Constructive Faith

You would have thought that America had enough on its mind in January of 1964. People were still grieving for JFK, white supremacists were ramping up their violence to combat the continuing Civil Rights movement, and the war in Vietnam was growing by the day. But culture warriors being what they are, what was on the mind of Indiana governor Matthew E. Welsh was the lyrics to Louie Louie. 

They made his ears tingle he said, and he determined that they were obscene. It didn’t help that the version climbing the pop charts featured the incomprehensible mumblings of Jack Ely fronting The Kingsmen.

Even the FBI got involved. In reality, the lyrics to the song were innocuous. Written in 1955 by Richard Berry, they told of a sailor returning home to his love in Jamaica. No obscenity.

It is not the worst case of a text being misunderstood, even of a song being misunderstood. Take, as another example, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” a 1986 hit by Timbuk 3. It became a prom theme, a graduation anthem, when it is actually about the risk, especially high back then, of nuclear annihilation, the bright future being an atom bomb. 

While that was the band’s biggest hit, they also recorded a song about marriage equality, “Legalize Our Love,” and a prescient takedown of white Christian nationalism, 1989’s “Standard White Jesus.”

And that is the Jesus I knew as a kid, the white guy with shampoo commercial hair and the creepy eyes that were looking at you no matter where you went in the room. If we’d done Mary in the Southern Baptist church, she’d have been pretty standard and white too, but we only acknowledged Mary at Christmas. Anything more was practically papist. 

God, of course, was also a white male, not only in appearance as rendered by Michelangelo, but also in attitude. In fact, and I’m sure this is just pure coincidence, but in that church where older white men had absolute power, God acted like an older white man with absolute power, an older white man with absolute power and a shocking fragility, for despite God’s supposed omnipotence, he was constantly offended that humans were not properly stroking his ego or following the rules he had implemented to micro-manage our lives. The culmination of his rage was the ultimate act of domestic violence, conspiracy to murder his only child.

Talk about misunderstanding a text. Geez.

Continue reading “A New Spirit: 5 June 2022”

She is beautiful and tall, this European woman sculpted by Joseph Hugues-Fabisch in 1864 and placed in a grotto in the Pyrenees, not short and Middle Eastern, as we might expect. But this was the Mary that Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen, the statue that still stands in Lourdes, the great shrine that has been caricatured by some as the Disneyland of the Roman Church. 

In normal times, about 350,000 of the desperately ill will bathe in the waters of Lourdes during the pilgrim season from Easter to All Saints Day, each seeking a miraculous cure. Countless others will visit the shrine, drinking water from the taps and purchasing what the late English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called “tawdry relics, the bric-a-brac of piety.”

Now, we can dissect everything from Bernadette’s claimed visions to the scant seventy miraculous healings recognized by the Roman communion since the shrine opened as a pilgrim site in 1860, but I’m not sure that gets us very far. We’re skeptics by nature and we like science, but sometimes something becomes holy simply because enough people decide it is holy, and even the most hard-core rationalists among us recognize the mysterious power in art and music and love, the mystery of being itself, and especially the weirdness that happens at the intersection of our brains and our bodies. Miracles are real, but the category “miracle” is a human one.

It is Lourdes that comes to mind when we read today’s gospel, which comes from the tradition associated with the apostle John. On the surface, it is just one more healing miracle among the many healing miracles of Jesus, and in the context of John, which offers us signs that Jesus is the Messiah, it is just one more sign. But there is a bit more depth to the healing stories in the gospels, to this story in particular.

Continue reading “Stirred Up: 22 May 2022”

The final book in the Christian Testament is a problem generally, and especially in the context of the English-speaking United States, where white Christian nationalists view its violence as a literal game plan. 

Among the problems, for example, is the name. It is often called “Revelations” or “The Book of Revelations,” when it is actually the revelation, singular, “to or of” John, the “to or of” being unclear in the ancient manuscripts and Koine Greek, and maybe not really that important. 

The English translation revelation is itself a problem, for in Koine Greek it is “apocalypse,” and the English cognates have diverged, with apocalypse no longer meaning what is revealed, but instead referring specifically to this vision of destructive re-ordering, of catastrophe. These days, a revelation, say that a politician is corrupt, is not an apocalypse. Its just Tuesday.

And which John? We almost all know more than one person by that name in real life, but when it comes to the Bible story, we engage in a sometimes absurd reductionism. It doesn’t help that it was accepted practice at that time to write and publish fraudulently in the name of someone with authority, the reason new texts were produced in the prophet Isaiah’s name centuries after the son of Amoz was dead, the reason we have texts written in the name of Peter and Paul that were definitely not written by Peter or Paul. There are multiple Marys in the gospels, but somehow fundamentalists insist on only one John.

The Gospel traditionally attributed to the actual disciple John, the brother of James, the three letters attributed to John, and this “revelation” to or of John are not from the same author, nor from the same decade or region. It is unlikely that the fisherman from Galilee actually wrote any of them, though the gospel at least seems to have come from a community associated with him. 

It is best to refer to the author of this text, the revelation, as John of Patmos, the Greek island off the coast of modern-day Turkey that the author identifies as the site of his visions.

And all of that before we even get to the content of the revelation, this fever-dream of a great battle between good and evil, good being the followers of Jesus, of course, evil being both Rome and Jews. The text has helped fuel centuries of Christian antisemitism, and plays rather well with the greatly exaggerated narrative of Christian victimization, especially popular with America’s white Christian nationalists who believe having to compete on an equal footing with others makes them victims. 

Continue reading “New Jerusalem: 15 May 2022”

Friends, my installation as the 15th Pastor and Teacher at the historic Park Church will be this coming Sunday at 4:00pm Eastern. The Rev. Paul Nixon will be preaching from his home in Southern California. The service will be available on Zoom: account ID: 868 590 2067, meeting pass code 246753. You can dial (929) 436-2866, or click: https://zoom.us/j/8685902067?pwd=R2h4bkNpblNyRTVYS1VGNGR0SXVzQT09

One of the National Public Radio programs I enjoy is “Hidden Brain,” so when I heard that host Shankar Vedantam had a well-reviewed new book, I went out and bought a copy. Titled “Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain,” it tells tales that are remarkable, incredible (as in hard to believe), and sometimes horrifying. 

Take, for example, the case of surgeon Bruce Moseley at a VA Medical Center in Texas. He had served as the surgeon for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, had a remarkable track record, yet he had long questioned the efficacy of a common procedure, arthroscopic knee surgery. He wondered if the procedure itself, the mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, had a benefit, or if the actual benefit was derived from the saline wash used during the procedure. He devised a study, and a colleague convinced him to add a third group, a control group that got the incisions, but had neither the actual scraping nor the saline wash. It was not easy to get a study like this approved, but it eventually was, and Moseley found enough patients willing to be randomly assigned into the three study groups.

After two years, patients in all three groups reported marked levels of improvement. And there was no difference between those who received the actual procedure, those who only received the saline wash, and those who had what was, in truth, placebo surgery. Let me say that again. The outcome was exactly the same for those who had the traditional procedure, mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, those who only had the knee joint flushed with saline, and those who had incisions made on their knee with no actual procedure.

This is a particularly stunning example of something we know as the placebo effect. Now, if you are like me, you tend to associate placebos with hypochondriacs and the gullible. After all, you and I are way too smart to ever be duped in this way. But are we?

Continue reading “Placebo : 8 May 2022”

Time travel has been a major feature in fiction, from novels to film, since H.G. Wells introduced his “Time Machine” in 1895. It accounts for literally billions of dollars in content. 

The climax of the 23 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Avengers:Endgame,” includes time travel as the central plot device, and brought in $2.8 billion dollars at the box office worldwide. That was for that single film.

Time travel features in mega-franchises like Back to the Future, Outlander, and Lost, is on Disney Channel and Netflix, and is the central premise of a television franchise that premiered when I was an infant, the BBC classic Doctor Who. That premiere came the day after JFK was assassinated, which caused a delayed start and low viewership, so the series might have never gone anywhere, an alternate timeline many of us would prefer not to imagine. As it was, the series caught on, running until 1989, then rebooting in 2005 and still going strong.

The Doctor, “Who” is not his last name, it is only just the Doctor, is part of a species of time traveling extraterrestrials called Time Lords. They also have the ability to regenerate into new bodies, convenient for a series approaching sixty years running with one main character, Since 2017, the Doctor has been played by Jodie Whittaker, the first woman in the role. Oh, and the Doctor is unambiguously good, though sometimes flawed. I guess even time traveling extraterrestrials have their baggage.

In today’s first reading, one of the Doctor’s time traveling companions, the completely human Amy Pond, has made the decision to travel through time to be with the man she loves. She gets a message to the Doctor through her daughter, and asks him, for the Doctor was a him at that point, to travel back in time and tell her younger self a story, one filled with hope, one promising adventure.

This totally messes with the rules of time travel, of which there appear to be three, though they get broken all the time. The first is that you should never meet another version of yourself. The second is that you should never use time travel for personal gain. This is how you tell the heroes from the villains in these things. And the last is that any change you make in the past can have unexpected and sometimes catastrophic consequences in the future, including eliminating your personal future.

The Doctor does visit young Amy Pond, and the power of the story prepares her for her future adventures. 

Today’s gospel reading is also about the power of story, potentially opening us up to an alternate future for Christianity and therefore all of history, for it involves the early struggles of the church to figure out what Jesus meant.

Continue reading “Rules of Time Travel: 24 April 2022”

Tattoos were tied to socio-economic class when I was young, something for sailors and truckers and sometimes gang members. That has changed generationally. I have four tattoos so-far, a fifth planned, though only one is always visible, and mostly unnoticed.

The first tattoo I got, when I graduated from Divinity School, is a band on my left arm containing a passage from the gospel according to Luke the Physician, written in the original Koine Greek from what is accepted by serious New Testament scholars as the standard edition, the Novum Testamentum Graece frequently called the Nestle-Aland after the famous German scripture scholars critical in its development, the father and son Eberhard and Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland. The Nestle-Aland offers the consensus reading as well as the manuscript variants, for there is no official Bible, despite what you may have been told, certainly not a four century old translation into Jacobin English. 

In fact, and speaking of four, our four primary ancient manuscripts of the Bible, called codices, are from the 4th century, and in the four gospels, there are variants in more than 40% of the verses.

It might be a little geeky to have scripture in the original Greek, or at least as close as we can get to the original Greek, tattooed on my arm. 

Who am I kidding? It is full-on nerd. 

But there is a reason behind my choice. You see, the line is the one we proclaimed at the start of this service of the resurrection, the one we translate as “The Lord is risen indeed.” And that is good enough for our purposes most days. 

Continue reading “Practicing Resurrection: 17 April 2022”

The terms Christianity and Christendom have often been used interchangeably, which turns out to be a problem for at least two reasons. 

The first is the notion that there was ever a singular Christianity. There were wildly different understandings of Jesus among his followers even when he was still alive, and though Christians spent centuries trying to figure out what had happened, to hammer out authorized belief, often with the help of swords, there has always been diversity within Western Christianity, as well as movements that never fell under the sway of the Western church. 

The Coptic Christian communities of northeast Africa have existed since the beginning, and four of the five patriarchs, those in Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople, never consented to the primacy of Rome. The Western Church claimed the title “catholic” to assert that it was the only universal church, while the Eastern patriarchs described themselves as “orthodox,” meaning theirs was the only correct belief. Because humans…

Still, at our withering end of the Christian family tree, it is not uncommon for folks to say Christian and mean only this Roman branch and its off-shoots, especially those associated with the three branches of the Protestant Reformation as well as the Azusa Street movement that would become Pentecostalism.

The second reason we no longer tend to use the terms Christianity and Christendom as synonyms is that faithful Christians, gospel Christians like us, recognize that conflating the religion and the empire creates problems, not just the sort of thing that happens when the Pope tells Henry VIII “no more wives for you,” but also the sort of problem that occurs when a movement founded by an un-credentialed rabbi and focused on social and religious revolution becomes an institution that caters to the powerful, cons the poor, and does everything in its power to make sure that it has power and wealth. 

Today, we tend to use the term “Christendom” to refer to this toxic religious movement that was co-opted by empire, and remains co-opted by empire today, the Jesus-claiming movement that embraced social Darwinism’s systemic violence while denying biological Darwinism, that believes in capitalism and colonialism, the Jesus-claiming movement that is obsessed with what LGBTQ+ folks are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms while happily electing rapists and racists to higher office. Christendom was well represented among the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021.

If the idea of a singular Christianity denies history and ignores diversity, the idea of Christendom is a perversion. If I accomplish nothing more in this life than helping a handful of people encounter Jesus and break-free from the toxicity of Christendom, it will have been a life well spent. Because Jesus is awesome, and Christendom sucks.

Continue reading “Palm Sunday 2022: Good & Crazy”

I had every intention of delivering a Nerf sermon this week. You know, the kind that doesn’t go very far, and can’t hurt anybody even if it manages to hit. 

I brought the thunder last week, and promised you a Lenten season that provided more comfort than challenge. 

Alas, there was a cultural moment, one that will preach, one that is worthy of our attention as progressive Christians, that opens good questions. So not only is this NOT a Nerf sermon, I’m not even going to deal directly with the scripture reading, which is lovely, filled with hope, but not remotely connected to our topic, which is “The Slap.”

Now, there is a chance that you’ve spent the last week in a silent monastic retreat, only leaving your cell at the monastery this morning to come to church, so in case you missed it, let me recap.

Last Sunday night, during the Academy Awards, the comedian Chris Rock cracked a joke about actress Jada Pinkett Smith’s short hair. Her husband, actor Will Smith, walked onto the stage and slapped Rock, twice shouting expletives that had to be censored on U.S. broadcasts. Will Smith was asked to leave the ceremony, and refused.

Many viewed Rock’s joke as out-of-line because Jada Pinkett Smith has been very public about suffering from alopecia, a particular form of hair loss, and candid about how the condition has proven challenging in the context of traditional standards of feminine beauty and the intense spotlight she is under as a celebrity. 

This is a thing she does, sharing her own challenges, her own vulnerability, inviting people into difficult conversations, an invitation I believe leads to healing and wholeness. She is a tough and brave woman. She has to be, for women have to work ten times as hard to get half the recognition of men, and that is squared for black-identified women of color.

Alopecia has been in the news a bit more than usual in recent years. My favorite Nascar driver suffers from it, though that doesn’t really get much attention, and besides, he’s wearing a helmet or at least a ball cap most of the time in public. 

Where it has gotten a lot of attention is with U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, who represents most of Boston and Cambridge in Congress. A progressive Democrat, she is part of a group of young, diverse, and progressive women known as “The Squad,” a group constantly targeted by ethno-nationalists, for they are terrified by women and people of color with power. 

Pressley, who also suffers from alopecia, shaved her head. She is still absolutely stunning, just beautiful, which should matter exactly zippo nada zilch because she was not elected to look good. She was elected to be smart and wise. That has not prevented hateful men from mocking her appearance.

So yeah, men mocking women who are already self-conscious about hair loss. It’s a thing.

Continue reading “3 April 2022: The Slap”

Luke 13:1-9

As I’ve said before, I’ve never really understood the difference between known unknowns and unknown knowns, or whatever silliness it is that drove us into the petro-war in Iraq, but I do know a thing or two about the unknowable. In fact, you might say that is my job which is more about guessing than anything. 

Among the many mysteries on that list is what actually happened during the life and ministry of Jesus, and I’m not even talking about metaphysical questions like the nature of Trinitarian personhood and incarnation. I’m talking about basic facts on the ground, the “this happened, then this happened” sort of thing. For as I recently shared from this pulpit, our sources for his ministry and teaching were written decades after the events, none by a first-hand witness, often using other written sources, primary source material that is long lost, and always written through the lens of later events and later beliefs. Anything written after the Jewish War of 70 C.E. is distorted by the gravity of that cataclysm just as things written in the next twenty years will always be warped by the trauma of the plague and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism.

Still, we can discern some broad patterns in the gospels, a sort of shared story, we just have to temper our certainty with substantial humility.

Ever so often, however, a moment will slip through that looks like it might be historic memory, primarily because it hasn’t been smoothed over. Today’s text contains this sort of material, as well as text that may have gone through some later theological polishing.

We begin with two tragedies. Luke has Jesus reference Galileans killed by Pilate and Judeans lost in a building collapse. The first is important as evidence that, despite later attempts to portray Pilate as mostly innocent of Jesus’ execution, practically passive in the face of the mob, history tells us that he was in fact a cruel man, a racist who despised the Hebrews he thought beneath him. Letting Rome off the hook and blaming Jews has produced millennia of sin.

The latter incident, the collapsed tower, is sometimes thought to have been the result of a natural disaster, though it is just as likely to have been the result of shoddy construction. We simply don’t know.

Jesus refers to these incidents in a problematic passage in which he tells those listening that they will die “just as those did” if they do not change their hearts and minds. Is this rhetoric related to his kingdom teaching, the idea that those who opt-in will be part of God’s eternal kingdom and so never really die? Or is it a moral judgment on both Pilate’s victims in Galilee and the unfortunate Judeans?

As a call to conversion, the passage works. We are called to change our hearts and minds, to align ourselves with God’s restorative justice and overflowing grace. Try to make sense of the theodicy, the justice of falling towers and violent prefects and whether God wills for some people to die tragically, and you end up in dark and dangerous theological back alleys where nothing good is going to happen.

Continue reading “Kudzu: 27 March 2022”