Constructive Faith

Luke 21:25-36

SERMON

I always wonder what to do about scholars and religious leaders who are right on some things but cling to barbaric and hateful ideas in other areas. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and current Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, supports social acceptance of homosexuality, but insists that it constitutes sexual misconduct, a Buddhist version of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” hypocrisy that has done so much harm and destroyed so many lives among Christians. Seems a little lacking in compassion to me.

The Anglican scholar and retired bishop N.T. Wright is willing to challenge the received understanding of Jesus and the end times, a revolutionary re-reading of a key New Testament concept, but he is behind our times on LGBTQI+ issues, even behind his own benighted Church of England. We can be happy that at least he no longer has the authority to sanction clergy.

It is to Wright and his rebellion against scholarly orthodoxy that I turn this morning. Christians have interpreted the teachings of Jesus and subsequently of Paul as predicting the sort of cataclysmic re-ordering of the world we later find in the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, better known as Revelation. In fact, heaven come to earth or a rapture into heaven and some sort of divine wrath is pretty central to many fundamentalist theologies. For progressive and reconstructive Christians, reading texts like today’s gospel suggests that Jesus, and therefore Paul, were wrong. I mean, clearly the world did not end and get a divine re-ordering during the lifetimes of the disciples.

Jesus draws on the language of the Book of Daniel, the last of the original works in the Jewish Bible to be written. It introduces the “Son of Man,” better read today as “the Human One” or as a representative human, as a divine game-changer. That book, as well as the recorded teachings of Jesus, the authentic letters of Paul, and the other collected works in Christian Scripture, all refer to a “Day of the Lord.” 

And because we have been taught to read this as apocalyptic, we read it as apocalyptic, read Jesus exclusively through the lens of the Book of Daniel, which is a pious fiction written in the 2nd century B.C.E. It is only one of twelve in a collection known as the Minor Prophets, and then there are the major prophets: in historical order, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. 

Wright suggests we read Jesus through the lens of this broader prophetic tradition in pre-Rabbinic Judaism, which often spoke of and witnessed actual cataclysmic events like the first destruction of Jerusalem. Wright would read phrases so long translated as “end of the world” as meaning “earth shattering events.” 

Wright could be right. We have to remember that Jesus probably taught in Aramaic, and those teachings were transmitted as oral tradition for approximately forty years before we begin to see written gospels composed in Koine Greek, an entirely different language. And what happened in the fortieth year after the execution of Jesus? Precisely the sort of earth shattering events Jesus seemingly predicted. 

Continue reading ““Dissipation and Drunkenness”: 1 December 2024”

John 18:33-37

It is the year 5785 in the Jewish Calendar, 1446 in the Islamic Calendar, and 2024 Anno Domini in the Christian Calendar, now known as the Common Era since European colonialism imposed it on so many cultures. Each of these calendars in the Abrahamic traditions starts on a different day, moveable for Jews and Muslims, always January 1st for Christians. But some Christians have a second calendar based on the seasons in church life. This calendar, called the liturgical calendar, begins with the first Sunday in Advent, as Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Liturgical churches then use a three or four year schedule of readings for each Sunday called a lectionary.

Protestant churches have mostly thrown off the Marian devotions and feasts of the saints so central to Roman Catholic practice, though the liturgical calendars are otherwise the same. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, the United Church of Christ, and many other Mainline traditions will all start Advent next Sunday.

Jews in the Rabbinic tradition conclude their annual cycle of readings, their version of a lectionary, with Simchat Torah, carrying to Torah Scroll around the sanctuary and sometimes into the streets, with much singing and dancing. We are not nearly that cool. We close our year with the Feast of Christ the King, or as we prefer to call it, not being monarchists, the Reign of Christ.

What is surprising is that the Feast itself wasn’t invented until 1925, by the Roman Catholic Pope Pius XI, and it was not moved to the end of the liturgical year until 1970. Still, Mainline Protestants adopted it, and placed it in the liturgical calendar. So here we are, doing something 99 times because a pope thought it was a good idea. Admittedly odd.

The encyclical letter establishing the feast appears to have been a response to the horrors of the Great War, known to us now as World War I, the collapse of several monarchies, including the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Habsburgs, and the rise of secular ultra-nationalism, which would plant the seeds for the rise of Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, though those trees of evil were yet to bloom when Pius created the Feast of Christ the King.

We are meant to use this Sunday to celebrate Christ’s eternal rule today, a common cause that transcends nations, and therefore promotes world peace.

About that…

But given the recent election, it might be best to skip our usual reflection on why we don’t do monarchs, why Congregationalism and the United Church of Christ are democratic, with a small “d,” and instead focus on the relationship between the religious and the secular.

Continue reading “Two Kingdoms: Reign of Christ / Christ the King 2024”

Mark 13:1-8

When I arrived at the Park Church a little over three years ago, I was surprised to see Roger Williams and Albert Schweitzer enshrined in the stained glass. They are not normally among the dead white guys in the gallery of dead white guys you’ll find in every church in the Congregationalist tradition. 

I mean, Williams was a leading Baptist, and the Baptist Church was across the street! And Schweitzer played an important role in how United Church of Christ pastors think about Jesus, but few outside of the academy would know that. 

Then I was told that while he was an important religious thinker and a Nobel Peace Laureate, Schweitzer was there for his contributions to music. Which makes sense given Bach on the opposite side of the sanctuary. Still, you’re going to hear about the Jesus part, not the music part, because I am definitely a pastor and definitely not a musician.

Schweitzer was an early leader in what is sometimes called “the quest for the historical Jesus.” New discoveries have been made since that quest started over a century ago, new ways of thinking including postmodernism have risen to prominence, but the fundamental question has remained the same. If we strip away all of the later theology and dogma, who was the real man who led a religious reform movement in Galilee and eventually died in Jerusalem?

This is difficult because we have no first hand accounts of Jesus, and only two brief mentions of him outside of Christians texts, one in “The Antiquities of the Jews” written by Josephus in 94 C.E., and one in “Annals” by the Roman senator and historian Tacitus around 116 C.E. Neither has much detail, and Josephus is notoriously unreliable, an ancient and self-serving turncoat. And we know how unreliable turncoats are, people who criticize demagogues one moment and praise them the next 

The gospels themselves were also written decades after the execution of Jesus. What we think is the earliest of the four canonical gospels, the Gospel According to Mark, may have been written around 70 C.E., and tradition tells us the author was a follower of Peter, writing down the stories with no certainty about the chronology, and possibly little knowledge of the geography. 

Since Mark serves as a source for Luke and the unknown authors of Matthew, any errors in that text are likely duplicated in the other two. And that is before you add on decades and eventually centuries of theological interpretation, in which people see in scripture what they have been told they will see in scripture, whether it is actually there or not, or translate the ancient languages based on what they want them to mean.

When Mark was written might matter, especially in regard to today’s text. In 66 C.E., Jews rebelled against Rome. This was the third time Jerusalem was the center of a violent rebellion against an occupying power. The first, against Babylon, was a disaster, resulting in the destruction of the city and Temple and the period we call the Babylonian Captivity.

The sequel, a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire, resulted in a surprising victory, though the rural outsiders who took over as high priests and kings proved corrupt and inept, and their independent Jewish state would soon fail, for nations don’t always survive their bad rulers.

This third installment was much like the first, no victory, not even in the short-term. Jewish factions kept bickering among themselves, failing to focus on Rome, the common enemy. They even managed to burn their own food supply in a besieged Jerusalem. In 70 C.E., the city fell yet again, the Temple once again destroyed, never to be rebuilt.

It is possible that Jesus did predict this second destruction of the Temple. After all, there was precedent, and the situation was at a breaking point. In the years after the execution of Jesus, the region suffered severe drought, reported in both the Christian Testament and the historical record. That was one of the sparks that lit the conflagration, along with greed in an unjust economic system and unhinged leaders in Rome.

Continue reading “17 November 2024: The Sequel”

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

Six centuries ago, if you attended a church service in Europe, the rites were in a language you did not understand. Much of it occurred with the officiant’s back to you. And there were no pews, which explains the short sermons. 

Don’t get any ideas.

If you knew the Bible at all, it was from a sort of street religion of mystery plays and festivals. 

Then, everything changed. First came Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press. Not that the average serf was out there buying a Bible, but the texts were more widely available and no longer strictly under church control. 

Then came Erasmus. If Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli were the parents of the Reformation, Erasmus was the grandparent, a Catholic priest and Dutch humanist who, among other things, encouraged better translations of scripture. Working from the oldest manuscripts in the original languages, he laid the foundation for what is today called the “textus receptus,” the received text, though even that foundational work notes the constant disagreement between the oldest biblical manuscripts. There is no such thing as “the Bible,” just Bibles, plural.

Spin this out a bit, and it did spin out quite a bit, and you end up with a paradox at the heart of the Protestant faith. On the one hand, we want and claim direct access to scripture, not scripture mediated through popes and priests. 

The most extreme expression of this is the idea that any person should be able to open the Bible as translated into their own language and interpret it properly.

At the other pole of the paradox, you have the idea that scripture is worthy of our study, and that it does require study. And though some lay people buy commentaries and study the text on their own, it often falls on what my alma mater calls “learned clergy” to place scripture in context.

Today’s reading from the Book of Ruth offers a little at both edges of this paradox. On the most basic level, the Book of Ruth is the story of widows, often vulnerable in the ancient Near East, and of a fidelity shown across traditional tribal lines. On the other hand, there is a bit of “if you know, you know” going on, because the ancients often used coded language in exactly the same way we do today, so when Ruth uncovers the feet of Boaz… well let’s just say, that’s not a foot. 

Though before you panic, when Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, they really are feet. 

Continue reading “Not A Foot: 10 November 2024”

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 

Though my father never finished high school and my mother never went to college, I grew up in a household that loved learning. There were books, magazines, two newspapers a day, and the evening news, back when there were only three evening news broadcasts and truth still mattered. 

I read about endangered species and life in a Soviet republic, watched news reports on the 1972 Managua earthquake and the related death of baseball great Roberto Clemente, so it should be no surprise that I also followed reports of the revolutions in Central America as a young adult, while serving in the Army and after discharge. I eventually made it to liberated Nicaragua, though that liberator is a despot these days. 

The civil war in El Salvador was still raging in the mid-1980’s when I was in the region, though the assassination of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was already history.

Most of you know how much I admire Romero, a nerd the Vatican selected because he would not upset the privileged. Radicalized by the murder of his close friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, he went on to cause what the late John Lewis called “good trouble,” and paid for it with his life, gunned down while celebrating mass in a hospital chapel.

In 1997, the Roman Catholic pope, John Paul II, allowed a “cause for beatification” to begin, the first step toward being declared a saint. That process stalled under that pope and his successor, both deeply conservative, theologically and politically, both shaped by Cold War “anti-communism.” The beatification process was revived under the current pope, himself a Latin American, and concluded with Romero’s canonization in 2018. He is now Saint Óscar Romero of San Salvador in the Roman church.

The bureaucratic process of declaring Romero a saint in that tradition is an example of the very messy human role in deciding who is considered holy in any particular historical and cultural context, saint, sanctuary, and sacred all meaning set aside as holy.

So let’s place the idea of sainthood in our particular context, as a church of mostly religious refugees in the Protestant, Reform, Congregational, and United Church of Christ traditions, then look at how we might benefit from the idea of saints in our own lives and that of this community.

Continue reading “Saints Ain’t: 3 November 2024”

Job 38:1-7, 34-41

It is an amazing gift and maybe a little bit of a curse that we homo sapiens are creatures who desire meaning. I learned a long time ago, long before I was an elected official, that if people don’t know what is going on, don’t understand what is going on, they’ll simply make stuff up. This is one of the primary drivers of religion and politics.

In our postmodern age of social media, this can be terrifying, but in premodern times this myth-making was not inherently bad. Rather than live in constant anxiety about the many things that are unknowable and uncontrollable, people lived in comfortable fictions. It kept us sane. Well, sort of…

One of those fictions was that deities, or a single deity, micromanaged the mundane, decided which fields got rain, which diseases got cured, which army won the war.

Of course, we are more sophisticated now, right? We wouldn’t ask God to lead our favorite football team to victory, then thank Him, always a “Him,” for that victory. 

We wouldn’t expect that an arbitrary and capricious god would heal some who are sick while choosing not to heal others, possibly tallying up the number of prayers or “get well” cards as a quantitative measure of worthiness, and then insisting the outcome was God’s plan.

We wouldn’t tell anxious children that the latest school shooting happened because God needed new angels, bad theology and bad policy, except that many do tell exactly this kind of repulsive lie, ask for divine intervention, thoughts and prayers, projecting onto God human will and agency, and thereby reducing God to human-size while avoiding human responsibility. 

The Book of Job, the source of today’s reading, is a pious fiction from a myth-making age. It intends to make meaning, to answer the question at the heart of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1981 book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Kushner was reeling from the death of his 14 year-old son, who suffered from the genetic disease progeria, when he took on this question, known in theological circles as theodicy.

The Book of Job may be a pious fiction, and if I am honest, I no longer believe it has value to our faith. God and the Adversary are basically super-sized omnipotent humans, sociopaths toying with human lives. Sure, Job comes out on the other side of this divine terror okay, but his family does not. 

My answer to the questions God asks Job would be “No. I didn’t create all things and have all power. That’s you, not me. So why are you being a jerk?”

Continue reading “20 October 2024: Sweet Spot”

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15

We rightly start our services at the Park Church with an acknowledgement of historic injustices committed against the indigenous people of the Americas and the kidnapped and enslaved people of Africa. The actions of the ancestors of so many of us of European descent can only be described under the contemporary category of crimes against humanity. But the first catastrophe to strike Native Americans was unintentional. The Europeans brought with them new diseases that may have killed as much as 90% of native populations. So massive was the reforestation of formerly cultivated fields that the earth experienced a mini-ice age.

This was not the end of the catastrophe, which continues to unfold today. Europeans claimed to have discovered the Americas, describing the native people as few and primitive. Population and societal collapse between first contact in 1492 and the establishment of the first English colony in 1607 left a wasteland that did not represent the historic reality of advanced cultures and thriving cities. The United Church of Christ has officially repudiated this Doctrine of Discovery, which does not really make up for our complicity in the settler colonialism that pushed ever westward, displacing Native Americans from any land that was even marginally valuable.

Most of us know the stories, the Trail of Tears, the cycle of broken treaties and wars, massacres at places like Sand Creek.

It was in this context of ethnic cleansing and genocide that a Northern Paiute religious leader named Wovoka had a vision during the solar eclipse on New Year’s Day, 1889. In the vision, God promised that if the people danced a new five-day dance they would accelerate the day when evil was swept away and the earth was renewed. There was significant Christian content in Wovoka’s vision, including the Second Coming of Jesus and a reunion with the dead. 

This new non-violent spiritual movement spread quickly among a people who felt powerless against the forces of white settlers and a white government. They called it “Dance in a Circle,” and it was adapted by other North American tribes. It was the Lakota version, called Spirit Dance, that led to the name sensationalized by the press and the military. White folks called it the Ghost Dance.

It also seems to have been the Lakota that developed the Ghost shirt, which supposedly repelled bullets. This may have been inspired by Mormon temple garments, which are believed to protect the wearer from evil. 

“Dance in a Circle” arrived in South Dakota at the same time the United States government was breaking yet another treaty with the Lakota people, taking most of their territory and forcing the tribe onto five small reservations with poor land, where they were expected to farm. The Lakota turned to the Ghost Dance, alarming the white agents representing the occupation forces. Bureau of Indian Affirs agents asked for more troops, which in turn increased the oppression and violence in a cycle that ended first in the murder of Sitting Bull, and eventually to the massacre at Wounded Knee. 

The Ghost Dance vision is a perfect example of apocalyptic belief, the idea that the world is so broken and corrupt that only the divine can restore it. Apocalyptic is always dramatic, sometimes violent. 

Continue reading “13 October 2024: Ghost Dance”

1 Corinthians 11:17-26

I sometimes wonder about the slow process of humans figuring out food. I mean, who looked at a tree on the Indian subcontinent and thought “You know, the inner bark might be tasty,” giving us cinnamon, one of my favorite flavors. 

Sushi made from fugu, a pufferfish, is a delicacy in Japan. It is a little tingly since the fish contains a deadly neurotoxin. In fact, chefs need years of training to be licensed to serve it. So how did they figure all of that out? By feeding portions to Granny until she fell over? 

“Oh yeah. Let’s not eat that bit!”

Cooking made these huge brains possible, but who looked at maize and thought “That will be safer, tastier, and more nutritious if we soak it and cook it in limewater before we grind it”? And yet, that is the ancient process civilizations here in the Americas developed, leading to the tortilla and “Taco Tuesday.”

Sometimes, I suspect it was all just one happy accident after another. Even today, some traditional sour beers depend on airborne wild yeast and bacteria to fall into shallow vats to begin fermentation. 

Yeast, so incredibly tiny, was passed on and preserved as starters, much like that sourdough starter so many created during Covid-19 lockdowns, long before we could buy little packets of Fleischmann’s at the grocery store. Well, for that matter, before grocery stores.

A little crush, a little mash, something sweet, something salty, yeast wild or domesticated, heat before or after, and badda-bing, as they say, a hot loaf of bread, a cold mug of beer or a glass of wine. 

I mean, you can eat grapes right off of the vine, but to get the full nutritional value out of most grains, you need pressure and heat. Transformation is necessary but not necessarily easy.

If beer or wine or even bread are not your thing, chocolate is the end result of a fermentation process too. And if you don’t do beer, wine, bread, or chocolate, why are you even alive?

Ingredients are brought together under the right conditions, magic happens, and they become something else.

And since we are a refugee church, picking up spiritual hitchhikers from the highways and byways of faith, since today is World Communion Sunday, it might be good to talk about another bit of magic, what we think does and does not happen when we come together at Christ’s table.

Continue reading “6 October 2024: Magic Happens”

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

You may occasionally notice me trip over the best term for the portion of our Bible sometimes called the Old Testament. There are many reasons for this, not the least being that calling it “old” suggests that the Christian Testament, called “new,” replaces it, Christianity therefore superseding Judaism. This is theologically problematic, insulting to followers of Rabbinic Judaism, and has contributed to centuries of antisemitism. 

Calling it the Hebrew Bible is more accurate, since most though not all of the texts were composed in that ancient language, not to be confused with Modern Hebrew. 

I sometimes refer to it as the Tanakh, using the Jewish designation for the texts, though Christians organize the texts quite differently. Jewish Bible seems most neutral, though what we think of as Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, doesn’t develop until several decades after the execution of Jesus.

At least references to the first portion of this Bible are pretty clear. The Torah, also referred to as the Pentateuch, is the heart of Judaism, both pre-Rabbinic and modern.

Though there are myths and legends of the time before King Saul, the overwhelming majority of the text focuses on a period of about eight hundred years, from the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to the reconstruction of the walls and the Temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Captivity. The Persians defeated the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., sending the captives home. This moment is captured in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. 

There are additions to the Jewish Bible after this date, but they are mostly presented as earlier texts. For example, the Book of Daniel claims to be a work from the Captivity, but is actually written more than three centuries later.

Today’s reading from the Jewish Bible is unique in several ways. 

First, it represents events during a period that is barely mentioned, that almost 350 years between the reconstruction of the Temple and the Maccabean Revolt of 167 B.C.E. 

Second, the events do not happen among the main body of the Jewish people, who are understood to have returned to Canaan, but instead take place in the diaspora, people who, due to dislocation or immigration, live among other cultures. In this case, the story of Esther takes place in Persia a generation or two after the Persians liberated the Jews. 

Third, and the real clincher, is that the Book of Esther does not have a single mention of God, nor does it contain any typical Jewish themes like Law or justice.

Continue reading “29 September 2024: Hanging Haman”

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”