Constructive Faith

I am going to begin this morning by going a little “meta,” and by that I don’t mean Zuckerberg’s civilization-destroying company. What I mean by “meta” is zooming out and looking at how the proverbial sausage is made, thinking about how we think about Epiphany.

Like other dates on the liturgical calendar, Epiphany wasn’t really a Congregational thing. Those Puritans and Pilgrims were a dry and cranky lot, only interested in the basics. Remember, they outlawed Christmas at one point. Thankfully that didn’t last too long. But there were plenty of ancient feasts and practices they still considered “Papist,” including Epiphany.

It was only a century ago, when the ecumenical spirit was in the air worldwide, that we started re-examining and restoring some of the Christian traditions we had thrown off, especially important as we grew closer to parts of the German church in America that were as much Lutheran as they were Reform.

Unlike the Feast of Christ the King, a 20th century fabrication, there is at least a real tradition, actual scripture, around Epiphany. It is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, as in the proverbial partridge in a pear tree and all that, and the date associated with today’s reading from Matthew, the arrival of wise people from the East at the home (not manger!) of Joseph and Mary.

The word “Epiphany” itself comes from the Biblical Greek for an appearance or manifestation, and so shares somewhat with the word “apocalypse,” which simply means to reveal or make known. Both lean into seeing as a way of knowing.

In particular, Christians have traditionally connected the story of the wise travelers with the gospel message to the Gentiles, that is, to people who were not ethnically or religiously connected to the tribe of Israel. Which is kind of important, because no good news for the Gentiles means no us, no Sistine Chapel, no Mozart Requiem, no Azusa Street revival.

Because there is that star, because there is that message to the Gentiles, pastors all-too-often slip into the sin of supersessionism, the wrong-headed theology that claims Christians replaced the Israelites in covenant with God, contributing to centuries of antisemitism, to Auschwitz and the Tree of Life Massacre. 

Just as often pastors lean into the language of light, connecting to old tropes that equate good with whiteness and evil with darkness, not only paralleled in racism, but also ignoring the very real and important role darkness plays in life, in rest, in mystery. Christmastide, the season from the Christmas Eve service through Epiphany, as well as Eastertide, the season from Easter Sunday until Pentecost, are assigned white as the liturgical color, because white is assumed to be good.

It is not that all of those pastors are intentionally racist or antisemitic. It is simply that we have this slow construction of story, a soup of ancient superstition and scientific knowledge.

So let’s ignore those old tropes, and, as they might say on a television police procedural, let’s just stick to the story, ma’am.

Continue reading “The Burning World: 8 January 2023”

If the local New Year’s baby this year was a boy, odds are it was named Liam, currently the most popular name for boys according to babycenter.com, one top search engine hit for baby names, though the site doesn’t make clear how they compiled their data or what regions it supposedly covers.

Liam, short for William, is not found in the Bible, though most of the popular boys names are. Biblical names are not popular at all for girls, maybe because there are fewer women named in scripture. 

For boys, the Hebrew Testament names Levi and Asher make the list, as well as variant forms of Luke and Matthew, half of the evangelists. John, however, doesn’t even crack the top 50, the closest being the derivative “Jack” found in the 22nd spot.

Gen Z parents are pretty keen on ex-presidents, with Carter at 30 and Lincoln at 40. Maverick is up there. I’m disappointed that “Texas Ranger” didn’t make the list. 

Poor John, that dying breed.

There is no shortage of Johns in the Christian Testament, even if you believe that John the Disciple was the author of the gospel, the three epistles, and the revelation received on Patmos. At the very least, there is John the Baptizer and John the Disciple, brother of James and especially loved by Jesus. 

Continue reading “1 January 2023: A Vote, Not A Veto”

If Jesus were born sometime in the wee hours of Christmas morning in South Korea, by the time everyone woke up with their New Year’s hangovers, he’d be two years-old. This is due to one of the three ways Koreans use to determine someone’s age. In one traditional method, you are born age one, and an additional year is added every New Year, regardless of your actual date of birth. Using this method, you are older than you think, though I doubt I can sell this to the Social Security Administration.

It can be quite confusing, and Korean culture has yet another traditional method, as well as sometimes determining age the way we do. They are working to adopt the single standard method used in much of the rest of the world, born zero years old and one year added on each birthday. Nothing wrong with tradition, even tradition that doesn’t fit our logic, but we live in an inter-connected world, with people and goods flowing across cultures and borders, and it sometimes helps to have shared standards. Just don’t ask an Englishman whether he wants a liter of ale… 

That’s a pint, thanks, mate…

Continue reading “Older Than You Think: Christmas Eve 2022”

The Gospel according to Mark begins in media res, which is just a fancy Latin way of saying “in the middle of the story.” Honestly, every story begins in the middle of some other story, beginnings being arbitrary things and all…

Specifically, the Gospel according to Mark begins with John the Baptizer. Jesus is a grown up, not the “Sweet Baby Jesus” Ricky Bobby likes so much in “Talladega Nights.”

The Gospel traditionally attributed to John (the Disciple not the Baptizer) begins at the beginning, and by beginning I mean cosmic-before-Creation beginning, but then moves on to the concrete story of John the Baptizer, essentially the same starting spot as Mark.

It is only in the two gospels traditionally attributed to Matthew and according to Luke the Physician that we find Nativity narratives. Both are late gospels, using the Gospel according to Mark as a primary source, as well as another document, a long lost gospel that we call Q. And since they share these two primary sources, you’d think that their Nativity stories would be much the same or at least pretty close. You’d be wrong.

Continue reading “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: 18 December 2022 (Advent4)”

We don’t really treat Advent as a penitential season anymore. It was hard to be a penitent at an office Christmas party with Barney’s “special” egg nog, and all of those holiday movies have happy endings… 

The Christmas Tree Farm gets saved, the pageant happens when the retired rock star returns to her home town and belts out a perfectly operatic Ave Maria while reconnecting with her high school sweetheart, and the blizzard breaks just in time for that donated kidney to get through as the Christmas star shines in the sky. And puppies, just because.

But I’m going to start this morning with a confession anyway. I may read and collect DC Comics, that is to say Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman, but I prefer the Marvel movies, like Ironman, which, I’m sorry to say, are just better. 

And I’m pretty sure that is some sort of violation of the Geek Code, akin to saying that Jean-Luc Picard commanded the Millennium Falcon. If you know, you know.

Continue reading “4 December 2022: The Dude Abides”

While a certain type of American blowhard is blathering on about “wokeness” and defunding libraries, the rest of us have been quietly getting on with the life-long process of learning. 

For example, while my theology and historical understanding of the Pharisees has been appropriately nuanced over the years, a recent conversation with Rabbi Oren from Kol Ami has led me to tweak my Communion Rite, and begin reading a new book on the Pharisaic movement. 

I grew up learning about and talking about “slaves.” It is only recently that I have come to understand how that term essentializes and reduces the humanity of those held in bondage. I now try to avoid the term slave, for they were people, not objects. I lean into “enslaved people,” and similar terms, making clear that slavery did not define who they were, it is something that was done to them. 

For years, I’ve pushed back against the term “sexual preference” as applied to members of the LGBTQI+ community, as if everything about us was reduced to what happens in bed and being gay was a choice, like say Rocky Road ice cream instead of Vanilla. I’ve tried any number of alternatives, but in the end, gay, lesbian, and all of those other letters gets to where we need to be and reflects the diversity of folks who do not fit the majority culture constructs and gender and relationship.

There is, however, one word that triggers a certain type of privileged American that still leaves me scratching my head. I mean, they make a big deal out of Memorial Day, go on and on about “The Greatest Generation” as if no other generation was ever great. But say the word “antifascist,” and they have you pegged as a cop-killing communist. And shorten it to “antifa,” and they just about explode.

I don’t think we need to redefine or abandon the term antifascist. I am proudly Antifa. You know, like my grandfather, part of that supposedly “Greatest Generation.” 

Continue reading “Fascist Killing Hope Machine: 27 November 2022”

Cooking was having a cultural moment even before the number of media platforms went haywire. There are still traditional cookbooks, selling like hotcakes to people who allegedly don’t even cook. Then there are the 23 or so cooking channels on your cable box or streaming service. And let’s not get started on the websites and the YouTube channels, the significant ink given over to cooking in our newspapers of record like the New York Times. There are films, from Jon Favreau’s aptly named “Chef” to “Julie and Julia,” based on the real life work of Julie Powell, who shockingly died just over a week ago.

Cooking even gets featured in current affairs, from the tragic suicide of the chef and adventurer Anthony Bourdain to the humanitarian work and political daring of Jose Andreas, the native Spaniard, naturalized American, whose work includes World Central Kitchen and a pugilistic relationship with our last president. Since 2010, World Central Kitchen has responded to countless natural disasters, set up kitchens during the pandemic, and is currently operating eight sites on the border between Poland and Ukraine. 

Meanwhile, Ievgen Klopotenko is cooking away at his restaurant in Kyiv. As reported by Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian, he was first known for cultural openness, a sort of Ukrainian Jamie Oliver trying to make school lunches more nutritious and more appealing, including the introduction of foreign dishes like curry, shepherd’s pie, and mac and cheese. Today, he focused on native dishes, and fighting Putin’s attempt to erase Ukrainian culture the best way he knows how, from the kitchen.

For all of its problems, and there are plenty of them, one of the gifts of globalization has been culinary diversity. I have the French cookbook on the shelf, but it is joined by books full of curries, Moroccan dishes, street food from African and Asia, and of course, the American South. We’ve come a long way since Julia Child premiered her show “The French Chef” the year I was born.

Home cooking has largely evolved with technology, as storage and transportation allowed us access to foods we might have never encountered, much less attempted on our own. Restaurant cooking had one major revolution, when Auguste Escoffier brought his military experience to bear on the organization of the kitchen at César Ritz’s Savoy in London, creating the “brigade de cuisine” that is still used to this day, more than a century later. Escoffier was thoroughly corrupt and absolutely genius, so significant a figure in the culinary world that he becomes Auguste Gusteau in Pixar’s 2007 film “Ratatouille.”

Of course, food is a faith issue, and I’m not just talking about to sometimes quirky dietary restrictions that developed in ancient times or the notion that gods eat and therefore require food sacrifices, whether the one God of the monotheisms or the many gods of polytheistic and ancestor-worshipping religions. Though I do always get a kick out of the suggestion that the original grain offering to Yahweh was actually beer.

Continue reading “Food, Glorious Food: 13 November 2022”

You know, sometimes things are just too easy. Like today’s scripture reading, from what we think of as Paul’s Second Letter to the church at Thessaloniki, a text that says the end times can’t come until the lawless one appears, a self-promoting man who will convince people to believe total lies. Yeah, about that… 

Maybe we’d better start packing, ’cause we’re about to be raptured, or, if God is really the complete jerk some seem to believe, get sent off on a very warm and very permanent vacation. Like SPF 5 million sunscreen and asbestos board shorts type of vacation. Happy Armageddon, Y’All!

The good news is that people have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time, and the evil men and women who are setting fire to our democracy are not the first cult leaders to sell the snake oil of mass delusion. The world hasn’t ended yet, though we’re doing our level best, what with human-caused climate change and all.

In other ways, today’s text is far from being easy. My favorite biblical commentary uses words like delusion, disorientation, and dismay when describing this chapter.

So what are we to make of this passage and more broadly of what we call biblical eschatology, of all the texts that suggest some form of divine re-ordering, whether that take the form of a Day of the Lord that establishes an earthly order that matches the divine will or an apocalyptic destruction in which the sheep and the goats get divided and earthly life ceases? The whole “Left Behind” scenario, or maybe the Omen series… 

And let’s answer that before we come back to the challenge the late Madeleine Albright offers, what to do with politicians who view texts like the Revelation to John of Patmos as an operations manual for domestic and foreign policy, who have enough hubris to believe they are guaranteed a spot in heaven. Besides making sure we never give them the nuclear codes.

Continue reading “Happy Armageddon, Y’All: 6 November 2022”

It may seem like so very long ago, but it was really only the Year One B.C. (that is, before Covid) when the great Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris burned. I remember the tears in the eyes of one congregant in the church I was serving at the time when she thought about all that was lost, art and architecture, and I suspect, as we recently experienced with the death of Queen Elizabeth, a sense of continuity, a sense of the world as it had been for all of her life. In fact, the congregant grieving the loss of the great cathedral was a native of England, so I can only imagine her sense of discontinuity these days with a new king and the Prime Minister of the month.

The Notre Dame fire was made worse by the fact that the fire brigade was not called until more than thirty minutes after the first alarm went off. First they sent a guard to see if the alarm was right. They were not ready to accept that there was a fire. Except they sent the guard to the wrong place, the wrong attic. By the time they looked in the right place and believed the fire was real, it was way too late.

After the fire, there was immediate discussion of what comes next, of rebuilding the cathedral. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, suggested an openness to a “contemporary architectural gesture.” As you might expect, heads exploded. Humans are nothing if not reactionary.

In the end, the French National Assembly passed a law requiring that the structure be rebuilt in a way to “preserve the historic, artistic and architectural interest of the monument.” 

Let’s bracket our American expectations about whether a national government should be controlling the reconstruction of a building it plans to give back to the Roman Catholic church, and for a moment, let’s even bracket the backwardness that insists that only the past is worthy of our attention. 

Let’s instead admit one simple fact: no matter what they do after the fire, it will not be the same as it was before the fire, and what was there before the fire itself had evolved and changed since it was originally completed in the 13th century, so which “before” should the reconstructionists even choose? 

Continue reading “After the Fire: 30 October 2022”

My recent vacation combined a little tourism and a lot of family. 

The tourism part included an outstanding exhibit at Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum focused on the American artist Jacob Lawrence, a 20^th century descendent of the enslaved African Diaspora, and his connections with artists still in Africa. I also visited Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown. It was the first time in decades that I’d experienced those historic sites, so closely tied to my own family’s story in America. 

Williamsburg continues to be what it has been since the Rockefeller’s made it a personal cause, a well-funded billionaire’s philanthropy. Yorktown and Jamestown are different. Both contain historic sites managed by the National Park Service on a shoestring budget, as well as substantial educational sites and museums under the auspices of a better-funded and independent foundation. 

At Jamestown, that foundation’s museum and re-creation of the ships and the first fort are called the Jamestown Settlement, and I must admit, I was blown away. They have done a remarkable job of re-framing the story. Where once you experienced a celebration of colonialism, the Doctrine of Discovery, and white supremacy, you can now hear about the intersection and clash of three advanced cultures, the First Peoples of the continent, the English who invaded and established the colony, and the Angolan abductees whose purchase at Jamestown marked the start of our nation’s original sin.

The foundation’s museum and re-created encampment at Yorktown is not quite as nuanced, still firmly rooted in American exceptionalism and white nationalism, with barely a nod to the overwhelming majority of residents in the original colonies who were not made free by the American Revolution, indigenous populations, slaves in the African diaspora, women… 

The American Revolution is, in the Yorktown narrative, primarily about taxation without representation, which is at least partially true. It was an economic war, about the exploitative and unsustainable model of overseas colonization. But there is little mention at Yorktown or in popular patriotism of the Southern concern that England might abolish slavery, something that seemed inevitable after a 1772 decision by the Court of the King’s Bench, and a move that would invalidate a primary source of Southern wealth.

The so-called Founding Fathers are at the center of it all in Yorktown, as are those familiar patriotic tropes, “give me liberty or give me death,” and the words of Thomas Jefferson, the “unalienable right” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I was already thinking about happiness, for today’s scripture and theme were on the calendar months ago. But what the heck is happiness? And does our faith promise us happiness?

Continue reading “Unfollow Your Bliss: 23 October 2022”