Constructive Faith

A challenging sermon on Christ the King in an age of Caesars…

While life in the United States is still far from normal, whatever normal is, there was a bit less buzz this year about tense stares and heated arguments over plates of turkey and stuffing. I don’t know if that is because people have learned what subjects to avoid, if hearts have really been changed, or if people simply are not sitting down in the same configurations they did two years ago when we felt so very divisible, if folks have actually been disinvited. It is probably a little bit of all of the above. Even this year though, there were surely more than a few who would have preferred to be anywhere except where they were on Thursday. For some, it was wanting to be somewhere specific, the “your family or my family” that is always a part of holiday negotiations. Others simply wanted to be in two places at once, not because they wanted to be under a different roof, but because they could not be in the kitchen and watching the parade at the same time, could not be at the dinner table and watching the big game.

If only we had the gift of Isidore. A Spaniard who lived into the 12th century, he is referred to as a “labrador,” which can be confusing in translation, for it does not mean laborer as we might guess. That word would better be translated “obrero” or “trabajador.” “Labrador” meant specifically a farm worker, and not the landowner, but the hired hands. Isidore was the sort of person Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers would represent centuries later, often poor and exploited. Nonetheless, he is the patron saint of both farmers of all kinds, and of Madrid, the gleaming Spanish capital filled with wealth he could have never imagined. Two US cities are named San Ysidro after him. He was renowned for his piety, something that got him in trouble with his fellow “labradors,” who accused him of missing work to attend mass. Continue reading “Isidore: November 25, 2018”

Claiming to be the messiah can get you killed in a terrible and violent way, and not just in ancient Palestine. It happened in Texas in 1978, when George Roden murdered Wayman Dale Adair with an axe bow to the head. You may not remember this particular incident, but it was one part of a larger story you do know. George Roden had been locked in a struggle for several years with the much younger lover of his late mother, who had served as head of their breakaway sect of a breakaway sect of a breakaway sect of a… well, you get the idea.

It all starts during the Second Great Awakening, early in the 19th century, when a Baptist preacher became maybe a little too focused on the parousia. The word parousia is Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, and was most frequently used in secular texts of that age to indicate the arrival of an important person, like an official from the imperial court. In the New Testament, parousia appears twenty-four times, with seventeen of those referring to the second coming of Jesus. During that same age, coins were struck to commemorate Nero’s visit to Corinth, coins that carried the inscription Adventus Augusti Corinth, for advent was the Latin word used for parousia. Advent meant arrival or coming. When we celebrate Advent, we are celebrating the first coming of Christ. Continue reading “Golden Gate: November 18, 2018”

He was born in a Commonwealth nation, and got rich in the newspaper business, including ownership of tabloids in England. Because of laws with which he did not agree, he is no longer a citizen of his native land. Deeply conservative, he used his platform as a publisher not just to report news, but to push a partisan agenda.

You probably think I am speaking of Rupert Murdoch. If so, you are wrong. I am speaking of the Right Honorable Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, though the honorable part is somewhat suspect after his years in a US penitentiary.

Whether or not you agree with his politics and his business ethics (or alleged lack thereof), few will argue with the fact that the man is brilliant. Among his side projects while running a media empire have been a number of books, including massive and respected biographies of both Richard Nixon and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This last may seem surprising, and not just because it is odd for a Canadian with British citizenship to be that engaged in the American presidency. Why would a conservative write a biography of the president that gave us the New Deal and laid the foundation for the safety net that today protects the poor and the elderly? Black is, somewhat begrudgingly, an FDR fanboy. He notes the man’s birth into a wealthy family, and his wholly unremarkable career prior to assuming the presidency. Continue reading “Fear Itself: November 11, 2018”

The verb to build has many synonyms, including to construct and to fabricate. You can build a ship or an airplane, a bonfire or a house, but only the last of these structures qualifies as the gerund, the form of the verb that functions as a noun. To be a building, something must be constructed with a roof and walls and, according to some definitions, must also be meant for permanent use. A sukkah, a temporary structure used during the Jewish holiday Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, would not qualify. You might build a lean-to out of brush as you camp along the trail, but what you are building is not a building, since it is not permanent, and even if it was, it has but one wall, albeit one that is also a roof.

Is the Statue of Liberty, that sign of America’s past welcome to immigrants, a building? It is constructed, it is meant to be permanent, but it does not have a roof or walls as such. Sure, you can walk around inside, ascend to the torch, but you are inside of a sculpture that was constructed as a sculpture.

I ask the same question about one of Gustave Eiffel’s other great constructions, his eponymous tower in Paris. In fact, if you read Wikipedia’s article on the tower, you will notice that it does not refer to it as a building, though it compares it to an 81-story building. The Eiffel Tower is permanent, and there are roofs and walls on portions of the three platforms, yet it feels to me like the difference between a skeleton and a body. It is the logical framework, minus so much that protects and decorates.

Human logic can feel a little like the Eiffel Tower at times too, all wiring and framework, no decoration and protection. This is, for me, why reason alone is not enough for a fulfilling human life, why a reductionist approach that makes us nothing but wiring and framework is not enough for meaning. Continue reading “This Sentence Is False: November 4, 2018”

Like most moments in history, the Protestant Reformation was not the singular act of nailing the Ninety Five Theses to the church doors of Wittenberg on October 31st of 1517, though we tend to pick that date, and that singular man, Martin Luther, for the sake of simplicity.

In truth, the seeds of the Reformation were being planted for at least two centuries before the German monk declared “Here I stand,” seeds planted by prophets like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, tended by many great thinkers of the Northern Renaissance like Erasmus, the Dutch priest and older contemporary to Luther, a groundbreaking translator of scripture, and a leading humanist.

Erasmus, probably best known for his devastating work “In Praise of Folly,” would be associated with many of the important figures of his age, including the English Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, later canonized, and Henry the Eighth, the ruler whose break with the Roman church led to More’s execution. In his recent dual biography of Erasmus and Luther, Michael Massing describes the dutchman’s visit to Rome in 1509, painting a picture of a church and a city in advanced decay. The Roman forum was a cow pasture, the great Capitoline a hill of goats not of emperors. Continue reading “Weekend at Bernie’s: October 28, 2018”

Now, I know Blue Hill, George Stevens Academy, and even this church, all have a real and personal connection to the blockchain and cryptocurrency, but I have to confess, I don’t really understand it. I mean, I was in the tech industry before I became a pastor, so the idea of the blockchain as a distributed technology makes sense, the economics behind cryptocurrencies, not so much. Traditional currencies like the dollar or the euro are no more than an agreed system of value and exchange, backed up originally by hard assets, and these days, at least in the case of the US dollar, by the “full faith and credit” of the United States. This is why economists panic when politicians hold that “full faith and credit” hostage, extracting political ransom to preserve the life of our economy. The dollar represents some measure of human labor and talent, some tract of land, some quantity of pork bellies.

But there is nothing that backs up cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. The whole idea is to be out of the control of governments, making it easier to move money while avoiding the watchful eyey of the IRS, the DEA, and anti-terrorism units, but that hiddenness also means there are no bailouts and no regulators preventing fraud. There is the constant danger of hackers, North Korean mostly, who have made off with billions. One corrupt regime, that of the Venezuelan despot Nicolas Maduro, has tried to sell the world on the petro, backed up, in theory, by the petroleum assets of that nation. It is as much of a sham as his Bolivarian paradise Venezuelans are fleeing by the thousands.

The value of every cryptocurrency is driven by speculation, with millions in imaginary value disappearing into the ether just this year, maybe appropriate since ethereum is another of those cryptocurrencies. Though there seems to be a new one almost every week, so I can’t quite keep up. Rather than the hip cyber geek I once was, I’m beginning to feel like a cranky old Luddite. Continue reading “Counterfeit Wampum: October 7, 2018”

On Wednesday night, in our Theology on Tap gathering, we wrestled with the Book of Joshua, with its story of divinely-sanctioned genocide. Many of us are unwilling to worship a god that would order the slaughter of innocent civilians, infants, even livestock. We struggle with both the historicity and the theology of this story, wondering how we can claim the Hebrew heritage without this notion that Yahweh is a violent and exclusive deity. The violence in the Hebrew Scriptures even led to an early Christian heresy, Marcionism, which claimed that the God of the Hebrew scriptures must be a lower deity than the loving God of Jesus.

The truth is, humankind has always had to wrestle with the past, past events, old beliefs, with interpretations of history, though it seems to be almost all we do these days. We pull down statues, change the names of buildings and streets, sometimes rushing to judgment. We want figures of the past to cohere with modern standards of equality and right conduct. For the most part, I get it. Naming the oppressor is necessary in combating oppression and taking the oppressor’s name off a building and the oppressor’s flag off the flagpole sends a powerful signal to those groups that have been oppressed. But like most everyone else, I’m not always certain exactly where to draw those lines. I wish right and wrong were always clear to me, but they aren’t.

Among the re-evaluations of past conduct that have been taking place are the scandals in the Roman church and the #MeToo movement. These have touched every aspect of modern life, from Hollywood and Congress to famous megachurches. Male power can victimize, and speaking truthfully about the ways men have used their power, their economic power, their religious power, has taken down one executive, director, bishop, and actor after another, as well as quite a few of those who enabled their misconduct.

It is hard, in the current context, to imagine that The Police won a Grammy Award in 1982 for the smash hit “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” the story of inappropriate longing between a teacher and a high school girl. It is one step short of Nabakov’s “Lolita,” a literary classic based on an actual kidnapping, a novel and a song we might now see through a very different lens. Continue reading “Don’t Stand So Close To Me: September 23, 2018”

In September 2017, fifty four weeks ago yesterday to be exact, during a burn ban caused by dry weather and high winds, a 15 year-old boy with a firecracker started a forest fire in the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon-Washington border. We’re not talking a flame thrower or a napalm bomb, just a firecracker a kid could easily lay his hands on. One hundred and fifty three hikers were trapped by the rapidly advancing flames, requiring rescue. By the time it was declared contained, two months later, more than 50,000 acres had burned and an inch of ash had fallen on Portland. Hot spots were still being discovered as recently as late May.

Wildfires occur in nature, and are part of a cycle of renewal, of death and regrowth, though they have been exacerbated in recent years by over-development, mismanagement of forests, and the effects of human-caused climate change. It seems as if the entire West Coast is on fire at times, and when the fire is finally out, the rains come and the denuded hills slide down, mud engulfing homes, businesses, and bodies.

One of the first to discover that particular wildfire, according to Forbes, was Kevin Marnell, who was hiking along Eagle Creek. Around 3:30pm, he heard a series of loud banging sounds that he at first thought might be gunfire. Then he saw the smoke.

Forest fires are loud. There is the crackle and sometimes explosive combustion as the fire’s fuel is consumed, as sap ignites and trees fall. But the burning does not cause most of the noise. Superheated air moves up and new air rushes in, bringing fresh oxygen to feed the fire. It is this air movement that we hear, effectively localized high winds. And they roar. Wildfires roar.

The author of the text traditionally known as the Epistle of James knows a thing or two about wildfires. He warns that like a firecracker thrown into a gorge, the tongue can start a blaze bringing tremendous destruction. Continue reading “Loud: September 16, 2018”

The region around the Pyrenees, the mountains that create a natural border between France and Spain, is also the home of a number of unique languages. One, Basque, is a language isolate, unrelated to other European languages. Others, like Catalan and Occitan, are derived from the romance language group, but distinct from either Spanish or French. It was in a dialect of Occitan, Gascon, that 14 year-old Bernadette Soubirous described her encounters with uo petito damizelo, “a small young lady,” or what she described simply as aquero, “that.” Those encounters, over the course of a fortnight in 1858, would come to be understood as apparitions of the Virgin Mary, for the damizelo would eventually refer to herself as the “Immaculate Conception,” a little too theologically convenient given that belief in the Immaculate Conception of Mary had only been promulgated by the Vatican four years earlier. Nonetheless, the apparitions and the spring that Bernadette discovered would become the heart of a faith-healing industrial complex at Lourdes in France, where approximately 350,000 pilgrims bathe in the waters annually, seeking cures.

Of those 350,000 pilgrims, one in ten thousand will report cures to the Lourdes Medical Bureau. Three to five of these are deemed worth investigation annually, and referred to the International Lourdes Medical Committee. That committee can deem the cure “medically inexplicable,” though only the bishop of the subject’s home diocese can declare it a miracle.

The good news is that the odds of experiencing a cure deemed medically inexplicable are almost twice as good as those of being struck by lightning. They still don’t seem that good. And remember, those who take the time and spend the money to go to Lourdes are predisposed to believe in miracles, or at least the possibility of miraculous healing.

These days, most of us are skeptical about faith healing, and with good reason. “Out demon lupus” shouts one charlatan in a recent segment of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” Snake oil is snake oil, whether or not you call it holy, and all the smoke and mirrors in the world cannot hide frauds like Benny Hinn. Continue reading “New and Improved: September 9, 2018”

Lightning bugs in a jelly jar with holes punched in the top.

Wet grass and playing in the sprinkler in the front yard.

Coppertone and beach towel lunches that put the sand in sandwich.

Twelve year old boys in a ramshackle fort in the woods, a stack of Mad magazines and that one girlie magazine Chip stole from his father, all of us uncertain, especially me.

These were the halcyon days of summer, at least as seen through the romanticized lens of the past, and that is the lens most of us use Continue reading “Lightning Bugs: August 26, 2018”