Constructive Faith

[This was the last service we recorded in the Sanctuary, with no worshipers present.]

Siobhan Dowd had only published two novels for children before she died of breast cancer in 2006. Two other works were close enough to done to be published posthumously. But her greatest success was no more than an idea when she died, an outline really, for a work about a boy coming to terms with his mother’s terminal illness. Fellow author Patrick Ness took it up, completing “A Monster Calls” in 2011. It went on to win top British awards for both the writing and for Jim Kay’s illustrations, the first work to capture both awards in more than fifty years. Five years later, it would become a feature film.

The “monster” of the novel, the one that visits and intrudes into the life of the boy, Conor, is a giant anthropomorphic tree. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien would recognize the monster as much like an “ent,” a species of sentient and mobile tree-creatures in that author’s imaginary world of Middle Earth.

Our trees do not walk, but it turns out they do talk. It has been over twenty years since ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered that trees were communicating with an assist from latticed fungi in the soil. Through this forest-wide web, if you will, they are able to communicate their needs and swap nutrients. Simard is clear that a forest is a cooperative system. All of those stories and myths about “the great mother tree” or “the great father tree,” found in indigenous cultures and science fiction, turn out to be more true than not. Continue reading “Forest and Trees: March 22, 2020”

Patrick O’Brian wrote his first novel when he was twelve years old and saw it published three years later, making him a bit of a literary wunderkind. Today, no one knows him for that novel, and few know of his many other works, for all other works have been dwarfed by the immensity of his Aubrey-Maturin series, the 21st volume unfinished at the time of his death in January 2000. That series was somewhat summarized in a single film that combined the titles of two of the books, “Master and Commander: Far Side of the World,” though few films can capture a single novel, much less twenty plus.

On one level, the novels are about espionage and naval warfare at the turn of the 19th century, mostly though not exclusively focused on the conflict between England and Napoleon. On another level, it is the tale of a remarkable friendship, Jack Aubrey, an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, and his friend and “ship’s surgeon,” Stephen Maturin. The latter is a polymath, a naturalist forerunner to Darwin on the HMS Beagle.

Stephen Maturin is also a spy. He is particularly useful in this role because he is not British, but is instead the son of an Irish officer who served in the Spanish Army and a Catalan woman. This location, as a person at the margins of two marginalized peoples, sometimes creates tension with his friend Jack. In one scene, captured in the film, the captain has reluctantly ordered that a man be flogged, a man who had behaved courageously in a crisis, but who later became insubordinate while drunk. A heated exchange takes place in Jack’s cabin after the flogging, with Stephen arguing for mercy, and for tipping the ship’s grog over the side, while Jack insists that discipline and order are necessary on a ship, a “wooden world” in his words, that must be kept afloat. The conversation ends when Jack says to his friend of many years, “You’ve come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother.” Continue reading “Anarchy, Brother: March 15, 2020”

You can find 3:16 on water towers, Tim Tebow’s eye black, and tattoos, in a country song by Keith Urban. It is possibly the best known passage in Christian Scripture, this verse from the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, considered by many to summarize the heart of Christian belief, God’s love, and the Son of God’s redemptive work.

It is this very familiarity that can also be a problem, for this story of an interaction between Jesus and a prominent Hebrew religious leader is packed with meaning and complexity, all too often mistranslated and misunderstood.

Take, for example, a bit of word play that makes sense in the Koine Greek in which the gospel was written, but that doesn’t work in English. The same word, various forms of “anothen,” can mean “again” and “from above,” so that while Jesus speaks of being born from above, born of spirit, Nicodemus hears “born again,” a physical impossibility, his misunderstanding. This double meaning and the back and forth between Jesus and the Pharisee would have been obvious to the gospel’s original audience, but not to us, whether we use the King James or the New Revised Standard Version, or any modern day translation for that matter. We hear so much about “born again Christians,” when it seems “born from above Christians” or “born of the Spirit Christians” are both more consistent with what Jesus is actually saying. And, of course, it is unlikely that Jesus was speaking Greek, and we have no record of how this interaction might have played out in Aramaic. Continue reading “Tebow and Water Towers: March 8, 2020”

On December 10, 1968, the body of Father Louis was found in the cottage where he was staying while attending a monastic conference near Bangkok. A short circuited Hitachi fan lay across his chest, but some observers felt the wound on the back of his head was not consistent with a fall, due to either electrocution or heart attack, possible natural causes of death, leading many, including the theologian Matthew Fox, to suspect that he had been assassinated by the CIA, that the scene discovered there at that Red Cross conference center was staged. I’m not a huge fan of conspiracy theories, but the CIA did that sort of thing a lot back then, though they were less brazen than the Russian, North Korean, and Saudi assassination squads that ply their trade around the globe today.

It might have made sense for the CIA to take out Brother Louis, for under his given name, Thomas Merton, he was one of the most influential Catholic thinkers in America at the time, a committed pacifist in a time of war, a supporter of interfaith dialogue, and a Catholic friend to Buddhist leaders, including the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama, the temporal and spiritual leader of free Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Vietnam was burning hot in 1969, not just from the napalm we were dropping from the sky, not just because of the struggle between the Chinese-backed Communist north and the very corrupt US-backed south, but also because of the struggle between Catholics and Buddhists within the south, the former group considered the elite who had collaborated with the former colonial power, France. Yet here was Merton, a Catholic friend to Buddhists, traveling in the region. Continue reading “Father Louis: March 1, 2020”

You may or may not believe in the virgin birth. It isn’t a box you have to check to be in this place. You might explain away the appearance of walking on water, the feeding of the five thousand, the acts of healing and exorcism, even the ways in which the disciples experienced Jesus as still present after they had seen him executed. There is no reasonable way to explain away the story of the Transfiguration, today’s gospel text from Matthew. It is possibly the least probable of the miracle stories, not the glowing white part, not even the voice of God part, but the appearance of Moses and Elijah, one dead for twelve centuries, the other for seven. If we grant this one, we might as well go all in on the miracles, water into wine and passing through locked doors and the whole shebang, and we are way too sophisticated for that sort of thing, right?

But even if we discount the historicity of the lesson, the physical reality of Moses and Elijah joining Jesus on a mountain-top, we must not discount the importance of the story. Even as the pious fiction it probably is, it tells us something about how the early Christian communities understood themselves in relation to the Pharisaic movement, the dominant form of Hebrew religious practice that would become Rabbinic Judaism, and how they understood Jesus, the Jewish reformer they followed. Those early Christians were taking the raw stuff of their experience of Jesus as being more than, being extraordinary, and cooking it up into a religion, and we are the distant heirs to that tradition, keepers of one version of that family recipe, so we are called to look past the creative and imaginative bits where we might stumble, look past them to the meaning, for the meaning is the treasure. Continue reading “Giannis is Giannis: February 23, 2020”

Video: https://vimeo.com/391926665

In the beginning was mystery. What am I? Why does the earth shake? Why does the rain fall sometimes, and not at other times? What happens when the body is no more? So the amazing fearful creative bipedal primate with opposable thumbs made up stories, projecting on to the universe the map of its own mind, stories of magical forces and gods that looked and acted like things they knew, mostly like themselves, though sometimes they would stretch, posit gods who were other, better, beyond.

This premodern world of stories gave meaning and structure to their lives, and they had discovered that structure was necessary, that the efficiencies of civilization, mutuality, led to thriving. The stories were not perfect, but neither were they.

This premodern way of interacting with the world would not disappear as new ways developed. It would simply become one dimension, one axis, and we still inhabit that space. We trivialize story, call it entertainment, but the great stories still speak of ultimate truth and mystery, of the power of love, of the struggle between good and evil, Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, Hamlet and Krishna, our other selves, working out the wheres and whats of the world.

But human knowledge mostly adds rather than replaces, and as we came to understand more, to record more, to build a critical mass of learned and recorded knowledge, we started to see natural patterns. We convinced ourselves that with careful observation that we could understand everything, absolutely everything, and so the great Enlightenment project, modernity, was born. We test and measure and dissect, answered many of those great questions asked by our ancestors, the whats and whys of earlier ages. Meteorologists explain the flood and drought, the surging seas and raging fires, even if the rapacious powers deny what has been discovered, documented. Continue reading “Choices: February 16, 2020”

It has been a heck of a week. At least no one shot up an elementary school, movie theater, or synagogue in the United States, at least as far as I know, so I’m going to score that as a win, though there was the shopping mall in Thailand. Everything else felt very much too much, the chaos in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, enough to fuel conspiracy theories on the right and on the left for years to come, the trauma of impeachment and retribution, neither of which I’m going to touch, a pastoral third rail sure to leave someone burned, probably me..

It started Sunday night. I confess to having watched the Super Bowl. It was the first time in years. My concerns about the devastating injuries on the field and the long term effects of brain damage off the field have not changed, and I’m not sure it is a problem that can be fixed. Nor has there been any movement on the systemic racism in the National Football League, from the hateful name of the Washington franchise to the notion that billionaire white owners can be political, but millionaire black players cannot. Still, I love the sport, one of only two team sports I’ve ever played, and the Super Bowl is as much a cultural event as it is a sporting event.

I was also on my laptop, which may be why I didn’t quite get everything that was going on in the halftime performance. I was thrilled that two powerful Latinx women were the stars of the show, that the Puerto Rican flag made an appearance with a blunt reminder that the territory is part of the United States and its people are our people. I was less thrilled with the bumping and grinding and general sexual acting out in what should be an inter-generational space, but then again, I’m an old prude who doesn’t like that sort of behavior when it happens in Pride parades either, and I am told in every case that I’m not culturally sensitive nor am I a good feminist when I suggest a little more discretion, from Shakira or Mick Jagger.

I totally didn’t get the children in cages thing that was going on until I read about the harsh clap back from white nationalists, who insist that only their politics are acceptable in the secular religious space of sports capitalism. Continue reading “City on a Hill: February 9, 2020”

Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict, stunned the world, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, when in 2013 he announced he would step down as head of the Roman church. Historians quickly pointed out that it had been done before, and was a possibility created by a Medieval pope, Celestine the Fifth, who served just five months at the end of the 13th century, stepped down, and then was imprisoned for the rest of his life by his successor, Boniface the Eighth.

The times being what they were, Boniface didn’t end so well himself. He was a proponent of papal authority, not just in the affairs of the church, which had experienced the Great Schism between east and west just three centuries earlier, but also papal authority in temporal affairs, meddling in the business of kingdoms and kings. Philip the Fourth, ruler of the emerging nation of France, took issue with papal interference, leading to heated dispute, an excommunication, and the eventual capture and beating of the pope, by French agents. Boniface died soon thereafter.

French kings would force a frightened church into a series of French popes and the relocation of the Papal Court to the French city of Avignon, a period that some call the Babylonian Captivity of the Roman church, after the ancient captivity of the Hebrews. It was a conflict-filled age that would see popes and anti-popes, and even a posthumous trial of Boniface’s corpse, which was disinterred for the occasion. Continue reading “William of Ockham: February 2, 2020”

A respected colleague, author, and friend recently posted on social media that President X was worse than President Y. He based this purely on body count, and by that measure, he was correct, but it seemed to me a bit like saying the Black Death was worse than Ebola, which might be true as long as you are a scholar and don’t happen to live in the Congo, where you might actually die from Ebola, but are unlikely to contract Bubonic Plague. I tried to gently remind him that better and worse are a matter of perspective, measured from our own location. A female colleague was rather less gentle, posting that his statement was an extreme example of white male privilege. She was, of course, correct. Our colleague has every single mark of privilege in our culture except extreme wealth, but he has a good education and a good job and does okay.

Fortunately, he is also capable of listening, so while social media isn’t exactly an ideal platform for this sort of dialogue, he was able to hear that some of us feel remarkably less safe today then we did X number of years ago, especially those of us in communities all too often the victim of hate crimes, Jews, African-Americans, Latinx, and LGBTQ folks among them.

Now, I’m not interested, at least in the context of Sunday morning worship, in debating the relative merits of politician X versus politician Y, nor am I particularly interested in a debate about identity politics. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, a radicalized political correctness that makes us afraid to speak at all or those who have privilege and still refuse to admit it, who deny that identity can matter when it comes to opportunity and to justice. At this point you have to attribute the latter to willful ignorance, akin to the NBA player who insists that the world is flat and those who deny the global climate chaos we see on the news every night.

I am, however, very much interested in this idea of division and unity and location, that last the great mantra of every business person and real estate agent. And we’ll get there, not to a particular location but to an idea, by way of Paul and his position as a follower of the Hebrew religious tradition. Continue reading “Location, Location, Location: 26 January 2020”

As a child, I had a mental image of John the Baptizer in the River Jordan with Jerusalem on a height in the background. I don’t know if this was based on some illustration in a book of Bible stories for children, on felt-board Jesus, because we all loved felt-board Jesus, or if it was pure fabrication, but I was pretty committed to the idea that the river was near the ancient city, no longer a real capital in the time of Jesus but still the center of the Hebrew religion, with its great Temple. My mental image was completely wrong. The River Jordan is a full twenty one miles from Jerusalem, which makes it much more dramatic when we read about the crowds coming from Jerusalem to take part in John’s repentance revival, for there were no cars or buses, not even good hiking boots from Patagonia.

Once they got to the river, they would hear John proclaim that they were sinners who needed to be cleansed. One by one, they would step into that river, where they would be dunked, then pronounced a part of the repentance community, their sins washed away. Baptism felt like a fresh start, and if John was right and the Day of the Lord, was indeed at hand, a day of judgment and wrath, better to be prepared than sorry.

John’s baptism was a religious innovation in his context. The Hebrew religion had the Mikveh, the ritual bath used to cleanse impurity, but it was not used for abstractions like sin. We might be skeptical about the concept of ritual purity and the idea that uncleanliness contracted from things like menstruation and dead bodies was contagious, but to the ancient Hebrews, this was real and physical, so they had mechanisms for cleansing.

Spiritual impurity, sin, was handled by burnt offerings at the Temple, and was not contagious though it could be communal. This thing John was doing was new, this untamed prophet with his dire warnings, exciting to some, scary to others, and deeply offensive to many. By what right did he announce the forgiveness of sins? Only the priests had that right.

While the Baptizer was unique in the Hebrew tradition, and his baptism would eventually be coopted by the Jesus movement, the idea of washing away sins in the river is not unique to Christianity. An ancient Hindu text called the Brahmanda Purana written three centuries before John the Baptizer states that “Those who bathe at Ganga at least once in its pure water are protected from thousands of dangers forever and get rid of sins of generations and are purified immediately.”

Of course, you take your life in your own hands bathing in the Ganga, or Ganges River, today. It isn’t so pure, the level of fecal coliform bacteria more than a 100 times the safe level, though countless thousands still ritually bathe in it every year in great and crowded festivals. The Jordan isn’t thriving either, polluted and diverted for agriculture, at times little more than a filthy ditch. We continue to destroy the planet faster than it can heal itself, threatening our own existence, and our great rivers are no exception to our madness, but that is a sermon for another day.

Churches around the world turn to the baptism of Jesus on this day, the rhythms of church life a tenuous connection between us in an age of so much division. Some will focus on the theophany, that moment when the voice of God is heard, declaring Jesus to be God’s son. Some Christians believe this is a moment of adoption, others a clear signal that Jesus was sent from somewhere else, maybe not the future of our first reading, but possibly from some eternal and heavenly reality separate from our own, one where the things that feel so broken in our world are whole.

Others will focus today on the idea of community as created by the rite of baptism, and baptism is generally still considered a requirement for membership in a Christian church. So central is baptism to Christian self-understanding that denominations as far apart as the Roman church and the United Church of Christ have formal agreements to recognize the validity of one another’s baptisms, the reason I still use traditional language when performing the rite despite my use of inclusive language everywhere else. In many houses of worship, even some of our own, congregants will be asked to renew their baptismal vows this morning.

As someone raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, I was not baptized as an infant, for we claimed a “believer’s baptism,” the notion that you needed to be old enough to understand that you were a sinner in need of God’s grace and salvation in order for baptism to be effective. Like those who trekked down to the River Jordan, baptism was a choice in my childhood, one I made at the age of ten after an extended stay in the hospital. It was filled not just with the symbolism of cleansing, but also with the language of death, dying to the old sinful self, being born again, just as it is in every church and in scripture, even when infants are involved.

Coming into our United Church of Christ tradition, which still baptizes infants, I wrestled with the meaning of the rite. So much did it trouble me that I wrote my Master of Divinity paper on the topic, looking at the history in scripture, theology, and practice. I learned that infant baptism was a sort of fudge, a relic of a time when entire households would convert at once, as we see in the writings of Pal and of Luke, that the idea of original sin, and by extension things like limbo, were manufactured to justify a practice that didn’t make sense in the context of the historic Jesus, for the Hebrew faith had moved away from the idea of inherited guilt by the time of the prophet Jeremiah.

I learned that the Reform branch of Christianity of which we are a part abandoned the idea of original sin though it remains so pervasive that many still think it a core belief. That is worth repeating. Though we have room for theological diversity in the United Church of Christ, our theological heritage is not one that accepts that babies are born into the world stained with sin and pre-condemned, and though those at the font may well believe they are saving the baby from damnation, I suspect very few pastors share in that belief.

I learned that confirmation was meant to address this fudge of infant baptism, for it is fully titled Confirmation of Baptism, in case you ever wondered what it is exactly we are confirming. It is the point where the young person takes on responsibility for their own baptismal vows, stewarded for them for so many years by parents, godparents, and the community of faith, that moment when the young person says “Yes, I choose to be a Christian” in a way that makes sense to them and to their faith community.

And for all of my work, historical, critical, theological and constructive, I still felt I was far from what was happening in the River Jordan and in so many churches around the world every single week, for I miss the urgency, the hunger, the brokenness that was at the heart of John’s baptism and is at the heart of so many baptisms today.

I wanted baptism to have that sense of salvation we read in the work of Ann Lamott, the urgency and relief when the drunk dies in that water and comes up a new person, the tears of joy when someone who feels they are not worthy of love, not their own, not god’s not anyone’s, suddenly feels new.

Religion is not meant for those who think everything is fine. People did not go down to the Jordan because everything was just hunky-dory in their lives and in their world. They didn’t drop their nets and follow Jesus because life was just rolling along.

Religion is for the broken and the wounded, for those who see the brokenness and woundedness of the world. Religion is for those who hunger for the might-be of love and longing and connection, who feel the gravitational pull of the divine. Religion, every religion, is for those who cannot live without it. It is no wonder that the most energetic worship is found in the most broken places.

We have bled our faith dry of any vitality with our logic and skepticism and most of all with our manners, for religion is raw and not always bothered with refinement. It is that bearded prophet standing in the Jordan. And I need it to be real and I need it to be for messy people, because I am a mess. I need this man who is proclaimed to be the son of God to be snarky with James and John, to lose his temper with Peter, to weep in despair in the garden, for I will do those things too. And if he can love when love seems impossible, maybe, just maybe, I can too.

Even that best loved of sermons, the sermon that basically just says “aren’t you swell,” attends to a hole, for there is that small little corner of your soul that is not sure you are swell, not sure you are safe, not sure that you are worthy of God’s love, and no number of “likes” and Instagrams and “snaps” are going to fill it up.

We need to be reminded that we are loved, that we are amazing, that we have original blessing instead of original sin, but we also need a place to put the brokenness and the fear. We need to believe in the might be, for ourselves, and for our world, a world filled with lonely people, scared people, people who do not love themselves, who do not believe they are worthy of love.

Even secularists like Eddie Vedder and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam know the feeling, writing in “Amongst the Waves”:

But I am up riding high amongst the waves
Where I can feel like I
Have a soul that has been saved
Where I can feel like I’ve
Put away my early grave
I gotta say it now
Better loud than too late

Come to the water, the river, the font, the lake, the sea. Feel the waves of holy love wash over you. Better now than too late.

Amen.