I've been thinking about what it's like to wait for Christmas. My older brother has two daughters that are 8 and 9 and the younger one's birthday is a couple days before Christmas. While I was visiting my parents, the younger one was expressing her enthusiasm for her upcoming birthday and Christmas and all the presents she will get. It struck me that their innocent experience of waiting for Christmas is so vastly different from what it's like to wait on things now. The end of their wait will be toys and games and entertainment and a feeling of being very loved. But as adults, our lives are often filled with apprehension, fear, and uncertainty as we wait for test results, news, job callbacks. Sometimes we don't know what we're waiting for, which can be terrifying.
The Psalmist writes in chapter 27 that enemies gather around and all sorts of evil closes in, and yet concludes in verse 14 that you must: "Wait for the Lord, be strong and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!" Such a poetic phrase, but one much easier said than done. In Advent, we're waiting for a day, which represents the arrival of our Savior. We know when December 25th hits (it's usually the same every year) and we know what's going to happen (family, food, presents, cheesy Hallmark Channel specials), but we don't know when we're going to find out if it's cancer and what the prognosis is, and we don't know if we'll be able to take care of an aging parent and our spouse/children or if we will still have a job in a month. Even though we are assured that Christ will return and that everything will be okay, there's a lot of what if between this and that, so how do we wait constructively? How do we wait without fear? What do we hold onto?
For me, the answer is Christmas. It's not just a day, but it's a remembrance that Jesus not only came, but comes daily, Incarnate in our lives each moment through the Holy Spirit. Wait for the Lord doesn't mean 'eventually' it means 'just a second!' It means God is working in your life, and in the lives of those around you, to bring you joy when you are being swallowed by despair, even if it's just one good belly laugh. It means that Jesus is with the doctors and nurses who are overseeing your medical care even when you don't know that outcome. It means that the Lord is making God's self known to you in each moment, and especially in the dark moments. I know that when I'm most down or scared, the thing that gets me through is not 'it's going to be okay' because who even knows if it's going to be okay? It's knowing that God has promised himself present in that crap, so when I'm afraid I can fall before Jesus and weep with that fear trusting that he sees my tears, even if I don't know when or if my grief will end. It's knowing that he came once, and because he came once, he will come again and again right now, tomorrow, and for the rest of eternity. It's knowing that when Jesus shows up, things do change.
Like the Psalmist, I know that: "If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up" and "I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." Because of that, we know that even though our enemies do gather around us, and even though our hearts are heavy with sorrow and pain and anxiety, God is here. And because God is here, we know God keeps promises, and that is how we can have hope that it really will be okay in the end.
Monday, December 9, 2013
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
The Gospel According to the Muppets
It's snowing like crazy today here in Minnesota and I had to be home for the internet repair people to check out our cabling, so I took advantage of being stranded indoors to put up Christmas decorations--and you can't put up Christmas decorations without Christmas movies, in my opinion! So I popped in The Muppet Christmas Carol, and as usual it made me cry like a baby. Charles Dickens was a secular humanist, but Jim Henson was not, and his theological approach to the classic story of A Christmas Carol really shows.
This story speaks to a lot of modern issues. Ebenezer Scrooge's greed is legendary, and in the midst of our November to January national shop-a-thon, we could discuss Scrooge learning about the value of generosity or thankfulness. Maybe next year I'll write that post. Right now, however, I want to think about Tim Cratchit the lesson that Ebenezer learns from a dying boy.
Ebenezer Scrooge is no stranger to pain. After all, in the play, his mother died giving birth to him, causing his father to resent him and send him away. His only source of familial warmth was from his sister, who also died. He goes on to meet Belle, the love of his life, only to let her slip away because of his endless pursuit of financial security. Jaded and pained, Scrooge closes his heart to caring about anybody but himself and becomes the iconic bitter old man we're familiar with.
And then, miraculously, God or fate or something intervenes upon this destructive path and sends three spirits to break his heart open and show him what Christmas is really about: love. Not just the love that's exemplified by the Cratchit family, although that is certainly an important aspect of Christmas, but the kind of love that becomes incarnate in the present moment and dwells with us. He learns this by seeing the gratitude and faith of a little boy whose future is pretty unsure.
Tiny Tim Cratchit is dying, or at least he is very sick and can't afford treatment, but unlike Scrooge, whose bad experiences caused him to close his heart, Tiny Tim shows kindness even to Scrooge, who severely underpays his father, thus causing his family to suffer. In the Muppet movie, Bob Cratchit proposes a toast to Scrooge as the "founder of the feast" and Mrs. Cratchit takes exception to it and goes into a minor tirade, sarcastically toasting him despite him being "odious and badly dressed." But Tim interrupts her and toasts him earnestly, where they begin to sing what is probably the most profound song ever performed by hand puppets:
This story speaks to a lot of modern issues. Ebenezer Scrooge's greed is legendary, and in the midst of our November to January national shop-a-thon, we could discuss Scrooge learning about the value of generosity or thankfulness. Maybe next year I'll write that post. Right now, however, I want to think about Tim Cratchit the lesson that Ebenezer learns from a dying boy.
Ebenezer Scrooge is no stranger to pain. After all, in the play, his mother died giving birth to him, causing his father to resent him and send him away. His only source of familial warmth was from his sister, who also died. He goes on to meet Belle, the love of his life, only to let her slip away because of his endless pursuit of financial security. Jaded and pained, Scrooge closes his heart to caring about anybody but himself and becomes the iconic bitter old man we're familiar with.
And then, miraculously, God or fate or something intervenes upon this destructive path and sends three spirits to break his heart open and show him what Christmas is really about: love. Not just the love that's exemplified by the Cratchit family, although that is certainly an important aspect of Christmas, but the kind of love that becomes incarnate in the present moment and dwells with us. He learns this by seeing the gratitude and faith of a little boy whose future is pretty unsure.
Tiny Tim Cratchit is dying, or at least he is very sick and can't afford treatment, but unlike Scrooge, whose bad experiences caused him to close his heart, Tiny Tim shows kindness even to Scrooge, who severely underpays his father, thus causing his family to suffer. In the Muppet movie, Bob Cratchit proposes a toast to Scrooge as the "founder of the feast" and Mrs. Cratchit takes exception to it and goes into a minor tirade, sarcastically toasting him despite him being "odious and badly dressed." But Tim interrupts her and toasts him earnestly, where they begin to sing what is probably the most profound song ever performed by hand puppets:
One line in this song makes it clear where Tiny Tim's kindness comes from: "I look into the eyes of love and know that I belong." Love isn't just a feeling, but something that is personified in the present, someone that gathers Tiny Tim and his family up in their sickness and poverty and pain and grief and wraps them up. In the midst of that, Tiny Tim famously prays: "God bless us, everyone!" making the source of his joy and peace clear. Scrooge had closed his heart through his suffering, but Tim opened his, because he was aware of Jesus, light of the world, walking beside him in his suffering. Where once Scrooge had lost love (shown so beautifully in the song 'When Love is Gone'), he had finally witnessed real Incarnational love in action through Tim's acknowledgement of love as a person rather than a thing, which broke him out of his own anger and greed. When Scrooge sings at the end in "When Love is Found" he's not just singing about regaining Belle or even gaining a community of friendship, but he's realized that Christmas is about love that comes to the present in order that the past might be repaired and the future might be changed for us and for all those around us!
That's what Christmas is all about! It's about a baby in a dirty, grungy stable offering hope for a future of freedom. It's about a man talking with a tax collector and dining with a hooker, transforming radically how they see themselves. It's about being forgiven when you hurt your spouse, or finding love after loss. It's about peace birthed from political unrest and revolution. Christmas is about your broken past being grieved and healed and transformed into something life giving and glorious.
I know everybody laments the consumerism of this season, but I really think it's okay. Buy your gifts. Watch them make your friends and family glow as they experience love. Because Christ's love transforms and because of that, your love transforms the world too. Just remember that the gifts aren't what the season is about--it's about a green, tender shoot coming from a dead stump. It's about the eyes of love staring into your life and recreating you each and every day.
Happy Advent!
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Trust, obedience, and the power of a widow.
In my preaching class this morning, one of my classmates gave a really nice sermon on stewardship and used the story of the widow at Zaraphath in 1 Kings 17. It's part of a larger narrative that starts out with Elijah calling down a famine on Israel as punishment for their various indiscretions, after which God speaks up and commands him to go and live off a little halfway dried up creek. Elijah obeys, but once the creek fully dries up, God sends Elijah out where he runs into a widow. He wastes no time in asking her to make him some food, to which she replies, "Hey dude, I'm gathering up sticks so that I can bake the last of my flour and oil and then die, but that's cool, I'll make you some cake." But she does it, because God has commanded her (note: she is not a Jew). Elijah reassures her that her flour and oil will not be used up as long as there is drought, and trusting this word from a random stranger in the wilderness, she obeys. Unfortunately, her son soon becomes ill and dies, and Elijah commands God to raise him. Surprisingly, God obeys.
The sermon I heard on this, and most sermons on this text, highlighted the trust piece. The widow has no reason to trust this stranger in the wilderness, but she does, and because of that trust, her oil doesn't run out, and even once her son dies, he is revived. Trust is not an unimportant theme here, but it's not the only theme. Mark Throntveit, professor of Old Testament ar Luther Sem would say this passage is actually about obedience. Elijah acts of his own accord, God commands him, he obeys. Then God commands the widow, and she obeys. And then, believe it or not, the same Hebrew word is used by Elijah when raising the widow's son from the dead. I think this text is actually about obedience and how it nourishes trust.
The preacher did a nice job of connecting the message of trust to stewardship. Rather than clinging onto our money, things, effort, etc, we are called to give those gifts to God and to others in order to serve our neighbors. But this is hard in what we hear described as "uncertain times." Most of the people I know are being slowly crushed by the weight of student debt and credit card debt. Many of us have obligations to children, parents, or financial institutions that leave us feeling very insecure. The preacher's message was that we need to trust God that the "jar of oil will not fail." In other words, God provides for us. But the reality is that there are people who don't have enough and sometimes all the trust you can muster doesn't mean you can buy health insurance or have security in your old age. While I applaud her for highlighting this word of promise, actually trusting is really hard. I found myself wanting to know, not just for my congregation, but for myself. There are areas in my life where I don't fully trust God's word to me, and I'd really like to know how!
God sent Elijah to dwell by a little wadi that was probably not spilling over its measley banks, but despite the logical conclusion that this foray into the desert might kill him, he does it. I'm not sure trust had a ton to do with it, at least at the beginning. Likewise, the widow seemed pretty sure she was going to die sooner rather than later if she fed the rest of her food to the random wadi-dwelling Hebrew fellow, but she did it anyway. She had no reason to believe his word, but she did what he and God said. In fact, I suspect that obedience might be a means toward getting to a point of trust. If the trust is never proved, how can it manifest? In other words, saying "just trust God" is not particularly helpful to people who are facing real doubts because the world has kicked the crap out of them or their future looks very uncertain. Trust isn't something that you can just flip on and off--it's something you have to practice. So I got to thinking about how to practice trust, and here are three suggestions I came up with. These are just my personal opinions on this matter, but I think there might be something here that a better theologian than I could flesh out more thoroughly.
First, look for the places where God has already demonstrated faithfulness to you. Even if you've had a life full of suffering, there are probably places where God has shown up unexpectedly. Just recently, my husband and I were doing some worrying about money. I have student debt, and we're trying to save to make sure we have money to take care of P's mom if/when she comes to this country. We bought a house in the spring and I'm still a barely-employed student. We manage, but we could be more comfortable. Not two days after another conversation about money, a friend of mine e-mailed me and asked if our little basement apartment would be available for rent, like, yesterday. She was planning to move back to town and needed a cheap place. Oh, hi, God! Thanks! That's been the story of my life. God HAS provided for both of us, maybe not everything we would want, but even in times when my family was really struggling, we always seemed to get by somehow from help from neighbors or whatever. I say this from a relatively privileged position, but weirdly, in my experience, people who have very little are people who praise God most graciously for what they do have, because they know that God is providing spiritually if not physically and God will provide for all our needs in the fullness of God's promised future.
Second, pray. I speak from my own experience here, but I find that Lutherans, and a lot of mainline/intellectual Christians highly under-utilize prayer. I'm not saying that prayer will always get you what you want, but the only way to get something is to ask for it. If you need trust, you can't just will yourself to have it, God needs to give you a way to experience that faithfulness. Some people are not good at praying. I stink at structured prayer time. But I have a friend who I describe as a spiritual powerhouse. When she prays, you can feel it, and I regularly ask this friend of mine to pray for me and my husband because prayer is powerful. It changes the pray-er and the subject of the prayer. Enlist the spiritual powerhouses in your life to pray for you, and pray for yourself. Heck, pray it for others if you don't feel comfortable praying for yourself. I don't really understand prayer, but we are told to ask, seek, and knock, and a relationship of trust is based largely on communication. So talk to God, for heaven's sake!
Finally, whatever you have been asked to trust in, don't just try to will yourself to trust in order to make the move. Do it even though you don't trust yet. Do it not because you are confident but because you are scared shitless but you've been called to it. It doesn't matter what that is. If your issue is worry about money, practice giving even if it's overwhelming. If your issue is insecurity, practice putting yourself in situations that challenge those insecurities. If your issue is fear of change, change things up and watch how God walks with you through the transition. It's only in doing it and seeing that God carried you through that you can really trust. The obedience is what brought Elijah and the widow to a place where they really could trust God and then have the audacity to demand fulfillment from God. Trust is not an easy thing, but it's really important. If we can't trust God on the small things, how on earth can we trust the greater promises for our future?
The sermon I heard on this, and most sermons on this text, highlighted the trust piece. The widow has no reason to trust this stranger in the wilderness, but she does, and because of that trust, her oil doesn't run out, and even once her son dies, he is revived. Trust is not an unimportant theme here, but it's not the only theme. Mark Throntveit, professor of Old Testament ar Luther Sem would say this passage is actually about obedience. Elijah acts of his own accord, God commands him, he obeys. Then God commands the widow, and she obeys. And then, believe it or not, the same Hebrew word is used by Elijah when raising the widow's son from the dead. I think this text is actually about obedience and how it nourishes trust.
The preacher did a nice job of connecting the message of trust to stewardship. Rather than clinging onto our money, things, effort, etc, we are called to give those gifts to God and to others in order to serve our neighbors. But this is hard in what we hear described as "uncertain times." Most of the people I know are being slowly crushed by the weight of student debt and credit card debt. Many of us have obligations to children, parents, or financial institutions that leave us feeling very insecure. The preacher's message was that we need to trust God that the "jar of oil will not fail." In other words, God provides for us. But the reality is that there are people who don't have enough and sometimes all the trust you can muster doesn't mean you can buy health insurance or have security in your old age. While I applaud her for highlighting this word of promise, actually trusting is really hard. I found myself wanting to know, not just for my congregation, but for myself. There are areas in my life where I don't fully trust God's word to me, and I'd really like to know how!
God sent Elijah to dwell by a little wadi that was probably not spilling over its measley banks, but despite the logical conclusion that this foray into the desert might kill him, he does it. I'm not sure trust had a ton to do with it, at least at the beginning. Likewise, the widow seemed pretty sure she was going to die sooner rather than later if she fed the rest of her food to the random wadi-dwelling Hebrew fellow, but she did it anyway. She had no reason to believe his word, but she did what he and God said. In fact, I suspect that obedience might be a means toward getting to a point of trust. If the trust is never proved, how can it manifest? In other words, saying "just trust God" is not particularly helpful to people who are facing real doubts because the world has kicked the crap out of them or their future looks very uncertain. Trust isn't something that you can just flip on and off--it's something you have to practice. So I got to thinking about how to practice trust, and here are three suggestions I came up with. These are just my personal opinions on this matter, but I think there might be something here that a better theologian than I could flesh out more thoroughly.
First, look for the places where God has already demonstrated faithfulness to you. Even if you've had a life full of suffering, there are probably places where God has shown up unexpectedly. Just recently, my husband and I were doing some worrying about money. I have student debt, and we're trying to save to make sure we have money to take care of P's mom if/when she comes to this country. We bought a house in the spring and I'm still a barely-employed student. We manage, but we could be more comfortable. Not two days after another conversation about money, a friend of mine e-mailed me and asked if our little basement apartment would be available for rent, like, yesterday. She was planning to move back to town and needed a cheap place. Oh, hi, God! Thanks! That's been the story of my life. God HAS provided for both of us, maybe not everything we would want, but even in times when my family was really struggling, we always seemed to get by somehow from help from neighbors or whatever. I say this from a relatively privileged position, but weirdly, in my experience, people who have very little are people who praise God most graciously for what they do have, because they know that God is providing spiritually if not physically and God will provide for all our needs in the fullness of God's promised future.
Second, pray. I speak from my own experience here, but I find that Lutherans, and a lot of mainline/intellectual Christians highly under-utilize prayer. I'm not saying that prayer will always get you what you want, but the only way to get something is to ask for it. If you need trust, you can't just will yourself to have it, God needs to give you a way to experience that faithfulness. Some people are not good at praying. I stink at structured prayer time. But I have a friend who I describe as a spiritual powerhouse. When she prays, you can feel it, and I regularly ask this friend of mine to pray for me and my husband because prayer is powerful. It changes the pray-er and the subject of the prayer. Enlist the spiritual powerhouses in your life to pray for you, and pray for yourself. Heck, pray it for others if you don't feel comfortable praying for yourself. I don't really understand prayer, but we are told to ask, seek, and knock, and a relationship of trust is based largely on communication. So talk to God, for heaven's sake!
Finally, whatever you have been asked to trust in, don't just try to will yourself to trust in order to make the move. Do it even though you don't trust yet. Do it not because you are confident but because you are scared shitless but you've been called to it. It doesn't matter what that is. If your issue is worry about money, practice giving even if it's overwhelming. If your issue is insecurity, practice putting yourself in situations that challenge those insecurities. If your issue is fear of change, change things up and watch how God walks with you through the transition. It's only in doing it and seeing that God carried you through that you can really trust. The obedience is what brought Elijah and the widow to a place where they really could trust God and then have the audacity to demand fulfillment from God. Trust is not an easy thing, but it's really important. If we can't trust God on the small things, how on earth can we trust the greater promises for our future?
Friday, November 1, 2013
With Every Act of Love
I've rarely heard a more succinct theological statement about what we're doing when we love others. I'm a huge Jason Gray fangirl because his theology is just so damn great and he uses amazing images (and has a super inspiring personal story to boot). So listen to this song and enjoy!
P.S. Jason, if you happen upon this--you're welcome for the free promotion. Feel free to thank me with free tickets and backstage passes. ;) (I kid, I kid... kind of.)
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Why Christians need feminism
I read two articles that kind of circle around the same topic and I want to try to deal with them both here, but forgive me if I run long(er than usual). This is a complicated topic, but it basically comes down to the role of feminism in the church. The first thing I ran across is an article written by Hannah Anderson and published in Christianity Today about why Hannah does not consider herself a feminist. The other is a response to a heartbreaking letter that John Shore received from a woman whose pastor told her she should have let her rapist kill her rather than be raped because it was better to die a virgin. These are two pretty bold examples of what's wrong with how the church has traditionally thought about sexuality.
The church has had a pretty backwards view of women. Although some people blame the church for society's continuing struggle to acknowledge the autonomy and intrinsic worth of women, I think it's the other way around. Ancient societies were horribly patriarchal. The Bible is rife with examples of women being treated like property and that's really unfortunate, because I don't think the Bible was ever intended to be used as a guidebook for how to oppress women. The Bible represents this view because this was the pervasive view of the world at the time. As far as I know, every ancient society in this part of the world saw womens' worth as based on their fertility. At the time, it kind of made sense. In nomadic and agrarian societies, if you didn't have children, you didn't survive and your wealth went to nobody. Women were essentially the best way for that very rudimentary economy to work and thus became more or less a commodity. The fallacy is that the Bible somehow tries to write this understanding of women in stone. Quite the contrary is true.
Look at a well known passage in Deuteronomy 22, which talks extensively about what should happen when certain sexual laws are broken. The best known is verse 28, which says: "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." This sounds AWFUL. What woman wants to be married to her rapist forever? It sounds like an atrocious command! But if we can get past the gut reaction and think about it in context, reflect on what would have likely happened. A young virgin is raped by a stranger while she's out and about. Now the value placed on her by the society has been taken, and she can not be married. Her father has to take care of her forever unless a man will agree to marry her anyway, which is unlikely if people know that it happened. Either that or her father rejects her and she is forced to become a prostitute. The law is there not to punish the woman for being raped but to protect her and her family. If a man thinks he's going to get a byblow and have no consequences, he'll just rape a woman without thinking about it. If he is suddenly going to have to pay money and take on an additional person to feed and clothe and treat like a wife (not a servant) for the rest of his life, it might not be worth his while to do it at all. So not only does it protect that particular woman from a life of destitution or prostitution (and her family) but it protects women from being raped in the first place by giving rapists a consequence. It sounds backwards to us, but it's actually rather progressive. That would be like telling frat boy date rapists that if they sleep with a girl that they will have to pay her tuition and child support for the rest of her life. They might think twice, yeah?
Okay, so the Bible does not always present the most forward thinking perspective on women. Some passages in the New Testament are especially troubling. Paul is often used to justify the submissive position of women within a marriage (though that is also a misreading in my opinion), but at the same time, Lydia hosted a whole church, Philip's daughters prophesied (preached), Prisca was a teacher, and some of the most central characters in the synoptic gospels were women. Even in the midst of a context that is not very friendly to women, we see women as valuable leaders in the church. That was the forward-pushing precedent the Bible tried to set within a very difficult context.
So what happened? Well, the Gnostic movement is kind of a big one. I don't have a source on this one except Lois Farag, a professor of early/medieval church history at Luther Seminary, but gnosticism can be traced to two big problems, one intended, the other an inadvertent result of what was labeled heresy. Gnosticism is a mystical movement which predates Christianity, but which also embraced it after its inception, and it holds that the worldly and physical should be rejected and the spiritual, otherworldly should be aspired toward. Misapplied to Paul's doctrine of the flesh/Spirit, it was really easy to say that the body is evil and leads us to evil and the soul is pure and leads us to God. There are a host of theological problems with this stance, starting with the very embodied nature of the Spirit of God from the earliest Yahwist tradition and moving into the fact that Paul was talking about flesh and spirit in a way that was never intended to split them apart but rather to talk about the two realities we inhabit fully at the same time, but the result is that the gnostics promoted this idea and it kind of stuck. Bodily things (eating, sex, etc) are evil, and an ascetic life is to be embraced in pursuit of the intellectual and spiritual things. This leads us to think of our bodies and their natural functions as sort of less, and something which need to be dominated and controlled. The other problem is that, with their emphasis on the spiritual, the Gnostic Christians often put women in leadership roles, but because they were heretical in other ways, their organizational structures were more or less rejected and so women in leadership was also rejected (and this rejection was canonized in the exclusion of women from the roles of clergy in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions). So we have our orthodoxy rejecting the role of women at the same time that some of the ideas about bodily things being less or even dirty sneaked into our thought, and suddenly women, who are much more at the mercy to their bodily happenings (menstruation, childbirth, etc) are cemented into the very inferior role that the gospels and epistles tried so hard to reject. Crap--thanks, gnosticism!
This has played an enormously detrimental role in how we think about sex. If sex is something that we tolerate merely for the sake of procreation (because it's a lower thing), and women are kind of seen as property for a host of reasons, all of that becomes entangled and starts to congeal into some really harmful ideas about sex. Sex is lesser, women are less, women's value culturally came from their ability to procreate, therefore women's sexual lives are a dirty necessity that need to be protected at best and subjugated at worst. That's why girls like me grew up hearing from our church that if we let somebody sleep with us, we would be worthless. That's why women are shamed for daring to be sexual beings of their own right. That's why women who are raped hear horrible things like the woman in the letter linked above. That's why men still feel entitled to take sex from us. That is why we need feminism.
Contrary to what the author of the Christianity today article says, feminism isn't the acknowledgment that women are human beings. We know that. We're not cows or grasshoppers. Feminism is about fighting these myths about womanhood and sexuality that are pushed on us from everywhere. Feminism is about acknowledging that we are created with desires and hopes and fears and dreams just like men, and that we have autonomy over all of those things. It's not about not needing men, as she asserts. People were created for companionship, friendship or romance, gay or straight and everything in between. Feminism is about claiming a space for ourselves within God's kingdom where we all equally participate in bringing about God's promised future. We need it because we still tell our little girls that their value comes from whether or not they keep their knees together, and that is a lie. I'm not saying that promiscuity is a good thing. I think sex is something to be cherished between people who are deeply in love, and preferably who are or will be married to one another because it is a way to protect your hearts. But what I am saying is that regardless of your gender or sexual relationships or ability to have children, your worth comes from Jesus Christ who called you and named you a beloved child of God. And until we tell our daughters that and believe it 100% and live it, we as Christians need feminism. So I'm sorry, Hannah Anderson, but I think you are wrong, because men are still telling young women that it would be better if their life ended than for them to be raped, and that's not okay. That is why I am a Christian feminist, and that's why you should be too.
The church has had a pretty backwards view of women. Although some people blame the church for society's continuing struggle to acknowledge the autonomy and intrinsic worth of women, I think it's the other way around. Ancient societies were horribly patriarchal. The Bible is rife with examples of women being treated like property and that's really unfortunate, because I don't think the Bible was ever intended to be used as a guidebook for how to oppress women. The Bible represents this view because this was the pervasive view of the world at the time. As far as I know, every ancient society in this part of the world saw womens' worth as based on their fertility. At the time, it kind of made sense. In nomadic and agrarian societies, if you didn't have children, you didn't survive and your wealth went to nobody. Women were essentially the best way for that very rudimentary economy to work and thus became more or less a commodity. The fallacy is that the Bible somehow tries to write this understanding of women in stone. Quite the contrary is true.
Look at a well known passage in Deuteronomy 22, which talks extensively about what should happen when certain sexual laws are broken. The best known is verse 28, which says: "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." This sounds AWFUL. What woman wants to be married to her rapist forever? It sounds like an atrocious command! But if we can get past the gut reaction and think about it in context, reflect on what would have likely happened. A young virgin is raped by a stranger while she's out and about. Now the value placed on her by the society has been taken, and she can not be married. Her father has to take care of her forever unless a man will agree to marry her anyway, which is unlikely if people know that it happened. Either that or her father rejects her and she is forced to become a prostitute. The law is there not to punish the woman for being raped but to protect her and her family. If a man thinks he's going to get a byblow and have no consequences, he'll just rape a woman without thinking about it. If he is suddenly going to have to pay money and take on an additional person to feed and clothe and treat like a wife (not a servant) for the rest of his life, it might not be worth his while to do it at all. So not only does it protect that particular woman from a life of destitution or prostitution (and her family) but it protects women from being raped in the first place by giving rapists a consequence. It sounds backwards to us, but it's actually rather progressive. That would be like telling frat boy date rapists that if they sleep with a girl that they will have to pay her tuition and child support for the rest of her life. They might think twice, yeah?
Okay, so the Bible does not always present the most forward thinking perspective on women. Some passages in the New Testament are especially troubling. Paul is often used to justify the submissive position of women within a marriage (though that is also a misreading in my opinion), but at the same time, Lydia hosted a whole church, Philip's daughters prophesied (preached), Prisca was a teacher, and some of the most central characters in the synoptic gospels were women. Even in the midst of a context that is not very friendly to women, we see women as valuable leaders in the church. That was the forward-pushing precedent the Bible tried to set within a very difficult context.
So what happened? Well, the Gnostic movement is kind of a big one. I don't have a source on this one except Lois Farag, a professor of early/medieval church history at Luther Seminary, but gnosticism can be traced to two big problems, one intended, the other an inadvertent result of what was labeled heresy. Gnosticism is a mystical movement which predates Christianity, but which also embraced it after its inception, and it holds that the worldly and physical should be rejected and the spiritual, otherworldly should be aspired toward. Misapplied to Paul's doctrine of the flesh/Spirit, it was really easy to say that the body is evil and leads us to evil and the soul is pure and leads us to God. There are a host of theological problems with this stance, starting with the very embodied nature of the Spirit of God from the earliest Yahwist tradition and moving into the fact that Paul was talking about flesh and spirit in a way that was never intended to split them apart but rather to talk about the two realities we inhabit fully at the same time, but the result is that the gnostics promoted this idea and it kind of stuck. Bodily things (eating, sex, etc) are evil, and an ascetic life is to be embraced in pursuit of the intellectual and spiritual things. This leads us to think of our bodies and their natural functions as sort of less, and something which need to be dominated and controlled. The other problem is that, with their emphasis on the spiritual, the Gnostic Christians often put women in leadership roles, but because they were heretical in other ways, their organizational structures were more or less rejected and so women in leadership was also rejected (and this rejection was canonized in the exclusion of women from the roles of clergy in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions). So we have our orthodoxy rejecting the role of women at the same time that some of the ideas about bodily things being less or even dirty sneaked into our thought, and suddenly women, who are much more at the mercy to their bodily happenings (menstruation, childbirth, etc) are cemented into the very inferior role that the gospels and epistles tried so hard to reject. Crap--thanks, gnosticism!
This has played an enormously detrimental role in how we think about sex. If sex is something that we tolerate merely for the sake of procreation (because it's a lower thing), and women are kind of seen as property for a host of reasons, all of that becomes entangled and starts to congeal into some really harmful ideas about sex. Sex is lesser, women are less, women's value culturally came from their ability to procreate, therefore women's sexual lives are a dirty necessity that need to be protected at best and subjugated at worst. That's why girls like me grew up hearing from our church that if we let somebody sleep with us, we would be worthless. That's why women are shamed for daring to be sexual beings of their own right. That's why women who are raped hear horrible things like the woman in the letter linked above. That's why men still feel entitled to take sex from us. That is why we need feminism.
Contrary to what the author of the Christianity today article says, feminism isn't the acknowledgment that women are human beings. We know that. We're not cows or grasshoppers. Feminism is about fighting these myths about womanhood and sexuality that are pushed on us from everywhere. Feminism is about acknowledging that we are created with desires and hopes and fears and dreams just like men, and that we have autonomy over all of those things. It's not about not needing men, as she asserts. People were created for companionship, friendship or romance, gay or straight and everything in between. Feminism is about claiming a space for ourselves within God's kingdom where we all equally participate in bringing about God's promised future. We need it because we still tell our little girls that their value comes from whether or not they keep their knees together, and that is a lie. I'm not saying that promiscuity is a good thing. I think sex is something to be cherished between people who are deeply in love, and preferably who are or will be married to one another because it is a way to protect your hearts. But what I am saying is that regardless of your gender or sexual relationships or ability to have children, your worth comes from Jesus Christ who called you and named you a beloved child of God. And until we tell our daughters that and believe it 100% and live it, we as Christians need feminism. So I'm sorry, Hannah Anderson, but I think you are wrong, because men are still telling young women that it would be better if their life ended than for them to be raped, and that's not okay. That is why I am a Christian feminist, and that's why you should be too.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Work in a Dark World
I was hanging out with a friend of mine recently, and for some reason we started talking about different professions. My friend started telling me about a dinner she'd had with friends of hers where they were discussing another friend who had aspired to be a lawyer and had "made it" so to speak, but hated it. They started discussing his options and how he could always transition to non-profit work, which led my friend's friends to lament how depressing non-profit work is. They were discussing at length the drawbacks to helping professions, and meanwhile my friend was sitting there thinking 'well, that's kind of what I do.' Immediately, they realized their blunder and said, "Well, that's different, you get to do baptisms and weddings and such!" But really, baptisms and weddings are a very small part of the day-in-day-out grind of real life blood and guts ministry that often involves tragedy and death and crisis. And they really didn't understand how you could be attracted to that kind of job, because it's all just so dire. While she was sitting there and listening, she had an a-ha! moment, and what she realized is that the difference between their view and hers came down to faith.
I encounter this attitude all the time, and with good reason. There's an episode of Scrubs where Dr. Cox says something like, "In the end, all of what we are doing is buying time for our patients." That's kind of depressing. I mean, all their patients do die eventually, and will probably go out suffering. Church work is no different from health care or any other helping field in that way, if you think that death really does get the last word. If that's the case, then what we do really is depressing. In the end, all our parishioners are headed for coffins (as are we) and everything we do is just entertainment between now and then, right? Well, it kind of seems that way at times, but thank God what Christians do is so much more than that, otherwise I would quit and go make boatloads of money doing something in the corporate world.
I heard a fantastic sermon today by a classmate of mine in my preaching class. He was preaching on evangelism and used, interestingly, the story of Ananais, the guy who went to minister to Saul/Paul shortly after his conversion where he had been blinded on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). You don't usually hear sermons about evangelism based on this text, but what I heard was that the thing that leads us to minister to others in the world (and by minister, I mean love, care, heal, etc) is an encounter with the risen Christ. Paul had such an experience on the road and was struck blind, and then it was the encounter Ananias had with Jesus calling him to go to Paul which is what enabled Paul to go out and become one of the most effective evangelists in Christian history. It's through an encounter with Jesus that lives our transformed. And here's the thing. If you believe that the image of God is in all creation and that Jesus is present here, by encountering people in the world, we are encountering Christ. Even in the darkest, most horrible situations, Christ is there.
That's why one of the holiest moments I have ever experienced in my life was in a hospital room where a woman was dying and her family was grieving. There was darkness there, no doubt. Those people were in gut wrenching pain, and it's hard to think about them even now. But at the same time, it was in the midst of that darkness that the light shed through reading of a Psalm, through prayer, through advocacy shone so much more brightly. The Holy Spirit shows up in and around us, and it's often in the shit that we see the sacred most clearly. And in seeing the sacred--in encountering Jesus in a hospital room or the scene of a car accident or a family dispute--we are reminded that this stuff is not the end of the story. It's a little reminder that says that the last word is always victory over death, is always joy, is always resurrection. And that's how people can fight the tide of injustice and wade waist-deep in others' grief and brokenness day in and day out. Because we know that what we're doing matters. We know that we're helping people see the reality of God's promised future, and that someday there will be a holy city here with a river that waters trees which are for the healing of the nations, where there will be no more sorrow or tears, and where the gate of the city will welcome all people by day, and that there will be no night there. That's the reality that we hope for, hold to, and trust in.
So yeah, it's hard to be a leader when it seems like the world is going to hell in a handbasket at the speed of light. But for Christians, that's not the end of the story, and we hope that by what we do, we're taking part in God's mission to put this broke-down, messed up world back together. And that's a calling worth getting excited about.
I encounter this attitude all the time, and with good reason. There's an episode of Scrubs where Dr. Cox says something like, "In the end, all of what we are doing is buying time for our patients." That's kind of depressing. I mean, all their patients do die eventually, and will probably go out suffering. Church work is no different from health care or any other helping field in that way, if you think that death really does get the last word. If that's the case, then what we do really is depressing. In the end, all our parishioners are headed for coffins (as are we) and everything we do is just entertainment between now and then, right? Well, it kind of seems that way at times, but thank God what Christians do is so much more than that, otherwise I would quit and go make boatloads of money doing something in the corporate world.
I heard a fantastic sermon today by a classmate of mine in my preaching class. He was preaching on evangelism and used, interestingly, the story of Ananais, the guy who went to minister to Saul/Paul shortly after his conversion where he had been blinded on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). You don't usually hear sermons about evangelism based on this text, but what I heard was that the thing that leads us to minister to others in the world (and by minister, I mean love, care, heal, etc) is an encounter with the risen Christ. Paul had such an experience on the road and was struck blind, and then it was the encounter Ananias had with Jesus calling him to go to Paul which is what enabled Paul to go out and become one of the most effective evangelists in Christian history. It's through an encounter with Jesus that lives our transformed. And here's the thing. If you believe that the image of God is in all creation and that Jesus is present here, by encountering people in the world, we are encountering Christ. Even in the darkest, most horrible situations, Christ is there.
That's why one of the holiest moments I have ever experienced in my life was in a hospital room where a woman was dying and her family was grieving. There was darkness there, no doubt. Those people were in gut wrenching pain, and it's hard to think about them even now. But at the same time, it was in the midst of that darkness that the light shed through reading of a Psalm, through prayer, through advocacy shone so much more brightly. The Holy Spirit shows up in and around us, and it's often in the shit that we see the sacred most clearly. And in seeing the sacred--in encountering Jesus in a hospital room or the scene of a car accident or a family dispute--we are reminded that this stuff is not the end of the story. It's a little reminder that says that the last word is always victory over death, is always joy, is always resurrection. And that's how people can fight the tide of injustice and wade waist-deep in others' grief and brokenness day in and day out. Because we know that what we're doing matters. We know that we're helping people see the reality of God's promised future, and that someday there will be a holy city here with a river that waters trees which are for the healing of the nations, where there will be no more sorrow or tears, and where the gate of the city will welcome all people by day, and that there will be no night there. That's the reality that we hope for, hold to, and trust in.
So yeah, it's hard to be a leader when it seems like the world is going to hell in a handbasket at the speed of light. But for Christians, that's not the end of the story, and we hope that by what we do, we're taking part in God's mission to put this broke-down, messed up world back together. And that's a calling worth getting excited about.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
What defines us?
This country is ridiculously divided still. It's kind of a joke that people can speak about any sort of unity as Americans. Maybe if you live in one particular slice of America that's true, but that's not been my observation. We're fundamentally split by politics, for one thing, as witnessed by the recent furlough situation. In fact, we're so busy throwing temper tantrums about the other side that we're willing to totally ignore democratic process (isn't that the point of this country?) and screw over a lot of people to do it. But it's a lot more than that, too. We're divided over issues of race even today. If you think we're in a post-race society, go walk around the wealthiest neighborhood in your city and see how many people of non-white ethnic groups you see who are not workers (lawn crews, cleaning ladies, etc). Yeah. There are tons of these divisions, but the one which has recently caught my attention is the economic divide. The weird thing is that the wealthy people in this country seem largely unaware that it even exists.
There's a little quiz going around the internet called "Do you Live in a Bubble?" The idea is to find out how insulated a life you have led compared to the average American. I scored a 50 on this test because I grew up in working class neighborhoods. My parents are doctors, but were in school until I was ten or eleven, and then were just getting their feet under them for a few more years. I've always walked a really interesting line between working class and upper-middle class for this reason. My parents are professionals, but are super down to earth who know what it's like to use food stamps and buy clothes second hand. At the same time, they were often roaming professionally in circles where people had been doctors since they were 26 and either never knew what it was like to be poor or forgot once they "made it." I recently married into a similar situation. My husband grew up in another country not particularly wealthy, although he had many opportunities that his peers did not, and eventually came to the U.S. and became a professional. My friends are pretty firmly in the lower to middle part of middle class, but his friends and colleagues generally fall on the top end of the spectrum. I sometimes feel like an anthropologist observing different social strata.
Anyway, today I was browsing facebook and somebody had posted this quiz and there was some discussion going on. I saw this little gem, which I copy here not to shame, but to point out a pretty common mentality among affluent/educated people that I think is problematic. The commenter wrote: "Exposure to the masses gave me no benefit except a dread of the pending idiocracy, and in retrospect, my happiest day was when I got into that so-called bubble in high school. Today, I'd rather consider my true community to be intellectuals across the globe than average yokels or homeboys next door. In that community being in a bubble means being ignorant about logic, science, or philosophy rather than military ranks or foul-tasting beer." Perhaps this was meant to be somewhat funny, and I do not know this person's story, but it strikes me that there's a real edge underneath this that says that it's good to be unaware of "the masses" and that those people are not of the same worth and should be shamed for their social position. Yikes.
I can see how using somewhat derogatory language toward the upper class ("bubble") might cause some defensiveness or concern about certain ideologies (I'm not a Communist, okay?), but my understanding of this quiz is that it is trying to draw attention to this huge divide between different social classes. It's not just that the higher strata doesn't understand what it's like to be poor; it doesn't understand it, and in some cases has some really harmful ideas about such people being rubes, or ignorant, or whatever. This entire class of people have become "a bunch of yokels" protecting their guns and Evangelical faith, which paints a really unfortunate picture.
I'm guilty of a little stereotyping here too, but this comment reveals just exactly how 2/3 of this country's population has become a caricature in the minds of many, and guess who it is that's making the legislation for that majority? Hint: it's not the poor. So here we have a class of people that not only highly misunderstands this particular social class, but has negative feelings about them, and no wonder we have harmful rhetoric out there about how lazy, ignorant, and unimportant these people are. It seems like these people maybe deserve to be in this position. If they didn't want to be there, surely they would do something about it? BOOTSTRAPS BOOTSTRAPS BOOTSTRAPS! Of course it looks that way if you refuse to really acknowledge the circumstances of individuals' situations and overarching culture.
1 Corinthians really speaks to this issue. People are coming to the Lord's Supper (the big meal after worship) but the wealthy are eating good food, and the servants are eating crappy food, or no food. This is creating huge tension within the community, and now people are fighting about it. We're fighting about it too. We're shutting down the government, we're filibustering by reading Dr. Suess, we're doing anything we can to get what we want and stop the other side from getting what they want, because we've stopped seeing people as people. They're just "those servants" or "those poor people" or "those yokels." Paul, as usual, is horrified by the mess he's found in the community, and writes a beautiful argument calling for unity, saying essentially: You are all one unified body. Your squabbling is like your hand cutting off your nose to spite your face. It makes no sense. He writes in chapter 12:12, "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." What he's saying is that being different ethnically, being of different socioeconomic status, being a slave or a slave owner, being a prophecier or a tongue-speaker is not the thing that defines you. The thing that defines you is love: the love you have received, and the love you are now able to give. It is the love that radically redefined creation, that crossed boundaries, that submitted to death for the sake of his friends--that is what defines us. In other words, you might not like each other, but you're going to love each other. After all, a community filled with hate and division is not bound to last long at all.
Notice something interesting here. Paul doesn't say that in Christ you are all feet or noses. He doesn't say 'absolutely, speak in tongues, every single one of you.' He never defines what a Christian looks like, but in fact uses the metaphor of the body because it is something which functions with unity but maintains distinctiveness. Understanding and celebrating middle America is not about denigrating affluent people. The world needs entrepreneurs and doctors and lawyers and professors. It's about saying that we all have our own functions and spheres and are called to be the best damn ear, eye, toenail, or whatever that we can be without striving to be any other part of the body, but that we are still bound by something because we have all, together, been named beloved by the radical love that knows no limits.
So can we stop with the "yokel" this and "trust fund baby" that? There are gifts of being in a working class community or a rural community that the affluent don't have, believe me. Having lived in small town America for a year, I saw how much we city dwellers miss out on the kind of neighborly support that such communities give in times of trouble. And there are gifts of being affluent, too. We aren't meant to pit these things against one another, but to share wisdom, to give generously, to use our social power to the benefit of those who are oppressed (or maybe even give it up??), and to stop "biting and devouring" one another in this way. We are all one community whether we like it or not, because God loves this whole ridiculous, screwed up world, and has unified it under a new label that we all share despite the superficial divisions: beloved. Let's look at one another with God's eyes now and then, and see how the love of Christ can transform even the deepest divisions into beautiful and harmonious unity.
There's a little quiz going around the internet called "Do you Live in a Bubble?" The idea is to find out how insulated a life you have led compared to the average American. I scored a 50 on this test because I grew up in working class neighborhoods. My parents are doctors, but were in school until I was ten or eleven, and then were just getting their feet under them for a few more years. I've always walked a really interesting line between working class and upper-middle class for this reason. My parents are professionals, but are super down to earth who know what it's like to use food stamps and buy clothes second hand. At the same time, they were often roaming professionally in circles where people had been doctors since they were 26 and either never knew what it was like to be poor or forgot once they "made it." I recently married into a similar situation. My husband grew up in another country not particularly wealthy, although he had many opportunities that his peers did not, and eventually came to the U.S. and became a professional. My friends are pretty firmly in the lower to middle part of middle class, but his friends and colleagues generally fall on the top end of the spectrum. I sometimes feel like an anthropologist observing different social strata.
Anyway, today I was browsing facebook and somebody had posted this quiz and there was some discussion going on. I saw this little gem, which I copy here not to shame, but to point out a pretty common mentality among affluent/educated people that I think is problematic. The commenter wrote: "Exposure to the masses gave me no benefit except a dread of the pending idiocracy, and in retrospect, my happiest day was when I got into that so-called bubble in high school. Today, I'd rather consider my true community to be intellectuals across the globe than average yokels or homeboys next door. In that community being in a bubble means being ignorant about logic, science, or philosophy rather than military ranks or foul-tasting beer." Perhaps this was meant to be somewhat funny, and I do not know this person's story, but it strikes me that there's a real edge underneath this that says that it's good to be unaware of "the masses" and that those people are not of the same worth and should be shamed for their social position. Yikes.
I can see how using somewhat derogatory language toward the upper class ("bubble") might cause some defensiveness or concern about certain ideologies (I'm not a Communist, okay?), but my understanding of this quiz is that it is trying to draw attention to this huge divide between different social classes. It's not just that the higher strata doesn't understand what it's like to be poor; it doesn't understand it, and in some cases has some really harmful ideas about such people being rubes, or ignorant, or whatever. This entire class of people have become "a bunch of yokels" protecting their guns and Evangelical faith, which paints a really unfortunate picture.
I'm guilty of a little stereotyping here too, but this comment reveals just exactly how 2/3 of this country's population has become a caricature in the minds of many, and guess who it is that's making the legislation for that majority? Hint: it's not the poor. So here we have a class of people that not only highly misunderstands this particular social class, but has negative feelings about them, and no wonder we have harmful rhetoric out there about how lazy, ignorant, and unimportant these people are. It seems like these people maybe deserve to be in this position. If they didn't want to be there, surely they would do something about it? BOOTSTRAPS BOOTSTRAPS BOOTSTRAPS! Of course it looks that way if you refuse to really acknowledge the circumstances of individuals' situations and overarching culture.
1 Corinthians really speaks to this issue. People are coming to the Lord's Supper (the big meal after worship) but the wealthy are eating good food, and the servants are eating crappy food, or no food. This is creating huge tension within the community, and now people are fighting about it. We're fighting about it too. We're shutting down the government, we're filibustering by reading Dr. Suess, we're doing anything we can to get what we want and stop the other side from getting what they want, because we've stopped seeing people as people. They're just "those servants" or "those poor people" or "those yokels." Paul, as usual, is horrified by the mess he's found in the community, and writes a beautiful argument calling for unity, saying essentially: You are all one unified body. Your squabbling is like your hand cutting off your nose to spite your face. It makes no sense. He writes in chapter 12:12, "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." What he's saying is that being different ethnically, being of different socioeconomic status, being a slave or a slave owner, being a prophecier or a tongue-speaker is not the thing that defines you. The thing that defines you is love: the love you have received, and the love you are now able to give. It is the love that radically redefined creation, that crossed boundaries, that submitted to death for the sake of his friends--that is what defines us. In other words, you might not like each other, but you're going to love each other. After all, a community filled with hate and division is not bound to last long at all.
Notice something interesting here. Paul doesn't say that in Christ you are all feet or noses. He doesn't say 'absolutely, speak in tongues, every single one of you.' He never defines what a Christian looks like, but in fact uses the metaphor of the body because it is something which functions with unity but maintains distinctiveness. Understanding and celebrating middle America is not about denigrating affluent people. The world needs entrepreneurs and doctors and lawyers and professors. It's about saying that we all have our own functions and spheres and are called to be the best damn ear, eye, toenail, or whatever that we can be without striving to be any other part of the body, but that we are still bound by something because we have all, together, been named beloved by the radical love that knows no limits.
So can we stop with the "yokel" this and "trust fund baby" that? There are gifts of being in a working class community or a rural community that the affluent don't have, believe me. Having lived in small town America for a year, I saw how much we city dwellers miss out on the kind of neighborly support that such communities give in times of trouble. And there are gifts of being affluent, too. We aren't meant to pit these things against one another, but to share wisdom, to give generously, to use our social power to the benefit of those who are oppressed (or maybe even give it up??), and to stop "biting and devouring" one another in this way. We are all one community whether we like it or not, because God loves this whole ridiculous, screwed up world, and has unified it under a new label that we all share despite the superficial divisions: beloved. Let's look at one another with God's eyes now and then, and see how the love of Christ can transform even the deepest divisions into beautiful and harmonious unity.
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