Author: Tom Leinbach

A Sermon Preached at the First Congregational Church in Wellfleet, MA on September 17, 2023

Not many know this, but Linda and I attended the royal wedding. I even officiated, actually. Oh, I’m not talking about the one in London a few years back with Meghan and Harry, No, this was my niece’s wedding a few weeks ago in California.

It was quite the affair, a four-day extravaganza involving multiple hotel gatherings on consecutive nights as well as, naturally enough, the coup de grâce: the glorious pageant – I mean, the actual wedding ceremony itself.

The outdoor venue, high above the Pacific, offered a bird’s eye view of the Los Angeles coastline, facing north toward Malibu and the Hollywood Hills in the distance. Naturally, everyone was dressed to the nines. Except for me. I stuck out like a skunk at a picnic, wearing my black robe amidst women with slinky, low-cut dresses and men with aviator sunglasses and penny loafers without socks. What can I say? It was very L.A.

Continue reading “A Sermon: “White Noise: Not as Easy as It Sounds””

Peter’s an interesting guy. At one time he was a member of Bermuda’s America’s Cup sailing team. He also was a friend of Teddy Tucker, the legendary treasure hunter who discovered over 100 shipwrecks in the waters surrounding that beautiful isle, including his most famous find, the “Tucker Cross,” an emerald studded 22-karat gold religious artifact recovered from the San Pedro, a Spanish galleon lost on Bermuda’s reefs in 1594.

Peter is also our favorite taxi driver. Whenever we visit the island (a place that holds special meaning to me given that my parents met there in 1946 and also because Linda and I honeymooned there), we make every effort to arrange his services.

Peter is a veritable encyclopedia when it comes to Bermuda. And a real raconteur. He knows every inch of the island and is highly conversant in politics, the economy, and local scuttlebutt. He’s also a lot of fun. Plus, he takes us where we want to go!

Continue reading “Gullible?”

Last Sunday I was taken out of mothballs, having been asked to preach at a nearby church. The theme of the day’s lectionary texts centered around the contrast between seeing and blindness, how spiritual seeing, in other words, differs from the way the “world” generally sees itself.

The gospel reading from John featured Jesus healing a man blind from birth. The upshot is that the religious leaders, the Pharisees, refuse to believe what is right before their eyes – a man born blind is now able to see.

Near the end of the reading, Jesus says, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

Continue reading “Get Off My Lawn!”

I’m old enough to remember seeking cover under my desk in elementary school. Apparently, it never occurred to the administrators at the New Lebanon School that in the event of a nuclear detonation our flimsy writing tables just might not fully protect us. But under the desks we went.

It is perhaps hard for those of us living today to imagine, or remember, the fear and anxiety that gripped our world in the 50s and 60s relative to “the bomb.” It was a topic on everyone’s lips.

With the advent of the “space age” and its technological advancements, particularly with respect to weapons delivery systems, the possibility of a “nuclear holocaust” had become real, one with the potential to wipe out tens of millions of people in a matter of moments. Worse still, we appeared to be on a collision course with our mortal enemy, a nuclearized Soviet Union.

Continue reading “Where Have All the Peacemakers Gone?”

The following is a talk I delivered on November 6, 2022 in celebration of the Harwich church’s 275th Anniversary

I am honored, though a bit surprised, to be standing here this morning. Perhaps I should explain. It all started the day my father insulted me. I was maybe 10 years old at the time.

How did he achieve this? He told me I had the perfect personality to be a pastor. It was the last thing I wanted to do. Which is to say I was your typical suburban kid (Greenwich, CT) with fairly typical aspirations, none of which even remotely included ministry.

Worse still, I knew my father was a bit of an authority on the subject. Though not himself a pastor, he was the product of five generations of them on his father’s side. Several of his uncles and great-uncles were pastors also, not to mention his mother’s father being a pastor as well!

Ministry was, in a sense, the family business. Ultimately, it fell to me to get the family back on track. It was a dirty job but, as I often say, somebody had to do it!

Continue reading “Past Pastors’ Talk”

As with most prophets, Jeremiah was not especially popular among his contemporaries. Of course, after his warnings proved true, and with the safe passage of time, we effortlessly assume we’d have agreed with him. But we probably wouldn’t have.

It’s important to note, parenthetically, that the one and only test of a true prophet in ancient Israel was whether his or her prophecies proved accurate. There was no such thing as a genuine prophet whose predictions turned out to be false.

All things considered, we don’t much like prophets. That’s because they say things we don’t want to hear. They are the proverbial skunk at the picnic. And, boy, are they ever negative! Why not lighten up a bit, for God’s sake? Why get all bent out of shape?

The reason is that they’re after the truth. Thus, they reject the convenient lies and comforting half-truths we prefer. They refuse to play to our pet biases, assuring us everything’s just hunky-dory. And they’re not afraid to go against the crowd and its unquenchable thirst for conventional wisdom and soothing clichés.

Prophets seek neither plaudits nor personal affirmation. Just truth.

Continue reading “The Mirage of Immortality”

I have it on good authority that many church-going Christians don’t care for the liturgical season of Lent, which began this year on March 2.

The reason? I think it has to do with Lent’s emphasis on repentance. Yet what is repentance? Isn’t it bad? And isn’t it just a holdover from the church’s unenlightened past?

Well, no, it isn’t. A local pastor years ago, writing in his church’s newsletter, likened Lent’s call for repentance to periodically changing the oil in your car, to remove all the gunk that prevents it from operating at full efficiency. It’s the same for us. To repent serves as a prerequisite to experiencing life at its fullest, and in a godlier way.

Repentance, therefore, is aspirational. It involves giving up something that diminishes life in order to embrace something that enhances it. And don’t we all want that?

Continue reading “Losing Our Souls”

Manicheansim is an ancient Persian religion notable for its belief in strict dualism. The world is divided between the good – the spiritual world of light – and the material world of darkness. Thus, there are only two teams, if you will. One good, the other bad.

O, to be on the side of the good! O, to be on the right team!

When war breaks out, the lines are drawn. Not to sound too much like a Putin puppet, but aren’t there at least two sides to every conflict? After all, wars don’t happen in a vacuum. More to the point, is it in any way possible, amidst the fog of war, to engage in sober analysis? To ask questions? To have doubts? Or does entertaining any of these necessarily suggest callous disregard for the victims of war?

Apparently, the only legitimate stance these days is: Stop thinking and go along with the crowd! Get on the bandwagon! Beat the drums of war! Get ‘em! Get ‘em! Get ‘em!

Continue reading “Manicheanism”

Søren Kierkegaard, the 19^th century Danish philosopher, once characterized a certain personality type as continually “fighting for what has vanished.” Times change, but they stubbornly refuse to let go of the past, spending all their energy trying to recapture that which no longer exists.

In his landmark 1998 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington countered his former Harvard student Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 thesis that the collapse of the Soviet Union had signaled the “end of history.” Communism had lost, the West had won. The whole world would now align with Western values and live happily within a new world order orchestrated and administered by the United States and its Western European allies. Case closed.

Huntington contested this view, outlining a much more sophisticated and nuanced view of geopolitics. While it is true that WWII left much of the world in shambles, economically and culturally, and that America emerged as the ascendant, dominant force, the world since has changed.

Continue reading “Fighting for What Has Vanished?”

For years I’ve argued that Pilate, the Roman governor of ancient Judea, is the prototype of contemporary thought.

During his interrogation of Jesus at trial, the prisoner declares, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my Voice.” In response, Pilate utters these (in)famous words, “What is truth?”

Like Pilate, we tend to blanch at the word “truth.” For one thing, it betrays unwarranted confidence. It’s too definitive, too black and white. It’s not inclusive enough. It might offend. “Your” truth and “my” truth necessarily differ. Besides, to assume such a level of understanding – that objective truth might exist – seems, well, arrogant.

No, we must avoid “epistemic closure,” that intellectual cul-de-sac of closed-mindedness that prevents us from being open to new ideas and new discoveries. Ideologically, it’s like being frozen in amber.

Continue reading “Virtual Reality”