Constructive Faith

Luke 11:1-13

A couple of months ago, I discussed one line in the received version of the Lord’s Prayer, the version from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew. In particular, I took issue, still take issue, with the line that says “Give us, this day, our daily bread.” 

It makes us passive, and while I am okay with humans receiving unearned grace from a loving Creator, I am not okay with sitting around and waiting for God to fix things we can fix ourselves, or for God to drop manna from the sky in some modern day version of the Exodus story. If we want bread, we need to plant some wheat, knead some dough, and chop some wood. And while we are at it, we should bake some extra bread for the neighbor who has been under the weather lately or lost their job or whatever. Though I’m not really sure how I’m going to feel if my neighbor knocks on the door at midnight asking to borrow three loaves…

There is another, more technical problem with that line in the prayer. The Koine word “epiousios,” translated as “daily” for centuries, is totally made-up, occurring nowhere else in Greek literature. The prefix and root word mean roughly “over substance,” which means nothing. Centuries of priests, translators, and scholars has simply fallen in line with the consensus translation, though some have suggested that instead of meaning “give us this day our bread for today,” it might mean “give us this day our bread for tomorrow,” pointing to the fact that day laborers during the time of Jesus, the working poor, used today’s earning to buy bread for their family tomorrow. If there were too many days when they could not work, the family went hungry. 

I’m not sure it means either of those things, daily or for tomorrow. It may be that the author of the original text layer, the lost text we call “Q,” was trying to capture a word in Aramaic, the language of the streets in 1st century Palestine, and we simply don’t know that word.

This morning, we’re going to move past that one particular problem, a problem of translation and theology, and do a deep dive into the Lord’s Prayer itself, for our gospel reading lifts up Luke’s version. Like the physician’s version of the Beatitudes, Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is shorter, and in many ways more concrete. We’ll work from Matthew’s more familiar version.

First, let me offer a couple of general notes. The Lord’s Prayer is thoroughly Jewish. There is nothing in it that would not have fit into mainstream Jewish belief at the time of Jesus, or for that matter, in this time. Rabbis have noted that it is a prayer both Jews and Christians could pray.

The fact that later authors never “christianized” it leads me to believe in the historicity of the story. 

Continue reading “27 July 2025: The Lord’s Prayer”

Amos 8:1-12

I was raised with felt-board Jesus and all of the traditional Bible stories, from Noah and the Ark to Paul and the earthquake, served up each week by Mr. Bridger in Sunday School. Everyone, adults and kids, went to Sunday School at 9:30 am at my childhood church, then everyone not in the nursery gathered for what we now call inter-generational worship, but that we just called worship back then, at 11:00am. 

I learned how to participate in worship as a child.

And for the record, if anyone had a sense of humor in that church, I was too young to notice. They seemed like nice enough people in that context, but I am so much happier in a denomination that knows how to laugh.

Despite this background, and decades of interest in religion, Christian and otherwise, I arrived at Divinity School twenty years ago this year with little real understanding of the historic context that gave birth to our faith tradition. What makes that even crazier is that I come from a history-loving family. My childhood home was filled with those Time-Life books you got in monthly installments, and family vacations were one battlefield or historic site after another. 

To be fair, the Biblical Age is at a much greater distance than the period covered in the 26 volumes of Time-Life’s “Old West” series. That chronological distance leaves a lot of room for uncertainty, and the events take place over centuries, not decades. The sources are a mess, re-arranged and redacted to reflect later situations, for history is and always has been told through the lens of now. 

Still, there are some broad socioeconomic and geopolitical patterns we can identify in the Ancient Near East, and one of those is that the region where most of the events unfold, roughly today’s Israel and Palestine, was a terrible place to establish an independent kingdom, which may explain why it was so short-lived. 

The land itself was marginal, semi-arid. The real problem was the great river valleys to the northeast and southwest. You see, ancient Jewish culture was based primarily on small-holds, family farm plots that produced enough food to sustain the family, with just enough surplus to trade for other essential goods. 

Those first Jewish tribes were radically democratic, and continued to have active movements of resistance even when they were ruled by monarchs and foreign powers. Democracy fosters innovation at the cost of efficiency.

To the southwest of Canaan was Egypt, with the great Nile River Valley, controlled by autocrats who enslaved and exploited.

To the northeast was the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley, which gave rise to both the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.

Both river systems produced a surplus of food, and surplus food is important. 

Continue reading “20 July 2025: Rent-Seeking”

2 Kings 5:1-14

Years ago, during my first parish internship, the well-intentioned volunteers running the Sunday School chose an all-ages curriculum based on the Books of Joshua and Judges in the Tanakh. The problem, of course, is that these books tell the story of divinely-sanctioned genocide, stories like the fortunately-mythical ethnic cleansing of Jericho.

One boy in the Sunday School, with the very biblical name Jonah, took exception, not only to the slaughter, but also to the bad science, like the sun stopping in the sky until the Israelites had finished slaughtering the Amorites, which, as the boy pointed out, would mean the earth had suddenly stopped rotating on its axis.

I am not sure how Jonah might have felt about my favorite Elisha story from the Second Book of Kings, for I have a favorite Elisha story, and assume you do as well Mine is still gruesome, though at least in the realm of the scientifically possible. It goes like this:

Elisha went up from there to Bethel. As he was going up the road, some children came out of the city. They mocked him: “Get going, Baldy! Get going, Baldy!” Turning around, Elisha looked at them and cursed them in the Lord’s name. Then two bears came out of the woods and mangled forty-two of them.

Talk about consequences!

The Elisha story in today’s reading is definitely less bloody, though it still contains a valuable lesson. Naaman, a great general in the neighboring country of Aram, learns from an Israelite slave in his household that a prophet in Israel can cure his skin disease. Naaman appeals to his own king, who sends Naaman with a royal letter and expensive gifts, asking the King of Israel for a cure. 

Naaman and his entourage are eventually directed to the prophet Elisha, who instructs him to bathe in the River Jordan seven times. The general is outraged that the cure is not more dramatic. Fortunately, his advisors have better sense, the general eventually follows Elisha’s instructions, and Naaman is healed.

The whole affair reminds me a little of the story of hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin, more commonly known under the brand name Febreze. The product really was a remarkable invention, a molecule that traps volatile hydrocarbons, the kind that cause odors. Revolutionary and effective, it didn’t sell at first. The reason is two-fold.

First, people become nose-blind. When I walk into a home with multiple cats, I immediately smell multiple cats, litter box and all. The folks who live there do not. They’ve become accustomed to the odor. In the same way, were you to enter my home a few months ago, you’d have probably immediately smelled old man and dog, though I only really noticed when it was wet dog. It will smell like dog again at some point, though not yet. I once interviewed with a church near a Spam factory, the meat not the email. The whole town smelled like Spam, though I doubt the locals even noticed.

But the second reason Febreze didn’t sell is more interesting. The product has no odor of its own, which is sort of the entire point. They had to add scents like Febreze Bora-Bora Waters and Febreze Vanilla Suede, both of which raise a whole second set of marketing questions, like who is chewing on suede that tases like vanilla? But let’s just leave those aside.

The thing that made things not smell didn’t sell until they made it smell because we associate cleanliness with smells.

Crazy, right?

Continue reading “Drama Llama: 6 July 2025”

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

SERMON “Debauchery and Other Hobbies”

Back in the day, when I was still a Boy Scout, and later a Scout Leader, I wondered about the Scout Oath. I was personally comfortable doing my duty to God and my country. Well, at least I was back then. But I wondered about Scouts who did not believe in God. 

Buddhist Scouts in Buddhist countries presumably had a different oath, one that maybe included the three jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. But what about Buddhist Scouts in the United States? I mean, you could earn a religious medal for a variety of faiths, and Buddhism was one of them, so at least one Buddhist Scout must have existed in the U.S. How did that little fellow swear to do his duty to God and country when he didn’t believe in God? 

I didn’t know about Tibetan Buddhism yet, where Bodhisattvas are a slap-dash paint job over ancient Bon gods, but the point still stands. Buddhists do not believe in God.

I would eventually have my own reckoning with that Scout Oath, for it ends with a promise to be morally straight, and straight was not exactly my specialty, even back then.

If the Boy Scouts of America assumes a particular and personified theism, the World Council of Churches assumes a particular credal system of belief. Not a complete set of dogma, no multi-page catechism, just the Nicene Creed. It is the default litmus test for Christian.

Somehow, the United Church of Christ got to stay in the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, even after we decided that creeds were not important. You will note that we do not ask you to affirm any creed, Nicene or otherwise, on Sunday morning at The Park Church. We rarely even mention our own United Church of Christ Affirmation of Faith, which does actually exist, and is pretty palatable.

To be fair, the Roman and Anglican traditions don’t recognize our clergy since we aren’t part of the fictional unbroken line of bishops that goes back to Peter. The Lutherans are willing to give us a pass on that. Though everyone is on board with baptisms, as long as they follow the Trinitarian formula.

Fundamentalists, who rarely care about creeds, dislike us because we pick-and-choose different passages than they pick and choose, so they don’t all consider us good Christians. And if you look at Fundamentalism for too long, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that their religion is about sex and gender, who is getting lucky, who they are getting lucky with, and whether someone should be wearing that outfit and swimming in that division. Though to be fair, I sometimes wonder about people’s outfits too, not because of their gender, but because of their taste.

For Fundamentalists, gender is about power and sex must is about procreation, which aligns well with the white supremacist eugenics of Elon Musk and members of the Trump Administration. Except for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who seems hell bent on killing as many children as possible, regardless of race.

The problem, of course, is that most Fundamentalist churches, if you scratch the surface, look a lot like the Harper Valley P.T.A. That smash hit from 1968 was written by Tom T. Hall and performed by Jeannie C. Riley. A mother, chastised by the Junior High Parent Teacher Association for her loose lifestyle and short skirts, shows up at the next meeting and exposes the hypocrisy of the organization’s leaders, themselves a bunch of drunks and adulterers. Feels pretty biblical, since Jesus hangs out with sinners, and warns about judging other, lest you be judged yourself.

Continue reading “Debauchery and Other Hobbies : 29 June 2025”

Galatians 3:23-29

22 June 2025

This whole moral leadership and non-anxious presence thing I try to pull off every week is not as easy as I try to make it look. I had another sermon prepared. I didn’t love it, but it was serviceable. The ideas may get recycled, but last night’s events require attention, so you will get a smaller dose prescribed for our current disease.

There is a meme that sometimes makes the rounds, sometimes gets printed on hoodies and t-shirts, that talks about how Jesus empowers women, elevates women, listens to women. I suspect it leans in a bit too much, after all, Jesus was a male in a patriarchy, but in the context of First Century Galilee, it might be fair to call him a feminist. He steps between the men and their intended victim, the woman accused of adultery, placing his own body on the line. This was a kind of lynch mob, lacking in what we now call due process. Jesus himself would be executed by the state at the request of the religious as a mob chanted “Crucify him! We have no king but Caesar!” and demanded the release of the bandit Barabbas. 

Dan Brown wrote fiction, despite the deceptive marketing of his books and the subsequent films, and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a modern forgery, but it is reasonable to believe that Mary Magdalene was among a group of women with more autonomy and power within the social movement of Jesus and his followers than they might have had outside of it.

Jesus clearly thinks of himself as a Jewish reformer in the prophetic tradition of that faith, though we have a number of encounters with non-Jews, sometimes uncomfortable encounters, as with the Syro-Phoenecian woman, and sometimes courageous encounters, like today’s reading of the demoniac in the cemetery, a topic we recently covered in the sermon “Pig Flag.” 

What we know is that among the dozens of Jewish reforms and other religious movements of the ancient Near East, indeed of the entire Roman Empire, only two survived as meaningful in the modern age. After the Jewish War and the destruction of the Second Temple, surviving strains of Judaism coalesced into what we now know as Rabbinic Judaism, while the Jewish movement inspired by Jesus would morph into Christianity. 

There were other religions in other parts of the world, but in that cradle of what we now call Western culture, a vast territory from the British Midlands to the sands of North Africa and east to Palestine, only these two would remain. Here, two millennia later and an ocean away, we have a Rabbinic Jewish community and dozens of churches, and as far as I know, exactly no temples dedicated to Augustus, even if far too many belong to the cult of the orange buffoon.

Christianity survived those first three centuries, spread like wildfire across the Roman world, because one man brought the fervor of a convert and re-wired the faith, freeing it from Jewish cultural practice. You might say he completes the work Jesus started in his reported interactions with Gentiles, in his interactions with women. By the time Paul is writing to the Galatians, a little more than two decades after the execution of Jesus, he can declare that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave or free, but all are one in Christ. This is an authentic text. That is real Paul.

This is why Paul became a bit of a subject célèbre among philosophers near the end of the last century, non-Christians who saw in Paul the first universalist, lower case “u,” a man who refused traditional labels and boxes, who was an agent of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And last night, our war criminal joined another war criminal in attacking a third war criminal that has been in a strategic partnership with a fourth war criminal, all drawing exactly the same idiotic lines that Paul seeks to erase, the fictions of gender and race, the arbitrary lines decided at some treaty table that called this valley part of this nation, that island part of another. Never mind the absurd certainty that their understanding of holy mystery is the only true understanding of holy mystery, that their violence is sanctioned, indeed sanctified.

What is our duty in a time of immorality and evil?

Continue reading “Lawless: At the Start of Another War”

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

SERMON “Wise Ass”

A few weeks ago, I taught a Monday School session on heresy. Technically, heresy is wrong belief. Practically, it is the losing side in theological battles as a religion becomes increasingly rigid, calcified, and in my opinion, dead.

Fortunately, though we still think of ourselves as part of the Christian religious trajectory, our United Church of Christ commitment to continuing testament and the right of Christian conscience means we don’t do creeds, and don’t label people as heretics because their understanding of unknowable mystery is different than our understanding of unknowable mystery.

This is a Sunday when heresy gets a lot of attention in traditional Christianity. The Sunday after Pentecost is, for churches that use the liturgical calendar, Trinity Sunday, and orthodoxy around the Trinity is particularly tricky. Preachers are sometimes advised not to preach at all, or, if there are seminarians handy, to throw them to the wolves. Better to let that wet-behind-the-ears newbie fail than to embarrass yourself as the parish rector.

We do not have seminarians, so you are stuck with me. Though I am only sort of going to preach on the Trinity.

While in Divinity School, I took a semester long course called “Trinitarianism and Anti-Trinitarianism” taught by the Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley, a systematic theologian in the Anglican tradition who would leave the next year to serve as the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Like most of my classes, I was a guppie among sharks, outclassed by my peers in every way. But I did manage to learn a thing or two.

Okay. Maybe a thing, not two.

Early Christians were able to manage the God and Jesus thing. I mean, there were still heresies, people occasionally losing their heads, literally. But it was only when they tried to figure out the Holy Spirit that things got messy. It was like finishing a jigsaw puzzle, and having one piece left over. 

That’s when they came up with the idea of the Trinity, describing God, called “The Father” in this context, Jesus aka “The Son,” and the Holy Spirit, as three divine persons sharing one nature. Definitely not three natures because that would somehow be polytheism, and not three modes of one person because that would be bad too for some reason I never completely understood.

Mostly I don’t care about these ancient arguments, heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy. 

I understand why the ancients conceived of God as a person. I accept that people who encountered Jesus thought they had experienced God. I get that our experience of God today is in one another and in creation. 

But as we studied the pre-cursors to Trinitarianism, I learned that the Holy Spirit, which also has to be eternal in classic theology, is foreshadowed in the Jewish tradition in an embodied “wisdom,” sometimes called “Sophia” after the Koine Greek word. And there is this whole body of work called “wisdom literature” in the ancient Near East, texts like the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Jewish canon, and the Book of Sirach in the additional materials known as the Apocrypha.

I’m not one-hundred percent on personified wisdom being the same as the Holy Spirit, but I am completely down with the fact that wisdom is depicted as a woman, because, as I mentioned last week, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it is not a woman who says “hold my beer!” right before they scream “YOLO!”

Which gives me a flimsy excuse to tell a fun story found in the Torah. We could use a fun story these days, and there are not that many in the Jewish Bible, what with all the genocide and war.

Continue reading “Wise Ass: 15 June 2025”

Pentecost / Pride Sunday

Acts 2:1-21

SERMON “Holy DEI”

In April of 1966, the cover of Time Magazine had no picture, and apart from the masthead, contained just three words and a punctuation mark, red against a black background. It asked “Is God Dead?”

It was a response to a theological movement that is a bit wonkish, and if I’m being honest, I don’t find that movement particularly interesting, except in that the Rev. Dr. King felt the need to take a pot shot at the idea.

I suppose for me, God is a bit like Schrödinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment in quantum physics. In that experiment, the cat in the box is alive and dead until you open the box, the observation collapsing the quantum state. And unless you are a physicist, that probably makes about as much sense as the idea that God is dead.

I have no question that God is alive in the sense of still present, though the god I was raised with, the petty male tyrant in the sky, egotistical perpetuator of domestic violence, is most certainly dead to me, and not just because that god is not the God I experience, not a god worthy of my praise.

Traditional Christian belief supposes that God does not change, that the salvation narrative contained in the Jewish and Christian scripture tradition is a carefully scripted divine drama, humans little more than puppets. 

In that traditional reading, God’s last communication with humankind occurs when John of Patmos receives a revelation, and since then, God has been more absentee landlord than divine presence. Two thousand years of radio silence. Unless little Joey receives enough “get well” cards or our favorite team needs a touchdown.

Sure, certain traditions have people, mostly men, who claim to speak for God, and Pentecostals lean into the Holy Spirit’s activity in the church, but systematic theology is about describing God as God was at that moment when the Christian Testament became a thing.

The thing is, to be alive is to change, so in that sense, that God of Traditional Christianity is dead, unchanging, boring, and unable to love.

Continue reading “Holy DEI : Pentecost / Pride Sunday 2025”

“Miracles” by Walt Whitman

Acts 1:1-11

SERMON “Body Electric”

I have never completely understood how Walt Whitman not only survived the mid-19th century, but indeed thrived, becoming one of the greatest American voices of his age. 

I mean, he might have had many of the marks of privilege in his age and ours: white, male, nominally Christian, but he was absolutely queer, and not even in the “Is he or isn’t he?” heavily coded way of that time. 

You do not need a degree in literature and an unpublished dissertation to figure out what he means in “We two boys, together clinging, one the other never leaving,” and he had what we once euphemistically called “longtime companions.”

Whitman not only thrived as queer man in 19th century America, his lifelong project, the always growing “Leaves of Grass,” became a sort of catalog of the American experience, at least as much of it as he could understand. He took in all he perceived of democracy and labor and land. 

His voice was always his distinctive voice, but when he sang the body electric, he aspired to sing of women’s bodies and children’s bodies too, the bodies of men and of the elderly. 

Sadly, he also wrote powerful verse about the fallen body of Abraham Lincoln, assassinated by a white supremacist, in “O Captain! My Captain!” Lincoln and Whitman would grieve to see the United States in the hands of a post-Constitutional White Supremacist government after both witnessed first hand the broken bodies of those who fought to expand the definition of American and preserve the union.

It is the fallen brown body of Jesus with which we must deal this morning. And honestly, I am not interested in the unanswerable question of what really happened. We know things that First Century Judeans did not know, like what happens when you go up… no pearly gates, just the cold vacuum of space, Space X junk, heavenly bodies, and the still mysterious dark matter… maybe, because we aren’t always as smart as we think we are.

Those who wish to strip all mystery and magic from the world may view the ascension as a crass fabrication, one part of a long con. I view it as a necessary theological move, the creation of a king-less Christianity.

Continue reading “Body Electric: June 1, 2025”

Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

SERMON “Apocalyptic Problems”

Back in more primitive times, as an arbitrary millennia on the Christian calendar came to a close, people imagined a catastrophic ending of the age, the collapse of society, or maybe even the destruction of the earth itself. There was a surge of interest in a biblical apocalypse and the rapture, and more than a little hysteria.

I am not, in fact, speaking about the late Tenth Century, “one thousand-zero-zero-zero, party over oops out of time,” when they were partying like it’s “999.” 

I am speaking about the turn of the last century, when the “Left Behind” series of Christian apocalyptic novels were bestsellers, when movies like “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” contemplated a planet-killing asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and of course, the Y2K bug was going to crash all of our computer systems, from banking to air traffic control.

It didn’t happen. Well, mostly. Air traffic control has been problematic since Reagan broke the union in 1981, and banking could come to a catastrophic end on “Q-Day,” which has nothing to do with the whackos of Q-Anon and everything to do with the fact that Quantum computing will render the encryption used by our financial system obsolete in an instant.

Y2K was a secular disaster cult, not religious. The silliness in 2012 around the Mayan Long Count Calendar was not Christian. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists maintains a Doomsday Clock, currently set at about a minute and a half from catastrophe, and they are exactly what the name suggests, Atomic Scientists. Astronomers tell us the Earth will eventually become uninhabitable as the sun continues through its life cycle. 

Still, Christianity has a particular reputation, one that is well deserved, for focusing on disastrous endings and after. Now, no one has actually been raptured, at least no one I know personally, but I can suggest a good candidate if you are looking for the anti-Christ.

We really don’t know where Jesus stood on the end times. Everything we know about him was passed down as oral tradition for at least a full generation before it was written down. And what was written down contains two very distinct and seemingly incompatible ideas.

Continue reading “Apocalyptic Problems: 25 May 2025”

Acts 11:1-18

SERMON “My God”

My predecessor at the church I served on the coast of Maine climbed Blue Hill Mountain hundreds of times, at least once a week during his decades serving that congregation. He was a bit of a Transcendentalist, a bit of a Unitarian, and certainly carved from the same cloth as Henry David Thoreau.

His familiarity with the mountain led, no doubt, to deep natural knowledge, complementing his undergraduate training as an arborist. I am guessing that those hikes also led to transcendent moments, frequent epiphanies of the sort narrated in our Opening Words, adapted from Annie Dillard’s 1977 essay “Holy the Firm.” 

Blue Hill Mountain was most certainly a “thin place” for the late Rev. Rob McCall, as was Puget Sound for Dillard, drawing on the Celtic tradition of recognizing places where the mundane and the holy are close to one another.

Traditional Christianity, orthodox with a lower-case “o,” appreciates these magical spaces as examples of God’s glory, and the most mystical of the traditional theologians might even dare to use the word “holy,” but there would be a warning label attached. 

For them, what passes for holiness in nature or art must always be partial, for particular humans and cultures claim to be the gatekeepers, messengers and managers of the transcendent, so that direct experience is always suspect. 

We see this in claims of religious exclusivity. God spoke to Abraham, and chose the descendants of Abraham and Sarah as a solely preferred people out of all of the homo sapiens in the world, God being himself (always “he”) just an immortal and omnipotent instance of homo sapiens. 

Continue reading “My God: 18 May 2025”