Constructive Faith

James 3:13 – 4:8 

Hey! Hey Hey! That’s what I say.

For younger folks, well if you know, you know. For older worshipers, you had to expect me to go there.

But let’s not start with the Rolling Stones. Let’s start with another kind of quaking and shaking.

Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Jordan Kisner on the last two Shakers. You may have read it. 

Brother Arnold, at 67 years old, is still active in the administration of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, while Sister June, 86, has withdrawn from public life.

As many as 4000 individuals might have belonged to the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the formal name of the movement, around the mid-19th century. They started as an offshoot of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. They were called Shaking Quaker, hence the name.

While the story of both movements is fascinating, as are the theological resonances with our own Social Gospel tradition, it may not have been particularly strategic for the Shakers to embrace celibacy, making it hard to recruit. Needless to say, no one was really born a Shaker, though they historically took in foundlings.

Today, the Shakers are best known for two things other than slowly going extinct. Hard work and craft were at the center of their faith practice, and they produced remarkable furniture and architecture known for simplicity and utility. And every musician and most church folks know a Shaker tune, Simple Gifts, which was adapted by Aaron Copeland for the score of the Martha Graham ballet “Appalachian Spring.” 

Simplicity and hard work seem like pretty good values these days, when bitter envy and selfish ambition, the topic of our reading from the letter attributed to James the Lesser, seem like the norm, and in some circles are even lauded. So let us once again spend some time on fear, desire, and that pervasive sense of worthlessness that eats at so many souls.

Continue reading “22 September 2024: Can’t Get No”

Epistle Traditionally Attributed to James the Lesser 3:1-12

The New York Times recently published an article on the use of gestures by apes. The behavior was first observed by Jane Goodall in the 1960’s. Apes turn out to have more than 80 meaningful gestures, most common across species, like reaching out when they want something, or signaling the young to climb up on the mother’s back. The earliest theories fell in line with bad science and bad theology, the idea that this was not true communication, but was instead habit or genetics. To me this felt like the now discredited idea that animals could not have empathy or anything resembling emotions. 

Last month, a trio of researchers introduced a new theory on the origin of these gestures. While not really addressing the issue of empathy and emotion, they acknowledge that apes have an innate ability we might consider communication, and that the development of common gestures across species is based on a shared physiology. It is a sort of ASL, in this case Ape Sign Language.

Helen Keller developed a set of about 60 meaningful gestures or signs during her childhood, though there can be little doubt that empathy and emotion were part of that landscape. Most of us know her story. Rendered deaf and blind as a small child by what doctors today believe was meningitis, she found the right teacher and companion in Anne Sullivan, and would go on to graduate from Radcliffe, which was then the women’s college at Harvard. She had a long career as a writer and public intellectual, and even has a connection of sorts to the Park Church, for she was a founding member of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, co-founded by Crystal Eastman, and now known as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Scientists have come to believe that plants communicate in a way, though few have suggested what we think of as thought and will. Animals communicate, send alarms when a predator approaches, dance off directions to a field of clover. Communication is critical for life in any collective, in a pack or a herd or a small city. And because humans are walking repositories of accumulated knowledge, because we are only human as we are in relation to other humans, communication is absolutely critical. First language, and then writing, allowed us to collect collective interest on the discoveries of earlier generations. The most radical libertarian holed up with an AR-15 in the woods did not invent that AR-15 or for that matter go from newborn to lunatic without a lot of communication, help, and socialization along the way.

We read from the Letter traditionally attributed to James this week, as we did last week. The James in question is James the brother of Jesus, not James the disciple. The disciple is sometimes called “the Greater” while the brother is identified as “the Lesser” or sometimes “James the Just.” Neither actually wrote the letter. 

It does not appear in a document we call the “Muratorian Canon,” the earliest known list of Christian Testament books, dated to the latter half of the Second Century. The first reference to the Epistle of James and the earliest known manuscripts of it are from the Third Century.

The text’s unknown authors provide some guidance on communications to the early church, for where two or more are gathered in Christ’s name, there Christ is also. Where three or more are gathered in Christ’s name, the first two are talking about the third. 

Gossip is so incredibly human, and can be so incredibly toxic. “Haitian immigrants are killing and eating pets.” This is not actually happening, but it has gone from gossip to truth in the minds of some because it has been amplified by political candidates and spread on social media by racists who want us to believe all brown-skinned immigrants are a threat, even when they are legal, as is the case in Springfield.

When a network de-platforms someone for hate speech, we hear immediate cries about the First Amendment by people who do not understand the First Amendment, which only applies to government restrictions on speech. The Constitution does not protect Rosanne Barr’s right to use network television to spew lies and hate.

Communication styles trip us up almost as often as communicated content. We think someone who rarely speaks is very wise or incredibly dumb. Internal processors get steam-rolled by verbal processors, while verbal processors get lambasted for provisional steps in the thought processes they often and maybe unwisely share aloud.

So I want to spend a few minutes talking about talking, communicating about communication, speaking about speaking, with all of the attached irony. I mean, one of the best things about being a “childless dog gentleman” is that Oscar never talks back, but congregants, constituents, and random social media users all do. I am thankful that at least I don’t have the stress of being in a P.T.A. or homeowners association!

Continue reading “15 September 2024 “This Is A Sign””

James 2:1—17

The first three books in the Christian Testament are known as the “synoptic gospels,” gospel in that they proclaim the good news about the life and ministry of Jesus, synoptic in that they tell that story in roughly the same way. 

This is a little misleading. For one thing, Luke wrote a single work which was broken into two parts and separated in the Biblical canon, so that we have Luke’s gospel, then the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, then Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Luke-Acts is meant to be one work, and should be read that way. 

Also, only Matthew and Luke have Nativity narratives, and they are wildly different, despite what we remember from centuries of one mashed-up version in our children’s pageants. 

Finally, the authors of Matthew are busy trying to turn Jesus into a new Moses, a covenant maker, so they re-arrange some things, re-locate others, and have that whole bit about dead toddlers and the flight to Egypt. 

So maybe we should call the three the “sort of” synoptic gospels.

Scholars agree that both Matthew and Luke draw on Mark as a source. They also both use a source we have lost, one that we call Q after the German word for “source.” We know this because both gospels contain parallel text not contained in Mark. 

Maybe one day we’ll dig up a copy of Q, something that really happened when the Gospel According to Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

Mark does not claim to be a firsthand witness to the life and ministry of Jesus. There is a remarkable third century reference to a second century document which claims Mark was a follower of Peter after Jesus was murdered. In the same way, Luke is writing as a historian, and is associated with Paul, so he also does not claim to have witnessed the ministry of Jesus.

But the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew is represented as a firsthand account. The Matthew of the title is Matthew the tax collector who becomes a disciple. On the plus side, as a tax collector he was likely one of the few disciples who was literate. On the negative side, why would someone who was actually there need to draw on Mark, a secondary source? Even if we throw out the consensus on Q, assuming that Luke is using Matthew as a source, we still haven’t solved the problem of Mark.

The answer is simple. The Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew was not written by Matthew, former tax collector and disciple of Jesus. It is a pseudographic work, which is to say a work attributed to someone who did not actually write it. 

This was a common practice in ancient times, before copyright, before journalism, before history was transformed from communal story telling to academic discipline. 

Moses did not write the Torah. Much of the Book of Isaiah was written long after Isaiah Bin Amoz was dead. Several of the letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul.

Most of you know this, but it bears repeating. Biblical texts were written, redacted, and accepted into the canon in very specific historic contexts and those contexts matter. 

This morning, we are going to wrestle with how the failure to place scripture in context has influenced Protestant Christianity, and how we might move beyond a pernicious false binary.

Continue reading “8 September 2024: Faith Works”

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.

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