Constructive Faith

“Avatar,” used here to mean a virtual representation of a computer user online or their player character in a game, has been around since 1979, though it exploded into common usage, at least among geeks like me, with Neal Stephenson’s highly influential 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash,” the same work in which Stephenson first coined the term “metaverse.”

Avatar would see a second surge in usage with the 2009 film of that name, which has grossed $2.8 billion since release, become the basis for a section of a Disney theme park in Florida, and will be followed with much-delayed sequels beginning this December.

This could lead you to believe that the word avatar is very modern, a neologism. It is, in fact, very ancient, derived from Sanskrit. In the massive and rich mythology of India, an avatar is an incarnation of a god, not exactly the same as Christ as one incarnation of Triune personhood, but with some similarities, the idea of a god who walks among humans and is, in one sense, mortal.

Avatar is most often used in association with a particular Hindu god, Vishnu, and with two important avatars of Vishnu, Krishna, a central figure in the Mahabharata, and Rama, the titular character in the Ramayana, the two great and lengthy epics of Indian literature. 

Hindus believe that Vishnu has incarnated nine times, had nine avatars, though in a huge and diverse country like India, there is no unanimity about exactly who those avatars have been, with some sects even including Buddha on the list.

Each avatar has appeared at a point in civilization where things were dire and humankind needed a “reset,” a return to decency and righteousness, at the end of an era, or a “yuga” in Sanskrit. All sects agree that the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu, called Kalki, has not yet come, but that when Kalki comes, it will be the end of the current and somewhat bleak era, the Kali Yuga. In Sanskrit, ten avatars translates as dashavatara.

The idea that Vishnu will come again to set a corrupt and violent world right should sound familiar, for it is not unlike the traditional Christian dogma of the second coming of Christ.

Continue reading “13 March 2022 “Dashavatara””

I had a clever sermon in mind, tying together the two disparate anecdotes in today’s gospel. You can tell I had something clever in mind by the first reading and my sermon title. About that…

Those who read my column for our most recent Cross Currents newsletter know that I have chosen to forego one aspect of Lent this year, the idea of giving up something like chocolate. It isn’t really part of the Reform Christian tradition, and anyway, the world feels pretty Lent-y right now without some trivial sacrifice. Scripture is filled with texts where the prophets announce that the sort of fasting God cares about is fasting from injustice. This is exactly the context of Micah 6:8, that passage so central to the Social Gospel movement. So this year, my Lent is going to include soup and prayer, but also some good books, naps on the couch, and chocolate mousse.

That does not mean that we are going to skip the whole season in worship, however. We still live in the story of the un-credentialed itinerant rabbi from Galilee. And this week’s reading marks a key turning point in how that story was recorded by Mark and copied by Luke and the unknown authors of Matthew. While Ash Wednesday is a ritual of sorts, it is from today’s reading that all eyes turn to Jerusalem. And to the events that occur in Jerusalem.

For too long, those events were framed by Christians as Jesus being killed by the Jews, with Rome being a reluctant player in the whole affair. It was a convenient narrative, especially once Christianity became the default religion of Rome. It also fueled century after century of pogrom and antisemitic violence. As a correction, enlightened and progressive Christians have emphasized in recent decades that it was Rome that actually executed Jesus.

But there is more than enough blame to go around, so let’s take a moment to look at the Jerusalem that is the destination of Jesus and his rag-tag band, the spiritual destination of our Lenten journey, from the Garden to Golgotha and on to the joy of Easter.

The entire region was occupied by Rome, a brutal and violent nation that believed it could swallow up territory at will. Jerusalem was under Roman rule, and technically under the administration of the prefect, Pontius Pilate, who, despite his portrayal in the gospels, was actually known for his cruelty.

But honestly, Pilate did not have to work that hard to maintain control. The Hebrew elite, the members of the Sanhedrin and the Temple establishment, collaborated with Roman rule. They did this for one simple reason. The money was still flowing. They were the wealthy Hebrews, and their ultimate loyalty was not to Yahweh or some ancient dream of a Davidic Kingdom. Their loyalty was to themselves, to profit. They ask the Romans to execute Jesus only after he disrupts the commercial activities in the Temple.

And back to our world. The stock market was back up at the end of the day Friday, and Berkshire Hathaway is in the black, even though innocent people are being slaughtered in Kyiv. Sure, energy prices are going to go up, impacting you and I, but that will just be an excuse for more price-gouging by corporations, and won’t really effect the wealthy, who spend only the tiniest portion of their assets on silly things like heat. I mean, its warm enough in Aruba! The toughest sanction, removal of Russia from the SWIFT system of financial transactions, has been limited to only a handful of banks and didn’t happen until last night, because that might effect the ability of Russian oligarchs to maintain luxury flats in London and Dubai, penthouses in Manhattan, might force their children out of places like Eton and Harrow, and that might actually impact the wealthy.

For when it gets right down to it, the world’s super rich are not loyal to God or country. Billionaires are only loyal to other billionaires, regardless of their nationality or crimes against humanity. Their nation is billionaire. Their religion is billionaire. Just like the wealthy members of Jerusalem’s Sanhedrin. This is what allows gay Silicon Valley denizen Peter Thiel to finance right-wing politicians who would happily round up every other LGBTQ+ person in America and put them in camps, for Thiel knows that billionaire trumps homo every time.

Continue reading “Transfiguration Sunday 2022”

[Note to Catholic friends: there is grace on the other side of the (wholly appropriate) Vatican-bashing.]

Joseph Forgives His Brothers

It is too good of a story to pass up, and so I won’t. 

Monty Python may think no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, but everyone should expect the Vatican Inquisition, which now operates under a stealth title, The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is the group of old men who have worked diligently to make sure that women know their place and homos are appropriately hated. They do this because they speak for God, because they are the gate-agents for divine grace, and you are not getting on the next flight to heaven without their permission. Or at least, so they think.

The Second Vatican Council, which created a more humane and human church, was quickly overwhelmed with a conservative backlash, spearheaded by the fervent anti-communist Pope John Paul II, and his top henchman, Joseph Ratzinger, who headed the Vatican Inquisition and would eventually become Pope Benedict. 

But there are still wings of the Roman church that believe worship is the work of the people, maybe not quite the barefoot guitar masses of the ’70s, but certainly less clerical and a bit more humble, a Nuns on the Bus sort of spirituality, though they too have been targeted by the Inquisition.

I’m not sure he’d describe himself in that way, but Father Andres Arango probably fits well in the low-clerical tradition. So it was, for more than twenty years, he baptized infants with the words “We baptize you,” thousands of infants in heavily Catholic Arizona.

Except, in June of 2020, while the world around them, including Italy itself, was on fire with Covid-19, people locked in their homes, loved ones dying alone in hospitals, the Congregation issued a ruling that this phrasing, “we baptize,” is not only incorrect, but that it renders the baptisms themselves invalid. And because every other Catholic sacrament hinges on baptism, every subsequent sacrament received by those Catholics is also invalid, as the Diocese of Phoenix recently declared in regard to Father Andres. Every marriage. Every communion. Every confession. 

By the logic of this group of church bureaucrats, there are certainly some people who are now in hell because, and pick any of these: a) their sins were not forgiven because their confession was invalid because they were not baptized, b) they were adulterers because their marriage was not valid because they were not baptized, c) they improperly received communion because they were not baptized, etc. etc. 

Father Andres was certainly not the only priest in the world to use a more humble wording of the rite, to remove himself from the role of God-proxy, so there are likely millions more who are, according to the Vatican, damned.

An American Jesuit, Father Thomas Reese, warned that the decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was going to create this sort of chaos and pastoral crisis back in October of 2020, though no one that mattered listened apparently. 

This is not the sort of publicity the Roman Communion needs right now, and contributes to the widespread perception that Christians generally are focused on the wrong things.

The good news is that most Catholics will just roll their eyes at this news, having realized long ago that the Church is not the old men that run it, and while we may want to push-back on that point, now might not be the best time, and besides, God’s grace is greater than human stupidity, in all of its infinitely creative forms, both the grace and the stupidity. 

Continue reading “20 February 2022: Membrane”

Luke’s Sermon on the Plain

One of the buzzwords among fundamentalists is “inerrancy.” By this, they mean the Bible is without error, that every word is directly inspired by the Holy Spirit ( an idea that presumably extends to the act of translation), and that every single word in the Bible is literally true and should be applied directly to modern life. Of course, they then blithely ignore whole sections of the text they find inconvenient, the contradictions, the things about economic justice, about immigrants, about not judging others.

Progressive Christians, on the other hand, understand that the Bible is a human document that seeks to interpret one ancient people’s experience of holy mystery. We know, for example, that the four gospels cannot all be literally true, for they contradict one another, though they can all contain truths. And today is a perfect example of this reality, for Luke’s version of this great teaching is different from Matthew’s more familiar version in several important ways. And we simply don’t have the source text Matthew and Luke shared, commonly known as “Q,” to see which one is right, which one best reflects historic memory.

So while you may tire of my attempts to place scripture in context, I ask you to stick with me. We are going somewhere, somewhere relevant to today as the sermon title suggests, we’re just getting there on the slow boat.

To the early Christian community that produced the gospel attributed to Matthew, it was important that Jesus be understood as a new Moses, the one who establishes a new covenant. It is why they created the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, and packed the Holy Family off to Egypt, as we discussed last Sunday. It is also why in Matthew we get a Sermon on the Mount, for Moses received the Ten Commandments on a mountain. Luke sets this exact same sermon on a plain, “a large area of level ground” in the translation we are using this morning.

The differences go beyond the physical location. The authors of Matthew give us spiritualized Beatitudes. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Luke is concrete. “Happy are you who hunger now, because you will be satisfied.” This is true throughout the two gospels. Luke focuses on those at the margins and without power: women, shepherds, the poor. Jesus being on the plain makes more sense in the Lucan context than Jesus delivering the word from on high, for this Jesus is one with us.

Needless to say, those with power have always preferred Matthew’s version. After all, the Lord of the Manor didn’t have to worry that the peasants were going to take up their pitchforks and seize his storehouse of righteousness by force. Continue reading “13 February 2022: Race Theory is Critical”

Today’s scripture reading, the dedication of the infant Jesus in the Temple, can only occur in the gospel written by Luke the Physician. Neither Mark, the author of the oldest gospel, nor the unknown authors of John, the weirdest, give us an infancy narrative.

The gospel that does offer an alternative infancy narrative, traditionally attributed to Matthew, shares with Luke the miraculous conception and the location of the birth, but Matthew is so busy trying to turn Jesus into a new Moses that he manufactures a slaughter of the male babies of Bethlehem and packs the Holy Family hurriedly off to Egypt, just in case you had missed the point.

So this story in Luke set in the Temple is unique in the biblical tradition.

The story serves a strategic purpose. Jesus led a Hebrew religious reform movement, and the increasingly Gentile expansion of that movement insisted on the continuity and legitimacy of their faith. Checking the boxes of Hebrew religious observance was important to them, proving to themselves and hopefully to others that they were not some new cult invented by a charlatan from Tarsus, but were in fact an expression of the Creator’s ancient and expanding covenant with all of human kind.

There is much to unpack here: Simeon who has the Holy Spirit decades before Pentecost, the statement that Jesus will be the source of conflict, and the cryptic message about a sword piercing Mary, and on the “feel-good” side of the ledger, a female prophet, Anna, who recognizes in Jesus the redemption of the Hebrew people.

But let’s leave all the metaphysics aside for a moment, and look at the event that drives the narrative. We are told that dedication of the first-born son at the Temple, along with the blood sacrifice of the two pigeons, or as I like to call them, sky rats, is the standard religious practice. Continue reading “Democracy of the Dead: 6 February 2022”

I am old enough to remember the legendary sportscaster Red Barber chatting with Bob Edwards on NPR’s Morning Edition every Friday for over a decade beginning in 1981. If Fridays were for Red, Wednesdays were for Frank, that other great sports journalist, Frank Deford, who continued on NPR for several more decades.

It was Deford that we heard in today’s first reading, on loyalty to our hometown sports franchises, a test I fail miserably. I grew up in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, the closest major sports franchises located in the District of Columbia, but Major League Baseball’s Senators, the second version of the Senators, for the old Senators had already become the Twins, would also be gone by the time I was eight, off to Texas, and besides Mom was and is a Dodgers fan, her loyalty heading west with that team from Brooklyn. NHL and NBA franchises came to D.C. a couple of years later, but my family wasn’t that interested in hockey or basketball.

No, the only professional sports team followed in our house was the Washington Football Team, then known by their former racist slur of a name. And even with that name changed, I’d have no reason to be loyal to a franchise with such toxic and predatory ownership, for we must remember that professional sport is a billionaires game, an increasingly, an oligarch’s game.

No, by and large, I’ve been willing to cheer for the local team wherever I lived, except for the three years I was at Divinity School, because, you know, the Red Sox.

Though Big Papi is cool. Continue reading “The Bills Were Robbed: January 30, 2022”

I did not preach this past Sunday, 23 January, but expect to be in the pulpit every Sunday from now until Eastertide I, barring a breakthrough infection. Please feel free to join us on Zoom, or to continue to read my better sermons here. Zoom info below, all times Eastern.

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It was the lie told in a thousand forms, uttered by a thousand voices, by generals, politicians, journalists, and activists. The Taliban was some alien thing, an aberration. True Afghanis shared our Western values, especially around women’s rights. We could win the war by defeating the Taliban.

How did that work out?

While it is true that our “allies” in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia played (and continue to play) a key role in supporting fundamentalist Islamist terrorists in the region, the dirty secret was always that the Taliban reflected the actual values of many if not most Afghanis, especially in the vast majority of the nation that is rural and under-developed.

The misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance is who they are. Of course these things are not in their own best interest, socially or economically. But sometimes, you can’t stop people (or a people) from choosing the path of self-destruction. Poland has fallen to an intolerant autocratic patriarchy. As has Texas and Florida.

America’s social, economic, and political progressives have been telling the same lie in a thousand forms for the last half decade. Trump and the movement that brought him to power does not reflect who we are.

It is exactly who we are. And who we have always been. Continue reading “Commentary: 20 January 2022”

People sometimes ask why I insist that the word “the” be placed in front of the word “Reverend.” It is partly just grammar OCD, the same reason I use the Oxford comma. “Reverend” is an adjective, not a title, similar to the way a judge is called “the Honorable,” but the title is actually “judge.” My title, in the United Church of Christ tradition, the office to which I was ordained, is Pastor and Teacher.

Of course, we’re all about the priesthood of all believers in the UCC, not particularly fond of hierarchy, so neither the adjective nor the title gets used very often.

But this is just our informality, not an act of intentional erasure. The same cannot be said for the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., for the adjective is almost always dropped by those who wish to turn King into a secular saint, an analog to Thoreau at best, Gandhi if necessary, forgetting that the latter’s non-violent resistance to British colonialism was rooted in his Hindu faith.

King was not secular. He frequently noted that people thought of him as a civil rights leader, but really he was just a Baptist preacher.

You cannot surgically remove religion from King, from his story, from his legacy. The things he says make no sense outside of the context of Christianity, specifically Protestant Christianity, and especially that beautiful tapestry that is the Black Church tradition. Continue reading “Feast of St. Martin of Atlanta 2022”

There is an irony in the fact that New England is one of the most secular regions of our nation, right behind the Left Coast, while my home state of Virginia is populated by religious charlatans and wanna-be authoritarians. Exactly the opposite was true during the Colonial era, when New England had theocratic leanings, while the Cavaliers of Virginia were often escaping the Puritan takeover of England.

Despite all of that, the fervor of the Great Awakenings, countless conmen with their golden tablets, lost tribes, and intergalactic dictators, (for who can forget Xenu!), America was never really quite as pious as it likes to think. That has been even more true since the Second World War, when church became as much a social and civic space as a religious space. Belief mattered less and less, as we peddled spiritual goods and services, fluff and feel-good and a get-rich gospel, or maybe just a place to hold a potluck and play bridge. No wonder folks are buying into goop and crystals. As least they are asked to believe something, even if absurd and lazy.

But belief matters. Purpose, vision, values, belief… all of these matter. We make decisions every day based on what we believe. The last four years, and the pandemic especially, have been a vivid reminder of how important belief is, from kids in cages and seditionists in the House to hundreds of thousands dead… dead!… that did not need to die from a pandemic that could have been better managed but was instead politicized.

So today, we are going to speak of core belief, not just an abstract consideration of the baptism of Jesus, but a living theology, then look at an analog in a very real problem in our nation, the problem of policing. Continue reading “Original Blessing: 9 January 2022”