Constructive Faith

At the start of the week, I was feeling a little sorry for myself. Can we just have one national crisis at a time, please? That’s what I was thinking.

My better angels caught up with me quickly, as they always do. I think my angels follow the motto of the legendary Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser. They walk softly but carry a big stick. I may have only been facing one crisis, but Americans of color were up to their necks in crisis long before the Covid-19 pandemic was a thing, and even that disease could not slow down the murder of African-Americans, in the street and in their beds. It could not stop the constant harassment by white citizens who feel they have a right to stop and challenge any person of color anywhere, demanding to know why they are where they are, something they would rarely if ever do to another white American, something increasingly caught on camera..

So it is just as well that Martin Luther advised preachers to stay silent on Trinity Sunday, for I cannot preach on the Mysterious Trinity this Sunday. In fact, to do so would be a dereliction of duty, for the gospel is not the gospel of some distant age, nor is it detached from our lives. The gospel is life. It is the gospel of now, and now demands our attention. Continue reading “I Can’t Breathe: June 7, 2020”

In a Wednesday Zoom meeting, a colleague from up county mentioned the odd juxtaposition of a Holy Day all about the Holy Spirit as “pneuma,” as breath and wind, literally breathed into the disciples by Jesus in John’s gospel, and the moment in which we find ourselves, where we are masked up and distanced and doing everything to avoid death by breath, for breath can be deadly. What immediately popped into my head? Not sophisticated theology, oh no, but rather that smash hit by the Police, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” which came out during my Senior Year in high school. Because, you know, I love you, but don’t stand so close to me…

And here, the Holy Spirit. I love Pentecost, for despite being totally formed by European Enlightenment thinking, Modernity’s religion of reason and the scientific method, I believe in the Holy Spirit. Not that I’m going to drop to the floor or start speaking in tongues, though speaking in tongues is something we are going to discuss.

No, I believe in the Holy Spirit because I believe that Divine Mystery we name as God is not an absentee landlord, but is real and present in creation, that God as Spirit is the unsolvable X in every single equation, the real world wide web, that the world is full of the hidden and the magical, that the more our European Enlightenment reason and scientific thinking discovers, the less we know and the more we realize that the world is freaky and strange, but in a good way.

I believe that mysterious X is the same force that draws us out of ourselves and that draws us to thin places and to one another, a spiritual quantum that right now is breaking your heart, for the thing that makes us images of God, the synergy and synchronicity that is relationship, is the very thing that can kill us right now. This too shall pass, but not nearly soon enough. Continue reading “Don’t Stand, Don’t Stand: May 31, 2020”

As a pastor and as a preacher, I try to balance comfort and challenge, because you preach what you need to hear, and because I believe we all need a bit of both things in our lives. It isn’t always a 50/50 split, just depends on the scripture, the Spirit, and the context, the world in which we live, where the congregation is as a people of God journeying together. During the first eight weeks of our time as a church in diaspora, I leaned hard into comfort on my almost daily video check-ins, and challenge for many of the sermons, though some check-ins were challenging, and some sermons were comforting, or at least so I tell myself.

Last week, Bob offered a word of comfort, one many of us, me included, needed to hear. Thank you, Bob. This week? Well, let’s just say I’ve been in touch with my Baptist roots. The good news is that there are plenty of worship options out there, so if you really just need comfort today, you can find it. Because, as I write this sermon, I feel like the news anchor Howard Beale in the 1976 film “Network.” In his infamous on-screen meltdown and rant, he encourage viewers to shout out “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Well, I am as mad as hell, but mostly at myself.

The story starts some weeks ago, when I told Shirley that I was going to try to order out more, for curbside and delivery, because I still have a job, and I want to support local businesses and workers that are struggling. She directed me to a Facebook group where local restaurants are posting their offerings. I’ve followed along, ordered some of the specials.

On Monday, with many local businesses talking about re-opening, I made a post in the group. I thanked our restauranteurs for their hard work and innovation. I also reminded them that many in the community are still at-risk or might not feel safe in a public setting, so encouraged them to maintain some level of curbside and delivery service. The initial response to my post was positive, with folks saying “Yes, please keep providing this service,” and some business owners saying they were still trying to figure out how to be safe, that they would continue to do curbside and delivery for some time. Then I closed Facebook and logged onto Zoom for a meeting. Continue reading “Mad As Hell: May 24, 2020”

In this time when we are speaking so much about China and disease, I’d like to turn the dial back to before Covid-19, to ancient China, at least to ancient China as understood through the very Western eyes of Benjamin Hoff and mapped onto a classic literary character in the 1982 bestseller “The Tao of Pooh.” Well into that book, we find this paragraph:

A saying from the art of Chinese medicine would be appropriate to mention here: “One disease, long life; no disease, short life.” In other words, those who know what is wrong with them and take care of themselves accordingly will tend to live a lot longer than those who consider themselves perfectly healthy and neglect their weaknesses. So, in that sense, at least, a Weakness of some sort can do you a big favor, if you acknowledge that it’s there. The same goes for one’s limitations, whether Tigger knows it or not – and Tiggers usually don’t. That’s the trouble with Tiggers, you know: they can do everything. Very unhealthy.

There is another whole sermon in that last bit, about Tiggers, and possibly politicians, who don’t know their own limitations, a homily about hubris and humility. But we’re going to focus on that ancient Chinese saying about disease and attention, for in the end, it is attention that makes the difference. The person who is aware of their vulnerability pays more attention. Continue reading “Foundation: May 10, 2020”

There is a scene early in the 1987 vampire comedy classic “The Lost Boys” when the two teen boys, moving into their grandfather’s house with their newly divorced mother, can’t find the television. They do, however, find the “TV Guide.” Grandpa’s response? “Read the TV Guide, you don’t need a TV.”

I sometimes feel like that when I am reading book reviews, in the Times or the Post, so many books reviewed that I will never actually read. As it is, I buy books faster than I read them. So it was that I read in a recent issue of “The New York Review of Books” Cass Sunstein’s piece about a biography that there is exactly zero chance I will ever purchase, borrow, or read, for it is a new biography of one of my favorite villains, and sadly, not the fictional kind. Continue reading “Got the TV Guide: May 3, 2020”

The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are more than a little confusing. Before we dive deep into today’s reading, let us take a moment to review them.

There is no post-resurrection appearance in the original ending of Mark, the earliest of the three synoptic gospels. We end that story with the female disciples fleeing the tomb in fear and amazement and telling no one what they had experienced. Finding this dissatisfying and not consistent with the kerygma, or proclamation of the faith, second-century authors added what are now known as the shorter and longer endings. While Jesus appears in the latter of these, there are few details.

The authors of Matthew and the physician Luke use Mark as one source for their gospels, and add a lost source scholars call Q. In Matthew, Jesus appears to the women on Easter morning, and they take hold of his feet. He speaks to the male disciples later in Galilee. Continue reading “We waste the hours with talking: April 26, 2020”

Colin Ford has great hair. He had great hair as a little boy actor in “Dog Days of Summer,” a forgettable film that opens at an Edenton Steamers game, the summer league team in the small town next to my mom’s, and yes, I’m wearing their ball cap right now though, if you are like me, you might be wondering about a clam as a mascot. Not exactly swift around the base path…

Colin Ford had great hair in a film you might have actually seen, “We Bought a Zoo” with Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. He had some pretty memorable scenes too, holding his own with actors with decades more experience.

Colin Ford has great hair in the recent Netflix series “Daybreak.” And that’s where the problem comes in. See, “Daybreak” is one of those post-apocalyptic series that has been in vogue for the last decade or so, and set in Southern California, where a biological weapon has turned most adults into something like zombies, and apparently has erased all of the small children, leaving a world controlled by gangs of teenagers, who are, of course, played mostly by actors who look nothing like teenagers. By the time the series opens, it has been months since the attack, since the collapse of civilization as we know it. Yet, Colin Ford has great hair, as do all of the other supposed teenagers in the series.

Where, you may ask, are they getting their haircuts? Okay, maybe you don’t ask, but I do. I am feeling decidedly shaggy these days, looking more like Daryl Dixon, an antagonist in “The Walking Dead,” than like a SoCal fashion model. This is definitely not a Hollywood apocalypse. Continue reading “Great Hair and Mullets: April 19, 2020”

The late William Strauss is best known as the co-founder and director of the Capitol Steps, a satirical theatre troupe originally made up of congressional staffers with over 40 albums and a long list of appearances on PBS and NPR. I suspect they are finding it hard to come up with material that tops real life these days. In fact, their last album, “Orange in the New Barack,” came out three years ago.

Few realize that Strauss was also an author and theorist, In fact, he had three degrees from Harvard, a Bachelor’s from the College, a J.D. From the Law School, and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School, where he was part of the first graduating class. Along with Neil Howe, he developed what is sometimes called Strauss-Howe generational theory, sometimes called Fourth Turning theory. The details may be for another day, another sermon.

I mention the theory primarily because, at least for me, it is more accurate than others. Any division of generations is arbitrary, but those that place me in the Baby Boom clearly get it wrong. I am way more “Breakfast Club” than “Rebel Without a Cause,” Gen X in my mind and according to Strauss-Howe. And while I already loved great literature and poetry, many younger members of Gen X were introduced to the power of the written word through the character of John Keating in Peter Weir’s 1989 film “Dead Poets Society.” Ironically, the movie is set in 1959, squarely in the Baby Boom. Keating, brilliantly played by the late Robin Williams, challenges his students, fans the flames of youthful rebellion and individuality. At one point, he pushes a shy new student, played by a young Ethan Hawke, to issue a barbaric yawp, a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Continue reading “Dead Poets: Easter 2020”

My undergraduate degree was a double major, one half of it being in English, with a concentration in Medieval to Renaissance British Literature. This meant, among other things, a whole bunch of Shakespeare. Even so, I slipped in several courses in other areas, including Black and Post-Colonial Literature, James Joyce, and Poetry, American and Contemporary. It was in one of my poetry courses that I first heard a professor declare that a poem was only good if it had meaning independent of the poet, that is, one should be able to confront the poem on its own and get meaning without knowing anything about the poet and his or her context. The image that comes to mind is poem as feral beast, run amuck, with leaves and twigs in its hair.

Certainly great literature has an ability to transcend time and place. While our lives are nothing like that of King David, we can see in him a mirror of humanity, if not our own, a humanity we have experienced in others. The same is true for a King Lear. But as a completely unorthodox Shakespearean, one who has been challenged to direct some of those four century old texts for the stage, I’d also say that they do not all stand the test of time, and that the idolatrous worship of some supposed version of Shakespeare’s texts is disastrous. Anyone who has studied how the texts were assembled, for we have no script from Shakespeare himself, knows that there is much uncertainty in what we have.

The antisemitism of The Merchant of Venice cannot be excused away, nor can the misogyny at the heart of The Taming of the Shrew. If the audience cannot understand half a soliloquy, packed as it might be with words no longer familiar to English speakers, then it fails to entertain, to move. The shrewd director, and here is where I am a heretic to some, will make those minor alterations and revisions necessary to make the play work for the audience, for if the audience is not moved, then the play is not the thing at all.

One does not need to know that the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke grew up on a Michigan nursery, the business of a family that had once served as gardeners to the Kaiser. A poem like “Child on Top of a Greenhouse” works perfectly well as a feral poem, but it doesn’t hurt to know that this isn’t some any child in some any place, but is in fact young Ted, and the place is Michigan, a climate not unlike our own. We can almost see that greenhouse, that child, that partly cloudy sky and sun fall bright and beamed. The volume in which the poem originally appeared contained an entire section about this childhood, powerful and sensual, enough that you can almost smell the root cellar and that hard working poppa, soap, sweat, and soil. Continue reading “On a Greenhouse: Palm Sunday 2020”

In the March 26th issue of the New York Review of Books, reviewer Helen Epstein, considering two new works, begins with this statement: “The United States is in the throes of a colossal health crisis.”

Ms. Epstein was not writing about the Covid-19 pandemic. I suspect it wasn’t even on her radar when she wrote the piece some time before publication, and that well before the cover date. Sure, the Senate Intelligence Committee knew by then, as did other elected officials. Some epidemiologists and public health experts understood the likelihood of what has, in fact, occurred, saw the runaway train and told our leaders what they needed to do, but they were largely ignored. And there is the long-term problem of our health system, less free-market than perverted-market, for abstract ideas of supply and demand fail completely when it comes to the value we place on our own lives and on the lives of those we love. I’m not willing to offer my mother’s life nor sacrifice my own to prop up the value of shares in Boeing. I bet you’re not either. Continue reading “Bones: March 29, 2020”