“I’ve watched congregations devote years and years to heated arguments about whether a female missionary should be allowed to share about her ministry on a Sunday morning, whether students older than ten should have female Sunday school teachers, whether girls should be encouraged to attend seminary, whether women should be permitted to collect the offering or write the church newsletter or make an announcement . . . all while thirty thousand children die every day from preventable disease.
If that’s not an adventure in missing the point, I don’t know what is.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
This is going to be a different kind of message today – different, at least, for me.
I became very frustrated when I read the selections for this week from the lectionary, I didn’t like any of them because it seemed to me that while the writers were extoling the blessings Jesus brought and our responsibility to love and serve Jesus -- at some point they also apparently felt obligated to reinforce their particular cultural belief that these blessings were ONLY for those who claimed Jesus as their Lord and savior – and most certainly not for any outside that limit.
I cannot preach this as God’s word because I do not believe it. It is an important piece of history about how Christianity began but it is NOT Good News at this point. God’s love is for everyone and always has been, human opinion aside.
So I decided to look outside the standard scriptures to find readings that teach what I believe to be true, and I was reminded that there are readings galore that do teach Good News. Many of these readings are not found in that collection of writings we call the Bible.
Many of the writers I particularly find spiritually helpful were not writing 2000 years ago but rather, within the last fifty years or so – like the piece we opened with today, written by Rachel Held Evans – a young woman who wrote about her awakening to an opening and welcoming Jesus instead of the teachings of the fundamentalist church in which she had been raised. Before her tragic and far too early death, she was one of the people I turned to to find a gospel for this world we live in – not a world from 2000 years ago. There is a world of writing out there today that connects me to Jesus far more than much of the bible.
I’m not talking here about strictly well written ideas – although that certainly matters. I’m talking about writing that stops you in your tracks, makes you go “whoa!” -- and forces you to recognize that you just read something really important – something that can almost bring you to tears with its beauty and simplicity and its insistence that you stop and pay attention.
If we spend all our time on the usual biblical teachings then we often find ourselves caught up in racist and misogynistic and classist ideas that may have been seen as perfectly acceptable in bible days but are no longer acceptable to us today. After all, what good is a church filled with folks who call themselves followers of Jesus but spend all their time squabbling over “rules” from a misogynistic culture from long ago instead of dealing with an actual present day issue as painful as the preventable deaths of thousands of children?
Misogyny is so commonplace in scripture that every woman who studies her bible knows to expect it and to automatically edit it out as they go along, but much of the bible is still sickening to read with its acceptance of gross violence against women as “normal,” for instance. Evans’ question forces us to see the idiocy in dwelling on such ridiculous questions instead of focusing on healing God’s beloved children.
Along with Evans I’ve pulled three other writers who are favorites of mine and who often force me to stop and ask questions I hadn’t considered before. These sources were chosen more or less at random. There are dozens more out there.
TTW is a naturalist whose writing stretches far beyond rocks and trees into all creation – God’s creation – where we learn as much of God’s greatness as we do natural history. She makes us aware that if the stories of faith we choose to tell – the ones we consider important -- are all from the Bible, then most of our connections are to the past and to people long gone. Terry Tempest Williams calls us to question where we go to find the stories of today.
The next quote, from Annie Dillard, has been part of my inner life since I first read it, probably somewhere around 1988 or so. It is from a book titled, Teaching a Stone to Talk, which I re-read at least once a year and every year I am gob-smacked anew. Every year.
With this quote Dillard reminds us to check ourselves to see if we are taking our relationship with God for granted. Have we become lazy in our relationship with God? There is so much more to following Jesus than simply showing up in church every Sunday. There is power here. Are we even aware of it?
The final quote for today is from Rob Bell:
Times change and if we are still only looking to one source of information we are unlikely to grow and change, even when God calls us to change – to reach out in new paths – to seek new ways to be – new voices calling us to hear God’s desires for us.
There are so many wonderful voices pointing us in new directions and bringing new understanding to the old. -- helping us to see past the old limitations and share our faith with our limit-less God. Perhaps we could spend more time studying them to see what they have to teach us?
I became very frustrated when I read the selections for this week from the lectionary, I didn’t like any of them because it seemed to me that while the writers were extoling the blessings Jesus brought and our responsibility to love and serve Jesus -- at some point they also apparently felt obligated to reinforce their particular cultural belief that these blessings were ONLY for those who claimed Jesus as their Lord and savior – and most certainly not for any outside that limit.
I cannot preach this as God’s word because I do not believe it. It is an important piece of history about how Christianity began but it is NOT Good News at this point. God’s love is for everyone and always has been, human opinion aside.
So I decided to look outside the standard scriptures to find readings that teach what I believe to be true, and I was reminded that there are readings galore that do teach Good News. Many of these readings are not found in that collection of writings we call the Bible.
Many of the writers I particularly find spiritually helpful were not writing 2000 years ago but rather, within the last fifty years or so – like the piece we opened with today, written by Rachel Held Evans – a young woman who wrote about her awakening to an opening and welcoming Jesus instead of the teachings of the fundamentalist church in which she had been raised. Before her tragic and far too early death, she was one of the people I turned to to find a gospel for this world we live in – not a world from 2000 years ago. There is a world of writing out there today that connects me to Jesus far more than much of the bible.
I’m not talking here about strictly well written ideas – although that certainly matters. I’m talking about writing that stops you in your tracks, makes you go “whoa!” -- and forces you to recognize that you just read something really important – something that can almost bring you to tears with its beauty and simplicity and its insistence that you stop and pay attention.
If we spend all our time on the usual biblical teachings then we often find ourselves caught up in racist and misogynistic and classist ideas that may have been seen as perfectly acceptable in bible days but are no longer acceptable to us today. After all, what good is a church filled with folks who call themselves followers of Jesus but spend all their time squabbling over “rules” from a misogynistic culture from long ago instead of dealing with an actual present day issue as painful as the preventable deaths of thousands of children?
Misogyny is so commonplace in scripture that every woman who studies her bible knows to expect it and to automatically edit it out as they go along, but much of the bible is still sickening to read with its acceptance of gross violence against women as “normal,” for instance. Evans’ question forces us to see the idiocy in dwelling on such ridiculous questions instead of focusing on healing God’s beloved children.
Along with Evans I’ve pulled three other writers who are favorites of mine and who often force me to stop and ask questions I hadn’t considered before. These sources were chosen more or less at random. There are dozens more out there.
- “Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell
TTW is a naturalist whose writing stretches far beyond rocks and trees into all creation – God’s creation – where we learn as much of God’s greatness as we do natural history. She makes us aware that if the stories of faith we choose to tell – the ones we consider important -- are all from the Bible, then most of our connections are to the past and to people long gone. Terry Tempest Williams calls us to question where we go to find the stories of today.
The next quote, from Annie Dillard, has been part of my inner life since I first read it, probably somewhere around 1988 or so. It is from a book titled, Teaching a Stone to Talk, which I re-read at least once a year and every year I am gob-smacked anew. Every year.
- “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews . For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
With this quote Dillard reminds us to check ourselves to see if we are taking our relationship with God for granted. Have we become lazy in our relationship with God? There is so much more to following Jesus than simply showing up in church every Sunday. There is power here. Are we even aware of it?
The final quote for today is from Rob Bell:
- “Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.”
“Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.”
― Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith
Times change and if we are still only looking to one source of information we are unlikely to grow and change, even when God calls us to change – to reach out in new paths – to seek new ways to be – new voices calling us to hear God’s desires for us.
There are so many wonderful voices pointing us in new directions and bringing new understanding to the old. -- helping us to see past the old limitations and share our faith with our limit-less God. Perhaps we could spend more time studying them to see what they have to teach us?
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