Constructive Faith

It was both heartbreaking and sweet, as love so often is. On March 3rd, 2017, the New York Times “Modern Love” essay was written by Amy Krause Rosenthal, a prolific and successful author. In it, she announced that she was dying of ovarian cancer, and offered a dating profile for her husband, soon to be a widower with three kids. Ten days later, she was gone.

Among her many works, across different genres and even media, was a 2009 children’s book titled “Yes Day!” This March, it made it to the silver screen. Well, to be more accurate, it made it to the little screen, for the film “Yes Day,” starring Jennifer Garner, was produced for Netflix.

The idea, of the book and of the screenplay, is that parents spend an awful lot of time saying “no,” and maybe, once in awhile, there should be a day when they say “yes.”

Within reason, of course. Yes Day does come with guardrails. The ten year old isn’t going to drive the car. And no one is going out to buy a pony. But, as blogger Dawn Booth reports, root beer floats for breakfast are a definite yes. Playing in the rain is also a yes. Playing hide-and-seek with your parents is a yes. Even doing a parent’s make-up and nails is a yes, which seems particularly brave.

It seems to me that, like parents, religion has a “no” problem, and while we can point to fundamentalists, we’d do well to look in the mirror, for “no” comes in many forms, wears many disguises, but in whatever form, it sucks the vitality right out of our faith, out of our leaders and our volunteers. It can come in the form of micromanaging and second-guessing, of stalling and delaying.

No is using process to stop progress.

No is the legalism that Jesus so despised when he spoke of the Scribes and Pharisees.

But here’s the thing: God is “yes.”

Earlier this week, a colleague and I were chatting over coffee about the texts and themes we were bringing to the pulpit this morning, for he also uses the Revised Common Lectionary, and he too is preaching on Joshua. I mentioned my sermon title, “God is yes,” and he reminded me that even in God’s no is a yes. For example, thou shalt not kill is really a yes to life.

Now, you already know me well enough to know that I don’t believe every rule in the Hebrew and Christian Scripture comes from God by way of divine revelation. Far from it.

Some rules are clearly needed for a well-ordered society, but I believe most rules are created by those with power and are primarily about preserving that power. Some put no in the mouth of a god made in their own image who wants what they want and hates who they hate. That’s just not God.

If God was no, then why is there anything? Seriously, the easiest thing to control is nothing. But God spoke something into being, and here we are. Creation is a glorious yes mess…

My late teacher Gordon Kaufman thought of God as serendipitous creativity. The late Templeton Prize winning scientist and mathematician Freemason Dyson put it this way:

I do not claim any ability to read God’s mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.

I’m with Dyson. Seriously, look at the platypus! Should we add a flat tail, like a beaver? Yes! What about a bill like a duck? Absolutely! How about venom, like a snake? Why not?

The duck-billed platypus is yes on steroids!

It is only in recent decades that scientists like the great minds at the Santa fe Institute have come to identify the yes hard-wired into creation in the form of complexity, the way discreet units, from particles to tribes, self-organize in surprising ways that create unexpected results, so that everything is always more than the sum of the parts, and attempts to break things down to those constituent parts is always deadly, destructive…

I can talk all day about the exuberance of God, of serendipitous creativity, of natural selection, of the ways life breaks through the hard stuff, about Maya Angelou and Mozart. But I don’t have to.

Because if you are inclined to see the cup that runneth over, you will. If you are inclined to see only the mess made where the cup runneth over, you will, for believing is seeing.

Believing is seeing. So be careful about what you believe.

No comes from fear. The desire to control comes from fear. No is fear distilled.

Sometimes that fear is completely rational. Listen, kid, wear the helmet while you’re out on that skateboard. I’ve seen people who suffered traumatic brain injury, and it ain’t worth it. Wear your mask and get the vaccine. Covid-19 is a gruesome way to die.

But mostly, we are afraid of things we can’t control. As our bodies age and get smaller, so to do our spirits. No comes to our lips faster than yes. We sit on the dark, on piles of gold, alone, afraid to fly for fear that one small bauble might go missing, refusing to truly to live. There is a reason the dragon became an archetype of greed, the wasted power, the wasted potential.

No is the human dragons that think they can kill vulnerability under mountains of gold, when no amount of gold can ever make us invulnerable, for our vulnerability is part of our beauty.

Yes is writing a dating profile for your husband as you lay dying, rather than insisting that he never love again. No is thinking that the love, of the spouse you leave behind, of the kids you leave behind, is zero-sum, and that love for someone else means less love for you.

No nails people to a cross. Yes raises them from the grave.

May we, like Joshua, say yes to a God who says yes to us every day…

Amen.

The Revised Common Lectionary, the schedule of worship readings shared by many Mainline Protestant churches, can be a valuable tool. Preaching resources are often aligned with the text, and many clergy groups use it for discussion and prayer. Worshippers can reasonably expect that friends in other Mainline churches, Presbyterians and ELCA Lutherans and Episcopalians and so on, probably heard some of the same readings on Sunday morning, if anyone actually heard a sermon worth remembering. More than anything, the Lectionary keeps us from getting into a rut and forces us to take in the whole story, making it harder to preach only what we want to believe or congregants want to hear. After all, as much as folks want every sermon to end with “You’re just swell,” that isn’t exactly faithful or reality-based. Sometimes, we are not just swell…

But the Lectionary is not perfect. There are more readings on any given Sunday than most of us are willing to read, so there is still a bit of pick-and-choose going on. Because readings tend to be short, they often rip incidents and teachings out of important context. And sometimes, the team that put together the schedule of readings simply didn’t like part of the text, so they skipped over it, as happens with today’s portion from the Second Book of Samuel. If you have ever heard the story of David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, you most certainly did not hear the portion where Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark when the oxen stumble. You would not have heard that Uzzah’s reward for coming to the rescue was to be struck down, killed by an irrational and violent God.

Pastors don’t like preaching that part of the text, for it is a reminder that Man made God in his own image, masculine intentional here. That is not to deny the reality of that divine mystery we name as God. It is an insistence that we always remember and name that our experience of the holy, of the sacred, is mediated through our own experience of the world, as upright primates and creative miracles, fearfully and wonderfully made. God, in order to be God, must be beyond our capacity.

Even reading the skipped parts, as we did today, deprives us of context and perspective, for we need to know why moving the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem is a thing David would want to do, and given David’s importance in the Christian understanding of Jesus, the ancient king’s every move is interpreted as a part of a holy plan, from the possible defeat of Goliath to the murder of Uriah.

So let’s take a minute to look at the story on its own merits.

For approximately two centuries after a small group escaped slavery in Egypt, the Hebrew people in Canaan operated as a loose confederation of tribes. Legend has it that the Ark of the Covenant contained artifacts from that escape. Following Hebrew numerology, we are told that there were Twelve Tribes, all equal in importance, and the Ark rotated between those tribes.

About three thousand years ago, the Hebrew people, worried about the growing threat of Philistines on the coast, and envying their powerful neighbors to the southwest and northeast, chose a warlord named Saul to be their king. Despite the story of divine choosing, the reality on the ground is that the crown should go to Saul’s son, David’s dear friend Jonathan. It does not. David engages in rebellion against Saul, and eventually takes the crown for himself.

David, that great king that is so important to the Christian understanding of Jesus, is a usurper. Many of his actions are about consolidating power and proving his legitimacy. Much of the story we receive in scripture is royal propaganda in the exact same way Shakespeare’s history plays are Tudor propaganda.

Claiming the Ark is the second step in consolidating his power. The first is conquering and claiming a city that does not belong to any tribe to insure that he is not beholden to any single tribe. He chooses a Canaanite city dedicated to the Canaanite god of dusk, Shalim, which becomes Jerusalem. Once he has established his new capitol, he seizes the Ark.

It might well confer some sort of blessing, as the text informs us it has done for Obed-edom. What it certainly does is confer power, for the Ark is sacred to the Hebrew Yahweh cult, so the whole of that cult turns toward the king’s new capitol, to the new mount where a Temple will eventually stand. The Ark of the Covenant will be placed in the innermost chamber of the Temple of Solomon, the “Holy of Holies” where the high priest can communicate with God. Whether the Ark was a sort of divine location or more like a holy walkie talkie is unclear.

The sacred object creates a sacred place, and David, in claiming it, is shaping a sacred story. The object, the place, the story, are all bigger than this one man and his schemes.

We can experience a sort of transcendent moment when we connect with something bigger than ourselves, when we stand amidst sequoias or in the cavernous space of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, when Britten’s War Requiem reaches a crescendo, or Simone Biles stands at the top of the medal platform. We can experience being part of something bigger than ourselves when we understand ourselves as part of an unfolding story, of this odd little progressive branch of Protestant Christianity, of this particular story of Park and Elmira and antiracism, when we honor our obligation to do not what we like and we want, but to do what is right, what honors our past by building our future.

But the sacred is more than transcendence. Germans experienced transcendence at the Nuremberg Rallies. Being part of a bigger story, being drawn out of ourselves and into something bigger, is only good if we are drawn out of our fear and all of the things that spring from our fear, greed and power. Being connected to something bigger than ourselves, a place, a story, is only good if it is good, which means thriving for both us and those things with which we are entangled, family, community, creation… well, everything really… Except mosquitos. There should be no thriving for mosquitos.

The sacred is not some box containing some tablets, a staff, and some magic bread. It is not some room filled with gold and incense wafting up towards a ceiling ever so far above.

The sacred is whatever aligns with God’s good purpose, which is continuous divine artistry, is the cycle of life, is this one bright gem of a world circling on sparkler of a son in the grand fireworks display that is creation.

Holiness is not deadly. The sacred is not deadly despite today’s text, despite the screenplay of the first Indiana Jones film, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which is a great film, just wrong about what it means to touch the holy. That gold box didn’t have any mysterious magic that would have helped Hitler or the Allies. God is not an irrational and violent abuser. God never was, despite thousands of years of bad press. God is good. The holy is here, if we choose it, if we align ourselves with all that is beautiful, is living, is yes.

There is nothing inherently wrong with taking care of yourself, your family. But love has to go beyond what serves you. It is only really love if it is selfless. There is nothing inherently wrong with precious objects and precious places, but they are not ours.

So what of that Ark? That sacred object?

It never appears in scripture again after the First Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians. Some claim it was hidden, eventually transported to Ethiopia. If we are to believe Dr. Jones, it has been lost in some U.S. Government warehouse. Seems just as well…

Let you soul swim in the sacred, in living stories and amazing places and in life, in creativity, in next…

Amen.

To make room for Christmas Eve prep, we are standardizing some re-usable worship elements. One is our “Prayers of the People.” Here is what I have for the four Sundays of Advent:

We come before God with our questions and our concerns, our joys and our sorrows.

Let us pray.

Most Amazing God,
You speak light,
holy data that takes form as all of Creation,
billions of flickering lights unfolding and expanding.

And there,
circling one of those lights you speak into existence,
are lives, flickering and beautiful, unfolding and expanding,
the green grass, the grazing sheep, the watchful shepherds.

And there, in that moment when love hung in the balance,
when times felt dark, light’s promise smothered by human fear,
you spoke love again,
as raw as a newborn’s cry.

Speak love into our moment.
Speak joy and hope and peace.
Speak mystery and truth.
Speak as we speak,

Bringing before you, our one author and source,
these our joys and concerns.
(Pause)

Because you are one with us in Christ,
Your Word spoken into this world,
we boldly pray as He taught us, saying:
Our Father…

My introduction to the ancient Arabic myth of djinnis was a case of cultural malpractice to say the least, with a hefty dose of patriarchy and misogyny on the side, for I am old enough to have watched “I Dream Of Jeannie,” a 1960’s television sitcom that was all belly-dancing subservience and moonshot. The only thing authentic was the chaos caused by the magic.

You get closer to the mark reading “The Arabian Nights,” or perhaps Salman Rushdie’s modern re-telling, “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” which amounts to, of course, one thousand and one. It is in that classic set of tales that you find such well known and oft filmed stories as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and the best known of the djinni tales, the story of Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. For younger generations, this is what a djinni is, this blue shapeshifter, whether animated and voiced by the late Robin Williams, or digitized and played by Will Smith.

The thing with supernatural creatures is that while they have rules, they are also wily. You’ve got three wishes, but like real life, you’d best be careful what you wish for. And don’t try to wish for more wishes, ’cause Djinni don’t play that… Continue reading “Ask the Djinni: July 26, 2020”

Two Homilies for 19 July: AM online worship, PM outdoors Vespers

Online Worship:

I understand it happens in other cities as well, though I never experienced it in New York City. That may be due to “alternate side of the street” parking rules and, well, the immensity of New York City. It might happen somewhere like Staten Island, or the furthest reaches of Queens. But it seemed new and odd to me those first winters in the metro Boston area, these lawn chairs in the street in January.

Now, some of you know exactly where I am going, but country folks and suburbanites may never have experienced it. You see, in Boston, and some other big cities with street parking, when someone digs their car out after a snow storm, they place a lawn chair or some similar object in the space to hold their parking space while they are gone. Moving someone’s lawn chair, or floor lamp, or stolen traffic cone, moving whatever is there as a placeholder to park your car in an available spot on a public street is considered a breach of the social contract. It can also lead to a breach of your personal space, a fat lip and a bloody nose. Continue reading “Lawn Chairs in the Snow: Two Homilies for 19 July 2020”

I have read my share of improvement books over the years, books about self, business, and community organizing. My shelves proverbially and literally runneth over. So I have no idea exactly what book and when, but at some point, years ago, I got in my head the idea that I should have a purpose, a mission statement of sorts. I embraced an idea from the English sculptor Henry Moore:

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

I’m not going to pretend that I bring every minute of every day to some great and noble task. Sometimes I just want to get the laundry done or stay cool in the summer heat. But generally, I keep my mission in mind. When I was Director of Learning for a new media firm in Manhattan, that purpose was to give people tools that would increase their creativity and happiness. My purpose as a minister isn’t that much different, still the same basic idea of tools for creativity and happiness, though those are now spiritual tools. Specifically, while being formed for ministry, I was able to name, for myself and those I served, a threefold mission. Continue reading “The Sower: July 12, 2020”

The victims were burned, electrocuted, and sexually assaulted. They were part of an ethnic minority, and many confessed under the torture. Some were sentenced to death.

This did not occur in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, not in Idi Amin’s Uganda, not in Myanmar or China. The victims were not Palestinians in yet another apartheid interrogation. This occurred primarily in the Area 2 Precinct Building on the South Side of Chicago, though it was not limited to this single precinct. And while one villain, John Burge, played an organizing role, he was not alone in believing that brutal violence was required to control black Chicago. These acts, globally understood as crimes against humanity, went on until 1991.

Let me say that again. African-American men were routinely tortured for almost twenty years by commanders and officers of the Chicago Police Department in what was referred to by insiders as the “Vietnamese Treatment.” Some of the living victims are younger than me. How can anyone wonder that many of the residents of the city’s mostly black South Side look on the department as violent and abusive? Continue reading “Confession: July 5, 2020”

Richard Rohr is an unlikely Christian superstar. He doesn’t have a megachurch or a private jet or thousand dollar suits. In fact, he has taken a vow of poverty as a Franciscan friar, so he is the opposite of all of those things, the bright lights and the glamor. Yet his dozens of books and daily mediations have a wide following, and while he has managed to stay inside of the Roman church since his ordination in 1970, no small feat for sure, he has also been an ally to the LGBTQ+ community and to ecumenical and progressive Christians of all stripes. I have several of his volumes on my study shelves, and some of you read his daily missives.

There is a quote attributed to him in Anthony B. Bartlett’s 2018 course book on a nonviolent reading of the Bible, though Bartlett doesn’t provide a citation, and a Google search fails to produce one either. Nonetheless, it sounds like Rohr, and even if it is not him, the words are wise and necessary.

Many Christians have to go through a time and experience of atheism, because the God we have been taught to believe in does not exist.

Now, some of you are part of the Hope family for precisely this reason, because the “god” you were taught to believe in as a child no longer made sense. Some of you have moved past that initial rejection, discovering new ways of encountering and understanding God, or better yet, of not understanding God and being okay with that. Some are still in that initial atheism, rejecting that traditional God and yet not quite willing to let go of that definition of what it is to be God. And some just like the music and the company, which is just fine too, though I do hope the wonder I have found in new ways of seeing the holy will rub off on you a bit.

If you have listened even this far into the sermon, then you have probably listened to other sermons as well, and already know that I like Rohr’s quote precisely because I had to live through that process myself, grieving even as I chose to break-up with the abusive God of my childhood, tip-toeing into new relationships, a few dates here, a few there, until I met the right God.

Today’s reading? As traditionally interpreted, that is the abusive God I had to leave behind. Reconfigure this tale ever so slightly, “if you love me you will do this thing that will destroy your soul,” and you have a textbook example of domestic abuse, domestic violence, Abraham with Stockholm Syndrome. Continue reading “God Does Not Exist: June 28, 2020”

Legend tells us that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, which would make them the oldest texts in our Judeo-Christian tradition. There are a few problems with this, the most obvious being that Moses, forbidden by God from entering the Promised Land, dies alone on a mountain and is buried in a secret location by God. Great. Who wrote that part?

In truth, some portions of the psalms appear to be the earliest surviving texts, dated at least two centuries after the Exodus event. The Torah itself is a product of a later age, mostly the years between the destruction of the “Northern” Kingdom of Israel in 720 B.C.E. and the destruction of the “Southern” Kingdom of Judah a hundred and thirty eight years later. A big portion of the Torah, including the entire Book of Deuteronomy, dates to a major religious reform under King Hezekiah.

The Book of Genesis is the most striking of these five books when it comes to textual history, for we can see very clearly how two very different traditions have been cobbled together, giving us parallel accounts of Creation and the Great Flood, two traditions, one from the lost Northern Kingdom and one from the South. It is not clear if the great patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, represent a single shared tradition, or if they too are the result of blending, a conscious effort to create a single shared story that takes in both traditions, that respects both.

We see a repeated pattern in Genesis, brothers are pitted against one another, including the two oldest sons of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, from different mothers, and the twin sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob. In both cases, the younger son usurps the rightful place of the elder.

Muhammed, in creating Islam, would appropriate the Ishmael tradition, claiming descent and therefore a shared Abrahamic heritage. But there is more that is going on with these texts than what later religious leaders would make of them. There is the central question of why. Why did the authors and redactors of a later time create these tales of brothers becoming tribes that would end up in competition with one another? Continue reading “Changing Stories: June 21, 2020”

I was never a fan of “That 70’s Show,” though I suspect that was more about timing than anything, for it aired during years when almost every day was a sixteen work hour day for me. I just didn’t watch much television, leaving a lacuna in my personal cultural memory. I did know that Ashton Kutcher was near the top of the celebrity heap, and recognized him when I saw the 2004 film “The Butterfly Effect.” Classified by some as science fiction, it was really more supernatural fiction, and named after a notion from chaos theory and complexity science. We’ll circle back to that in a bit.

Kutcher’s character, Evan, is part of a trio of friends who experience a series of traumas during childhood. In each instance, Evan blacks out. As an adult, he realizes that he can travel back in time to those blacked out moments and change his actions. The film deals with the consequences of these seemingly small changes, each resulting in a completely different life. A decision made in a critical moment at the age of twelve forever changes the future.

It is actually a pretty good film, as the genre goes, though it isn’t for everybody. Critics hated it, but the public seemed to love it, and it made $96 million on a $13 million budget. It is, at least, a lot less weird than a similar film, “Donnie Darko,” which came out three years earlier. Trust me, Donnie Darko probably is not your thing… Continue reading “Butterfly Effect: June 14, 2020”