Constructive Faith

Exodus 1:8-2:10

I came out of the closet during the worst years of the AIDS crisis. Folks were dying, including people I knew, co-workers and members of my social circle. Some courageously went out in public with Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic form of cancer, visible on their bodies like a latter day Scarlet Letter, while others hid from public view. People died alone, or without the comfort of longtime companions, as families and hospitals refused to acknowledge same-sex relationships. 

It is no surprise, then, that the late playwright Larry Kramer led others in founding ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Socially-acceptable hemophiliacs like Ryan White aside, AIDS was most common among gay men, and gay men did not fit social constructs of gender expression and affectional orientation. Many believed the disease was divine judgment.

ACT UP followed in a long tradition of direct and disruptive action in pursuit of justice, an approach used by Suffragettes and activists in the Civil Rights movement, and still used by Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and the particularly controversial and diverse Stop Oils collectives.

Legal equality for the LGBTQI+ community is at-risk these days, but at least for now, legal equality is the law of the land, even in neo-fascist Florida, the state of hate, even in liberal California, where small business owner Lauri Carleton was gunned down just nine days ago for displaying a Pride flag. 

There is still no cure for HIV/AIDS, though retroviral drugs have slowed disease progression and extended lives. Among those are treatments developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, a company named after a play that is itself named after a passage in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, when the cranky man of God asks if there is no balm in Gilead. The balm in Gilead was a rare perfume used for medicinal purposes and derived from the terebinth tree. The prophet essentially asks “Is there no medicine for this?”

Gilead’s HIV treatments, the medicine for this, use a drug they developed called tenofovir. Like all of the antiretroviral therapies developed to manage HIV/AIDS, tenofovir came with awful side effects, was extremely expensive, and incredibly profitable for the company.

According to New York Times reporting on a current lawsuit, as early as 2004, Gilead had created a version of tenofovir that was safer for patients. They shelved that new treatment for over a decade. The existing version of tenofovir was under patent until 2017. Gilead continued to sell the more dangerous form of the drug for another decade, only rolling out the new version in 2015, allowing them to extend the life of the patent. An extended patent meant no competition, and a continued monopoly meant more profit.

Gilead Sciences knew the newer form of tenofovir was less toxic to patients, doing less damage to kidney’s and bones. They didn’t care. Corporations, originally intended as a structure to allow people to partner in business creation, now function as a facility for amoral and often immoral conduct.

Continue reading “27 August 2023: No Balm From Gilead”

Matthew 14:22-33

When I arrived at that particular congregation, I was told it was part of my job to select the hymns for worship. This was not welcome news for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that I am not even slightly musical, as well as the fact that the congregation, like the Park Church, used the New Century Hymnal, which was a great idea in the abstract all those years ago, but there are far better hymnals out there today. 

But the real real problem of me picking the hymns was best captured by an exchange when I’d been there about a month. I don’t know whether the sermon was any good that Sunday, probably not. It certainly wasn’t on the mind of the congregant who made a beeline for me after worship. “Pastor,” he asked, “Why don’t you choose hymns we know?”

The answer, which I gave, was obvious. “I just got here. I don’t know what hymns you know.” 

For the record, that was not the right answer. 

Pretty much everyone in those pews, and pretty much everyone in these pews, has hymns they know and love. Which would be great if you all knew and loved the same hymns, if every hymn spoke to every one of our guests who comes through the door, if every hymn was suitable to every season and occasion and reflected our theology as progressive Christians engaged in the world. But you do not all know and love the same hymns, and as our church becomes more diverse, the variety of musical expression and taste only grows.

So yeah, hymnals can be an issue. 

Continue reading “Flip the Script: 13 August 2023”

Genesis 32:22-31
Matthew 14:13-21

On a muggy July evening eight years ago, nursing student Stephen Smith was found murdered on a rural road in South Carolina. Smith, who was openly gay, was romantically linked to the older son of a prominent local attorney. The case would go cold quickly and be neglected for six years.

Less than three years later, that same attorney’s longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, died as the result of severe head trauma. It was reported that she had fallen from the front steps of the wealthy family’s estate, Moselle. There was no autopsy and the death certificate would fraudulently list “natural causes.” An insurance settlement of $4.3 million dollars never reached the family, instead being stolen by the attorney.

One year later, in 2019, the younger son of the attorney was drunk driving a motorboat late at night when it crashed, killing one of his close friends, Mallory Beach. His blood alcohol level was .286, more than three times the legal limit. The family attempted to blame another young man for the crash, and it was weeks before the younger son was arrested. Even then, he received special treatment.

Facing civil suits related to the boat accident and a forensic review of his financial records, attorney Alex Murdaugh murdered his wife and younger son at the kennel of the family’s 1700+ acre hunting estate on the evening of June 7, 2021, shooting his son with a shotgun, and his wife with an assault weapon.

Years of fraud and embezzlement began to unspool. Alex Murdaugh, conspiring with his surviving son, Buster, attempted to sell and hide assets. In early September of that year, Alex was supposedly shot in the head while changing a tire on a rural road. A cousin was later arrested for conspiracy to assist a suicide, though it is not clear that Alex Murdaugh’s death was actually intended. The cousin was also Alex Murdaugh’s partner in narco-trafficking, providing him with Oxycodone for personal use and distribution.

You know much of this story, for it was in the news for months, especially during the trial earlier this year which resulted in Alex Murdaugh being convicted for murdering his wife Maggie and son Paul. 

Some of the financial crimes have been adjudicated, while others remain in various stages of litigation and prosecution. Investigations into the deaths of Stephen Smith and Gloria Satterfield have been re-opened, and there are allegations of other crimes. Netflix, CourtTV, and podcasts aplenty have been all over this, of course, because humans love a good scandal. Always have. 

I can just imagine the people of Jerusalem gossiping as King David’s family was torn apart by rape, murder, and rebellion. Then again, King David was a murderer too.

We could just wrap Alex Murdaugh’s behavior up in a box called drug addiction, and put a label on it, and drug addiction is a terrible thing. But the American scourge named Sackler shares something fundamental with Alex Murdaugh, and with citizen Trump as described in his niece Mary’s book “Too Much and Never Enough.” 

Continue reading “The Lowcountry Murders: 6 August 2023”

Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

By the time I arrived in Mr. Taylor’s classroom, the super cool one at the very end of the hall with the funky walls, the room for the supposedly smart kids, I’d passed through a tough couple of years, including a hospitalization, the death of a beloved grandmother, and abuse. We’d moved out of the city, and I was no longer the gifted child left feral in the elementary school library, but was instead just an average kid in above average classes. Of course, my seventh grade teacher knew almost none of this. He just told it like he saw it, and informed me that I was a pessimist.

I am pretty sure he was well intentioned, though I doubt telling a confused 12 year-old trauma victim they are a pessimist is in the Teacher’s Handbook. All these years later, I still think back to that conversation. He could not have been more wrong, something he might have discovered had he known what to ask or had I known what to say. I wasn’t a pessimist. I was a survivor. Socially awkward, to be sure, guarded with good reason, but tough as nails. 

Today, I mock and denounce the wingnuts who believe there is a child-trafficking ring operating out of a pizza parlor to harvest fear hormones from children, am frustrated by those who fall for Q-Cult disinformation like the recent shockumentary “Sound of Freedom.” 

I think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dangerous man who believes crazy stuff and is an embarrassment to the family name, and that’s saying something considering Teddy and that bridge back in ’69. 

But to be honest, crazy could also be used to describe my belief system, in a creation that is ultimately good, in the power of love and the potential for human thriving. Most days this whole human project looks like a slow-motion disaster, the politest term I could use. And a disaster not just for us, but for life on the planet, the only planet we currently know of where life exists. 

And yet, I hope, and I fight, even on the dark days, and most of us have experienced dark days at times.

Today’s scripture texts, from Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome and from the gospel attributed to but surely not written by the disciple Matthew, risk getting into the theological weeds, predestination and justification and other silliness we’ve covered in recent weeks, though at least the selection from Paul ends with that powerful and reassuring passage that says nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

But there is this foundational message about the kingdom of God, and that is where I would like to focus.

Continue reading “30 July 2023”

Romans 8:12-25

The opening weekend for the 1987 film “The Princess Bride” was arguably a disaster. It cost around $16 million to make, and brought in a fraction over $200 thousand in the U.S. and Canada. Of course, ticket prices were a lot lower then, but so was the cost of making the film. It would go on to be a modest success during its cinema run, taking in about $30 million worldwide, but those numbers do not tell the whole story, for more than three decades later, many of us can quote lines from the film, for the 1987 script based on William Goldman’s 1973 novel was simply brilliant, and you can find t-shirts, home décor, and memes aplenty based on the movie. Just search Etsy. It is a priceless intellectual and cultural property.

The cast was star-studded, including Billy Crystal as Miracle Max, called on the revive the seemingly dead Westley, which brings us to one of those classic lines: “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”

The Roman Empire was mostly dead at the start of the Common Era’s fourth century when Constantine and Licinius signed what came to be known as the Edict of Milan, granting religious freedom in the regions they controlled. This was a crucial moment in the history of Christianity, for there had been widespread persecution in the preceding years. 

In the pop-history version of the story, Constantine has a vision of a cross and becomes a Christian himself. This is late propaganda. Like all warlords and powerful men, what Constantine worshipped was Constantine, and his engagement with a growing Christianity was self-serving. Some things never change.

The Edict of Milan also marked an important turning point theologically, for while the early church had spent most of three centuries fighting over the faith, now it was in the interest of the state to resolve these battles, for they were not confined to councils and venomous epistles, but often spilled out into mob violence. So rulers became arbiters of doctrine, arbiters with troops, as partisans fought over and fabricated new ideas and beliefs, like how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could be three persons and one God, of one substance, using words in ways they had never been used, or how Jesus could be both fully human and fully God at the exact same time. Among those bitter disputes was what came to be the heretical view that Christ was less than the Father and the first created thing, as well as the opposing ideas that Christ was more human than divine or more divine than human, neither being deemed acceptable.

The holy is beyond our knowing, and Hebrew scripture calls us to a theological humility, but that didn’t stop the ugly fights of that age, fights that were to the contestants a matter of eternal life or eternal damnation. 

Continue reading “Sanctification: 23 July 2023”

Romans 7:15-25

Today’s Unitarian Universalist movement in America is diverse, a mixture of individuals from different faiths and no faith, and sometimes a compromise for an interfaith marriage. Much like the United Church of Christ, members are bound together by a personal commitment to a local congregation, and in the UUA, to a core set of Seven Principles, crazy ideas like “the inherent worth and dignity of all people” and “the democratic process” in decision-making.

There are many parallels and connections. Unitarian Universalism, like the UCC, is the result of a merger between different theological traditions. The Unitarian part of their heritage is partially the result of a schism within Congregationalism, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address.” Historically, many New England towns had a First Parish and a First Church, one now part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the other now part of the United Church of Christ, all depending on who won in that particular town, for the church building, silver, and graveyard were at stake, not to mention souls and damnation, which were secondary to the property, of course.

We have so much in common with Unitarian Universalists, share so much in our worldview, that there are churches that belong to both denominations. This is possible mostly because folks have mellowed, and when I say folks, I mean our Puritanical Congregationalist heritage, and some of the more rabid Atheist Humanists that dominated the UUA a half century ago.

But I’d like to turn to the other half of the Unitarian Universalist heritage, and to a modern day schism of sorts.

We’ll begin in the Biblical Age, as we do. The Israelite faith did not originally include a notion of life after death. Fidelity, pleasing God, resulted in blessings in this life. Except that didn’t always happen. Sometimes bad things happened to good people, and vis-a-versa, leading the ancient theologians to one of two strategies. One was to blame the victim. If bad things are happening to you, you must not be all that good. We see this a lot in the ancient prophets. The Assyrians are invading because of injustice, or because the Northern Kingdom wasn’t worshipping properly. This primitive theology of blessings and curses in this world is at the heart of today’s Prosperity Gospel heresy, co-mingled with the heresy of Fundamentalism.

The second strategy was the growing belief that if what we might think of as karma didn’t play out in this life, then there must be a future life, where the good would be rewarded and the bad punished.

Continue reading “9 July 2023: What sort of God?”

Romans 6:12-23

When Disneyland opened in 1955, the Tomorrowland section of the park was futuristic, if a little kitsch. After all, Sputnik was still in the future, and the few computers that existed took up entire rooms. They most certainly did not fit in our pockets.

It was intended that Tomorrowland, both the California version and the later iteration in Florida, would always point to the future, would have to be updated constantly. That didn’t happen. They added things here and there, but those are iterations of the company’s intellectual properties, showcasing Buzz Lightyear or Stitch. It would not be surprising to see an “I Like Ike” button in the crowd, though prices are exponentially higher.

Maybe technology just moved too fast for them to keep ahead. Or maybe our tech-future is just too terrifying for children. Terminator 2, when the A.I. SkyNet goes to war against humankind, just doesn’t give that family fun vibe, if you know what I mean. Hasta la vista, baby.

While science fiction and futuristic classics look almost comical as the years pass, a few continue to hold their own. One of those is Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a 1992 classic novel in the genre of techno-futurism called cyberpunk. Some of the imagined technology has come to pass, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes horrifically. Fortunately, the ability of a computer virus to infect our own wetware hasn’t happened, though maybe it has, since social media has been the carrier of mass psychosis.

But it is the social commentary that seems especially prescient. In “Snow Crash,” the government has largely faded into irrelevance. Instead, our daily lives are carved up into competing corporate franchises, and gated enclaves. It is a capitalist utopia, where humans exist solely for the purpose of the bottom line, where tribe is pitted against tribe, and people spend way too much time down the rabbit hole, because the virtual is better than the physical.

This is some people’s idea of freedom, a daily “Battle Royale.” No wonder the winner-take-all video game “Fortnite” spread like wildfire. The competitive violence in the game reflects the values so many kids hear at the dinner table, or more likely, in the backseat while eating their “Happy Meals,” a zero-sum world where you can only win if someone else loses, preferably fatally.

And I am not okay with it. I don’t accept that the biggest jerk wins, Congressional elections aside.

Continue reading “2 July 2023”

Matthew 9:9-26

Jesus existed. That may sound like a bit of a no-brainer. After all, you are sitting in a Christian church on a Sunday morning when you could be eating a bagel and watching “Meet the Press,” because we are a “Meet the Press” sort of crowd. But a church president, not ours, once told me that Jesus was completely made-up. Not that she didn’t believe specifically in the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection or the whole walking on water thing. She was throwing out the baby, the bath water, the whole darned tub, and the Sea of Galilee for good measure. I had a lot of questions that I chose not to ask.

Adam and Eve? You can have them. Totally a myth. Satan in the desert? Yeah, and Elvis at the donut shop. But there are certain figures in the Bible that reek of historicity, that it is reasonable to believe existed, if not in the exact same form as the later stories about them. 

For example, while certain smug scholars spent years claiming that King David was a myth, others were digging away in the hard dirt of Palestine, where thirty years ago they discovered that a wall at the site of the ancient Israelite city of Dan included re-used stone from an earlier monument, in a style called a stele. The site is called a tel, archeologist speak for the mound created by centuries of ancient settlement on the same site, so the stone became known as the Tel Dan Stele. 

The inscription on the Tel Dan Stele, in Aramaic, claims that the person who erected the stele killed King Jehoram of Israel, son of Ahab, which is remarkable enough, because we have all these stories about Ahab and Jezebel. But the stele adds that the victor defeated both the army of Israel, the northern kingdom, and the army of Israel’s ally, the House of David, what we know as Judah or the southern kingdom.

The stone is dated to the 9^th century B.C.E., and Jehoram died in the 9^th century B.C.E., sometime around 842. Jehoram and his nephew, King Ahaziah of the House of David, were defeated by Hazael, the Aramean king, who of course spoke Aramaic.

This gives us material evidence of David’s existence pretty close to when he existed. But we didn’t need archeology to tell us David was real. The story in scripture, messy as it is, feels real.

Continue reading “Love or Anger: 11 June 2023”

Matthew 28:16-20

It is a busy day on the church calendar, what with Trinity Sunday, Pride Sunday, and Communion Sunday for us once-a-month types. Even though we are more Reform than Lutheran, I’m going to fall back on Martin Luther’s admonition against preaching on Trinity Sunday, and just not preach on that. Hey, two out of three ain’t bad…

I like sports, as you all know. Unfortunately that includes ice hockey, which hasn’t worked out so well for me this year. The Maple Leafs, my favorite NHL team, made the playoffs, again, because they pretty much always do, then promptly collapsed, which they pretty much always do. I mean, when they last won the Stanley Cup, I was four. 

Then there is that train wreck in the money pit across the street. I mean, I’m gonna root for the hometown team every time, but the Elmira Mammoth were pretty awful if we’re being honest, with constant player turnover, and now the whole enterprise seems to have failed, as the team could not attract enough fans to pay the bills.

Now, if you love hockey like I do, you know a particular end-of-game strategy, called “empty net.” This happens when a team is down by one goal near the end of the game. In desperation, they pull the goalie to get another attacker on the ice. I mean, a loss by one goal is no different than a loss by two goals, which is often what happens anyway. 

All the leading team needs to do is snatch the puck and send it down to the other end of the ice, where there is a big fat nobody standing in goal. Then, with seconds left on the clock and the opponent now up by two goals, the goaltender comes back. 

This past season, only one NHL team scored more goals than they gave up when they pulled their goalie. Our closest team, the Buffalo Sabres, tried empty net 33 times. They scored the tying goal three times. They gave up an additional goal 17 times. And if you are doing the math, 13 times, neither team scored.

Those are not great odds.

And as ineffective as pulling the goalie is in the NHL, it is still wildly successful compared to attempts to explain away the anti-gay passages in scripture. I’ve watched both scholars and amateurs try it, twisting themselves into knots trying to make scripture not say what it so clearly says.

Continue reading “Pride Sunday 2023: Queer Saints”

Acts 2:1-21

It is easy, in an age of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, an age when neo-Fascists are working hard to erase the story of Black America and to drive the LGBTQI+ community back into hiding, when small-government hypocrites insert themselves between a doctor and their patient, to forget how far we have actually come in pursuit of safety and equality. 

Take, for example, the 2006 Academy Awards, when the gay-themed “Brokeback Mountain” was expected to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Some in the gay community, including me, had a love/hate relationship with the film. Seeing queer characters on television and in film was still relatively rare, so there was the positive of any representation, but it was still tragic representation. 

For decades, we were usually depicted as criminally insane. If we were not monsters, then we were victims, dying of AIDS, tortured by unrequited love, mourning a lover who died tragically. Queer characters couldn’t just be, they had to be pathetic. Even if society did not punish them with incarceration, murder, or apathy, the universe would, some deus ex machina, a meteorite from the sky. 

Today, there are same-sex couples on the Disney Channel and in Hallmark Christmas Movies, but in 2006, the Academy could not quite give an Oscar to a film about queer love, so the Best Picture controversially went to the Paul Haggis film “Crash.” 

It is not that “Crash” was a bad film, though its exploration of racism in America has been critiqued as shallow by folks like Ta-Nehisi Coates. In fact, “Crash” might be seen as the high-point of a particular style of filmmaking that exploded in the first decade of this century, the networked narrative that tied seemingly disparate stories together. That same year, another film in the genre reached theaters, one that took as a theme the biblical story that starts this morning’s exploration of Pentecost. 

“Babel” was about an American couple on vacation in Morocco when the wife is shot. It is about the Moroccan boys who are supposed to be using the rifle to protect the goats, not to shoot tourist buses. It is about the deaf and mute daughter of the Japanese hunter who brought the rifle to Morocco. It is about the Mexican nanny, working illegally in the United States, who is caring for the children of the American couple on the bus. Most of all, it is about the many ways we fail to understand one another, with a healthy dose of the “Butterfly Effect,” where one small act has unpredictable and life-changing impacts far, far away.

Continue reading “Pentecost 2023: Out of Control”