Constructive Faith

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”

Acts 9:36-43

SERMON “Daily Bread”

My recent time off included a trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I serve on the Alumix Advisory Council for the Divinity School at Harvard. Among the highlights was the opportunity to present the Gomes Honor for Friend of the School to the Rev. Dr. Stephanie Paulsell, a recently retired professor who not only served as my advisor, but who also preached at my ordination. She is ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), one of our partner denominations, and was the last of my teachers on the full-time faculty. Several still have emerita status, and a shocking number are quite dead. Among this latter group is Gordon Kaufman, one of the founders of Constructive Theology.

For those who are familiar with theology, Constructive Theology is the opposite of Systematics. While Systematics tries to describe fixed truths, parsing holy mystery into pint-sized certainties, Constructive Theology admits that all of our theological thinking is provisional, subject to new insights, located in the contexts of place, time, and culture, evaluated not by untestable metaphysical claims, but instead measured by their contribution to human thriving, and by extension, to the thriving of the planet as a living system. Not is it true, but is it useful. In classic theology, humans are passive in the face of direct revelation. In Constructive Theology, humans are partners with the holy in the task of meaning making.

Kaufman supervised both of my major papers, the first on prayer. Specifically, I wanted to challenge traditional notions of prayer as transactional. And I’m not even talking about the proxy transactions of the Roman tradition, where various saints and demi-gods intervene on behalf of the living and the dead, releasing people from purgatory, curing various afflictions, and in the case of Saint Anthony, locating lost car keys.

Even in our own Reform Protestant tradition, prayer is often seen as transactional. We may offer thanks and praise, but mostly we pray “for” whatever it is we are praying for. 

There are a couple of problems with this. First, what sort of God needs or even wants constant praise? That God would be co-dependent at best, manipulative and abusive at worst, an immortal version of Donald Trump. Many American Christians believe in exactly that sort of violent and capricious god, which may help explain why they see the autocrat as God’s agent. 

Second, and equally important, there is exactly zero evidence that either merit or prayer determines outcomes, that the transactions are successful. Good people get horrific diseases, are surrounded by prayer, and still die… while horrific people often thrive. Research tells us that prayer does have a positive impact, not because the hand of God reaches down and rewires the world like some puppet master in the sky, but because it changes us and our relationship with the world around us.

In for a penny, in for a pound, as the old English expression goes. Since I was putting prayer under the microscope of constructive thought, why not consider the most famous of all prayers in our tradition? Why not consider “the Lord’s Prayer”? Particularly, I took aim at the line “give us, this day, our daily bread.” 

Continue reading “Daily Bread: Mothering Sunday 2025”

Good Friday Homily 2025

Though there are independent records of the execution of Jesus by Roman occupation forces under the prefect Pontius Pilate, we have no record of the trial itself except for the accounts in the gospels. This is not really that surprising. Judea wasn’t exactly a great assignment, and there are few records of Pilate’s ten years of service in the region. He disappears from the historic record after he is dismissed from his post and returns to Rome.

We know that Jesus had followers and friends among the Jewish elite, including Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and the gospels tell us Peter and a second disciple made it inside, so accounts of events before the Sanhedrin may be historically accurate. Did he, as legend often suggests, also have would be followers among the Roman soldiers? 

It seems unlikely that Pilate was the wishy-washy dreamer who washed his hands of the execution. Pilate had little regard for Jewish religion and custom, and a prefect was a military governor, not a civilian. His rise to that middling high office most certainly reflected a cold and calculated brutality.

If the events are dramatized, there is no question that they are characteristic of Roman rule. Though the cross has become the symbol of Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus and the two bandits was far from a one-off. There were crosses outside of every city in the Roman colonies, containing the dead and rotting and sometimes still living and moaning bodies of runaway slaves and insurrectionists.

But tonight I want to focus on what happens before Jesus is nailed to a cross. There is, of course, the physical torture. Interrogated all night, he is then flogged, a mock crown placed on his head, a purple robe like that of a king across his bleeding back. He would eventually die under a placard naming him King of the Jews, often abbreviated INRI from the Latin.

Evil does not simply seek to execute threats to the powerful. It seeks to first humiliate its victim, to strip them of their dignity, of what makes them human. This is its own form of terrorism.

Continue reading “Good Friday and Easter Sunday 2025”

Psalm 118:19-29

Luke 19:28-40

SERMON “The Lonely Mountain”

My family joined the white flight to the suburbs when I finished 6th grade, before I would have started junior high in an urban school system. I can look back on that now through the lens of an adult anti-racist, which does absolutely nothing to change the past. 

Because I had been considered gifted in my previous school, I was placed in the class with the highest achievers in my new school, an obvious mistake. 

My homeroom teacher was Mr. Taylor. He was that teacher. 

You know that teacher. There is one in every school. His classroom, the furthest from the office and cafeteria, was cool, had walls painted like a map instead of the pale industrial colors of the rest of the building. 

In addition to the core learning expected of all seventh graders, he offered a menu of independent learning activities for credit. One of the items on that list was reading “The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

I was already an avid reader, and I was probably going to be a nerd anyways, but that sealed the deal. I spent my early teenage years with my nose buried in the Lord of the Rings and various prequels and supplements.

So it was that I sat in a bedroom that was still relatively new to me, decorated for our nation’s bicentennial, and wept. 

I had powered past Gollum and the forest, the initial events at the Lonely Mountain, and had just read of the death of a central character. I can still see the paperback, the quality of light in my bedroom, the quiet of the house, hear my own sobs, still more little boy than adolescent.

It was certainly not the first time I had cried, not the first time I had cried from deep sorrow, not even the first time a book had brought me to tears. But this was on a whole new level.

I’ve read plenty of books in the nearly half century since that day, wept more than a few times while reading, watching a film, attending an opera. 

Great writing can transcend genre and make you care about a character, whether it is Bilbo Baggins, John Grady Cole, or Katniss Everdeen. And if you are wondering, that is a range from the fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and the gritty realism of Cormac McCarthy, to the brutality of Suzanne Collins, this last without a doubt the best author of the eerily prophetic genre of dystopian teen angst. The Hunger Games series, in which the powerless are sacrificed to entertain the powerful and maintain tyranny, is looking more and more like reality every day.

Story is how homo sapiens makes meaning of the complex and the mysterious. You can get as hardcore empiricist as you want, leaning into the long de-bunked outlook called positivism, which has nothing to do with positivity, but in the end, we tell the story of those scientific discoveries, the story of how those discoveries changed lives, changed the world. 

No one does dramatic readings of the Pythagorean Equation or Fermat’s Last Theorem, except maybe at MIT, where I once worked as a Chaplain Intern.

I wept that afternoon a half century ago because I was learning through literature, learning that people, in this case hobbits and dwarves, are complicated and imperfect, that reconciliation does not always mean restoration, that good and evil lie on a continuum rather than a binary, that sometimes awful stuff happens.

The story worked as a story, moved me, because I started with the “Unexpected Party,” dealt with the trolls and the goblins, visited Rivendell and encountered the tricksy Gollum long before I got to the Lonely Mountain. 

If I has skipped from Gandalf scratching a sign on the door to the climactic events at the Lonely Mountain, there would have been no tears, no trips to the bookstore for volume after volume of Tolkien’s writing, no Tolkien calendar among the Christmas gifts year after year.

Continue reading “Palm Sunday 2025”

John 12:1-8

Isaiah 43:16-21

You probably had never heard the name Joe DePugh before this week, though you may, like me, have known him as a character. 

DePugh, who recently died, was the inspiration behind Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 hit “Glory Days.” The song, which opens with a real life encounter, names the ways we live in the past, seek to recapture our glory days, like that fastball DePugh could throw in his youth.

As the first generations of Christians transformed a Jewish reformation movement into a trans-cultural religion, they wove into the story a modified form of glory days, of messianic expectation. 

Let’s take a few minutes to parse that.

There was a significant kingdom in Canaan, or whatever name you call that region, now or at any given point in history. For about a century, that mighty-ish kingdom was made up of a collection of people who would eventually be identified as Jews. The city that became Jerusalem was captured and transformed into a capital, with a Temple built on a high point sometimes called Mount Moriah, Mount Zion, or simply the Temple Mount. 

The most powerful of that short-lived nation’s three rulers was David. Though he was a usurper, a rapist, and a murderer, the nation torn apart by civil war during his last years on the throne, his reign would be romanticized in much the same way Shakespeare romanticized the Tudors. 

David’s heirs would rule a declining remnant state called Judah for another four centuries. That house produced a significant amount of propaganda, including the claim that Yahweh made a covenant with King David, much as Yahweh had made a covenant with the house of Abraham and Sarah in the Torah. The Davidic Covenant asserted that a descendent of the king would sit on the throne forever.

In the real world, Jews lost control of the northern part of their kingdom early on, which was largely depopulated. The southern part of their kingdom would become a client state to other regional powers, before it too was destroyed, the Temple a burning ruin, the elite held captive in a foreign land.

Some texts in the Tanakh, the Hebrew language scripture, suggest a hero would come to liberate and restore the people to their former glory. The term used for this hero is Messiah, which refers to the individual being anointed with oil, something that is still done, was done behind a privacy screen during the recent coronation of King Charles III. 

The Koine Greek word for the Anointed One is Christ, and oil is still traditionally used as part of christening. Christ and Messiah are the same word.

One “Messiah” is named in the Tanakh, the Jewish Testament. That messiah is King Cyrus of Persia. He defeats Babylon and frees the Jewish elite, who then return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple and the city’s walls as a Persian client-state.

Since the development of history as a discipline with scientific support, Christian historians have convinced themselves that during the time of Jesus, the pre-Rabbinic Jews of Judea and Galilee were expecting a Messiah to appear and save them. That is to say, scholars claim that during the time of Jesus, there was widespread Messianic expectation among the Jewish people. That view has been challenged in recent years.

This morning, we are less interested in that unknown, whether the average Jewish inhabitant of Judea in the early First Century longed for a messiah, and more interested in what is known, what the early Christians did with that idea.

And to put it bluntly, they flipped it on its head.

Continue reading “Kill the Past: 6 April 20254”

Psalm 32 (adapted)
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Today’s gospel reading features a parable often known as the Prodigal Son. 

I’d venture to say that it is the second most familiar parable in the gospels, only surpassed by the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Among other things, the reading serves to remind us how easy it is to miss subtle clues in ancient literature, literature that was not written for us. 

We are told that the younger son has demanded his inheritance and squandered it is in a distant region. The text does not directly describe that distant region as Gentile, and yet it does, for there is a “pig flag” in the text. 

There are no pig farms in Jewish towns. 

We see this “pig flag” in other places in the Christian Testament as well. For example, Matthew’s version of a story found in all three Synoptic Gospels has two mentally ill un-sheltered men in the cemetery, rather than the one in the more familiar Lucan version of the Gerasene demoniac story. When Jesus exorcizes their demons, the demons move into a herd of pigs. The herd promptly runs into the sea and the pigs drown, which does not thrill the locals. That’s a lot of lost bacon.

We are meant to understand that Jesus is healing people pretty indiscriminately, even Gentiles who didn’t ask to be healed. 

Continue reading “Pig Flag: 30 March 2025”

Luke 13:31-35

Philippians 3:17-4:1

I have long opposed ethno-nationalism, the idea that any state is defined as belonging to a single ethnicity or religion. Note that I did not say race, for while race is one of the most powerful lies in our nation, it is ultimately a lie, with no biological or anthropological basis.

As a child, I learned the story of the genocide and ethnic cleansing targeting America’s First Peoples, reading heart-breaking histories like Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” learning the story of Chief Joseph and the failed flight of his people in the Pacific Northwest.

As a young adult, I would learn about Latin America, the unique combinations of colonizers, indigenous peoples, and descendants of the enslaved African diaspora in every country. I visited the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in my twenties, then under United States embargo as Ronald Reagan waged war against imaginary communists in that region. There I was able to observe the intersection of the three cultures, long before we re-framed our own American story to acknowledge this exact same reality, First Peoples, European Colonizers, and Enslaved Africans. The hidden history of Asian immigrants was yet to be told.

Like so many of you, I watched in horror as Yugoslavia fell apart and fell into a series of ethnic wars. I spent a year backpacking around other parts of Europe while that war was unfolding, avoiding the Balkans but hearing stories, and was back in the United States when more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred by Serbian ethno-nationalists at Srebrenica. At the same time, Hutu ethno-nationalists slaughtered more than a half million ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda.

I have been especially vocal as a faith leader and public theologian about the targeting of Muslim minorities in China, Myanmar, and India.

And, of course, I am a committed anti-racist, opposing white ethno-nationalism in the United States in all of its forms, none more so than White Christian Nationalism, a grotesque perversion of the gospel.

Yet, despite this consistent concern for minorities and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity, I have always placed an asterisk next to modern day Israel. While it described itself as a Jewish state, there have always been non-Jewish Israelis, including Muslim and Christian Arabs, Bedouin tribespeople and members of the Druse faith. The Shoah or Holocaust that ended eighty years ago has been seared into our minds, seemingly justifying the creation of Israel as an ethno-state, already a dream before that horror after centuries of antisemitism and pogroms.

And that was where my thinking stopped, an uncomfortable carve-out for modern-day Israel, until the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack led by Hamas and the retaliatory Palestinian genocide by Israeli Defense Forces. 

Continue reading “Borders: 16 March 2025”

Luke 4:1-13
Deuteronomy 26:1-11

SERMON “Hungry Gods”

The traditional focus for the first Sunday in Lent is the temptation of Christ, the time when Jesus underwent a period of deprivation in the wilderness. It reflects a relatively common practice among would-be prophets of that era, and indeed across cultures, a sort of ancient vision quest. But as they say, “been there, preached that,” and fairly recently, when we discussed the fact that within the context of the gospel story, Jesus choosing the poor as the focus of his redemptive ministry was a real choice. After all, Satan had offered him ultimate earthly power.

Instead, I want to look at Deuteronomy, the source of our reading from the Torah, and the idea of sacrifice. After all, some still lean into the ancient practice of “sacrificing” something for Lent, frequently chocolate for some reason. I’ve never heard of anyone giving up Brussel Sprouts until Easter. Or coffee for that matter.

The Book of Deuteronomy is traditionally attributed to Moses, and much of the book presents itself as the words of Moses. The only real narrative action comes at the end of the text, when Moses, having been forbidden to enter the Promised Land, dies alone on the holy mountain and is buried by Yahweh. And as I asked the group in Monday School this week, if Moses dies alone on the mountain, who wrote that part?

Of course, Moses did not actually write the Book of Deuteronomy, or any other book in the Torah. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe in the historicity of Moses and the slave escape from Egypt. But I recognize that the texts are the product of a much later age, with the first layers of the Torah created after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom during the 8th century B.C.E. Refugees entering Judah from Israel brought with them new texts and new ideas, including exclusive worship of Yahweh, something we saw last week in the conflict between the Northern Kingdom prophet, Elijah, and the royal household of Ahab and Jezebel.

In the wake of this national catastrophe, the surviving Southern Kingdom underwent a period of reform and cultural construction, creating something we can begin to recognize as proto-Judaism. This culminated during the reign of King Josiah, which began around 640 B.C.E. Scripture tells us that under Josiah’s reign, repairs were made to Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, and that during that process the High Priest Hilkiah discovered a long lost “Book of the Law,” now believed to have been a core portion of Deuteronomy. 

And by found, we mean fabricated, for much of the text has to do with a cultural context unimaginable to Moses, unimaginable to the next several generations that lived in a loose confederation for a couple hundred years after the Exodus, before the pivotal century when the warlord Saul consolidated power, the usurper David conquered Jerusalem, and the heir Solomon constructed the Temple. 

That is not to say that the Torah is wholly bad just because it wasn’t actually written by Moses, but also not to say that the Torah is wholly good. There are laws specific to that one ancient culture that no longer fit with our understanding of the world, ancient misogyny and homophobia for example, and quite a few laws that we ignore, like the prohibition on charging interest or the command to pay a just wage, both replaced by our true modern religion of neo-liberal capitalism. 

Our reading, dedication of the first fruits of the harvest, falls into a pretty complex system of sacrifices required under the Temple cult and detailed in the Torah. If we are honest, the sacrificial system of the Temple was about supporting the staff of the Temple. Few offerings were slated for a holocaust, a completely burnt sacrifice as a sin offering. Most of what came in as meat and bread and first fruits fed the priests and their households.

The prophets remind us more than once that God does not eat meat and does not require that sort of sacrifice. We do not worship hungry gods. This is the exact topic of the canon within the canon, the sixth chapter of the Book of the Prophet Micah, which says:

“With what shall I come before the Holy One, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before God with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Holy One be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Holy One require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

And that, just maybe, is the little redemptive takeaway from this passage in Deuteronomy, a door to Lenten conversion. 

Continue reading “Hungry Gods: 9 March 2025”

Exodus 34:29-35

Luke 9:28-43a

SERMON “Up On the Mountain”

In the First Book of Kings in the Tanakh, or maybe “One” Kings to our wicked wanna-be king, we find the story of an ancient wicked king, Ahab, his foreign queen, Jezebel, and his antagonist, the prophet Elijah. 

It is a bit of a saga, with twists and turns, and ends with dogs licking up the blood from the chariot in which Ahab died. 

But there is a moment, early in the story, when there still seems to be a chance of redemption for the king, a chance that he might turn out okay.

His wife has brought to Israel with her a retinue of priests dedicated to the god Baal. This offends Elijah, who insists on exclusive worship of Yahweh. As you do.

Elijah challenges the priests of Baal to a sacrificial showdown, calling fire from the sky, and when he wins, orders the mass murder of the remaining opposition. As you do.

After this, the offending worship having been temporarily purged from the kingdom, Elijah has Ahab go up on the mountain to break his fast. This points back to another story.

During the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, Moses serves as an intermediary between Yahweh and the Abrahamic people. It too is quite a saga. 

Having negotiated a treaty with God, a covenant in theological terms, Moses and Aaron take seventy elders up on to the mountain, where they ritually eat and drink to seal their new covenant with God. Ahab eating and drinking on the mountain mimics this covenant-making.

In today’s gospel reading, we are once again on a mountain, this time with Jesus and three of his disciples. This, however, is no picnic. As Jesus is praying, he begins to shine, then Moses and Elijah suddenly appear. Again, we are pointing back to an earlier incident. When Moses comes down from initially negotiating the covenant between Yahweh and the descendants of Jacob, his face also shines, as we read from Exodus.

Many pastors will preach this morning about the theophany, the encounter with God, the voice coming from the cloud. Some will want to wrestle with the pericope or story that follows, the healing of the epileptic boy and the words of Jesus condemning his “perverse generation.” And let me tell you, that is tempting given the perversion that passes as fundamentalist Christianity today. But instead, I want to talk about connections. 

The authors of the gospels, turning oral tradition into written accounts, understood Jesus as being in continuity with Moses and Elijah. To be sure, surpassing Moses and Elijah, but that is another sermon altogether, on what theologians call Christology.

Story builds on story, for humans are constantly in the act of making meaning of our world, or choosing to allow others to make meaning for us. And let me assure you that it is far better that you make your own meaning than that you let oligarchs or Madison Avenue do it for you.

We live our story, are everyday authors. How we connect our story to others stories can empower us, can lead us to our better selves, but it can also destroy us and others.

Continue reading “Up on the Mountain: Transfiguration 2025”

Genesis 45:3-11, 15

Luke 6:27-38

SERMON “Hoping Machines”

Once Allied anti-Fascist forces had secured the beaches of Normandy, a steady flow of service members and supplies flowed into northern France. 

While the Allies had the advantage in the air and on the water, there were still risks. For example, the merchant ship S.S. Sea Porpoise was off the coast of Utah Beach on July 5, 1944 when it was hit by a torpedo fired by U-390, a Nazi German submarine. Fortunately, the ship did not sink, and while twelve crew members were injured, one notable crew member was not harmed.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was a well-known anti-Fascist, and of course, one of our nation’s best known singer-songwriters. He had hoped to travel with the USO, entertaining our troops. The thing is, Woody Guthrie was a Socialist, and though never an official member of the Communist Party, he was considered a “fellow traveler.” So no USO for Guthrie, just a roll of the dice, enlistment in the service of his choice or a high probability of the draft. He chose the Merchant Marines.

In late 1946, not long before the onset of Huntington’s Disease, Guthrie wrote “The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine.”

He would need that hope. He would live for 15 years after his diagnosis, often confined to psychiatric facilities, and unable to speak during his last years, a horrible fate for a singer.

Hope may seem an odd note for today’s scripture readings. Forgiveness, certainly. Pacifism? Maybe. But why hope?

Let me remind you that I am no fan of wimpy pacifist Jesus, long luxurious hair and a pristine white robe surrounded by pristine white sheep and pristine white children in the image so many of us saw in the Sunday School classroom, the Savior for white Christian nationalists, and pretty much no one else. 

It is true that the passion narratives record no resistance on the part of Jesus when he was arrested with overwhelming force, when he was in the custody of the Sanhedrin’s security forces or the Roman Army. But he could be more than a little sharp with his words, and used force when monkey-wrenching the commercial enterprise in the Temple. 

His followers may have entered Jerusalem with palm fronds instead of pitchforks, but that does not change the fact that he was preaching revolution, and it is not just an economic revolution, though it is certainly that.

This passage is often read as weakness by a society that worships power and greed, in which physical and economic violence is glorified. 

This passage does not preach weakness. There are many kinds of strength.

Continue reading “Hoping Machines: 23 February 2025”