Constructive Faith

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, 11

Video at : https://vimeo.com/366618954

There has been a running joke of many years that I am just about the least “gay” gay man ever. Now, I take issue with this fake news. It is true that some question my fashion judgment, that I prefer a beer to a Cosmo, that I watch sports, and by that I don’t mean figure skating… and that I go to bed early. But are we really going to traffic in base stereotype? Besides, I always thought it was a one question application, and that question was not about brunch entrees or Judy Garland.

At least I get one thing right. I do like musical theater and opera, no doubt the result of a childhood where Camelot, Fiddler on the Roof, and Mario Lanza played on the giant console record player in the living room. I especially like it when musical theater crashes into other musical genres, because I love nothing more than a good mash-up. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I love Hamilton, where history and hip-hop collide with musical theater, because I like history and hip-hop too. In the years B.H., that is before Hamilton, there were other beautiful collisions, notably Jonathan Larson’s smash hit Rent, which opened on Broadway in 1996 and ran for twelve years, grossing over $280 million.

Rent is a modern reimagining of “La Boheme,” Puccini’s classic opera, which premiered exactly a century earlier, conducted by a young Arturo Toscanini. In Rent, the Latin Quarter becomes lower Manhattan, the scourge of tuberculosis becomes AIDS, but the issues are still the same: art on the precipice, love among the wreckage, exploitative economics, and the constant specter of death. The protagonists do not know what comes next, so time and the moment are major themes. The second act begins with one of the show’s enduring anthems, “Seasons of Love,” which reminds us that a common year is “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes.” Another is the refrain, included in the finale, that tells us:

There’s only us, there’s only this
Forget regret, or life is your’s to miss
No other path, no other way
No day but today

The people in Jeremiah’s time knew a thing about anxiety too. The prophet’s attention was primarily drawn to the macro, to matters religious and political, rather than to the domestic, but people certainly still loved and grieved, suffered disease and hunger and the sort of constant anxiety that comes from one piece of wretched news after another. Continue reading “Present Tense: October 13, 2019”

Sermon delivered at Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI

Video at vimeo.com/364710296

1 Samuel 21:1-9

Monday was my last day of freedom, though freedom might be a bit prosaic considering I’ve spent several weeks moving halfway across the country, unpacking, and generally setting up a household, which is mostly, but not completely, done, all while taking three classes online. I’m delighted to be here, of course, but gosh, moving is hard work. So there I was on Monday, one day left, with errands to run, a few minor projects I could reasonably hope to check off before starting work Tuesday morning, and I found myself at Target, considering those storage cubes, then walking by the clearance rack.

And Lo! There appeared on the clearance rack bed sheets in a size I needed. “Stranger Things” bedsheets to be exact, a product tie-in with that very successful Netflix series. I’ve slept on them now for several nights expecting totally jacked-up dreams, but not so much, at least not yet.

You see, “Stranger Things,” is an homage to the pop culture of my teen and young adult years, and it is a wicked creepy sci-fi horror, hence my concern that the sheets, one of the last things I see as the lights go out at night, might plant nightmarish seeds, visions of demi-gorgons dancing in my head.

At the start of the first episode of “Stranger Things,” four of the central characters, boys on the cusp of adolescence, are playing Dungeons and Dragons. I know a thing or two about that game. I started playing back when the rules were still in a set of small paperback volumes that might have come from a ditto machine, and were most certainly laid out on a manual typewriter.

It was a game where you could be anything except the nerd that you probably actually were if you were playing D&D. You might be an Elven mage, a Halfling rogue, or a stout Dwarven warrior with his trusted battle-axe.

And this was my conception of a battle-axe, something from fantasy, D&D and Conan the Barbarian, not a weapon real warriors used. Except, it turns out, they did. Continue reading “Battle-Axe: October 6, 2019 World Communion Sunday”

During recent weeks, I have moved halfway across the country, settling in as a first time homeowner, and completing some continuing education coursework in human rights. I’m back in the pulpit starting this coming Sunday. In addition to appearing here and on my public Facebook page, those who wish to will also be able to see sermons, which are webcast. More on that to come…

Colossians 1:1-14
Psalm 25
Luke 10:25-37

Bacteria have been a bit of a thing in recent weeks. Last week our lectionary readings included the story of Naaman, the Aramean general who seeks healing in Israel. Naaman is afflicted with leprosy, a disfiguring and contagious condition, something we hear a lot about leprosy in scripture. But the term was used for any disfiguring or unsightly skin condition, so we don’t know for sure exactly what Naaman suffered. Still, it is sometimes actual leprosy, what we today call Hansen’s Disease, and it is bacterial.

Several weeks earlier, I spoke about the human microbiome, the symbiotic bacteria that inhabit our guts and other parts of our body, that we increasingly understand as essential and even formative of our sense of self, with an unhealthy biome contributing to depression and autism spectrum disorder, among other things.

This is a bit of a paradigm shift, for we have been primarily focused on the eradication of all bacteria. We’ve belatedly come to realize that this has been a mistake, this demonizing of entire class of life form. For example, only bacteria and a family of similar single-cell organisms called archaea can synthesize B12, a vitamin essential to metabolism and DNA synthesis, so without bacteria, there is no us, there is no this, no advanced multi-cellular life forms at all. From your yogurt to C-diff, we find bacteria everywhere, contributing to human culture and sometimes taking lives.

It should not be surprising, then, that scientists continue to study this microscopic life that is part of our lives. So it was that geneticist Rotem Sorek and his team at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science began an experiment focusing on bacterial response to a viral infection. Continue reading “Viral: July 14, 2019”

2 Kings 5:1-14

It is probably not wise to shock people right out of the gate, but I’m a pretty straight-forward sort of guy, so here goes: I like okra. Now I know some folks think it is slimy, but that’s just because they don’t know how to cook it. I make a mean gumbo, and breaded and fried, okra is just dandy, not slimy at all.

You want slimy, how about squash, eggplant, raw tomato? So those who know French cooking will not be at all surprised that ratatouille is not one of my favorite dishes. It is a whole dish of baked slime, slices of eggplant, zucchini, squash, and tomato. But Ratatouille sure is a great movie.

For those who are not Disney fans, or who have not been forced to sit through countless hours of Disney with kids or grandkids, Ratatouille was a 2007 Disney-Pixar film set in the Parisian restaurant scene. In it, a rat with culinary aspirations uses a kitchen boy as a front. Much hilarity, drama, and pest control ensue. The main lesson, for there is always a main lesson, is one that appears regularly in children’s literature and film. You can be anything you want to be, even if you are a rat who wants to be a chef.

Now I’m cynical enough to know that isn’t completely true. Nature and nurture do sometimes work to narrow our field of possibility. My childhood dreams did not include Olympic curling, for example, because Virginia Beach was not a real hotbed for winter sports, with or without a broom. Or at least it wasn’t when I was a kid. These days one of the top players in the NHL is from Arizona, so all bets are off. Continue reading “Ratatouille: July 7, 2019”

Galatians 5:13-25
Psalm 16
2 Kings 2:1-14

When we think of prophets, we might think of the Big Three, the named books we encounter most frequently in worship and Sunday School: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We might think of the Book of the Twelve, the minor prophets, sometimes named, sometimes fictional. We might think of other prophets named in the histories that did not leave behind a text, people like Elijah and his student Elisha in today’s reading. But we almost always think of prophets in particularity, mostly singular. Ezekiel isn’t hanging with his homies breaking pots and having seizures. Prophecy is not thought of as a group activity.

This singular conception of the prophet is the result of tradition, our declining familiarity with our scriptures, and our mental tendency to flatten, to simplify. Individual prophets have a name, the groups do not. But Isaiah was not really just Isaiah, but an entire school of religious thought and prophecy that would produce new work in the prophet’s name for at least two centuries after the death of Isaiah Bin Amoz. Jeremiah was closely associated with a major Jewish reform in the decades before Jerusalem was conquered and destroyed by the Babylonians, a reform movement that would produce much of the Hebrew scripture, including the history we read today, and that would continue to expand the book written in the prophet’s name for at least another four centuries. And then there are the unnamed prophets, like those that seem to taunt Elisha in today’s reading, one group numbered in the text as fifty men. Our narrow definition of prophecy does not fit the textual and historical evidence. Continue reading “Lion Bait: June 30, 2019”

Luke 8:26-39
Psalm 42
Galatians 3:23-29

We humans, bipedal thinking animals that we are, operate in one particular time and space, and while we may know that things are often more complex than they seem, we tend toward a mental Occam’s Razor, choosing the easiest and simplest construct whenever possible. So it is that we eat Italian food, take vacations in Italy, maybe brush up on our Italian on the plane, all while thinking that Italian is a thing. But Italy as we have understood it in our lifetimes, is fairly new, emerging during the Risorgimento, the consolidation of many small states, that was not completed until 1871. Even the language we think of as Italian is a construct of that era, drawn from a form of Tuscan that was primarily literary and spoken by the upper class. Neapolitan and Sicilian are not dialects of Italian but instead distinct languages, distant cousins evolved from the same street Latin root. Spain, France, Germany, each was formed as a nation, as an identity, as a language, by distinctly human forces. God forbid I should say it, but the same is true for the United States, what is in and what is out.

If nations can be brought together by force of will, so too can they fall apart. Today, the word used for the dissolution of a nation into small and competing tribes is thought of as Balkanization, something we tend to associate with the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, with horrific war, with genocide, and with the Dayton Accords. In fact, the term first referred to the break-up of portions of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires a century earlier.

The modern nation-state of Israel is a construct. Some of you were even alive when it happened. The ancient state that shapes our thinking and comes to mind isn’t quite what real either We tend to conflate Israel and Judah, to assume the contours of the Holy Land where Jesus taught and healed were roughly analogous to the contours of the Kingdom of David and Solomon. But that kingdom existed for a mere hundred years. Conquest, exile, and immigration made for no clear borders, for cosmopolitanism in some places and for segregation in others.

Our first reading, Jesus and the man possessed, appears in all three synoptic gospels. In Matthew, it takes place in Gadara, a town six miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee in what we think should be Jewish territory. In fact, the town was part of the Decapolis, a set of ten prominent Gentile cities in the region, and had been given to Herod by Augustus. Mark, the source of the story, and Luke, who follows Mark, places it in Gerasa, also part of the Decapolis and a further 27 miles southeast. Gerasa was larger, more grand, and though founded by Alexander the Great, by the time Jesus got there, it was thoroughly Roman.

Of course, we might have known that it was not a Jewish town, whichever town it was, because… well, you know… pigs. Continue reading “Balkanization: June 23, 2019”

Proverbs 8:22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5

J. Robert Oppenheimer would later recount that on seeing the results of his greatest achievement, the world’s first atomic blast, words from the Bhagavad Gita immediately came to mind. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” But Hinduism was not the only religion on Oppenheimer’s mind, for the test itself was code-named Trinity. When asked why, he stated that he had been thinking of John Donne, the great 17th century English poet, dean of St. Paul’s, and member of Parliament.

Though the verses on Oppenheimer’s mind when asked to name the project made no specific reference to the Trinity, Donne was explicitly Trinitarian in his thought and theology. The poem normally listed as number 14 in his Holy Sonnets begins:

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

And there it was, on July 16, 1945, a mushroom cloud breaking, blowing, and burning in the desert, the destroyer of worlds. It is fitting that the desert in which the test site was located was known locally as Jornado del Muerto, the journey of the deadman.

If it is unclear how Oppenheimer, who had poetry and myth and a tremendous amount of science running through his brain, landed on this key term of Christian theology at that precise moment when he was asked for a name, it is equally unclear how we landed on the idea of Trinity itself, though it may be fitting that you cannot look directly at an atomic blast, which would be blinding, and we cannot look directly at the Trinity, despite two thousands years of attempting to put Divine Mystery in a tidy box, for the bow never stays tied. Continue reading “Bomb, Satellite, Guts: June 16, 2019”

Romans 8:14-17
Psalm 104
Acts 2:1-21

When I crossed the Queensborough Bridge on 9/11, it was a Muslim merchant who handed me a cold bottle of water from his inventory. This was the reality of that day, not the cheering Muslim crowds in Jersey City of the infamous lie. Still, it is true that fundamentalist versions of Islam have sometimes had difficulty in societies that are diverse, free, and open, for fundamentalism of any kind makes an enemy of tolerance and peace, is always destructive, whether it is the fundamentalism of American Christians, our very own red, white, and blue Taliban, or the fundamentalism of Hindu nationalists in India, even the fundamentalism of atheist extremists who rage against the existence of churches. It is no surprise that fundamentalism often goes hand in hand with racism and nationalism, for they all violently pursue a mythical and pure past. Still, just as there are moderate and open-hearted forms of patriotism, there are moderate, even progressive, open-hearted forms of Islam, of Christianity, of Hinduism. We like to count ourselves among the most open-hearted of Christian movements.

One of the challenging paradoxes of our age comes when a free and open society welcomes fundamentalists who object to the sort of free and open society that would welcome them. Nowhere has this question been messier than in the Netherlands, where the nation’s tradition of radical welcome resulted in the large-scale immigration of Muslim fundamentalists who objected to Dutch liberalism, to the equality of women, of the LGBTQ community. In November of 2004, one of those Islamic fundamentalists murdered a Dutch film director who had, working with a Dutch-Somali member of the Netherlands’ House of Representatives, created a controversial short film about the treatment of women in Islam. The victim achieved more fame in death than in life, though he carried a rather famous name, for he was Theo van Gogh, great-grandson of Vincent’s brother, an art dealer also named Theo.

Like Einstein, who we discussed last week, Vincent van Gogh has become a cultural icon, movies and songs, Kirk Douglas in “Lust for Life,” Don McLean’s ballad “Vincent,” an episode of Doctor Who, and of course his ubiquitous works, Sunflowers and Starry Night on shirts and bedsheets, umbrellas and underwear.

It may be gauche to love van Gogh, but I do. There may be some snobbish grace in the fact that I can take or leave Monet, prefer Donatello’s David to Michelangelo’s, that I think Cezanne was a prude and Picasso was better before Cubism. But in the end, I just like van Gogh’s use of color, of distortion, his choice of subjects. Continue reading “Theo, Theo, and Vincent: June 9, 2019”

Ephesians 1:15-23
Psalm 47
Luke 24:44-53

There is a powerful monument in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, a window into a below ground chamber of empty bookshelves, for this was the site of the most infamous Nazi book-burning. In the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, one can find a plaque commemorating the site where the vicious Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola met his fiery end in 1498, the same site where he had earlier burned books, paintings, including work by Sandro Botticelli, in the Bonfire of the Vanities.

There is no memorial, however, to the destruction of works of art, specifically religious images, during the 8th and 9th centuries in the iconoclast controversy, though the physical evidence is everywhere in what is present and what is absent in the eastern Mediterranean region. Cultural evidence of iconoclasm exists in the final split between the Western form of the church, which would come to call itself Catholic, or universal, and Eastern forms of the church, who would take for themselves the title Orthodox, for “right belief,” both evidence of chauvinism and hubris.

Today, an iconoclast is anyone who attacks a cherished belief or institution, though it originally meant specifically someone who destroyed images, eikon in the Greek, for that was the spiritual spasm that erupted in the Byzantine empire. In fact, modern iconoclasts might paradoxically become an icon themselves, someone like Albert Einstein, who challenged basic understandings of the universe in his day and age. Think, for a moment, how weird it is that we instantly recognize the image of a man who worked in the field of theoretical physics and died more than a half century ago. Not only do we recognize his image, but we can readily repeat his most famous equation, E=MC2, and name his most famous theory, relativity, though I suspect that I am not alone in knowing these things without really understanding them, for we often know what we don’t really understand.

While the last half of the 20th century would see tremendous leaps in technology, much like the last half of the 19th, the first half of the 20th would see massive shifts in human knowledge, in human thinking, not experienced since the Enlightenment. You don’t have to be a scientist or a geek to know some of the names and theories of scientists and thinkers from that age, Gödel’s Incompleteness, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, Einstein’s Relativity, and Schrödinger’s cat, which has taken on cultural icon status all of its own. Continue reading “Schrödinger’s Jesus: June 2, 2019”