Constructive Faith

Ezekiel 2:1-5
Mark 6:1-13

Paul Haggis had an extraordinary career in Hollywood as a writer, director, and producer, and has two Emmys and two Oscars. He also spent years in the cult of Scientology, only breaking with that organization in 2009 when they supported Prop 8, a proposed ban on same-sex marriage in California, several years before the U.S. Supreme Court established marriage equality as the rule of law. 

Haggis was the first high-profile defector, leading to an avalanche of other defections from Scientology, tell-all books and television series, investigative reports and full-length documentaries.

Some of us knew exactly how crazy Scientology was even before these revelations. Founded by a science fiction writer who was both a sociopath and a con artist, it continues today as a major criminal enterprise, imprisoning current members, protecting the physically violent current head of the cult, and harassing those who escape. It is hard to know if accusations that have been made against Paul Haggis are legitimate expressions of #MeToo resistance in Hollywood, or are simply more Scientology terrorism.

Scientology is a pay-to-play organization. You pay for classes and something they call auditing, and as you sink more money into the cult, the more secrets are revealed. Somewhere well north of $100,000, you might “go clear,” the basic goal of Scientology. That is when you start paying for levels in their more advanced Operating Thetan program. And it is at Operating Thetan Level III that you learn the “big secret,” not so much a secret anymore as more and more former members “go clear,” not in Scientology, but of Scientology.

The big secret is that the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, Xenu, was worried that he might be deposed, so he used psychiatrists and their galactic version of IRS agents to round-up billions of his potential enemies. These rebels were all transported to Teegeeack, stacked around volcanoes, then blown up with hydrogen bombs. There are many details, but you really don’t need all the details. Unfortunately, this mass execution let loose the souls of the victims, called Thetans. They cling to the current inhabitants of Teegeeack, now called Earth.

Before you rush home and jump in the shower to wash off the Thetans, which totally won’t work without a six-figure investment, you should hear the good news. At Operating Thetan Level VIII, you learn that the Galactic Confederation will soon return and telepathically enslave us, but soon after that, L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology, will return and liberate us. Sort of a space opera version of the Revelation to John of Patmos, with Hubbard cast as Christ.

Now, if I am being honest, I tell this story partly out of smug satisfaction. I mean, there may be some crazy stuff in my own religious tradition, but it is mostly not that blatantly crazy, and besides, it is way older, which somehow makes all the difference. 

Ezekiel might have been mentally ill, and by today’s definitions he certainly was, but at least he wasn’t a seer who claimed he could find secret treasure (for a fee) like Joseph Smith before he was visited by the angel Moroni and founded Mormonism, which is now old enough to no longer be considered a cult, despite all that crazy stuff about Native Americans.

It is pretty easy to call it a scam when money changes hands, but what about Helen Schucman, who received “inner dictation” from Jesus and wrote “A Course in Miracles,” a religion of sorts now better associated with Marianne Williamson? Schucman and her partner made money from the book, but there is no reason to doubt she believed what she said. 

What if what trades hands is prestige or power instead of money? What happens when the supposed prophet starts gathering multiple lovers, as they so often do, sometimes children? 

How do we know which metaphysical claims are true, draw the line between revelation and delusion? Does it matter if the claims are false if they provide meaning? When does community and meaning become something sinister, the Apostolic Socialism of the People’s Temple tipping over into the mass suicide and murder at Jonestown, 909 victims who drank the Flavor Aid, most voluntarily?

Continue reading “7 February 2024: God Talk”

Lamentations 3:22-33

2 Samuel 1:1-27 

It seems fitting that we close out Pride Month with a slightly queer lectionary text, the passage that most strongly suggests that the relationship between David, son of Jesse, and Jonathan, son of King Saul, was not strictly platonic. It is, of course, in the context of David’s grief over the death of Saul and Jonathan, though the account comes from Davidic propaganda and feels more than a little disingenuous.We are meant to believe that David becomes the king through divine action only, though we know that his entire career is marked by treachery and sin, that he is a usurper, a coup plotter, a murderer.

Even this passage, filtered through that lens of Davidic legitimacy, flies in the face of decency. The messenger who brings David the war report, the crown and armband that will mark David as king, is murdered on David’s command when he admits to putting the mortally-wounded Saul out of his misery at Saul’s own request.

Though there is some ambiguity in the ancient Hebrew texts about the title “Song of the Bow,” it is worth noting that the text cites the Book of Jashar. This is not the only instance where scripture cites other scriptures we no longer have, lost or simply unauthorized.

We can say with relative certainty that David existed, despite the now discredited skeptics. Much of the history in 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1^st and 2^nd Kings, while told from the Israelite perspective, fits what we know to be true from archeology and sources in other parts of the region. 

David’s grief, however, is uncertain. We do not know if it is performative or genuine. 

I am inclined to believe that embarrassing and contradictory texts, ones that do not fit the prevailing narrative, probably contain a kernel of historicity, and this text is difficult and embarrassing. Even so, David’s public grief, like the accusations of Job’s supposed friends, offers us little that is true and useful.

Better, then, that we turn to our first reading this morning, a reading of mourning, from the Book of Lamentations.

First, the context: In the year 586 before the Common Era, the last bit of the once great Kingdom of David, a remaining mini-state then known as Judah, was destroyed by the Babylonians, Jerusalem and the Temple razed. 

It was that conqueror’s practice to take the skilled and educated from defeated lands back to Babylon, and so the official story, in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, shifts east, where we find figures like the prophet Ezekiel and the folk-hero Daniel. Judah is depicted as de-populated, the few peasants left there as mixing with non-Israelite tribes, and therefore subject to dispossession when the Babylonian Captives returned. 

Of course, this depiction of those remaining in Judah as unfaithful and deserving of exclusion is far from reality. Their erasure from Jewish history starts with attribution.

The Book of Lamentations is traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, for it was the practice during biblical times to attribute all texts to someone important, the reason so much of the Book of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah and so many of the letters of Paul were not written by Paul. 

Jeremiah, according to tradition, had fled the destruction of Judah going southwest, dying in Egypt, not Palestine. This text describes the situation in Palestine from the viewpoint of someone on the ground. The Book of Lamentations actually comes from the very people who are largely erased from the Jewish story, those who were not taken into captivity.

The author, authors, or editors have produced a brutal piece of lyric poetry, not bad for a supposedly worthless and ignorant people left behind in the rubble and one-donkey towns of Judah. The violence is of Homeric proportions. 

While they attempt in places to frame the defeat of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple as divine will, punishment for infidelity, the text never settles on a single message, and does not suggest that their grief is in any way redemptive. Instead, we find sadness, anger, and tenacity. 

This, I believe, is proper grief, the kind of grief we often experience, as tangled up as the Christmas lights we used to unpack the weekend after Thanksgiving. While we have technical terms like compound grief and complex grief, all grief is actually both of those things, compound and complex.

I first started thinking about the structure of grief when I was in high school after encountering the groundbreaking work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. If you do not know the name, you certainly know her ideas. She suggested five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 

Humans being humans, we wanted checkboxes, so we turned this into a linear set of tasks or markers. First you did denial, and when you got to anger, you were done with denial. 

Instead of stages, which are discreet, we might be better served to think of these as the moods of grief or locations of grief, changeable, the soul caught up in a high energy whirlwind, spinning, ascending and descending in turns, re-inhabiting locations of grief, but slowly coming to ground as the system loses intensity, at least when the system is working properly, no two whirlwinds being quite alike. The grief does not disappear so much as it becomes part of the landscape, a disturbance and a mark we sometimes notice, sometimes don’t.

I would have done well to remember these lessons the first time I was at a deathbed as a chaplain, summoned in the middle of the night to the Intensive Care Unit of a Boston hospital. It all happened so quickly, and I have remembered it through the lens of constructing my own theology of pastoral practice so that the encounter has taken on surreal characteristics, the dying man more bloated and grayer than seems possible. And all I wanted to do was fix things, to put the encounter in a properly labeled box and tape it shut. 

I couldn’t fix the fact that the patient was dying, was dead by the time I left them. But I could offer the family easy answers, cheap answers, and so I handed them a Bible open to 1st Thessalonians, Chapter 4, thought to be the earliest letter of Paul and possibly the first Christian writing we still have. It is traditionally used at funerals, and seeks to reassure the living that those who die in Christ will rise up on the Day of the Lord, meeting the descending heavenly host. It was meant to reassure that first generation, since the death of believers before the Second Coming did not yet fit into their theology.

I knew that it did not mean what the grieving family would hear in the text, that their deceased loved one would be waiting in heaven. Never mind that I knew nothing of the life of the man who had died, whether he would go to heaven if that is what actually happens. Never mind that I can only guess at the abundance of God’s grace, and am actually agnostic about life after death. 

That text immediately came to mind because I had been assigned that exact passage in a seminar on Thessalonians being taught by the world’s foremost expert on the Pauline epistles. I would present on the text in direct translation from the Greek within the week. 

But like the friends of Job, I wanted to make the grief make sense, to wrap it up, absurdly to somehow make the family feel better so I did not have to sit with them in their pain, or carry any of it with me when I left.

Afterwards, I promised myself I would never do that again, never offer easy answers, never discount doubt and grief, but would simply be present, would lean into tenacity, just like the authors of Lamentations.

God did not want more angels and so use Adam Lanza to slaughter first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary, kids who would have graduated from high school this year, so there is no making sense out of that tragedy. The war crimes committed on October 7th, 2023 had nothing to do with God’s will or justice, and the crimes against humanity that have happened ever since are in no way sanctified. These are monstrous horrors, and we must tell the stories of these monstrous horrors every day, reminding ourselves that they are still happening, and we must resist.

But it does not take a monstrous horror to trigger our grief, does not even take death, for grief is simply an emotional and spiritual response to negative change, to loss, and we can grieve for a church community that no longer looks like it once did, for the diner that was part of our childhood, and if we are not careful, might grieve for democracy itself.

And we are not alone in grieving. The hard line we have drawn between ourselves and other animals is a lie we have told to protect ourselves, from our finitude, from our co-identification with those animals, for while we fantasize about seeing Sparky in heaven, we have no desire to encounter this morning’s bacon in heavenly porcine form.

Elephants grieve. Apes grieve. And I suppose, in their own way, there is complexity in their grief. They may not know why their mother is dead, but if we get right down to it, neither do we. 

We can explain away the physical processes, but we do not know why holy mystery and serendipitous creativity landed on a system that is a constant churn of tenacious life and the constant closure that is death, why we are such a brief and unpredictable flash, why we can be life-givers and death-bringers, sometimes a little of both, why we must spend time on the burning ruins of the Temple, soot-faced and tear-streaked, and why we find again and again the goodness of God in this world and in the fickle and fragile creatures that walk with us on the way.

When I lived in the city, I frequently worshiped at St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue, one of the few remaining churches in the Anglican choral tradition, and it was that congregation that received the oft-quoted words of the late Queen Elizabeth, as we grieved the losses of 9/11. “Grief,” the Queen wrote, “is the price we pay for love.”

And really, that is where I am going to leave it, with love and a sermon that, like its subject, does not get tied up with a neat bow, but tails off into distraction, losing a little energy, just as it should.

Amen.

Mark 4:26-34

France, like all of the developed democracies, is struggling under the weight of mass migration driven by poverty, climate change, and war, both the conventional type and the narco-wars we cause ourselves. The strong showing of Far Right and anti-immigrant parties in the recent election for the European Parliament has even led Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the French Parliament and call a snap election. 

A year ago, France was experiencing a crisis of a very different flavor, though one also related to climate change. Specifically, a heat wave in Alberta and Saskatchewan created a catastrophe for French dining. Those two Canadian provinces provide 80% of the mustard seeds used in France, and the French do love their mustard.

As the New York Times reported last summer, so central is mustard to French culture, that the idiomatic equivalent to our expression “my blood is boiling right now” is “the mustard is rising into my nose,” which sounds incredibly unpleasant. 

Before you ask, there is no explanation for our own positive American mustard idiom, “to cut the mustard,” which doesn’t make sense as either cut as in slice or cut as in dilute.

Humans have cultivated the mustard plant for around four thousand years, with the earliest evidence found in the Indus Valley. In addition to eating the greens, the Chinese developed a paste from ground mustard seeds, and the Romans added unfermented grape juice to produce what we now know as the condiment “mustard.”

The mustard seed is tiny, the point being made in our parable from the Gospel According to Mark. The parable specifically compares those tiny seeds to the Kingdom of God, though we Christians also sometimes compare them to “faith like a mustard seed,” and sometimes to good deeds. The core idea is that something that starts small can become very big. Like four fishermen following a street preacher in Galilee.

Continue reading “Nose Full of Mustard: 16 June 2024”

Psalm 138
1 Samuel 8:4-20

Sudan and Darfur have been back in the news this past year, though stories of the atrocities there have sometimes been lost in the noise of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Hamas and Israel. All three conflicts have resulted in war crimes. In particular, the Sudanese conflict involves a re-branded Janjaweed, the Arab militia responsible for genocide in Darfur in the past.

In truth, we might not have paid that much attention to the civil war in Sudan even if we didn’t have the other two conflicts. We have become desensitized when it comes to coups and conflicts in the global south, especially in Africa. The coup d’etat of the week may be funded by Russia, but the face of the rebellion will be some officer in the nation’s military, and often not even a general. It is not at all shocking to hear that the new boss is a colonel, a major, sometimes even a lowly captain.

Today’s scripture reading from First Samuel records a pivotal moment in the history of the varied peoples of Palestine in the early Iron Age. As Christians, we tend to read backwards, seeing these events through the lens of Davidic propaganda and Messianic fulfillment, but I’d like to suggest we’d do better to think of modern coups and conflicts. 

The transformation from a loose confederation into a royal nation-state triggered a brief moment of glory, followed by a long and painful decline. There is a tension that runs through the Bible, the histories and the prophetic texts, that finds its way into the formation of Christian belief, that indeed still exists in our faith tradition and in our secular affairs. But let’s focus on the story and the character of David.

The Israelites were a loose confederation around 1000 B.C.E., a mix of native Canaanites and folks who had escaped slavery in Egypt. The culture was still forming, and was nowhere near the text-based ethical monotheism we’d come to associate with Judaism. There was no Temple, no king, and polytheism was the norm. We can still see this is in scripture, especially psalms that position Yahweh as the chief god in a pantheon of gods.

They were definitely moving toward some innovative beliefs. They rejected god-kings, something all too common in Egypt, Rome, and to Canaan’s east. They saw humans as being made in God’s image, but banned depictions of God as a human. And the reason they had no king is because God was their only proper ruler. Human leaders would rise up as needed, stories told in the Book of Judges, but otherwise they were expected to act as a community of mutuality and accountability.

A new group had settled on the coast in the region that is today called Gaza. The Israelite tribes saw the Philistines as a threat, and they may well have been. Tribal raids and expansion were the norm in any case, so there was always antagonism at the borders. When the people asked for a king, Samuel warned them that there is a cost, a literal cost, to having a king, and Yahweh revealed that their choice of a human king was a rejection of divine rule.

Sunday school flattens the story and hits the kid-friendly highlights, ignoring the sexual violence and the contradictions, for the accounts in 1^st Samuel come from two sources that do not always agree.

The Children’s Bible version lets us know that Saul was chosen as king, but fell out of God’s favor. Samuel then turned to the House of Jesse, anointing the youngest son, David, as the future king. David was present at a battle between the Israelites and the Philistines, though we have two different explanations. He is the only one brave enough to face the Philistine champion, the giant Goliath, who he kills. David then comes of age in Saul’s court, close to the king’s son, Jonathan. When David falls out of favor with Saul, he flees for his life. Saul and three of his sons are killed in combat with the Philistines, and David, who we remember has been chosen by God and anointed by Samuel, becomes king. The end, now let’s talk about David’s son, wise King Solomon.

Except, of course, that isn’t the whole story. The whole story is messy and definitely R-rated. There is a reason biblical scholar Baruch Halpern described David as the first fully realized character in world literature.

Continue reading “Bad King David – 9 June 2024”

In my very first call as a minister, I served as an associate pastor for a church that had more than 900 members on the books, though the reality was a shade lower. There were still kids in church back then, a very different time culturally and economically. A desirable local school system didn’t hurt either, though in that context desirable meant white and economically advantaged, the same kind of urban/suburban split that poisons so many communities. 

One of my tasks as the junior pastor was to teach the confirmands. And in that region, there was a conference-wide confirmation retreat every spring, so the kids and I headed off to church camp for a weekend.

As part of the retreat, the kids had to role play being a pastoral search committee, so they were divided into congregations and given a brief description of their church and community, while the clergy sat through interviews.

I ended up being called by Country Club United Church of Christ, which, for those who know me, is absolutely the last place I’d ever want to serve as Pastor and Teacher. And that isn’t even the point of my story.

As the young teens described their imagined church to me, they explained that the sanctuary was quite lovely, and included a large golden statue of God.

Just to be clear, God, not Jesus.

I had questions. I had concerns.

What did they think God looked like? Were they familiar with this thing called the Ten Commandments? And in particular, did they know which one came in at number two on the list?

It would have made me wonder about the religious education programs in their home churches, but truth be told, I already had a good idea how that went. They had mostly attended Sunday School in programs intended to entertain rather than educate, missing months at a time due to cheerleading or basketball. About half were in the confirmation process against their will, which made things tricky when it was actually time for confirmation.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the kids thought a graven image of God was okay. American Christians worship an idol they call “God” all the time. Not just American Christians, of course, but that is my context, the one I can most confidently address.

So let me just get this out there. God is not a giant old white man in the sky, despite the image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Not in the sky. Not white. Not male. Though definitely old. 

God is also not a book written over the course of a thousand years, give or take a few centuries, and completed two thousand years ago. 

Humans created God in our own image, not the other way around, then wrote it down and declared it to be true, which does not make it true.

Most of those efforts were well-intentioned, humans trying to make meaning out of our fragile and finite existence, though some of our less stellar traits made it into the mix, a good dose of patriarchy and nationalism. So we end up with a Bible that endorses genocide and slavery, where God looks co-dependent and sociopathic. 

Continue reading “2 June 2024: Pride Sunday”

Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

The Protestant Reformation made the faith less transactional and less sacramental, centering covenant in structure, and word in worship. Despite this, the German reformer Martin Luther cautioned against preaching on one particular Sunday, Trinity Sunday, suggesting that there was nothing sensible that a pastor could say. For once, I am taking that advice. Sort of. I’m preaching, just not on the Trinity.. 

Besides, I am agnostic about the Trinity, or more accurately apophatic, believing humans have no business speaking about the ultimate nature of God. At best, we can describe our experiences of the holy. All else is guess work, a pebble of maybe thrown into an ocean of mystery.

Instead, let us think about bodies, given Paul’s hostility toward the flesh and Nicodemus’ confusion when Jesus starts talking about being born again. 

We have all heard the trope that claims we are not bodies that have a soul, but rather are souls temporarily housed in a body. And that may be true. There are certainly enough credible accounts of supernatural weirdness for me to know that I don’t know. 

What we do know is our lived experience as embodied humans, and that can be weird enough. A pregnant mother with influenza in the second trimester means an increased risk that the child will develop schizophrenia as a young adult. Adults who get strep are more likely to become hoarders. Your gut biome, if out of balance, can contribute to depression. Most of us know that a urinary tract infection can have a cognitive impact, never mind more dramatic events like traumatic brain injury or brain tumors. 

It is hard to know how we are who we are when things that are not us can make us someone else. And that doesn’t even take into consideration relativity, the cognitive type rather than the quantum. It does not matter one bit if what “they” believe is lunacy if they believe it is real and operate in the world as if it is real. 

There may be no such thing as government bioengineering using “chemtrails” from aircraft, but that did not stop Tennessee from outlawing them. There are no microchips in Covid-19 vaccinations, but try telling that to those who refused vaccination, risking their own lives and sometimes helping kill others in the process.

And this is just the recursive loop of “I,” of our constant re-creation of self, never mind that the body has a will and a life of its own, is an energy system coded for self-preservation, and ultimately coded for self-destruction as part of the evolutionary process. 

We do not will our hearts to beat, do not manage the process of digestion, and may barely think about it once the meal is done unless it goes wrong. We do not negotiate treaties with the entire nations of bacteria that make us us. We rarely think about breathing, except when we can’t. 

This weekend, “I can’t breathe” has a special resonance, for yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a body damaged and ultimately destroyed by the slave master’s whip, for the legacy of the lash and the lynching tree are still real in our economic, social, and judicial systems, in the way policing is done in so many urban communities, a paramilitary occupation force at war with civilians.

Continue reading “26 May 2024: Bodies Everywhere”

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Acts 2:1-21

I grew up in a beach town. Among my childhood memories are countless days at the beach. My mom, Arlene, and either or both of the Shirleys would pack some combination of a dozen kids into some combination of vehicles and sometimes just one vehicle packed like a clown car, and head off to the public beaches, where we would eat sandy sandwiches, get stung by jellyfish, and otherwise have a grand old time, even when “Jaws” hit the theaters and made everyone else afraid of the water. In fact, maybe especially then, since the beach was less crowded.

We never lived close enough for me to bike to the beach like a real surf rat, but beach culture was always there. When “Margaritaville” came out in 1977, it went right into high rotation on local radio stations, and I have been a bit of a Jimmy Buffett fan ever since, despite not liking Margaritas. In fact I was never really a full-fledged “Parrothead,” as his most diehard fans were known, for like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and the Dave Matthews Band, loving Jimmy Buffett is almost a religion, traveling from show to show all summer. One thing is for sure, though. I know a lot of his songs, from Come Monday to Cheeseburger In Paradise. Buffett died from cancer last September.

During his long career, Jimmy Buffett collaborated with some of my other favorite artists, including other beach-culture musicians like Jack Johnson and Kenny Chesney. But it was a traditional country music artist that collaborated on the song that provides the title for this morning’s sermon, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” a reminder that the day job may drive you to day drinking.

I always think of this song when we get to Pentecost because I find Peter’s words in our scripture reading both incredibly human and incredibly amusing, the sort of text that makes me believe in the historic core at the heart of the text. 

“They’re not drunk,” Peter proclaims. “It’s only the third hour of the day!,” which is what he actually would have said because 9:00am is not how they told time back then. And all I can think is, you know, “It’s the eleventh hour somewhere!,” though the eleventh hour, too, has taken on a completely different cultural meaning. In any case, the time of day has never stopped a committed drunk.

The disciples, having returned to Jerusalem after hanging out with Jesus in Galilee, must have sounded drunk. I mean, sure there was the language thing. Luke makes a big deal out of the language thing, emphasizing how cosmopolitan Jerusalem was, cataloging as many as fifteen regions represented. But honestly, that isn’t the miracle that impresses me.

It isn’t the resurrection that impresses me. Love won, the grave was emptied, and embodied/not embodied Jesus ate fish, walked through closed doors, and helped his followers understand what had just happened, but then he disappeared again, “touchdown Jesus” ascending. 

They had the Holy Spirit, come down like tongues of flame, but the Holy Spirit was not like some demon possessing a body. They were the bodies, those bumpkin followers. They were the bodies who had the audacity to continue to proclaim an alternative to the brutality of Rome and the greed and corruption of the Sanhedrin, even after their leader had been tortured and killed. Fifty days later, and you know what had changed in the world of Roman-occupied Judea? Zilch, nada, nothing. Nothing, that is, except them.

Call it the Holy Spirit. Sure. But it was more than a little crazy to keep telling people that better was possible, better government, better business, better community, even better selves, because God was better than they had ever imagined. They knew this for a fact, for they had experienced it in a better man who made the broken feel whole.

It was a little crazy to say that good was on the move, and that they, women and men from the sticks, completely un-credentialed in the ways of that ancient time, were the vectors that were taking it viral, to anyone who could hear the good news, regardless of their language or culture. There was room for Nicodemus, an Ethiopian eunuch, a wealthy woman in Corinth.

Continue reading “Five O’Clock Somewhere: 19 May 2024”

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

When Jesus was asked who a re-married widow would be married to in the afterlife, he said she wouldn’t, that heaven doesn’t work that way. This is a passage that is mostly ignored, even by the selective literalists of fundamentalism, as we imagine reunions at the Pearly Gates with loved ones and pets of the past. I am agnostic on the matter, my faith being more about living than dying. Dying seems to take care of itself, while living takes considerable effort, at least done well.

Post-mortem marriage is the sort of very practical question that comes up when we try to map our certain existence in this life onto our unknowable existence in the next. It is not unlike the body problem, which comes in two parts. 

The first is the problem of our particular bodies. The theology that developed in certain strands of pre-Rabbinic Judaism and carried over into Christianity was one of bodily resurrection. This is why, for example, certain traditions were resistant to cremation. No body, nor resurrection. There might have been a case for embodied resurrection in the first generation after Jesus, but two thousand years later, countless bodies are simply gone, and if I were to die tomorrow, or even more dramatically if the rapture were to occur and I made the short-list, who would get this particular set of atoms that comprise my body? For surely everything that is in me today has been part of something or someone else, even the microplastics.

The same sort of sticky questions arose right out of the gate for Christianity, the second form of body problem, when the followers of Jesus claimed he had been bodily resurrected. They claimed guards at the tomb so no one could accuse them of stealing the body. The authors of John have Thomas touch the wound where the spear entered the side of Jesus, hastening his death due to the Passover. Jesus eats post-resurrection, and presumably does the things that result from eating. Yet he passes through locked doors, so maybe they weren’t really clear about the story they meant to tell. In fact, Christians fought over the body of Jesus, pre and post resurrection, for centuries after his execution.

If you’ve got a resurrected body, then you have to account for that body, and they couldn’t exactly kill him again. Fortunately, there was precedents of sorts, two prior individuals who did not die. The first is less familiar, a patriarch in the Book of Genesis before the Great Flood named Enoch. Ancient languages are always a little uncertain in translation, but scholars mostly believe the text describes Enoch being taken to heaven alive.

The second immortal is better known, a tale we tell often in worship. The prophet of the Northern Kingdom named Elijah is taken up in a flaming chariot, which just goes to show you can get to heaven by being fabulous and flamey.

The early believers and gospel authors deal with the “beam me up” body of Jesus by doing just that, arms up and ascending like “touchdown” Jesus. Heaven is up, as is traditional, though I am not sure if that is a fixed up located over Jerusalem, an up that encircles the globe but is invisible, or maybe just some quantum slip in time and space. 

Our Christian story is that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, though we progressives are a difficult lot when it comes to gender, so maybe the left hand of the Mother, and besides, Jesus can’t always be up there because he is so often down here leaving footprints in the sand on some beach or another.

Jesus was real, and his life and ministry improbably changed the world. In my personal theology, the one constructed out of the parts of ancient Christianity worth I find saving, Jesus is historical, a man in a particular context, an occupied land filled with corruption, despair, and violence, but Christ is timeless. Christ is a continuation of Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the way that the gospels say Jesus promises to be with us. Those are soft categories, of course, as God seems to hate being put in boxes.

Continue reading “12 May 2024: APB Wally aka Waldo”

1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

Coming from the aspirational working class, my cultural tastes are a mix of high brow and low brow, from the Daytona 500 to The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, a contemporary opera super relevant to recent events. Then add in a little generation-straddling, and you never know what you’ll get. 

In movies, however, I am decidedly low-class. I have zero need to see another Meryl Streep melodrama. Give me a good adventure or caper film any day. I probably know almost as many quotes from Gen X films as I do from scripture, from “You’re killing me, Smalls!” to “I don’t think that means what you think that means.” 

But some of my favorite films are filled with memorable lines inappropriate for use in a pulpit, and barely suitable for a pool hall. Almost everything that comes out of John Goodman’s mouth in his role as Walter Sobchak in “The Big Lebowski” is profane. But there is that one G-rated quote relevant to today’s scripture: 

“This isn’t ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”

And gosh are there rules. Rabbinic Judaism, which formed after the Jewish War in the First Century, claims 613 commandments in the Law of Moses. Then there were the smooth-talkers who interpreted the rules like latter-day contortionists, “smooth talker” a derogatory term in that context.

Both the gospel traditionally attributed to John but certainly not written by John and the first letter claimed to have been written by John but certainly not written by John tell us to obey God’s commandments, which seems good counsel despite the dubious authorship. But what are God’s commands? That list of 613 reasons you are probably a sinner?

Jesus states very clearly that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. But his interpretation of the law is far from smooth… it is demanding. When asked to summarize the Law, he said “Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as you love yourself,” which by the way also means you can’t hate yourself. Jesus is then asked “Who is my neighbor?,” leading him to tell the story of the Good Samaritan.

So what is it? The Law of Selflessness and Love? Or the minutia and nit-picking the gospel writers would attribute to the Scribes and Pharisees?

It is a sort-of eternal question. So let me tell you a more contemporary story.

Continue reading “5 May 2024: “Sobchak””

Acts 8:26-40

The United Methodist Church made the news again this week as their General Conference convened in Charlotte, North Carolina. Though a significant number of churches and districts have left the denomination in recent years, somewhere around a quarter of local congregations, they are still fighting over LGBTQI+ clergy and same-sex marriage. I find this frustrating, for while Methodism was never a stop on my particular spiritual journey, there is much to be admired in their theological heritage, never mind all those Wesleyan hymns, which are awesome. For one thing, their understanding of grace is way better than that of our Calvinist tradition, though that is a bit “in the weeds” for our purposes this morning. Besides, we’ve been ordaining LGBTQI+ folx for more than half a century.

So I guess that, given their queasiness about queerness, I should not have been surprised at what I discovered in my Bible commentary on the Acts of the Apostle this week as I was doing my sermon prep. That particular volume in the “Interpretation” series is authored by Methodist theologian and Bishop Will Willimon. I generally like Willimon, but he is off base when he states in his commentary that the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s reading was not necessarily castrated, and therefore not necessarily excluded from the Temple community. He then goes on to blatantly ignore that elephant in the room, going to absurd lengths to interpret the text.

So let’s be really clear, and really in-context. This story is weird and very radical. 

Philip is a sort-of B-league apostle, not one of the inner four, but not among those we forget or that change depending on the gospel you are reading. He is a transfer from the movement surrounding John the Baptizer. He comes from the same town as Peter and Andrew, yet his name is Greek, and he is the one who connects with the Greeks at the door who wish to meet Jesus. We can assume that this conversation, between the Ethiopian court official and Philip, took place in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire.

The Ethiopian is a castrated court official, something that was not uncommon in that age and region, especially among royal courts that kept harems. And let’s just park all of the misogyny of harems, because it is obvious enough, and not the point of the story.

Willimon wants us to believe Luke is using the term “eunoxos” to mean court official, but that term, “dynastes,” is also in the passage. In the same way, Willimon wants to conflate “Eithiop” with otherness generally, but again, Luke has chosen all three descriptors. This man is what the text says he is, despite efforts to straight-wash him.

Castrated men were excluded from participation in the religious assembly. Look at Deuteronomy 23:1. We may know that the Book of Deuteronomy is a late and priestly fabrication, not something written by Moses, but Philip, the character within the framework of our story, and Luke, the author of this historical account of the early church, absolutely believed Deuteronomy to be the authentic rule of God. 

Continue reading “28 April 2024: A Very Queer Caravan”