Constructive Faith

Acts 8:14-17

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

There are at least four solid sermons in this morning’s gospel reading. You’ll be glad to know I am only preaching one of them.

Last Sunday was an anniversary remembered only by Christians in the Anabaptist tradition. It was on that date, January 5th, 1527, that Felix Manz was executed by drowning in Zurich. His crime was re-baptizing adults. He is considered the first Anabaptist martyr.

This week we consider baptism, as the liturgical calendar turns to the baptism of Jesus. It is one of only two sacraments recognized in Protestant Christianity, and like communion, resulted in early and permanent divisions within the Reformation.

We start with Pre-Rabbinic Judaism. Like some continuing movements in modern Judaism, it followed a purity code. Any number of things could make an individual ritually unclean, including menstruation or touching a dead body. Immersion in a ritual bath called a mikveh was required in order to restore a state of purity. Purity was especially important in a Temple-based system.

Immersion to cleanse a state of sinfulness was an innovation of John the Baptizer. Followers of Jesus would come to interpret John as a forerunner to Jesus, a latter-day Elijah, for tradition said Elijah would return to announce the arrival of the Messiah. 

The gospels report that John and Jesus are cousins, that some of the disciples are drawn from the community surrounding John, and that Jesus himself was baptized by John, as we heard in Luke’s account.

We have no way of verifying the historicity of these various claims, though both John the Baptizer and Jesus are historic figures, both executed as a threat to the ruling class. The two movements were in competition with one another as well as other popular movements of the time. Connections between the two movements opens a world of possibilities best explored in Bible study.

What we can say is that Jesus does not baptize during his active ministry. He announces the Kingdom of God, heals and teaches and feeds. People are made clean through his word. If immersion baptism and the closed repentance community is a fitting symbol for John’s movement, the radically open table fellowship seems fitting for the Way of Jesus.

Continue reading “Dunkin’ – Baptism of Jesus”

Matthew 2:1-12

Ephesians 3:1-12

SERMON

In many churches this morning, worshippers will hear cute tales about the Three Wise Men or Three Kings and their gifts, carefully woven fictions designed to keep the privileged comfortable and the marginalized anesthetized.

Of course, we do not know that the visitors in the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew are three in number, or that they are in fact men, and they most certainly are not kings. Besides, it is the job of the preacher to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, not to be a spiritual anesthesiologist.

Some pastors will lean into the theme of the star and light and white, the liturgical color of the day, in their sermons and homilies. 

Humans have always been afraid of the dark, as we are afraid of what we do not know and cannot control. Among other species, predators are at work in the dark, but human predators are just as likely to be at work in the day, often from the corner office. 

A celebration of lightness all too easily becomes a celebration of whiteness, when the dark is a reality of creation, a productive zone that is a biological and spiritual necessity, one we should embrace. Known unknowns should not be a problem, for God is utterly unknowable. We are called to be mystics.

Still other congregations will hear the traditional theology of good news for the Gentiles, the idea that this moment in the Christ story means that salvation will be available to those who are not Jewish. 

Jesus seems to embrace the cosmopolitan character of Palestine in the early First Century and Pauline Christianity would burn like a wildfire across the Roman roads and around the globe, but to suggest that Christianity is the only correct spiritual path leads us back into the trap of antisemitism and notions of a petty god who is most certainly not good, to a god too small to embrace all of humankind, never mind all of creation.

If those are the stories and themes you need this morning, you might want to go online this afternoon, for I am not the only pastor who posts material on the internet. Surely you will find your serving of spiritual porrige.

I am more interested in the part of the story we leave out of the Christmas pageants, the part that comes after our reading, the slaughter of the male babies of Bethlehem and the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt.

Continue reading “Epiphany 2025”

When Johnny Cash sang about a “boy named Sue,” I’m betting Joyce Hall could relate. 

When his parents named him after the Methodist Bishop Isaac W. Joyce, they could have gone with Isaac. Instead, he spent his life going by his initials, J.C. 

When he was seven, his father, a Methodist pastor, died, and at eight he started selling products door to door. He would go on to create a business empire, first with postcards and wrapping paper, then moving into media with the “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” By the time he died, he was a billionaire in today’s dollars. And while I am generally not a fan of billionaires and private wealth. Lord knows I am not a fan of billionaires this year! But Hallmark is fairly benign as these things go. 

We can joke about their formulaic Christmas movies, but Hallmark, along with other Christmas movie producers like Netflix, have slowly embraced the 21st century. You’ll see more mixed race couples, more queer characters, and even the occasional queer romance. 

And of course, the quaint old inn will be saved, the wicked developer will have a change of heart, and the kind old man turns out to be Santa, because in the universe of Hallmark, old is good, the big city is (mostly) bad, and kids are always precocious.

Continue reading “Christmas Eve Homily 2024”

22 December 2024 – Advent IV

First Reading – Nikki Giovanni, The Women and The Men (1970)

if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious
which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say

Second Reading – Micah 5:2-5a

Third Reading – Luke 1:39-55

Sermon

We are the blessed stewards of an amazing pipe organ, and the blessed partners with an amazing Music Director and Organist, so I do not begrudge the sermon-free Sundays of Lent III and Advent III. In fact, preachers in liturgical settings missed Advent III for decades, as this was the week traditionally sacrificed to Christmas Pageants. Still, Gaudete Sunday, with its pink candle and theme of joy, is unique, and worthy of our attention, so I am going to attend to our week four theme, love, while also leaning into last week’s theme. And we’ll start with our reading from the Gospel According to Luke the Physician, Mary visiting Elizabeth, and giving us the lines that came to be known as the Magnificat, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” and so on.

We could embrace our not particularly well-hidden cynicism, and problematize the entire story, that of an unwed teen who either lies about her virginity or is involuntarily impregnated, by the divine or a cad of the more common variety. Neither approach offers a promising start to a story of salvation. 

But I understand why early Christians came to believe in the virgin birth, how it fit into their pre-scientific understanding of purity and sacrifice and a transactional god, how they were interpreting the ancient prophets. I just don’t believe in that transactional god, and I’m not sure Jesus believed in that transactional god, so I’m not ready to let salvation hang on the two Nativity narratives. 

Jesus saves by changing the way we understand God and therefore the way we understand ourselves, blows right past all of the traditional Jewish notions of who is in and who is out, who is clean and who is untouchable, and replaces judgment with grace. This is a rather important detail, for drawing lines and pursuing retributive justice are the most human things to do, and pre-rabbinic Judaism had always responded to cultural pressure by doubling down on what set them apart, on odd practices in diet and dress and worship. The weirder they seemed to others, the more they felt themselves, much like today’s rich and famous.

Jesus didn’t do that, didn’t care about in-group and out-group, and for all we might criticize Paul, the evangelist to the Gentiles, the end result of his mission is a religious community defined by choice, not race or ethnicity.

Still, some want Mary to be a virgin, choose Matthew’s kings and Luke’s manger, even want the brutality at the end of Christ’s life to be rendered a “Good Friday,” and if that works for you, hey… go for it. 

Jesus and John as cousins makes sense, miracle babies leaping in the womb maybe less so. Though I can totally roll with Mary’s words about divine reversal, the rich and powerful brought down, the lowly lifted and filled. The meme that circulates every year about this time nails it… these two pregnant women are sitting around talking about a revolution.

Joy might be excessive in describing Mary’s situation. Relieved that she hasn’t been stoned in the street seems more likely. And we are mindful that while some expectant mothers are joyful, like Elizabeth, many women who find themselves pregnant are not joyful, and even in that ancient context, they could make decisions about their own bodies.

And again, joy might make sense through the lens of a post-resurrection theology, but let’s not forget that there are dead bodies everywhere in this story, from the slaughtered toddler boys of Bethlehem in Matthew’s nativity narrative to the head of Elizabeth’s son on a plate, to Mary’s son brutally tortured and publicly executed.

I want to suggest that joy is appropriate and is an incredibly subversive and a necessary spiritual practice, one that reflects something at the heart of a progressive and reconstructive Christianity. 

Continue reading “Disruptive Joy”

Baruch 5:1-9

Occasionally, a sequel is better than the original, as was the case with “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.” “I’ll be back, baby.”

Occasionally. 

Horror films seem quite good at milking the franchise, and there are the epic multi-film adaptations of literary classics, but even they can go wildly wrong, like “The Hobbit” film franchise that turned a 300 page novel into what felt like 300 hours of film.

If critics are to be believed, the recently released “Gladiator II” has jumped the shark, in the Fonzi on the motorcycle sort of way. The film is apparently a mess, complete with CGI sharks.

The original Ridley Scott film, from the turn-of-the-century, was widely regarded as a masterpiece. That film begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 C.E., traditionally used by historians as a marker for the end of the Pax Romana or Roman Peace. This was a period of two centuries that began with the rise of Augustus, and was marked with relative peace, prosperity, and colonial expansion.

About that…

There were countless wars and conflicts during the Pax Romana. 

If a town in the colonies could not pay the backbreaking Roman taxes, it might be burned to the ground, the inhabitants enslaved. If a slave rebelled, he or she would be crucified, as would be anyone else who was troublesome or inconvenient. 

Crucifixion was far from a one-off, nor was it the relatively quick affair we find in the gospels. Romans were creative in their brutality, using a variety of methods and configurations in crucifixion: upside down, crossbar, no crossbar, X. Death could take hours or days, and though it has been commonly believed that asphyxiation was the primary cause of death, this notion has been challenged. 

Especially important was the fact that bodies were not removed for burial. The entire point of crucifixion was deterrence. The wails of the dying and the decomposing corpses drove home the point that this could happen to you if you caused trouble.

It was peaceful, alright. Peaceful like Auschwitz.

This is the sort of peace the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. calls a “negative” peace in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he describes as the absence of tension, not the presence of justice. 

King wrote his letter in response to “A Call for Unity,” a gaslighting epistle by seven white clergy people and a rabbi critical of direct action for civil rights. King’s letter not only introduced the concept of “negative peace” as the opposite of justice, but also gave us the now famous quote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Gaslighting in the guise of calls for unity didn’t go away with the Rev. King’s epistle.

Continue reading “8 December 2024: Highway Department”

Luke 21:25-36

SERMON

I always wonder what to do about scholars and religious leaders who are right on some things but cling to barbaric and hateful ideas in other areas. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and current Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, supports social acceptance of homosexuality, but insists that it constitutes sexual misconduct, a Buddhist version of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” hypocrisy that has done so much harm and destroyed so many lives among Christians. Seems a little lacking in compassion to me.

The Anglican scholar and retired bishop N.T. Wright is willing to challenge the received understanding of Jesus and the end times, a revolutionary re-reading of a key New Testament concept, but he is behind our times on LGBTQI+ issues, even behind his own benighted Church of England. We can be happy that at least he no longer has the authority to sanction clergy.

It is to Wright and his rebellion against scholarly orthodoxy that I turn this morning. Christians have interpreted the teachings of Jesus and subsequently of Paul as predicting the sort of cataclysmic re-ordering of the world we later find in the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, better known as Revelation. In fact, heaven come to earth or a rapture into heaven and some sort of divine wrath is pretty central to many fundamentalist theologies. For progressive and reconstructive Christians, reading texts like today’s gospel suggests that Jesus, and therefore Paul, were wrong. I mean, clearly the world did not end and get a divine re-ordering during the lifetimes of the disciples.

Jesus draws on the language of the Book of Daniel, the last of the original works in the Jewish Bible to be written. It introduces the “Son of Man,” better read today as “the Human One” or as a representative human, as a divine game-changer. That book, as well as the recorded teachings of Jesus, the authentic letters of Paul, and the other collected works in Christian Scripture, all refer to a “Day of the Lord.” 

And because we have been taught to read this as apocalyptic, we read it as apocalyptic, read Jesus exclusively through the lens of the Book of Daniel, which is a pious fiction written in the 2nd century B.C.E. It is only one of twelve in a collection known as the Minor Prophets, and then there are the major prophets: in historical order, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. 

Wright suggests we read Jesus through the lens of this broader prophetic tradition in pre-Rabbinic Judaism, which often spoke of and witnessed actual cataclysmic events like the first destruction of Jerusalem. Wright would read phrases so long translated as “end of the world” as meaning “earth shattering events.” 

Wright could be right. We have to remember that Jesus probably taught in Aramaic, and those teachings were transmitted as oral tradition for approximately forty years before we begin to see written gospels composed in Koine Greek, an entirely different language. And what happened in the fortieth year after the execution of Jesus? Precisely the sort of earth shattering events Jesus seemingly predicted. 

Continue reading ““Dissipation and Drunkenness”: 1 December 2024”

John 18:33-37

It is the year 5785 in the Jewish Calendar, 1446 in the Islamic Calendar, and 2024 Anno Domini in the Christian Calendar, now known as the Common Era since European colonialism imposed it on so many cultures. Each of these calendars in the Abrahamic traditions starts on a different day, moveable for Jews and Muslims, always January 1st for Christians. But some Christians have a second calendar based on the seasons in church life. This calendar, called the liturgical calendar, begins with the first Sunday in Advent, as Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Liturgical churches then use a three or four year schedule of readings for each Sunday called a lectionary.

Protestant churches have mostly thrown off the Marian devotions and feasts of the saints so central to Roman Catholic practice, though the liturgical calendars are otherwise the same. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, the United Church of Christ, and many other Mainline traditions will all start Advent next Sunday.

Jews in the Rabbinic tradition conclude their annual cycle of readings, their version of a lectionary, with Simchat Torah, carrying to Torah Scroll around the sanctuary and sometimes into the streets, with much singing and dancing. We are not nearly that cool. We close our year with the Feast of Christ the King, or as we prefer to call it, not being monarchists, the Reign of Christ.

What is surprising is that the Feast itself wasn’t invented until 1925, by the Roman Catholic Pope Pius XI, and it was not moved to the end of the liturgical year until 1970. Still, Mainline Protestants adopted it, and placed it in the liturgical calendar. So here we are, doing something 99 times because a pope thought it was a good idea. Admittedly odd.

The encyclical letter establishing the feast appears to have been a response to the horrors of the Great War, known to us now as World War I, the collapse of several monarchies, including the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Habsburgs, and the rise of secular ultra-nationalism, which would plant the seeds for the rise of Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, though those trees of evil were yet to bloom when Pius created the Feast of Christ the King.

We are meant to use this Sunday to celebrate Christ’s eternal rule today, a common cause that transcends nations, and therefore promotes world peace.

About that…

But given the recent election, it might be best to skip our usual reflection on why we don’t do monarchs, why Congregationalism and the United Church of Christ are democratic, with a small “d,” and instead focus on the relationship between the religious and the secular.

Continue reading “Two Kingdoms: Reign of Christ / Christ the King 2024”

Mark 13:1-8

When I arrived at the Park Church a little over three years ago, I was surprised to see Roger Williams and Albert Schweitzer enshrined in the stained glass. They are not normally among the dead white guys in the gallery of dead white guys you’ll find in every church in the Congregationalist tradition. 

I mean, Williams was a leading Baptist, and the Baptist Church was across the street! And Schweitzer played an important role in how United Church of Christ pastors think about Jesus, but few outside of the academy would know that. 

Then I was told that while he was an important religious thinker and a Nobel Peace Laureate, Schweitzer was there for his contributions to music. Which makes sense given Bach on the opposite side of the sanctuary. Still, you’re going to hear about the Jesus part, not the music part, because I am definitely a pastor and definitely not a musician.

Schweitzer was an early leader in what is sometimes called “the quest for the historical Jesus.” New discoveries have been made since that quest started over a century ago, new ways of thinking including postmodernism have risen to prominence, but the fundamental question has remained the same. If we strip away all of the later theology and dogma, who was the real man who led a religious reform movement in Galilee and eventually died in Jerusalem?

This is difficult because we have no first hand accounts of Jesus, and only two brief mentions of him outside of Christians texts, one in “The Antiquities of the Jews” written by Josephus in 94 C.E., and one in “Annals” by the Roman senator and historian Tacitus around 116 C.E. Neither has much detail, and Josephus is notoriously unreliable, an ancient and self-serving turncoat. And we know how unreliable turncoats are, people who criticize demagogues one moment and praise them the next 

The gospels themselves were also written decades after the execution of Jesus. What we think is the earliest of the four canonical gospels, the Gospel According to Mark, may have been written around 70 C.E., and tradition tells us the author was a follower of Peter, writing down the stories with no certainty about the chronology, and possibly little knowledge of the geography. 

Since Mark serves as a source for Luke and the unknown authors of Matthew, any errors in that text are likely duplicated in the other two. And that is before you add on decades and eventually centuries of theological interpretation, in which people see in scripture what they have been told they will see in scripture, whether it is actually there or not, or translate the ancient languages based on what they want them to mean.

When Mark was written might matter, especially in regard to today’s text. In 66 C.E., Jews rebelled against Rome. This was the third time Jerusalem was the center of a violent rebellion against an occupying power. The first, against Babylon, was a disaster, resulting in the destruction of the city and Temple and the period we call the Babylonian Captivity.

The sequel, a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire, resulted in a surprising victory, though the rural outsiders who took over as high priests and kings proved corrupt and inept, and their independent Jewish state would soon fail, for nations don’t always survive their bad rulers.

This third installment was much like the first, no victory, not even in the short-term. Jewish factions kept bickering among themselves, failing to focus on Rome, the common enemy. They even managed to burn their own food supply in a besieged Jerusalem. In 70 C.E., the city fell yet again, the Temple once again destroyed, never to be rebuilt.

It is possible that Jesus did predict this second destruction of the Temple. After all, there was precedent, and the situation was at a breaking point. In the years after the execution of Jesus, the region suffered severe drought, reported in both the Christian Testament and the historical record. That was one of the sparks that lit the conflagration, along with greed in an unjust economic system and unhinged leaders in Rome.

Continue reading “17 November 2024: The Sequel”

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

Six centuries ago, if you attended a church service in Europe, the rites were in a language you did not understand. Much of it occurred with the officiant’s back to you. And there were no pews, which explains the short sermons. 

Don’t get any ideas.

If you knew the Bible at all, it was from a sort of street religion of mystery plays and festivals. 

Then, everything changed. First came Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press. Not that the average serf was out there buying a Bible, but the texts were more widely available and no longer strictly under church control. 

Then came Erasmus. If Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli were the parents of the Reformation, Erasmus was the grandparent, a Catholic priest and Dutch humanist who, among other things, encouraged better translations of scripture. Working from the oldest manuscripts in the original languages, he laid the foundation for what is today called the “textus receptus,” the received text, though even that foundational work notes the constant disagreement between the oldest biblical manuscripts. There is no such thing as “the Bible,” just Bibles, plural.

Spin this out a bit, and it did spin out quite a bit, and you end up with a paradox at the heart of the Protestant faith. On the one hand, we want and claim direct access to scripture, not scripture mediated through popes and priests. 

The most extreme expression of this is the idea that any person should be able to open the Bible as translated into their own language and interpret it properly.

At the other pole of the paradox, you have the idea that scripture is worthy of our study, and that it does require study. And though some lay people buy commentaries and study the text on their own, it often falls on what my alma mater calls “learned clergy” to place scripture in context.

Today’s reading from the Book of Ruth offers a little at both edges of this paradox. On the most basic level, the Book of Ruth is the story of widows, often vulnerable in the ancient Near East, and of a fidelity shown across traditional tribal lines. On the other hand, there is a bit of “if you know, you know” going on, because the ancients often used coded language in exactly the same way we do today, so when Ruth uncovers the feet of Boaz… well let’s just say, that’s not a foot. 

Though before you panic, when Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, they really are feet. 

Continue reading “Not A Foot: 10 November 2024”

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 

Though my father never finished high school and my mother never went to college, I grew up in a household that loved learning. There were books, magazines, two newspapers a day, and the evening news, back when there were only three evening news broadcasts and truth still mattered. 

I read about endangered species and life in a Soviet republic, watched news reports on the 1972 Managua earthquake and the related death of baseball great Roberto Clemente, so it should be no surprise that I also followed reports of the revolutions in Central America as a young adult, while serving in the Army and after discharge. I eventually made it to liberated Nicaragua, though that liberator is a despot these days. 

The civil war in El Salvador was still raging in the mid-1980’s when I was in the region, though the assassination of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was already history.

Most of you know how much I admire Romero, a nerd the Vatican selected because he would not upset the privileged. Radicalized by the murder of his close friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, he went on to cause what the late John Lewis called “good trouble,” and paid for it with his life, gunned down while celebrating mass in a hospital chapel.

In 1997, the Roman Catholic pope, John Paul II, allowed a “cause for beatification” to begin, the first step toward being declared a saint. That process stalled under that pope and his successor, both deeply conservative, theologically and politically, both shaped by Cold War “anti-communism.” The beatification process was revived under the current pope, himself a Latin American, and concluded with Romero’s canonization in 2018. He is now Saint Óscar Romero of San Salvador in the Roman church.

The bureaucratic process of declaring Romero a saint in that tradition is an example of the very messy human role in deciding who is considered holy in any particular historical and cultural context, saint, sanctuary, and sacred all meaning set aside as holy.

So let’s place the idea of sainthood in our particular context, as a church of mostly religious refugees in the Protestant, Reform, Congregational, and United Church of Christ traditions, then look at how we might benefit from the idea of saints in our own lives and that of this community.

Continue reading “Saints Ain’t: 3 November 2024”