Constructive Faith

I’d say that it was an unusually difficult week, but every week seems to be one of those weeks recently, a week when the country is divided over some public statement or public action, a week when the meme wars rage, the comments section is on fire, and that brother-in-law puts something on Facebook that makes your blood boil. We are as flammable as the California hills, anything can spark the inferno.

This week it was Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who chose to sit during the national anthem, protesting the racism that is so evident in our politics and in our policing, so obvious if you look at the data. His action was meant to provoke, was meant to push, because what good is a protest if no one notices? And people noticed, sort of like that provocative someone we claim to follow, always challenging false gods, false values. And questioning what passes for patriotism is patriotic, is Christian, for many of us, many who love this country, have come to see how the flag and other motifs of patriotism have been co-opted, false idols for the cult of Americanism. Continue reading “Tea Leaves”

Last week I suggested we explore some new forms of sabbath, sabbath as resistance to systems that are no longer working, systems that are tearing at our souls and at the fabric of our communities. As many of you know, one way I’ve chosen resistance, chosen sabbath, is by not getting cable television. I miss watching sports, but I can get my news elsewhere, and I am not exposed to television commercials, endless pharmaceutical ads, not to mention the flood of political attack ads from both sides that are carefully crafted using all that is known about the subconscious and subliminal messaging to leave us as angry and anxious as possible.

That I have opted out of this cycle of manufactured desire and manufactured fear does not mean I have opted out of television, of the many ways we use narrative to entertain, to inform, to make meaning. Telling stories is important, is human, and television and films are great formats for telling stories. Streaming services give me access to the work of brilliant and creative artists.

So it was that in recent weeks I watched the Netflix original series “Stranger Things.” The show, by the Duffer brothers, has been a breakout hit, something that might have never made it on a regular network. Only eight episodes long, it is an homage to the 1980’s, a mash-up of sci-fi and horror that stars Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine, both actors starting their careers in that decade. Continue reading “Total Perspective Vortex”

Eating is a social act, and I don’t simply mean because we so often eat in family units, prefer to break bread with friends. Eating is a social act because in advanced cultures, technology allows a small percentage of the population to produce a surplus, so that others might take on others tasks, if we are lucky, the arts, if not, war. This was one of the key challenges for the ancient Hebrews, for they lived on marginal land, while the rich river valleys to their northeast, the Tigris-Euphrates, and to their southwest, the Nile, produced enough to support large armies, making the Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians a perennial threat despite the defensible terrain in Canaan.

In advanced cultures, like those in the ancient river valleys and like the one in which we live, food then becomes part of the system we call economic activity, the exchange of goods and services, and what you eat very much reflects the values and stratification of the social system, generals and admirals feasting while soldiers and sailors eat hard-tack and ship’s biscuit.

This is true in America today, where the urban poor often live in food deserts, areas where there are no grocery stores, no fresh produce, nothing but the highly processed foods – powdered donuts and sugary drinks – found in bodegas. For many, if you want fresh healthy foods, you have to take a long bus journey to the suburbs, where you can buy only as much food as you can carry, especially hard on the elderly and disabled. Continue reading “Sabbath Resistance”

I was recently asked if a line in a sermon, referencing “egos swimming in a sea of privilege,” was about a particular political candidate. As it happens, I served on Long Island for the last several years, with a constant stream of news stories about sociopathic excess in the Hamptons, and that was what I had in view as I wrote. In the same way, this Sunday’s references to misogyny had nothing to do with the fact that we have the first female presidential candidate in our nation’s history, and everything to do with the fact that I am a feminist, something you will also have noted in my use of inclusive imagery for God.

This raises an important set of questions, especially in an electoral season that seems more divisive and fraught than any I have experienced in my lifetime. Many a pastor has been accused of politics (defined as anything about which a particular congregant disagrees) or been informed that being political in church is “against the law.” This bears some exploration. Continue reading “Pastors, Politics and Pot (Oh My!)”

Many years ago I was interviewing Glen Phillips, lead singer of the once popular and newly resurgent band Toad the Wet Sprocket. I noted that many of their songs dealt with the mistreatment of women, and that this seemed unusual for a group made up of four young men. His reply, not completely suitable for the pulpit, boiled down to the fact that he knew few women who had not suffered at the hands of men. This theme continued to appear on his solo albums, including the poignant “Men Just Leave,” a bitter pill wrapped in a confectionary beat on his 2001 release Abulum.

I don’t know his story, don’t know why he is so awake when it comes to the misogyny that permeates our culture, don’t know why I am awake to the misogyny that permeates our culture, but I am, and am committed, like Glen Phillips, to naming it where I see it. And so it was, in 2006, that I had my encounter with Jake. Continue reading “Want to be”

It is a long road from being a black teen beaten by the cops to being the Borough President in what the musical “Hamilton” calls “the greatest city in the world.” Eric Adams joined the NYPD dreaming that he might be a part of much needed reform, and served for 22 years before entering politics. Today he leads the newly fashionable hipster-haven of Brooklyn, and was recently interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, tackling the tricky issue of policing and race, a subject he knows all too well. In response to a question posed by Terry Gross, Adams responded “Who would have thought that Steve Jobs would have such an impact on policing in America?” Continue reading “Living: July 31, 2016”

Delivered by the Rev. J. Gary Brinn on July 17, 2016
at First Congregational Church of Blue Hill

They say we become our parents, and I can sure see my late father when I watch my youngest sister. Amy and her husband Paul live in an old house, and the closets were not designed for our oversized lives. The bath towels only fit if they are folded a very particular way, and Paul, who is out of work for six to nine months on disability and trying to be helpful, has not mastered towel origami. Faced with a stack of mis-folded towels, Amy is apoplectic. Like my dad, her way is the right way.

At least she can sleep at night. This is not always the case, for Paul is a cop. It is a scary time to be in law enforcement. Weapons of mass murder are in all of our communities, paranoia runs rampant, fueled by politicians and the press. We refuse to fund care for the mentally ill and addicted. Extremists commit acts of unspeakable violence in the name of God, an Islamic Jihadi in Nice, a Christian Jihadi in Colorado Springs. Continue reading “From the Desert”

It came to him in the bathtub, though the phrase was coined by a professor at Yale. One doesn’t necessarily like to imagine someone like the chair of the Federal Reserve in the bathtub, but we all get ideas in the bath or shower, so there you are. The phrase itself was uttered in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute twenty years ago this coming December. The phrase was “irrational exuberance,” and the speaker was Alan Greenspan. He was referring to what he believed were the unrealistic valuations of dot-com companies. It was, he believed, a speculative bubble. Irrationality seems inherent in financial speculation, an exuberant feedback loop if ever there was one, in which the gap between prices and value widens until there is crisis and crash.

Humans behaved this way even before the shell game of our current financial system was invented, attaching insane values to real world objects. The first documented speculative bubble was Tulip Mania, which peaked in 1637. Though we think of tulips as a very Dutch thing, they were actually new to Europe at the time, imported from the Turkish realm of Suleiman the Magnificent. According to Charles Mackay’s contested 1841 account, at one point during the Dutch frenzy, a single bulb was traded for twelve acres of land, or the amount a skilled craftsman would earn in ten years. Then, the bubble burst, wrecking the Dutch economy. Continue reading “Exuberant Reconciliation”

It sates itself on the life-blood of fated men,
paints red the powers’ homes with crimson gore.
Black become the sun’s beams
in the summers that follow,
weathers all treacherous.

These lines are not a description of the scriptural “Day of the Lord,” do not come from the Revelation to John, nor from the Book of Daniel, nor even from today’s text, the 13th Chapter of our gospel, a section often called the Marcan Apocalypse. The text is, instead, from Völuspá, an ancient Nordic epic, and from a particular section that focuses on Ragnarök, their equivalent of our apocalypse, when, in a period of great conflict and destruction, the current world ends and a new world is born.

So here’s the good news. Christians aren’t the only crazy ones. Other cultures have taken a good hard look at the world we live in and particularly at human behavior and decided that the best thing would be to start again from scratch. Continue reading “Ragnarök: A Sermon on the Marcan Apocalypse”

On Tuesday night, a small group of us gathered. We prayed, we read from an ancient book, we questioned. Our topic was the miracles of Jesus, his “deeds of power” to cite the text, especially those mighty deeds reported in the Gospel According to Mark. What are we to believe about those miracles in light of our modern scientific worldview? If we seek rational explanations, have we explained away Jesus himself? What is Jesus without the resurrection, the greatest miracle of all? These are not easy questions, but the refusal of so many Christians to bring our faith into conversation with our existence, our knowledge, has resulted in the emptying of the church, as our faith is seen as primitive, anti-science.

We, in the progressive church, are all about doing that hard work, asking the hard questions, for we believe the Way of Jesus is still relevant, that the world is still charged with the goodness and glory of that Divine Mystery we name as God, even if we choose a faith that is alive, that can adapt. We are willing to explore, to adventure, to bring scripture and the real world into conversation.

We started Tuesday night with a text from first Isaiah, Hebrew scripture that Jesus knew and could quote, that his Hebrew followers would have known, would recognize. The text places the miraculous acts of healing, of making whole, performed by Jesus in the context of the prophetic, in the context of the Kingdom of God. For it says this in the 35th chapter of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah: Continue reading “The Widow”