Constructive Faith

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18

Ephesians 6:10-20

SERMON “Saturday Mornings”

Maybe I was already a little gay boy, who knows? I don’t remember anything wrong with the Saturday morning cartoon “The Herculoids,” which included a blond boy in a loin cloth, but apparently it was too violent, as were other programs like “Space Ghost.” Concerned parents organized a campaign, as they do, and Saturday Morning Television got a complete makeover in 1969. 

Be careful what you ask for. 

Among the new offerings was “H.R. Pufnstuf,” a live action show with oversized puppets that made you wonder exactly what stuff was being puffed. 

One cartoon premiered that went on to become a media franchise and a part of popular culture. “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” featured four teenage detectives and their Great Dane, Scooby Doo. The team would roll into town in their psychedelic van, the Mystery Machine, to solve cases involving swamp monsters and ghosts and zombies and the like. The mysterious monsters almost always turned out to be a human bad guy in disguise.

In the original series, the four teens were all white. In the most recent reboot, an adult animated series that launched a year and a half ago on HBO Max, Fred Jones remains the white high school jock stereotype, but the Shaggy character become Norville Rogers, who is African American, Daphne Blake is an East Asian-American, and Velma Dinkley, the star of the new series, is South Asian-American and bisexual. Scooby is nowhere to be seen, nor were the fans. Let’s just say it was not a hit.

Paul proclaims a mystery in today’s reading from the letter traditionally attributed to him and assigned to the church at Ephesus, buried under a lot of militaristic imagery. But there is no pulling off the mask moment here, and even if there was, I’m not sure Paul’s “mystery of the gospel” sometime around 55 C.E. would be our mystery of the gospel today. After all, Paul interpreted Jesus through the lens of the Temple and a transactional understanding of God in a pre-scientific age. There are some Christian communions that are still transactional, considering transactions like communion to contain mysterious transformations of bread into flesh, but that isn’t really our gig. Like the four kids and a canine in the original Scooby-Doo, we tend to pull off the mask to find just another human. And though there are some Christians that cling to the pre-scientific, We science around here.

What is the mystery of the gospel that Paul rightly identifies in other texts as foolishness to non-believers? If not popes and purgatory, what is it that we proclaim? 

Let’s start with a sort of anthropology, “anthro” itself tipping our hand, as it means human. Orthodoxy insists that humans are a unique order, distinct and apart from all other living beings in this context we know, this blue-green planet circling a star. Science contradicts this, telling us that we are not apart from our context, and our only distinction is being the current state in the evolution of one trajectory of bipedal apes. 

Still, Homo Sapiens makes meaning in a way we have not yet witnessed in other species, and transmits meaning to one another. This library of human knowledge continues to grow, though at times we must discard volumes and entire sections, and we still have the problem of people ending up in the wrong section, deep in horror fantasy when they think they are in non-fiction.

Our ancestors faced the great mysteries and created a placeholder they called God. In and of itself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Many of us still use the word God to describe the something instead of nothing, the ways in which chaos becomes complexity and complexity creates beauty and even the fact that we can encounter something and assign it the term beauty.

But we are finite and our context is finite, so we fit God into human categories, assign personhood to that placeholder. This is useful as long as we don’t confuse the placeholder with the reality. 

When the strongest and most brutal rose to the top of human tribes, God was the strongest and most brutal among many gods. When societies became complex enough that there was a new need for law and order, God became the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner. And if God was justice, then disaster must be just, punishment well-deserved, nations destroyed as divine will, lives destroyed as divine will, even unto the seventh generation, as the not-always-good book says.

Earlier prophets laid the ground work for the gospel’s radical re-envisioning of God. The Israelite and Judahite prophets still conceptualized God as human, but maybe a little transactional. Prophets like Hosea began to imagine God as a scorned but patient lover. 

Jesus moved God even further from that first conception of divine co-dependence, even from that second conception of divine judgement, for while judgment remains, grace abounds. It is never too late to be forgiven. Resurrection isn’t an Easter morning magic trick. It is an every day occurrence, as people forgive themselves, get clean and sober, embrace a gift long suppressed, break free from the prison of social constructs of gender and sexuality, and sometimes just plain old get out of prison. 

We are finite, fragile, fickle, and often fearful. This naturally leads to a sort of defensiveness, a bunker mentality, hoarding of more than we need. Being born-again has been co-opted by toxic forms of Christianity, but it is the heart of our faith, that your tomorrow need not be determined by your yesterday. 

There may be constraints on your body. There are constraints on your body. Context matters. A kid in Gaza right now is probably not going to take up ski jumping. It is miracle enough if that kid manages to survive the genocidal maniacs on all sides of that war.

Disease and tragedy are realities. But your soul, your spirit, has a reset button. You can choose to live love any time. Your internal universe is yours.

The gospel is exactly the opposite of human smallness. Be not afraid. Go. Serve. Be bigger than you imagine you are, more expansive than you are now, forgiving and loving, and know that the reward for this outwardness will be greater than whatever we put into it, greater than the sacrifices we make, for what we will find is our true selves. 

Lizards are lovely, but you are not called to be a lizard and that tiny little primal part of your brain should not be driving the bus…

So the mystery is not so much mystery as it is paradox, is cosmic reversal, is call to resist walling ourselves in, choosing instead to go out. 

Love your neighbor. Who is my neighbor? Everyone.

Feed, heal, and clothe the sacred, for the sacred is the vulnerable and oppressed. 

Glorify God always, pray always, by choosing to see the miracle, the quantum entanglement and weirdness and mysterious beauty. 

Be still and know God.

Paul proclaims the mystery and paradox of our faith from his location, at the brutal intersection of the Pharisaic movement in Pre-rabbinic Judaism and the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Roman Empire two thousand years ago. The Christianity we have received contains Neo-Platonism and Romanticism and a hundred other flavors, many still detectable to the discerning palate.

We are called to proclaim the mystery/paradox of our faith from our location, as participants in a socio-economic system we seek to unwind, in brutal late stage neo-liberal capitalism at the tail end of settler-colonialism and genocide, in a world where toxic patriarchy is still a noxious weed, reduced but not yet eradicated.

But hey, we’re getting there. The arc of the universe could bend toward justice a little bit faster, hopefully before we destroy the planet.

Paul’s mystery of the gospel was his mystery of the gospel, and our mystery of the gospel is ours. That on the whole, the something instead of nothing is good, that the source of that something that includes us is good, that as small as our individual lives may be, they are amazing, and that in the story of Jesus, we learn a way of living in the world that makes the most good of what we have been given, learn a way to love and serve that is our best selves.

We’re not going to war. We are calling people from war. Put on the safety vest of love. Don the hardhat of humility. Pick up the shovel of service. Out, out into the streets, out into the mysterious universe. Scooby-Dooby-Do.

Amen.

Psalm 111
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14

Okay, let’s start with the de-construction, because we are the sort of people that can handle a little complexity and messiness.

Most folks have two, maybe three things in their memory bank about King Solomon. First, and foremost is the story of the two women claiming the same infant. Second is that God asked Solomon what he wanted, and he chose wisdom. Third is that he was responsible for construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem.

But if you were paying attention to the verse numbers in our reading, you might wonder what we skipped. And what we skipped was a bloodbath. 

Solomon slaughtered everyone who might challenge him for the throne or support a challenger, including an older brother. He even murdered folks who had offended his father, but that his father had pledged to spare. Joab, a general mentioned in last week’s reading, seeks sanctuary in the tent where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, for the temple hadn’t been built yet. Solomon orders hims executed right there next to the altar.

This is the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor. The Lectionary, the rotation of readings shared by many churches, curates scripture. I am often more interested in the bits that are left out.

And as you know, I think the carefully curated Children’s Bible version of Christianity is of little use to us as we do not live in a Children’s Bible world. 

Solomon did some good things. 

Solomon did some bad things. 

There are construction projects, several murders, and real housewives, so basically a Tuesday in New Jersey.

Continue reading “18 August 2024: Cutting Room Floor”

2 Samuel 18:5-33

It is a story I have told many times. The locals were delighted to see us as we boarded the ferry. We would be sailing east on the Rio Escondido on our way from Managua to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast. So delighted were they, that they rearranged themselves, their goods and their livestock, to make room for us on the bow of the boat, where we would have the best view. Or so we thought.

Sure, there was a machine gun nest on the roof, but there were armed soldiers everywhere we went in Central America in the 1980’s, more in Tegucigalpa than in Managua, but what is one more or one less M-16 or Ak-47 in that context?

It was only about an hour into our journey that our guide explained the source of the local’s enthusiasm. It seems the Contras, U.S. funded terrorists, sometimes attacked the ferry. But they were terrified that they might accidentally kill an American, so if they saw people who were very clearly “gringos” on the boat, they would not attack. In fact, at that point only one American had been wounded in an attack on the ferry, an African-American activist who was indistinguishable from the Black population on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

We’d had to get to Nicaragua in a roundabout way, as it was under U.S. embargo. Reagan was still in office, and since America doesn’t do nuance, the socialist government in Nicaragua was communist, which of course became our self-fulfilling prophecy as we pushed the socialist government of Nicaragua into the arms of real communists like Cuba and the Soviet Union.

I’d followed events in Nicaragua since my childhood, being that nerdy kid who read the newspaper and watched the evening news when I was home. I knew about the 1972 earthquake and the death of baseball superstar Roberto Clemente as he was flying in with relief supplies. I knew about the revolution that overthrew the brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, and the efforts the Carter Administration made to support the new regime. I knew that the moment he took office, Ronald Reagan had not only reversed that policy, but had started an illegal proxy war against Nicaragua, the reason there was a machine gun nest on the roof of the ferry, the reason we were invited to the front of the boat.

The Sandinistas, the revolutionaries who liberated Nicaragua, were the good guys. During their first years in office they achieved remarkable things, like increasing literacy by around 60%, and lifting many out of poverty. They’d won an overwhelming victory in a fair election once they had stabilized the country, not that Ronald Reagan cared.

The leader of the Sandinistas, president of Nicaragua, who I was privileged to see while I was in country, was Daniel Ortega. The president of Nicaragua is Daniel Ortega. And there lies the problem.

Last week, we read the counter narrative to the Davidic Covenant. That covenant, part of royalist propaganda, claimed that just as God had chosen one tribe out of all the world’s tribes, so had God chosen one house out of all of the Israelite households, promising that a member of the House of David would sit on the throne forever. Christians seized on this idea, imagining Jesus as natural-born heir to the Davidic promise, his reign eternal as the resurrected Christ. Never mind small details like Joseph not actually being his father, at least according to the credal traditions.

Christianity conveniently ignored other divine promises, like the one we heard last week, when the prophet Nathan confronts David over the murder of Uriah, when God declares through the prophet that “the sword shall never leave your house.”

In today’s reading, we see that sword in action. David, who took power after leading a coup d’etat, was a despicable man. Now, he is a decrepit despicable old man on the throne, more the Shakespearean Lear than courageous King Henry, facing a rebellion by his own son, Absalom.

Continue reading “11 August 2024: Savior Complex”

Ephesians 4:1-16
2 Samuel 11:26 – 12:13a

My sister often walks her Golden Retriever, Paisley, with a friend who has a hound named Bogart. A few weeks ago, Bogart’s other doggy parent was walking him solo when a crossbow bolt suddenly struck the dog with what came a fraction of an inch from being a kill shot. The community rallied around Bogart and his owners, raising money and offering prayers, and the most recent news is that Bogart has survived surgery and infection and seems to be on the mend.

Amy and I talked about the fact that this could have been Paisley, or could have been one of the humans walking their dog that was struck and possibly killed, could have been her. James Smith and Linnette Torres were both arrested and charged with First Degree Restless Endangerment. She faces the additional charge of Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree. And for the record, these were not teenagers, as you might expect. He is 56 and she is 45. 

You do not need to go to law school to notice that the charges do not include Cruelty to Animals. They were not aiming at the dog. They didn’t even intend for the crossbow bolt to leave their backyard. They were just too stupid to realize that it would. And no, I’m not going to sugar-coat it. At least they weren’t in the backyard firing an AR-15.

Recklessness and negligence are lesser charges in our justice system because under English Common Law, the foundation of the law in 49 states and at the federal level, “mens rea” is required for many charges. This is Latin for “guilty mind,” and what we more commonly call “criminal intent.”

Intent is just one factor when we are wrestling with the concept of evil. We can be sure that the actions of the sociopath are evil, but is the sociopath himself evil if his mental illness is caused by genetics or an evil father and a cruel childhood or some combination of the two? Is it ever appropriate to describe a person as evil, or must we only attach that label to actions? 

According to the 2500 year old purity code found in the Torah, a cheeseburger is a gross violation of the Law as directly revealed to Moses. At least this is the traditional belief. According to a dubious insertion in 1st Corinthians, the fact that the president of our Church Council is a woman is a sin and disordered. So was that Thursday afternoon Big Mac at the rest area actually evil? Are we all going to burn in some make-believe hell because Jenny handled announcements and will help us welcome new members?

First, let us de-bunk some common notions about evil. We understand the Creation myths to be exactly that, myths. They wrestle with ancient and eternal questions about the nature of consciousness. They reflect the historic struggle between those who kept herds and those who planted crops. And most of all, they reflect one ancient culture that had evolved as a patriarchy.

A god who would place a booby-trap tree in a Garden of Eden would not be a good god. That same not-very-good god proposes rewarding and punishing generation after generation. You could be suffering for something an ancestor did a century ago. By the time of the prophet Jeremiah, the Israelite religion is moving toward each person being responsible for their own actions. The concept of inherited or “original” sin re-emerges in early Christianity as an answer to a practical and pastoral question: Why exactly are we baptizing babies? 

Continue reading “4 August 2024: On the Nature of Evil”

2 Kings 4:42-44
John 6:1-21

On Friday, I threw away my sermon. And it was almost done. 

It wasn’t awesome, but it was serviceable enough, focused on scarcity and abundance in keeping with today’s gospel reading. Sure, I took a potshot at late-stage neoliberal capitalism, a swing at social media, engaged in a little confession around my own problematic relationship with consumerism, and even cited a New York Times article from this past Thursday about a new social media counter-cultural campaign called “underconsumption core,” but it was kind of the same old same old. It had a call to action, one I have preached from a Christian perspective with Buddhist influences many times.

Then I turned on the Olympic opening ceremony. This is not something I normally do. 

I remember the terrorist attack on the 1972 games in Munich, the Communist athletes jacked up on performance enhancing drugs, and the boycotts by one nation or another. I still don’t like professional athletes participating, though I have no good reason. The line between amateur and professional athletes no longer exists in the United States, with NCAA athletes being paid and transferring from school to school. 

If all of that was not enough, we have learned that the cost of hosting the games is prohibitive, and I don’t just mean the social cost of dislocating the poor to create new stadiums and the Olympic Village, though that certainly happens, for they don’t put these things where the rich folks live. 

We are at a point where the games can either be held in big cities, where previous hosts already have the basic infrastructure, or in autocracies that care little about social costs.

And honestly, I hate the chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” and the medal trackers. I would be perfectly okay with the single athlete teams from Belize, Liechtenstein, Nauru, and Somalia taking home medals, however improbable. I’m for the underdog that way, just like Jesus.

So yeah, I’m a little cynical. But the French usually put on a good show. And France shares some of the same aspirations as the United States, even if neither nation has lived up to our promise. In fact, they do us two better, for in addition to claiming liberty as a core value, they add equality and fraternity, while we wrote inequality into our constitution. 

I needed some down time, not only with no multi-tasking, but with real life zero-tasking. So I sat on the couch and watched the show, the boat parade down the Seine, the parkour torch relay, the second torch relay to the unique caldron, and that finale by Celine Dion, performing despite a terrifying medical condition. And I made a decision.

I’m going to park my cynicism for the next couple of weeks.

Continue reading “Let the Games Begin”

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Ephesians 2:11-22

In the United Church of Christ, we believe authorized ministers are ultimately called by God. However, since so many of us have abandoned the idea of God as a puppet master in the sky, we get a little fuzzy on the details. We also believe in a formation process for clergy, traditionally a 4+3 education of undergraduate and graduate work, as well as clinical training and internships. But ultimately, it is the church that discerns a call to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament, the local church that recognizes the call of one of its members and the gathered church in the local association that authorizes and ordains the new minister. 

We’ve created some alternative paths to authorized ministry in response to a serious clergy shortage, but I generally support the traditional model. Clergy, even properly formed, authorized, and held accountable, can do incredible harm, so I have little time for self-proclaimed pastors operating out of storefronts. I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, as it smacks of elitism. I’d have never let the prophet Amos in the door, which I do recognize as a problem. Still, having a system of support and accountability is consistent with the Christian Testament. Members of the early church held one another accountable.

One of the best un-credentialed pastors in America, also a prolific author of contemporary Christian thought, is Brian McLaren. Among his bestsellers is the rather lengthily-titled “A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/Calvinist + anabaptist/Anglican + Methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian.” 

More manageable is “A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That AreTransforming Faith,” published in 2010. In it, he tells the story of having a disconcerting lunch with an American Evangelical theologian. His companion asked him how he would define the gospel. McLaren responded with the very orthodox Protestant formula drawn from the work of Paul, “justification by grace through faith.” I’ll let McLaren pick up the story from here:

He followed up with this simple but annoying rhetorical question: “You’re quoting Paul. Shouldn’t you let Jesus define the gospel?” When I gave him a quizzical look, he asked, “What was the gospel according to Jesus?” A little humiliated, I mumbled something akin to “You tell me,” and he replied, “For Jesus, the gospel was very clear: The kingdom of God is at hand. That’s the gospel according to Jesus. Right?” I again mumbled something, maybe “I guess so.” Seeing my lack of conviction, he added, “Shouldn’t you read Paul in light of Jesus, instead of reading Jesus in light of Paul?”

Yeah, all that, and oh yeah… also absolutely impossible. Paul is already the dominant voice in Christianity before the gospels are even written. The words of institution we use in communion come from Paul, not the gospels. 

But not all of Paul is really Paul. Minimalists believe only six of the letters in the Christian Testament are authentic, while many of the rest of us would include a few more, texts like 2nd Thessalonians that appear to have been cobbled together from authentic Pauline texts. There is general agreement among scholars and most pastors that some works attributed to Paul are most certainly not Paul.

Five of the six universally accepted letters were written to congregations Paul helped establish. There is practical theology in 1st Corinthians, pretty foundational theology in our progressive tradition, but we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a letter written to people he knew and is an intervention in a church where there was division. 

The sixth, the letter to a church he did not establish, was his theological treatise and letter of introduction to the churches in Rome. We have no way of knowing if he ever got there for his trial and possible execution, or if he died while on the way. The texts are silent on this matter.

Before his uncomfortable lunch with the theologian, Brian McLaren thought of himself as a “Romans Christian.” For folks who know history, that might be a little uncomfortable, for Paul’s letter to the Romans has often been the starting point of Christian antisemitism, including the antisemitism of Martin Luther, the nominal founder of Protestantism.

Continue reading “21 July 2024: DEI”

2 Samuel 6:1-19

Mark 6:14-29

SERMON “Head on a Plate”

I like opera, one of the few things that allows me to keep my gay card, but my taste in opera is rather suspect. I like Puccini, so that goes in the plus column, but I also quite like modern operas, works by Thea Musgrave’s “Simon Bolivar,” John Adams’ “Death of Klinghoffer,” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” dubious taste to the tasteful folks up in the Muppets boxes who really just want to see “Tosca” for the twentieth time. 

I can take or leave Wagner, life being finite and the Ring cycle seemingly infinite. At my crankiest, I wonder if I’m listening to a work by Richard Strauss, or someone strangling a cat, despite the critical acclaim in his lifetime and his stellar partnerships. You have never heard of his first two attempts at opera, Guntram and Feuersnot, but his third opera was a smash hit. “Salome” opened in 1905 with a libretto by Oscar Wilde. Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular authors of the age, served as librettist for three of Strauss’ works and the inspiration for a fourth.

And before you wonder if you have stepped into a music history lecture rather than a sermon, I should explain that Salome, subject of that wildly successful third opera, is maybe or maybe not the young woman who asks for the head of John the Baptizer. 

The Greek manuscripts are a mess, so scholars debate whether it is Herodias, daughter of Herodias or otherwise unnamed daughter of Herodias. A non-biblical source, “Antiquities of the Jews,” written in 94 C.E. by Flavius Josephus, names Salome as a step-daughter of Herod Antipas, and this has dubiously stuck in the popular imagination, at least the popular imagination of people who imagine ancient decapitations. 

This is the same Herod who is portrayed in the Passion narratives, Rome’s puppet-ruler in Galilee, not to be confused with his father, Herod the Great, who restored the Temple and ordered the murder of the infants of Bethlehem, or his brother, Herod II, one time puppet-ruler of Judea who was replaced by direct Roman rule under Pontius Pilate. Herod II is mistakenly called Philip in the Gospel According to Mark, though other sources say that it is Salome who is eventually married to another brother of Herod Antipas, her uncle Philip. You got all that? There may be a pop quiz…

In the opera and in art, Salome is usually portrayed as a young woman, a femme fatale, when the Greek text indicates she is in fact a child. Either way, she is used by her mother to set in motion the execution of John the Baptizer. The reason has to do with the usual scheming of the elite. Herod the Great killed a couple of sons, disinherited another, women married uncles and half-brothers, including the Herod in our reading who is married to Herodias, his brother’s ex-wife. The attempt to keep wealth and power in the family is pretty much the same today, maybe with a little less inbreeding, though I sometimes wonder.

John the Baptizer had a thing or two to say about this conduct, especially the incestuous marriages, which ran contrary to Jewish law. But Herod Antipas both respected and feared John as a religious reformer, as indicated in our text, hence John’s survival in captivity. That is until a girl/woman named something or another dances, and Mommy gets her revenge.

The execution of John the Baptizer fits the religious framework for Israelite prophets, persecuted and sometimes executed, and foreshadows the later execution of Jesus. In both cases, reluctant rulers, Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate, are manipulated by third parties to order the execution of someone who is innocent in the eyes of God. But this is really where the comparison stops. 

No special or divine meaning is attached to the human violence in the murder of the Baptizer. It fits nicely, however, in the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, source of our first reading this morning, so much so that it merits an entire chapter in his foundational text.

If that murder is set as senseless human violence, our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures depicts senseless divine violence, though it does share the provocative dancing. Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark of the Covenant when the cart carrying it hits rough ground, and is immediately killed by an angry god.

This is a stupid story. We brush it off immediately as nonsense. God would never act that way! A god who would do this, would engage in this senseless violence, would not be good.

And yet, we do not blush in the face of divine violence slaughtering the first-born males of Egypt, even of the livestock. We do not blush when we hear that God uses foreign nations to destroy first Israel and then Judah as punishment for religious infidelity. 

We do not blush when we are told that God demanded the brutal torture and execution of Jesus in order to reconcile with humankind. For as Girard notes, like every people in every age, we sanctify that violence.

Continue reading “14 July 2024”

Ezekiel 2:1-5
Mark 6:1-13

Paul Haggis had an extraordinary career in Hollywood as a writer, director, and producer, and has two Emmys and two Oscars. He also spent years in the cult of Scientology, only breaking with that organization in 2009 when they supported Prop 8, a proposed ban on same-sex marriage in California, several years before the U.S. Supreme Court established marriage equality as the rule of law. 

Haggis was the first high-profile defector, leading to an avalanche of other defections from Scientology, tell-all books and television series, investigative reports and full-length documentaries.

Some of us knew exactly how crazy Scientology was even before these revelations. Founded by a science fiction writer who was both a sociopath and a con artist, it continues today as a major criminal enterprise, imprisoning current members, protecting the physically violent current head of the cult, and harassing those who escape. It is hard to know if accusations that have been made against Paul Haggis are legitimate expressions of #MeToo resistance in Hollywood, or are simply more Scientology terrorism.

Scientology is a pay-to-play organization. You pay for classes and something they call auditing, and as you sink more money into the cult, the more secrets are revealed. Somewhere well north of $100,000, you might “go clear,” the basic goal of Scientology. That is when you start paying for levels in their more advanced Operating Thetan program. And it is at Operating Thetan Level III that you learn the “big secret,” not so much a secret anymore as more and more former members “go clear,” not in Scientology, but of Scientology.

The big secret is that the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, Xenu, was worried that he might be deposed, so he used psychiatrists and their galactic version of IRS agents to round-up billions of his potential enemies. These rebels were all transported to Teegeeack, stacked around volcanoes, then blown up with hydrogen bombs. There are many details, but you really don’t need all the details. Unfortunately, this mass execution let loose the souls of the victims, called Thetans. They cling to the current inhabitants of Teegeeack, now called Earth.

Before you rush home and jump in the shower to wash off the Thetans, which totally won’t work without a six-figure investment, you should hear the good news. At Operating Thetan Level VIII, you learn that the Galactic Confederation will soon return and telepathically enslave us, but soon after that, L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology, will return and liberate us. Sort of a space opera version of the Revelation to John of Patmos, with Hubbard cast as Christ.

Now, if I am being honest, I tell this story partly out of smug satisfaction. I mean, there may be some crazy stuff in my own religious tradition, but it is mostly not that blatantly crazy, and besides, it is way older, which somehow makes all the difference. 

Ezekiel might have been mentally ill, and by today’s definitions he certainly was, but at least he wasn’t a seer who claimed he could find secret treasure (for a fee) like Joseph Smith before he was visited by the angel Moroni and founded Mormonism, which is now old enough to no longer be considered a cult, despite all that crazy stuff about Native Americans.

It is pretty easy to call it a scam when money changes hands, but what about Helen Schucman, who received “inner dictation” from Jesus and wrote “A Course in Miracles,” a religion of sorts now better associated with Marianne Williamson? Schucman and her partner made money from the book, but there is no reason to doubt she believed what she said. 

What if what trades hands is prestige or power instead of money? What happens when the supposed prophet starts gathering multiple lovers, as they so often do, sometimes children? 

How do we know which metaphysical claims are true, draw the line between revelation and delusion? Does it matter if the claims are false if they provide meaning? When does community and meaning become something sinister, the Apostolic Socialism of the People’s Temple tipping over into the mass suicide and murder at Jonestown, 909 victims who drank the Flavor Aid, most voluntarily?

Continue reading “7 February 2024: God Talk”

Lamentations 3:22-33

2 Samuel 1:1-27 

It seems fitting that we close out Pride Month with a slightly queer lectionary text, the passage that most strongly suggests that the relationship between David, son of Jesse, and Jonathan, son of King Saul, was not strictly platonic. It is, of course, in the context of David’s grief over the death of Saul and Jonathan, though the account comes from Davidic propaganda and feels more than a little disingenuous.We are meant to believe that David becomes the king through divine action only, though we know that his entire career is marked by treachery and sin, that he is a usurper, a coup plotter, a murderer.

Even this passage, filtered through that lens of Davidic legitimacy, flies in the face of decency. The messenger who brings David the war report, the crown and armband that will mark David as king, is murdered on David’s command when he admits to putting the mortally-wounded Saul out of his misery at Saul’s own request.

Though there is some ambiguity in the ancient Hebrew texts about the title “Song of the Bow,” it is worth noting that the text cites the Book of Jashar. This is not the only instance where scripture cites other scriptures we no longer have, lost or simply unauthorized.

We can say with relative certainty that David existed, despite the now discredited skeptics. Much of the history in 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1^st and 2^nd Kings, while told from the Israelite perspective, fits what we know to be true from archeology and sources in other parts of the region. 

David’s grief, however, is uncertain. We do not know if it is performative or genuine. 

I am inclined to believe that embarrassing and contradictory texts, ones that do not fit the prevailing narrative, probably contain a kernel of historicity, and this text is difficult and embarrassing. Even so, David’s public grief, like the accusations of Job’s supposed friends, offers us little that is true and useful.

Better, then, that we turn to our first reading this morning, a reading of mourning, from the Book of Lamentations.

First, the context: In the year 586 before the Common Era, the last bit of the once great Kingdom of David, a remaining mini-state then known as Judah, was destroyed by the Babylonians, Jerusalem and the Temple razed. 

It was that conqueror’s practice to take the skilled and educated from defeated lands back to Babylon, and so the official story, in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, shifts east, where we find figures like the prophet Ezekiel and the folk-hero Daniel. Judah is depicted as de-populated, the few peasants left there as mixing with non-Israelite tribes, and therefore subject to dispossession when the Babylonian Captives returned. 

Of course, this depiction of those remaining in Judah as unfaithful and deserving of exclusion is far from reality. Their erasure from Jewish history starts with attribution.

The Book of Lamentations is traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, for it was the practice during biblical times to attribute all texts to someone important, the reason so much of the Book of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah and so many of the letters of Paul were not written by Paul. 

Jeremiah, according to tradition, had fled the destruction of Judah going southwest, dying in Egypt, not Palestine. This text describes the situation in Palestine from the viewpoint of someone on the ground. The Book of Lamentations actually comes from the very people who are largely erased from the Jewish story, those who were not taken into captivity.

The author, authors, or editors have produced a brutal piece of lyric poetry, not bad for a supposedly worthless and ignorant people left behind in the rubble and one-donkey towns of Judah. The violence is of Homeric proportions. 

While they attempt in places to frame the defeat of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple as divine will, punishment for infidelity, the text never settles on a single message, and does not suggest that their grief is in any way redemptive. Instead, we find sadness, anger, and tenacity. 

This, I believe, is proper grief, the kind of grief we often experience, as tangled up as the Christmas lights we used to unpack the weekend after Thanksgiving. While we have technical terms like compound grief and complex grief, all grief is actually both of those things, compound and complex.

I first started thinking about the structure of grief when I was in high school after encountering the groundbreaking work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. If you do not know the name, you certainly know her ideas. She suggested five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 

Humans being humans, we wanted checkboxes, so we turned this into a linear set of tasks or markers. First you did denial, and when you got to anger, you were done with denial. 

Instead of stages, which are discreet, we might be better served to think of these as the moods of grief or locations of grief, changeable, the soul caught up in a high energy whirlwind, spinning, ascending and descending in turns, re-inhabiting locations of grief, but slowly coming to ground as the system loses intensity, at least when the system is working properly, no two whirlwinds being quite alike. The grief does not disappear so much as it becomes part of the landscape, a disturbance and a mark we sometimes notice, sometimes don’t.

I would have done well to remember these lessons the first time I was at a deathbed as a chaplain, summoned in the middle of the night to the Intensive Care Unit of a Boston hospital. It all happened so quickly, and I have remembered it through the lens of constructing my own theology of pastoral practice so that the encounter has taken on surreal characteristics, the dying man more bloated and grayer than seems possible. And all I wanted to do was fix things, to put the encounter in a properly labeled box and tape it shut. 

I couldn’t fix the fact that the patient was dying, was dead by the time I left them. But I could offer the family easy answers, cheap answers, and so I handed them a Bible open to 1st Thessalonians, Chapter 4, thought to be the earliest letter of Paul and possibly the first Christian writing we still have. It is traditionally used at funerals, and seeks to reassure the living that those who die in Christ will rise up on the Day of the Lord, meeting the descending heavenly host. It was meant to reassure that first generation, since the death of believers before the Second Coming did not yet fit into their theology.

I knew that it did not mean what the grieving family would hear in the text, that their deceased loved one would be waiting in heaven. Never mind that I knew nothing of the life of the man who had died, whether he would go to heaven if that is what actually happens. Never mind that I can only guess at the abundance of God’s grace, and am actually agnostic about life after death. 

That text immediately came to mind because I had been assigned that exact passage in a seminar on Thessalonians being taught by the world’s foremost expert on the Pauline epistles. I would present on the text in direct translation from the Greek within the week. 

But like the friends of Job, I wanted to make the grief make sense, to wrap it up, absurdly to somehow make the family feel better so I did not have to sit with them in their pain, or carry any of it with me when I left.

Afterwards, I promised myself I would never do that again, never offer easy answers, never discount doubt and grief, but would simply be present, would lean into tenacity, just like the authors of Lamentations.

God did not want more angels and so use Adam Lanza to slaughter first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary, kids who would have graduated from high school this year, so there is no making sense out of that tragedy. The war crimes committed on October 7th, 2023 had nothing to do with God’s will or justice, and the crimes against humanity that have happened ever since are in no way sanctified. These are monstrous horrors, and we must tell the stories of these monstrous horrors every day, reminding ourselves that they are still happening, and we must resist.

But it does not take a monstrous horror to trigger our grief, does not even take death, for grief is simply an emotional and spiritual response to negative change, to loss, and we can grieve for a church community that no longer looks like it once did, for the diner that was part of our childhood, and if we are not careful, might grieve for democracy itself.

And we are not alone in grieving. The hard line we have drawn between ourselves and other animals is a lie we have told to protect ourselves, from our finitude, from our co-identification with those animals, for while we fantasize about seeing Sparky in heaven, we have no desire to encounter this morning’s bacon in heavenly porcine form.

Elephants grieve. Apes grieve. And I suppose, in their own way, there is complexity in their grief. They may not know why their mother is dead, but if we get right down to it, neither do we. 

We can explain away the physical processes, but we do not know why holy mystery and serendipitous creativity landed on a system that is a constant churn of tenacious life and the constant closure that is death, why we are such a brief and unpredictable flash, why we can be life-givers and death-bringers, sometimes a little of both, why we must spend time on the burning ruins of the Temple, soot-faced and tear-streaked, and why we find again and again the goodness of God in this world and in the fickle and fragile creatures that walk with us on the way.

When I lived in the city, I frequently worshiped at St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue, one of the few remaining churches in the Anglican choral tradition, and it was that congregation that received the oft-quoted words of the late Queen Elizabeth, as we grieved the losses of 9/11. “Grief,” the Queen wrote, “is the price we pay for love.”

And really, that is where I am going to leave it, with love and a sermon that, like its subject, does not get tied up with a neat bow, but tails off into distraction, losing a little energy, just as it should.

Amen.

Mark 4:26-34

France, like all of the developed democracies, is struggling under the weight of mass migration driven by poverty, climate change, and war, both the conventional type and the narco-wars we cause ourselves. The strong showing of Far Right and anti-immigrant parties in the recent election for the European Parliament has even led Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the French Parliament and call a snap election. 

A year ago, France was experiencing a crisis of a very different flavor, though one also related to climate change. Specifically, a heat wave in Alberta and Saskatchewan created a catastrophe for French dining. Those two Canadian provinces provide 80% of the mustard seeds used in France, and the French do love their mustard.

As the New York Times reported last summer, so central is mustard to French culture, that the idiomatic equivalent to our expression “my blood is boiling right now” is “the mustard is rising into my nose,” which sounds incredibly unpleasant. 

Before you ask, there is no explanation for our own positive American mustard idiom, “to cut the mustard,” which doesn’t make sense as either cut as in slice or cut as in dilute.

Humans have cultivated the mustard plant for around four thousand years, with the earliest evidence found in the Indus Valley. In addition to eating the greens, the Chinese developed a paste from ground mustard seeds, and the Romans added unfermented grape juice to produce what we now know as the condiment “mustard.”

The mustard seed is tiny, the point being made in our parable from the Gospel According to Mark. The parable specifically compares those tiny seeds to the Kingdom of God, though we Christians also sometimes compare them to “faith like a mustard seed,” and sometimes to good deeds. The core idea is that something that starts small can become very big. Like four fishermen following a street preacher in Galilee.

Continue reading “Nose Full of Mustard: 16 June 2024”