Constructive Faith

John 5:1-9
Psalm 66
Acts 16:9-15

Mater and Anger are friends.

Well, that’s not exactly right, though what is exactly right is about as improbable as a friendship between these two characters in two very different Disney-Pixar worlds. Mater is a beat up old tow-truck in the Cars franchise, a series of films, spin-offs, and products featuring anthropomorphized motor vehicles that is right in the wheelhouse of a six year old. Anger is one of the personified emotions inside of Riley, a young girl, in the film “Inside Out” with a focus on pre-teens. The actors who provide these voices are respected comedians, though I’m not sure respected is a word that is particularly accurate, nor do I think either comedian would want to be described as respectable, for Mater is voiced by the comedian Daniel Whitney, better known as Larry the Cable Guy, while Anger is voiced by Lewis Black, better known as Lewis Black.

Though they share a career, they are culturally and politically opposites. Black, the elder of the two, is a fiery liberal, a social critic, and has served as an ACLU “ambassador for voting rights.” Larry the Cable Guy? He’s part of the Jeff Foxworthy “You Might Be a Redneck” school of comedy. Let’s just say he’s more likely to show up at a Monster Truck jam than at an ACLU rally. Despite these differences, they remain close friends, something remarkable in the current climate where we are all deep inside our ideological and cultural bunkers.

While I am more aligned with Black’s world view, I grew up among white Southern working class men. This is my native culture, so I need no translator to understand Larry the Cable Guy’s humor. My late father, in the garage with a television above his workbench, would have fit perfectly in Larry-land, though Dad hated comedians that poked fun at his tribe, jokes that came a little too close to the truth, funnymen like that other Disney voice actor, Tim Allen, aka Buzz Lightyear. Though Dad might have disliked Larry’s stand-up, he’d have loved his catch phrase, “Git-R-Done!” My dad was all about getting it done.

Both of today’s readings are about getting it done. Neither text is particularly complex or mysterious, nor is there much in the way of complicated theology. I mean, there is theology, of course, it is the Bible after all, but the focus is on the narrative action. Man needs healing, no one helps him, Jesus skips the intermediary step of getting the man into the pool, instead declaring that the healing has already happened. “Stand up, take your mat, and walk,” says the healing rabbi, and the man does. Boom, mic drop… Continue reading “Mater and Anger: May 26, 2019”

Revelation 21:1-6
Psalm 148
Acts 11:1-18

During my years in the corporate world, at the intersection of technology and design, I worked with Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, governmental and non-governmental organizations. I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement when I was consulting with Hasbro, for they were developing toys for Star Wars films that had not yet been released,. I went out to lunch at “interesting” places with United Auto Workers members in Detroit, not the sort of places I would regularly eat lunch. I walked the streets of San Francisco. But most of my clients were right there in the Big Apple, and among them was the New York Police Department’s CompStat Unit.

Comp and Stat are the giveaways. This is the department’s big data team, before we were using the term big data. Today you can find CompStat online at the NYPD’s website. You will see, at least as of Wednesday, that crime is down again this year in almost every category, with the exception of sex crimes, and that category is always challenging because of variables and delays in reporting.

You wouldn’t know it by listening to the 24-hour news cycle, which feeds on hysteria, nor by listening to politicians, for fear has reliably been the best tool for manipulating and deceiving voters, but the simple truth is that like illegal immigration, crime has been going down for years. It has been going down for so long and there is so much data, that there is now a serious scientific debate about the factors that led to the decline Continue reading “Tipping Point: May 19, 2019”

John 10:22-30
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17

Bastardizing both Shakespeare and Latin, I recently posted to social media the phrase “Et tu, Derby?” It is, of course, a reference to the Bard’s account of the death of Julius Caesar, when his friend Brutus joined the assassins and Caesar uttered the phrase “You too, Brutus?”, as well as to this year’s Kentucky Derby, when the apparent winner was disqualified. It isn’t that I need to have an opinion on horse racing, a subject in which I have zero expertise, and I certainly don’t need to tweet out my ignorance. I knew weeks before the Derby about the twenty-three horses that have died at the Santa Anita track since Christmas, something that has brought unwanted attention to what many perceive as cruelty and endangerment in horse racing, and since the Derby, I have had the opportunity to listen to people who actually do know a thing or two about the sport explain why the entangled legs of racing thoroughbreds are a bad thing. Really, I just posted “Et tu, Derby?” because I’m tired of everything being politicized and divisive. What is the purpose of getting people riled up, political and angry about the Kentucky Derby?

Also while I was away, the Khaleesi had a latte. It was during an episode of the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” set in a mythical and ancient land of dragons and magic and extreme violence, the violence mostly though not exclusively directed at women, one of the reasons I gave up the show several seasons back. The show runners have been notoriously obsessive about detail. For example, they make the teen actor who plays Bran remain in place between takes so that the fur in his costume won’t move. Yet somehow, they allowed what looked like a Starbucks cup to remain on set and to actually appear on screen during last Sunday’s episode, spotted by the sort of super nerds who analyze every aspect of the show for clues, the Reddit crowd. As you can imagine, the internet had a field day, with memes about what sort of latte the mother of dragons would drink. Personally, I view it as further evidence that Starbucks, along with Amazon, Apple, Tencent, and Alibaba, are taking over the world. Not satisfied with their marketshare in real life, they’ve invaded fictional worlds as well. They’ll be opening branches in Mordor and Hogwarts any day now.

And here, at the juncture of dragons, fiction, horsemen, and assassinated emperors, we find today’s reading. Continue reading “Mother of Dragons Latte: May 12, 2019”

John 20:19-31
Psalm 150
Acts 5:17-32

Horatio Alger Jr., the son of a Unitarian minister, made a name for himself in the last half of the 19th century writing stories of teenage boys who, through hard work, pluck, and a generous helping of luck, escaped poverty. Originally set in East Coast cities, he would eventually expand his palette to include the American West, that landscape of rugged white individualism. Alger’s name remains synonymous with this form of rags-to-riches tale.

These days, we have a love-hate relationship with these narratives. We want to be able to celebrate hard work and talent, but also realize that many who work hard all their lives remain trapped in multigenerational poverty, that there are structural and systemic barriers, that our supposed safety net is often a series of hoops and silos that diminish and demean. When we rightly celebrate those who escape poverty, we run the risk of blaming those who are still poor for being poor.

My own father experienced grinding poverty during his childhood. His father, a Norfolk cop, developed tuberculosis. A meagre pension and relocation to a sanitarium in Albuquerque left the family dependent on a local soup kitchen. Dad was determined that his own children would never experience that sort of hunger. He had huge vegetable gardens, and worked non-stop, 24 hours on as a firefighter, 24 hours off, then with a second job on his weekdays off-shift. Mom worked for much of my childhood too, various clerical and sales jobs. Amazingly, my sisters and I were not feral, but always supervised. I was not untethered and wild until I was a teen, but that is a different sermon.

Mom and Dad would have laughed at parents scheduling a date night, which wasn’t a thing for working class folks in the 1960’s and ’70’s. Didn’t happen. The best they could manage was to have friends over for cards every other Friday night. But somehow, when I was eight and my sisters were still toddlers, Mom and Dad managed to schedule an actual anniversary date.

And there, in that giant cinema of an earlier age, the curtains opened, the screen came to life, and my little butt was in the seat between them. Continue reading “Date Night: April 28, 2019”

History buffs may have realized that our reading from Isaiah is the same one quoted by George Washington in his Farewell Address. I’d like to tell you that I am smart enough to know Washington’s address, but what I really know is the musical “Hamilton.” In fact, the season of Lent is over, so it may seem strange to start my Easter sermon with a confession, but I have one. I wish I was smarter than I am. At the very least, I wish I was nearly as smart as some people seem to think I am.

I can read about the first third of the journal Nature, the newsy part, but when I get to the main content, the actual science, I am lost. I love James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Finnegan’s Wake is gobbledygook, even with a guide. And while I think some twentieth century poetry, like T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” is definitely worth the effort, I am convinced that some of those poets we were forced to decipher in high school and college were writing simply to prove to themselves how smart they were. I mean, could Ezra Pound just stick to one, maybe even two, languages? For all of his crankiness, I’ll take Robert Frost any day, poetry that ordinary people understood.

While I may not be quite as smart as I want to be, I am often smart enough to catch continuity errors in novels, films, television shows. Several weeks ago I mentioned attention and sometimes the lack of attention around continuity in the storylines of the DC and Marvel comic universes, which can be challenging when characters like Batman have been around for decades, in the hands of sometimes hundreds of writers and editors across multiple titles, not to mention television and film franchises, each written to a specific cultural context, World War II, the Red Scare, Black Power, even the LGBTQ equality movement.

In the genre-defining television series “Lost,” the moments before the crash are replayed in flashback again and again. The problem is that the flight attendant’s announcement that the seatbelt sign was on has at least three completely different versions, the captain, the pilot, illuminated, turned on, you get the idea. Continue reading “Continuity: April 21, 2019”

Maundy Thursday

A recent issue of the Economist reported on a dramatic discovery, a fossil record of what precisely happened when a giant asteroid smashed into the Yucatan peninsula approximately 66 million years ago. Geologist Walter Alvarez, along with his father Luis, a physicist, both of UC Berkeley, first proposed the asteroid impact theory in 1980, and Walter was on hand recently, almost 40 years later, as archaeologists analyzed perfectly preserved fish discovered in a single day’s deposit of 1.3 meters of debris in North Dakota. The fish were fossilized all facing the same direction, into a massive wave. There was the asteroid’s telltale layer of iridium as well as other evidence of the impact. The event was, as reported, hellfire on earth, and this is tangible evidence, as dramatic as the ruins of Pompeii, a cataclysm frozen in time.

The Alvarez’s and colleagues believed the event marked the end of the age of the dinosaur. There are competing theories, not about whether an asteroid impact created a planet-wide catastrophe, which seems certain, but about whether that was the single cause of the mass extinction. In any case, the dominant and arguably most evolved life forms on the planet went nearly extinct in a relatively short period of time. What was left of dinosaurs evolved into birds, while mammals took off, resulting in, among other things, us.

Things evolve and change, though for most of human history, this goes on without people really noticing. To be sure, there are times when massive shifts happen within one or two generations, and we happen to live in such a time, but generally, we think the way things are is the way things have always been. It is at best a comfortable fiction. Continue reading “Homilies for the Triduum 2019”

Any decent bookstore is chock full of great detectives. There, lingering on the shelves, you will find Miss Marple, Precious Ramotswe, Kurt Wallander, countless others, each the invention of a gifted writer, and many appearing on our television screens. One of those fictional detectives, the mostly forgotten Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, has found a unique niche in university history departments, of all places, where I first encountered him several decades ago. He appears in six novels by the late Josephine Tey, but it is only one of these, “The Daughter of Time,” that has consistently appeared near the top of lists of the greatest mystery novels of all time, placed as high as number one during the 1990’s.

In the novel, Grant, rehabilitating from an injury, uses his time to investigate a centuries old mystery, the fate of the Princes in the Tower, England’s King Edward V and his brother, Richard of Shrewsbury. The book asks a fundamental question: who gets to write history? It is a question we still ask, or at least should still ask, both of near history, of far history, even of scripture.

The two boys disappeared during the reign of their uncle, Richard III, around the turn of the 16th century, and people have speculated ever since. Shakespeare, whose patrons were the Tudor usurpers, would portray Richard as a hunchbacked monster. His bones have been found under a carpark in Leicester and his reputation somewhat rehabilitated by historians, but the remains supposed to be those of the two boys, interred in Westminster Abbey, have never been tested, so their identity remains unproven. We do not know who may or may not have murdered them, nor even know with certainty that they were actually murdered. Tey, through her character Grant, argues that it was the Tudor, Henry VII, not Richard, who had reason to commit the crime and eliminate rivals with better claims to the throne.

You might say that this is ancient history, but lost royalty and not-so-lost royalty have been the subject of more energy than seems quite fitting for a country that worked so hard to throw off a monarchy. Hucksters traveled America in the 19th century pretending to be displaced royalty or selling people, at high price, the lie that they themselves were displaced royalty. Much ink and airtime went to the question of Anastasia during the 20th century, the supposedly escaped daughter of the last Russian tsar, and it might still be the subject of debate had not the bodies of she and her brother Alexie been found. Continue reading “Kings: April 14, 2019”

Philippians 3:4b-14
Psalm 126
John 12:1-8

In the Flood myth, Noah the ark-builder had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth, Presumably, they helped their father build that ark, though after the flood, one son, Ham, would be cursed when he discovered his father drunk and naked. Slave-holding Christians took one line in this story, “lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers,” to justify their barbarity, claiming that the descendants of Ham became the modern day Africans, and therefore the Bible sanctioned slavery. Little did they know that we are all descended from Africans.

More recently, another man named Ham played a key role in the construction of an ark. Ken Ham, originally from Australia, but now living in the US, is paradoxically someone trained in science and a Creationist, responsible for both the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, tourist attractions located in Kentucky. A fanatic in the heresy of selective literalism, he and his foundation promote fundamentalism with the help of generous tax subsidies.

His 510′ long ark is just one example of the age-old fascination with the Flood story. An image of Noah and the ark appears in a two-thousand year-old catacomb, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in Medieval miracle plays and in Benjamin Britten’s one-act opera “Noye’s Fludde.” The disgraced comedian Bill Cosby famously uttered the phrase “What’s a cubit?,” and Steve Carell played a modern day Noah, a congressman who didn’t exactly practice creation care, in “Evan Almighty.”

But of all of these cultural references to the myth, only the 2014 Darren Aronofsky film makes mention of one of the Bible’s great mysteries. Among the challenges Russell Crowe, action-hero Noah, faces are beings described in the first four verses of Genesis 6:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.

Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

Noah’s Ark has been a Sunday School staple since Sunday Schools were invented at the turn of the 19th century, but I don’t think very many of them really discussed the “sons of God” going “in to the daughters of humans,” those daughters giving birth to a race of demi-gods. It is one of the many texts we skip because they make no sense, are nonsense, or are simply disgusting.

The Bible is full of mysteries, for miracle is mystery, but even accepting those miracles at face value, we are often left with unanswered questions and confusing narratives. One mystery that has periodically captured the attention of Christians is the character of Judas, at the center of today’s reading. Continue reading “Judas: April 7, 2019”

2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Psalm 32
Luke 15:1-32

Once upon a time, the National Guard was mobilized and sent to the Mexican border, and no one protested or called it a political stunt. It all started just over one hundred and three years ago, on March 9, 1916, though maybe you could say it really all started at the Battle of Puebla on Cinco De Mayo, fifty-four years earlier, for long before folks were drinking fancy margaritas Cinco de Mayo was a day for celebrating Porfirio.

On that first Cinco De Mayo, General Porfirio Diaz became a national hero as he led Mexican troops against a French intervention. He would ride that celebrity for decades, all the way to the presidency, and with the exception of one four year term, would serve as Mexican president from 1877 to 1911, pretty good for someone who originally ran as an opponent of presidential re-election. Resistance to his continued rule built slowly over the decades, erupting into civil war in 1910, though some prefer the term revolution, depending on which side you pick and which historian you read.

Whether it was a civil war or a revolution, one thing is clear. It was a horrible mess, not a people throwing off a colonial power, a native despot, or even an oppressive economic system, but instead a game of factions and shifting sides, often with little ideology but much naked ambition, greed, and personal animosity.

When a nation become lawless, the lawless thrive. So it was that a bandit from Durango became a revolutionary. Born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, you know him by his adopted name, Pancho Villa. As commander of the División del Norte, he proved himself an able strategist and leader, if not a particularly faithful ally. He would help overthrow one president, but then turn on the one he helped put in power.

Early on he had been depicted as a flamboyant hero in the American press and even caught Hollywood’s eye. But in 1915, he and his army were defeated at the Battle of Celaya in April, and again at the Second Battle of Agua Prieta in November. Villa and his forces became nothing more than a rag-tag guerrilla force from that point on, desperate for supplies. So it was that one morning in March 1916 would find them on the outskirts of Columbus, New Mexico, three miles into US territory. Continue reading “Chasing Pancho: March 31, 2019 Lent 4”

Genesis 15:1-18
Psalm 27
Luke 13:22-35

As we gathered to celebrate my grandmother’s life last November, several of us recalled the character “Nurse Fox” from a children’s book Gram read to us when we were small. A vixen serving as an R.N. seemed perfectly normal to us as kids, our world already chock full of anthropomorphized talking animals, though it turns out nursing does not exactly fit the fox archetype. Foxes are traditionally thought of as clever, sneaky, chicken-stealing scoundrels, truly wily unlike that hapless coyote. You see a hint of this in Disney’s Zootopia, where a petty criminal, the fox Nick Wilde, is one of the co-protagonists. It is Disney, of course, so Nick has to turn out to be a good guy by the time the credits and the blooper reel roll.

It was not Disney’s first animated fox by any means. There was Br’er Fox in “Song of the South,” a 1946 mixture of live action and animation that is today seen as racist. Almost three decades later, Disney’s 21st animated feature, “Robin Hood,” had a fox in the title role, sparring with the Sheriff of Nottingham depicted as a wolf. The message is that if foxes are tricksters and steal your chickens, wolves are truly to be feared, for they will eat you. Fear of wolves is, of course, ancient.

The animated “Robin Hood” actually combined the classic tale of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor with elements of another Medieval tale, that of the fox trickster Reynard, where the opponent was also a wolf. Disney had considered making a film about Reynard and Chanticleer the Rooster in the mid 1930s, around the same time as Snow White, and the character was considered for projects again and again for the next two decades. The tales of Reynard originated in the historically-contested territory of Alsace in the 12th century and spread throughout Western Europe. So popular was the character that reynard became the French word for fox, replacing the previous word, goupil.

There are several species of fox in Palestine, so it is not surprising that Jesus refers to Herod as a fox in today’s gospel lesson. Continue reading “The Fox: March 17, 2019 (Lent 2)”