only interested in the basics. Remember, they outlawed Christmas at one point. Thankfully that didn’t last too long. But there were plenty of ancient feasts and practices they still considered “Papist,” including Epiphany.

It was only a century ago, when the ecumenical spirit was in the air worldwide, that we started re-examining and restoring some of the Christian traditions we had thrown off, especially important as we grew closer to parts of the German church in America that were as much Lutheran as they were Reform.

Unlike the Feast of Christ the King, a 20th century fabrication, there is at least a real tradition, actual scripture, around Epiphany. It is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, as in the proverbial partridge in a pear tree and all that, and the date associated with today’s reading from Matthew, the arrival of wise people from the East at the home (not manger!) of Joseph and Mary.

The word “Epiphany” itself comes from the Biblical Greek for an appearance or manifestation, and so shares somewhat with the word “apocalypse,” which simply means to reveal or make known. Both lean into seeing as a way of knowing.

In particular, Christians have traditionally connected the story of the wise travelers with the gospel message to the Gentiles, that is, to people who were not ethnically or religiously connected to the tribe of Israel. Which is kind of important, because no good news for the Gentiles means no us, no Sistine Chapel, no Mozart Requiem, no Azusa Street revival.

Because there is that star, because there is that message to the Gentiles, pastors all-too-often slip into the sin of supersessionism, the wrong-headed theology that claims Christians replaced the Israelites in covenant with God, contributing to centuries of antisemitism, to Auschwitz and the Tree of Life Massacre. 

Just as often pastors lean into the language of light, connecting to old tropes that equate good with whiteness and evil with darkness, not only paralleled in racism, but also ignoring the very real and important role darkness plays in life, in rest, in mystery. Christmastide, the season from the Christmas Eve service through Epiphany, as well as Eastertide, the season from Easter Sunday until Pentecost, are assigned white as the liturgical color, because white is assumed to be good.

It is not that all of those pastors are intentionally racist or antisemitic. It is simply that we have this slow construction of story, a soup of ancient superstition and scientific knowledge.

So let’s ignore those old tropes, and, as they might say on a television police procedural, let’s just stick to the story, ma’am.

Continue reading “The Burning World: 8 January 2023”